The sun is out, the air is warmer, and in Montreal that can only mean one thing: Fringe season is nearly upon us. Here at Forget The Box(.ca), the anticipation has hit a fever pitch as we assemble our review team and prepare for the creative surge of the festival.

Six years ago, local literary magazine yolk broke out of its shell and splattered all over Montreal’s literary scene by way of an event called Egg the Poet. The Instagram post promoting this event is captioned as follows: “Come join us January 17th to celebrate the launch of Yolk, a new Montreal-based literary journal dedicated to the word. This is a chance to share what is ours and soon to become yours.”

Anne of Green Gables becoming a multiverse-crossing serial killer wielding a Japanese sword is just the beginning of Kirsten Shute’s Fanfiction Is for Teenage Girls (Cactus Press, 2025). Her chapbook is full of clever, hilarious wordplay and even dips into the history of ancient, reconstructed languages.

In a city that often tries to polish burlesque into a sanitized, corporate-friendly product for the tourist agenda, Mina Minou is throwing a massive wrench into the machine. As a multidisciplinary artist with over a decade of skin in the game, she’s the architect of The Fool’s Journey, a sprawling, five-show competition series that ditches the “prettiness" of traditional pageantry for a chaotic blend of radical absurdity and experimental play.

If you step inside Turbo Haus on a Wednesday night, there’s three things that you’re guaranteed to find: good music, good people, and a good time. Once you make your way past the bar and near to the stage, you’ll be able to enjoy some of the best musical talent that Montreal has to offer with a crowd that always brings the right energy.

Dr. Lemco's Creative Club events kept coming up in my feed. Invitations to paint, pictures, folks having fun, friends posting, proud of (or laughing at) their resulting pieces. And it wasn't just random people; it was the comedians I hold in high regard, people I can speak to frankly, people I trust when they say I think you’d like this.

Thankfully, Forget The Box doesn’t follow suit. No, here at Forget The Box, you’ll get the nitty-gritty of arts journalism laid out for all to see. Instead of Santa, we’ve got Creative Director Andrew Jamieson, and playing the trope of Mrs. Claus is our very own Dawn McSweeney, Editor-at-Large.

It’s an undisputed fact that the Harlem Renaissance had a profound impact on the world. This movement gave us great music, literature and painters. It also gave us playwrights like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. However, these were American playwrights.

Combining his love for making people discover movies and his desire to establish a recurring project where a community could be built, Jeremie launched QCCMTL in May 2024, giving Montreal queers and film lovers the chance to experience a piece of queer film history in theatres once a month.

Before I even stepped into Barfly, I was greeted by the crowd spilling out into the streets of St. Laurent. I walk past the vivid, brightly painted fly mural on a weekly basis, and I have to say I was more than a little thrilled to finally peek behind the curtain and enter the iconic bar.