This year for Halloween, we creep back into the archives and Stephen Osborne digs deep into his family's history at the Salem witch trials.
Kristen den Hartog
The Two Lots
Theft, death and don't-mess-with-me expressions—unlocking the family portrait.
BRADLEY PETERS
Mission
Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.
BRADLEY PETERS
Mission
Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.
Finn Wylie
Road Trip with Cupid
“Want to marry me? My wife she burned me. She just burned me, you know. Now I’m going to court to burn her back.”
RICHARD VAN CAMP
In Memoriam: Edith Iglauer, 1917 - 2019
Respected journalist, Geist contributor and maker of olive sandwiches.
Edith Iglauer
The Prime Minister Accepts
Edith Iglauer invites Pierre Trudeau over for dinner and gets Barbra Streisand as a bonus.
JILL MANDRAKE
Ice Cream Dude
Compassionate, good truck driver, likes kids, likes ice cream—the makings of a no-fail ice cream dude.
Stephen Osborne
Exotic World
In 1989, when Harold and Barbara Morgan opened the Museum of Exotic World in the front rooms of Harold’s commercial painting business in Vancouver, they had been travelling the world every winter for forty-five years and had accumulated many souvenir
Randy Fred
Blind Man Dance
Randy Fred receives his first traditional Nuu-chah-nulth name.
Michał Kozłowski
After the Money
Notes from the Governor General’s Literary Awards.
Hàn Fúsēn
Till Talk
Han Fusen navigates multiculturalism and kookoo sabzi from inside a Persian grocery store.
JILL MANDRAKE
peanut brittle
Jill Mandrake on the surprising effect of peanut brittle.
Jocelyn Kuang
49 Days to the Afterlife
Rice, tea and a trillion dollars of spirit money.
Jeff Shucard
King Zog and the Secret Heart of Albania
The secret heart of Albania is imbued with compassion and a desire to help those in need
David Look
Sleeping Class
Scenic views, fresh muffins and drunk passengers—three days and four nights aboard the Canadian from Vancouver to Toronto.
ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Chicken at Large
What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?
Matt Snell
Laying on Hands
In Peterborough, Pastor Billy cures arthritis, back pain, bone spurs, lymphoma, stage four liver cancer, sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation
Susie Taylor
We Smoke Our Smokes
From morning to night, there's always someone coming in for smokes and a chat.
Marcus Youssef
Happy Shiny People
The Museum of Communism is easy to find thanks to the museum’s advertising slogan: We’re above McDonald’s.
Steven Heighton
Jogging with Joyce
Before I opened for Joyce Carol Oates at her reading at Harbourfront in Toronto, we had dinner: Oates and her husband, Raymond Smith; the organizer, Greg Gatenby; and me.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
World's Most Wanted
Who knew my dad's old pen was a famous Parker 51 Vacumatic?
Véronique Darwin
K to 7
Veronique Darwin revisits her childhood journal, from hearing ghosts in kindergarten to staring at hotties in grade seven.
Ann Diamond
An Awful Thing
“Never write a line you don’t mean,” said Carver. “And don’t ever imag
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 on John Franklin, John Rae and the Globe and Mail's enthusiasm for cannibalism.
Alberto Manguel
Marilla
Prince Edward Island gothic.
Alberto Manguel
Hoping Against Hope
Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.
Joseph Weiss
King of the Post-Anthropocene
Kaiju are the heroes we deserve.
Stephen Henighan
Left Nationalists
Progressives are far less likely to be nationalists than ever before.
Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)
There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.
Daniel Francis
Acadia's Quiet Revolution
Revolutions need popular heroes, and unpopularvillains, and the Acadians of New Brunswick had both.
Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore
To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Distant Early Warning
We think of the Arctic as pristine and untouched—but nowhere on the planet is as harshly impacted by climate change.
Alberto Manguel
Libraries without Borders
Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.
Stephen Henighan
Happy Barracks
In Hungary, goulash socialism becomes difficult to swallow
Alberto Manguel
How I Became a Writer of Colour
Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.
Alberto Manguel
Beginning at the Beginning
To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions
Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma
Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier
Alberto Manguel
The Devil
We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Smashing Identity Algorithms, Yes Please
While status registration under the Indian Act is a construct, claiming status identity isan important factor in Indigenous identity and cultural transmission.
Stephen Henighan
Victims of Anti-Communism
Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments,receives monumental status in Canada
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Buried Treasure
Mary Schendlinger challenges a review of a biography of Blanche Knopf, the underrecognized co-founder of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies
Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.
Alberto Manguel
Reporting Lies
The craft of untruth has been perfected.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Clowns, Cakes, Canoes: This is Canada?
Romantic notions that equate Indigenous peoples with nature are not going to cut it.
Rob Kovitz
Question Period
Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"
Stephen Henighan
Write What You Can Imagine
Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading.
Stephen Henighan
City Apart
The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.
When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?
Stephen Osborne
The Tall Women of Toronto
In this city of tall buildings, the most imposing shadows are cast by women.
Stephen Henighan
Latinocanadá
Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.
Veronica Gaylie
Blue Cheese
A decadent feast of poetry; but what will it do to your heart?
Edith Iglauer
Aquafun
Plumb the depths of the Aquafit subculture with our embedded nonagenarian.
Alberto Manguel
Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam
A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.
Jeff Shucard
Hurricane
Four days after Sandy, Shucard's parents are in good humour, very brave and very glad to see him—and unsure if he's taking them to Bolivia, Azerbaijan or Canada.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Terribly Human
"Awkwardness comes with loving someone too much or not enough." A review of Other People We Married by Emma Straub.
Daniel Francis
It's a Free Country, Isn't It?
During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Rookie Yearbook One
The Senior Editor of Geist learns to "Wear Knee Socks with Everything" from an exceptional blog turned print book by Tavi Gevinson.
Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven, Part 2
Thad McIlroy undergoes a hernia operation—and with Neil Diamond and the right kind of drugs, it might only take ten minutes.
Sheila Heti
Stakeout
Sheila Heti spends a day in a diner in Toronto observing the enormous EUCAN electrified garbage can at the corner of College and Bathurst.
Stephen Osborne
Women of Kali
A feminist writer/publisher sought out stories of the partition of India: atrocity and hardship, looting, rape and murder committed by and upon Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Grief-in-Progress
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Nox by Anne Carson (New Directions).
Michael Hayward
Writing in Blue
Michael Hayward reviews Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Knopf).
Mandelbrot
Zero Drag and Genius
Mandelbrot reviews The Wage Slave's Glossary written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell and illustrated by Seth.
Chelsea Novak
National Boyfriend
At a taping of George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Chelsea Novak meets Canada's boyfriend.
Michael Turner
Oh, Canada
Michael Turner questions a US-curated exhibit of Canadian art that exoticizes Canadian artists while suggesting they are un-exotic.
Daniel Francis
Boob Tube
Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?
Eve Corbel
Collier Cornucopia
Eve Corbel reviews Collier’s Popular Press: 30 Years on the Newsstand.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Cut-Out Lit
Kelsea O'Connor reviews Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (Visual Editions).
Jennesia Pedri
Dividing Lines
Jennesia Pedri reviews Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Marcello di Cintio (Goose Lane).
Patty Osborne
Absolute Centre
Patty Osborne reviews Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart).
Stephen Henighan
Against Efficiency
Stephen Henighan argues that efficiency has become a core value that heightens social divisions.
Francois-Marc Gagnon
Among the Curious
Francois-Marc Gagnon explores curiosity as the opposite of indifference.