fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Michael Hayward
Artists Behaving Badly

Michael Hayward reviews the honest, outrageous and at times unflattering biographies of Lucian Freud and Rockwell Kent.

Mandelbrot
Private Parts

Mandelbrot reviews The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms by Bruce Dern.

Stephen Henighan
Cross-Country Snow

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

Stephen Henighan
Immigrants from Nowhere

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

Daniel Francis
Time for a Rewrite

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

Daniel Francis
When Treatment Becomes Torture

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

Susan Mockler
Hey, Sexy

"I glanced at Jack, his tattooed arms, his gloved hands resting on the wheels of his manual chair. If only I could get my arms back. I could live with anything else."

roni-simunovic
Literary Festival Field Guide

Roni Simunovic catalogues types of literary festival attendees: the jaded art student, the CanLit socialite, the overworked publisher and more.

Eve Corbel
Old Women Cry at Weddings

Eve Corbel on marriage and what comes after the wedding: the monster mortgage, the dreary housework, the contemptuous in-laws and more.

Christopher Gudgeon
Waiting for Our Lord God Jesus Christ…

…in the Maple Leaf Lounge at the John G. Diefenbaker Airport in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

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.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
All Zeit, No Geist?

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland, a "humanizing portrait" of Alcatel-Lucent, the company that developed the internet we know and love today.

Dylan Gyles
Heavy Reading

Dylan Gyles embarks on a quest to read all of literature's most difficult tomes, starting with Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

Michael Hayward
The Chicagoan

Michael Hayward reviews a new compendium of The Chicagoan, the “Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.”

Michael Hayward
The Life and Breath of the World

Michael Hayward reviews Cascadia: The Life and Breath of the World, co-edited by Trevor Carolan and Frank Stewart.

Stephen Osborne
Vacation

Stephen Osborne rejects the "whiny questions of national identity" posed during the "golden age" of Canadian literature in the 1960s and 70s.

MYLES WIRTH
Hibakusha

Myles Wirth tells the story of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, oil tanker designer and survivor of bombings at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Rob Kovitz
Plan Your Getaway

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Werner Herzog, Battlestar Galactica, Maureen Dowd, Alexandre Dumas, Weeds: Season 7—meditations on the plan.

Meags Fitzgerald
Phototeria

Meags Fitzgerald illustrates the early history of one of the first ever photo booths and its creator, a stuttering inventor from rural Ontario.

Nina Bunjevac
Letters to Manitora

Nina Bunjevac's homesick father receives hundreds of mis-addressed letters and postcards from Serbian penpals.

Stephen Osborne
Shackled

Stephen Osborne discusses the notion that Canadian literature is “shackled to a corpse dragging us down into the future.”

Barry Till
Snapshot Art

A collection of export paintings, created as souvenirs for Western tourists by Chinese painters who adopted Western painting techniques.

Thad McIlroy
Teary-Eyed Testosterone

Thad McIlroy reviews Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them.

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.

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.

Alberto Manguel
Dante in Guantánamo

After fol

Stephen Henighan
Canada for Spartans

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Stephen Henighan
Language and Nation Now

Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world?

Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

CARMINE STARNINO
Next Door Café: A Poet's Musings

Reflections on how a bar in Parc Extension, QC, influenced an eponymous poem about "unprogress, inertia, the failure to learn from mistakes."

Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Places

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

Stephen Henighan
In Praise of Borders

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation.

Alberto Manguel
Pictures and Conversations

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Stephen Henighan
Writing Bohemia

Bohemia is a good place to grow as a writer, but is it a good place to live one’s whole life?

Alberto Manguel
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour

He is one of the strangest crea

Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

Alberto Manguel
Final Answers

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

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.

Stephen Henighan
The BookNet Dictatorship

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

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.

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.

Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

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 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.

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.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Secret Market

When Frank Warren began collecting the secret thoughts of strangers at PostSecret.com, he inadvertently created a new genre.

Alberto Manguel
Hospital Reading

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

Stephen Henighan
Homage to Nicaragua

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

Daniel Francis
Magical Thinking

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Umar Saeed
Arguments

A young Canadian man visits family in Pakistan to settle a generational feud.

CONNIE KUHNS
Signs of Life

Does a house that has been home to four generations of one family still hold their electricity?

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.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Caleb and Opa on Holiday

Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?

Patty Osborne
A Little Distillery in Nowgong

A review of A Little Distillery in Nowgong by Ashok Mathur.

Alberto Manguel
Role Models and Readers

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

Alberto Manguel
Imaginary Islands

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

Florence Grandview
Lights Out at the Jubilee

At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.

David Wisdom
UJ3RK5

A Vancouver rock band made up of musicians, photographers and at one time, a prominent sci-fi writer.

Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

Stephen Henighan
The Market and the Mall

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

Daniel Francis
Sex, Drugs, Rock ’n’ Roll and the National Identity

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

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.

Alberto Manguel
The Other Side of the Ice

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

EVELYN LAU
Love Song to America

Reflections on John Updike's death.

Alberto Manguel
Geist’s Literary Precursors

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Michelle Fost
Long Distance

Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.

Sheila Heti
American Soul

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

Annabel Lyon
Irony-Free Reality TV

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

Edith Iglauer
Mad About Harry

A new pet kitten becomes part of the family.

Jill Boettger
City Under Water

The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...

Stephen Osborne
The Coincidence Problem

That dreamlike quality causes rational minds to dismiss the moment as “only a coincidence.”

Alberto Manguel
Cooking by the Book

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.