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reviews
columns
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.

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.

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.

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.

Patty Osborne
Canada’s Dark Depths

Sex, suicide, Nelson and Cabbagetown—Patty Osborne reviews The Modern World and The Secret Life of Fission, two hard-hitting story collections.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
All My Little Words

Kelsea O'Connor reviews 101 Two-Letter Words, an illustrated Scrabble guide by Stephen Merritt with running themes of sloths, songwriting and vampire dogs.

JILL MANDRAKE
Still Stupefying

Jill Mandrake is blown away by South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky, a journey into "the land of guilt and sorrow."

roni-simunovic
Second Chances

Roni Simunovic reviews Seconds by Brian Lee O'Malley, a graphic novel about getting second chances whether you deserve them or not.

Stephen Osborne
Harrowing

"This is not a documentary; it is, however, an overpowering aesthetic and emotional experience, a true happening"—Stephen Osborne reviews Susan Sontag's film Promised Lands.

Jesmine Cham
Technology Creeps On

Jesmine Cham talks scaremongering, tinfoil hats and invasive technology in this review of Technocreep by Thomas P. Keenan.

Dylan Gyles
Philosophy and Chloroform

Dylan Gyles reviews Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers, the story of a disillusioned young man grappling with life, the universe and metaphysical truths.

Michael Hayward
All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away

Michael Hayward reviews Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, a "a window into the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire."

Eve Corbel
Seized

Eve Corbel reviews Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington, in which two girls are taken from their family by Western Australia government officials in 1931.

Michael Hayward
Smoke and Mirrors

Michael Hayward reviews American Smoke by Iain Sinclair, an account of the author's road trip across North America in search of traces of the Beat Generation.

roni-simunovic
Based Loosely

Roni Simunovic reviews Based on a True Story by Elizabeth Renzetti, the bizarrely fascinating tale of a washed-up soap star's struggles with unemployment and substance abuse.

Lily Gontard
Wild Woman

Lily Gontard reviews Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, a memoir about crisis, redemption and hiking.

roni-simunovic
Bird Metal

Roni Simunovic investigates Hatebeak, a death metal band with an African Grey parrot vocalist.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Strange Things Come From The Woods

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, a collection of comics full of "ghosts, parasites, dead brothers, mysterious strangers and murderous husbands."

Stephen Osborne
The Saddest Place on Earth

“I walked into the garage, and found a teenage boy in a tank top and shorts." Kathryn Mockler's poems eschew meaningless metaphors for direct language.

Michael Hayward
Talking Ducks

Michael Hayward reviews The Old Castle’s Secret by Carl Barks.

Michael Hayward
Behind Closed Doors

Michael Hayward reviews My Struggle Book 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård.

Lily Gontard
Matters of Life and Death

Lily Gontard reviews Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother by Helen Humphreys.

Patty Osborne
Working with Wool

Patty Osborne reviews Working with Wool, A Coast Salish Legacy and the Cowichan Sweater by Sylvia Olsen.

Patty Osborne
Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899-1929

Patty Osborne reviews Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino 1899–1929 by Margaret Horsfield, a peek into the lives of the early settlers of the West Coast of Vancouver Island.

JILL MANDRAKE
What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order

Ronald Wright explores the modern history of our southern neighbour in What Is America? A Short History of the New World Order, reviewed by Jill Mandrake.

Robert Everett-Green
The Best of Times

Robert Everett-Green reviews The Best of Times by Ludwig Bemelmans, author of the Madeline stories, consisting of illustrated articles that Bemelmans wrote about his travels through Europe.

Michael Hayward
Famous Foods

Michael Hayward reviews Luke Barr's Provence, 1970, an investigation of the winter when six major culinary figures lived together in France.

Patty Osborne
Closer to Memory Than Imagination

Patty Osborne reviews Air Carnation, a story by Guadalupe Muro that combines the author's personal memoirs with poetry, songwriting and fiction.

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.

Saeko Usukawa
Gulf Island Sojourn

"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do every­thing for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."

Miriam Toews
Sweet Badass Dude

A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.

Stephen Osborne
The Lost Art of Waving

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

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
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?"

Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation

Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.

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

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."

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 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.

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

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.

J. Jill Robinson
One Night at the Oceanview

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

Life in Language

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

Daniel Francis
Red Scare

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

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.

Myrl Coulter
Room Ten

Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

Daniel Collins
Phallic Blessing

In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.

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.

Stephen Osborne
Banker Poet

Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.

Stephen Henighan
Third World Canada

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

Stephen Osborne
Life on Masterpiece Avenue

Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.

Michael Turner
Making Stuff Up

Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.

Thad McIlroy
Death and the Economist

The art of the obituary lives on: Obituaries of note from The Economist magazine, including those of the "gunrunner of CIA front companies" and "last interesting Marxist."

Daniel Francis
Double Life

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.