Nina Bunjevac is a Toronto based cartoonist and illustrator. Her art education began at the Djordje Krstic school of applied art in Nish, Yugoslavia, and continued on to Central Technical School Art Department and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Her work has been published in a variety of literary magazines and comics anthologies in Europe, US and Canada. Recent publications include: Mineshaft magazine (USA), Giuda, InguineMah (Italy), Le Dernier Cri (Marseille, France), Komikaze (Croatia) and Komiko (Serbia). [Read more...]

If it’s true that having children brings us into closer touch with the child in ourselves (not being a parent myself, I have to take that on faith), then it’s probably equally true that the best way to get back into touch with our adolescent selves is to go into a high school classroom. [Read more...]

carte blanche has been around for a few years now and every issue we receive more submissions. The challenge of selecting poems has become more difficult as the competition for publication gets tougher—in terms of both sheer numbers and quality. [Read more...]

The association of poetry with nationalism is ancient and, in the literary establishment, effectively universal. Poets in the distant past sang of their peoples, and poetry has traditionally taken the highest role in national self-expression: there’s a reason most peoples sing verse anthems instead of reading prose paragraphs when they’re celebrating national identity. [Read more...]

carte blanche contributing editor Len Epp launched an exciting new project today: the Montreal International Poetry Prize, a global poetry competition with a prize of $50,000! [Read more...]

What I still think of as comics has been going through a time of great change and growth. When I decided to dedicate most of my time to making them in high school, it was in part because I was being kicked out, and comics were something you didn’t need a degree in. In truth, there were no degrees to be had in comics. If you wanted to learn more about the medium, you studied art, writing, and film, and extrapolated from these different media. If you achieved a professional level of skill there was little worry about competition; I landed my first paying jobs at Marvel after just one serious attempt to get work in the early 1990s. [Read more...]

Updated March 20th!
It may be that suburbanism is one of the West’s greatest inventions. Not only have suburbs come to dominate the built environment of North America, they have also taken hold across the world, even in those regions that invented the city. As suburbanism has changed, so has its meaning, and we can follow some of these developments through the photographic record.
[Read more...]

“I guess I approach it in a few different ways. As a neurologist I am interested in the generation of narrative, that is, in the neurobiological mechanisms—the language areas plus the emotional part of the brain plus the frontal lobes—that together generate some sort of sequential order out of things. I find that just fascinating in terms of narratives and disordered narratives that we see in neurology. For example, you can have perfect language function and good recall but if your frontal lobes aren’t working, it is sometimes quite difficult to be able to relay history in an organized way. You see that in some patients with frontal temporal lobe dementia.” [Read more...]

Elaine senses that her mother is watching her and her cheeks burn with the heat of a mindful, almost reproaching gaze. She has been warned by her mother that it was impolite to stare at guests, and on most occasions—her mother’s quarterly hosting of the book club or when Frank and his friends passed a beerless and bored Saturday night squatting in their kitchen waiting for a better plan to crystallize—it is never an issue; but with Sarah she is physically unable to look elsewhere. [Read more...]

Want to receive news, sneak previews, calls for submissions, and more?
Join our mailing list!

[Read more...]