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Patty Osborne
Room of One's Own Journal

The December 1994 issue of Room of One's Own, subtitled "Geography of Gender," features the winners of its first annual literary competition, along with nine other finalists. The writing here is very good, the cover is inviting, and they've reviewed

Lily Gontard
Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars

Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle

Mandelbrot
Sacred Places in North America: A Journey into the Medicine Wheel

Notman's department store approach to photography is carried on in this century in the work of Courtney Milne, whose recent Sacred Places in North America, subtitled A Journey into the Medicine Wheel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), represents the fruit of

Stephen Osborne
Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women

The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to se

Lara Jenny
Salt: A World History

Thanks to an educational record I had as a kid, I’ve always known that salt was once traded for gold. What I didn’t know about salt, though, is a heck of a lot, and it’s all covered in Mark Kurlansky’s 400-plus-page book Salt: A World History (Knopf

Alana Mairs
Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory

Near the beginning of his book, Ricou states that his intention in writing about this ubiquitous plant was to answer the question: “Could a regional culture be found by focusing on a single, native, uncharismatic species?” More simply, he wanted to f

Patty Osborne
Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights

When the Bosnian peace agreement was announced in Dayton, Ohio, I wanted to ask Elma Softic what she thought of it all. I had just finished reading her book Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights (Key Porter: translation by Nada Conic), and I wanted her to c

Leah Rae
Sartre for Beginners

What I remember most vividly from Existentialism 101 was nausea—not Sartre’s famous novel, but a classmate of mine who spontaneously vomited during a discussion of Nietzsche.

Kris Rothstein
Screaming at a Wall

Drugs and disillusionment also figure in Greg Everett’s memoir Screaming at a Wall (Grundle Ink), featuring a main character named Greg and events and dialogue that are too convincing to be made up. The charm of this book is its unflinching portrayal

Stephen Osborne
Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail

Stephen R. Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (Thomas Allen) is an excellent account of life and lingering death on the high seas during the age of empires and oceanic voyag

Lara Jenny
School Shmool

Portland is a great destination for fans of the independent presses. During a recent two-day trip, I selected a few must-have zines and chapbooks from a huge selection.

Carrie Villeneuve
Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle

Seachd: The Inaccessible Pinnacle (Simon Miller), is the first Gaelic-language movie at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Seachd ( “seven”) is the age Aonghas is when he and his siblings are orphaned and sent to their grandparents; seachd is

Geist Staff
Selected Poems

In Leonard Gasparini's Selected Poems (Hounslow Press), the themes range from urban night-life lyricism to wry, formally structured meditations on humanity, travel and the natural world. Gasparini's vision of life is often dark but never obscure.

Michael Hayward
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

Joelle Hann
Self

Yann Martel's novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel's first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears i

Mindy Abramowitz
A Philosophical Investigation

Last time I went to the mystery bookstore looking for something hard-boiled, I came out with A Philosophical Investigation (Doubleday) tucked under my arm. I have since returned to seek out author Philip Kerr's previous novels, the Berlin Noir trilog

Patty Osborne
Confessions of a Shopaholic

In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as

Eve Corbel
Alter Ego Comics

A review of Michel Rabagliati's semi-autobiographical graphic novels, featuring tales of his boyhood in Quebec.

Michael Hayward
Divisadero

“Everything is collage,” a character observes in Divisadero (McClelland & Stewart), Michael Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years.

Stephen Osborne
Enchantment & Other Demons

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Norbert Ruebsaat
Eros the Bittersweet

Ann Carson has written a sensual and thought-provoking book about desire and called it Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Press). My friends tell me you can't theorize about desire, and my lovers tell me (when I begin to theorize about desire) that

Jon Burrows
eye-Dentical Twins

When eye-Dentical Twins (eye press) arrived in the office, everyone crowded around. The book is a collection of photographs from the newspaper eye weekly, in which two unlikely celebrities are paired and the resemblance is described in a witty cutlin

Michael Hayward
Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems

This recent collection compiles the very best of the poet's oeuvre.

Patty Osborne
Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike

In Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike by Jennifer Duncan (Anchor Canada), we meet women who escaped the prison of propriety and domesticity by joining the Gold Rush to the Yukon.

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.

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.

Stephen Osborne
The Unremembered Man

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch?) with Einstein’s head in it, a plaster model (was it plastic, perhaps? modelling clay? plasticine?)

EVELYN LAU
Yaletown Suite

She would see him sometimes around Yaletown, her former counsellor, heading glassy-eyed toward a bar or creeping up the back steps of the massage parlour.

Marjorie Doyle
Child Traveller

The time had come for our marathon trek through Europe. I was ten, and hated it already.

Steven Heighton
Watching the Ducks in Chiang Mai

A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

Stephen Osborne
Fields of Time

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Stephen Osborne
Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

Billie Savage Gates
Spot Fire

I am down in the cabin and Ross, who is eighty feet up in the fire tower, sees smoke. He tries to report it but his radio isn’t working and nobody can understand him. They phone him back on the cell: does he need the water bombers? He says no, it’s just a spot fire. In that moment a huge gust of wind blasts through the cabin, blows a towel off a rack, slaps it against the valve of the water cooler and turns on the water.

Quade Hermann
The Gist of Everything

My mother stands at the top of the stairs, thin as a skeleton and reeking of booze. “Are you drunk?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Have you had anything to drink today?” “No,” she says. Lies, all lies. There are always more.

Minelle Mahtani
Fact
Looking for a Place to Happen

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

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

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

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

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.

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.