Our Mission

Canned is a literary magazine that seeks comfort in the off-kilter.

We relish absurdism, the weird, and the odd. Bring us your jaw-breaking juxtapositions, the snickers summoned up from your lowest lows and your highest highs. We mean to investigate the world, our time, and ourselves through a warped lens. We want the sharp, the clever, the slash-and-burned recognition. We want to meet your silliest personas and your most vulnerable realizations. Invite us to embrace the best things and the worst, with depth a-plenty.

Shake out the cobwebs. Make the bed. Pour jam on it.

We seek new voices and old, emerging and established. We seek the words of all cultural identities, orientations, and perspectives. Above all, we want writing that calls to the present and the future, the kind that endures past its shelf-life, and that we can preserve and return to, savoring it on a slice of toast come winter.

Canned was founded in 2020 with support from the Vermont Arts Council & the National Endowment for the Arts.

Can Opener

Makes 2 servings

Ingredients:
3 oz. bourbon
1 oz. orange liqueur
1 tbsp. maple syrup (to taste)
Juice of 1 lemon
Dash of vanilla extract

Garnish:
Lemon wedges
Bourbon-preserved cherries (store bought, homemade, or, if not available, soak pitted fresh sweet cherries in a mixture of orange liqueur and vanilla extract for 1 hour before mixing drink)

Combine ingredients in a 24 oz canning jar. Top with enough crushed ice to fill jar 2/3 full, then use a cocktail spoon to mix liquid and stir in garnishes. Top with soda water, then serve. 

For a nearly non-alcoholic version, replace the bourbon and orange liqueur with six dashes Angostura bitters (vanilla extract and angostura bitters both contain alcohol). For a strictly non-alcoholic version, omit the bourbon, orange liqueur, and vanilla, and include six dashes of a spicy alcohol-free bitters.