Editor's Note

Editor’s Note — Issue 53

Welcome to our first issue of 2026, friends. Here in Montreal, winter still has a firm hold, though the groundhog has reportedly seen its shadow. We’re choosing to read this moment generously—hoping the cold and flu season is behind us and that spring is beginning, however quietly, to take shape.

We’re delighted to bring you an open-themed issue that gathers an expansive range of voices across fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, translation, photography, and comics. 

It’s Valentine’s season, and the issue’s cover art, “The actress (study)” by Angie Quick, sets an evocative tone. The painting invites the viewer to linger on questions of performance and sensuality, opening a conversation that resonates across the many voices that make up Issue 53.

Poetry in this issue, curated by Véronique Synnott, features work that moves fluidly between intimacy, imagination, and formal playfulness. In “Year of the Fire Horse,” Phoebe Wang’s speaker attempts, yet struggles, to embrace the promise of Lunar New Year. And Jane Shi’s poignant poem offers a deliberately unadorned meditation on memory, inheritance, and the moments that alter us before they can be named. 

Elsewhere in this section, readers will encounter self-portrait visual poetry inspired by Jiffy Pop, figures from Greek mythology reimagined as celestial bodies, a ghost behind the wheel of a car, and poems shaped through blackout and erasure. Poets featured here include Cassandra Myers, Kathy Mac, Constantina Gicopoulos, Amber McMillan, and Misha Solomon.

A woman nearly burns her boyfriend’s cottage down; a self-conscious nine-year-old girl brings chocolate squares to school on her 9th birthday; dead squirrels in the bike lane prompts multiple 311 calls to have their bodies removed; and a depanneur becomes a small cathedral of welcome during a Montreal power outage: these are some of the stories selected by Liana Cusmano featured in our Fiction section by E.M. Foley, Elizabeth Jacyshyn-Owen, Yasmina Jaksic, Ersun Augustinus Kayra, and Silas James.

Translations curated by Nicola Danby include ”Minus a Thousand,” in which the narrator navigates extreme cold in an excerpt from Françoise Major’s short story collection Dans le noir jamais noir, translated by Mélissa Bull; and while trudging through a peatbog, a father reconnects with his estranged son in Sinking, translated by Katia Grubisic from David Clerson’s Mon fils ne revint que sept jours.

Creative nonfiction pieces selected by Caite McNeil include “Earth’s Curve” by Grace Schwenk which explores the perspective of Schwenk’s experience as a lookout at a fire watch tower; “Ultimi Habitores Mundi—Inhabitants of the World’s Edge”, a-coming-of-age piece touching on Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt's experience as part of a nomadic French-Canadian military family; “Road Trip” by Emira Tufo takes us on a journey, offering the reader multiple snapshots of the Bosnian-Canadian writer’s musings on flights between Montreal, Sarajevo, Gaza City, and Tel Aviv; and “Jetty” by Kirby Michael Wright, set in Hawaii, featuring a palomino quarter horse, lively family dynamics, and pro wrestling.

Photography, selected by Shaney Herrmann, features Latin American sisterhood in “Muñekas” by Belén Catalán and Catherine De Sa Quintaes; “Observations of the Waters” by Clara Emery tells the tale of the ocean and belief; human-made mountains overtake the skylines of India and Bangladesh in “Urban Mountains” by Pinaki Nath; and “Untitled Data Centres” by Avery Nielsen-Webb explores the hidden industrialization of America’s landscape through digital infrastructure using Google Earth imagery.

Comics curated by Gabrielle Cole include “Ding Dong” by Charlie Pinhui Chen which touches on the fine line between being a house guest or being family and scenes from Jack Kennedy’s feminist doodle-driven hockey un-memoir not-quite-novel hybrid manuscript "Skating on the Back of a Giant Whale."

Many thanks to our Managing Editor, Jade Palmer, whose care guides each issue from draft to publication, and whose steady coordination keeps carte blanche moving onwards and upwards.

I’m grateful to our contributors for trusting carte blanche with their work, and to our editorial team for the thoughtfulness and care they bring to each issue. Thank you, as always, to our readers for returning to us and spending time with the work.

As winter begins to loosen its hold and spring edges closer, we invite you to spend some time with issue 53. We hope you enjoy browsing through the work at your own pace. If a particular piece resonates with you, we’d love to hear about it—please feel free to share your thoughts online and tag us. Your engagement and feedback mean a great deal.

Happy perusing through Issue 53.

Greg Santos
Editor-in-Chief
carte blanche magazine
Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, February 2026