Welcome to the last month of the year. The month when, because of Holiday season, everybody’s studies start winding down, even if they don’t want them to.  Sure, a lot of us plan to use the holidays as that time to really bear down on our courses, thinking that the lulls in work schedule will mean we finally have that extra time to get to all the things we keep meaning to do.

And we all know how well that goes.

Between family obligations, natural disasters both of the small and large variety, and the constant pressure to either live up to the consumer-corporate ideal of the holiday or to take on an active resolute stand against the commercialization of the season, we can often find ourselves waking up with the hang-over from the New Year’s Party that each year seems a little less special than the last and suddenly realizing that all that holiday time we wanted to spend studying we’ve been spending doing other things.

So.  In the spirit of all that.  Here’s one of those other things you can spend time doing, and it would be a great help to me.  Take a wander through your memories of the Voice Magazine articles you read (or perhaps wrote) over the past year, and let me know any that stand out.  That’s right, once again I’m starting to do the collection of material for our Best of the Voice edition.

If you’re new to this idea, every year I dedicate the first issue of January to a collection of the best and most interesting articles the Voice Magazine was able to publish over the previous year.  This not only serves as a great introductory issue to what the Voice Magazine is all about, it also gives Voice writers a bit of break, knowing that they don’t have to create yet another article while all the Holiday activities are going on.

But even though I have some good ideas of the stuff I think is the best, I’m really more interested in the things that you, the readers, feel is the most representative of what you think the ideal Voice Magazine should be like.

So drop me an email at karl@voicemagazine.org and let me know your picks.  Maybe you’ve got enough to create a full issue, or maybe you just kind of remember that one article about the thing with the thing and if you can manage to give me enough of an idea of what you’re thinking about, I’ll see if I can find it for you.

Meanwhile, this week, we’ve got a pretty solid issue, with, oddly, two writers both approaching the topic of how to deal with the traumas and bad things in life.  Even more odd is that they both came to similar conclusions though taking sightly different paths.  So if you don’t believe in coincidence, then maybe this is a sign of something.

We’re also featuring an article about a diversity issue that’s often not considered, the diversity of age, and an article that looks at the history of lawfare, and how it’s being used in Canada today.

Plus, of course, we have music reviews, events, scholarships, research opportunities, thoughtful and inspirational articles, not to mention our regular columns.  So enjoy the read!