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Celia Haig-Brown
Resistance and Relentlessness

The long road to decency and justice.

Shyla Seller
Wanting

Shyla Seller on the brilliance of the Vancouver poet Gladys Maria Hindmarch.

JILL MANDRAKE
Dirty Dirty Gets Down to the Nitty Gritty

Jill Mandrake on Mississippi Live & the Dirty Dirty, a Southern rock band in East Vancouver.

Rick Maddocks
The Other 9/11

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

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

Patty Osborne
Ordinary Filipinos vs. The Normal Irish

Patty Osborne on teenage love, internet clicks and stolen babies.

Michael Hayward
Fine Art in Lockdown

Michael Hayward on Félix Fénéon and the exhibits unseen during COVID-19.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Kathleen Murdock
Everything on Earth

Kathleen Murdock on race, resilience, rage and joy.

Thad McIlroy
Life in the Valley

Thad McIlroy urges us to run from big tech before the death knell tolls.

Carmen Tiampo
Wash With Like Colours

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

Brad Cran
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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.

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.

JORDAN ABEL
Indigenous Poetry Without Borders

As a Nisga’a writer, I’m often deeply invested in not only how other poets are tackling issues through poetry but also how Indigenous writers are navigating that same terrain. Reading poetry is necessary. Reading Indigenous writing is essential.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

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.

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."

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
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
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

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

David Sheskin
Fact
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"

Danielle Hubbard
The muse hunt

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

CONNIE KUHNS
Marriage on the Download

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

Deborah Ostrovsky
Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Bad Pronunciation

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Debra Rooney
Comics
Weird Jobs

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

Stephen Osborne
Waiting for Language

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Grant Buday
Reduce, Reuse, Reincarnate

Destroying books for the greater good.

Natasha Greenblatt
Scavenger Hunt for Losers

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

Finn Wylie
Shelter in Place

"I never went looking for them."

Tara McGuire
Short Term

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Jill Boettger
Do You Remotely Care?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Stephen Smith
The Acknowledgements

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

Robyn Ludwig
Black Velvet, If You Please

The secret is in the velvet.

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.

Daniel Francis
The Living Unknown Soldier

In The Living Unknown Soldier (Henry Holt), the French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour tells the story of “Anthelme Mangin,” an amnesiac discovered wandering on the train-station platform in Lyon in February 1918. He was assumed to be a prisoner of war

Geist Staff
The Lotus-Eaters

The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson.... Peg Thompson's movie we have seen: it's called The Lotus-Eaters, and it's set in the sixties on one of the Gulf Islands of BC, in

Michael Hayward
The Maytrees

For summer I favour books that can withstand the indignities of the season: beat-up paperbacks that can get stained by sunscreen, or library hardcovers in Brodart jackets that can be wiped clean with a damp cloth. But I make exceptions for new books

Michael Hayward
The Lizard Cage

Karen Connelly has travelled extensively in southeast Asia and described her experiences through non-fiction (Touch the Dragon, a memoir of her year in Thailand, won the Governor General’s Award in 1993) and poetry. Connelly’s first novel, The Lizard

Patty Osborne
The Museum Guard

Speaking of the library, the day after I borrowed The Bird Artist by Howard Norman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a book my brother had recommended, The Museum Guard (Knopf), also by Norman, arrived in the Geist office. For some reason I chose to read Th

Mandelbrot
The Montreal Gazette

The Montreal Gazette reports that Réjean Ducharme, whose new novel Va Savoir is at the top of the bestseller list, has released a photograph of him after a photographic hiatus of twenty-five years, or, in the words of the Gazette caption writer, "a q

S. K. Page
The Middle Stories

Sheila Heti, author of The Middle Stories (Anansi) has received much praise in the Globe and the National Post, all of it deserved. The stories in this little volume are very short and very good: formidable might be the right word.

Michael Hayward
The Narrow Waters

Julien Gracq, one of France’s most senior and respected writers, provides a living bridge to the era of Proust and Alain-Fournier, and in his slim book The Narrow Waters (Turtle Point) Gracq explores a theme favoured by both of those writers: the mys

Stephen Osborne
The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland

The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and

Patty Osborne
The Imaginary Girlfriend

John Irving's The Imaginary Girlfriend (Knopf) is an attractive little hardcover book that is a pleasure to look at and to hold. But to read it is another matter.

Carmen Rivas
The Mummy Congress

Until I read The Mummy Congress by Heather Pringle (Penguin Viking), I thought mummies were just dead people with good PR. But this book traces the role mummies have played in anthropological, historical and medical research, as well as helping to re

Patty Osborne
The Name of the Game: How Sports Talk Got That Way

It's been reported that my nephew in Ottawa needs to be encouraged to read, but he doesn't need to be encouraged to do sports. With this in mind I ventured into an unfamiliar genre. Sports books seem to come in two flavours—how-to books (which most t

Leah Rae
The Milk of Birds

Gary Michael Dault’s The Milk of Birds (Mansfield Press) is an exercise in brevity—each of the one hundred poems in the volume contains between fifteen and forty words. Dault presents the reader with images of nature and nature as metaphor in poetry

Michael Hayward
The Paris Review Interviews, IV

Michael Hayward reviews The Paris Review Interviews, IV (Picador).

Patty Osborne
The New Vancouver Library

The first time I visited the new library I was planning only to look around. It was opening week and things were pretty busy.

Darren Barefoot
The Noam Chomsky Lectures

The Noam Chomsky Lectures (Coach House) is a table play. For two hours Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia sit behind a table and wage war on the Canadian Government and Big Business.

S. K. Page
The New Yorker Stories

The twenty-one stories by Morley Callaghan that appeared in The New Yorker between 1928 and 1938 have been gathered into a small volume by the author’s son Barry, who is the publisher of Exile Editions.

Michael Hayward
The Odyssey

The unabridged audio version of the Odyssey (Penguin) opens with a brief interlude of eerie music, followed by the voice of Gandalf announcing: “The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, read by Ian McKellan,” and with that, one is caught up in an ep

Geist Staff
The New Northwest: The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions 1908-1909

The New Northwest by Bill Waiser (Fifth House), is subtitled The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions 1908-1909, but provides us with very little information about these two fascinating subjects. The New Northwest can be seen as another wacky v

Luanne Armstrong
The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline

Roy Woodbridge tries hard to connect everything in his somewhat despairingly named book, The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline (University of Toronto), in which he calls for a “war on ecological decline”—a war on the forc

Michael Hayward
Travels in the Scriptorium

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy was a revelation to me: literary puzzles examining the nature of fiction-writing; an intellectual meta-fiction that turned the hard-boiled detective genre on its head. Those three novels featured characters with cryptic

Michael Hayward
The Wild Places

For me and other residents of the North Shore of Greater Vancouver, the wilderness is literally blocks away. A line drawn due north from the peaks of the North Shore mountains to the Yukon border will intersect only four roads other than logging road

Kris Rothstein
Tricks

Kris Rothstein reviewed the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival. For more reviews, visit her Geist blog at geist.com/blog/kris.

Daniel Francis
Under the Tuscan Sun

For the second Christmas in a row, I asked for a ten-day holiday at a cooking school in Tuscany, and for the second year in a row my ever-practical wife found a way to indulge my fantasy without emptying our bank account. Last year she pacified me wi

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.

Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination

Anyone who has lived in Vancouver for any length of time has watched whole neighbourhoods of gleaming condominiums rise up; no one can quite remember what was there before. Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner, tackles this collective civic amnesia in

Patty Osborne
Dreaming Home

Dreaming Home, an anthology selected by Bethany Gibson (paper-plates), is another little book stuffed full of great stories—eight of them, all by emerging writers. My favourites were "Personal Effects" by Judith Kalman, about a father leaving his hom

S.K. Grant
Earth's Mind

Roger Dunsmore is the author of Earth’s Mind, a collection of essays published last year by the University of New Mexico Press, and he is an old friend of mine. I met him thirty years ago in Europe when he had just finished reading Black Elk Speaks,

Patty Osborne
Earth and Ashes

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag M. Goknar (Harcourt) is a powerful story wrapped up in a perfect little hardcover book (4' x 7") that contains only 81 pages.

Patty Osborne
Easy Day for a Lady

In May I picked up An Easy Day for a Lady by Gillian Linscott (St. Martin's Press), from the mystery shelves at the local library.

Patty Osborne
Eating My Words

I found more history—this time to do with food—in Eve Johnson’s Eating My Words (Whitecap), a collection of essays originally written for the Vancouver Sun. Not all of them are historical, but my favourite ones are, including the history of real food

Michael Hayward
Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table

Michael Hayward reviews Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (Norton).

Leah Rae
Edison and Leo

Gimli back my eighty minutes!

Michael Hayward
Empty Phantoms

The Mike Wallace interview is reprinted in its entirety in Empty Phantoms (Thunder’s Mouth Press), an exhaustive collection of “nearly all known printed, recorded, and filmed interviews” with Kerouac: by Ben Hecht on his Chicago radio show in 1958, b

Sarah Leavitt
English Passengers

A fast-paced seafaring adventure from my father’s bookshelf, in which a wealthy Londoner on a religious mission to Tasmania falls in with a crew of Manxmen smuggling tobacco, liquor and French porn.

Patty Osborne
Eunoia

The frontispiece of Eunoia by Christian Bök (Coach House) is a drawing of a cone, a line, a sphere and a paraboloid, all nestled inside a cylinder. This complicated arrangement of lines and points illustrates perfectly how my mind worked while I was

Kris Rothstein
Eve and the Fire Horse

When Julia Kwan’s grandmother died, her parents said the grandmother had been reincarnated as a goldfish. The report from Sunday school was quite different: Grandma had gone to hell. Eve and the Fire Horse is Kwan’s story of a young Chinese-Canadian

Norbert Ruebsaat
Elizabeth Costello

In Coetzee’s most recent book, Elizabeth Costello, the main character—“she, Elizabeth Costello”—wonders if she is “a light spirit,” and I like this idea. Elizabeth Costello is not called a novel either, although on the dust jacket Coetzee is describe

Rose Burkoff
Esther

The story of Esther Brandeau, the first Jew to set foot in New France, could have been a dull historical re-creation, but Esther, by Sharon E. McKay (Penguin), is an action-packed story about a feisty, unusual and believable heroine.

Brian Joseph Davis
Everybody Loves Nothing

An established experimental poet—the kind that comes with a beard and a fear of proper capitalization—was heard recently to denounce video art as “arty farty stuff.” As a writer and sometime video artist myself, I like to think of the two disciplines

Stephen Osborne
Everything Arrives at the Light

If a poem is going to grab you, it has to do it right away, as Lorna Crozier's poems do. Here are a few openers from her new book, Everything Arrives at the Light (McClelland & Stewart): "He had a good wife, he said, / she did not complete his senten

Stephen Osborne
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Everyday Stalinism—certainly a tide to conjure with—by Sheila Fitz-Patrick (Oxford) is subtitled Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, and is proof that under certain circumstances the everyday is never normal. This is a h

Lara Jenny
Everyone in Silico

The near future of Jim Munroe’s Everyone in Silico (No Media Kings) reads like Naomi Klein’s (No Logo) idea of hell. Ads pop up everywhere and chase you down the street, and they can only be turned off by the very rich.

Leslie Pomeroy
Experience

For those unfortunates who missed the reading (and I encountered a number on the sidewalk after the event), Amis's book, Experience (Knopf Canada), is comparable: very well written, amusing enough to make you laugh out loud, thoughtful, interesting a

GILLIAN JEROME
Expecting Baby: 9 Months of Wonder, Reflection and Sweet Anticipation

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Kris Rothstein
Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Goodlooking) Hero

Like Adrian Mole, the famous teenaged diarist created by Sue Townsend, the unnamed hero of Maureen Fergus’s Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Good

Stephen Osborne
Fahrenheit 9/11

Toward the end of Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie written and directed by Michael Moore, various U.S. military people and some civilians voice their dismay at finding themselves embroiled in a war that has no meaning.

Extremities

Often I have yearned to go to Newfoundland, as part of an eastward reversal of the migration of the sixties. I felt that yearning again when I read Extremities, a collection of short fiction by the ten Newfoundland writers who make up the Burning Roc

Patty Osborne
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Oskar, the main narrator of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin), is a precocious nine-year-old who dreams up things like a tea kettle that reads in his father’s voice instead of whistling, and a skyscraper t

Barbara Zatyko
Faceoff at the Summit

I read and reread Faceoff at the Summit (Little, Brown), the story of the Summit Series written by Dryden and Mark Malvoy. Dryden describes the Team Canada star Frank Mahovlich giving the team an inspirational talk before a big game: “‘Gentlemen,’ he