Welcome to Issue 09 of Funicular Magazine. This marks the final issue in our collaboration with the immensely talented Wenting Li from Toronto. We love collaborating with visual artists for our covers. We wish we could do more than one cover per issue. Wouldn’t that be fun? It would surely kill us. Let’s stay alive a little longer, shall we?

This is our winter issue and it definitely feels like one. Sure there’s the content which might feel a little chilly and dark at times but we put together this issue in the very depths of some winter darkness ourselves, here at Funicular Headquarters. It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie but the Omicron variant has been wreaking havoc over the past few months. It has not been fun. We put our heads down and we got this issue ready for you all in time. It really is a beautiful issue. Some of our favourite work so far is contained in this issue. Maybe some of your favourite work too! I read a tweet this week that said Harvard had a bigger acceptance rate than most literary magazines. It’s like 5% for Harvard. That’s good to know that we are a more exclusive club than Harvard. More diverse too, but we won’t get into that now. We warmly welcome you into our secret society.

I decided this year that I’m going to buy a big map of the world and put it up in my office. Then I’m going to buy multicoloured push pins and put a pin in every place where one of our Funicular writers lives. Then one day very soon we’re going to visit all those places. We’re going to need a list of all your favourite brunch spots in town. Until that day comes when we can all brunch together again safely, we humbly submit to you Funicular Issue 09.

Knock yourself out.