fact

Edith Iglauer

Snowed In at the Sylvia

I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.

Stephen Henighan

Becoming French

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

Alberto Manguel

Final Answers

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

Stephen Osborne

Stranger

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.

David Albahari

Bird in the Willow

Some

George Fetherling

Adventures in the Nib Trade

No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories.

Jane Awde Goodwin

Dear Doctor

The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.

Manfred Buchheit

Burin Highway

From Mapping a Sense of Place: The Photographs of Manfred Buchheit, 1972-1995, an exhibition curated by Bruce Johnson for the Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Veronica Gaylie

Memory Test

Does the individual have difficulty finding words, finishing sentences or naming people or things?

Veronica Gaylie

The Guy Upstairs

Veronica Gaylie encounters Trevor Linden, the Greatest Canuck Who Ever Lived, in economy class.

Jane Silcott

Lurching Man

One instinctive action saves a life in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

‍

Stephen Henighan

The BookNet Dictatorship

According to the numbers, Canada will never produce another Atwood or Findley.

Stephen Gauer

Jumper

Another classic story from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Issue."I felt disoriented, almost light-headed, as though I were slightly stoned or moving inside a dream."

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.

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.

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

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.

‍

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.

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."

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

Daniel Francis

Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

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?"

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

The Lost Art of Waving

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

Dayna Mahannah

The Academy of Profound Oddities

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

‍

Kelly Bouchard

After the Flames

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

ERNIE KROEGER

Acoustic Memory

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

J.R. Patterson

True at First Flight

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

‍

Eimear Laffan

The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

‍

rob mclennan

Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

‍

Sara de Waal

Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk

Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy

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

My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

‍

Sara Cassidy

The Lowest Tide

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

David Sheskin

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"

CONNIE KUHNS

Marriage on the Download

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

Danielle Hubbard

The muse hunt

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

Deborah Ostrovsky

Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney

Weird Jobs

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

Grant Buday

Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Stephen Osborne

Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Natasha Greenblatt

Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie

Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Robert Hunter

Launching Greenpeace

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

Michael Hayward

A play is a play is a play

Review of "Gertrude and Alice" produced by United Players of Vancouver.

Kris Rothstein

Intelligence Girls

Review of "Censorettes" by Elizabeth Bales Frank.

Patty Osborne

From Russia With Love

Review of "Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea" by Teffi (trans. Robert Chandler).

Helen Godolphin

ON Piracy (And petrified oranges)

Review of "Our Flag Means Death" created by David Jenkins on HBO Max.

JILL MANDRAKE

ONCE A PUNK BAND, ALWAYS A CULTURE BEARER

Review of No Fun (the band) and reissued music by Atomic Werewolf Records.

Joseph Weiss

An Anti-war Godzilla

Review of "Godzilla Minus One" directed by Takashi Yamazaki.

Michael Hayward

Songs of battle

Review of "Canzone di Guerra: New Battle Songs" by Daša Drndić, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth.

KELSEA O'CONNOR

Pride and prejudice meets Diana Wynne Jones

Review of "The Midnight Bargain" by C.L. Polk

Anson Ching

the universal human

Review of "The Invention of the Other" directed by Bruno Jorge (2022).

Michael Hayward

Getting past the past

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

Daniel Francis

writing from an early grave

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

Michael Hayward

The peripatetic poet

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

Michael Hayward

Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

KELSEA O'CONNOR

Haunted House guest

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

Anson Ching

Sailing the roaring forties

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

Michael Hayward

BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson

More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Michael Hayward

A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Debby Reis

A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

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

Kris Rothstein

The messy back of history

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

Peggy Thompson

Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward

subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR

Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne

Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

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.

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.

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.

Michael Hayward

Rain Falls in Norway

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dakota McFadzean

Duck Thoughts

The odd duck out.

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.

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.”

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?

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."

Patty Osborne

Aiming for Roses

First there was the Canadian daredevil Ken Carter who, for five years (starting in 1976), made repeated attempts to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-propelled car.

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.

Michał Kozłowski

In the Flesh

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

Arthur Manuel

Occupy Indian Affairs

Arthur Manuel recounts the time he and over 300 other activists took over the Department of Indian Affairs in 1973.

Patty Osborne

What's Going On?

"Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call by Arthur Manuel is a helluva good read, in which smart people find ingenious ways to fight for change against a Canadian government that has been intractable, no matter which party is in power."

Evel Economakis

Leningrad Redact

“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Christine Novosel

Stuck on the Grid

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Michael Hayward

Cycling Innocently Into the Arctic

I Cycled into the Arctic Circle: A Peregrination by James Duthie and Matt Hulse (Saltire Society) is a “newly revived and revised edition of deaf Scotsman James Duthie’s rare journal.”

Stephen Osborne

The Orwell Effect

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

JILL MANDRAKE

Clouds of Intrigue, Rays of Hope

"Like most people who have seen the stand-up comedy and other stage-work of Charles Demers, I sure couldn’t pass up a book of his personal essays."