We are excited to share the first batch of publications from Issue 4: Ascension 2026. I’m pleased to say this is our best issue yet, featuring new work from some of Canada’s greatest writers of faith, including A.F. Moritz, George Elliott Clarke, D.S. Martin, Sarah Klassen, Pamela Mordecai, Burl Horniachek, and more!

Announcement: Short Fiction & International Submissions

We also have some changes coming to Traces. Starting this fall, our October issues will be open to international submissions from anywhere in the world.

Additionally, Dominic Lindl will be taking over as our new Fiction Editor. We are now open to short fiction submissions from Canadian and international contributors.

Check out our Submittable page for details.

SUBMIT

Issue 4: Ascension 2026

Special Features

Each issue, we run special features highlighting the work of Canadian writers of faith. In Issue 3, we highlighted the work of poet Daniel Cowper. This issue features new poetry and spotlights newly published collections by A.F. Moritz and D.S. Martin.

A. F. Moritz has published more than 20 books of poetry that have received various recognitions, such as the Griffin Poetry Prize. His 2024 book, Great Silent Ballad, received the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. In 2026 he has published The Wren, poems, and a translation, Eternities (bilingual edition), of the 1918 book Eternidades by Juan Ramón Jiménez.

New Poetry by A.F. Moritz:

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and serves on the Advisory Board for Traces. His new poetry collection The Role of the Moon (Paraclete Press) is a Gold Medal Winner at the Illumination Book Awards, and a Finalist for the 2026 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award.

New Poetry by D.S. Martin:

Issue 4: Week 1

We slowly roll out each issue over four weeks. Be sure to subscribe to receive each weekly batch of publications straight to your inbox.

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Poetry

This week includes new poetry by George Elliott Clarke, Sarah Klassen, Jesse Keith Butler, & Brad Davis!

Interviews

Book Reviews

A special thanks to everyone who helped make this issue possible, especially our interns Sydney Goodreau & Lucia Ottenbriet, the Traces Advisory Board, and our Editorial team.

See you next week!

The Traces editorial team.

Reviewed by Jeffrey-Michael Kane

The Land Is the Ledger

Reading the Bible on Turtle Island does not ask whether Indigenous perspectives belong in biblical interpretation. It asks whether the Bible, as received by the Canadian church, has ever been properly placed—set down on this particular land, read in the presence of the peoples who were already here, held accountable to the covenants that were broken in its name.

H. Daniel Zacharias and T. Christopher Hoklotubbe bring specific credentials to this question. Zacharias is Cree-Anishinaabe/Métis, raised in Winnipeg on Treaty One territory, now Associate Dean at Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia. Hoklotubbe is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation, a professor at Cornell College in Iowa. Both are faculty for NAIITS, the first accredited Indigenous-designed theological institute in North America. They are not outsiders proposing a thought experiment. They are insiders proposing a return.

The book’s methodology is what the authors call “Turtle Island hermeneutics”—a reading practice rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing. They structure the work around the metaphor of the Big Drum, which calls people together for ceremony, and the Circle Dance, which moves communally rather than linearly. In interviews, they describe their collaborative writing process as “theological jazz”: passing prose back and forth, improvising on biblical themes, allowing insights to emerge from encounter rather than extraction. The approach is deliberately non-systematic. It resists the tidy categories of Western biblical scholarship in favour of something more relational, more rooted in story and place.

This could easily become sentimental. It does not. The book’s strongest moves are technical, not atmospheric.

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Consider their re-translation of Genesis 2:15. The traditional English rendering—God placed Adam in the garden “to till it and keep it” (RSV/NRSV)—positions the human as manager, overseer, agricultural executive. Zacharias and Hoklotubbe argue that the Hebrew is better rendered “to serve and conform oneself to” the land. The shift is small but seismic: the human is no longer master of the garden but its humble kin, shaped by the place rather than shaping it. This is not mere interpretive license. It is a defensible reading of the Hebrew, one that simply sounds different when heard on Turtle Island, where “dominion” has meant something very specific and very violent.

The authors build a series of such reframings, each placing a biblical text alongside an Indigenous experience and asking what resonance emerges.

Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness become a Vision Quest—a ceremonial practice of fasting, solitude, and openness to spiritual direction that is native to many North American peoples. The Holy Spirit descending as a dove becomes, in their reading, an “enfeathered” God, continuous with Indigenous understanding of birds as spiritual messengers. This is not syncretism in the pejorative sense. It is a claim about continuity—the recognition that the Spirit was present on this continent before any missionary arrived, and that the forms of that presence might look like what Indigenous peoples have always known.

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The most striking parallel is also the most uncomfortable. The authors read the story of Naboth’s vineyard—in which King Ahab, with Jezebel’s help, arranges the judicial murder of a man who refuses to sell his ancestral land—through the lens of the Doctrine of Discovery and the broken treaties that followed. Naboth’s crime was refusing to treat land as a commodity. His punishment was death and dispossession. The application to Canadian history is not subtle, and the authors do not make it subtle. They name the Numbered Treaties. They name the legal architecture that permitted the seizure of Indigenous land in the name of Christian civilization. They ask whether the church that carried the Bible to Turtle Island has ever reckoned with the fact that it also carried King Ahab’s logic.

Similarly, the Babylonian Exile becomes a lens for understanding the Residential School system. Both involve forced removal from ancestral land. Both involve the deliberate suppression of language, ceremony, and memory. Both produce a literature of lament and survival. The parallel is not exact—no parallel ever is—but it is productive. It asks the Canadian reader to consider what it means that the Bible contains its own archive of displacement and forced assimilation, and whether that archive has ever been read honestly in a country that produced the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Not every move in the book lands with equal force. The reading of the Atonement alongside the Sun Dance ceremony and the story of Corn Mother—both involving sacrificial suffering for the sustenance of the community—is suggestive but insufficiently argued. The book gestures toward equivalence without establishing its terms, leaving the reader to supply a theological bridge that the authors do not fully construct. The structural resemblance is real — all three narratives turn on suffering that sustains — but the authors do not pause to ask whether the mechanics of sacrifice are commensurable: whether the once-for-all logic of Pauline atonement and the cyclical, communal logic of the Sun Dance and Corn Mother can bear comparison without flattening each other. This is precisely the move most likely to alarm the book’s evangelical readership, and it is the one place where the authors offer neither the theological scaffolding to follow nor the exegetical argument to refuse. This is inevitable in a work that covers so much ground, but it leaves the reader wanting more rigour precisely where the stakes are highest.

The book is also, frankly, a challenge to its own publisher. IVP Academic is an evangelical press, and evangelicalism has historically been suspicious of anything that looks like religious syncretism. Zacharias and Hoklotubbe do not flinch from describing smudging, sweat lodges, and pipe ceremonies as valid spiritual practices—not merely cultural artifacts to be tolerated, but genuine encounters with the divine that preceded and may yet inform Christian faith on this continent. That IVP published this suggests a shift in evangelical self-understanding, at least at the academic margins. Whether that shift reaches the pews is another question.

For a Canadian audience, the book’s central provocation is simple and difficult: God was already here. The Creator was present on Turtle Island before 1492, before Jacques Cartier, before the Jesuits, before the Indian Act. The Indigenous peoples who lived on this land were not waiting in spiritual darkness for Europeans to bring the light. They had their own encounters with the sacred, their own covenants with the land, their own ways of reading the world as a text. What Zacharias and Hoklotubbe propose is not the replacement of the Bible but its re-placement—setting it down again on ground it never properly touched, reading it in the presence of peoples it was used to silence, and asking whether the church that carries the Bible to Turtle Island will answer for the distance between what the text commands and what was done in its name.

This is not comfortable reading. It is not meant to be. The authors are gracious but unsparing. They write as people who love the biblical texts and have been wounded by its misuse. They write as Indigenous Christians who have had to fight for the recognition that those two words can belong together. And they write as scholars who believe that the technical work of translation and interpretation is never neutral—that every rendering of the Hebrew, every choice of metaphor, every reading strategy carries a politics and a theology, whether we admit it or not.

The land, they suggest, is also a ledger. It keeps its own record. And sooner or later, every interpretation answers to what is written in the land.

J.M.C. Kane is the author of Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). As an ASD-1, he writes from this learned experience. Kane won the 2025 Ellis Prize for non-fiction, was a finalist for the 2025 Welkin Prize for Fiction and received the Reader’s Choice Award, was Shortlisted for the 2025 Letter Review Prize for Short-Fiction, named a finalist in the 32nd Annual Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Contest (2025), and has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His prose work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Minnesota Review, New Ohio Review, Plough, Vita Poetica, Dappled Things, and Others. He lives in New Orleans with his family where he works as an attorney.

H. Daniel Zacharias is Associate Dean and Professor of New Testament Studies at Acadia Divinity College (Acadia University), Nova Scotia. He holds a PhD in New Testament Studies from Highland Theological College, University of Aberdeen. His scholarship focuses on the Gospel of Matthew, early Jewish and Christian interpretation of Scripture, and Indigenous hermeneutics. He is also affiliated with NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community and is the author and editor of multiple academic works in biblical studies.

T. Christopher Hoklotubbe is Assistant Professor of Religion at Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. He earned a ThD in New Testament and Early Christianity from Harvard University Divinity School. His research centers on early Christianity in its Greco Roman context, the Pastoral Epistles, and Indigenous biblical interpretation. He serves as Director of the Indigenous Theological Circle and as Coordinator of Graduate Studies for NAIITS.

Reviewed by Jennifer Nundal

Abigail Favale, academic, theologian, and autobiographer, has published her debut novel through Ignatius Press. Our Lady of the Sign is a semi-surrealist work centred on the story of an atheistic college professor, Simone Stark, who embarks on a journey to visit the far-flung town in Idaho where she spent her adolescence. There, contemplating the need for an abortion for the second time in her life, she experiences a series of demonic encounters while reuniting with the figures of her past. These disquieting events, which constitute the majority of the novel, guide her on a journey to the discovery of true freedom.

“Yes.” The word rises easily from within her, up from under her heart. She says it again. “Yes, I promise. Yes.”’

This resounding ‘yes’ is the note upon which the novel ends, echoing the Marian fiat in keeping with the deeply Catholic tone of the entire book. The novel aims to draw the reader into Simone’s conversion as she gradually relinquishes her attempts to control the direction of her life through an abortion and an affair with a past lover; these are superseded, ultimately, by the final abandonment of herself to a burgeoning new existence, which will bring with it a child, shared with her boyfriend Peter who awaits her back home.

The subject of conversion is undeniably a beautiful one, and has been meaningfully explored by Favale in her autobiography Into the Deep (2018); however, here as the theme of a work of literary fiction, it fails to convince. The preponderant issue lies not so much in the quality of the prose—Favale is a competent writer—but rather the medium in which she has set out to elucidate her particular vision of a Catholic theological anthropology. This rich theological framework, expounded upon by Favale in her academic work The Genesis of Gender (2022), and the conversion story so powerfully told in her autobiography, appear again in Our Lady of the Sign as the heart of the novel. Here, however, the message of conversion and the call to explore more deeply the physical and spiritual dimensions of femininity are far less compelling when woven into this fairly transparent fictional narrative. Of course, literature is more than capable of conveying a worldview or belief system to the reader; great fiction, nevertheless, ought first and foremost to transport the reader into its own world—a world very much like our own, or perhaps not like it at all—before releasing them, hopefully changed, back into their own. “In Our Lady of the Sign, one feels oneself jolted back and forth continuously between the events of the narrative and a university classroom in which Favale qua academic is lecturing. In other words, in failing to leave her own academic voice out of her novel, she also fails to create an entirely believable fictional world in which the reader can lose herself. One is prevented from having any chance of becoming absorbed in the story due to an excessive number of intellectual guideposts.”

“Perhaps this was the moment, the call to adventure, that initiating moment of the hero’s journey. She’d taught it so many times in Lit 101, that archetypal narrative pattern that appears in every culture, every great story: the hero’s journey. And it begins with the call to break out of the confines of ordinary life, and into something more. Many try to resist the call. The risk is too great. What will be her answer?”

It is not altogether easy to express the impression left upon the reader by excerpts like this one. The transparent foreshadowing feels ungainly and rather didactic. In her essay, “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction,” Zadie Smith summarizes the ends of fiction as having much to do with empathy, and the writing of it as being an exercise in a fascination with—and presumption about—that which is other than us. In other words, writing fiction involves the creation of characters quite possibly as unlike the author as can be, but with stories which draw on the wealth of emotion which is the inheritance of all human beings. It is in the feeling of human feelings, felt on behalf of another, that the power of fiction consists. Smith argues that our current culture challenges this view of fiction as empathetic, speculative, and other-oriented, and rather asks the writer to refrain from pretending to understand others, and to write instead only about herself, or someone very like herself.

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The character of Simone shares undeniable parallels with the author herself. An unbelieving feminist academic, unsatisfied with her life, finds herself in a push and pull romance with the allure of Catholicism: this is Favale’s story as much as it is Simone’s. Hence, it is as difficult to argue with this novel as it would be to argue with Favale about the genuine sincerity of her own story. How can one say she is wrong, or challenge her assumptions, when she knows this story through and through? It is thus that the reader finds herself in a position where, while she cannot disagree with the neatness or plausibility of the story, she does not, to once again draw upon Smith, “believe in the imaginary people… placed in these fictional situations.” The story does not grab, nor is it truly open to the reader’s unique and intimate interpretation and relationship to it; like Favale’s non-fiction, it feels factual even in its sentiments. It is fruitless to argue with such facts, but one also feels nothing for them. Consequently, the novel fails to argue itself into the reader’s heart, as all great fiction is wont to do.

“Virgin and mother at once, she thinks. An impossible ideal. She remembers her graduate seminar in medieval literature, the cult of Mary, her professor’s conviction that Mary was a male fantasy, brilliantly concocted to control women while seeming to elevate them.”

Again, the reader is jolted from the narrative. The purpose of such passages feels purely instructive, spelling out repeatedly an unambiguous message intended for the reader. Later in the novel, a page-long description of an icon of Our Lady of the Sign drives home the novel’s imagery and message again, with rather a heavy-handed force. Ultimately, one cannot escape the feeling that even the reader’s intimate, deeply personal reaction to the characters and ideas in the book has been preordained and must thus be carefully directed throughout. In her eagerness to share her convictions, Favale seems to have sold the characters of her story short; often, they feel more like mere tools employed in the delivery of her message than real, living people. Herein lies the fundamental flaw which prevents Favale’s novel from being a great work of fiction, as worthwhile as it may be in its many components.

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It is necessary to conclude with the admission that this novel was difficult to review. Favale is here, as in all her works, a clear thinker with a genuine talent for writing. Her gift for centering an intensely female experience in a Christian context is no small thing, and is much needed in our times. Should she continue to write novels, confessional or otherwise, it is only hoped that she might more completely abandon her academic proclivities and engage more boldly with that which is unlike herself, allowing for a fiction that truly transports without reservation.

Jennifer Nundal resides in Langley, British Columbia.

Abigail Favale, Ph.D., is a writer and professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. A Catholic convert with an academic background in gender studies, Abigail writes and speaks regularly on topics related to women and gender from a Catholic perspective.

Abigail’s memoir, Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion, traces her journey from evangelicalism to postmodern feminism to Catholicism. Her essays and short stories have appeared in print and online for publications such as First Things, Public Discourse, The Atlantic, Church Life, and Potomac Review. She was awarded the J.F. Powers Prize for short fiction in 2017. Favale lives with her husband and four children in South Bend, Indiana.

The Call to Home
by George Elliott Clarke
 
(for The Hon. Mayann Francis)

My Utopia? A round stone tower
cobbled from marble and shale—
such lone, ocean-coloured scenery amid greenery—
the super-verdant Three Mile Plains—
a dreamy, supreme jungle—
green—as sumptuously green—as an avocado—
where red-breast robins and black-cap chickadees
stage a torrid clamour, strident canticles—
their songs raging impromptu, glamorous arias—
phantasmagorical cadences—
airs—
in my ears—
while perfume buffets my face—
the blossoming of apples, the tang of pine—
an unmistakeable honey
of unparalleled sweetness,
heralding persistent Succulence.

And indoors, tabled,
are pears from Nova Scotia, pear wine from Nova Scotia
(Morocco-adjacent is Nova Scotia)—
sanctified bottles—
an ambiance of cinnamon and lemons—
the oneiric music of Portia White, trilling—
an enterprise of light
profiting every window.

Here and now I awake, still adrift in dream,
relishing a lingo of vino and aurora—
seditious, gold-dawn Clairvoyance—
mandatory sunflowers preening in the garden.

And when I leaf my pages,
the verses embody a Pantheon,
and I’m a colossus of wine—
as arrogant as Champagne—
or Dylan Thomas-wild, Malcolm X-disciplined—
a gardener corralling a jungle.…

George Elliott Clarke was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1960. He was the 4^th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7^th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17). An English professor at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, UBC, and Harvard. He has received the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, Premiul Poesis (Romania), Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, and the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US). Basta!

Field Verses
by Sarah Klassen
 
Life is not as easy as crossing a field.
(Russian proverb)

Of what breadth and width is that field
you imagine you’ll cross? Half way,
hard ground may become quick sand
that grips you in its hungry vortex.

Or this: Beneath a child’s quick steps
undetonated rage lies sleeping.
Imagine this field--furrowed or unfurrowed,
sun-flooded or wrapped in mystery--
until the moment of explosion.

In August an acreage is ripe for harvest.
Your father stands chest-deep in it, his fingers
rubbing kernels from burgeoning heads of grain.
September rains pour, soil is water-logged,
harvest machinery bogs down,
yellow heads of wheat and barley rot.

And what about the property where someone
intending a quick crossing,
inadvertently stumbles on buried treasure?
How could any one pass lightly by,
or resist persuasion to sell everything
for that?

Even a field where lilies bloom is not easily traversed.
You’ll want to stop and smell. You’ll touch
the waxen petals gently, then, touched
by beauty”s brevity,
mourn.

One day there will be nothing
but dust, half-buried stones
and a few bleached bones
gleaming like pearls
in an otherwise empty field.

Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg poet and fiction writer. Recent poetry publications are The Tree of Life (Turnstone Press) and New and Selected Poems (CMU Press). Awards include National Magazine Awards gold and silver and the Gerald Lampert Award. Klassen’s poems explore both the physical and spiritual aspects of life.

It's Come To This
by Brad Davis

I’m tired of caring whether a poem comes to enough.
There’s a subway on the bridge, and just south of it
a cylindrical metal chimney releasing what looks like steam
into the golden hour of sunset here in Brooklyn,

sixth floor, so roof level. I’m facing north, looking east,
and tired too of feeling what the poem really needs
is a quirky, post-post-modern diction or slant rhyme
or some gorgeous metaphor to distinguish it from prose—

as if delighting in the pan-urban palate of muted reds
and greys flattened in the view out the window weren’t enough,
and all of it laid out beneath a lavender, late January sky.

Is it because I am older than I thought I’d ever get
and live with knowing time is shorter than it’s ever been,
that I’m caring more about the moon, up now and full.

Brad Davis is a Canadian-American poet living in northeastern Connecticut. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vallum, Traces, Image, Poetry magazine, The Paris Review, JAMA, Puerto del Sol, Brilliant Corners, Spiritus, and many other journals. Brad’s most recent collection is On the Way to Putnam: New, Selected, & Early Poems (Grayson, 2024).

Garments of Skin
by Jesse Keith Butler
 
Cast out from the garden
In garments of skin
We begged for a pardon
To enter back in
 
This wide world rests under
The thumb of its God
We set out to plunder
The wildlands of Nod
 
The seal of the chrism
The vellum stretched thin
We bind up our wisdom
In garments of skin
 
The prayer was impatient
So was the response
This civilization
We’ve hammered from bronze
 
This echoing tower
These wars we won’t win
When night comes we cower
In garments of skin
 
The sin that awaits us
Is crouched at the gate
We’ve lifted our faces
A moment too late
 
We passed from the garden
In garments of skin
As boundaries harden
The work can begin

Jesse Keith Butler is an Ottawa-based poet who recently won first prize in the ESU Formal Verse Contest. His poems have been published in a variety of journals, including Arc Poetry, New Verse Review, Dappled Things, Pulp Literature, and Blue Unicorn. His first book, The Living Law (Darkly Bright Press, 2024), is available wherever books are sold. Find him at www.jessekeithbutler.ca.

Voice: Ruin
by A. F. Moritz
 
My voice is a ruin of the great building
which was nothing but a hollow in the ordinary hills,
their streams and coverts, slopes and meadows.
It had been built by song beyond
all towers of materials that can be
mined and fused from a wasted ground. My voice
is a hollow grown from the long-ago, long-gone
coming of the poet whose voice was a song
of unaccustomed joy here
in the sky’s silence. In that ruin of a vale,
which is also a fallen building, my voice is the ruin
of one shepherd out of spirits, sitting on a stone,
wishing never to have to get up
and go where once were cottages and flocks
and at evening a woman by the low stone door.

A. F. Moritz has published more than 20 books of poetry that have received various recognitions, such as the Griffin Poetry Prize. His 2024 book, Great Silent Ballad, received the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. In 2026 he has published The Wren, poems, and a translation, Eternities (bilingual edition), of the 1918 book Eternidades by Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Biography of the Tyrant
by A. F. Moritz
 
Hell is like you: being nothing on earth
but terror others are absorbing—
digesting the maiming of their body
into the body of tomorrow, the beautiful one.
Hell is put down into the dirt to decompose
to a grain of the core—fire, that loam. Hell is your being
the will to ash and torture: dead from the start,
dropped in the dark, festering to feed
the ultimate root of the meditation of life,
the planet of health—the surface, the face,
flesh, skin of the planet far above the molten
generator. Hell is to be unwilling, unwitting,
a food of the green gold land, the blue
silver ocean, under the white and gold blue sky.

A. F. Moritz has published more than 20 books of poetry that have received various recognitions, such as the Griffin Poetry Prize. His 2024 book, Great Silent Ballad, received the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. In 2026 he has published The Wren, poems, and a translation, Eternities (bilingual edition), of the 1918 book Eternidades by Juan Ramón Jiménez.

Road With Cypresses
by D.S. Martin
 
You have not always felt   so straight & strong
felt more stable than passersby  
more revelatory than the crescent moon
in the inverted sky

You watch wheatfields waver with life & energy  
unnoticed by the preoccupied
Nothing is static   You see the curl of cinnamon
& gold   the swirl of indigo & sapphire

But tonight   bridging between seen & unseen
you stand   shimmering & alive
each heavenly light   with its own corona  
vibrates   as in your mirrored eye

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and serves on the Advisory Board for Traces. His new poetry collection The Role of the Moon (Paraclete Press) is a Gold Medal Winner at the Illumination Book Awards, and a Finalist for the 2026 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award.

Sky Poem
After Psalm 19
by D.S. Martin
 
Silence speaks   a cascade of stars  
wordless words   verified by seen & unseen things   
formed with intent   sent   to sing   
to present themselves   to make evident   all the entire firmament brings   
utterance only half heard   by those 
not yet in tune with all it means   The sky poem   
breaks forth   as the sun   rising above the horizon   seems 
to blaze benevolence across the world    beams 
substance    & all its energy hurled    Nothing misses
the warmth   or leaves each silent word unheard   
or lets the invisible go completely unperceived

What is it that has been established   preserving our earth   
despite our contrary actions?   Does God send instructions
for salmon to struggle upstream   for the moon
& the tides   & the grasses   keeping hillsides
from washing away   & the sustained momentum 
bringing on another day?
Are not the instructions of the Lord right
bringing light to the eyes   strategic
in the precision of savory beauty   shining bright  
showing us what to do?   Like the flick of a blue jay's tail   
the pieces come together   beyond our comprehension   
more subtle than the satisfying click   of a brick 
slipping into place    a salve to our wounds
a blaze marking the trail   the morning's 
first sip of coffee to the tongue

In the dark    as I drive the king's highway   
following your signposts    how can I keep
from veering off course   from landing deep in a ditch?   
How can I discern my own errors   before I've slid
to either side?   Direct my steering   my words   my calculations    
Once I arrive at my destination    I look up   
marvel at the stars   consider all they declare

D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and serves on the Advisory Board for Traces. His new poetry collection The Role of the Moon (Paraclete Press) is a Gold Medal Winner at the Illumination Book Awards, and a Finalist for the 2026 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Poetry Book Award.

Scott Aasman was interviewed by Liv Ross via Google Meets…

Liv Ross for Traces: To get a sense of place, and how you were formed as an artist, can you tell me about your initial drives and inspirations to become an illustrator, and who were your primary influences starting out?

Scott Aasman: Like many kids, I was always drawing, from a really young age. But when I was about five, I had something called Legg-Perthes disease—essentially a degenerative hip disease, which causes the deterioration of the femoral head of the hip. And it forced me to be in bed, in traction, for six weeks with casts on my legs. Eventually, I wore Forrest Gump-style braces on my legs with a steel bar between my knees from when I was five to about eight. During that time, being a young kid who went to school, it was a little bit difficult to go outside during the winter—getting snow stuff on and all that. So I spent a lot of time inside during those years. During that time, I did a lot of drawing and it became a thing I was able to use to differentiate myself. I was known as the kid with braces, and so to be able to be known as something that was not just a kid who was in braces, but as a kid who could draw allowed me to take a little more control of how I can present myself to the world rather than this needy kid who’s kind of limited. I could be the kid who could surpass limitations and draw pictures of whatever he wanted. From Grade 1, Grade 2, into Grade 3, I was doing a lot of drawing because that was the way I could really express myself and kind of give myself a better face. I have this distinct memory of drawing Snoopy from the Peanuts comics, and my teacher praising me for it. We were doing art clubs at school and she let me be a part of the older group for drawing because I was at that level. So that made me feel really special, and I just never really stopped drawing from there on.

As I got older, I got into skateboarding culture and snowboarding culture and was influenced by the art on skateboard decks. I spent a lot of time looking through old skateboarding magazines and drawing skateboarders, and that helped me a lot with figure drawing. That was a scene that really embraced artistic abilities. Art was kind of a cool thing for that.

As I got older and friends got into bands, I did not have a lick of musical talent, but I had the ability to draw. So I was drawing t-shirts, poster designs, and album covers. That was a way that allowed me to have an in with that whole band culture. I always found myself in these art and art-adjacent communities, being able to express myself in that and make myself a part of them.

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I never set out to be an illustrator, I guess, but it just worked out that that was where my skills fit in, and I like the democratic nature of illustration. It’s less to do with the institution, less to do with these higher-up galleries or things where you are playing a game. I mean, that’s not to say there aren’t any games to play while you’re building a career in illustration. But I like being able to make work that rubs shoulders with people’s every day. Be it in a magazine you’re leafing through, or on a t-shirt design, or album cover, or skateboard graphic—I find it really cool that somebody drew it. That’s what inspired me as a kid and still inspires me today.

If we want to talk about primary influences, I mentioned Charles Schulz and Peanuts. But also Bill Watterson with Calvin & Hobbes. Bill Keene with Family Circus. I spent a lot of time as a kid just copying comics.

Calvin and Hobbes was a real breakthrough for me. I distinctly remember drawing Calvin and realizing that his hair wasn’t just lines. They were little triangles. So, learning about line weight by copying the work that Bill Watterson was doing. Those kinds of artists really allowed me to understand how to make drawings and were influential on my work, my love of drawing, and how I draw.

Traces: I really like that you brought up the comics. Some of the things I love about your work, whether you’re doing the full comic pages or strips, or your single image illustrations, is that they are great examples of storytelling in a visual medium. One could think that to tell a story, you have to use words, whether written or oral. But you are able to get across a full story, even in a single image. So, how was it that you were able to move into being able to do that? How do you come up with some of these stories? How do you determine the details to get that story across?

Aasman: Yeah, I’ve always been super fascinated with stories, even from a young age. I have memories of my children’s Story Book Bible as a kid. They had these kind of baroque images of the Bible stories. They had this one of Moses raising the brass serpent in the desert. I don’t remember how that story was told, but I do remember how the images portrayed the terror on the people’s faces, and the snakes biting people, and Moses determined as he raised the image of the snake. I was so fascinated by that image, how it could just communicate so much of this entire story in this one image. So I’ve always been interested in how pictures can also tell stories.

I think my study of Art history aided all this. In university, I got really into the Northern Renaissance artists and was really inspired in how they treated Biblical stories in the sacred art of the time. Guys like Jan van Eyck, and Rogier Van der Weyden, Robert Campin, and how their stories aren’t just a single moment in time. There’s kind of like different time periods all included in one image. And it’s not just a snapshot like how we see a picture. It’s more like layering different elements of the story into one, on top of that they are often depicting these stories not in history but in the present day, with Biblical characters wearing common clothes of the time, in places that reflected where the artists came from.

Also sketchbooking. I’ve always kept an active sketchbook, and it’s always a big mess of just stuff kind of thrown together. That’s a way to learn how to fit images together, how the images can interact. I’m interested in how things sit with other things on the page. You can have two different forms, and they can inform each other. Through those various roots, I came to my own style, my own approach. I don’t take one snapshot from the story. I take several snapshots across the story and layer them together, kind of interweaving and intermingling, allowing the story to unfold and different elements to rub shoulders against each other. Hopefully, by hitting some of the familiar notes, people can recognize the story, and then also see how having these various different aspects that don’t make logical sense can meld together. They can then put the pieces together themselves, make connections.

Traces: You brought up allowing the viewer or participant to have connections to put together the pieces themselves, to read the image. Much like critical reading of prose and poetry, I feel like critical viewing is also a learned skill. If you’re willing, I would love to go over a couple of your pieces and have you open out some of the images that you are using and create a sort of jumping off point for people coming in to explore your work. Giving them a bit of a sense of direction. I would like to start out with one of your recent illustrations, and one of my favorites, Knight and Dragon.

Scott Aasman: Yeah, this one is called Blood of Dragons//Language of Birds. It’s loosely based off of the story of Sigurd and the Dragon from Norse mythology. There’s an old, old story that goes, that if you drink the blood of a dragon, you can understand the language of birds. That was the starting point of the entire image. It’s a Norse story, but it’s obviously not Norse imagery. I’ve got a European knight there. It’s very loosely tied.

If we want to rewind a little bit here, the way I approach these images, I’m dealing with different versions of narrative. The meta-narratives that go beyond culture, that form who we are as people groups. Whether they are religious stories, myths, or cultural stories, I like to infuse some personal narrative into these as well. Also local narrative, so my community, my city, or my country. There’s always a layering of narrative in these as well, so hopefully people can relate them on different levels.

So this dragon one. I was really interested in the story of Sigurd, and the birds that helped him defeat this dragon. I also thought it was really interesting, this idea of drinking blood. It’s a part of our sacraments as a Christian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dragons the past couple of years. They’ve been really interesting to me. In a lot of cultures, they are not purely evil. They can be helpful and beautiful. Even in the Bible, as I just mentioned, Moses is told to raise a bronze snake that the Israelites were to look to for salvation from disease. The term “seraph” in Hebrew can be translated as “fiery serpents”—so is it too much a stretch to think of God’s angels being dragonlike?

Maybe I don’t want to go too deep into this, but I did have a sort of weird spiritual encounter with Jesus where he kind of revealed himself in the shape of a dragon. It was a weird experience, but it also provided a sort of impetus for this image. There’s this idea of someone wrestling with a dragon, which also points back to Jacob wrestling with God.

Traces: I did pick up on the design for the dragon being drawn from the Asian Lung Dragon, rather than the more European Wyrms. And the Asian dragon motif tends to be associated with blessing and benevolence. It’s easy to make a connection here with St. George and the Dragon, but the pose and framing mimics more the images of Jacob wrestling the angel.

Scott Aasman: That was a very conscious effort. Taking the Asian style dragon, sort of long and twisty—one that was held up, rather than pinned down. I think a lot of it is exploring my relationship to European myth and a North American.

Both sets of my grandparents immigrated from the Netherlands. So I do have a bit of a tie to Europe in my blood, but I’m trying to figure out what it means to be a North American and understanding these stories. How can I bring in more stories of this land? I know Martin Shaw has talked about knowing the stories of the places you’re from. And you and I were at Breath and Clay, and I was talking to Malcolm [Guite] about it as well. He gave me some insight to, that there’s such a rich tradition of storytelling here in North America as well, and Jesus shows up in those places, too. So how do I tie into those?

I’m losing this particular piece in it, but this is tying into the broader or bigger issues I’m running into with telling stories in my art. Deciding what stories to tell. I guess with this one, it’s a Nordic story that I’ve put a more western European spin on, with elements of what I learned from Asian cultures and their views of dragons, plus my personal story of experiencing Jesus as a dragon are all colliding in this thing. What happens when we drink Jesus’s blood? What happens then? We speak the language of birds. We engage with nature differently. We engage with the world differently.

Traces: I would like to move into the St. Christopher image. As we were selecting illustrations to discuss, you mentioned this one was a little bit more of a struggle or a wrestling to bring it into being. It took you a number of years.

Scott Aasman: This image is another one that is really important to me. It’s from a series called “Lullubies, Legends, and Lies.” where I made a conscious effort to put a number of stories from the Bible, to Christian and classical myth in a narrative blender both as an image but as a story and see what happens. This story, this image I made, I started almost ten years ago. I drew out a good portion of the upper half in pen and ink. My son, who I modeled into Jesus in this image, drew on it with a marker. I was kind of defeated and let it sit for a number of years, before I pulled it out, digitized it, and kept working.

It deals with the story of St. Christopher. In a lot of Orthodox icons, he’s depicted with a dog’s head. This sort of ugly, terrifying creature from the fringes. His entire life, he was seeking the most powerful one to serve. He goes to a warlord, who cowered at the feet of a king, who cowered at the feet of Satan, who cowered at the symbol of the Cross, but he couldn’t find Christ. So he gave up on following anybody. He began a life of just helping ferry people across a river. Eventually, a child came to him who needed help crossing the river. As he carried this child, he realized how heavy the child was getting and almost drowned. When he reached the other side and dropped the child off, the boy revealed himself as Christ. He said “While you were carrying me, I was carrying the entire world.” From there, he follows Christ until he is martyred, getting shot by arrows. Although several of the arrows that were shot missed him. There’s a lot of cool mythology around that.

This story comes from the Golden Legend, a book of popularized lives of the saints. And that’s what this piece was based on.

I used my son carrying his favorite truck as Christ , and I had a whole bunch of local freshwater fish swimming around him. Fish from the area where I’m from. I was kind of tying in his early life, the dangers around him. Him crying out, looking for someone to serve amidst the tumult. Christ revealing himself.

It’s working in several layers. It has the river scene itself, elements of his death, elements of his search, and the tension between all of that that he must have felt.

Traces: Out of curiosity, you have these arrows which are in a kind of scribbly pattern. Is that a reference to the original destroyed image with marker scribbles?

Scott Aasman: You know it could be, although it was unconsciously done. It would kind of fit with the story and the making of the image. That’s all where the scribbles were, too. That’s a good observation.

This one is an older image. I feel like I’ve changed a lot as an artist since doing this one. But it was one of the first real deep dives to see how far I can push this storytelling in an individual image.

Traces: Another one that you had sent was the Aspidochelone.

Scott Aasman: This one is based on a couple of different stories about navigation, and my grandparents’ journeys to North America from Europe. It’s about St. Brendan the voyager. The land of milk and honey. The Promised Land.

In 2019, my last surviving grandparent passed away. We’re going on seven years ago that this happened, but I’d been thinking a lot about legacy and the journey that my grandparents took, this act of faith after World War II when their country was demolished. They were young. They got married and moved across the ocean to a place where they could only take one suitcase and not a lot of money. At the same time I was reading about St. Brendan and his journey. In it, there’s the aspidochelone. It’s depicted like a colossal whale or turtle, and it resembles an island. It’s often luring sailors to their death.

There’s this interesting story of St. Brendan, and he sees this island in the middle of the Atlantic. They celebrate Easter on it. It ends up being a whale, named Jasconius. He celebrates Easter on the back of the whale, who complains about their fire causing pain and kicks them off, and they continue on. I was thinking of St. Brendan sailing to a new land, but also North America being Turtle Island, and the land of milk and honey for my grandparents—but also how are we perhaps ‘making a fire’ where it does harm to the place we are—and how can we better honour the place we find ourselves.

The little ship on there is the ship that my grandparents immigrated on, as well as a set of my wife’s grandparents. Two years ago, we visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they have the actual port where the ship landed and my grandparents entered Canada. The gates that they walked through. At that time, I was thinking a lot about what it means to enter the desert or wasteland in order to come to a new place. What it means for that place to have its own identity and being, and how do we adopt the place, and yet let it be its own place with its own people and stories and character and personality. How do I navigate my European roots with my Canadian identity now? It’s a collision of different stories and cultures coming together.

Traces: I want to go ahead and move into your work with comics, as I know that this has been a new move and taking up a lot of your time recently.

Scott Aasman: As My kids started reading, they gravitated towards comics and graphic novels, and I started reading with them. I was blown away by the stories and art that was present in many of them. It wasn’t very acceptable literature when I was their age, but it’s a legitimate artform! As an adult coming back to Charles Shultz and Bill Watterson now, there’s some deeply profound and beautiful stuff in there! But there is also just a lot of good storytelling.

But my introduction to comics started with a zine that our friend Corey [Frey] and I have been working on for a couple of years called nephew. We’ll talk about a weird idea. I’ll draw a bunch of pictures, and Corey will write a bunch of words that turn into a poem, and we’ll sort of smash them together to see what happens. The marrying of image and word is at the heart of illustration and at the heart of comics.

I’ve always sort of had my images layered on top of each other but this caused me to stretch things out a bit and make space for words. Eventually, I just took the plunge and created boxes to go to a more traditional comic look

I have a series that I’m working on called Men Like Trees Walking. I’m almost done with all of the drawing, and then I’ll do a bit of digital editing. It’s trying to stretch how far images can go in storytelling and how the brain fills the space between two loosely tied images. It’s not a very straightforward way of comic book making, although I have been exploring more traditional comic book making with the Dolorous Stroke which is going to be published later this spring, as well as another one based on The Wasteland from T.S. Eliot.

I’m interested in how the brain connects different panels when there are no words. But I also wanted to create something a little more approachable.

I’ve shown a lot in group shows and galleries. That’s exciting to me still, but it felt like trying to cater to an intellectual crowd. Maybe like you’re trying to play games or reach a certain level of credentials. I like comics because there is an un-pretentiousness to it. There’s a really cool community for it in my city, of people who just make stuff. There’s something very low stakes and democratic, but also the potential to say something very deep. I really like how it can just be xeroxed and stapled together and handed out. It doesn’t have to prove anything. It just is what it is, a thing that can exist.

Traces: Seeing some of the posts and comics that you have shared, they have a very Folk Art kind of feel to them.

Scott Aasman: I think you can see thats an overall trend I’ve been working at in my all work. In my older work, like the St. Christopher, I was very purposeful and tight about where I placed my lines and how I formed my work, and I’ve been trying to loosen that up. For the longest time I was pushing for accuracy and perfection, but with the digital tools so prevalent and accessible nowadays, I’ve grown a bit tired of perfection, and I just want to see the hand present in the work again. Making comics feel like I have permission to remain loose. It more naturally aligns with my sketchbooks and how I love to draw. I mean, I still like doing my fine art work, and am more than happy to provide clients with a cleaner style. There’s nothing wrong with purposeful design, composition and intention. But what I love about comics is they seem more akin to discovery and play.

I feel like there’s a lot that connects with comics that feel more natural and how I want to make work, rather than how I ought to make work or what would please a client. It’s more punk rock. For me, it’s getting to the fun of artmaking that can get lost when you’re too focused on the expectations of meeting deadlines, client work, “career building” and trying to make a name for myself.

Traces: That reminds me of an article that I read from Ted Gioia that discussed our lack of folk music. Not as in Indie Folk as a genre, but folk just playing music in their living rooms. He opines that in childhood, you should encourage just playing music, as in playing with instruments, goofing off, playing badly, and doing it for fun as a good and excellent thing to do. Skill and discipline can come later.

Scott Aasman: That’s a thing I’ve come back to with my students in the classes I teach and in my workshops, like Drawing Goodly Badly and Tending the Garden of Ignorance. It’s important to have things like a sketchbook where you don’t feel like you have to perform as an artist. Instagram and social media have commodified our hobbies and tried to turn them into side hustles instead of things that are just fun or are just good and right to do. So I encourage my students to be able to just step back and draw through exercises that ask to draw with their left hand or with their eyes closed, and in doing so focuses them on process over product, and find that mark making can be surprising and supremely satisfying. Having the freedom to do something poorly is a lost art for our kids and our communities.

Traces: Thank God for folks like you who are finding ways to reach an audience who aren’t looking for words or poetry. But you can catch the eyes looking at more modern art and get a good dose of mythology while their there!

Scott Aasman: That’s the goal!

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Liv Ross is a poet and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. She has been published in The New Verse Review, The Front Porch Republic, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, and VoeglinView. She also serves as Managing Editor for Traces Journal. Her first book, The Blackbird Ballad, is scheduled for publishing May 2026 from Solum Literary Press. She can also be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity.

I’m writing to you today, as a guest writer of Feuilles, from Berton House in Dawson City, Yukon. For two months I am the writer in residence in Pierre Berton’s childhood home. It’s March 20, but winter is stubbornly hanging on here. It has in fact warmed up from when we arrived three weeks ago to 40 below. But the mornings are still briskly cold, and the afternoons rarely warm above minus 10.

This is a bit of a homecoming for me, as I grew up in the Yukon and spent my first four years in Dawson. The town has been incredibly welcoming to me and my family. We’ve been invited to countless community events since we arrived. In spite of the weather, the community has decided that it should be spring, and is acting accordingly. This weekend is the community’s spring festival, and we’re looking forward to more cold-fingered, warm-hearted fun.

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New Issue Coming Soon!

Our Spring 2026 issue launches in just one month. Be sure to subscribe to receive the issue straight to your inbox.

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The Order of Love

Community Events & Opportunities

Orion Arts residency: Open for Applications

Applications are OPEN until midnight, Sunday, April 12th, 2026.

Launch of Optic Heart: A Biography of Margaret Avison. Volume 1: 1918-1977 by David A. Kent

The St. Thomas Poetry Series is hosting a launch for David A. Kent’s new biography of esteemed Canadian poet Margaret Avison. The launch will be held atS t Thomas’s Church, 383 Huron Street, on Saturday, April 25 at 2:30 pm. Reception to follow.

Poems for Persons of Interest: Poetry Submissions Open

PFPOI will be open to poetry submissions for their June issue, April 1 through April 30.

2026 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award

The 2026 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award is now open for submissions. The winning poet will receive a two-thousand-dollar award, and the winning poem will be published in Plough Quarterly. Deadline to submit: April 30th.

Vallum Chapbook Award

Enter Vallum's annual Chapbook Contest for a chance to win $300, publication, and 25 complimentary copies of your chapbook! Open to Canadian, U.S., and international entrants. Deadline: April 30, 2026

The Understory: A Comment Festival

Save the Date for THE UNDERSTORY, Comment’s inaugural festival to be held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, from Thursday, May 28 to Saturday, May 30, 2026.

2026 Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest

Dappled Things has announced the Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest in honour of beloved poet Jane Greer. Submissions are open now until May 31st!

Cultivate 2026 Retreat: ROOTED (Greenville, SC, June 19-21)

Come join faithful creatives and leaders from all over the world during this inspired and equipping retreat, taking place June 19th-21st in Greenville, South Carolina, at First Presbyterian Church. Tickets are now on sale and selling fast!

Do you have a publication, event, or milestone you’d like to share with the Traces community? Submit your news to be featured in a future edition of “Contributor Sightings.”

Second Reading

Berton House is right across the road from Robert Service’s old cabin. I stare at it every day.

I’ve always had a conflicted relationship with Robert Service. Growing up in the Yukon, you’re constantly force-fed his poetry. I developed a sense that it was somewhat gimmicky, something like the sour-toe cocktail that tourists flock to but that locals roll their eyes at.

Since I’ve been here, I’ve been reading Pierre Berton’s 1907 edition of Songs of a Sourdough, and I’ve developed a new respect for Service. Simply on the level of verse, he was a master of the ballad form. (Berton also had a collection of other poets who tried to imitate Service, and the difference in quality is glaring.) But is his work poetry?

We can perhaps set aside “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which is clearly a masterpiece of genre writing. Beyond that, his Klondike poems are certainly uneven, but what has been impressing me (perhaps because I’m reading them on site) is their deep sense of place. When I read his later work, after he had left the Yukon, his facility with verse continues, but there is a raw energy and rootedness that is lost.

I find “The Spell of the Yukon” particularly striking. There’s a freshness to his phrasing, a particularity of vision, that I think elevates it to the level of true poetry. Look at that fourth stanza—“some mighty-mouthed hollow,” “the big, husky sun”—so many of these phrases still feel like a distinctive expression of a deeply-felt experience of place.

The Spell of the Yukon
By Robert W. Service

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
   I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
   I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it— 
   Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
   And somehow the gold isn’t all. 

No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
   It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
   To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
   Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
   For no land on earth—and I’m one. 

You come to get rich (damned good reason);
   You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
   And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
   It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
   It seems it will be to the end. 

I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
   That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
   In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
   And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
   With the peace o’ the world piled on top. 

The summer—no sweeter was ever;
   The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
   The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
   The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
   O God! how I’m stuck on it all. 

The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
   The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
   The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
   The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
   I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t. 

There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
   And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
   And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
   There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
   And I want to go back—and I will. 

They’re making my money diminish;
   I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
   I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
   It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
   So me for the Yukon once more. 

There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
   It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
   So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
   It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
   It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

Off the Beaten Path

One of my favourite community sites in Dawson so far is the Dawson City Thrift Store, attached to Saint Paul’s Anglican Church. I’ve frequented many thrift stores all over Canada, and this one is my favourite. It’s located in a ramshackle old Dawson building and is bursting with absurdly affordable treasures.

The store has been running, in one form or another, since the 1940s. My aunt, Evelyn McDonald (pictured), has been involved since about the 1980s. The revenues from it fund a community dinner they serve every Wednesday (also cooked by Aunt Evelyn!) which is open to everyone from town. The food’s amazing, and you’re sure to meet interesting people.

“And then saw I that all the compassion that man has on his even-Christian with charity, it is Christ in him, that all the noughting that he showed in his passion, it was shown again in this compassion … and that his pains and his tribulation surpass so far all that we might suffer, that it cannot be fully thought.”

Julian of Norwich (c.1342–after 1416) lived at the same time as Chaucer. She was an anchoress, a mystic who came to live in a small cell attached to the south side of St Julian’s church, from which she took her name. Established in the cell at least by 1394, she wrote in A Revelation of Divine Love about a series of sixteen mystical “showings” that began with a vision of a cross held before her by a priest on 3 May 1373 as she lay near death.

The first quotation above comes from the closing chapter, chapter 86, of A Revelation of Divine Love. Julian’s unadorned and penetrating question, “What, would you know thy lord’s meaning in this thing?” affirms the human search for meaning. She anticipates a lingering difficulty for her reader, a querulousness, an embarrassment, a refusal to acknowledge curiosity maybe, a genuine puzzlement. “This thing,” the Lord’s passion, is overwhelming. Perhaps it seems vaguely inappropriate, even gauche, to seek to know its meaning, as if doing so were to limit the passion or commodify it in some way, a little like asking, “Will this be on the final exam?”

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Julian pushes past all of this with a simple invitation. She meets us where we are and encourages us to hope that an eminently reasonable and natural question, “What does it mean?” might possibly be met with an answer we can believe in.

She then puts us at ease: “Know it well.” This is an affirmation. There is indeed something to be known and understood, something that can satisfy our deepest intellectual cravings. Maybe the idea of finding meaning seems somehow sterile or one-dimensional. In an Age of Reason or an era of technocratic modernity, many people look to rational explanations to suppress a certain kind of aspiration and vitality. Yet Julian invites us to lean into our desire to know and to find meaning.

To admit even now, finally, to a hunger to know opens up something interior. The simplicity of the response matches that of the question she has posed: “love was his meaning.” This answer meets us before it wrongfoots us. Divine love as expressed in cataclysmic suffering fulfils whatever demands one might have for meaning. The Passion provides intellectual satisfactions, if one is prepared to let it.

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At the same time, what Julian says defies expectations. Coming at the end of an entire book elaborating a vision of the cross, “love was his meaning” activates a paradox. It takes the addressee beyond their capacity to make sense of “the thing” – suffering, the Passion, how an all-powerful God could organize the redemption of a world he created around the sacrifice of his own self – in terms of a satisfied curiosity. We discover that “meaning” has more dimensions than anything we can think or imagine. Christ’s suffering and death, his “noughting,” cannot be fully thought.

The idea of finding meaning in its turn unlocks dimensions of love. Love is more than a feeling. It’s certainly more than sentimentality. Love lives in the reality of Christ’s life and passion; it encompasses questions of identity, substance, and purpose, who, what, why. The vision of the love to which Julian points her readers is clouded over by all our efforts to express or represent its fullness.

Yet this limitation does not cripple us by leaving us within an intellectual puzzle. Rather, Julian affirms all our acts of compassion in the recognition that they are participations in Christ’s love. They too are grounded in the same paradox. We have been drawn into this life, a life of love beyond our capacity to fathom it.

There’s just one month left to submit to the spring issue of Traces Journal! Read on for our submission guidelines, and for a slew of links to poetry contests, residencies, and open submissions of interest to our readers.

Read to the end to learn about a unique artist residency in a monastery in upstate New York, and how you can apply!

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Traces News

Submissions are OPEN!

We’re now open for submissions for our Spring issue, which will be published in May 2026. We’re accepting poetry, book reviews, and interviews (pitches and completed pieces).

We are also open to prose pieces and are especially interested in publishing short essay series on topics related to Canadian and Christian art.

Submit!

The Order of Love

Do you have a publication, event, or milestone you’d like to share with the Traces community? Submit your news to be featured in a future edition of “Contributor Sightings.”

Community Events & Opportunities

Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

The New Quarterly’s annual Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest is open again! Deadline EXTENDED to March 9th, 2026!

Inkwell Writers’ Competition: The Agony & Ecstasy of the Artist

just announced their first writer’s competition! Click the link for eligibility, guidelines, and more. Submissions close March 31st, 2026.

2026 Annual Sacred Poetry Contest

Submissions are open for this ekphrastic sacred poetry contest. The best part? This year, one of the featured paintings is by Canadian painter Clarence Gagnon! Deadline: March 31, 2026.

Claire Harris Poetry Prize

The Claire Harris Poetry Prize, an initiative of Goose Lane’s icehouse poetry imprint, is now open for submissions for debut poetry collections. The prize aims to enhance the visibility of debut poetry collections by previously unpublished poets from Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities. Deadline is March 31, 2026.

Behold the Man! A Wayfare Poetry Contest

Wayfare magazine announces “Behold the Man!,” its first annual contest for poems about or related to Jesus of Nazareth. Submissions are accepted February 1st through March 29th, 2026 (Palm Sunday).

Orion Arts residency: Open for Applications

Applications are OPEN until midnight, Sunday, April 12th, 2026.

The Understory: A Comment Festival

Save the Date for THE UNDERSTORY, Comment’s inaugural festival to be held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, from Thursday, May 28 to Saturday, May 30, 2026.

2026 Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest

Dappled Things has announced the Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest in honour of beloved poet Jane Greer. Submissions are open now until May 31st!

Contributor Feature

reviews The National Gallery of Canada’s current special exhibition, “Winter Count: Embracing the Cold for .

The North Facing Window

The Many Colours of Snow

I tend to imagine winter as reality having been flattened out: the vivid colours of fall are replaced with a muddled palette of grey and white and cream; the steady noise of an active social life with quiet evenings in and solitary reading…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Marie Trotter

Special Highlight: Orion Arts Residency

The Monastery Arts Residency brings artists and writers to live, create, and seek beauty for a week under summer skies at Mount Saviour Monastery near Elmira, NY. If you’re looking for an opportunity to get off the grid and spend some time surrounded by artists, monastic rhythms, and hundreds of sheep, this residency is for you! You can read all about the residency on their website and check out photos from previous summers on their Instagram.

You can also follow on Substack, and check out their founder & director, who is a poet, photographer, iconographer, and more!

A. Soane didn’t care about form, he was all about emotion.

Nineteenth-century architect John Soane (1753–1837) turned his London home into a living example of the sorts of things he could do architecturally. Eventually becoming professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, he did so for clients and students alike. Upon his death and according to his detailed instructions, his home became the museum it is to this day.

A sign in the breakfast room says that the room boasts a floating dome. What’s a floating dome? While visiting the museum, I heard the question put to an attendant. The volunteer, an architecture student himself, answered in a striking way. Rather than provide even a rudimentary technical understanding of the phrase “floating dome,” he apparently thought to cut to the chase of what really mattered to the great historical figure. He gave the answer quoted above: “Soane didn’t care about form, he was all about emotion.”

I personally was interested in a different sort of response because, presumably like the questioner, I too had no idea what made a dome “float.” I have since discovered that a dome is said to be floating when the building in which it is found doesn’t rely on it structurally. The dome is therefore simply for effect, an emotional effect. Formally, a non-floating dome does the work of supplying a roof for a structure and integrating the forces of its walls or pillars. They are holding it up and it, in its turn, is giving stability and coherence to the whole. Something like that. (If you google “floating dome,” you’ll get pictures of geodesic domes on water, so the phrase may be a term of art, and perhaps a British one at that.)

I’m reminded of Brunelleschi’s dome atop the awe-inspiring Duomo in Florence. Brunelleschi invented a brickwork pattern called spina di pesce (herringbone) to make the structure self-supporting. The dome also relies on a heavy lantern, the top part that pokes up. The downward force of the lantern helps keep everything in place. The dome is functionally integral, the opposite of floating, at least in the sense of the term of art as used in the John Soane Museum. Of course, on a sultry summer day, viewed from one of the nearby hills the duomo absolutely appears to float, but that’s something else again.

Among his achievements, Soane was awarded the contract for the Bank of England, a building he completed in 1833. It had domes and arches in it. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t true that he was “all about emotion” or didn’t care about form. He couldn’t have succeeded as an architect had that been literally true. Yet the point stands. The student was making the case for a particular understanding of Soane’s architectural achievement and he was appealing to reason-and-emotion-in-tension to do so. The trope was doing cultural and interpretive work.

I am here revisiting a theme I have touched on in a post (not for Traces) about the Golden Gate Bridge. I commented on how Ted Danson’s character in Man on the Inside, a retired engineer, augments function with form. In that instance, form provides “the beating heart” to the engineering accomplishment, making the bridge much more than merely rationally “useful.” In the case of the attendant’s not dissimilar but flipped evocation, “form” has become the word associated with reason: the prosaic necessities for holding something up and the head scratching, the mathematical formulas, and the knowledge of materials to go along with that. The passion of the project has shifted away from form to emotion, and with the latter the inference of heartfelt creativity.

In other words (if I may interpret the attendant freely) Soane, like the engineer responsible for the Golden Gate Bridge, could not rest content with mere utility. Context is necessary to understand the meaning of the terms, but the appeal to a tension between reason and emotion, perhaps even reason and love, is similar.

Would it be pedantic to say that the attendant was prising reason and emotion apart? He may have said what he said mostly for effect, because he found the question boorish. His gnomic remark may have issued from disdain at a lack of rudimentary knowledge of architectural terms of art. However, it may have been enflamed by a perceived literalism on the part of the questioner that evinced little interest in emotion and creativity in architecture. He was damned if he was going to cater to terminological rationalism.

More seriously, though, the student’s suggestion of a strict opposition presumed architecture as a zero-sum conflict in which reason was always to be subordinated to emotion. Paradoxically, this felt like a downgrading of love as well. Love is always fascinated by the particularities of a lived situation and the demands, sometimes moral, always intellectual, that a work requires.

The snow is coming down! This week, it seems like everyone I talk to across the country is buried in snow. I hope you’re curled up somewhere by a raging fireplace with a cozy drink and a pile of books beside you. Read on for the latest gallery-going recommendation, a slew of open poetry contests, and the latest news from the Traces team.

Traces News

Welcome to our new Managing Editor: Liv Ross

We’re excited to have Liv Ross as our new Managing Editor! Liv Ross is an urban monk, a poet, and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. She has been published in The New Verse Review, The Front Porch Republic, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, and VoeglinView. She also serves as Managing Editor for Traces Journal. Her first book, The Blackbird Ballad, is scheduled for publishing May 2026 from Solum Literary Press. She can also be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity

We’re Hiring!

As Liv transitions to her new role, we’re now hiring for two editorial positions: Reviews Editor (Poetry) and Interviews Editor. Interested applicants can send a CV and a short cover letter to traces.editor@gmail.com.

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Submissions are OPEN!

We’re now open for submissions for our Spring issue, which will be published in May 2026. We’re accepting poetry, book reviews, and interviews (pitches and completed pieces).

We are also open to prose pieces and are especially interested in publishing short essay series on topics related to Canadian and Christian art.

Submit!

The Order of Love: Valentine’s Edition

Our Traces dispatch, “The Order of Love,” is published monthly. For February, we have a special “Valentynes” installment on Chaucer and one of the first Valentine’s Day poems ever written!

Do you have a publication, event, or milestone you’d like to share with the Traces community? Submit your news to be featured in a future edition of “Contributor Sightings.”

Community Events & Opportunities

St. Basil Writers’ Workshop

The St. Basil Writers’ Workshop is a year-long program for fiction writers to focus on the craft of writing. Workshops are taught by a variety of faculty, including Jonathan Pageau and Paul Kingsnorth! Applications will close February 28th, 2026.

Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

The New Quarterly’s annual Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest is open again! Deadline is February 28, 2026.

Winter Count: Embracing the Cold at the National Gallery of Canada

The exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, “Winter Count: Embracing the Cold reflects on winter’s significant impact across diverse cultures and artistic expressions.

Featuring more than 150 works from the early 19th century to the present, this exhibition brings together Indigenous, Canadian settler and European perspectives on the subject.” On now until March 22nd, 2026.

Claire Harris Poetry Prize

The Claire Harris Poetry Prize, an initiative of Goose Lane’s icehouse poetry imprint, is now open for submissions for debut poetry collections. The prize aims to enhance the visibility of debut poetry collections by previously unpublished poets from Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities. Deadline is March 31, 2026.

Behold the Man! A Wayfare Poetry Contest

Wayfare magazine announces “Behold the Man!,” its first annual contest for poems about or related to Jesus of Nazareth. Submissions are accepted February 1st through March 29th, 2026 (Palm Sunday).

The Understory: A Comment Festival

Save the Date for THE UNDERSTORY, Comment’s inaugural festival to be held at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, from Thursday, May 28 to Saturday, May 30, 2026.

2026 Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest

Dappled Things has announced the Jane Greer Memorial Poetry Contest in honour of beloved poet Jane Greer. Submissions are open now until May 31st!

Contributor Sightings

The Traces community out in the wild…

“Conspirators,” by

Read Kostas’ latest short fiction series on his Substack, Waymarkers

Call Out Coyote: Poems by

Seth Wieck’s poetry collection Call Out Coyote is available to preorder from Wiseblood Books!

Seven Poems by

Elijah has published a whopping seven poems in the latest issue of The New Stylus!

The life so short, the craft so long to learn,

Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquering,

The dreadful joy that slips away so quickly –

All this mean I by Love ….

These are the first lines (modernized) of one of the first Valentine’s Day poems ever written. Chaucer penned them sometime in the late 1370’s or early 1380’s: ninety-eight stanzas in a seven-line form that he may also have invented, a form he devoted to cultic practice:

For this was on Saint Valentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make ….*

*Foul: fowl, rhymes with fool; chese: choose; make: mate

“There” is a parliament of fowls on a hill of flowers presided over by “the noble Goddess of Nature.”

Chaucer has two wry observations to make about love’s relationship to learning. One is that it should be a thing at all. The first line, “The life so short, the craft so long to learn,” is a bog standard aphorism. People have been saying it since the days of Hippocrates’ “Do no harm.” It refers to mastering anything. You’ve got to work hard, you’ll have some ups and downs, stick with it.

The fourth line doesn’t surprise anyone much, but it’s off just enough for the reader to be struck by the simple truth of the admission. The tone of the delivery remains shrouded: it could be wonder, bitterness, petulance, detached frankness. There’s something off, though. Love isn’t supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be simple, presumably starting with love at first sight. To think of it as a craft doesn’t bode well. One could end up like Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice, he who gives “little delicate compliments” to ladies with “as unstudied an air as possible.” Early in the English tradition, Chaucer signals the social and literary fertility of an implicit tension between study and love.

Literariness is the object of Chaucer’s second wry remark. He makes himself the butt of a joke about love and bookishness, or the difference between knowing and knowing-about:

For even though I know not Love in deed

Nor know how he pays folk their hire

Still, it happens that I full oft in books read

Of his miracles and his cruel ire.

You can almost see Chaucer working himself up, taking himself too seriously, talking himself into his competencies. All the while he suggests the chasm that separates theory from practice, head knowledge from the experience of love.

He knows he’s doing this, naturally: presenting a persona, speaking the ineffable. We haven’t arrived at the unadorned author. We know that. Our danger is to overlook the great authorial presence in this poem (in Chaucer’s works generally) and the gentle jokey seriousness. This apparently is what Chaucer is like: jokey, readerly, reflexive, and utterly committed to the bond of charity sexual, political, ontological.

The poet is going to report on a parliament of fowls he comes across in a dream. First, though, he describes steamier and seedier encounters in the same dream (with more than passing references to Priapus and Venus). We learn to trust his decorum (this isn’t the Miller’s Tale) before we read his journalism. In this phase of his dream, Chaucer writes about seeing the God of Love Cupid and then, among his servants, Craft personified:

Then was I aware …

… of the Craft that can and has the might

To cause by force a creature to do folly –

Disfigured was she, I will not lie.

One senses a difference between this Craft (“the Craft that …”) and the craft pursued in the poem’s opening line.

Forgive me: it’s hard to talk about these things properly. First the easy bit: it’s not like Chaucer anticipates having a problem with William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Nor is it as though he is upset about the power of sexual attraction and temptation. “To cause by force a creature to do folly” isn’t about young people fumbling on the couch and getting carried away or, as Thomas Merton put it, getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar.

Craft is disfigured because she’s part of a world of artifice, sterility, priapic lust, and wasted love service (Chaucer includes a list of bad lovers – think GOT meets Jeffrey Epstein), a world Chaucer passes through before he comes to Nature and her parliament. This Craft has to do with deleterious ways of loving and writing.

The reason this is difficult to talk about is that the secularizing of literature has made it hard for the person (me, maybe you) wanting to talk about Chaucer on sex in ways that are other than permissive, hugely non-judgemental, and generally nudge-nudge-wink-wink not to sound like or to be perceived as though they’re members of the Moral Majority and have a problem with art-artifice-constructedness-creativity to boot.

There are all sorts of riotous fun and games in the parliament presided over by Nature, who is “full of grace.” Generally, she lets the birds get on with their ordering, their inclinations (“as them Nature would incline”), and their hilarious specious debates. Furthermore, prominent space is given to courtly performativity: Chaucer in no way sets up a nature vs culture or fact vs fiction or givenness vs constructivism world of binaries, nor need (ought) the Christian reader interpreting him in and for our time do so.

Chaucer saw in sexual dalliance and craft a threat to what he calls “common profit,” as did classical writers on the virtues generally. (We talk obsessively about narcissism, but we didn’t invent the myth that gave us the term.) Chaucer saw in classical and Christian ethics as they passed over into cultural discourse in his day an ominous dimension of enculturated sexual practice. I think medievalists like C.S. Lewis, who had an abiding awareness of the occult, and Charles Williams, who wrote compellingly about spiritual warfare in sexual terms, recognized in their studies a strand of culture that was malevolently “disfigurat,” and the loss (or suppression) of this awareness in modern medievalism.

Sexual dalliance is love without thought. Or an idea without love. It is to be caught in a spell. It can befall the aesthete, the rationalist, the hunter, the sentimentalist.

To stand before the Goddess of Nature,

to take hire dom and yeve hire audyence

to accept her judgement and give her heed

is the beginning, not the end, of difficulty. You’re driven by desire, must listen, must talk, try to make it work with some kind of coherence, look around and see everyone else more or less making a hash of it too (not least many of the Christians), all of us sent off again in springtime with her blessing.

But, Lord, the blisse and joye that they make!

I hope you all had a joyous Christmas season. I had the opportunity to visit many friends and family members in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. Keep reading for some beautiful photos from my time in the snowy Ottawa Valley, and my thoughts on the current AGO exhibition, David Blackwood: Myth & Legend.

Traces News

Welcome to our 2026 Interns

This January, we launched our inaugural Traces Internship Program. For 2026, we have two interns joining our editorial team. Read more about them below!

Lucia Ottenbreit: My name is Lucia Ottenbreit, and I am a fourth-year literature student at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Barry's Bay, Ontario. I'm currently working at the college as a student events organizer. My hobbies include playing piano, swing dancing, and writing. In this internship, I am most excited to work with the Traces team and learn how to cultivate my own voice as an author!

Sydney Goodreau: Hello everyone! My name is Sydney Goodreau and I am a fourth-year Creative Writing honours major at Redeemer University. My passion for both reading and writing go hand-in-hand. And while my classes often bury me in books, I spend my extra time playing the piano, singing in choir, and travelling with my friends. I can't wait to intern at Traces, a magazine that combines my passion for tasteful literature and my love for seeking God's divine hand in my home country, Canada.

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Submissions are OPEN!

We’re now open for submissions for our Spring issue, which will be published in May 2026. We’re accepting poetry, book reviews, and interviews (pitches and completed pieces).

Submit!

We are also open to prose pieces, and are especially interested in publishing short essay series on topics related to Canadian and Christian art. Check out Burl Horniachek’s latest essay in his series on Christian Canadian poets and Norm Klassen’s latest dispatch from The Order of Love, as examples.

The Order of Love

Our Traces dispatch, “The Order of Love,” is published monthly. In the January instalment, Klassen comments on another recent AGO retrospective on Joyce Wieland:

“A metaphysically assured aesthetic beckons this generation of Canadian Christian artists, critics, and curators, one that looks to politics and art and to an “eternal” it dares to name, even as it acknowledges the inexhaustibility of its naming and its making.”

Contributor Sightings

The Traces community out in the wild…

The Colosseum: A New Journal of Arts and Letters

This new journal features new work from many members of the Traces community! Consider subscribing or submitting your own work to this new, exciting journal.

The Colosseum “will publish new poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews in hopes of enlivening contemporary literature, renewing our culture, and supporting the return to literary craft and intellectual and spiritual depth in the arts.”

Greening the White Cube: Josh Tiessen’s new Substack newsletter!

From Tiessen: “I am excited to launch a newsletter featuring my paintings, essays, lectures, and films, exploring the intersection of creativity, ecology, and spirituality. This will include my free Josh Tiessen Insider Report, an occasional update for my art exhibitions, public talks, print releases, books, and more.”

Josh Nadeau launches new book: Heaven Meets Earth: A 40-Day Journey of Transformation Through the Nicene Creed

In Heaven Meets Earth, philosopher-artist Josh Nadeau, creator of Sword and Pencil, invites you to explore the Nicene Creed in this 40-day devotional journey of transformation for everyday saints. With his iconographic-style art and his insightful words, Josh brings the traditional to the present day in this visually inspired exploration of the faith.

Do you have a publication, event, or milestone you’d like to share with the Traces community? Submit your news to be featured in a future edition of “Contributor Sightings.”

Ordinary Time

Things we’re reading and listening to in our spare time…

David Blackwood: Myth & Legend

This month, I’ve spent a lot of time with the works of the Canadian printmaker, David Blackwood. The current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, “David Blackwood: Myth & Legend,” is one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen at the AGO since the Rubens exhibit in 2019.

Rather than repeating myself too much here, I’d like to direct you to my personal Substack, The North Facing Window, launched this week. There, you can find my first post introducing the life and work of David Blackwood, with additional posts on specific aspects of his work to follow in the coming weeks.

The North Facing Window

Short Stories of the Sea: An Introduction to David Blackwood

Consider this a brief introduction to Blackwood’s life and work. Over the next few weeks, I’ve planned a series of posts that engage with Blackwood’s work in depth, including formal analyses of works from the Lost Party Series, a close reading of Blackwood’s work alongside Rambrandt’s “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” and my personal connection Blackwo…

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4 months ago · 13 likes · 2 comments · Maya Venters

The North Facing Window is a place for my personal reflections on Canadian art and writing, which I hope will be of interest to many of our Traces readers.

The North Facing Window

A Canadian poet writing about literature, art, tradition, craft, culture, and more.

By Maya Venters

Wellwater by Karen Solie

Karen Solie is perhaps one of Canada’s most internationally recognized poets, making a name for herself in Canada, the USA, and the UK. Her most recent collection, Wellwater, was published with Picador Poetry and House of Anansi Press in April 2025. So far, the collection has been awarded the 2025 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry, the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry, and was a CBC, Observer, Financial Times, and Guardian Best Book of 2025. On January 18th, the winner of the esteemed T. S. Eliot Prize will be announced, for which Solie’s Wellwater is a finalist in the running.

I have been rereading Solie’s collection, and I plan to share some extensive thoughts on her work in the coming weeks. For now, I’ll share a poem from the collection and simply encourage readers to purchase this brilliantly executed collection from perhaps Canada’s best living poet.

Community Events & Opportunities

Call for Submissions: Poems for Persons of Interest

Poems for Persons of Interest is now open to submissions for their March issue. Submission window closes on February 10th.

David Blackwood: Myth & Legend

The David Blackwood Exhibition is now open at the Art Gallery of Ontario until July 26, 2026.

ZOOM Seminar: Faith, Forgiveness & Fortitude in Jane Eyre

Shemaiah Gonzalez, author of Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight, is running an online seminar on Faith, Forgiveness & Fortitude in Jane Eyre. Sessions take place on Wednesdays for the months of February, and spaces are filling quickly!

I determined to see her exhibit when I got a notice from the AGO with a blurb and a picture of a quilt with the words “Reason Over Passion” stitched into it. I assumed that, as a modern artist, she probably meant the phrase ironically. The title of the retrospective, Heart On, suggested as much, substituting as it does the heart for the head; I wondered what clues her other works provided, along with the curatorial explanations.

The description of the quilt threw me. Wieland was quoting Trudeau, who had recently said, “For many years, I have been fighting for the triumph of reason over passion.” The blurb observed that Trudeau’s words “intrigued her” and offered this explanation: “Concerned about the 1960s race riots and escalating war in Vietnam, Wieland saw in newly elected prime minister Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) an answer to the United States’ increasingly violent and opportunistic imperialism.”

On this interpretation, passion means violence and the lust to dominate. Reason implies restraint and letting others be. We can extend the inferences. In May 1968 Wieland and her partner Michael Snow opened their New York apartment for a “quilt-in” that brought together about 100 people. Together, they produced the French-language version of the quilt, which the artist and her partner subsequently presented to the prime minister. Reason, then, in this context implies common sense, the collective judgement of the people.

A little digging revealed an alternative interpretation to the one of Wieland’s being “intrigued” by a politician’s phraseology. In 1969, Wieland produced Reason Over Passion as an 80 minute movie without dialogue but with the phrase “reason over passion” reproduced as 537 nonsensical anagrams. In the film, she sandwiches the footage she took of Trudeau at the 1968 Liberal leadership convention in between scenery she filmed from a road trip to the east coast and an earlier trip to Vancouver by train. The artist, looking to move back to Canada, declares that she “decided to unite the leader of the land [sic] and cement it with his words, not so much cement as spread them across a continent, reason over passion, overwhelmed, metamorphosed into passion through use.”

In one critic’s estimation, “[Wieland] became a propagandist whose work embodied an earnest declaration, but that by virtue of its intimate, passionate, irrational aesthetic, eagerly and gladly undermined that message.” For Wieland, this same critic avers, passion “seeps out of Canada’s green pastures and paved roads” and into “whatever eternal might remain glorious and free.” The website Quinzaine des Cinéastes agrees with this view. It holds that “as a woman, as an artist (who worked with textiles undervalued as women’s craft not high art), and as a passionate Canadian nationalist, ‘Passion over Reason’ described more of her own approach to art and life.”

Both of these views might be accurate, the one dating to 1968 and the promise associated with a new leader, the other to 1969, reflecting Wieland’s changing opinion of the federal government over time.

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Nonetheless, what is one to make of this either/or? Both prospects will make the Christian uneasy. In many a Christian context, the call for reason to rule over passion is strong. The sentiment also reflects a Stoic ideal: freedom from the passions, what the Stoics called apatheia. A significant streak of Stoicism runs through Christianity (one would expect no less of a great moral system). Yet Christianity offers something more mysterious than Stoicism: a deepening of reason, utterly bound up with and dependent upon the revelation of divine love, which in turn gives (infinitely explorable) definition to love in the great scandal of particularity, the Incarnation.

The paradox of love and reason therefore also resists the artistic inversion of the Stoic paradigm. The contemporary Canadian artist will be grateful for the elevation of works by women, for the recognition of materials and forms once relegated to craft or the scrap heap, for the thrust of non-violence and ecological concern, all of which Wieland helped to effect. Yet the thoughtful person, let alone the Christian artist, can never rest easy with an “irrational aesthetic.” Such an aesthetic undermines itself the moment it opens its mouth.

In her silent, experimental record of the Canadian landscape, Wieland attests to a great presence and mystery. Neither these critics nor the curators apparently have the language to describe what her art helps to reveal, perhaps despite itself. Walking through the exhibit, I see virtually no signs of the artist’s wrestling with religious identity (except for the Spirit of Canada getting nailed by a bear and the sublimation of the religious impulse as a desire to reconcile politics and art). A metaphysically assured aesthetic beckons this generation of Canadian Christian artists, critics, and curators, one that looks to politics and art and to an “eternal” it dares to name, even as it acknowledges the inexhaustibility of its naming and its making.

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