When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.
We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.
Geist is the Canadian magazine of ideas and culture—every issue brings together a sumptuous mix of fact + fiction, photography and comix, poetry, essays and reviews, and more of the weird and wonderful from the world of words.
Geist distills the Canadian imagination into a tactile, stackable, admireable, finishable and entirely shareable magazine.
Notes & Dispatches from ADRIAN RAIN, HOLLIE ADAMS and KATHY PAGE; New fiction by PAUL DHILLON; Feature essay from EMILY LU; Comics by ONJANA YAWNGHWE and YOKO OJI KIKUCHI; Poetry by NOFEL; Winners of the 2023 PolterGeist Writing Contest, and much more!