Confessions From a Dreamer
The Letter From The Editor as it appears in the March 2026 issue.
I have been dreaming about a storefront.
A pretty, public-facing space where Blank Spaces could live in three dimensions—shelves of back issues, a reading nook, a table long enough to seat a writers’ group. Somewhere people could wander in off the street and find us. A place with a sign above the door.
I’ve spent more time inside this daydream than I’d like to admit. I’ve imagined the paint colour. The chairs. I’ve filled online IKEA carts with Billy bookcases.
When it became too urgent to hold, I forced myself to do some deep thinking, asking an honest question: Is this actually what I want? Or is it just the most familiar shape a dream can take?
Because when I get quiet and tell the truth, what I’m really longing for isn’t a storefront. It’s proof. Proof that what we’ve been building here for nearly ten years has weight and dimension and a place in the world. Proof that this thing I started at a coffee shop table with a crazy idea and too much hope wasn’t foolish. Proof that Canadian writers and artists deserve to be found—not just online, not just in the inboxes of people who already know to look—but in real rooms, by real people, in the places where real life actually happens.
And when I looked up from that daydream, I found the proof was already there. I had just been looking for it in the wrong shape.
Blank Spaces lives at the library, where writers who might never have walked through a literary magazine’s door show up anyway, because the library already belongs to them. It lives at the coffee shop, where a writers’ group gathers every week and someone comes away with a story idea they didn’t expect. It lives in our contest shortlist, in our back issues, in the quiet moment when a contributor opens their email and reads that we want their work—that we chose them.
We are not a storefront. We are an ecosystem. And when that word came to me, I cried.
I cried because I had been measuring us against something we were never meant to be, and the relief of setting that down was physical.
This issue, with Al Gord’s ferocious, uncontainable art, feels like the right place to say that out loud. Al makes work that refuses to be quiet. His canvases are restless and free—industrial and electric and entirely unwilling to sit inside a neat frame. There is something in his rebellion that I recognize. Blank Spaces has never fit the traditional literary magazine mould either. We never had the right credentials. We just had the conviction.
And that conviction is starting to stir something new in me. I’m not ready to say too much yet—I’m still letting the idea take shape—but I will tell you this: I think it’s time for Blank Spaces to move. Not to stay in one room and hope people find us, but to go to them. To show up in communities across this country, in rooms that already belong to the people we want to reach.
Canada is vast and so are its stories. I want to find them where they live.
More on that soon. For now, pour something warm and settle in. This issue is worth the time.
With love and a little bit of fire,
Alanna Rusnak, Blank Spaces Editor in Chief
