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.
David Albahari
The Art of Renaming
Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?
These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.
CONNIE KUHNS
Fifty Years in Review
A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.
J. Jill Robinson
Hot Pulse
I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.
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.
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.
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.
D.M. FRASER
Surrounded by Ducks
D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.
DAVID COLLIER
The Last Grain Elevator in Regina
When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor.
HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves
When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.
Eve Corbel
Getting It Wrong
It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.
Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail
What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.
Stephen Smith
Rinkside Intellectual
Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.
Brad Cran
Fact
Empires of Film
Brad Cran
Fact
Leading Men
"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.
Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois
Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.
Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur
Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.
Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl
Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik
Hal Niedzviecki commemorates his Jewish grandfather—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.
Daniel Francis
War of Independence
World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.
JILL MANDRAKE
Elementary
On the merry-go-round, you just shouted out a destination and all the kids pushed until everyone agreed we’d arrived.
CONNIE KUHNS
Life After Virginity
A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock.
Kathleen Winter
BoYs
Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.
Ann Diamond
How I (Finally) Met Leonard Cohen
On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.
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.
Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.
Patty Osborne
A Secret Well Kept
Review of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" by Rosemary Sullivan.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
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.
JILL MANDRAKE
A Backward Glance or Two
Review of "Let the World Have You" by Mikko Harvey.
Sara Cassidy
The Lowest Tide
Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.
Michael Hayward
ADVENT (AND OTHERS) IN A BOX
Review of "Short Story Advent Calendar" by Hingston & Olsen Publishing.
Gabrielle Marceau
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.
Michael Hayward
Wanda x 3
Review of "Wanda" written and directed by Barbara Loden, "Suite for Barbara Loden" by Nathalie Léger, translated by Natasha Lehrer and Cécile Menon and "Wanda" by Barbara Lambert.
David Sheskin
PRESS 1 IF
PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.
Patty Osborne
Teenaged Boys, Close Up
Review of "Sleeping Giant" directed by Andrew Cividino and written by Cividino, Blain Watters and Aaron Yeger.
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."
Debby Reis
Dreaming of Androids
Review of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? " by Philip K. Dick.
Anson Ching
Further Years of Solitude
Review of "Black Sugar" by Miguel Bonnefoy.
Jonathan Heggen
A Thoughtful Possession
Review of "The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories" edited and translated by Jay Rubin.
Jennilee Austria
Scavengers
That’s one for the rice bag!
Michael Hayward
Sitting Ducks
Review of "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands" by Kate Beaton.
Peggy Thompson
What It Means To Be Human
Review of "All the Broken Things" by Geoff Inverarity.
David M. Wallace
Red Flags
The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
Daniel Francis
Future Imperfect
Review of "The Premonitions Bureau " by Sam Knight.
Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase
Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Rocks in a Hard Place
Review of "A Field Guide to Gold, Gemstone & Mineral Sites of British Columbia, Volume Two: Sites within a Day’s Drive of Vancouver" by Rick Hudson.