by Greg Santos
This fall, carte blanche put out a call inviting creators to mull over the word “soft” as a theme for our final issue of 2023. After a challenging number of years building our collective resilience during a global pandemic, I was interested in having our editorial team consider works that touch on the soft, slow, open, and gentle.
Read Moreby Marne Litfin
Marne Litfin is a postgraduate fellow in fiction at the University of Michigan. Their stories and comics are published and forthcoming in Electric Lit, Joyland, The Rumpus, Gulf Coast, Southeast Review, on The Moth Radio Hour podcast and elsewhere.
Read Moreby Mélina Lopez-Racine
Mélina Lopez-Racine lives in Tiohtia:ke (Montréal), works as a bookseller, and manages the Drawn & Quarterly Zine Club. One of her pieces has been published by Frog Farm in their collective zine called HELL FARM. The rest of Mélina's artworks may be viewed on Instagram @mlracine.
Read Moreby Reid Urchison
Reid Urchison is an artist and writer living in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke. Their comics have been published in ReIssue, Open Word, and elsewhere.
Read Moreby Moira Brown
The weekend following my twenty-fourth birthday is the weekend I go honeymooning with my sister. The Executive Suite at the Motor Court Motel in London, Ontario, looks something like the dream realm.
Read Moreby Adam Alokby
Reed’s my twin, but I never felt like we were that connected or anything. Not in that special way people ask us about. To be honest, I think it’s all a big joke, feeling your twin’s pain and all that. It doesn’t make sense.
Read Moreby Emily Cann
Sally has said on numerous occasions, It’s me, it’s me, it has to be me. At book club we surround her, we smother her to say it’s not you. Of course it’s not you. It is men. It has to be men. She says yes, yes it’s the men. I pick the wrong men. Someone inevitably says, They’re all the wrong men. Sometimes it is even me that says that.
Read Moreby Bronwyn Garden-Smith
An ice storm knocked the power out in your city on Valentine’s Day. The next day, the temperature rose obscenely, causing the ice that had coated the trees to melt, making the water drip drip drip drip on your coat insistently like an anxious tic. Then your power came back; you charged your phone, boiled water for tea.
Read Moreby Adam Haiun
Everywhere there are holes and bad fathers. Last year a woman stepped into her pantry and fell into the canopy of a pine forest. Just a few weeks ago a garden shed opened to the sea and a new kind of squid spilled out onto the lawn. Each room is an opportunity for a hole and each father is an opportunity for a bad father.
Read Moreby Edmario Lesi
Two girls watch a YouTube video of the accident that removed me from Never Never—a reality TV show wherein teenagers are stranded in a remote part of northwest Queensland. The girls sit against a bookshelf, and the smaller of them rests a laptop on her overturned school bag.
Read Moreby Alex Manley
The whole cab ride back Marie kept thinking it was a bad idea, staring out the window, picking at the edges of the clear sticker on the window with the different fare rates. She had a hard time putting into words just what it was she was in the process of doing but it made her stomach tense up
Read Moreby Gabriela De Paz
My photography is typically inspired by the details of my daily environment. This series specifically was an attempt to capture the magical childhood nostalgia I felt one rainy evening while looking at—rather than out—my window. I wanted to capture the layers between the self, the home, and the outside world, as they weave together to produce the essence of who and what we are.
Read Moreby Savannah Dodd
Through a slow and embodied creative process, I have sought emancipation from the “colonisation of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency” (Odell, 2019: 14). Fanned by the gig economy and entrepreneurial culture in which creative people must necessarily participate, it is this drive toward productivity upon which capitalism relies. In this way, my work is not only personal, but political.
Read Moreby Esther Mathieu
In the course of a week, a day, an hour in Montana’s Centennial Valley, the sky and air and landscape change so many times it is impossible to chart the soft gradations. Life becomes a series of in-between spaces.
Read Moreby Ying Zhao
Ying Zhao is a writer and photographer currently interning at the United Nations Environment Programme. Landscape and nature hold significant roles in her photography. Her work has been featured in publications such as the Upper Mississippi Harvest Literary and Arts Journal, the Santa Clara Review, and the Salmon Creek Journal.
Read Moreby Katrina Agbayani
my whole body stupid with it: / July on the lawn. / through the screen window glows / the stovetop purpled with heat,
Read Moreby Logan Anthony
a brittle flower bobs / her head in the october rain, / each strike of a drop / as it cascades in descent
Read Moreby Sheila Black
If you stand in the gallery on the first floor / and keep still, the stone appears to breathe a little. / The Nereids are braced against the wind and spray.
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