quist
[/ kwi:st /] noun
a wood pigeon
West Midlands and Southwest England dialect
of obscure origin
Quist is a changeable thing.
Sometimes it’s quiet and wistful, having lost a syllable or two in some wooded glen when it was just a quistling, a biographical fact that makes it feel sad and a little special, too.
At other times, Quist is a scorching blaze in the sky—the quintessence of flight, on a quest to recover what it lost or never had. Touch Quist at your own peril; if you try to hold it back, it will burn your hand like the molten tail of a falling star.
When people come over unannounced, Quist may become querulous and pick a fight, or else conceal itself among the branches of an oak or inside a thicket of buckthorn and wait for them to leave. Depends on the visitors, really.
Quist is quizzical, peering out from its nest and taking in all the disorder, confusion, and noise—Noise, NOISE. Sometimes it puts its wing over its head and weeps; other times, it quakes and caterwauls along with the shrieking universe for the sheer pleasure of being alive.
Quist is quirky. Not everybody gets it and that’s okay—except for when being an outsider feels like a thirst that will never be quenched.
Quist has questions and demands answers (even though it suspects it will have to figure things out for itself).
Masthead
Jennifer DeLeskie
Editor-in-Chief, Prose Editor
Jen DeLeskie (she/her) is a writer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), on the traditional and unceded land of the Kanienʼkehá:ka people. Her work is eclectic, spanning literary realism, horror, science fiction, fantasy, and personal essays. Jen believes that art can illuminate pathways out of darkness by helping us imagine new and better futures. As prose editor, she seeks stories and essays that brim with honesty and urgency.
(Photo credit: Pantea Pezeshkan)
Erin Samant
Managing Editor
Erin Samant (she/her) is a graduate student at the Université de Montréal and works as Managing Editor at flo. Literary Magazine (along with Quist). In her spare time, you can find Erin reading memoirs, sipping iced lattes and tending to her countless houseplants.
Jessica Bebenek
Poetry Editor
Jessica Bebenek (she/her) is a queer interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator who splits her time between Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) and an off-grid shack in the woods on unceded Anishinaabe land. Since 2015, she has been facilitating events, workshops, and classes at the intersections of poetry, risograph printing, collage, zine-making, and magic. Her seventh chapbook, You Don’t Get Out Much, on living with chronic pain, was released in Summer 2024 and her first full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There, will be published by Book*hug Press in 2025.
As an editor, she is looking for poems which express something true about the unique life of their author with raw honesty, as well as poems which explore and expand the idea of what a poem can be. She loves to be surprised by a poem—give her the goosebumps.
Ev Ricky
Arts Editor
Ev (they/them/theirs, xe/xyr/xyrs) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, jack-of-all-trades cultural worker, and white settler based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). Xe is passionate about harm reduction, cultural sovereignty, and access ecologies, especially at their intersections with youth work. Their
writing and artwork busies itself with graphic medicine and pathographics, speculative text-image relations, care, immunity, and access intimacies (a term coined by Mia Mingus). Xe owes a lot to the trans, queer and disability communities they belong to, and xyr work is often speaking with them.
John Wickham
Web Designer
John Wickham (he/him) is a communications professional with a background in arts management, education, and content strategy. He is the communications officer of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, where he has worked since 2022. Prior to his work in the arts, he worked as an editor and writer in marketing and as a college lecturer in English and history. He lives in Montreal with his partner and two cats.
Quist is based in Tiohtiá:ke, which is what Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk)—and now many others—call Montreal. This place has been and continues to be a historical gathering place for many Indigenous peoples. We’re grateful to be part of a long and proud history of creating and sharing stories on these lands.
For a map of the traditional lands of the Indigenous peoples of Quebec, Canada, and beyond, visit Native Land Digital.