Letter from the Editor
The Inaugural Issue: All Saints, 2024
This is the most beautiful time of the year to be in Canada. I’ve put a few thousand kilometres on the car this autumn driving along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor. And though I’ve seen the Rockies and the Alps, for me, nothing can beat the brightly coloured hills of Quebec’s Eastern Townships on a sunny October day.
But even now, as we round the bend into November, there are signs of the coming winter. The fields are filled with parting geese. The chipmunks are getting fat. The cloud patterns have changed and the air carries a different smell. Most of these changes are too subtle to be noticed. But Canadians are tuned to look for these small movements that prepare us for the radical shifts from one season to the next.
On my way home from the townships, somewhere near Belleville, my car broke down in the middle of the night. I was stuck on a long stretch of the 401 between a forest and a field, waiting for a tow truck, a taxi, OPP (anyone, really) to get me. As I stared into the dark woods, I remembered that Belleville was Susana Moodie’s old stomping ground, and I recalled her enchantment with the land which stood before me.
Susana Moodie is one of Canada’s early female writers who catalogued her experience of coming to Canada in 1832 and living in a British Colony in “the bush” with her family. In Roughing It In The Bush she describes encountering the landscape of the Canadian wilderness for the first time:
The mellow and serene glow of the autumnal day harmonised so perfectly with the solemn grandeur of the scene around me, and sank so silently and deeply into my soul, that my spirit fell prostrate before it… my soul at that moment was alone with God… I never before felt so overpoweringly my own insignificance, and the boundless might and majesty of the Eternal.
This encounter with the Eternal in the grandeur of the Northern landscape has been a common thread throughout Canadian art and literature. In my conversation with Josh Tiessen, Josh traces a “spiritual impetus” behind much of Canadian art: a sensibility tied to “an affection for the natural environment and our beautiful country.” This impetus pervades our aesthetic heritage, be it rooted in Indigenous, Christian, or Theosophical visions.
Canadian artists have lacked a space to explore this spiritual impetus in a public way. These places exist, but they are often – rightly – localized, being tied to universities, churches, and organizations across the country. As in Danielle Page’s “Ode to the Bladderwort,” these locally rooted communities are like
…a delicately petalled signal wound
In slender stalks and webbed roots shooting out and up.
In other words, they are traces of the “boundless might and majesty of the Eternal” made manifest across the country.
Traces Journal aims to be a public, national space where conversations and ideas from across the country can come together. It is my hope that Traces might be a small movement to prepare the way for larger cultural shifts. We wish to draw the attention of readers across Canada and be a beacon of hope for Christian writers and artists in need of conversation and community, like, as Greg Kennedy writes in “Prayer in the Age of Climate Change,”
…a certain patch of trilliums
On the brink of blooming
Who gesture with three green hands
A universal sign of hope.
This issue explores the traces of Christianity in the arts across Canada. When selecting pieces for this issue, it was interesting to me how many of these pieces were rooted in their landscape; be it D.S. Martin’s reflections on the cardinal, or Malcolm Guite’s recollection of sailing up the St. Lawrence Seaway, as Susana Moodie did over one hundred years earlier.
What was even more encouraging, however, was the enthusiasm for this project. We received an overwhelming number of responses, submissions, donations, and expressions of interest for Traces before it even began. As we get this project off the ground, I hope we can deliver on the intention to create a meaningful meeting place for artistic expression and dialogue for Canadian artists of the faith.
The Inaugural Issue: All Saints, 2024 is now live. I hope you will enjoy the thoughtful conversations, poems, reviews, and essays we have to share. This issue – as I hope every issue will be – feels like a direct, living response to Emily Carr’s call to artists in her journals, Hundreds and Thousands:
So, artist, you too from the deeps of your soul, down among dark and silence, let your roots creep forth, gaining strength. Drive them in deep, take firm hold of the beloved Earth Mother. Push, push towards the light. Draw deeply from the good nourishment of the earth but rise into the glory of the light and air and sunshine. Rejoice in your own soil, the place that nurtured you when a helpless seed. Fill it with glory—be glad.
And with that, I’ll leave you to see what the beginning holds.
Maya Venters
Editor-in-Chief
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What a beautiful introduction for your inaugural issue, Maya! I am so thrilled that your journal will be bridging the gap between Canadian Christians and the arts!