Thad McIlroy reviews Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them.
Becky McEachern
The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking
Becky McEachern reviews Michele Genest’s The Boreal Gourmet: Adventures in Northern Cooking, featuring a blend of the author's culinarily enlightened upbringing and indigenous northern Canadian ingredients.
Patty Osborne
The Underwood
Patty Osborne reviews The Underwood by P.G. Tarr, winner of a 3-Day Novel Contest.
Michael Hayward
To Have or Have Not
Michael Hayward reviews Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, a collection of essays with a title that speaks for itself.
David Albahari
Two Homes, One Wolf
If a house were a good thing, the wolf would have one.
Patty Osborne
Without Reservations
Patty Osborne reviews Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, a memoir by Anahareo, and Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine, two contrasting reflections on the aboriginal experience.
Michael Hayward
Notes on the Cinematographer
Michael Hayward reviews Notes on the Cinematographer, a cryptic compendium of notes and quotes from the French filmmaker Robert Bresson.
Stephen Henighan
Offend
The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.
Daniel Francis
Folly of War
Daniel Francis reviews All Else Is Folly, a "useful antidote" to the patriotic narrative that hails World War I as Canada's "coming of age."
Eve Corbel
Jungle Out There
Eve Corbel reviews Lumberjanes, a "smart, cute-in-a-good-way" comic series that follows the supernatural hijinks of five girls at an extraordinary summer camp.
Veronica Gaylie
London Double
Veronica Gaylie encounters invisible lamps, uncooperative clerks and a cushion with a bear and/or badger on it during a trip to London.
VINCENT PAGÉ
Milton Acorn Googles His Own Work
"Could I forget: the look that tells me you want me"—Vincent Pagé creates Google autocomplete poetry.
CARIN MAKUZ
Bride of God
On her first communion, a young girl searches for peace of mind in a world of purgatory, UFOs and the Lennon Sisters.
Stephen Osborne
Canadian ten-dollar bill
The dreadful effects of “computer-assisted publishing” can be observed in the new Canadian ten-dollar bill, a specimen of which I had been carrying around for days wondering where I could have picked up such a miserable-looking coupon.
Stephen Osborne
Dream Counsels
"The soiled side of the shirt is the great baggage of dreams"—Stephen Osborne dreams of Hemingway, Harper and profiteroles.
Jill Boettger
Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood
Jill Boettger reviews Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood, a collection of 22 essays by women who are both mothers and writers.
Drunk, Armed With Guitar
"RCMP are responding to Canadian Tire for a report that a male is threatening staff with an axe he was trying to return" and other tweets from @ScanBC.
Elevator Will Not Fall
Ludwig Wittgenstein instructs you on how to comport yourself in a stuck elevator.
Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail
What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.
Daniel Francis
Acts of Resistance
"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.
Wilson MacDonald
Author Tour, 1923
The poet Wilson MacDonald reluctantly reveals secrets of literary success.
Michał Kozłowski
Publishing Life
The zine scene—comics, wrestling, skateboarding and music.
ANDREA BENNETT
Rockin' Through Ontario
andrea bennett suggests that Road Rocks Ontario, a poorly proofread guide to our middle province’s geologic wonders, has a five-star rating on Goodreads because "people who like rocks like them a whole lot."
Derek Fairbridge
Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage
Derek Fairbridge reviews a documentary on the Canadian rock band Rush.
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.
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.
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.
Alberto Manguel
Being Here
In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?
Ted Bishop
Edith and Frank
Ted Bishop visits Edith Iglauer and her husband Frank in their seaside home, where he is treated to a fast drive on a winding road, conversation on good books, and a lesson on what it's like to grow old gracefully.
Stephen Henighan
A Table in Paris
Stephen Henighan remembers Mavis Gallant, the original nomad of Canadian literature, who wrote some of Canada's finest fiction at Pablo Picasso's café table in Paris.
Stephen Henighan
Wheels
Stephen Henighan investigates bus travel as one of Canada's last surviving democratic spaces.
Michael Turner
Vancouver Re-Remembered
Michael Turner reviews At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937-1998, by Claudia Cornwall.
Jane Silcott
Mimesisa
Jane Silcott explores the ideas of beauty and mimicry both in theory and in the wilds of a motel complex.
Daniel Francis
Deviance on Display
Daniel Francis investigates the practice of visiting asylums and penitentiaries as entertainment in nineteenth-century Canada.
Alberto Manguel
Facing the Camera
How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?
Stephen Osborne
1968
Stephen Osborne compares the "major problem" of loitering in 1968 Vancouver to the 2012 Occupy movement.
Michał Kozłowski
Boomtown
L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.
Daniel Francis
Noir
Daniel Francis explores the photographer as Vancouver's most interesting historian.
Alberto Manguel
Observer and Observed
Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.
Stephen Osborne
The Man Who Stole Christmas
On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley.
Stephen Henighan
Tigers' Anatomy
As Canadian leaders look to emulate Asian nations, our government fails to see that the tigers' fatal flaw is the absence of democracy. Or, maybe they do see.
Daniel Francis
Warrior Nation
The Great White North gets rebranded and gains some military muscle: goodbye peacenik, hello soldier.
Alberto Manguel
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read, Part Two
I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.
Alberto Manguel
How to Talk About Books We Haven’t Read
A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt
David Campion
Memory and the Valley: An Interview with Sandra Shields and David Campion
Ross Merriam
Ann Diamond on Memory and Forgetting
Most of our lives probably disappear from our memories, although some people remember much more than others.
Stephen Henighan
Nations Without Publishers
In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.
Stephen Henighan
Court Jester
One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.
Patty Osborne
The Sound of Hockey
GILLIAN JEROME
Weeble World
Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.