Generated by All in One SEO v4.9.1, this is an llms.txt file, used by LLMs to index the site.Poetry, Fiction, Essay, Art: Grown Out of Our Experience

## Posts

- [Blog](https://understoreymagazine.ca/blog/)
- [<i>Qorbanot: Offerings</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2022/10/qorbanot-offerings/) - Alisha Kaplan and Tobi Aaron Kahn’s Qorbanot: Offerings (SUNY Press, 2021) is a gift of candour, scholarship, history, and future. Its substantial, glossy pages relax open (on a table, a lap, into the reader’s palms) to insist that we take time to witness its shimmering dialogue between poet and painter. Qorbanot is a particularly complex
- [<i>Undoing Hours</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2022/07/undoing-hours-by-selina-boan/) - Selina Boan’s debut poetry collection Undoing Hours (Nightwood Editions, 2021) sidelined me for weeks. Read a few pages, fill up on her heartfelt and playful language, feel the swell, come apart at the seams a little bit, put it down, try again; “take your mess / bless it and start over” (30). Boan’s poems are
- [<i>Among Silent Echoes: A Memoir of Trauma and Resilience</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2022/02/among-silent-echoes-a-memoir-of-trauma-and-resilience-by-phyllis-dyson/) - Gratitude is something we are reminded to acknowledge every day. While we are aware that others have lives harder than our own, it’s something else entirely to read about such lives in detail---to attach a human face to the concept and rid ourselves of our own ignorance, if only slightly. Phyllis Dyson’s debut, Among Silent
- [<i>Good Mothers Don't</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2021/09/good-mothers-dont-by-laura-best/) - Even in lives riddled with tragedy, there are always moments, if scattered, that give hope for the future. Nova Scotia author (and Understorey Magazine contributor) Laura Best builds on this duality in every aspect of her latest novel, Good Mothers Don’t (Nimbus Publishing, 2020). Best details the after-effects of electroshock therapy and other ‘treatments’ for
- [<I>Women on the Ballot</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/10/women-on-the-ballot-by-betsy-mcgregor/) - It is an unfortunate fact that there have been more MLAs named John elected to Nova Scotia's provincial legislature than there have been women. Women on the Ballot: Pathways to Political Power (Rubicon, 2019) bills itself as an “essential roadmap” to correct this imbalance by empowering women to run for political office. Author Betsy McGregor
- [<i>Hustling Verse</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/11/hustling-verse-edited-by-amber-dawn-and-justin-ducharme/) - Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019) showcases the literary talent of almost five dozen self-identified current or former sex workers (an umbrella that includes stripping, phone sex, full-service, etc.). The autobiographical thrust of Hustling Verse renders slut-shaming absurd and delivers a kind of reality check that only sex workers
- [<i>Rebent Sinner</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/11/rebent-sinner-by-ivan-coyote/) - “I read and then reread Stone Butch Blues [by Leslie Feinberg] in 1993, and […] I recognized myself in someone else’s story for the very first time. "I recognized myself and picked up a pen, and now it’s twenty-seven years later and I have not put it down.” Observations like this are the heart of
- [<i>Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2021/02/sweet-water-edited-by-yvonne-blomer/) - A watershed is actually an area of land—all the land containing rivers, lakes, and streams that drain into a larger body of water, such as the ocean. The Mississippi watershed covers forty percent of continental United States. In Canada, thirty percent of freshwater drains into the Hudson Bay watershed, which spans five provinces. So watersheds
- [<i>Fauna</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2021/03/fauna-by-christiane-vadnais/) - Ask any young person what they think about climate change and the prognosis is likely grim. They’ll recall childhood science classes full of dire nature documentaries and summers that got warmer and warmer with each passing year. I am twenty-one years old and the idea that damage done by the climate crisis will soon be
- [<i>Fuse</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2021/04/fuse-by-hollay-ghadery/) - Who am I is a question many biracial and bicultural people ask themselves. Society and family often demand they choose a side. Hollay Ghadery was born in Ontario to a white Canadian mother and an Iranian, Muslim father. Her memoir Fuse (Guernica Editions; MiroLand, 2021) is a revealing and thoughtful book about her hybrid, perhaps
- [<i>The Quiet Is Loud</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2021/04/the-quiet-is-loud-by-samantha-garner/) - The Quiet is Loud (forthcoming from Invisible) is a zeitgeist zirconia, a choker of sparkling speculation for Gen Z readers whose reading tastes are migrating toward adult literary spec fic. For her debut novel, Toronto writer Samantha Garner pours her curiosity into an approachable, recognizable narrative structure that is just right for this audience: the
- [<i>Little Housewolf</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2021/05/little-housewolf-by-medrie-purdham/) - The summary and review excerpts on the front flap and back cover of Medrie Purdham’s Little Housewolf (Véhicule Press/Signal Poetry, 2021) celebrate the considerable skill with which the poet brings tiny, fragile objects into focus---often temporarily into life. All this laudatory metadata is perfectly true, yet at odds with what I found most intriguing in
- [<i>Rising Tides</i> edited by Catriona Sandilands](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/rising-tides-edited-by-catriona-sandilands/) - In the few weeks it has taken me to read and review Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate Changing Times (Caitlin Press, 2019), the world has all but forgotten the climate crisis. It is March 2020. Headline stories of wildfires and floods have slipped to the bottom of news websites or disappeared completely. We are consumed
- [Focus on Black Writers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/10906/) - In support of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially the protests occurring throughout May and June of 2020, we have collected some of the poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction published by Black writers in Understorey Magazine, as well as a new poem by African Nova Scotian writer Robyn Martelly. We have also updated and re-printed
- [Who Am I?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/who-am-i/) - Who am I? A black man who no one sees? I'm a black man, just trying to be free. Free from discrimination, incarceration and poverty, Free, just let me be free. Free from stereotypes and mental slavery, Free, will we ever be free? Am I supposed to be ashamed? Will I get blamed? Just because
- [Even If](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/even-if/) - We must persevere. Even if the hands of society grab and pull at us, trying to mould our bodies, our souls, We must break away. Even if the words of others speak to the darkest thoughts, We must protect our minds. Even if the lens only filters black and white We must see in colour.
- [Imagine](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/imagine/) - Imagine walking into a space where you automatically feel out of place because nobody’s face is identifiable with your race and Imagine walking into a store and being watched like a hawk, or getting pulled over by the cops for simply wanting to “talk” and Can you imagine having the ambition to apply for a
- [I Am Black History](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/i-am-black-history/) - My name is Donna Paris And I am Black History The story, I am told, is that my great-great-grandfather came to Nova Scotia from Ireland once slavery was abolished in Great Britain. Despite the many hardships he faced, he managed to send his three sons to university and dream into the future so I can
- [Grace and Roberta: The Story of Canada's First Recorded Race Riot](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/grace-and-roberta-the-story-of-canadas-first-recorded-race-riot/) - When Black Loyalists came to settle in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, in the late 1700s, most arrived as “free blacks.” They were former slaves who fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War in exchange for land and freedom. When they arrived in Birchtown, however, they found themselves still indentured to wealthy white Loyalists in
- [Power](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/power/) - Power thought they took it away when they exchanged our crowns for chains Pain Embedded not knowing where I was headed Lost I tried to remember the footprints In the sand I followed the man to a ship enslaved On it engraved "Blacks only" Only blacks They tried to attack So I ran Back through
- [That Word](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/that-word/) - A boat named No Justice floats in the bay. Gleams of gentle light peek at the horizon. I hear the incessant juddering of the grass cutter. The dull hum, an unruly crowd--a thousand terns descending. Their outcry fades, that word rises. Spewed by the Amherst councilman. Tattooed where the children watch-- at the base of
- [Women in Prison](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/06/women-in-prison/) - Because it's 2015. And there's women in the cabinet But that might not seem so adequate To women in the custody of the state It might not seem that late for black women imprisoned at ever rising rates Positioned by the colour of her skin to be a criminal by definition Or it might just
- [New from Demeter Press: <i>birth of the uncool</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/06/new-from-demeter-press-birth-of-the-uncool/) - Demeter Press, based in Toronto, has published books on motherhood since 2006. Their catalogue includes fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and many ground-breaking scholarly works. Due to recent loss of grant funding, however, Demeter is at risk of closing. They need support -- through books sales -- to continue their engaging and important work. birth of the
- [Three Quick Reviews: The Women of the East Coast Literary Awards](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/09/three-quick-reviews-the-women-of-the-east-coast-literary-awards/) - Last week (September, 2014), the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia announced the winners of their annual East Coast Literary Awards for published works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. As always, a batch of fine contenders were shortlisted. As almost always in the publishing world, most of the shortlisted books and all of the winning titles were
- [<i>No One to Tell</i> by Janet Merlo](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2016/10/book-review-no-one-tell-janet-merlo/) - Today, the RCMP announced that it will offer up to $100 million in compensation to RCMP officers who have experienced sexual harassment and abuse on the job. The RCMP Commissioner also offered an apology: “We failed you. We hurt you. For that, I am truly sorry.” Acknowledgement, compensation and public apology have been a long
- [<i>Blended</i> edited by Samantha Waltz](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2015/03/a-review-of-blended-writers-on-the-stepfamily-experience/) - It took until 2011 for Statistics Canada to formally include stepfamilies in the population census. At that time, almost 500,000 Canadian families – over 12 per cent – were step. It's telling that stepfamilies had been left out. We tend to believe they are not so different from others; stories unique to blended families often
- [In the Year](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/05/in-the-year/) - In the year 20/20 our vision cleared. The fog of hedonistic narcissism that had covered the earth during the last century lifted with an unprecedented suddenness. Robed gladiators donned their masks and shields, and their gloves came on, as they prepared to protect the innocent victims who had been stripped naked and thrown into the
- [Today](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/05/today/) - One Day, elbows will nudge in darkened theatres. One Day, voices will harmonize with fingers interlocked. One Day, sweet smiles will follow “sorry” when strangers collide. One Day, arms will wrap lost warmth tightly, unapologetically. Today: I long for One Day.
- [Email: Covid-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/05/email-covid-19/) - Introduction Since our co-written piece was published in Understorey Magazine last fall, we have continued to email and chat online and with each other via video technology, which freezes constantly, to keep expanding our project “Field Notes: Desire Paths, Women, Land and Body.” With the incredible world-shifts due to the novel coronavirus COVID-19, our conversations
- [Loss and Love in the Time of Covid](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/05/loss-and-love-in-the-time-of-covid/) - Evenings of board games and laughter, intellectual discussions over dinner, days of drifting from reading to knitting to cooking elaborate meals and baking beautiful bread. Walks in the woods with my dog, the odd bike ride with my husband. Gardening in the sun. I had unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but this is what I dared imagine
- [Friday](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/05/friday/) - We hear of the death of a man. By key stroke. Counting Another number. This could be you. This could be me. We hide the death of a child. Deep in the womb. Living Uneasy. Murdering easy. Handful of shining clink. We bear the death of a land. In black smoke. Coughing. Uprooting Breath. Limbs
- [For My Sister in Her P.P.E.](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/for-my-sister-in-her-ppe/) - Recently, a memory of you, asleep beside me in the wide bed in Haileybury, your black hair fanned out on the pillow like a split seed. Do you remember that house? Where we found the trunk in the attic, full of fancy clothes, transformed to our tickle
- [I Took It All for Granted](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/i-took-it-all-for-granted/) - Life as a university student is an absolute, never sleeping, always studying, where is my caffeine, level of chaos. As a first-year university student, adjusting to this lifestyle was much more difficult than I had first thought. My first semester came with the thrills of new freedom and an expanding perspective of life and all
- [Given the Circumstances](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/given-the-circumstances/) - we all say now, in light of, as well as can be, strange days, these times. The universe has no short-term memory. Each morning we have the grief- work of reminding the ravens, the buried moles of our losses and because it’s spring, the budding poplars, returning house finches. Each dawn we must tell the
- [The Idea for This Novel](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/the-idea-for-this-novel/) - Came to me out of the blue--No When the news reported that drones Would be delivering Amazon packages I thought about the spread Of dinners, care packages and Toiletries--No Need to ever to get a drivers license, I think, since The novel future is about how we are forced inside Because the air is bad,
- [The Pandemic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/the-pandemic/) - His very darkest brown eyes sparkled and were so vibrant in contrast to his blond, prairie-field fluffy head of hair flowing freely in the wind. His eyes jumped with the excitement he carried in his nine-year-old body. He was as excited as any nine-year-old boy would be with the notion of going home. To be
- [Creatures, already dead, come here](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/creatures-already-dead-come-here/) - One is my mother. Her smile a Siamese cat’s -- her ears sharp and tail proud as she blinks a wise-eyed stare. One is a dead poet I love. His appearance wakes me inside the dream I’m dreaming. I panic that he has died, but in my sleep, he lives again. Who is here and
- [Done Here](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/done-here/) - Small the changes we made to the yard from last spring to this. Shrubs mainly, a path, a deck. But we must have changed the northwest passage around the house for today the strong wind, soothing as it was for a time in its familiarity as I sat with the horror of news, ultimately crushed
- [What I Do and Don’t Miss Social Distancing](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/what-i-do-and-dont-miss-social-distancing/) - After Nora Ephron’s “What I’ll miss, what I won’t miss" What I Don’t Miss Traffic Chauvinism Mall noise Parking meters Public restrooms Small talk What I Do Miss Sparring New book smell Textures Specialty tea stores The family cat Hugs
- [Self-isolation with universe](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/self-isolation-with-universe/) - The universe has a peculiar reaction to our sincere desires. -- Mary Ruefle, “Someone Reading a Book” Sincere desire: to call today the worst birthday but I don’t care. The cat is all now you know how it feels. House finches swing on the feeder, chuffed to see me behind glass. My sincere desire is
- [I Have Rheumatoid Arthritis. What Happens When I Run Out of Hydroxychloroquine?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/i-have-rheumatoid-arthritis-what-happens-when-i-run-out-of-hyrdoxychloroquine/) - My COVID-19 adventure began on March 13th around 3:30 in the afternoon. I was standing in a grocery store loading a weekend’s worth of groceries onto a conveyor belt. Then there was a “ding” from the pocket of a woman ahead of me. As she whipped out her phone and began reading, more dings came
- [It’s My Privilege](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/its-my-privilege/) - I’m a social, organized, life-long learner. This has always served me well and particularly does so now. For example, I belong to a Bridge Club. It’s a retirement plan to keep my brain active. The also allows my husband and me to interact with humans now that our work colleagues are out of our lives.
- [Standard Tuning for Social Isolation](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/standard-tuning-for-social-isolation/) - Shut indoors in the middle of a pandemic / you would think it would be quiet / but my two young children are yelling over nothing/the phone is ringing with relatives / updates from the school board / conference calls I can’t bear to pay attention to/outside—a siren, then two / emails and voicemails with
- [Enclosure](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/enclosure/) - I’ve been writing, reflecting in my journal and thinking just what you asked: Why does this feel different from the already self isolated state we live in? The closest I’ve come to it is a feeling that’s like those wire-framed screen covers people put on food in the summer to keep the flies off. They
- [Come So Far](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/come-so-far/) - Little Covie (may I call you that?) doing what you've done since the beginning -- begetting and begetting in biblical proportion, as though there were no tomorrow, surviving as we wear you to the mall. I call Aminah, a refugee, to ask has she all urgent instructions in Arabic? “This virus is everywhere, in every
- [in these times](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/in-these-times/) - and in these times, I focus on the birds, the chirps, the helicopter thrum of wings the gossip high in the bare branches trees waiting for pips to become a blush of early green at dawn they branch like the lobes of lungs and crocus tips sharp-tongued make faces through the leaden leaves and in
- [In Alight of Covid-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/in-alight-of-covid-19/) - T’was the beginning of 2020, we thought we were all free Christmas just ended, but there’s still time for a spree It’s the new year, a new decade, forget the black past but who knew COVID-19 would hit just as fast It made its first appearance in Wuhan, China then stealthily gained way to Europe
- [Infection](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/infection/) - Scalp, corset-tight; muscles screech against my bones Flock of geese in my chest Map of the world with its new and jarring colors — I avoid the mental math. Toxic thoughts, throat-choke fears spinning out My mother’s lungs — Weary as old dish rags. My children, everyone’s children. Hands scoured raw, doorknobs sheathed; I exhale,
- [Pulling Together](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/pulling-together/) - I wakened Tuesday as most everyone did, dreading what news the day might bring about COVID-19. What I didn’t expect was to find a small but definite lump in my breast as I casually brushed my hand over my left side. I froze and thought, “Really? Is this some kind of cosmic joke?” To make
- [Covid-19 Painting Project](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/covid-19-painting-project/) - Born of my anxiety from the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been spending copious amounts of time during this isolation period creating abstract acrylic paintings. After hearing from friends living in Italy who are still suffering from an extended period of intense fear, sadness, and extreme cabin fever, the many works of art that I’ve produced
- [What It's Like To Not Be Panicking When Everyone Else Is](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/what-its-like-to-not-be-panicking-when-everyone-else-is/) - I am afraid of everything: spiders, public speaking, my furnace exploding, living on the first floor of an apartment building, being late, sleeping, needles, walking home alone at night, job interviews, first dates, fifth dates, relationships, choking, asking other people for help, using a gas stove, driving, flying, breaking a bone. I have struggled with
- [South of the Border](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/south-of-the-border/) - My car sits idle in the driveway of my parents’ house, spring pollen coating it undisturbed. I have not left for more than a bike ride since March ground to a halt, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Lucky that I’m not required to risk my life at work. Lucky that losing my part-time
- [Unschooled: Guelph, Ontario, March 23 2020](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/unschooled-guelph-ontario-march-23-2020/) - The school, emptied goes silently blind, each window dark under clouds, an unseeing eye chilled grey in the yard, hard brown bricks hold fast to the bolts of a basketball hoop no bells ring, no children cascade out the doors, noisy, half-fledged running to fly, flapping boots coats hats mitts one boy, unschooled, his basketball’s
- [Falling In a Pandemic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/falling-in-a-pandemic/) - Yesterday, I saw a woman fall and everything changed. I decided to go for a drive with my dog, Bella. Roll the windows down so she could take in the scents of another neighbourhood. I just wanted to drive. No music, no inspirational podcasts, just silence and the cool air, the bright sun and us,
- [grasp-less](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/grasp-less/) - the capsized cling to laptops bottom lines sink will you fast with me? eat freedom grasp-less embodiment grief release my child birthed spirit walk decades undead here I remain, expanded midwife ush-plush-usher in beyond normalcy forced dimensional bridge bear down, collected dilation span breath yet here we be awed ask of creation
- [Diago’s Dark Waters](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/diagos-dark-waters/) - On our tour of the Rio Negro, while the boat putters across its strong-tea waters local guide, Diago adds colour commentary in addition to the construction genius of a bridge over 2 miles long with 246 supporting columns, he adds that each month 24 people plummet to death from it he describes first contact with
- [Things I Never Thought I’d Say (Except in a Pandemic)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/things-i-never-thought-id-say-except-in-a-pandemic/) - 1. “Don’t touch my face, don’t touch my face.” Repeating the mantra when the wind blows my hair in my eyes. 2. When I hear the front door open, “Strip, take off your clothes. Wash your hands.” 3. “OMG, I’d hate to be on that cruise!” On hearing about the Grand Princess passengers. 4. “Ah,
- [From One to Many](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/from-one-to-many/) - Since February 2019, when I was diagnosed with a strange cancer, visible on CT, PET, and all the other alphabetized scans---but not making me outwardly ill---I have become used to staying at home, more and more. I go out for treatments at the hospital, which leave me fatigued and with a suppressed immune system, so
- [Bittersweet Lament](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/04/bittersweet-lament/) - Nightmares 3 nights in a row Nowhere I can go Will temptation overcome Self-isolation God is with me But is it God’s timing A personal 9/11 Has become public It has been a winter of Stocking up Snowed ins Falls Study deadlines A fender bender Concern About a loved one Never ending I hope Flowers
- [Three Haiku](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/three-haiku/) - Today’s sum twenty Eight thousand and two hundred Forty-four ascents. Sun sears fishbone sky Cloudbursts pierce quicksilver hems Earth inhales exhales. White noise lie in state Silent sky and interstate Doves know no borders.
- [An Unexpected Delivery: Day 8ish Covid Clampdown](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/an-unexpected-delivery-day-8ish-covid-clampdown/) - A package arrived yesterday afternoon via UPS, just as John was taking Rudi, our little dachsie, out for a pee. Well, bedlam ensued. Rudi and I were squeezed in the storm porch between open doors. My husband John was on the front steps trying to shut the door. The delivery guy was trying to give
- [Haiku, March 2020](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/haiku-march-2020/) - Kindness, contagious; Heart-hands reach across the world, hold each other like blossoms.
- [Grandparenting in COVID-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/grandparenting-in-covid-19/) - Precious days lost Will I miss her first steps? Daily photos and videos help But I can’t touch her soft skin Pat her round belly Inhale her baby scent FaceTime becomes “Story Time with Grandma” She reaches out to touch my face Opens and shuts the iPad for Peek-a-boo And giggles as I feign surprise
- [<i>High School</i> by Tegan and Sara](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/03/high-school-by-tegan-and-sara/) - Dancing (or crying) to songs by Tegan and Sara is practically a rite of passage for queer women and girls in Canada and beyond. Both Vancouver-based twins have been open about their sexuality since their music career took off in 1998 and they quickly became icons for the LGBTQ+ community. But before “Closer,” before “Boyfriend,”
- [Atlantic International Film Festival: Diary of a Feminist Film-Goer](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2020/02/fin-atlantic-international-film-festival-diary-of-a-feminist-film-goer/) - Did you attend the 2019 Atlantic International Film Festival? Are you planning to submit a film to the 2020 festival? We are now about half way between the '19 and '20 festivals so what better time to post a review? Last September, we sent our intrepid reviewer Corinne Gilroy to FIN. (Yes, the Atlantic International
- [<i>Listen Before Transmit</i> by Dani Couture](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/12/listen-before-transmit-by-dani-couture/) - A Shepard-Risset Glissando is a set of three musical scales, separated by octaves, played simultaneously to produce the auditory illusion of notes forever ascending (or descending). The effect isn’t ethereal so much as it is unnerving, because the layered scales never resolve. Songs and symphonies teach us to expect resolution. Melodies are boomerangs and hungry
- [<i>Disintegrate/Dissociate</i> by Arielle Twist](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/03/disintegrate-dissociate-by-arielle-twist/) - Most poetry book launches, in my experience, are serious, courtly, murmuring affairs: kind words of introduction, soft applause, hums of contemplation and approval. Solitary reactions occurring simultaneously; subtle, even-tempered responses to subtle, even-tempered books. Enter Arielle Twist. Enter her ecstatic, surprising, jubilant family, friends, and fans. Twist launched her debut collection of poetry, Disintegrate/Dissociate (Arsenal
- [<i>Shut Up, You're Pretty</i> by Téa Mutonji](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/03/shut-up-youre-pretty-by-tea-mutonji/) - “But who was I?” asks Loli, the singular narrative voice uniting Téa Mutonji’s engaging collection of short stories. Shut Up, You’re Pretty (forthcoming, April 2019) is Mutonji’s debut and the first publication by VS Books, a new imprint of Arsenal Pulp founded by Vivek Shraya. The stories follow Loli from childhood, when she moves from
- [<i>No Meeting Without Body</i> by Annick MacAskill](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/06/no-meeting-without-body-by-annick-macaskill/) - Annick MacAskill’s debut poetry collection No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018) strikes me as off limits—as fenced-in under high security. Perhaps MacAskill’s personal vignettes and anecdotes—conveyed through the work and labour of figures such as Aristophanes, Hildegard von Bingen, and Ovid—will resonate with the guiding metaphors of other readers’ life and loves. But I
- [<i>The Nap-Away Motel</i> by Nadja Lubiw-Hazard](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/07/the-nap-away-motel-by-nadja-lubiw-hazard/) - We all have stayed at the Nap-Away. For a night or a week or a longer time, at some point and for some reason, we all have found refuge in a small motel on the edge of a city. The facade is nondescript except for one or two curious features. The same might be said
- [On Creating a Literary Festival: Five Questions with AfterWords Co-Organiser Stephanie Domet](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/10/on-creating-a-literary-festival-five-questions-for-afterwords-co-organiser-stephanie-domet/) - Understorey Magazine: AfterWords is a brand new literary festival for the Halifax area. What inspired you take on this project? Stephanie Domet: My co-organiser, Ryan Turner, and I have had the idea for AfterWords since the final Halifax International Writers Festival back in 2008. Halifax hasn't had a multi-day literary festival for the past ten
- [CLOSED Re Nature:                       Writing on a World under Threat](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/04/re-nature-writing-on-a-world-under-threat/) - Free Editing Services for Issue 17 Have something to say about climate change — and not sure how to say it? Passionate about the environment but new to literary writing? Understorey Magazine aims to inspire new and emerging writers, as well as support established writers. For Issue 17, we are offering free editing services.
- [CLOSED Diverse Stories of Women on Stage](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2019/02/diverse-stories-of-women-on-stage/) - Text-only follows the graphic below. Understorey Magazine seeks stories that illuminate the diverse experiences of women* on stage and in performance in Canada. Send us plays/performance texts that bring the lives and voices of womyn to the forefront. We are also looking for prose and poetry by women directors, actors, and producers about their
- [Femmes francophones du Canada atlantique](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/10/femmes-francophones-du-canada-atlantique/) - Nouveau délai: 3 mai 2019 Nous invitons les contributions des femmes des communautés, des dialectes, des cultures et des histoires francophones divers du Canada atlantique, incluant mais sans s’y limiter, acadiens, brayons, métis français, français terre-neuvien, et de plus, des résidentes actuelles venant des régions francophones du monde. Understorey Magazine publie les histoires des vies
- [<i>Elemental</i> by Kate Braid](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/12/elemental-by-kate-braid/) - Each September, I wend my way through the back roads of the Annapolis Valley to attend Becoming an Outdoors Woman (BOW): a volunteer-organized retreat and workshop series aimed at women interested in hunting, fishing, and other outdoorsy pursuits. This year, I brought my copy of Kate Braid’s Elemental (Caitlin Press, 2018), which I snuck away to
- [Recently Closed: Age](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/03/open-age/) - Please read general submission guidelines here. A text version of our call for submissions follows the graphic below. Understorey Magazine seeks stories of ageing while female. What is too old? What is too young? Why do these questions matter more for women than men? How can we move beyond age in our conversations, workplace, media
- [Youth Creative Writing Workshop: September 27](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/09/youth-creative-writing-workshop-september-27/) - Join Guyleigh Johnson, author/poet of Expect the Unexpected & Afraid of the Dark for a YOUTH WRITING WORKSHOP Ages10-16 Thursday, September 27 4-6 pm Dartmouth North Community Centre 105 Highfield Park Dr. (Pinecrest Room) FREE EVENT with light snacks provided ~Learn about writing poetry & publishing a book~ Please register: guyleighjohnson902@gmail.com OR editor@understoreymagazine.ca
- [<i>Catch My Drift</i> by Genevieve Scott](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/09/catch-my-drift-by-genevieve-scott/) - The relationship between a mother and her child is a rocky phenomenon that can be difficult for some authors to capture. Genevieve Scott’s debut novel, Catch my Drift (Goose Lane, 2018), is a wonderfully realistic story of a complex family, and at the heart is mother and daughter, Lorna and Cara. As a millennial feminist,
- [<i>A Circle on the Surface</i> by Carol Bruneau](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/09/a-circle-on-the-surface-by-carol-bruneau/) - In 1956, Enman Greene takes his twelve-year-old daughter Penelope out for lunch at a Halifax fish ’n’ chip shop. She believes it’s for her birthday, but Enman has actually brought her there to reveal a secret: the truth about Penelope’s mother. Once Enman begins his story, A Circle on the Surface (Vagrant Press, forthcoming in
- [<i>Gush</i>, edited by Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon & Tanis MacDonald](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/08/gush-edited-by-rosanna-deerchild-ariel-gordon-tanis-macdonald/) - I'd forgotten Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is about religion. What I remember from the book, what most readers likely remember, is that eleven-year-old Margaret desperately wanted her period. For anyone who has had a period---for one year, ten years, forty years---that plot line is so off-the-charts bizarre it's unforgettable. But
- [<i>All This Blood</i> by Susie Petersiel Berg](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/06/all-this-blood-by-susie-petersiel/) - Blood is a deeply weird word. Its strange proto-Germanic double-O ends in a palpitation---a thud---a footfall on dark earth, while its spectral onomatopoeia hums of haemorrhage, not haemostasis. In her new poetry collection All This Blood (Piquant Press, 2017), Susie Petersiel Berg uses the process of haemostasis---how the body stops bleeding—to conjure wounds that have
- [Sharon Bala on Writing <i>The Boat People</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2018/01/sharon-bala-writing-boat-people/) - “I'm an extrovert, in case you haven't noticed,” Sharon Bala says, her enthusiasm and warmth carrying across the phone from chilly Newfoundland to chilly Nova Scotia. She's commenting on the hectic schedule for launching and promoting her new book, The Boat People. “It's demanding,” Sharon says, “even for an extrovert.” The Boat People (McClelland and
- [<i>Powered by Love</i> by Joanna Henry, Ilana Landsberg-Lewis & Alexis MacDonald](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/11/powered-love/) - At the turn of the twenty-first century, when AIDS-related deaths in developed countries were finally on the decline, infection and death rates in sub-Saharan Africa continued to soar. Stigma, discrimination and misinformation meant that testing and treatment remained unavailable for the millions of people—in some countries up to thirty percent of the population—with HIV/AIDS. The
- [<i>F-Bomb</i> by Lauren McKeon](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/10/f-bomb-lauren-mckeon/) - Time Magazine's list of Firsts highlights recent accomplishments by American women: First female presidential nominee. First female to own and produce her own talk show. First openly gay person on prime-time TV. First black woman to run a Fortune 500 company.... The list is both impressive and utterly crushing. Most women achieved their “first” only in
- [<i>Refuge in the Black Deck</i> by Nicola Peffers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/09/refuge-black-deck-nicola-peffers/) - Nicola Peffers’ memoir, Refuge in the Black Deck (Caitlin Press, 2017), tells of the struggles many women face to make it in a “man’s world.” Peffers, an Alberta native hailing from my own hometown of Fort McMurray, gives an honest-to-a-fault description of her time as an Ordinary Seaman in the Canadian Navy. Reading the book,
- [Call for Submissions: African Nova Scotian Women](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/03/call-submissions-african-nova-scotian-women/) - EXTENDED DEADLINE: September 15, 2017. We are excited to announce that Issue 12 of Understorey Magazine will be dedicated to writing and art by women of African descent in Nova Scotia. This project is funded in large part by the Delmore "Buddy" Daye Learning Institute, an organisation focussed on excellence in Africentric education, with additional funding from the
- [<i>What We Once Believed</i> by Andrea MacPherson](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/08/believed-andrea-macpherson/) - I knew that What We Once Believed (Caitlin Press, 2017) would speak to the feminist-mother in me when I read the epigraph, a poem by Catherine Barnett about mothering the mother and a quote from Muriel Rukeyser that asks: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split
- [<i>Just Jen</i> by Jen Powley](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/06/just-jen-jen-powley/) - In Just Jen: Thriving through Multiple Sclerosis (Roseway, 2017), a book less than two hundred pages long, Jen Powley takes us on a trip that we wouldn't otherwise experience. This is exactly what I want from a book: the opportunity to go on an unfamiliar journey. I say this even though I was diagnosed with
- [Creative Writing Workshops: May 2017](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/03/creative-writing-workshops-may-2017/) - MAY 6 10 am until noon Bauld Centre 35 Wilfred Jackson Way Dartmouth, NS Facilitator: Lindsay Ruck MAY 27 10 am until noon Black Loyalist Heritage Centre 119 Old Birchtown Rd. Shelburne, NS Facilitator: Louise Delisle
- [<i>Field Notes</i> by Sara Jewell](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/05/field-notes/) - Ever since I met my "Upper Canadian" husband in my hometown of Fredericton at age twenty and moved to southern Ontario at twenty-one, I've had a love-hate relationship with the Maritimes, as well as with rural and small-town life in general. At times, I have resented what I saw as its narrowness and stubborn attachment
- [<i>Tell</i> by Soraya Peerbaye](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/01/book-review-tell-soraya-peerbaye/) - It took me four days to read Soraya Peerbaye’s Tell: Poems for a Girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015). By day three, I wasn’t sure I could follow through, so acute was my fear and respect for the tide of pain and loss on nearly every page. Tell honours Reena Virk, assaulted and murdered by her peers
- [<i>Writing Hard Stories</i> by Melanie Brooks](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/02/writing-hard-stories-celebrated-memoirists-shaped-art-trauma/) - When I received my copy of Writing Hard Stories by Melanie Brooks (forthcoming from Beacon Press, February 2017), I envisioned myself curled up in my comfortable armchair with coffee, settling in for a good long read. That was not to be—partly due to demands of a busy holiday season and introducing a new kitten to our
- [Mother's Day Reading at Lexicon Books](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2015/05/mothers-day-lexicon-books/) - We had a fabulous crowd for the Mother's Day reading at Lexicon Books in Lunenburg! Poet and co-owner of Lexicon Books Alice Burdick welcomed the audience and introduced the readers. Natalie Meisner read from her memoir Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family. Lorri Neilsen Glenn read from
- [Photos from Authors' Reading](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/07/photos-from-authors-reading/) - We had a wonderfully literary afternoon on July 27 at the Second Story Women's Centre. Three local authors read from books released earlier this year. Kate Inglis read passages describing Missy Bullseye, the junk-scrapping pirate heroine from Flight of the Griffons. Linda Little read from Grist and poetically described the life of Penelope, a single
- [Understorey Magazine at Word on the Street!](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/08/understorey-magazine-at-word-on-the-street/) - Join Understorey Magazine on Saturday, September 21, 11-5, on the Halifax Waterfront for Word on the Street. We'll have a table with copies of the magazine and exclusive (you won't find them anywhere else) Understorey bookmarks and coasters to give away. We are also hosting a panel of fantastic authors who will read from their new mother-centric books:
- [Understorey Magazine at CCWWP](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/05/understorey-magazine-ccwwp/) - Join Understorey Magazine editor Katherine Barrett and Cargo Literary editor Mo Duffy Cobb at the 2017 Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Frederiction, New Brunswick, June 9-11. We will be discussing: how and why we founded online literary magazines, the role of literary magazines in nurturing new writers, and challenges of the current publishing environment in
- [Call for Submissions: Service](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2017/01/call-submissions-service/) - Please read about Understorey Magazine and our submission guidelines before sending your work.
- [Seven Years, Five Editors, Four Publishers: How I'm Writing My Novel](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2016/11/seven-years-five-editors-four-publishers-im-writing-novel/) - Ever wonder what it takes to write, edit and sell a novel? While there are a few overnight-success stories, most authors work very hard to produce a manuscript and get it noticed. Annette Martin published an excerpt from her novel-in-progress in Understorey Magazine in 2014. But she started writing long before that—and she's still working to revise
- [A New Partnership: Understorey Magazine and the Alexa McDonough Institute](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2016/05/understorey-magazine-alexa-mcdonough-institute-new-partnership/) - Big news for Understorey Magazine! We are now in partnership with the Alexa McDonough Institute (AMI) for Women, Gender and Social Justice at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. AMI, chaired by Susan Brigham, is a hub of feminist energy, action and research. Understorey and AMI share a mandate of empowerment through self-expression
- [The Preludes to Assaults](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2016/03/the-prelude-to-assaults/) - Jane Eaton Hamilton is a Canadian author and activist. Her writing has won or been nominated for numerous awards. The following article, first posted February 5, 2016, is reprinted with permission from her website. Background on the on the Jian Ghomeshi trial is available on Wikipedia. Jian Ghomeshi, you [redacted]. I don’t know you very
- [A Day in My Life: Andrea Lundrigan](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/10/a-day-in-my-life-andrea-lundrigan/) - Summer, 2014. Wake up at 7:45am, pull up yesterday's jeans, braid hair to hide the bedhead. Find Bea already up and dressed. Make breakfast and lunch at the same time - savour the Valley strawberry jam on my English muffin. Wonder if perhaps I'm packing too much food - she's 9 and leaving home for
- [A Day in My Life: Courtney Gerber](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/09/a-day-in-my-life-courtney-gerber/) - Greeted my toddler at 7:15am. Nursed said toddler. Nuzzled said toddler until 7:45am. Ate breakfast. Played, played, and played toddler-style. Cleaned a poopy diaper. Started to clean the shower (one tile down, quite a few damn many to go). Rushed to the gym for a 45-minute workout. (Thank you partner for staying home with the
- [A Day in My Life: Bethany Gladhill](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/08/a-day-in-my-life-bethany-gladhill/) - Got up, had coffee, got a little girl going. Drove across town to a friend's to help her pack -- and score some of her clothes (long story). Came back, entertained said little girl and visiting 15-year-old Russian foreign exchange student staying with us. Weeded parts of the back yard. Attempted to put in a
- [A Day in My Life: Annette Sawers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/08/a-day-in-my-life-annette-sawers/) - Husband away on business trip, seems my brain has turned to mush! Not very sleepy tonight; must be the 13 hours sleep I had. (Sore hip, took two codeine instead of two aspirin. Mental note: must move bottles to two different locations.) Found my keys, after looking everywhere, and the house is cleaner as I
- [A Day in My Life: Su Rogers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/07/a-day-in-my-life-su-rogers/) - Between 6:00 am and 4:26 pm, I did the following not-so-brilliant but time-consuming things: I went for an early walk access what traffic was on the water. Went in front of red buildinged (my computer doesn’t like the word ‘buildinged’) Adams and Knickle, onto the Public Wharf and subsequently onto the Railway Wharf before shooting
- [Three Quick Reviews: Writing Guides for Women](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/07/three-quick-reviews-writing-guides-for-women/) - Check Goodreads or Indiebound, and you'll find a virtual bookcase of writing guides: books on verse, dialogue, and plot; books for academics, Christians, and preschoolers. Precious few, however, have been created for women. Of course, women don't always need or want gender-specific writing advice, but for some of life's changes and challenges—motherhood, for instance—tailored guidance
- [A Day in My Life: Sheila Morrison](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/06/my-day-sheila-morrison/) - Woke up at 6:15 (unusual for me) astonished at how brilliant the sun was shining at such an hour. Have I been missing something? Must be nice at the cottage. Stretched my cranky knee and deforming toes while listening to CBC. Answered the phone—my daughter downstairs confirmed she will go to the dreaded ECT appointment
- [A Day in My Life: Linda Roe](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/07/a-day-in-my-life-linda-roe/) - I awake too early this morning, 2:17 a.m., and spend the wee hours on the couch in our lounge...our two cats cuddled up with me, purring and cleaning themselves. The day begins at 7-ish with an instant coffee, which has been a habit since my Correctional Officer days in Ontario. I worked seven different shifts
- [A Day in My Life: Lesley Crewe](https://understoreymagazine.ca/2014/07/a-day-in-my-life-lesley-crewe/) - July 13, 2014 Up at 6:30 in the Prince George Hotel in Halifax. Had a shower. Got dressed. Had coffee from a little coffee machine in the room. Went downstairs to conference room and met Nimbus colleagues. Listened to other authors read from their books. Gave my own ten minute reading. Signed books, made plans

## Pages

- [Home](https://understoreymagazine.ca/)
- [Contact Us](https://understoreymagazine.ca/contact-us/) - Thanks for your interest in Understorey Magazine. You can get in touch through the contact form below. Our postal address is: Understorey Magazine Alexa McDonough Institute for Women, Gender and Social Justice Mount Saint Vincent University 166 Bedford Highway Halifax, NS B3M 2J6 You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram.
- [The Future of Understorey](https://understoreymagazine.ca/submissions/the-future-of-understorey/) - DECEMBER 2024: INDEFINITE HIATUS Understorey Magazine is on indefinite hiatus. Since our last issue in 2021, we have worked with several organizations in hope of finding a new institutional home for the magazine and new sources of funding. All of these organizations, and the people within them, have been incredibly enthusiastic and supportive. Unfortunately, none
- [Mandate](https://understoreymagazine.ca/mandate/) - Our vision is to sustain a relevant, accessible, and aesthetically beautiful venue that illuminates the life experiences of writers and artists in Canada who are women, non-binary and/or genderqueer. To achieve this vision we: Publish compelling, original works of literary prose, poetry, and visual art. Inspire, encourage, and mentor new and emerging writers and artists.
- [6 Things I've Learned Publishing a Literary Magazine for 10 Years](https://understoreymagazine.ca/6-things-ive-learned-publishing-a-literary-magazine-for-10-years/) - by Katherine Barrett, Understorey Magazine's founder and editor Understorey Magazine sprouted as an idea in 2012. We published our first issue in 2013 and have since published 21 issues---over 400 writers and artists. The future of Understorey is uncertain but during our recent hiatus, I looked back at how the magazine evolved, what I’ve learned,
- [General Guidelines](https://understoreymagazine.ca/submissions/general-guidelines/) - Currently CLOSED for submissions. Please see The Future of Understorey and 6 Things I've Learned for more (many more!) details. Understorey Magazine publishes stories based in life experience and told through fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. We feature writers who identify as women or non-binary, and who also have a strong connection
- [Submissions](https://understoreymagazine.ca/submissions/)
- [Teaching/Resources](https://understoreymagazine.ca/teaching-resources/) - Teaching a class? Organizing a book club? Engaging in self-study? Why not explore literary magazines as a source of timely writing by new and established authors? All articles in Understorey Magazine are available online, free of cost. Most articles are under 1500 words. This means everyone in your class or club can get—and finish—the readings.
- [Masthead](https://understoreymagazine.ca/masthead/) - Katherine Barrett is Understorey’s founder and editor. Katherine has worked on women's and environmental issues for many years and has published numerous works of scholarly research, short fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction. She is also managing editor of the academic journal Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice. Katherine believes writing and sharing stories can
- [A Five-Step Guide for Young Writers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/resources/five-step-guide-young-writers/) - (as brought to you by a young writer*) Writing is a hobby, an occupation, and an art---one open to all ages. But the hardest part, as with anything, can be starting out, especially for young writers. There are tons of questions surrounding the writing process in general. How do you get better? How do you
- [Past Issues](https://understoreymagazine.ca/archives/)
- [Support Us](https://understoreymagazine.ca/support-us/) - Understorey is a non-profit magazine produced in partnership with the Alexa McDonough Institute for Women, Gender and Social Justice at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Our vision is to sustain a relevant, accessible, diverse, and aesthetically beautiful venue that supports and empowers women and non-binary writers and artists. We are committed to paying every
- [Events](https://understoreymagazine.ca/events/) - Climate Crisis: Our Future, Our Story Free Writing & Publishing Workshops for Youth (ages 14-19) Join Understorey Magazine and the Alexa McDonough Institute for Women, Gender and Social Justice for a free two-hour workshop on writing and publishing about the climate crisis. #Climateaction needs storytellers and journalists. Learn to craft your story and help create
- [Resources](https://understoreymagazine.ca/resources/) - A Guide for Young Writers Read Understorey's Five-Step Guide for Young Writers here. Literary Magazines by / about / for Women and Non-Binary Writers Brain, Child Magazine (US) CALYX (US) Canadian Woman Studies (academic and literary) Canthius: feminism and literary arts (Canada) Guts Magazine (Canada; closing 2019) Literary Mama (US) Many Gendered Mothers (Canada) Minola
- [Literary Links](https://understoreymagazine.ca/resources/literary-links/) - Literary Magazines by / about / for Women and Non-Binary Writers Brain, Child Magazine (US) CALYX (US) Canadian Woman Studies (academic and literary) Canthius: feminism and literary arts (Canada) Guts Magazine (Canada; closing 2019) Literary Mama (US) Many Gendered Mothers (Canada) Minola Review (Canada) Mslexia (UK) Persimmon Tree (women over 60; US) Plenitude Magazine (LGBTTQI;
- [](https://understoreymagazine.ca/9403-2/)
- [Print Copies](https://understoreymagazine.ca/print-copies/) - Understorey Magazine Issue 12 is available as a print magazine. 52 pages; 8.5 x 11 inches; 70 lb glossy paper. Black and white text with full colour illustrations. Read the digital issue here. Copies are $10 (plus shipping). Bulk orders for schools and other organisations are available. To order, contact us via our contact

## Articles

- [Gary Gets Angry Sometimes](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/gary-gets-angry-sometimes/) - He calls us Smiley, Pinky, and Blue Eyes, which makes us feel like 1930s gangsters. I call him Helmet Guy because each day during drop-in hours, he rides a shiny red electric scooter down the street from his unit to the housing co-op office and he always leaves his matching helmet on during our conversations.
- [the end of the world (three poems)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-plant-in-the-disability-office-three-poems/) - I ask the worker to make a copy of the sheet of paper and I stare at the plant which is falling over. Someone must have thought a little green would do the office good but the plant wasn't so sure. There was no sunlight in the office and there was no rain.
- [We Are Not Made For You](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/we-are-not-made-for-you/) - Art is my way of expressing my creativity. I feel it speaks louder than words. It is my belief that we, as a people, all have value; we can pull from the strength of our ancestors as we continue on life’s journey.
- [<i>still</i>](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/still/) - / when i was small my mother used to perch up on the chesterfield in the living room / mirror asleep along the top of the cushion / the sun's blood caressing her face / bleeding through the panes while she plucks her eyebrows /
- [Nocturnal](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/nocturnal/) - If in the silence of the earliest / morning, before the sun cracks / across the sliding glass / of the wide Red River – If in that hour, / like a pocket, the cat quiet, curled / against the inner, ragged hem, / I laced on my running shoes....
- [Botwood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/botwood/) - I have a second life in present-day Botwood / because grandmother was there / an icon for us to visit / the Botwood Mural Arts Society / aims to resurrect the town through art / painters from all around are invited / to create murals....
- [Learning Their Names: Letters from the Home Place](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/learning-their-names/) - Tonight I write to you from inside winter, its dark stillness, from fire in the grate / made by my love who understands the appetite of fire....
- [Entangled in Yarn(bombs)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/entangled-in-yarnbombs/) - Like other forms of street art, it’s difficult to know the artist's intention but it's safe to assume there is an element of fun. Despite the expanded practice and broader definition, it’s still rare to spot a yarn bomb in real life. Except in Twillingate.
- [Yepsen](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/yepsen/) - Burn blisters from the woodstove, / the whole of my dog’s snout, a / frost-shattered axe blade and the / fine thread between what I want / and the ditch of sky. / The fine line / between my silence and splinters / in my palm....
- [This isn't the house. / Unregulated Waste Management Facility](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/this-isnt-the-house-unregulated-waste-management-facility/) - This isn’t the house I grew up in. / We’re both set in our ways. / I’ve walked on trails that pass uncomfortably close to trees. / I’ve walked on trails that humans don’t use....
- [Lobster Season Closure](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/lobster-season-closure/) - I am a commodity, export, / no longer poor-man’s food / prepared by wives / in drafty kitchens. / The engines are off, / hands still. / There will be time again / to be pulled upward, / lifted from saltwater. / For now, the pull is within / and away from myself.
- [A Feast to Die For](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-feast-to-die-for/) - Amarjit never ate with him. He complained she was too noisy. He complained she was eating too much. He complained she was eating too little. She just sat across from him and watched like a sentinel, noting each approval and recoiling at any dissatisfaction.
- [Canner](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/canner/) - During the Second World War everyone had a garden, a ​Victory Garden they were called. The whole family participated. It was fun and a way to feed ourselves and store for the future, whatever that uncertain future may be. No matter how small the yard there was always room....
- [A Nice Pair of Stilettos](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-nice-pair-of-stilettos/) - After we closed up that night, Deb and I were cashing out with rum and cokes, a plate of poutine set between us, stilettos on top of the bar, shining under the lights. "You're young," she said. I shrugged, letting shoulders do the talking. "You could do better."
- [This Day](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/this-day/) - I used to try and explain that farmers accept death as a part of life. That we believe the animals have a purpose and are there to be used. That there’s tremendous satisfaction in knowing you’ve given your animals the best care possible and in knowing they are going to feed others.
- [Bubble Waffle on Xie Road](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/bubble-waffle-on-xie-road-2/) - thirteen years ago she stood beside him / in a ponytail and simple T-shirt / eyes steady on the nimble hands / that rested on the handle of the hot iron / heat against heat a quick catch / his wrist jerks and the platter flips / onto its stomach flames slowly roasting
- [butcher's hands](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/butchers-hands/) - take three pounds of flesh and bone / cleave the block in two / trim the fat but leave the muscle / these hands must grip knives / use a boning blade / to fillet grooves between fingers / slice off the thumb tip / a destined loss / etch a jagged scar across ...
- [Breaditations](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/breaditations/) - I. MEASURE; MIX two cups of lukewarm water / the temperature of our beating hearts / two and a half teaspoons yeast / dropped without warning / one teaspoon of sea salt / since we could not cry for fear / a quarter cup of oil / we learned to count it out
- [The Lucky One](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-lucky-one/) - It’s your turn to prepare the sweet bread for the Christmas family gathering this year. Your mother used to take care of it, and her mother before her. But with those matriarchs gone the responsibility now falls to you, the eldest woman in the family.
- [Food Fights](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/food-fights/) - Bring Your Kid to Work Day and my Eighth Grader wanted to come to the cake factory with me. You can't have kids on the plant floor when we are in operation, and to tell you the truth I didn't want her to see me with a hairnet and scrubs on, sorting cupcakes into colours.
- [Five Pounds of Yellow Onions](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/five-pounds-of-yellow-onions/) - After Roger died, I discovered I couldn’t cook. I did not know how to make soup, stew, paella, rice pilaf, stir fry, potato omelettes. He cooked these meals. When we knew he was dying, he asked me to promise I would prepare, cook, and eat "proper" meals every evening.
- [It’s Not My Childhood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/its-not-my-childhood/) - But I’ll remember it for you. / You gorged yourself on wild pears / Scarred apples picked from gnarled trees / Snakes lurked underfoot among the tall grasses / But you learned to eat your fear with screams, / Transformed it into ecstasy. / You had no use for quiet. /
- [Essential Workers or Essential Work?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/essential-workers-or-essential-work/) - Have we really thought about these workers—the woman at the cash, the dishwasher in the restaurant, the trucker on the highway—or have we only thought about the work that needs doing? Do we value essential workers or just their essential work?
- [Laughter](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/laughter/) - I wish laughter were / the last thing to go / but it goes / before hearing, / before thought, / before breath, / this bubbling thing, this spasm, / this wriggling fish, / half muscle, half air, / that flops out of us, / with a hook in its flesh....
- [Two Yahoo! Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/two-yahoo-poems/) - The animal is a sign of a need, surely— / one that we’re too frightened / to say out loud. / Not a need to hold each other, / necessarily. Not the need of weak-willed men / to tell someone when to sit or fetch. / Perhaps it is a need to know....
- [Instructions for Lucretia](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/instructions-for-lucretia/) - Take a spoonful of sugar for the hiccups / Dash his brains into his mouth / Map the stretch marks on your thighs / Stay grounded by looking up / Inhale the sky / Avoid long speeches / Call your mother, talk about the day you were born....
- [Dilemma](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/dilemma/) - I love to see an audience of poets chuckling and hooting. I love to see the look on newcomers’ faces: “Poetry has sure changed since high school.” But humorous poems need just as many revisions as sonnets, sestinas, or free verse.
- [Delivering the Tragic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/delivering-the-tragic/) - When I wrapped up and stepped off stage to applause, two producers I’d never met booked me for paid shows on the spot. Then a swarm of people approached me to tell me their own stories of doctors and misdiagnosis.
- [Go for Gold, Audrey Pham](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/go-for-gold-audrey-pham/) - As a shy person, one of the greatest salves I’ve found is to give my jokes to characters, and have those characters played by actors who are not me. What a joy, what a thrill, and what a relief to have these actors go out there....
- [Smiling Is Not Professional](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/smiling-is-not-professional/) - I examine the wrinkles around my eyes and mouth. I have developed some pretty significant laugh lines. I see them as signs of resistance. I have somehow managed to keep laughing, even when I’ve been told that I shouldn’t.
- [Good Game](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/good-game/) - “Offside!” Four wheezes. There’s no offside in Indoors, everyone thinks, everyone knows, but Four insists. Four believes. She storms down the field, a petulant child with fallen arches and roots that need touching up.
- [The Music of Laughter](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-music-of-laughter/) - And so this madness from my mummy went on. Music. Laughter. Singing. Two months later, I came home from school and heard a familiar tune I could not place. My mom looked up at me with her smile and said, “I am playing ‘Like Virginia.’”
- [Melt](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/melt/) - dangling icicles glitter in the sun / droplets swell, cling, quiver and finally free fall / splattering, disappearing into wet pavement / letting go – I take myself less seriously now / cracking up always feels better....
- [Crazed](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/crazed/) - You dropped “crazed” from the second description. Aaah, he’s just a guy, you know, who could be having a bad day, you know, he needs our understanding, you know, why don’t we look at this from his point of view?
- [Hysteronia](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/hysteronia/) - So outta the blue, the woman starts, well, aging. One day she’s out for a long run, uphill both ways, with zero stretching or anti-inflammatories. Next day she wakes up and her bedside table is covered with pill bottles and cross-stitch....
- [Somebody Get a Wig](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/somebody-get-a-wig/) - To work in comedy is many things: / exciting / hilarious / exhilarating / difficult / good wigs / late nights / loud bars / free beers / never stable / full of gossip / endless hours writing sketches / only to have them forgotten....
- [Gelotology](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/gelotology/) - My mother always covers her mouth when she laughs. Once I showed her / what I thought was a great photo, and she said, “Oh, my teeth.” / Scientists document our rhythmic breaths and vocalizations. / It isn’t always a joke....
- [The Mess](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-mess/) - I’m tired. / Tired of the words / crunching underfoot, cheerios / smushed into the carpet, never / devolving to earth. / Of climbing over / boxes of disconnected words / belonging once to poems, essays, / fiction and non, / rumbled-jumbled....
- [Deep Pool Bridge](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/deep-pool-bridge/) - When Clara was eight, her mother asked her if she ought to leave her father. She did not say that Clara would go with her, though they both assumed it. “We could live in the country. The little cottage at Deep Pool Bridge.
- [Behind Me, My Footprints Fill with Powder / Persephone](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/behind-me-persephone/) - A mouse-gray sky dusts the hills, / softens the silhouettes of evergreens. / I walk alongside my adult daughter, / our words tiny clouds between us....
- [A Pinch and a Wiggle](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/pinch-and-a-wiggle/) - Shannon goes to fetch the totes full of vacuum-sealed fish and cuts them open. She admires the intense crimson of sockeye. Then she carries the two canners up from the basement, one matte-grey like the sky, one a shiny aluminum....
- [Rural Creative](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/rural-creative/) - Rural and quiet should not be confused with lifeless. Lack of high-profile events or line-ups outside venues does not mean lack of workshops, performances, readings, or exhibits. You just need to know where to look.
- [Lucky Strike](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/lucky-strike/) - Everyone in Buchans lived in the shadow of Lucky Strike deckhead. Steely crisscrossed supports locked the legs of the towering triangular headframe in place, a Jenga of girders and I-beams atop a 700-foot mineshaft.
- [Spontaneous Combustion](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/spontaneous-combustion/) - Half-naked above me in autumn / the flowering crab is laden with hard little apples / the bite that I take leaves a bitter taste / in my throat, the birds will ignore them / all winter long until repeated frosts / soften them and /all else is gone....
- [Siteseeing #23-28](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/siteseeing-23-28/) - Someone posts crocuses / on Facebook and we are out / the door and across the pasture / wind be damned, sleeping / deer too who boing boing / from slough to hilltop and turn / stunned. Are we real or some kind of nightmare?
- [Light of Her White Hem](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/light-of-her-white-hem/) - Light jackknifes the Beaufort, pries open the mountain filling with snow./ From the rear of the bus; from the bottom rung; from her under-brow stare--- / the girl in dark glasses hunches over last night’s dream: / underwater hands shelling peas....
- [Acadian Lines](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/acadian-lines/) - I left a light in the upstairs window. A beacon / for the driver in case the hot blue heat / blowing through rusty vents, silencing the crunch of / wheels on snow covered roads, lulled you to sleep. / I’ve pulled the rocker to the side kitchen window....
- [Song for Barbie / Song for Leonard](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/song-for-leonard-song-for-barbie/) - Why do I suspect it did not / go well for you, bright light? / In our four-corner village, you / flared briefly. / If I coloured in the lines, you / barely noticed the page, / crayoning instead the windows, the skies beyond. Wild child....
- [On Being Remote (& Saying Good-Bye)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/on-being-remote-and-saying-good-bye/) - To be remote can also mean to be emotionally distant. Physical distance can offer self-protection from relational difficulties. In my high-voltage family, we needed space from each other. Yet we craved connection, too.
- [The Nature of News](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-nature-of-news/) - Decades ago, when I lived in the city, I met a woman who did not. Her letters schooled me in a more rural kind of news. For her, news was when the chickadees that she’d been watching for a month stood aside and let their fledglings fly....
- [Finding the Bizarre in the Mundane: On Environment and Memory](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/finding-the-bizarre-in-the-mundane-on-environment-and-memory/) - “You're brave to go in that water,” the woman said. In one hand she held a convenience-store bag of snacks and in the other a cigarette. “It didn't always look like this, though...."
- [Bear with Me](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/bear-with-me/) - The land is so ever-present, unimpeded by concrete and traffic noise, that I am compelled to express my feelings for it rather than faithfully render it. I am conscious of a settling in, a rootedness, and so my paintings have become more abstract.
- [Re-Wilding Under Those Conditions](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/re-wilding-under-those-conditions/) - Stick this time – as in, half-formed century – with a pin / into the butterfly thorax, into embolism: / there is not a word in every language for / extinction event / but sometimes there are / a few / words for burning / neiamgla'tijig
- [Service Works](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/service-works/) - People used to tell me that giving was more rewarding than receiving. But once I started using alcohol and drugs in my early teens, my vocabulary reduced to “Gimme, gimme.” I started on a road to nowhere and no one cared. Not even me.
- [Funny, Not Funny](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/editorial-funny-not-funny/) - Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb? A: That’s not funny. Which is funny, right? Or not. The relationship between women and humour—and laughter and comedy and even smiling—is complicated.
- [Postpartum: Three Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/postpartum-three-poems/) - I am wet ash./ Void of all light and warmth/ no hope to flutter about./ A cold lump of what was once so bright./ All joy burned away long ago./ Once so cherished, now discarded./ Used and unwanted/ left with the bleak rain of misery./It does not soak, it does not penetrate/
- [Mom](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/mom/) - Caitlin McGuire is a fourth year painting student at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax. She created "Mom" for Understorey Magazine. Inspiration for the comic "came at a time when I really did need my mom," Caitlin said. "Funny how life happens that way."
- [Bradley at the Dinner Table](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/bradley-at-the-dinner-table/) - You don’t want salad. / Your mouth is full of / moist dayglow gobs of / bubble-mint spiderwebs. / You spit them out in your napkin, / slurping an emerald smoothie / I made just for you. / It tastes like gummy bears / you tell me, as you take a sip ....
- [Baby Steps](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/baby-steps/) - Zoe aimed the blue tube at the paper and squeezed hard trying to dislodge the dried paint that had sealed the opening after the cap disappeared. The tube split and the paint shot onto the floor, her hands, her clothes, her new pillow. Zoe sat frozen, bright blue streaming down her wrist....
- [In the Museum of Your Last Day](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-museum-of-your-last-day/) - Tangled sheets, / but no pillow. / A storage basket with broken binders / and unopened packages of lined paper. / The pencil case you fill every September / but never use. / Your dress shoes, / upside down by the closet. / Folded paper squares / rain weed when I open them.
- [You Call This A Life?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/you-call-this-a-life/) - If you asked April and Hazel what life is like (with Down syndrome), they would probably give you their undivided attention for a few moments. Hazel would likely start telling you about her friends in school, her little brother Olav, and her favourite foods and activities.
- [Shuffle Forward](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/shuffle-forward/) - The child is suddenly silent, / Unresponsive / His face — pasty white and expressionless, / his skin feels cold and moist. / His grey ball cap has been pulled down / so far over his forehead / you can’t see his eyes. / His breathing is shallow and quick. / His pulse is strong....
- [Carmen Is Licking Her Babies](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/carmen-is-licking-her-babies/) - I always do this after work. I come in right off the Access-a-bus and get my pillow and get right in here. We’re all squashed up behind the sofa—me and Carmen and the babies. Mum told me to move away but she doesn’t really know Carmen like I know her.
- [The Doll](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/letitiafraser/) - Letitia Fraser is a proud descendant of North Preston and comes from a long line of artists. About The Doll Letitia says: “I wanted to use things that have a connection to my community and my childhood, both of which are a great source of inspiration for me.”
- [Jennifer Raven: Cancer Girl](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/jennifer-raven-cancer-girl/) - Jennifer Raven is a photographer, writer, teacher, single mother of twins, and cancer survivor. Adventures of Cancer Girl, illustrated by Denise Gow-Morse, portrays the daily life of single mother with cancer. As Jennifer writes: single mother + cancer = superhero.
- [Stacked Up Together](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/stacked-up-together/) - Some months before, the three of us had been abandoned by the boys' father. I was now farmer, farmer’s wife, mother and father on a farm that demanded the efforts of two grown adults.... Dave was eight and Pete only six; I could not let them suffer the scars of divorce.
- [Nana](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/nana/) - She sat in an armchair in the corner of the apartment that she shared with my grandfather, her cigarettes on a small, round table beside her with a lighter—those were the days of lighters—and an ashtray with a beanbag bottom. And a glass of Tang lemonade (yes, Tang made lemonade too). And the TV guide.
- [Aftershock](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/aftershock/) - “So what did you and Mattie do today?” Ryan pours Pinot Grigio into Claire’s glass. “I’ve been thinking about the earthquake. We aren’t really ready if there’s an emergency. We should have a kit.” He rallies to the change of subject. "We probably have the stuff we need."
- [Sunday Night Bingo](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/sunday-night-bingo/) - Your first born sleeps eternal— / A whisper in the ear / A bundle swaddled / at the bottom of the breath. / I, alone, am the promise; / The fountain of youth, the only ovaries left. / All the eggs in one / basket-case who tosses back Fireball / in the bathroom stall /
- [Centre Stage](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/centre-stage/) - I stood in the wings with my unneeded prompt book, shocked by the realization that something I had written was being enjoyed by a hall full of people. As the final curtain fell, my mother strode to centre stage to claim her directorial applause.
- [Aquarium](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/aquarium/) - A week or two every August for nine years / we lived our heart’s desire, surrounded by water / and birdsong and starlight; / pulled on bathing suits each morning / and stripped them off reluctantly at night / when we emptied the clumsy aquarium
- [Two Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/two-poems-3/) - She moves through time and place without hint of physical effort./ Her neck is sensuous in its turning./ Rises on the surface, wings beating silently, near meeting in prayer./ Calls to her children lost over centuries. / She dives. Her wail reaches down.
- [Why Tell Stories?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/why-tell-stories/) - Why make pictures? Why chisel form from stone? Why assemble words into lines and verse? In one sense all art is storytelling. But why do we tell such stories, especially when we're busy, broke, stuck, tired or criticized? I'd never asked myself the question.
- [Island Girl](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/island-girl/) - For sixteen nights she sleeps fitfully in her berth, the contents of her stomach rolling like the ocean. Always on the harsh edge of seasickness but never turning down the elegant evening feasts of foods so savoury, so sweet and thick, she sometimes weeps....
- [Service](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/service/) - Despite differences in interpretation, the work published here invokes two enduring elements of service. There is commitment (willing or less so), hard work, sacrifice. But there is also growth. All of the women represented in these stories are changed through acts of service.
- [Birchtown / Conversation with Elizabeth Cromwell](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/birchtown-conversation-elizabeth-cromwell/) - The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre has evolved into a tangible representation of our black community–a part of our history and our future that is accessible to all. A history that needs to be seen, heard, recognized and remembered.
- [Her Flower](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/her-flower/) - Picasso’s cubism method was captured to depict multiple points of view unified through geometric shapes. I wanted to create a painting that expressed the confidence and perseverance of beautiful black women everywhere!
- [Daughter of the Sun](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/daughter-of-the-sun/) - This is a very personal piece for me. As a woman living with fibroids, I have researched the overwhelming statistics on the complications fibroids can create for black women, not only in the child-rearing years but also into menopause.
- [The Crops / The Chattel](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-crops-the-chattel/) - The Crops and The Chattel are part of a series of ten paintings depicting the arrival of an African family to what is now Canada in 1785. The series shows their subsequent contributions to Black history.
- [Four Quilts](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/quilts/) - These four quilts were crafted by Marlene Dorrington and Myla Borden of the Vale Quiltmakers Collective. Designs by David Woods are based on images collected during travels through Nova Scotian communities.
- [Bad Blood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/bad-blood/) - The Keeper is a muddy-red-coloured rubber menstrual cup that looks like a metastasised pencil eraser. It wasn’t pretty. And it sure wasn’t cheap, either. Maybe $30—no small outlay of cash for a retail shift-scrounging early-‘90s undergrad; thirty bucks was more than my entire power bill back then.
- [Animal Kingdom](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/animal-kingdom/) - Richie and I were almost finished our morning constitutional, once around the lake, when he sprang it: "Why don’t we have a baby?" The call of a passing loon muzzled my response as I stooped to pat a French bulldog, a veritable blob of lard on the trail.
- [Big Chop](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/big-chop/) - “No regrets, right?” Patti questioned and ordered at once, as she continued to cut. “No regrets,” Grace echoed, while thinking of things she had in fact regretted---the too-corporate work, the years spent seeking approval from family and friends . . .
- [On Two-Eyed Seeing:<br>An Interview with Chelsey Purdy](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/on-two-eyed-seeingan-interview-with-chelsey-purdy/) - Two-Eyed Seeing is viewing the world through one eye with the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and the other eye with the strengths of Western ways of knowing.
- [Women in Prison](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/women-in-prison/) - Because it's 2015./ And there's women in the cabinet/ But that might not seem so adequate/ To women in the custody of the state/ It might not seem that late for black women imprisoned at ever rising rates/ Positioned by the colour of her skin to be a criminal by definition/
- [The Pedicurist](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/pedicurist/) - But she is tiny and powerful./ She is very good at what she does./ She barely has to think. I trust her./ She is sweet and rude. To the other pedicurists,/ she speaks suddenly, and seemingly angrily/ in their language, though she does not turn/ her body to them, and her body expresses no anger.
- [outpatient, i](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/outpatient-i/) - I wonder if I am too well / dressed for this. Should/ I still be in my pyjamas and / exhibiting ticks round/ the mouth and hands (early/ on-set of tardive dyskinesia)/ Will they stamp "faker" in/ clear black letters on my file/ and send me on my merry way?/ (would this be a relief?)
- [Colored Girl](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/colored-girl/) - Pack your bags,/ All the wonder, dreams/ You’ve tied in rags/ Live with me now and oh, what fun/ No more girl/ Living life on the run./ Colored girl/ What do you say?/ Come procreate with me/ A brand new day/ This is good/ Where we at right now internal gaze looking out/ Let’s bow
- [Etuaptmumk](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/etuaptmumk/) - With my heart and eyes, I have a completely different view,/ The consequence of my skin comes in an entirely different hue./ Don’t you see? Although you represent us,/ We think very differently than you./ Because we see the world not through one set of eyes,/ But through two.
- [Nowhere](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/nowhere/) - In a town where everyone knows everyone and everything about each other I know surprisingly little. People ask, Are you a small town person or a big city person? I just assumed I was a big city person considering the smothering town I am escaping. But now the city is dizzy and lonely.
- [Legacy](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/legacy/) - What special event would warrant a photograph? Is the date the age of the house? Or is it recording the birth of a child?I was told there were twins—two houses, two brothers—one who built an exact copy of this house just down the road, with the floor plans reversed.
- [Imagined Dialogues with My Grandmother](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/imagined-dialogues-grandmother/) - After she passes away I start listening to old Russian ballads, trying to imagine that she is singing back the nonsensical chants from my childhood. I cannot comprehend the language but its similarities to Serbian yield slow flows of faint echoes, providing an inexplicable comfort.
- [Little Red Roofs](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/little-red-roofs/) - I inherited a hooked rug from my grandmother depicting a rural structure all roof and snow, red and white, a Quebecois-style thing of a sort now much coveted in Bank Street antique shops that has seen much abuse at my hands, years since I took it after her death
- [Play Theory](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/play-theory/) - I was powerless over this plastic girl / And so I went to my computer / Where I entered into a world / Where I could manipulate everything / With only a blank page / And a keyboard / And my mind / And everything I had wanted to pretend / Tumbled out in words
- [Even If....](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/even-if/) - We must persevere. Even if the hands of society grab and pull at us, trying to mould our bodies, our souls, We must break away. Even if the words of others speak to the darkest thoughts, We must protect our minds. Even if the lens only filters black and white we must see in colour.
- [Perhaps, and Yet](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/perhaps-and-yet/) - speckled green eyes and calloused hands / focal points to his form / an achromatic shadow that looms / the realization comes with foreign touches / with his sharp intakes of the winter air / he dismantles every fragment of / my being shattered on damp pavement he lets his footsteps echo as he exits
- [Your Words Don't Hurt Us](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/words-dont-hurt-us/) - Queers! I laugh and pull her close She leans her head on my shoulder Your words don’t hurt us I love her / Freaks! I chuckle and squeeze her hand She smiles weakly Your words don’t hurt us I love her / Dykes! I wince and look to her She drops my hand....
- [Power](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/power/) - Power / thought they took it away / when they exchanged our crowns for chains / Pain / Embedded /not knowing where I was headed / Lost / I tried to remember the footprints / In the sand / I followed the man / to a ship / enslaved / On it engraved "Blacks only"
- [What Counts / Dirt Medicine](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/what-counts-dirt-medicine/) - We, the fossil fuel-addicted, / gather: / AA circles of the present / include true confessions of grief / for lost land and / wayward soil, / disconnection from earth / and mourning / the changing ecology / cars, cars, cars, / and where did all / those trees go?
- [she came home](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/she-came-home/) - the military doesn’t want her / neither do the hospitals or safe houses / I pick her up off of the street / drive her as far from Edmonton / and the military prison as we can get / Club Ed she says soldiers call it
- [(dis)service](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/disservice/) - bent head and borrowed bearing / eyes averted and authored by / outward lens / in this factory mass-producing / man’s concept of woman / my seat in the line / was gifted by my mother/ from her mother / and her mother / and her mother
- [Four](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/four/) - Crow’s shadow slides / Down icy perch / Calling no one / Howls and hisses / Screaming, spitting / Echoes over / Empty morning / Of bitter air / And spiteful frost / Reverberates / Over concrete / And inside me
- [A Design for Humankind](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-design-for-humankind/) - There it stands--my mothers time-worn loom / Holding life’s sweetness and life’s sorrows / A glorious tapestry of entwined lights and darks! / Threads of all colours harmonizing. / Imagine this as a map of the world....
- [Dear Ugly Duckling...](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/dear-ugly-duckling/) - I write to you because you are too familiar. / Do you not find it strange that I’d seen you, / read you a hundred times before, / but never felt the pain that I now feel? / I did not recognize you then….
- [Old Whitney Pier](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/old-whitney-pier/) - Don’t cross those tracks, / Stay on that side of the overpass. / Whitney Pier? / A place some people feared. / A diverse community with lots of culture. / A Canadian Heritage site like no other. / Welcome to the Pier Dear....
- [In My Skin](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/in-my-skin/) - In my caramel-coloured / Five foot, six inch frame / In my thick thighs / And high round buttocks / Toned arms / Large forehead / Large face / Almond-shaped eyes / Full lips / Laugh lines / Large hands / And high in-stepped feet….
- [Dear Daughter](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/dear-daughter/) - What if I told you this world is dark, cold and ugly? / What if I told you your whole life they’ll try and convince, blame and force you into believing it’s you? / What if I told you you’ll be confused and some parts you’ll believe are true?
- [Imagine](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/imagine/) - Imagine walking into a space where you automatically feel out of place because nobody’s face is identifiable with your race and / Imagine walking into a store and being watched like a hawk, or getting pulled over by the cops….
- [Behind the Door](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/behind-the-door/) - The ache wakes her, / her breasts so hard and tender. / Something wrong with the nipples. / How they pull inside her / when she’s cold / like fists. / If it isn’t breasts, it’s hips. / Femurs lengthen in the dark hours. / At times, she limps. / The socket no longer fits.
- [Sunset Over a Mosque in Quebec City](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/sunset-mosque-quebec-city/) - Even with faith we have no answers. We try to find /understanding through our shared rituals / of mourning and remembering: / a community clasps hands around a city block, / a gathering light candles to overcome what haunts us, / a family prepares to bury their loved ones.
- [The Reclamation](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-reclamation/) - When young I ran / loose and barefoot / Over partially colonised fields / and tide-transmuted rock. / Not pausing to consider the life / crushed underfoot / Or the millennia sharply pressed / into my tender arches . . .
- [Two Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/aged-cumin-and-busting-bollywood/) - You are so young. You are so ripe. / Cinema lights are bright and bold. / Dalit untouchable is she. / Unbutton more, the director nudges. / Hijra with henna hands is she. / You look so young . . .
- [To Dye or Not to Dye](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/to-dye-or-not-to-dye/) - To dye or not to dye, that is the question: / Whether ‘tis nobler to let the grey hairs win / And reveal the age she truly is, / Or to take arms against the march of time / And hit the Clairol aisle at Shoppers . . .
- [Discussion de Famille](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/discussion-de-famille/) - Je sais que tu es là, / Ma voix ne sait pas, / Il joue une clé de sol sur un alto; / “Je t’aime,” ne signifie rien. / Mon esprit est avec vous. / Mes mots ne sont pas. / L’espace entre nous est l’air, / Perdue dans la traduction.
- [Mémoires d’une vieille maison acadienne](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/memoires-dune-vieille-maison-acadienne/) - Jeune homme / C’est toi qui m’a bâtie et soigneusement réparée. / Jeune femme / C’est toi qui m’a aimée, nettoyée, remplie avec ta famille. / Ici vous avez passé toute votre vie ensemble. / Homme / Tu as rempli le poêle à bois
- [Recurring Dream](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/recurring-dream/) - I’m in the wings, downstage right, / opening night. Old proscenium stage, / heavy dark curtains. Invisible / on the other side a full house, expectant, / sound waves like surf on a pebble beach / swelling, ebbing, swelling. Dust, / sweat. /
- [Show People](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/show-people/) - A palpable suspension of disbelief / audience of skeptics enthralled beyond conscience / façade in foundation, shade: too light. / beauty mark drawn high on a supple cheek / A trill of a piccolo and— / My cue. / This is what I live for.
- [The Sixth Extinction: a lament](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-sixth-extinction-a-lament/) - to the tiny ones / Caribbean Monk Seal Nasal Mite / and the nameless ones / a frog from Sri Lanka / to the sleek-skinned water dwellers / Yangtze River Dolphin / and the dog-faced winged ones / soaring in the dusk / Small Samoan Flying Fox
- [In Borneo](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/in-borneo/) - There are too many palm trees. / The sky, overcrowded with clouds, / towers with thunderheads / every monsoon afternoon. Too much beach. / At dusk the tide slides in, / rubs its rippling silver skin on the rocks, / licks its tongue along the sand.
- [Theories of Nature](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/theories-of-nature/) - Let me tell you this bright and / twisting thing. The natural world dictates / letters for its secretary / to transcribe, just as the squirrel / with the white ears takes pains to / pivot on its upstage leg, and a robin / turns sideways to imitate Alfred Hitchcock
- [Two Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/at-the-tree-zoo-and-all-the-words-for-blue/) - Snow slides in clots / down the windshield, car fan on defrost set high, wiper blades / can’t do enough. / The guest is a lawyer, a woman, Indigenous / even-voiced, firm, implacable / in my ears, in the storm, she repeats / Apocalypse / Water / Hypoxia / Trees
- [Polar Bear in the Grocery Store](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/polar-bear-in-the-grocery-store/) - One night, at the height of winter, / a polar bear swam the widening ocean that / drowned her mother. She paddled, heavy with / grief and her wet white coat. / Overhead, the snowless sky was dark / and the air was hot.
- [Turning: a climate grief poem](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/turning/) - It's grief, / alright. / the same burning arrow / through the heart's gills / the same stone weight / of emptiness / — loss / of words / of what to do / of a place / that doesn't ache / the way the living room, / the bedroom and the kitchen / ache
- [Leatherback Endangered](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/leatherback-endangered/) - Crack up and out, shake / fragments of egg off the face. / use the largest shells as backbone, / as home. creep across dank, damp sands / to undulating ebb of rip current and flow along / swift Atlantic gulf stream
- [The Oriole](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-oriole/) - Beyond lit panes, a flimsy fragile feathered thing / wavers on the highest bough, her scant weight teetering / above a paisley floor stippled with shadow and trembling / light. The bird trills as though her heart will fly /
- [In Alight of Covid-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/in-alight-of-covid-19/) - T’was the beginning of 2020, we thought we were all free / Christmas just ended, but there’s still time for a spree / It’s the new year, a new decade, forget the black past / but who knew COVID-19 would hit just as fast /
- [Infection](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/infection/) - Scalp, corset-tight; / muscles screech / against my bones / Flock of geese / in my chest / Map of the world with its new / and jarring colors — / I avoid the mental math. / Toxic thoughts, throat-choke fears / spinning out / My mother’s lungs — Weary as old dish rags.
- [Unschooled: Guelph, March 23](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/unschooled-guelph-ontario-march-23-2020/) - The school, emptied / goes silently blind, each window dark / under clouds, an unseeing eye / chilled grey / in the yard, hard brown bricks / hold fast / to the bolts / of a basketball hoop / no bells ring, no children cascade /
- [Bittersweet Lament](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/bittersweet-lament/) - Nightmares 3 nights in a row / Nowhere I can go / Will temptation overcome / Self-isolation / God is with me / But is it God’s timing / A personal 9/11 / Has become public / It has been a winter of / Stocking up / Snowed ins / Falls / Study deadlines
- [Three Haiku](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/three-haiku/) - Today’s sum twenty / Eight thousand and two hundred / Forty-four ascents. // Sun sears fishbone sky / Cloudbursts pierce quicksilver hems / Earth inhales exhales. // White noise lie in state / Silent sky and interstate / Doves know no borders.
- [Diago's Dark Waters](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/diagos-dark-waters/) - On our tour of the Rio Negro, while the boat / putters across its strong-tea waters / local guide, Diago adds colour commentary / in addition to the construction genius of a bridge / over 2 miles long with 246 supporting columns, he adds / that each month 24 people plummet to death from it
- [Grandparenting in Covid-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/grandparenting-in-covid-19/) - Precious days lost / Will I miss her first steps? / Daily photos and videos help / But I can’t touch her soft skin / Pat her round belly / Inhale her baby scent / FaceTime becomes “Story Time with Grandma” / She reaches out to touch my face
- [What I Do and Don't Miss](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/what-i-do-and-dont-miss-social-distancing/) - What I Do and Don't Miss After Nora Ephron’s “What I’ll miss, what I won’t miss" What I Don’t Miss Traffic Chauvinism Mall noise Parking meters Public restrooms Small talk What I Do Miss Sparring New book smell Textures Specialty tea stores The family cat Hugs
- [Self-isolation with universe](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/self-isolation-with-universe/) - Sincere desire: to call / today the worst birthday / but I don’t care. / The cat is all now you know / how it feels. House finches / swing on the feeder, / chuffed to see me / behind glass. My sincere desire / is to record a teaching video. /
- [Enclosure](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/enclosure/) - I’ve been writing, / reflecting in my journal / and thinking just what you asked: / Why does this / feel different from the / already self / isolated state we live in? / The closest I’ve come to it is a feeling that’s like those / wire-framed screen covers
- [Come So Far](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/come-so-far/) - Little Covie (may I call you that?) / doing what you've done since / the beginning -- begetting and begetting / in biblical proportion, as though / there were no tomorrow, surviving /as we wear you to the mall.
- [In These Times](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/in-these-times/) - and in these times, / I focus on the birds, the chirps, the helicopter thrum of wings / the gossip high in the bare branches / trees waiting for pips to become a blush of early green at dawn they branch like the lobes of lungs
- [Done Here](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/done-here/) - Small the changes we made / to the yard from last / spring to this. Shrubs / mainly, a path, a deck. / But we must have changed / the northwest passage / around the house for today / the strong wind, soothing /
- [Creatures, already dead, come here](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/creatures-already-dead-come-here/) - One is my mother. Her smile a Siamese cat’s -- / her ears sharp and tail proud as she blinks a wise-eyed stare. / One is a dead poet I love. His appearance wakes me / inside the dream I’m dreaming. I panic that he has died, /
- [The Idea for this Novel](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-idea-for-this-novel/) - Came to me out of the blue--No / When the news reported that drones / Would be delivering Amazon packages / I thought about the spread / Of dinners, care packages and / Toiletries--No / Need to ever to get a drivers license, I think....
- [Given the Circumstances](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/given-the-circumstances/) - we all say now, in light of, as well / as can be, strange days, these / times. / The universe / has no short-term memory. / Each morning we have the grief- / work / of reminding the ravens, / the buried moles of our / losses /
- [Friday](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/friday/) - We hear of the death of a man. / By key stroke. Counting / Another number. This could be you. / This could be me. / We hide the death of a child. / Deep in the womb. Living / Uneasy. Murdering easy. / Handful of shining clink.
- [Email: Covid-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/email-covid-19/) - I'm at home sick, thinking it is just a cold, watching the coronavirus count, but also trying to watch lighter things on Netflix when I can, and planning the garden for the farm this summer. Extra rows of potatoes and carrots and beets for the Food Bank.
- [Today](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/today/) - Today One Day, elbows will nudge in darkened theatres. One Day, voices will harmonize with fingers interlocked. One Day, sweet smiles will follow “sorry” when strangers collide. One Day, arms will wrap lost warmth tightly, unapologetically. Today: I long for One Day.
- [grasp-less](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/grasp-less/) - the capsized cling to laptops / bottom lines sink / will you fast with me? / eat freedom / grasp-less embodiment / grief release my child / birthed spirit / walk decades undead / here I remain, expanded / midwife ush-plush-usher
- [For My Sister in Her PPE](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/for-my-sister-in-her-ppe/) - Recently, a memory of you, asleep / beside me in the wide bed / in Haileybury, your black / hair fanned out on the pillow / like a split seed. / Do you remember / that house? Where we found the trunk in the attic, full of fancy clothes....
- [Boys and Girls Build Software](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/boys-and-girls-build-software/) - Boy and girls were given the task to build software from scratch, / Their very own. / The boys got to it immediately, building it up from bones. / Began to hatch, / A plan, a strategy to wind it up, put in the least amount of work. /
- [Two Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/modeling-religion-vogon-poetry/) - Ah, how to explain to you, Warrior Queen, / your name has just been invoked by a bot / generating poetry by fictional expansionist aliens? / Welcome to our millennium, Mother of Forsaken Queens. /
- [Manner of Speech](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/manner-of-speech/) - I wrote a computer program to write haiku. This was in 1994 or thereabouts. I wrote it in PASCAL. Here is its best work: The taller teacher / enlightens slowly, but this / ignorance consumes. / Or rather not its best work. It had no best work.
- [Pretty Corners Catch the Eye](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/pretty-corners-catch-the-eye/) - there was no way to tell / before / just how / hard a floor could be / no reason to know / the hours one could zoom / through days / dazed, cross legged / seated posing / laptops on laps / tablets on tummies / work life balance
- [Milky Light of a Clinica’s Infinite Gaze](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/milky-light-of-a-clinicas-infinite-gaze/) - 21 and I’m dispensing eight months of rent / to feel some weighted kind of fleshy titillation / trans girls from YouTube said it would be painful / having silicone bags shoved into the bust – / but then again, all the lips : hands : teeth : tongues ....
- [Salad Spinner](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/salad-spinner/) - My mother is mystified by the salad spinner, / mesmerized by its whir and endless spin, / suspicious that it could do a better job / than her hands that know vegetables so well, / hands that know how to wash the silt from greens /
- [The Pickers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-pickers/) - farmer blood, peasant blood, / managing-to-hold-on-by-a-thread blood / seeps from veins into deepening soil, / willing things to grow in desolate places. / we’ve always picked things, / soft things and hardened things / bajra, jowar, rice, sugar cane, and cotton ....
- [Words > Stories > Action](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/words-stories-action/) - In this issue of Understorey Magazine, our contributors do not lord over nature's bounty. Nor do they stand aside in reverence or awe. They do not separate themselves at all—from nature, or from a nature in crisis.
- [Rains](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/rains/) - Questions about perceptions of weather and climate are often a part of my research and I'm genuinely curious to learn the responses. Here in the Gambia, however, I can now almost predict what I will hear: the weather is indeed changing.
- [Canvassing](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/canvassing/) - It’s always a guessing game: how long to wait before I accept that no one is coming. Thankfully, she answered quickly. She had a go-away face, though, her eyes hard and a tension around her mouth as if she were trying to spit me out.
- [Shifting Landscape](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/shifting-landscape/) - The moment I knew it was time to give up sheep farming is etched into my memory. It was late February and lambing season. Checking the barn, I saw a ewe straining. She was trying to birth her lamb, but the lamb’s knees had gotten jammed....
- [Ruby](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/ruby/) - Before the storm, when you were still a brand-new person, in those weeks of late summer when the barometric pressure was high and the sky clear blue, we stayed mainly in the big park where there's a real forest and a river.
- [Us and STEM](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/us-and-stem/) - How does technology, with all its biases, affect our lives? How might something as simple as a salad spinner, as familiar as a karaoke machine, or as complex as computer-generated haiku forge conversations across generations and cultures?
- [Beverly](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/beverly/) - “We’re gonna be taking out a lot of dirt then, eh?” Keith said. “Any idea how much?” Without waiting for an answer, both men turned and walked up the hill. In the distance, I heard the surveyor answer: “I’m guessing several truck loads.”
- [Me and My Fancy Chair](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/me-and-my-fancy-chair/) - Being comfortable would be fantastic, but I know not to expect too much. I should be able to hold my head straight and move my right hand unhampered by the chair. My right hand functions the best; it's the hand I rely on.
- [Algorithms](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/algorithms/) - Sometimes it can feel like algorithms have a deep understanding of my needs, even before I do. Sometimes I'm no longer sure of when my actions are influencing the algorithms and when the algorithms are influencing me.
- [Karaoke Machines and Asian Pop Stars on the Prairies](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/karaoke-machines-and-asian-pop-stars-on-the-prairies/) - On the screen, a woman appeared to float in a landscape of darkened clouds as she walked among Asian male angels or ballet dancers.
- [Insurgency](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/insurgency/) - If my mind could go back in time and inhabit the body of my seven-year-old self, I would get on my bike, get out of that circle and ride the wrong way down a six-lane highway or straight into a wall, jumping off at the last second.
- [Forever](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/forever/) - I want to tell you about a moment, gone before I was able to gather a thread of thought. But once you know, its presence never leaves. It winds around you as mist, a wind that swirls, unseen but always felt. It only comes to you after losing someone you deeply love. We lost our
- [Loss and Love in the Time of Covid](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/loss-and-love-in-the-time-of-covid/) - Evenings of board games and laughter, intellectual discussions over dinner, days of drifting from reading to knitting to cooking elaborate meals and baking beautiful bread. Walks in the woods with my dog....
- [Covid Stories: April-May 2020](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/covid-stories-april-may-2020/) - This collection reflects a moment in history. Anxiety, shock, gratitude, fear, restlessness, determination. Reading these stories even a few months later, we realize how much we didn't know, how we made things up as we went along.
- [When Everyone Is Panicking](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/when-everyone-is-panicking/) - I am afraid of everything: spiders, public speaking, my furnace exploding, living on the first floor of an apartment building, being late, sleeping, needles, walking home alone at night, job interviews, first dates, fifth dates....
- [The Pandemic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-pandemic/) - His very darkest brown eyes sparkled and were so vibrant in contrast to his blond, prairie-field fluffy head of hair flowing freely in the wind. His eyes jumped with the excitement he carried in his nine-year-old body.
- [Falling in a Pandemic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/falling-in-a-pandemic/) - Yesterday, I saw a woman fall and everything changed. I decided to go for a drive with my dog, Bella. Roll the windows down so she could take in the scents of another neighbourhood. I just wanted to drive. No music, no inspirational podcasts....
- [An Unexpected Delivery](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/an-unexpected-delivery/) - A package arrived yesterday afternoon via UPS, just as John was taking Rudi, our little dachsie, out for a pee. Well, bedlam ensued. Rudi and I were squeezed in the storm porch between open doors.
- [Things I Never Thought I'd Say](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/things-i-never-thought-id-say/) - 1. “Don’t touch my face, don’t touch my face.” Repeating the mantra when the wind blows my hair in my eyes. 2. When I hear the front door open, “Strip, take off your clothes. Wash your hands.” 3. “OMG, I’d hate to be on that cruise!”
- [From One to Many](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/from-one-to-many/) - Since February 2019, when I was diagnosed with a strange cancer, visible on CT, PET, and all the other alphabetized scans---but not making me outwardly ill---I have become used to staying at home, more and more.
- [South of the Border](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/south-of-the-border/) - My car sits idle in the driveway of my parents’ house, spring pollen coating it undisturbed. I have not left for more than a bike ride since March ground to a halt, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Lucky that I’m not required to risk my life at work.
- [Covid-19 Painting Project](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/covid-19-painting-project/) - After hearing from friends living in Italy who are still suffering from an extended period of intense fear, sadness, and extreme cabin fever, the many works of art that I’ve produced lately reflect my attempts at keeping my own dark thoughts, worries, and ruminations at bay.
- [Pulling Together](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/pulling-together/) - I wakened Tuesday as most everyone did, dreading what news the day might bring about COVID-19. What I didn’t expect was to find a small but definite lump in my breast as I casually brushed my hand over my left side.
- [In the Year](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/in-the-year/) - In the year 20/20 our vision cleared. The fog of hedonistic narcissism that had covered the earth during the last century lifted with an unprecedented suddenness. Robed gladiators donned their masks and shields, and their gloves came on....
- [I Took It All For Granted](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/i-took-it-all-for-granted/) - Life as a university student is an absolute, never sleeping, always studying, where is my caffeine, level of chaos. As a first-year university student, adjusting to this lifestyle was much more difficult than I had first thought.
- [Hydroxychloroquine?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/i-have-rheumatoid-arthritis-what-happens-when-i-run-out-of-hydroxychloroquine/) - My COVID-19 adventure began on March 13th around 3:30 in the afternoon. I was standing in a grocery store loading a weekend’s worth of groceries onto a conveyor belt. Then there was a “ding” from the pocket of a woman ahead of me.
- [It's My Privilege](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/its-my-privilege/) - I’m a social, organized, life-long learner. This has always served me well and particularly does so now. For example, I belong to a Bridge Club. It’s a retirement plan to keep my brain active. The also allows my husband and me to interact with humans....
- [Standard Tuning for Social Isolation](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/standard-tuning-for-social-isolation/) - Shut indoors in the middle of a pandemic / you would think it would be quiet / but my two young children are yelling over nothing/the phone is ringing with relatives / updates from the school board / conference calls I can’t bear to pay attention to /
- [What Gets Measured Gets Managed](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/what-gets-measured-gets-managed/) - With a chronic pain condition, swimming is the most comfortable sport. For many months, my ten-year-old, $12 stopwatch in its water-resistant plastic bag accompanied me to the public pool.
- [On Science and Storytelling:<br>An Interview with Maryam Heba](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/science-and-storytellingan-interview-with-maryam-heba/) - Maryam Heba describes herself as a Muslim woman from the Middle East, a first-generation immigrant to Canada, a Life Sciences graduate, an advocate for women in science, and someone who is passionate about combining science, art, and storytelling.
- [From the Editor (2nd edition, June 2020)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/from-the-editor-june-2020/) - Let’s celebrate our differences. Let’s lift each other up. Let’s make sure this is a movement, and not just a moment. Black women matter. Black artists matter. Black futures matter. Black dreams matter. Black lives matter.
- [A Message from DBDLI (June 2020)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-message-from-dbdli-june-2020/) - Systemic anti-Black racism in our workplaces, communities, and institutions here in Canada and around the world underscore the urgent need for change. It also highlights the need for an amplification of Black voices, perspectives, and stories.
- [From the Editor (December 2017)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/editorial/) - "I wear it joyfully. I wear it big. I wear it womanly. And I wear it Black. Black. Black. As night, deep and soft and endless with no moon. Just black and perfect splendour in life and in being a woman in this world."
- [Our Future, Our Story: New Climate-Writing by Youth](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/our-future-our-story-new-climate-writing-by-youth/) - In October 2019, Understorey Magazine and the Alexa McDonough Institute organised a two-day workshop for youth. The focus was on writing about the climate and ecological crisis: journalism, poetry, spoken word, fiction, essay.
- [Spring Poem](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/spring-poem/) - When I woke up this morning two birds were inside the cage of sticks I’d struck in the ground for peas. Below them, a green reception of wet vines. Weeks before I’d gone into burnt pasture and cut alders before they leafed. I plumped cold ground. I pressed cloudy seeds. I swept away little stones.
- [Field Notes on Desire Paths](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/field-notes-on-desire-paths/) - And so, I hold two beliefs, as we all do here in the Anthropocene: I have a child, though I believe the population of humans should go down. I travel, have travelled, though I fear this travel is one of the worst things we can do....
- [Future](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/future/) - we saw the future before we lived it, / we learned new definitions of the word “apocalypse” / we screamed chants that rang out like machine gun fire / when we pulled the trigger of our lips, / gun cocked and ready, / like my tongue; cocked and ready. / fire, aim, steady
- [Ten Lessons I Learned from the Salish Sea](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/ten-lessons-i-learned-from-the-salish-sea/) - 1. greet the water / plunge your hands under the surface, fingers dancing in the tide / remember it like an old friend / like a beginning / like a home / speak your name to this place / listen for its response say thank you / 2. say thank you again....
- [Seven Pieces](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/seven-pieces/) - Kate explores the many seeds of dissociation perpetuated in her childhood home, including the denial of their Métis roots, the dull, distant disconnect to their French Canadian and Scottish cultures, and the powerful force of religion....
- [Dragging My Soul Across A Hellscape of Broken Glass, or One Woman's Account of Filing For Disability Support](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/dragging-my-soul-across-a-hellscape-of-broken-glass-or-one-womans-account-of-filing-for-disability-support/) - My doctor made an appointment with a neurologist. I’m still waiting, a year later. I went to my naturopath, who, before talking about the seizures, asked me about my financial situation. (Freelance artist. Poor.) She suggested disability support.
- [Playing Ball](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/playing-ball/) - Tabitha is placing a rubber ball on a nightstand. Ken (her father) sits in a wheelchair. Tabitha hums while she is combing his hair. Tabitha finishes combing. She puts the ball into Ken’s hand and has to wrap his fingers around it.
- [Suddenly You're 50](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/suddenly-50/) - No working. No writing. 'Cause the last thing I want to do is write. Nooooooooo. Not writing. No desire. To write. Not even journal. NO. And I am definitely not going to write a new show. GAWD! The world does not need another show—right?
- [1=0.999999](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/10-999999/) - The interior of an elevator, with reflective mirrors on all sides. A woman (1), bone-tired, steps in at the top floor. She presses a button to go down to the ground floor. The doors shut. She initially stares at the floor....
- [Our Ghosts](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/our-ghosts/) - Our Ghosts was inspired by the true story of the mysterious disappearance of my father during a routine flight from the Comox Air Base on March 22, 1956, and its impact on my family. I wrote the play for my Mom, Claire Stubbs.
- [England <i>and</i> Theatre, My Neverland](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/england-and-theatre-my-neverland/) - I am the child of two immigrants. Two adventurous souls who found each other on the other side of the globe. England, the lair of Shakespeare, produced my Father. Ireland, isle of the storytellers, created my Mother.
- [Whale Song](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/whale-song/) - I found out about this conference on Twitter and wow…. I just had to be here. I won’t take too much of your time, I promise—I know you have important things to do. Like saving the world. Or saving the Arctic…. Can we actually do that? Save the Arctic?
- [Storytelling and the Truth about Brown Women](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/storytelling-and-the-truth-about-brown-women/) - Stories make us feel, make us think. Stories make us reflect upon our own actions. That’s why I went into this profession, to tell stories—but not just any stories. I’ve told many people this: I wouldn’t be an actor if I didn’t have brown skin.
- [Asian or Mixed-Race Monologue](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/asian-or-mixed-race-monologue/) - It’s Pride month, but I don’t really celebrate. Sure, I have a few rainbow flags and I might change my Facebook profile pic, but for the most part being gay is something I don’t know if I will ever truly celebrate.
- [#metoo](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/metoo/) - I was seventeen. And you made out with me while I was passed out. I was so drunk; I had crashed into the glass patio door. Fell right on my ass. I got really funny when I was drunk. I was kind of a shy kid, so, being funny was intoxicating.
- [Love Handles](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/love-handles/) - It wasn’t until the pistol end of the revolver was about to enter my vagina that I finally took pause for thought. It wasn’t until the scene was set for them to make intimate acquaintance that I found cause to reflect.
- [The Way You Remember It](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-way-you-remember-it-part-1/) - The Way You Remember It (Part 1) by Monica Lacey references the fallibility of memory, and the way personal perspective shapes the archive of experiences we share with others. The way we remember things is not necessarily the way things happened. We all create a version of reality based on our unique lens.
- [Editor's Note](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/editors-note/) - It is inspiring to have this opportunity to engage with the unique and rich work being done by artists across the country. How invigorating to edit this issue at a time when equity, diversity, and inclusion are finally coming to the forefront of theatre.
- [Smog Can Be Thick, kittens can be cruel](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/smog-can-be-thick-kittens-can-be-cruel/) - This story is a peek into my zany mind, never intended to be read by anyone but those intimately involved in the production. It served as both a fun exercise and a love letter/farewell to this powerful and touching play.
- [Certified](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/certified/) - OK. Being certified insane means being kept against your will in a psychiatric facility. You are incarcerated but inside a hospital. Less bars, mostly just on the windows. And no guards, just nurses, but male nurses, big male nurses.
- [Elapultiek (we are looking towards)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/elapultiek/) - Set in contemporary times, a young Mi’kmaw drum singer and a Euro-Nova Scotian biologist meet at dusk each day to count a population of endangered Chimney Swifts (kaktukopnji’jk). They quickly struggle with their differing views of the world.
- [Shake](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/shake/) - And shake she did. She belted, bouncing and moving wherever the music took her body. Her electric guitar jiggled along, nestled under her chest. She was un-contained in a way that I’d always thought was reserved for thin women.
- [Assistant Editor's Note](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/assistant-editors-note/) - This issue of Understorey is a platform for womyn across the country to share in our common struggles around equity, diversity, and inclusion, but also rise to the challenge of creating a world where we don’t need to struggle any longer.
- [Kouchibouguac](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/kouchibouguac-par-rebecca-belliveau/) - «Kouchibouguac» par Rebecca Belliveau est l'une des six légendes paranormales qu'elle a interprétées à la fois dans l'écriture et en peinture. Cette série de tableaux intitulée «Légendes de mon Acadie» a été achevée en 2015 et a été tournée dans de nombreux endroits et galeries au Nouveau-Brunswick.
- [(Se) détordre la langue](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/se-detordre-la-langue/) - Nos auteures répètent, partagent, soulignent, à travers des plumes lucides, provocantes, luxueuses, traditionnelles, de formation et autre, leurs expériences; celles qui font partie de la mosaïque sociolinguistique de la région distincte du Canada atlantique.
- [Parenthèses](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/parentheses/) - C’est pourtant la pâte de la vie, de ma vie et sans doute de celle de bien d’autres. Dans des sursauts de ce qui me reste d’indépendance ou de volonté, je veux, de temps en temps, me prouver que je peux me préserver un peu d’espace à moi.
- [Un effet d’entraînement ](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/un-effet-dentrainement/) - Je suis née à Terre-Neuve, dans une famille complètement anglophone.... Bref, je suis tombée dans la francophonie sans comprendre la conséquence et l’influence que cette langue aurait sur ma vie une quinzaine d’années plus tard.
- [Mon ailleurs-ici ](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/mon-ailleurs-ici/) - Mon parcours de vie, malgré ses particularités, est commun à bien des gens. Sans doute ce récit provoquera-t-il sourires ou soupirs songeurs. Vous rencontrerai-je dans certaines intersections de l’ailleurs-ici?
- [En enfer, rien de nouveau](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/title/) - Sans doute étais-je sorcière en ces temps sombres dont on se souvient si peu. Le linge claque toujours au vent, suspendu à la corde des jours fluides. Je ne parlerai pas la langue des autres dans l’intimité de mon alcôve....
- [Être acadien(ne) c’est dans l’sang!](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/etre-acadienne-cest-dans-lsang/) - Toutefois, comme peuple Acadien nous avons une riche culture, des coutumes acadiennes, des chansons qui racontent notre passé, un « parler » unique et coloré avec de beaux accents qui changent selon les régions....
- [Twenty-One](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/twenty-one/) - Fast, so, so fast. Suddenly, his jacket was on the side of the road, and, in my poor muddled brain, he’d run so fast across the street that his jacket had flown off behind him, incredible! I ran ahead to pick it up. I remember his death so much more clearly than his life.
- [Five Years Old](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/five-years-old/) - This autumn, Understorey Magazine turns five. As editor-in-chief for those five years, I have learned a thing or two about the creative process, about art and time. These ideas have inspired our issue on age.
- [You Can Do Better Than That](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/you-can-do-better-than-that/) - One woman walking toward us stopped and said to me, “Well, aren’t you the sandwich generation.” Yes, yes I was. My days were full of caregiving from the moment I woke up until I laid my head on the pillow at bedtime.
- [Words Fail Me](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/words-fail-me/) - Snow is falling in my brain, gentle, / relentless. It starts with a small silence, / a gap / in the easy rhythm of talk. A familiar word fails / to arrive. / Bewildered by the changing landscape, / beginning to be frightened, I push on . . .
- [Badass Orla](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/badass-orla/) - Even with her failing eyesight, Orla can conjure up shapes in the dark like a magic lantern show. Cormorants wheeling over the Irish Sea, a pooka in the guise of a white hare. By some miracle, she doesn’t have to pee all night.
- [Face](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/face/) - My figment, my flirt, my false friend, / who do you favour? What’s your fee? You can depend / on craters and valleys and friction / to warn — you will not be able to flaunt your fiction / forever. You are mine . . .
- [Our Lady of Thermodynamics <i>and</i><br> The Rapture of Crazy Jane](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/our-lady-of-thermodynamics-and-the-rapture-of-crazy-jane/) - Ageing takes guts. . . . Parsing our way through some bodily change, my partner asked “Is this normal? Is this what is supposed to happen?” I answered, “I don’t know. I’ve never been this old before.”
- [The Stations of Her Loss](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-stations-of-her-loss/) - It came with first breath, / with a baptism from holy waters, with a slap / that knocked you into the noise of time. / It came, as always, with numbered / fingers and toes, a severed cord, a split brain, / division and oblivion; / a gift and a loss . . .
- [Quickening](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/quickening/) - In the middle ages, a woman was not considered pregnant until the baby quickened. That means, until she felt movement. Before that first kick, women could do anything and it didn’t count—poisons, pessaries, jumping up and down. The medievals got up to all sorts of things.
- [Blood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/blood/) - Can we talk about the cashier who is given a four-hour shift without a break? About the student who can’t leave the room during a three-hour exam? Can we talk about how displaced or homeless women can maintain dignity when society pretends periods just don't happen?
- [Bringing Light to the Dark](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/bringing-light-dark/) - My period arrived when I was fourteen, announcing our future together by settling into my pelvis on a nest of corroding nails. I spent days in bed every month, curled around a heating pad, wondering at the euphemism of “cramps” because what I felt was a deep, greedy, constant pain.
- [Scars / Murmur](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/scars-murmur/) - scars silence blood /shut up leaks and spills / stitch seams on skin / where none should be / scars silence blood /open up floods / of stories / word rivers, pouring out / from throat, bird voice / melody, telling and retelling / events that skin carries / in hues that pale away
- [Practice / Spirals](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/practice-spirals/) - “A good job done,” and I agree as I pass the dainty mug patterned / with fruit that matches your kitchen wallpaper. I try but fail / to filter the sound in my head. It is the beginning of your breathlessness, / the sound that leads to the swish and gurgle of bedside pumps
- [Blood and Vinegar](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/blood-and-vinegar/) - It happens as Al is walking home, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her overcoat. Usually she is on her guard at such times, wary and aware, but tonight she is high on a night out with the old crowd—Sam, Jess, Billie, Little Jo, who’s just Jo now that Big Jo is gone.
- [Africa: An Apology](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/africa-an-apology/) - You were the defeated land, the place that had lost every battle. So please understand that a part of me also felt lost and defeated. I wanted to escape our connection, relinquish our relationship, cut all ties. Almost instantly, I removed you from my life. I told myself I wasn’t African.
- [Her Many Names](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/her-many-names/) - Grandmothers Ke-Che-Cho-Wick, Wash-e-Soo-E’Squew, / Kitty (Catherine), Sally and Catherine – / under the same moons as cousins, strangers, / the unnamed, notorious, ordinary, extraordinary, / your stations in life / both promise and threat; / The Bible, solace / and weapon; blood, the source / of strength and shame.
- [Mabel's Fable](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/mabels-fable/) - The doctor observed the baby lying in the palm of his hand. Said, “Best not to feed her. Just leave her on a pillow near the open window. She’s much too tiny to live through the night.” But the baby didn’t die. She grew into a woman who was small, but mighty.
- [Mom-Friend](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/mom-friend/) - You are the Mom-Friend. The Mom-Friend is always prepared for blood, though not in the warrior sense. Your friends laugh because you carry a first-aid-kit worth of tissues, menstrual pads and Band-Aids wherever you go. But they’re not laughing when they get paper cuts or when the blisters on their feet burst.
- [The Life of a Creature](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-life-of-a-creature/) - A puppy. A German Shepherd, young enough that his ears are still flopped over. He has parvovirus. Liquid, bloody diarrhea squirts out of him, splattering everywhere, like the last bits of ketchup from an almost empty bottle. I hook up an IV, give him fluids, anti-emetics, antibiotics, but he dies anyway.
- [I Am Black History](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/i-am-black-history/) - The story, I am telling, is that my Grade Five teacher accused me of cheating when I got a ninety-seven percent on a history test because “How could a little Black girl really be that smart?” I am Black History....
- [On the Hunt for Diverse Stories](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/hunt-diverse-stories/) - I spent that summer reading the shiny new books from cover to cover. But as my interest in reading grew, so did my awareness of what was missing in the books I read: Me. None of the characters looked like me, acted like me, or spoke to my experience.
- [Grace and Roberta](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/grace-and-roberta/) - Roberta was a terrific axe-woman. She helped split firewood and build shelters. She was also a hunter of wildlife, so she was able to feed herself and Grace with small game, rabbits and birds, and gave what she could to others.
- [The Unforgettable Journey](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-unforgettable-journey/) - My parents were hard-working and resilient people. They put up with many difficulties to send me and my three older sisters and brother to school because education was what kept us busy and eventually paved our way out of the camps.
- [Heart of Africville / Pieces of a Woman](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/heart-africville-pieces-woman/) - Angel Bonita Gannon is the daughter of a former Africville resident and activist. Her creative interpretations of Africville are dedicated to her family history. She aims to inscribe a new discourse of art that will foster discussion and generate solutions.
- [Beauty](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/beauty/) - Beauty your nigger-knots are / unmanageable / we'll have to comb them down / s t r a i g h t / but they're tricky with / resilience, they'd rather hang loose / curling up from their roots. / What about braids with pretty beads?
- [Own My Own / That Word](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/own-my-own-that-word/) - The dull hum, an unruly crowd--a thousand terns / descending. Their outcry fades, that word rises. / Spewed by the Amherst councilman. / Tattooed where the children watch-- / at the base of Glace Bay’s skateboard park.
- [Granny](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/granny/) - I am an old woman made of deposited salt / My bloodline runs authentically hot / I hail from perpetual sunrise / Where battle is real and peace treaties are lies / Spent decades on my feet and kept my house clean....
- [Conversation with Jade Brooks](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/conversation-jade-brooks/) - A no-holds-barred account of human trafficking in Canada. Author Jade Brooks, now 25, was born in Toronto and grew up in Halifax. At age 11, she was put into foster care and by age 17, found herself lured into the sex trade.
- [What to Read Next](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/books-african-nova-scotian-women/) - Books by Wanda Thomas Bernard, Jade H. Brooks, Louise Delisle, Shauntay Grant, Gugu Hlongwane, Sylvia Hamilton, Guyleigh Johnson, El Jones, Wanda Robson, Lindsay Ruck, Wanda Taylor, Maxine Tynes, Gloria Ann Wesley....
- [Finding the Courage to Give Back](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/finding-courage-give-back/) - In this profession, we often work with clients who are living on the margins, who face adversity every day. But I believe most of us face adversities in life and we have someone, or something, that helps us overcome.
- [After I Left](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/after-i-left/) - I should have left when he stole from me the first time. I should have left when he knocked the wind out of me the first time. I should have left when he cheated on me the first time. I should have left the first time he chased me up the stairs screaming at me.
- [A Profound Call to Serve](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/profound-call-serve/) - Before I became a lay worship leader, however, I’d learned what it meant to be in service when I became a caregiver for my father after he was diagnosed with dementia. This happened in 2002, when my father was sixty years old and before “early onset dementia” was even a type.
- [Duty: Three Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/duty-three-poems/) - Births and deaths come crowding when my weather finger moans. / The three-month-old in Peds misses his mother who hasn't been seen all week. / Nurses fight over who wants most to take him home. / A woman, sixty-three, misses her mother. Orphaned now.
- [To Whom It May Concern](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/to-whom-it-may-concern/) - Thanks for your email. I am sorry I have not responded. I've been trying to find a place to live. I left my rental suite due to mould exposure. The landlord denies it exists so I have been paying rent while not living in my place. I have couch-surfed at five different places so far.
- [Join the Conversation: <br>The Politics of Poppies](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/conversation-politics-poppies/) - As the politics of poppies illustrates so well, there is no single story of war. At the same time, there is often resistance to hearing different, and sometimes conflicting, stories about war. We invite you, readers of Understorey Magazine, to join this conversation.
- [Cardboard](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/cardboard/) - Late that evening, Marie drags the empty stove box from the curb into her backyard and covers it with garbage bags held down by stones and a big stick. She spends the next afternoon with her kitchen scissors making small cuts in the tough side seams....
- [The Trouble with Margaret](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-trouble-with-margaret/) - I am not a patient person. I do not suffer fools gladly. But with Margaret I was patient because she was no fool and I’d made a choice. So, four nights a week, I climbed the steps from my tiny suite, surfacing in her living room at eight o'clock.
- [Chemistry of Fire](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/chemistry-of-fire/) - I have a bomb in my purse. Its presence is constant. It could go off at any hour, as long as I’m in range of the detonator. Across the province, the country, the continent, there are hundreds of thousands of people carrying their own bombs....
- [X, Y, Z...?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/x-y-z/) - Millennial Megan enjoys a latte at Starbucks and outlines a story in her Moleskine notebook. Later, she sits on her bed with her laptop, expanding her ideas into a finished draft. When Megan needs to fill in facts, she searches Google or calls friends on her cellphone.
- [In Between](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/in-between/) - In Guyana, everyone can tell you are from "out-away" by your clothes, your accent and for the simple fact that they don't know you in a country where everyone knows everyone. One night I was chatting with my cousin Kiesha. We were identical in age but I already assumed we would be different.
- [Stardust](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/stardust/) - "Words cannot express the gratitude I feel towards you. You saved me from a treacherous fate, a painful death I would have endured alone. Thank you, Zephyr, mistress of mayhem, bringer of the windswept and gentle breeze of the west. I am forever in your debt.” “You forgot queen of the sky.”
- [Filling the Void](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/filling-the-void/) - One day while exiting the school, she noticed a group of kids smoking outside and she thought they looked cool and tough and everyone else seemed to be mildly afraid of them. Everyone called them the druggy group. She decided she would become part of this group.
- [To Man, From Woman](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/to-man-from-woman/) - Our ability to have and raise a child, Does not limit our ability to be educated. Why do we have to let you push us around? Does our strength scare you? Standing up for ourselves is not an act of rebellion. In this time of hate and sexism, Feminists are not chauvinist.
- [Fractures: An Adoption Story](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/fractures-adoption-story/) - His anger at being so unwanted in the world took on a more visceral, physical response as he grew older. His fists became a weapon of choice in expressing the rage he didn’t understand and I, three years older but not much bigger in size, a convenient punching bag.
- [Going Home / Somewhere Borrowed](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/going-home-somewhere-borrowed/) - I thought I knew where I came from, but I lied. I shift my truths like furniture in a rented house. Cumin, coriander, tuberose: what does it matter if my memory draws blanks? Even perfumers are anosmic. Everywhere I go belongs to other people.
- [Recipe Books / Colonial Guilt](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/recipe-books-colonial-guilt/) - I think of all the recipe books she gave me, that I crammed into a water-stained cardboard box and took to the Salvation Army the year I moved from Sherbrooke to Québec. She sits at the table, runs a finger down the list of ingredients for rhubarb crumble, flattens her lips in concentration
- [On Rejection and Snow Angels](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/rejection-snow-angels/) - We must buckle down, finish our work, and ship it out to the world. And then we wait as our creative offspring is surveyed, judged, and more than likely shipped right back home again. Turned down. Rejected. Like the fifth winter storm in February, rejection is unfair, infuriating—and inevitable.
- [Supper Helper](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/supper-helper/) - “Who wants to be supper helper?” I call out, beckoning one of my three teenage kids from behind their closed bedroom doors. I am sitting in my wheelchair and aiming my voice down an empty hallway. It's time for them to choose between setting the table and preparing supper, or cleaning up afterwards.
- [Made This Way](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/made-this-way/) - When my mother's emotions ran high, she ran too. One night about three months after the accident, she slipped out of the house and four hours later, at three in the morning, someone brought her home. They had found her sleeping on a bench down by the bay.
- [Extraordinary](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/extraordinary/) - Welcome to the “Extraordinary” edition of Understorey Magazine, a diverse collection of stories, poetry, and visual art on mothering through social, physical, and mental challenge. We are excited to publish work by both new and established writers and artists from across Canada and abroad.
- [Review: The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/review-the-brief-reincarnation-of-a-girl/) - In The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl (Gaspereau Press, 2015), Nova Scotia poet Sue Goyette delivers a long form poem about a four-year-old Massachusetts girl who died after prolonged exposure to a cocktail of drugs prescribed for bipolar disorder and ADHD.
- [Star's Echo](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/stars-echo/) - As we left the testing room, I joked I had a little mute girl, tossing the term casually around. How long are you going to stay quiet? I joked. She didn’t respond until we re-crossed the threshold of the testing room door. About five minutes, she replied.
- [Thomas and May](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/thomas-and-may/) - Many of May’s typically developing friends fell away on the long march to high school, with its clubs and teams and career paths. Thomas became a hockey player. That’s about all I knew of him. I’d like to say that he asked May to the prom. She didn’t go.
- [Psychiatric Protocol](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/psychiatric_protocol/) - Patient reports suicidal ideation. / How often does the patient think of suicide? / 1. If every day, go to question 2. / 2. Does the patient have a suicide plan? If no, go to question 3. Test for personality disorder. / 3. Does the patient exhibit impulsive behaviour ... ?
- [Grandmother](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/grandmother/) - Shauntay's poem "Grandmother" is published in The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2012) and most recently featured as a spoken word recording on her 2014 album release Say Sumthin.
- [Auf Wiedersehen, Pluto](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/auf-wiedersehen-pluto/) - Pluto would have liked it here in Deutschland. Now he is dead, just gone up in smoke. If my mother had let me take him he would be alive today, living on Wienerschnitzel with a squeeze of lemon. He could have played marbles with me in the playground behind our building.
- [Three Decades of Silence / Wiklatmu'jk](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/three-decades-wiklatmujk/) - For years it was this way: stories and poems would die just after their birth while my daughters interrupted me, i was simply too exhausted, or other real life of adulthood ceased the flow of words. Not having access to creative silence was bothersome.
- [The M Word](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-m-word/) - The M Word examines motherhood and maternity through a very broad lens and includes experiences of motherhood that are often invisible and experiences that are still taboo.
- [Stars Did](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/stars-did/) - As an adult, I’ve come to expect unanswered questions. I’ve become familiar with the flexibility of quantum mechanics, a science that bends information depending on stances and light. I accept that; I even like it. But maybe kids need more. Faith.
- [Gathering Mi’kmaq Medicine](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/gathering-mikmaq-medicine/) - "Next year you will be twelve, a time when a girl can become a woman, and you will need to know these medicines.” She braided my long blonde hair and continued, “My mother, your great grandmother, was a medicine woman. She used the medicines to cure people."
- [Reena](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/reena/) - She agreed to drop charges against her father, come/ home. Imaginary charges, her mother said. But not/ imaginary friends. They invited her. To Craigflower Bridge./ That’s a pretty name. A name that sings. I’ll buy a stuffed bear/ for my foster mother, she said. But first, a party.
- [Two Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/two-poems-2/) - General Instructions I am sending my son to assist you next week. Do you have any children? Treat him as your own. Be patient with messy rooms, odd solar powered gadgets running about. Does your cook make veggieburgers, brew Ginger Beer? I will email you the recipes. Oatmeal cookies are his favorite. I mailed some
- [My Daughter's Mothers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/my-daughters-mothers/) - Natalie Corbett Sampson's debut YA novel, Game Plan, portrays teen pregnancy and open adoption. "My stories start from the truth of personal experience and—by asking 'What if?—grow into fiction," Natalie says. In her essay, "My Daughter's Mothers," she describes the personal truth that inspired her book. Once upon a time... that’s how fairy tales start. But the
- [Time to Grow Up, Mommy Lit](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/time-to-grow-up-mommy-lit/) - The “second oldest profession,” Erma Bombeck wrote of motherhood in her 1983 book on caring for “children, a husband, and oneself.” Motherhood is indeed an ancient profession—or job, or calling, or stage of life—yet Bombeck's book was among the first to discuss it candidly. We have printed and distributed books since the 1400s. Women have
- [momento mori](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/momento-mori/) - Still now and every day after I’d fight for Her. And every day in between that slips by with sleep then waking to the silence that screams from Her empty crib. Where full breasts weep in warm showers draining the last sign of Her from my body. Now people can pretend She was never there here
- [The Alder Bed](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-alder-bed/) - Annette Martin's novel-in-progress is set in outport Newfoundland and spans five decades. As a headstrong teenager, Lexie Fisher marries wayward Dan and quickly has three daughters, Iris, Rose, and Daisy. Newfoundland winters, poverty, and Dan's drinking slowly fray Lexie's mind. Her young daughters must assume adult roles---of one sort or another. Understorey Magazine is pleased
- [Counting Underwear](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/counting-underwear/) - Julie, my youngest daughter, runs in laughing and forgetting to close the front door. “Nanny says you got lots of panties in the wash.” She skips around the table. My husband has been unemployed. Money is tight. We don’t have a washer or dryer so my mother, who lives next door, has offered to help.
- [To the Teenagers in My Writing Circle, Psychiatric Ward](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/to-the-teenagers-in-my-writing-circle/) - To the delicate girl who kept getting thinner--- thin as smoke from a cigarette, a fault line in her green eyes. To the young man whose father slipped into his bed, his fury trapped, a coiled cobra. It was hot, sun pounded windows that couldn’t open. But something opened when one girl said to another. You wrote that? Wow.
- [Recalibrating](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/recalibrating/) - 1. When my mother flew across the Atlantic, in autumn 1979, the flight attendant served her a croissant like two conch shells placed open-end-together on the breakfast tray. When my mother, pointing, asked, what is it? the word, croissant--- which she could not have spelled--- curled unfamiliar in her lexicon. She left the bread uneaten.
- [A Life in Eight Bras](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-life-in-eight-bras/) - My house is filled with hot spots. Not the warm, cozy kind, but the little storms of matter and memories that amass when one woman, one man and three little boys live together under one roof. Take my bra drawer for example. It’s the middle drawer of my night table; not a typical place for
- [Walls](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/walls/) - Walls is a CinePoetry collaboration between Ardath Whynacht and director Walter Forsyth. Since its premiere in April 2013, Walls has shown at many film and poetry festivals, including the Atlantic Film Festival (Halifax), Zebra (Berlin) and Visible Verse (Vancouver). Walls was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Atlantic Filmmakers Cooperative. Understorey Magazine
- [Grist](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/grist/) - Linda Little's latest novel, Grist, examines motherhood, gender roles, and hard work through the character of Penelope, a women left alone to run a mill in nineteenth-century rural Nova Scotia. Grist has received fabulous reviews. Understorey Magazine spoke with Linda about her novel and her work. Understorey Magazine: There are autobiographical elements in Grist. You
- [Vox Humana](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/vox-humana/) - "Last Summer in the Old Craig House" from Vox Humana Musk melon, moth skirt, with those skin-like petals that come in pink and white. Mauve pink, for musk, our mother, that summer our brother was born. Gold spun hair on the gun-metal green lilacs, put there to help the fairies build their houses. And fairy-rings
- [Marianne Claire Rivers, 1851](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/marianne-claire-rivers/) - From the Editor When Catherine Brunelle sent the manuscript for The Adventures of Claire Never-Ending, I agreed to publish an excerpt on Understorey based solely on the strength of Catherine's writing and her determination to bring her book into the world. Claire Never-Ending was self-published with funds raised on Kickstarter. In other words, the book
- [What Did You Do Today?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/so-what-did-you-do-today/) - No doubt you've been asked, perhaps by a partner, an acquaintance, your own child returning from school: “What did you do today?” Maybe you have asked yourself: What have I done today? What have I achieved? How do you respond? “I sold two paintings.” “I closed a deal.” “I ran 10K.” Do you respond with the
- [A Conversation with Lesley Crewe](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-conversation-with-lesley-crewe/) - Cape Breton mother and author Lesley Crewe has published six acclaimed novels, including her latest, Kin. Lesley's first novel, Relative Happiness, will be released as a feature-length film in 2014. Lesley spoke with Understorey editor Katherine Barrett about motherhood, grief, and creativity. How did you start writing novels? I was working as a newspaper columnist in
- [The Length of the Court](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-length-of-the-court/) - In the twisted sheet hours I unmuffled my head to decipher my son's sleep talk knees banging against his wall uuugh (a grinding growl) The doctor says I take notes at every appointment just like my mother, maaaaaaa a lurching as she is lost to me, a
- [Tiger's Milk](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/tigers-milk/) - This thing always seemed too tame or domesticated. Beyond you with muscles & tattoos your hitch-hiking skills and ability to tie all seven essential knots (the clove hitch, the half hitch) too fecund too essential how could you make milk: nurse or be nursed? (the verb, the noun) Sadly you picture
- [A Curse and a Blessing](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-curse-and-a-blessing/) - The zygote that became me was formed inside a poisoned woman. Tina’s heart was pure and strong, although it was broken by the man who provided half of my DNA. The heart is a symbol of love in the same way a skull and crossbones signifies a poisonous substance. Sometimes the two collide. Tina’s blood
- [Milking Sunshine](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/milking-sunshine/) - River withdrew into the corner of the barn and cautiously watched her mother, Lily. A few months earlier, River's parents had transformed the old backyard shed into a home where a goat could live. The goat was to replace the dog River had always dreamt of owning but her mother prohibited because of her allergies. “The
- [Are You Listening?](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/are-you-listening/) - Your child, who is joyful, creative and loving, metamorphoses at age 18 into someone you don’t recognize. She becomes a raging, frightened, lost soul who slams doors and forgets how to dress, sleep, talk coherently or perform any of the things we all do so naturally. What do you do? Knowing that your child is
- [Lebanese Kitchen](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/lebanese-kitchen/) - It’s six o’clock: I’ve barely closed the front door behind me and already the sound of arabic mixed with french mixed with english the smell of fresh garlic mixed with all-spice mixed with lemon clings to my thick brown hair. Mom’s kitchen is the closest I have to my grandmother to my grandfather to the
- [Stolen Seconds](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/stolen-seconds/) - Sometimes I steal into a quiet garden to stand by the washing line Laundry forgotten in my hands as my eyes search grey skies Looking for something, searching for something Seeing everything but noticing nothing I breathe deeply and release one long shuddering sigh A breath held without conscious mind Waiting for just a few
- [Mothering](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/mothering/) - Mother knits you from snot & silk & memory, building your tiny bird bones from her own teeth and glass upon glass of full-fat milk, or else she finds you & your valentine heart, builds a nest from light, sap & broken branches, circling the wild air, singing your homecoming. You have her eyes even
- [Hanging Out the Wash](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/hanging-out-the-wash/) - Ma hangs the wash on the long clothesline in the backyard of our butter-yellow house. The sea rolls in the distance. I watch from my window. When the heat of high summer is a skin and the sea breathes from its deep belly, in the midst of that season heavy with close dreams, she crosses
- [Always a Mother](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/always-a-mother/) - No matter what I do, I am a mother. No progeny required to lavish love on my endeavours, whether I am raising eyebrows, the bar, tomatoes, or even a child from my womb, or yours, or hers. It is fine work to knead life’s pliant dough, watch it growing round, fueled by the yeast of
- [Silence. Please.](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/silence-please/) - I am trying to learn silence. It’s not easy. I am trying to remove clutter. That, too, is difficult. By silence I mean moments of stillness longer than a few seconds. You know: when nothing hums, beeps, whistles, dings, roars, revs, crackles, or chirps. When no one talks, cries, yells, or mutters. When I can
- [Early December in Toronto](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/early-december-in-toronto/) - Clouds heavy with snow hang over the city, not yet ready to release wonder. An occasional perfect snowflake escapes, and is suspended between sky and earth. It floats at the whim of a gust of wind, and dissolves into thin, cold air before it reaches the ground. We are gathered in a small house on
- [Preview: Double Pregnant](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/preview-double-pregnant/) - Natalie Meisner is a writer from Lockeport, Nova Scotia. She currently lives in Calgary and teaches creative writing, drama, and literature at Mount Royal University. In her forthcoming book, Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family, Natalie describes the decision she made with her partner, Viviën, to become pregnant--at the same time. Double Pregnant will be
- [Never a Mother](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/never-a-mother/) - I have never been a mother to a human child. I have never tried to become one. At one time, I thought it would be my lot in life, but this was more a gloomy conviction born in the depths of depression—I would end up an impoverished single mum—and the opposite of an aspiration, more of
- [The Hollow](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-hollow/) - I woke into a nightmare and you were there, smiling into dark, cavernous spaces, already calling them home, translucent fingertips pressing my stretching walls and me, aware of your distant vibrations, unsettled and afraid. I cannot conceive you as reality: gauze hair, infinitesimal teeth, film of flesh, aqueous eyes--my eyes, staring back at me. I
- [A Conversation with Alice Burdick](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-conversation-with-alice-burdick/) - I met poet Alice Burdick on a snowy morning at the Biscuit Eater Café in Mahone Bay. We sat in winter sun made cozy by the scent of baking, Latin tunes on the CD player, and shelves stacked high with books, including Alice's latest collection, Holler. We planned to talk poetry and motherhood but first
- [The Cling of a Cold Night’s Dreaming](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-cling-of-a-cold-nights-dreaming/) - With breakfast I read The Essential Zen carefully ordering the morning marshaling good energies admiring the brush painted circles the kiwi fruit in yoghurt the sunflower seeds in bread the fuzzy bear slippers but nothing is quite strong enough to pull me back together as the black cat sits on the mule post staring with
- [Two Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/two-poems/) - Small Wonders The shuffle of her feet as she creeps to my bed, to snuggle me awake. Kissing my cheeks, and whispering, “No, I’m the lucky one.” Leaving Listen this evening as the quiet East train rushes past streets, and fields, coffee cups, and lies. Ten Mothers say, “I have arrived.” While in the
- [2014: The Year of Reading Women](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/2014-the-year-of-reading-women/) - This year, 2014, is the year to read women authors—or so declares writer and illustrator Joanna Walsh. Her campaign began modestly: a few New Year's “cartes de voeux” with a suggested reading list and a #readwomen2014 hashtag on Twitter. The Guardian picked up the story in January, however, and readers, writers, booksellers, and literary journals have
- [The Old Queen Rains](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/the-old-queen-rains/) - The old queen possesses a cold stare that no doubt caused those around her to tremble uncontrollably. I suspect she never smiled during what my grandmother referred to as “Her Majesty’s sixty-three year reign.” I look up at the yellowed photo hanging on the wall, finally deciding that rain is a very fitting word. She
- [He Sees the Wonder](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/he-sees-the-wonder/) - Along the edge of the harbor a brown road wiggled its way past clusters of clapboard houses wedged between rocks. Ruth Woodford washed dishes while watching her son, Allan, pitch rocks off the wharf. His face, at sixteen, was gaunt. Dry skin tightly drawn over hollow cheekbones and pale ears like two oversized petals of
- [Just Wondering](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/just-wondering/) - for Alex The day you turned eighteen snow froze to the ground, a patchwork of chipped ice and sienna grass. Ditches gleamed and clouds cracked to reveal shafts of wan sun, pouring bitter lemon light. Your words fell like snow, soft and cold. They penetrated my skin. “I won’t be home for my birthday next
- [Abortion](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/abortion/) - Do you remember how we talked? Words slowly formed an understanding between us— you wouldn't come again but you would stay for awhile, I wouldn't hold you but I would hold your spirit wandering large, looking for a place to land. And I would remember you beyond the passing of seasons. I would remember the
- [Before Bed](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/before-bed/) - If you look at a mirror in the dark, you see the devil’s face. -My best friend, Diane, at 13 Son Number Three Sitting beside the washbasin resisting squirming and I have to brush his teeth because (the dentist says) children under the age of ten, or is it six I forget now, do not
- [Remembering Marie On the Eve of the Millennium](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/remembering-marie/) - What does it feel like to know you are going to die not die like everyone must. But die because the one who says he loves you who says he will always love you who says if you leave him he will kill you because he loves you so much he wants no one else
- [On My Dining Room Table](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/on-my-dining-room-table/) - You won’t find heirloom silver, Royal Albert China or a cut glass crystal vase—all trashed in exchange for that second-hand leather-bound copy of Nicholas Nickleby in its original ornate well-kept box. A History of Art Impressionism essential to answer her question: how do I define ‘neoimpressionsm’. A fat ragged, coverless dictionary, the ‘u’ page is
- [Under the Law / Ice So Thin](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/under-the-law-ice-so-thin/) - I find myself walking on ice so thin/ Ice too timid to expose what goes on/ Underneath the truth./ I tread lightly in an effort to placate your anger/ Your rage/ To mitigate that withering look you flash my way/ The one that lets me know you are not pleased/ And you are rarely pleased./
- [A Conversation with Carol Bruneau](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/a-conversation-with-carol-bruneau/) - These Good Hands is Carol Bruneau's sixth novel. Published in May 2015 by Cormorant Books, These Good Hands is a fictionalized biography of nineteenth-century French artist Camille Claudel. The book explores mental illness, misogyny, compassion, and the enduring power of art.
- [Authors' Advice to Writers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/authors-advice-writers/) - We invited eight Canadian women who are both authors and mothers to share their experiences and writing advice. They spoke about how to find time, carve out a routine, weave writing into the chaos of life, avoid or embrace intrusion, and trust in yourself.
- [Things I Shouldn't Say](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/things-i-shouldnt-say/) - "Your mom was pretty upset about what you wrote," he says. "Oh," I say. In The Argonauts, her memoir about motherhood and identity, Maggie Nelson muses, "Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea." I haven't yet learned that feeling. I am seven. I didn’t write it to hurt her.
- [What to Read Next](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/what-to-read-next/) - Three new books: In Rose's Run, Rose Okanese is a mother of two young girls on a fictional reserve in Saskatchewan. Fling! explores motherhood and perhaps the secret to happiness itself. Shallow, Selfish and Self-Absorbed presents sixteen reasons to choose child-free.
- [Tonic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/tonic/) - Whatever those tonics were, they couldn't have been all that frequent or vile-tasting; my father still talks about the horrible taste of the cod-liver oil they were forced to swallow every morning at school. Bad tastes stick in the memory as well as in the throat.
- [Uranium: Three Poems](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/uranium-three-poems/) - Let those who use it bear its waste, those who live with the wounds heal the land. We need generations to keep and guard our decommissioned mines and deep geological repositories. Beacons to mark where we buried our glassified thorium. Our mausoleums of light.
- [Waiting to be Heard](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/waiting-to-be-heard/) - “Tell us,” the parole board members had said in the hearing, in and amongst their hours of questions. “What do you think are the long term effects of the crime on your victims?” I didn’t like how, implied in their questions, we were his possession, his victims.
- ["Nice Cop"](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/nice-cop/) - When Albert Benoit answered the phone, I informed him that his niece had made allegations. “That filthy, lying—” “Mr. Benoit,” “bitch,” he said. “Mr. Benoit! Before you say anything else, please hear me out.” He sighed. “Yes Ma'am.” “I want to give you the opportunity to tell your side of the story.
- [Scars](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/scars/) - A homeless man shouted at me from across the street as I was walking with my son, “Bed bugs! Bed bugs! Don’t let the bed bugs bite that baby.” I wondered if he remembered that only a few days ago I gave him pocket change and cigarettes. He never thanked me.
- [Three Keys](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/three-keys/) - Years ago, my first real boss taught me two things. One. Listen to the boss. Two. Listen to your head and heart. In case of conflict between one and two, remember that God is watching; do what is right. Today, my head is aching with the sandpaper of forced retail smiles.
- [Justice](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/justice/) - Reports and statistics and headlines tell only a partial story. Behind the Correctional Investigator's numbers, behind the federal inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, behind the “I believe survivors” and Black Lives Matter slogans—are voices.
- [For the Journey / I Know You Remember](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/journey-remember/) - An immigrants’ daughter with no memory of birth, place, or family save a Nova Scotian childhood starting at five. Today I’m training to Toronto (yes, they say that here) with a vegan attaché of important papers and appointments to keep, and snacks for the road.
- [incested girl / Academic Dialogue](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/incested-girl-academic-dialogue/) - He wants me to listen to/ his story, his pain, his ideas/ but not to mine/ He says, “You are cold”/ I open my mouth/ yes, a heavenly freezer door/ a sudden frosty wind/ where no words live/ then quickly close it/ mindful of my sweet preserves/ walk away
- [Searching for Home](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/searching-for-home/) - There were dragons at home, though. Divorce came, a bitter crisis that left us all shattered. My mother stayed at the house with my two sisters, and I moved out with my father. I was ten. My father told me I was lucky to be with him, I was better off away from my mother.
- [Collective Voices](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/collective-voices/) - When I went to that school in the refugee camp, we had no facilities and being a girl, you know, it means so many different things. We would study and go home at noon and wait and return the next day. Sometimes the teacher would not show up. I felt there was nothing to study.
- [Her Story Repeats](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/her-story-repeats/) - I moved to the United Kingdom forty-five years after my parents left Ireland for Canada. The daughter of outsiders became one herself. For my parents, immigration was a leap into the unknown. My father left his job in a bakery with the hope, but no promise, of better prospects abroad.
- [My Mother's Wounds](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/my-mothers-wounds/) - These are my mother's wounds from the height of Lebanon's Civil War. But these are mere marks. Her true wounds are never ending anxieties from sudden loud noises, the never fading memory of seeing her sister thrown from the ground to building balconies
- [What to Read Next: The Write Crowd](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/read-next-write-crowd/) - The Write Crowd: Literary Citizenship and the Writing Life by Lori A. May (Bloomsbury 2015) is not your average writing guide. It does not explore point of view or plot structures. It does not advise on how to pitch to agents or approach publishers. But it just may keep you writing.
- [Home and Away](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/home-and-away/) - I learned that moving can change more than an address—it can alter a sense of self. But I still cannot fathom true displacement. I have never left or made a home due to conflict, disaster, abandonment, discrimination, illness or economic crisis. For this I learn from others.
- [Catfood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/catfood/) - Mum was up smoking at the window. Tapping ashes into the sink. Nini's dead, I told her. I put her last bottle of blueberry jam on the table. Mum took straight off past me with her cigarette. Cross the gravel in bare feet like God said it, not me. So I set about making toast
- [Rant](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/rant/) - Yes, I am a Feminist. No, I do not hate men. Yes, I believe women are still oppressed. No, I have never burned a bra. Yes, I wear one. No, I am not a lesbian, but so what if I were? Yes, I wear make-up. No, I don’t like the color pink. Yes, I have
- [Empty](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/empty/) - She was drunk. Lip gloss stained beyond the limits of her mouth. Skimpy polyester blouse Clingy, plunging Nude push up bra, worn, faded, peeking through Pitiful cleavage She was lonely. Designer jeans not intended for a forty year old body. Flashy sequined pockets Tight, MILF-Y Jewels glistening crushed hopes and dreams Muffin top She was
- [12 Weeks Along](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/12-weeks-along/) - There you are with your comma-shaped body your ball-point eyes your scotch tape skin your paperclip limbs I put a yellow sticky-note on my belly our first game of Hide and Seek Don’t peek, little baby You’re not ready for this world yet I haven’t bought you any onesies You’d been chilly, naked baby so
- [A Story Under a Story](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/story-under-story/) - A story. A story under a story. And a story under that, and behind that one, and—wait!—there is another, larger one. When my first child was born, the doctor threatened forceps, and so I pushed. But once out of my body, my son seemed never to want to be close again; for a decade as
- [Reunion](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/reunion/) - I met someone. You can call her what you want. I'm going to call her biological mother for now. Jesus, we look alike. We’re a little lost. We talk and talk. Jesus, we sounds alike. We order green tea and forget to drink it. Questions, answers Questioned, answered Cheekbones, same talk talk talk Expressions, similar
- [Welcome to Understorey Magazine](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/welcome/) - Welcome to the first issue of Understorey Magazine, stories of motherhood in Nova Scotia. We are very pleased to publish new writers, new works by established writers, and visual art from women around the province. Through diverse artistic styles and personal experiences, our contributors have created a full cast of women and mothers: the joyous,
- [At the Bookmobile: Helen Keller Gives Counsel](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/at-the-bookmobile-helen-keller-gives-counsel/) - Suppose we live out of darkness. Are our bright words any less true? If I say the sword-flash of river or you say the streets of Paris, is it forgery? We are kin, raised by women who ran their lives against the poor house, magnolia and bog laurel pressed between the same dusty pages. Some
- [New Books: Milk Fever](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article/new-books-milk-fever/) - Milk Fever by Lissa M. Cowan Demeter Press, 2013 The “wet nurse” now seems an antiquated term and obsolete profession, but only a hundred years ago wet-nursing was common throughout the world and remains so in many cultures today. Canadian author Lissa M. Cowan was fascinated by the practice of wet-nursing, particularly the long-held notion

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## Issues

- [Issue 1: Fall 2013](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-one/)
- [Issue 2: Winter 2014](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/winter-2014-issue-two/)
- [Issue 3: Spring 2014](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/spring-2014-issue-three/)
- [Issue 4: Fall 2014](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/fall-2014-issue-four/)
- [Issue 5: Winter 2015](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/winter-2015-issue-five/)
- [Issue 6 (2015): Extraordinary](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-six-extraordinary/)
- [Issue 7: Winter 2016](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/winter-2016/)
- [Issue 8 (2016): Women and Justice](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-eight-women-and-justice/)
- [Issue 9 (2016): Home and Away](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-nine-home-and-away/)
- [Issue 10 (2017): Youth on Power](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-ten-youth-on-power/)
- [Issue 11 (2017): Service](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-eleven-service/)
- [Issue 12 (2017; 2020): African Nova Scotian Women](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-twelve-african-nova-scotian-women/)
- [Issue 13 (2018): Blood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-13-blood/)
- [Issue 14 (2018): Age](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-fourteen-age/)
- [Numéro 15 (2019): Femmes francophones du Canada atlantique](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-15-femmes-francophones-du-canada-atlantique/)
- [Issue 16 (2019): Diverse Stories of Women on Stage](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-16-diverse-stories-of-women-on-stage/)
- [Issue 17 (2019): RE Nature](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/re-nature/)
- [Issue 18 (2020): Technology](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-18-technology/)
- [Issue 19 (2020): Food Work](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/food-work/)
- [Special Issue: COVID Stories](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/covid-stories/)
- [Issue 20 (2021): Laughter](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-20-2021-laughter/)
- [Issue 21 (2021): Rural & Remote Living](https://understoreymagazine.ca/issue/issue-21-rural-and-remote-living/)

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- [Conversation](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/conversation/)
- [Advice](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/advice/)
- [Spoken Word](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/spoken-word/)
- [Excerpt](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/excerpt/)
- [Comics](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/comics/)
- [Video](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/video/)
- [Prose Poem](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/prose-poem/)
- [Visual Art](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/visual-art/)
- [Poetry & Audio](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/poetry-audio/)
- [Book List](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/book-list/)
- [Essay & Poetry](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/essay-poetry/)
- [Cover Art](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/cover-art/)
- [Script (excerpt)](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/script-excerpt/)
- [Script](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/script/)
- [Monologue](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/monologue/)
- [Libretto and Video](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/libretto-and-video/)
- [Poetry & Prose](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/poetry-prose/)
- [Announcement](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/announcement/)
- [Interview](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-categories/interview/)

## Article Tags

- [22](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/22/)
- [7](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/7/)
- [poetry](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/poetry/)
- [climate change](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/climate-change/)
- [Africa](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/africa/)
- [creative nonfiction](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/creative-nonfiction/)
- [women](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/women/)
- [farming](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/farming/)
- [Ontario](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/ontario/)
- [climate strike](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/climate-strike/)
- [Indigenous](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/indigenous/)
- [african nova scotian](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/african-nova-scotian/)
- [black lives matter](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/black-lives-matter/)
- [haiku](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/haiku/)
- [math](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/math/)
- [gender](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/gender/)
- [technology](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/technology/)
- [software](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/software/)
- [engineering](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/engineering/)
- [fiction](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/fiction/)
- [Douglas Adams](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/douglas-adams/)
- [Vogon](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/vogon/)
- [religion](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/religion/)
- [pandemic](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/pandemic/)
- [lockdown](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/lockdown/)
- [Covid](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/covid/)
- [culture](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/culture/)
- [STEM](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/stem/)
- [PoC](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/poc/)
- [immigration](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/immigration/)
- [science communication](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/science-communication/)
- [literary](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/literary/)
- [karaoke](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/karaoke/)
- [Hong Kong](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/hong-kong/)
- [Calgary](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/calgary/)
- [China](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/china/)
- [fitness tracker](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/fitness-tracker/)
- [chronic pain](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/chronic-pain/)
- [swimming](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/swimming/)
- [hiking](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/hiking/)
- [trans](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/trans/)
- [childhood](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/childhood/)
- [food](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/food/)
- [street food](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/street-food/)
- [food cart](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/food-cart/)
- [personal essay](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/personal-essay/)
- [livestock](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/livestock/)
- [pigs](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/pigs/)
- [food work](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/food-work/)
- [baking](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/baking/)
- [Christmas](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/christmas/)
- [bread](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/bread/)
- [lucky coin](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/lucky-coin/)
- [cooking](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/cooking/)
- [arranged marriage](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/arranged-marriage/)
- [Punjab](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/punjab/)
- [factory](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/factory/)
- [manufacturing](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/manufacturing/)
- [butcher](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/butcher/)
- [community kitchens](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/community-kitchens/)
- [grief](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/grief/)
- [restaurants](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/restaurants/)
- [waitressing](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/waitressing/)
- [server](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/server/)
- [Covid-19](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/covid-19/)
- [coronavirus](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/coronavirus/)
- [canning](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/canning/)
- [preserves](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/preserves/)
- [history of food](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/history-of-food/)
- [agriculture](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/agriculture/)
- [pickers](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/pickers/)
- [migrant labor](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/migrant-labor/)
- [fisheries](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/fisheries/)
- [lobster](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/lobster/)
- [PPE](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/ppe/)
- [stories](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/stories/)
- [Canada](https://understoreymagazine.ca/article-tags/canada/)