This special 20th anniversary anthology invites you to journey outside yourself: float in a capsized rowboat, downward-dog through a yoga studio adapting to covid-19, reflect on the legacy of residential schools, find purpose on the Camino de Santiago, and make peace with your raccoon neighbours. These are stories of ego, loss, birth, renewal—the salient issues of our time.

In emerge 20, stories in fiction, narrative non-fiction, speculative fiction, young adult fiction, poetry, and lyric prose isolate the everyday tales of human resilience and solidarity that will leave you wanting more from these emerging writers.

CONTENTS

Betsy Warland—Foreword

FICTION

Dora Joella Prieto—The Last Wisdom Tooth

Elliott Gish—Grey Dog

B. B. Randhawa—The Woman Who Thought She Was a Cow

Teminey Beckers—My Name Is Badger

Dora Larson—The Apartment

Prachi Kamble—World Class Education

Barbara Cameron—Unconsecrated Ground

Angela Kruger—Hotel Blue: Stories

Frederic Sahyouni—The Fragrant Harbour

Colleen Doty—All About Isaac

Libby Soper—The Anniversary Cake

eve nixen—Two stories

Sarah Phillips-Thin—Grasping at the Pineapple

Francesca Mauri —The Day of Her Disappearance

Anya Wyers—Romilegal: Downtown

Uttara Krishnadas—Infectious

Judy Dercksen—Not the Namib Desert

Magnus Lu—Ten Days of Undoing

Stephanie Peters—The Upset

DK Eve—Lunch Shift at the Castle Café

Tanya Belanger—The Last Stop

Višnja Milidragović—Happy Hour

Rebecca Chan—An Unnatural Widow

Hugh Griffith—The Snake Club

Sandra Sugimoto—Sisters

Christina Kruger-Woodrow—Lie Fallow

NON-FICTION

Katie Lewis—Nuts

William W. Campbell—Amusia and Ravel’s Boléro

Kim Spencer—Two pieces

Lori Greenfield—The Tuesday Ladies

Emily Chan—Living in Ms. Shauna Roberts’s Apartment

Justyna Krol—System Failure

Emma Brady—The Bedroom

Nancy Jin—Guifang

Deborah Folka—Dessert in the Desert

Shenul Dhalla—Hope for a Cure

Christine Pilgrim—Goodbye

Maryanna Gabriel—Get Thee to a Nunnery

Ola Szczecinska—Big Sur

Calvin McShane—Catching the Way Zendo

Margaret Miller—Two pieces

Anne Rosenberg—Two pieces

Kate Covello—Disruption and Innovation: Yoga Teacher Training After covid-19

Ankush Chopra—Stay the Course

SPECULATIVE AND YA FICTION

Jenn Marx—Electric Blue Tongue

Jess Wesley—The Curse of the Fairy Queen

Hannah Costelle—The Dressmaker of Drumchapel

Diane Dubas—Enough

Clare McNamee-Annett—We Are Doing Fine

Libby McKeever—What Came Before

Katherine Fawcett—Ursula Medium

Sky Regina—We Are Apricots

Tim J. O’Connor—Kath’s Party

Erin Pettit—Gilded City

Elizabeth Page—Price of Privilege

Daniel Ortiz Rubio—Purple Stain

Sofia Pezentte—The Blameless One

Stephanie Charette—To Hunt the Mountain

Léa Taranto—Kiss the Ground

Susan Taite—Glimmers

Jack Murphy—Hyper Neon Cowboy

Bailey Bjolin—Dome

Danica Longair—Hope Is a Necessary Delusion

Robert Weber—The End Is … Mundane?

POETRY

Alana Cheyne—Three poems

Ela Przybyło—Two poems

Anna Lee-Popham—Three poems

Brandon Houston—Can I Pray for You

Kuldeep Singh—Five poems

Pinki Li—To the Family of Raccoons Who Moved in Late Last Week

Sarah Jessie Tucker—Four poems

F. J. Erica Yang —The Frightfully Pale Yellow

Laura McGavin—Two poems

Clare Adam—Two poems

Amrit Kaur Sanghera—Moving Another Way

Marco Melfi—A Model From Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Reminisces

Michael Edwards—Two poems

Tharuna Abbu—Three poems