This issue invites the reader into worlds that exist between the visible and invisible, the public and private, the living and the dead. Revealing glimpses into the lives of five different female narrators, these stories introduce us to the spectrum of hyper-visibility and invisibility that frame women’s lives and environments. Cassidy McFadzean’s “Bigger and Gentler” tells the story of a young writer struggling for visibility and acknowledgment in her partner’s shadow, while Eileen Holowka’s “To the Child I Will Not Have” reads as a love letter to a future foreclosed by ecological disaster. Kendra Guidolin’s “Everyone Keeps Me” addresses the dead, celebrating the beauty of a sisterly bond, while examining the hidden fractures beneath a seemingly perfect life. Taryn Hubbard’s meditative “Night Shift” looks at the invisibility of female labour, depicting the day-in-the-life of an ageing woman, who has come out of retirement to care for her struggling daughter and grandchild. Finally, acclaimed author Zsuzsi Gartner’s “The Burn” addresses the slow but increasingly visible violence of climate change, transporting us to the burning forests of Australia to the underground caves of the Montreal metro, in a search for answers and antidotes to a world on fire.

It is with great pleasure that we present these five distinct and wildly talented Canadian voices!

-Kasia van Schaik, Fiction Editor, and guest editor Caitlin Stall-Paquet

Caitlin Stall-Paquet is a Montreal-based writer, editor and translator whose work has appeared in Elle Canada, Xtra, Air Canada enRoute, Atlas Obscura, Hazlitt, Maisonneuve, Vice and Matrix.