We have men on the slope and men on the ridge. In the gully, more men. Men on the main road wait for the men on the esker to move up onto the ridge so that they (the men on the road) can take their (the esker-men’s) place. Men hesitate and grumble. T
JANNIE EDWARDS
Members
Honourable mention in the 8th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.
Katie Addleman
Middle of Nowhere
“Thank god for you,” Polly said one day after work, as she and Ruth sat under the fluorescent lights of the town’s only bar. “You’re the only normal one here.”
BILLEH NICKERSON
McPoems
Poems of memorable customers: the one who ordered a hundred cheeseburgers, the one who bought three meals a day at the drive-thru, the drunk one in a clown suit, and more.
MICHAEL CRUMMEY
Making The Fish
Two motions with the knife, across the throat below the gills and along the bare length of the belly, like a Catholic crossing himself before a meal.
ANAKANA SCHOFIELD
Malarky
"Naked men. At each other all the time, all day long. I can’t get it out of my head."
Steven Heighton
Lost Diary
At first the sound was like a raw stropping of steel on steel although we had little such heavy stuff along...
Let’s Go Dancing
A poem from Randall Magg’s book about Terry Sawchuk, the legendary hockey goalie who got his start with the Detroit Red Wings.
RUSSELL F. HIRSCH
Lemke Overboard
A sleepwalking old man brings a community together in the waves of the sea.
CARY FAGAN
Laughing Heir
"He listened to the message three times, then sent a text to Ciara begging off dinner without giving a reason."
Krazy & Ignatz 1937
BILL BISSETT
Kontest Carnage
langwage binds us 2gethr separatelee n parts n sharing almost replikating nevr reelee xact wun uv th biggest communal spells we ar all bound n unbound in
Tom Walmsley
Kid Stuff
Moth fought his last fight in the basement of a church forty miles out of town. The crowd was polite and applauded after every round, but made hardly a sound while the punches were being thrown. None of the overhead lights were extinguished and there
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Five Stories, Nine Selves
That’s what matters to me, these stories, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you.
Steven Heighton
Fireman's Carry
In this excerpt from Steven Heighton's new book, The Dead Are More Visible, a firefighter must decide what lives are worth saving in the heat of a four-alarm fire. The official line is that firefighters save people—but what about reptiles?
VIVEK SHRAYA
First Pluck
A young boy gets his first pair of tweezers after overhearing locker room conversations about body hair in this excerpt from God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya.
SUE GOYETTE
Fidelity
Three poems by Sue Goyette, excerpted from her book Penelope.
Jill Boettger
Poem For the Barn
Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens
Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc.
Veronica Gaylie
Old Timer Talkin’
Uncle Tom lies in St. Paul’s Emergency pacemaker jumping like a sockeye salmon while he teaches two nurses four verses of Danny Boy.
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.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
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.
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."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
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
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
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
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
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
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.
Thad McIlroy on "The Weekend Man" by Richard B. Wright.
Jasmine Sealy
Small Victories
Jasmine Sealy on "You Can't Stay Here" by Jasmina Odor.
Erin Soros
Carbon
"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."
Jocelyn Kuang
27,000 Cups of Tea
Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.
Stephen Osborne
Espresso Nerd Heaven
"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."
Rose Burkoff
Sun in Winter: A Toronto Wartime Journal 1942-1945
During World War II, Gunda Lambton and her two young children left England to live in Canada.
Patty Osborne
Barnacle Love
A review of Barnacle Love, a collection of short stories by Anthony De Sa.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Buried Treasure
Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Mandelbrot
Ordinary Bodies
Together the images in Bathers constitute a supreme study of ordinary bodies, and demonstrate in visceral ways just how unique is the ordinary body: no two alike, each an expression of itself.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Notes on Navigation
"This Accident of Being Lost" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (House of Anansi) is a sharp collection of short stories and poetry that resists the colonialism of contemporary Canada.
JILL MANDRAKE
Unabashed Drawing
"Drawing the Line: The How to Draw Book" is best suited for young artists who are interested in graphic novels or comic stories.
Kris Rothstein
The Native Heath
Stolen honeycombs, a fiancé training to be a missionary in Africa, a picnic marred by quicksand and fog, a fundraising party for pig pensions...
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Friend in Need
Helen Garner’s novel "The Spare Room" opens in Melbourne as the protagonist and narrator, a middle-aged woman also named Helen (hmm), prepares for the visit of Nicola, her dear friend.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Free to Be
Her story powers along; eventually she will arrive at the start, returning to the losses set down in the preface, losses so terrible we won’t mind if she chickens out.
Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies
Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Treaties
A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.
Randy Fred
Borderless
Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.
Michał Kozłowski
Corpse Reviver
The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.
Christine Novosel
Hived Off
Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.
Michael Hayward
Jack Kerouac, Francophone
Jack Kerouac, that prototypically “all-American” writer, was born to Québécois parents, and raised in the midst of an expatriate French-Canadian community in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Patty Osborne
Better Late
A middle-aged man moves to a new city to restart his life, gets to know an old man named Oliver, and after only a few months realizes that he has fallen in love with both the new city and the old man.
roni-simunovic
VQFF 2017: Signature Move
Fawzia Mirza on the white, Western concept of coming out: "We have to let go of thinking that there’s one right way to be. It’s about finding better words and language to talk about the gay experience."
Robert Everett-Green
Wholesome Reading
Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.
Barbara Zatyko
Stumped
Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.
Michael Hayward
Bookshop of the Heart
Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris regularly makes it onto lists like The World’s Coolest Bookstores and The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.
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