Introduction to the River of Time Issue

“Dip a finger into the River of Time, —

it comes back

STAINED” 

When faced with the chance to edit an issue of GLYPHÖRIA, I felt I needed to theme it around this line from Frank Bidart’s “For Mary Ann Youngren.” In the last few years, it has become a bit of a refrain for me, and an important part of my philosophy. To remember is to be changed by memory. To reach into the past is to be marked by it. In this way, all artists make marks on our collective psyche. This layered fresco of marks is perhaps where the spirit lives. 

While bringing together the works that became 'River of Time,' I’ve been thinking about a news story I saw on TV as a kid: an ancient fish had been caught in the waterway that ran through the city, and was determined to be of a previously extinct species. It was a living fossil, a lazarus creature. The fisherman held it up for the camera, it looked like a rock covered with barnacles and frills. I tried to find that news story, or any record of prehistoric fish found in the Trent Canal, but there was no trace. Either history has swallowed every mention, or time has folded my memory of this story into a new shape for me, aggrandized and specified it, fermented it in a broth of my experiences. At night I still dream of coelacanths leaping over the lift lock, crashing through the frozen waters. When I’m restless, I go out to throw pebbles off the bridge into the South Saskatchewan River and I think about all the stories hidden in the dark water.    

In this issue you will find eleven works of creation for you to add to your own broth, to misremember, and to wear the mark of. Our contributors have tackled questions of grief, habit, catastrophe, childhood, growth, suspension, pause, and brevity. Each one approached the banks of the River of Time, and fished out something different. What a pleasure to draw back in the net and find it full of such a variety of beautiful flotsam. I hope you, dear reader, will enjoy perusing these succulent fruits of the fourth dimension.

—Alasdair Rees, Curator

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Alasdair Rees lives on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon. From 2019 to 2020, he served as Saskatchewan's first Youth Poet Laureate. His writing has been longlisted for the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize and the Grouse Grind Lit Prize. Recent publications include Estuaire and The Brooklyn Review. He has served as editor for Grain, Metatron Press, and FR: Arts et culture, a first-of-its-kind publication on French-Canadian artists outside of Quebec. 2021 saw the release of a collection of poems titled Mon écologie, which went on to win the Prix du Livre Français at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. Alasdair’s installation, Duet, was on show as part of Picasso: Becoming the Faun at Remai Modern for 5 months in 2023.