Hung with glowing neon spider webs and pink lighting bolts, Coup D’État sits patiently on the corner of Clark and Marie-Anne, waiting for clients and walk-ins.

There’s free popcorn on a table to the right, and interviews for Letterbox are being held in the hallway. Giggling students crouch over the microphone and compare notes on recent favorite films while others hunch over a table to admire stickers for the second-ever Twelve Vacancies Film Festival.

Forget The Box, as it currently exists, is a testament to the necessity of change. When I resurrected this publication in 2023, it wasn't a mere dusting off of archives, but a full-fledged reinvention.

If you’ve been in Montreal for a while, you probably noticed that the neighborhood of Verdun has undergone quite the transformation over the past couple of years.

Street lamps gleamed against turning trees; juicy oranges, crisp reds, and mellow yellows, on the cusp of tumbling from their branches in the late October chill. I headed to Mcsway Poetry Collective’s Halloween open mic, hosted at the ever-so-cozy community hub, The Yellow Door.

In the heart of Montreal’s vibrant art scene, there’s a place that has quietly yet powerfully shaped the city’s culture and given local artists a home.

Metatron Press is an award-winning literary publisher based in Montréal, Quebec. Founded and managed by Ashley Obscura, this remarkable publishing house is “devoted to publishing new perspectives in literature that reflect the experiences and sensibilities of our time.”

Up a short flight of stairs, above Boulevard Saint Laurent, is one of the city’s top venues. From the outside, the only signage is plain black, but inside hides a true cabaret theatre.

With the summer now in full swing, it may feel as though perhaps the winds of change are finally sweeping through the arts in Montreal.

Back home in southwestern Ontario, it’s a twenty-minute drive to the nearest second-hand bookstore, a place which, for the longest time, I did not know the name of. It’s a long, single-story building with book-patterned posters lining the windows and pictures of the children whom the non-profit benefits placed in the entryway.