Read Managing Editor Ethan Vilu's review of Louise Carson's 2023 mystery novel "The Cat Looked Back". Have a book you'd like us to review? Please reach out at meditor.fs@gmail.com! A solitary woman takes stock of her life while baking eccles cakes. An antiques dealer pursues a strained, halting romance. A vulnerable man feels conspiratorial forces pressing in from all sides. The wide river runs. Cats scurry about in the night. A fire burns. The Cat Looked Back, the sixth entry in Louise Carson’s Maples Mystery series, is a story told primarily through texture and atmosphere. Rather than any g ..read more

Read author Marc Herman Lynch's full conversation with Tasnuva Hayden about volunteering with filling Station Magazine, completing a creative writing thesis, and the horror of Japanese ghost stories. Find a copy of Marc's debut novel, Arborescent (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020) at your local bookstore or online at Arsenal Pulp Press. Please note, this conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Tasnuva Hayden: We are meeting today to chat about your volunteer work with filling Station, your involvement with literary academia, and your first book, Arborescent. Can you please start by intro ..read more

A review of “Genuary 2023 Day 28 - Generative Poetry” by Carson Kompon https://carsonk.net/works/art/piece?type=OBJKT&id=809399 Since 2021, computer programmers, artists, and writers have participated in ‘Genuary’, a month-long celebration of computer-generated art during which participants complete daily coding exercises based on 31 different prompts. This year, in response to a prompt asking after generative poetry issued on January 28th, Canadian indie game developer Carson Kompon produced “Genuary 2023 Day 28 - Generative Poetry”—116 lines of Lua script for the PICO-8 fantasy console ..read more

As part of filling Station's new monthly review series, Margaryta Golovchenko reviews Natalie Wee's Beast at Every Threshold (Arsenal Pulp, 2022). Find the book at your local bookstore or online at Arsenal Plup. Read the full review below. It is hard not to look at the cover of Natalie Wee’s highly anticipated sophomore collection, Beast at Every Threshold, and not wonder who the beast in question is. A closer look makes this question seem, at first glance, redundant — one can clearly make out a fox-like creature in what appears to be a state of disassembly, reshaped by the hands to which its ..read more

As part of filling Station's brand new monthly interview series, we asked Issue 76 contributor Moni Brar about her writing, winning the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award, and her advice to emerging writers. Read the full interview below. How does it feel to win the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award? Surreal! I’m genuinely quite shocked to have received this award. I feel incredibly honoured to in the company of other writers I’ve long admired (like the filling Station’s very own Managing Editor, Amy LeBlanc!). I also feel quite proud as a Punjabi-Sikh wri ..read more

This review by Calum Robertson was originally published in Issue 77 of filling Station Magazine. Read the full review below ..read more

On Winnifred Eaton & the re-issue of her novel Cattle Chinese Canadian novelist Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) lived and wrote across North America for decades before settling in Alberta. She was the first person of Asian descent to publish a novel in the US. She distanced herself from the problematic Japanese pseudonym “Onoto Watanna” (under which she had published nine bestselling novels about Japan), by publishing two novels about ranching in southern Alberta, Cattle (1923) and His Royal Nibs (1925). Except for a brief period in the late twenties, when she ran Universal Studio’s screenwri ..read more

On dread, gothic horror, and Shirley Jackson Amy LeBlanc’s Homebodies is now available from Enfield and Wizenty (an imprint of Great Plains Publications) on bookstore shelves and online. LeBlanc’s other published works include: I know something you don’t know from Gordon Hill Press and Unlocking from University of Calgary Press. It is an appropriately quiet and overcast day when I sit down with Amy LeBlanc to discuss her newest publication, Homebodies, a uniquely sharp collection of short stories that promises to provoke "dread, abjection, and horror." I had spent most of the night before pre ..read more

Safety Razor is a collection heavily steeped in this idea of inheritance and reception. As part of our review series, Margaryta Golovchenkol reviews Safety Razor by Emily Osborne (Gordon Hill Press, 2023). Find a copy at your local bookstore, or online at Gordon Hill Press. In the poem “Heirlooms,” which appears towards the end of Emily Osborne’s debut collection Safety Razor, the speaker ruminates on a painting of an abandoned mansion by Jack Humphries and its role in her family history. The mansion is at once a family home that was lost due to the economic crash brought about by the Great D ..read more

In Fox’s view, literature is vital to the war on capitalism and patriarchy. As part of our review series, Jennifer McDougall reviews "This Has Always Been a War: The Radicalization of Working Class Queer" by Lori Fox (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Find a copy at your local bookstore, or online at Arsenal Pulp Press. The war in Lori Fox’s first book is one waged quietly in wine tasting shops, grocery produce departments, domestic gardens, construction sites, ski villages, dining establishments and during family dinners at farmhouse tables across the country. In this invisible war, the winning sid ..read more