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Gary Barwin
Elegy for a Poodle

When I am dying, it would be comforting tobe told that I had been the human equivalent of a good dog. Loving,compassionate, faithful, understanding, dignified, but also goofy, curious,fun, protective, a friend. Let’s leave out obedience.

C. E. COUGHLAN
Dog Show Dancing

The next performer, Coco, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, stood on his back legs and hopped alongside a woman wearing white go-go boots who jiggled her hips in time to “ymca.” Coco weaved between her legs, rolled across her feet, lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air. The woman’s brow was furrowed and sweat ran down her face. Coco bounded in front of her, then backed through her legs and sneezed twice. The judges looked at each other and one of them wrote somethingdown.

Andrea G. Johnston
The Fallen Man

It’s dark when I get off the bus by the corner store. Not the best area of town. The only other person in sight is lying on the sidewalk.

S. Taylor
Wet Dragonflies

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

Craig Taylor
Karaoke at the Lantzville

This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

Bill MacDonald
An Ounce of Civet

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

Craig Taylor
Punch

It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.

Stephen Henighan
Separate Crossings

Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.

DAVID COLLIER
Happy Hearts

A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.

Daniel Francis
The Landscape Men

The Group of Seven “vision” is an inadequate way to describe an urban, multiracial, industrial society like Canada, and pretty much always was.

George Fetherling
City of Neighbourhoods

In Bangkok as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours.

Stephen Henighan
Before Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

Daniel Francis
At the Margins

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Stephen Osborne
Signs and Portents

Mr. C.F. Keiss, awealthy American visitor from Bucyrus, Ohio, met death with “tragic suddenness”under the wheels of the new City auto ambulance at the corner of Pender andGranville Streets yesterday afternoon.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Horror Show

When we hitchhiked back to Castle­gar it was dark and the lights on the car dashboards flickered and their glass reflected the faces of the men who’d picked us up and who, I imagined, knew everything there was to know about electricity.

Alberto Manguel
In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

Mary Vallis
Rec Room Afterlife

Not long ago on a sticky Saturday night at a comedy club in Madison, Wisconsin, the funeral director with whom I was having a drink told me how long it takes for the formaldehyde to replace the blood in a dead person’s arteries. He drank a light beer

Andrea G. Johnston
Parley

At the Tim Hortons on Young Street in Halifax, a man clears his throat, a rough-looking older guy in the back corner, staring out the window. One knee, angled out from the table, jigs up and down; the rest of him is quite still. A sheet of notepaper

George Fetherling
The Definite Article

The top-selling American novel of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The phrase “the Christ” reminds us that the second word originally meant something along the lines of “the person who has been anointed.” By the twentieth century, the article had been dropped, making “Christ” sound like the family name of Sometime Carpenter Jesus, offspring of Joe and Mary Christ, brother of Jim Christ who keeps cropping up in the New Testament. But a couple of generations after Jesus lost His definite article, His spokesmen on Earth were still “the Reverend” So-and-so or even “the Reverend Doctor” until the editors of Time and their kind followed Samson’s example and warning: metaphor ends in 25 metres—smote them with the jawbone of an ass.

Michał Kozłowski
Wild World

One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected ­butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.

Jane Silcott
Gangly Man

I don’t take public transit very often, which is a failing—not just environmentally, but also personally, because sometimes that forced contact with the rest of the populated world can be profound. In Japan, many years ago, I was trapped in the small space between train cars by a crowd of schoolboys; my claustrophobia reached such a level that one leg began to judder up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, and the only thing that prevented me from climbing out over the tops of my fellow passengers’ heads was the gaze of a man about a foot away who conveyed calm to me by keeping his eyes trained on mine.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Window Booth at Rapido

A group of university exchange students from France at the next table watch the entire interaction as if they were on a field trip for Lessons in North American Social Behaviour. They discuss the annoying aspects of the life they’re having here. Quebec is more American than they expected, they say. You can’t smoke in restaurants. The Québécois accent is drôle.

Gillian Wigmore
CBC Shows an Interest in the Pine Beetle Epidemic

The National calls from the cbc in Toronto. They want me to be their “eyes on the ground.” I try not to laugh—I’m a part-time poet who lives in the suburbs. The woman on the phone asks what it’s like to live in a city in a forest. Does she mean here? In Toronto, she explains, that’s how they described it to her. She must be picturing deep woods with houses and corner stores tucked in among the paths, and roads more like wagon trails. When I drive past Winners and Costco I don’t think “forest.” No, I tell her, Prince George is a lot like the outskirts of Guelph. She falls silent and I amend it: Prince George is like Edmonton but planned by drunken loggers. She seems to like that better, so I carry on: it’s like living in a logging camp but with easier access to big box stores. What about the trees, she asks. Oh, they’re fine, I say, just shorter and mostly gone.

Stephen Osborne
Julia’s World

I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

CB Campbell
Joe and Me

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

Mazzy Sleep
Heart Medicine

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

Jennilee Austria
Scavengers

That’s one for the rice bag!

David M. Wallace
Red Flags

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

Jeremy Colangelo
i is another

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Patty Osborne
Closer to Memory Than Imagination

Patty Osborne reviews Air Carnation, a story by Guadalupe Muro that combines the author's personal memoirs with poetry, songwriting and fiction.

Jennesia Pedri
Crossings

Jennesia Pedri reviews Crossings by Betty Lambert.

Stephen Osborne
Praise Song for the Day

"Plain, non-pretentious, utterly mundane: It’snot clear what else an inaugural poem can be." Stephen Osborne reviews Elizabeth Alexander’s poem for Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Michael Hayward
From A to X

Michael Hayward reviews John Berger’s From A to X, a tale of anger, displacement and resistance.

Leah Rae
The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland

Leah Rae reviews The Echoing Years: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Canada and Ireland: "Finally, a comprehensive collection of fair-to-middlin’ verse for the multilingual."

Michael Hayward
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III

Michael Hayward reviews The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III, a collection of discussions with the leading dramatists, poets and novelists of the past fifty years.

Michael Hayward
Wildwood

Roger Deakin's Wildwood is a heady romp through the world’s forests and their entangled histories. Reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Michael Hayward
Pie Tree Press: Memories from the Composing Room Floor

Michael Hayward reviews the autobiography of Jim Rimmer, a “high priest” of type design and private-press printing.

Stephen Osborne
An American Story: The Speeches of Barack Obama

Stephen Osborne reviews a collection of Barack Obama's speeches that was surprisingly popular overseas.

Kris Rothstein
Anna’s Shadow

Kris Rothstein reviews Anna's Shadow by David Manicom, "much more than just another post-Cold War thriller."

Stephen Osborne
Kahn & Engelmann

Stephen Osborne reviews Kahn & Engelmann, a German novel by Hans Eichner hailed as a masterpiece in Europe.

Michael Hayward
The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You: A Guide to Self-Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs

Even the healthiest reader can uncover the fatal illness within thanks to The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You: A Guide to Self-Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Leah Rae
The Chicken, the Fish and the King Crab

This edge-of-your-seat film follows a Spanish chef on his quest to win the prestigious cooking competition, the Bocuse D’Or. Review by Leah Rae.

Michael Hayward
The Discovery of France

Michael Hayward reviews Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, a scholarly but entertaining history of France’s emergence in the modern era.

Michał Kozłowski
The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

“Adopt a reading pseudonym” is but one piece of advice offered in The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu, reviewed by Michal Kozlowski.

Carrie Villeneuve
When You Leave Town

Carrie Villeneuve reviews a new album from an East Vancouver band that appeals to music fans of all ages.

Thad McIlroy
Slumdog Millionaire

Thad McIlroy reviews Slumdog Millionaire, a 2009 film by Danny Boyle.

Michael Hayward
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm

A peek inside Roger Deakin’s living, breathing farmhouse in the waning years of his life in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Lily Gontard
Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell uses statistical analyses to prove that location and timing are everything in Outliers: The Story of Success, reviewed by Lily Gontard.

Thad McIlroy
Failed Experiments in the Future of Publishing

Thad McIlroy reviews The Reaper by Steven Dunne.

Eve Corbel
Ebb and Flow

Eve Corbel reviews The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble, a novel that takes place on land but is all about the sea.

Michael Hayward
Edward Lear in Albania

Michael Hayward reviews Edward Lear in Albania, an account of the author's travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848.

Michael Hayward
Saudade

Michael Hayward reviews Anik See’s Saudade, a collection of essays to plunge you deep into the meanings of travel and place.

Thad McIlroy
The Celebrated Crad

Thad McIlroy reads Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories by Lorette Luzajic, the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Randy Fred
Blind Man Dance

Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.

Michael Hayward
Japanese Beatniks and Revised Boy Scouts

Michael Hayward on a selection of work from the writing collective known as "the Beats"

Thad McIlroy
The Smile Test

Thad McIlroy on Jan Morris's "Smile Test" throughout Canadian cities.

Patty Osborne
Queerspawn

Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."

Michał Kozłowski
After the Money

Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

Stephen Osborne
White Wampum

Stephen Osborne on Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America.

Patty Osborne
With An Albanian Twist

Patty Osborne on Slow Twisting by Anonymous.

Anson Ching
Transpacific Trade, circa 1800

Anson Ching on Anna, Like Thunder.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
News in a Nutshell

Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.

Michael Hayward
Cast Out of Eden

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming of Age in Winteridge

Kelsea O'Connor on Our Animal Hearts by Dania Tomlinson.

roni-simunovic
Express Recycling Depot

Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.

Michael Hayward
Brion Gysin: Honorary Canadian

Michael Hayward on a collection of conversations with Brion Gysin—writer and counterculture legend.

Hàn Fúsēn
Till Talk

Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.

JILL MANDRAKE
peanut brittle

Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.

Jocelyn Kuang
49 Days to the Afterlife

Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.

Jeff Shucard
King Zog and the Secret Heart of Albania

The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need

Patty Osborne
Perfectly Adequate Expectations

Patty Osborne on the mixed review of Crazy Rich Asians.

Alberto Manguel
Libraries without Borders

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
What They Say

Mary Schendlinger on Natalia Ginzburg's narrative of her family during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

Michael Hayward
Karl Ove Knausgaard: A tale of the tape

The final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle allows us to compare Karl Ove’s literary edifice with others of similar ilk—and bulk.

David Look
Sleeping Class

Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Chicken at Large

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

Matt Snell
Laying on Hands

In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation