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All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Alison McCreesh
Tuque, Socks and Nothing Else

Alison McCreesh encounters snow in May, a bemused gas station attendant and a dumpster to cook behind on a trip across Canada.

M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds

We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.

Annabel Lyon
The Life You Can Save

Hint: It’s not your own.

Norbert Ruebsaat
A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes

Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

Michael Hayward
The Muskwa Assemblage

"Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land."

Patty Osborne
A Cockney in China

At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.

Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear

Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.

Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

Daniel Francis
Umpire of the St. Lawrence

Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.

Michał Kozłowski
Poets on Film

The Western Front, Canada’s longest running artist-run centre, recently hosted a public screening of two dozen or so films from their archive of readings by poets from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Patty Osborne
The Mere Future

Meet the new bosses of a futuristic New York. Same as the old boss?

Alberto Manguel
Pistol Shots at a Concert

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

JEROME STUEART
Road Trip

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

Katie Addleman
Greyhound

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

Rebekah Chotem
Room for the Real

Rebekah Chotem reviews the film adaptation of Room by Emma Donoghue.

Stephen Osborne
National Poetry Daze

CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day by reading a poem written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, which raises the question: are there no living poets who cut the mustard?

Michael Hayward
Coastal Memories

Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.

Stephen Henighan
Phony War

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

Lily Gontard
Fathers and Daughters

Lily Gontard reviews A Rock Fell on the Moon by Alicia Priest and The Stone Thrower by Jael Ealey Richardson.

George A. Walker
La Vie en Rose

Pierre Trudeau among the stars—a series of woodblock prints by George Walker.

Stephen Osborne
Insurgency

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Ice & Fire

Over Christmas I read my friend Stephen Osborne’s book Ice & Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press), which is also a Geist Book, and felt I was reading a handshake: familiar and new.

Andrea King
Great Historical Curiosity

The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.

Joe Bongiorno
The Shī Fu

Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.

Carmen Tiampo
What Survives

My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone

KATHRYN MOCKLER
I Won’t Clean the Tub

He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.

Carolyne Montgomery
In the Pines

It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.

BILLEH NICKERSON
V4G 1N4

A poem about a postal code.

John Patterson
Devil’s Night

On Halloween in 1966, John Patterson's father burned down the Jones's house to give the neighbourhood kids a thrill.

GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Working Life for a Girl in the 1960s

We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.

M.A.C. Farrant
Stories from a West Coast Town

Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life

Jennesia Pedri
T-Bay Notes

Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice

Jocelyn Kuang
Candy Cap Magic

Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.

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.

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.

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.

Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet: Short Film

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

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.

Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

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
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.

Patty Osborne
Fact
A Secret Well Kept

Review of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" by Rosemary Sullivan.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
The Human Side of Art Forgery

Review of "The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case: The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson Forgeries" by Jon S. Dellandrea.

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.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Graphic Heroism

The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Doubleday Canada) is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel offering feminist adaptations of folk tales wrapped in an epic-feeling love story.

Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Thad McIlroy
I'm Sorry

In Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Doubleday) the main character Jude says “I’m sorry” over 100 times. And he adds in “I’m so sorry” 30 times.

Michael Hayward
Sarah Lund's Sweater

Michael Hayward reviews the sweater that Sarah Lund wears in every episode of Season 1 of The Killing, a serial crime drama.

Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Steampunk Crimefighters

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua asks the question: what would the world be like if mathematician Ada Lovelace and inventor Charles Babbage had succeeded in creating the first Victorian computer?

JILL MANDRAKE
Scary Stocking Stuffers

Jill Mandrake a new series called Christmas Ghost Stories (Biblioasis), selected and illustrated by Seth.

Patty Osborne
Keep On Truckin'

This fast-paced, quirky, heart warming and hilarious novel captures the fast and loose crossovers of language and culture that make southeast New Brunswick unique.

Geist Staff
Path of the Jaguar

This past December longtime Geist columnist Stephen Henighan did a promotional tour of western Canada for his latest novel, Path of the Jaguar.

EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

Stephen Osborne
The Great Game

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.

Michael Hayward
Rain Falls in Norway

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

CONNIE KUHNS
Last Day in Cheyenne

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

CARY FAGAN
What I Learned in Florida

There were always things to see at the pond—tadpoles, leopard frogs, dragonflies—but that day we saw two boys, with a rifle.

Patty Osborne
The Other Side of the Mountain

"The Orange Grove is dry and sparse and heartbreaking, much like the unnamed country in which it takes place."

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Eve Corbel
Greeting Cards for Tiny Occasions

Eve Corbel creates a set of greeting cards to celebrate life's best and worst mundane moments.

Stephen Osborne
Thomas Bernhard: The Gnarly Work

When faced with the gnarly writing of Thomas Bernhard readers experience again and again the difficulty of summarizing what they are reading, of thematizing what they have read.

Kris Rothstein
A Cup of Pyms

Pym’s loving but sly take on the world is reminiscent of Jane Austen, but I find Pym funnier and somehow more shrewd and gentle in her satire.

CONNIE KUHNS
Strange Women

Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.

Dakota McFadzean
Duck Thoughts

The odd duck out.

Shelley Kozlowski
Revving

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

Stephen Osborne
Panic Defence

barbara findlay describes herself as a lawyer, and therefore a member of a privileged group, who did not herself have the same civil and human rights as everyone else: a paradox that became central to her life and her “lawyering.”

Thad McIlroy
Check-Out

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

Thad McIlroy
Notes on the Cosmos

Three generations of the Crosby family live and die, but all you really need to know about Tinkers by Paul Harding is the writer’s exceptional use of language.