Letter From The Editor
As our team wraps up on LooseLeaf’s last ever unthemed volume, I think about the ways in which this magazine has functioned as a small but valuable platform for our community.
To me, magazines represent both a kind of boldness, and intentional memory.
My favourite magazines as little witnesses of their time, nimble enough to reflect the ongoing conversations, slow enough to demand thought and care. A good little magazine is both reflexive and dynamic, pulsing with the energy of the community in conversation.
LooseLeaf is a publication that believes in the need to offer a platform to voices at all stages of development. The emerging voice has its place and also needs to be in community to grow and deepen in perspective. As much as possible, our editing process has always reflected this belief, and we have always asked our writers and artists to meet us and journey with us to polish each piece till it shines in its own special way.
I am grateful still to everyone who’s ever graced the pages of the magazine with their art, and the faith they put in our vision and our process. I am also aware that the editing and publishing process has changed me as much as it has offered opportunity to others.
Thank you to this community of dreamers, thinkers, critics, creatives for all your brilliance. Thank you for uplifting and supporting each other, and celebrating each other’s work.
May there always be little magazines for our important communal moments and histories.
Managing Editor
Jasmine Gui
Masthead for Volume 7
Managing Editors: Jasmine Gui, Abby Ho
Poetry: Natalie Wee, Isabelle Zhu, Elise Yoon
Fiction: Elliott Jun, Victoria Liao, Elizabeth Ching
Visual Art: Amanda Low, Philip Ocampo, Rose Ho
Photography: Lucy Lu
Layout: Anna Kwan
Cover Art by Cat Lamora
February
A potter lost his betrothed the night before the wedding and, drowning in sorrow, could not be moved to throw at the wheel any longer. Instead, he grieved at the grave of his lover until one day he saw a plum blossom sapling that had grown by the resting place. With a full heart, the potter decided to plant it in his home so that he may look after this sapling as he would have his lover. Decades passed and the tree saw many suns and moons in the care of the potter’s aging hands. In his old age, his heart grew heavy with worry with each day - once he passed, no one could look after the tree. A few more seasons came and went when the potter was not seen in the village for a while. Worried, the villagers entered his home in search of him. No one was to be seen but something sat under the falling flowers next to the potter’s beloved tree. It was a porcelain bowl painted with the image of a small warbler resting on the branches of a plum blossom tree.
Cat Lamora is a Korean-Canadian paper artist based in Toronto. Through the fragile and temporary medium of paper, her work strives to preserve the brief liminal space created at the crossroads of diaspora consciousness, memory, culture, and nostalgia, examining how each lived experience constructs the building blocks of identity. She is interested in exploring the qualities of ambiguity and disorientation, and the ephemeral events experienced and forgotten that fringes between everyday reality and surreality. In an attempt to embrace the fragile nature of the medium, every installation is assembled, presented, and disassembled differently, just as our memories are changed and re-embedded each time they are recalled.
The production of this magazine volume is made possible by the Ontario Arts Council.
