fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Saeko Usukawa
Gulf Island Sojourn

"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do every­thing for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."

Miriam Toews
Sweet Badass Dude

A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.

Stephen Osborne
The Lost Art of Waving

Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.

Ann Diamond
How I (Finally) Met Leonard Cohen

On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.

Stephen Osborne
Shots Fired

A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"

Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

MARY MEIGS
Off- and On-Camera

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

Michael Hayward
Literary Lives

Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."

Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Stephen Osborne
Chiquita Canáda

Last month we had a visit from Eliz­abeth Anderson, who hails from Min­neapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state univer­sity. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader.

MARY MEIGS
Being in the Company of Strangers

Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would

Patty Osborne
Beyond Recall

Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.

J. Jill Robinson
One Night at the Oceanview

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

Life in Language

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

Daniel Francis
Red Scare

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

Stephen Henighan
Divergence

Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.

Myrl Coulter
Room Ten

Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Daniel Collins
Phallic Blessing

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

Stephen Osborne
Banker Poet

Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.

Stephen Henighan
Third World Canada

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

Stephen Osborne
Life on Masterpiece Avenue

Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.

Michael Turner
Making Stuff Up

Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.

Sara Cassidy
Flying the Coop

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

Véronique Darwin
New Normal Board Games

Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.

Stephen Osborne
Hospitals of the Mind

A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N

Tiffany Hsieh
Church on Queen

Here they are our people.

Randy Fred
Resistance and Renewal

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

Celia Haig-Brown
Resistance and Relentlessness

The long road to decency and justice.

Rick Maddocks
The Other 9/11

Chileans remember when their government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

Carmen Tiampo
Wash With Like Colours

People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

Patty Osborne
Underwire

"We got into Zellers through jewellery, purses and umbrellas, stockings and underwear and into brassieres, where our momentum deserted us. Now we were both in unfamiliar territory."

Myrna Garanis
World-Class Hotel

Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.

Stephen Osborne
Defining Moments

The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment, a you moment, a me moment...

Sara Cassidy
Gravitass

A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Meanwhile, in 1666

Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.

Robert Everett-Green
Licorice Roots

A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Contact No Contact

Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.

Randy Fred
Seeing Things

When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.

Stephen Osborne
Reading in Summer

Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.

Marko Sijan
Peace on Earth

"My father believes the world is coming to an end, yet he commits his life to curing the sick." Dispatch by Marko Sijan.

Lucianne Poole
Chainsaw Man

A man with a chainsaw boarded the number 7 bus at about 7:45 a.m., when I was on my way to work in downtown Ottawa.

Kristen den Hartog
Solace

Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.

Jeff Shucard
My Week in Tunisia

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

Jordyn Catalano
Goodbye and Good Luck

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

Hàn Fúsēn
Soy Alérgico

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

Jonathan Montpetit
The Art of Shaving Oneself

In search of a unified self.

Andrea Routley
Thank You All For Coming

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

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.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
Fact
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
Dogs and the Writing Life

Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.

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.

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.

JILL MANDRAKE
Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?

Published by The Writers' Exchange, “this book was created by Division 6, Mrs. Mehnert’s grade 3 class, at Thunderbird Elementary in the winter of 2014.”

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."

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.

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.

Merilyn Simonds
Implanting Forgetfulness in Our Souls

Each of the paradigm shifts that pushed human communication forward has met with stiff resistance. Even the invention of writing. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, such resistance seems incomprehensible, almost ridiculous.

Patty Osborne
Anti-Poverty Connection

In 1997, when Internet connections were dial-up and most of us were just trying to figure out how the World Wide Web worked, a group of people had the foresight to see that the Internet could be a powerful tool for the anti-poverty movement.

JILL MANDRAKE
Page's Pages

The poet and artist P.K. Page wrote Mexican Journal (Porcupine’s Quill) from 1960 to 1963, while posted in Mexico with her husband, Ambassador W. Arthur Irwin.

Alberto Manguel
Reporting Lies

The craft of untruth has been perfected.

roni-simunovic
Literary Gaydar

Sometimes, in all the twists and turns of a great story, two characters of the same gender kiss and it almost makes up for all the times when they didn’t.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Clowns, Cakes, Canoes: This is Canada?

Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.

Beth A. Robertson
Séan-tific Femininity

Despite enormous gains by feminists in opening up scientific and medical professions to women from the late nineteenth century onward, femininity continued to be associated with intellectual ineptitude.

Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet: Short Film

A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.

Patty Osborne
Flying Canoe

When I tried to describe the weird and wonderful book Accordéon by Kaie Kellough (ARP) to two Québécoise friends, I had to resort to reading a few excerpts because my own words failed me.

Rob Kovitz
Question Period

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

CONNIE KUHNS
The Ove Within

For Ove, the central character in the film A Man Called Ove there is nothing ahead but frustration, disappointment and sadness. “It’s just chaos when you’re not here,” he says to his newly departed wife as he lays flowers on her grave.

roni-simunovic
Middle-Aged Soft Rock Band

The first thing John K. Samson said when he and his band stepped onstage at the Commodore Ballroom on February 2 was, “Hi, we’re a middle-aged soft rock band from Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

David Koulack
A Different Sort of Synagogue

David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.