Toronto Journal

FICTION. Before they kill him, he wants some chicken. The entire conversation, thirty-minutes of hell with her mother, boils down to this. Narrated by Brigid Cami.

STORIES FROM THE CITY. Extolling the suburbs of Toronto as places where you could truly breathe free, Paulino Santana, newly-minted homeowner, successfully solicited a number of Portuguese compatriots to fill his house in East York. Narrated by the author.

TORONTO FEATURE. “None of my race have, perhaps, seen the different phases of one man’s history as I have.” Thus wrote George Copway, near the beginning of his 1847 memoir. Narrated by the author.

Welcome to the fifth issue of Toronto Journal . . . and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re following the Harry Potter growth model. Narrated by Brigid Cami.

The clues are scattered throughout Parkdale.

On Saturday, August 28, 2020, I wake up and wonder how I’m going to spend the next two days.

I only decided to go at the last minute.

The ammonia reek of Francis's breath filled the examination room.

Every night, before I fell asleep, my mother would sing it to me: the song of Dahut, the princess of Ys, the Mari-Morgen.

“What's the verdict doc, is this the end of the line?”

If – a word that floats effortlessly from the lips and fades along with its forgotten promises and takes with it a myriad of possibilities and a wealth of potentially better memories.

Lisa Winter could only see the back of Luc’s head as the repurposed school bus descended the steep valley toward Ahuachapan.

The first time someone’s shoes showed up in the toilet, people in class thought it was an accident, or at the least a one-off.

The seventh day of the July heat wave, a Friday, I drove Maggie and Patrick out to Nassau County to spend a month with their father, the narcissistic sociopath, or the sociopathic narcissist (at least according to me, the armchair psychologist).

Dear Reader, welcome to the fourth issue of Toronto Journal.

Stripping to my underwear while standing at the foot of a hospital bed belonging to an elderly woman is both embarrassing and nerve wracking – worse than trying on clothes in the store aisle when the change rooms are full.

The god box sat on the counter in Burkhardt’s mother’s kitchen, where everything was dark faux-marble lined with white streaks like fat in a steak.

In 1951, Max Bieler bought a failed restaurant in downtown Binghamton and turned it into an Army-Navy store.

Jenny said something the other day at Elena’s soccer game that I’ve been thinking about a lot.

What made me think that going to Montreal in the middle of February would somehow shake me out of my seasonal depression?

Every family has a rich aunt. Mine was Aunt Sally.

It's hard to believe that a nondescript high-rise on Bloor Street between Huron and St. George was once the city’s most contentious piece of real estate.

Welcome to the third issue of Toronto Journal .

Welcome to the second issue of Toronto Journal. If you have already come across our journal, you will find the format of this issue similar to the first.

If you were asked to name the most famous Canadian authors, who would come to mind? Margaret Attwood, surely. Alice Munro, Leonard Cohen. Mordecai Richler, L. M. Montgomery, Robertson Davies, . . . and probably a handful of others if you were given a moment to think about it. And yet, even if you were given a good hour to concentrate – to name every author you could – I suspect that there would be...