Maya Khankhoje is a Montreal reader/writer whose living space has been taken over by bookshelves.

Cartoon: "The Proposal" © by Susan Dubrofsky & Anna Fuerstenberg

The Winter solstice is the season for radical transformation, for plunging into the depths of darkness to emerge triumphant into the light, for believing that regardless of the frozen landscape, come Spring the rose will bloom, for meditating through the gloomy final days of the Aztec calendar to emerge clean of mind and sharp of eye. Once the festivities have died of bulimic shock, it is a time for curling up with a book in front of the fire and having a jolly good read. Which is why Montreal Serai dedicates this issue to those who believe in swapping stories around the campfire, in denouncing the heinous acts which in Ian McEwan’s words “secrecy made ….possible”, in telling “a story that must be told” which “never forgives silence” as articulated by Okey Ndibe. It is also a time for poetry, which in Taoist understanding, is not the bland boiled rice of prose, but rather the heady wine distilled from fermented grain.

Montreal Serai’s mandate is to take radical ideas from the margins to the centre, to provide a forum for “La Republique mondiale des letters” now understood as a global system of literature, to undo myths, to break taboos, to do what Salman Rushdie does best: "to go for broke, to dispense with safety nets, to aim for the stars, to be bloody minded, to argue with the world". Its mandate is also a response to George Orwell’s exhortations to engage “with the political realities of time…both a challenge and dilemma for writers”. Why fiction? Because fiction achieves an apparent paradox: the unveiling of a lie by the telling of another lie. Why poetry? Because poets are seers and as such are close to the essence of things.

Gao Xingian, Nobel Laureate of 2000, believes that writers are ordinary persons who are perhaps more sensitive than the rest and rightly intuits that the starting point of literature is “talking to oneself”.

In this issue Montreal Serai offers you the solitary musings of several ordinary persons from different corners of the world who, in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words, are the “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” fighting for social justice and most importantly, for true humanity, because the expression of our culture is what makes us human and gives meaning and resonance to our lives.

The powers that be might burn our books, but our stories shall continue to be told.