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dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Anson Ching
the universal human

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

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Christine Lai
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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

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.

Daniel Francis
Under the Tuscan Sun

For the second Christmas in a row, I asked for a ten-day holiday at a cooking school in Tuscany, and for the second year in a row my ever-practical wife found a way to indulge my fantasy without emptying our bank account. Last year she pacified me wi

Kris Rothstein
Twenty Miles

Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley (Coach House) hurtles headlong through the chaos of a season of tough young women playing university hockey. Isabel Norris (Iz) is the unlikely heroine of this novel, a pretty girl whose talent for hockey is more of a comp

Rose Burkoff
Two Lives

Vikram Seth made a name for himself with the conventional epic A Suitable Boy, but most of his publishing ventures have been strange and surprising. Two Lives (McArthur & Company) is the non-fiction story of his great uncle Shanti and great aunt Henn

Stephen Osborne
Tyndale New Testament

The Tyndale New Testament of 1526 is now available in a life-sized edition from Oxford. This was the first pocket-sized popular bible; it could be easily hidden from the thought police of the time, who were eager to burn any copies of the book they c

Lara Jenny
True Confessions of a Big Geek

I never expected to find two new zines about geeky gay girls. Sarah Dermer, author of the Toronto zine True Confessions of a Big Geek, should really get together with Joy, who publishes Super Geek Girl in Portland.

Darren Barefoot
Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love

The latest book from Canada's Angry Young Playwright Brad Fraser includes a reprint of his infamous Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love alongside the screenplay of his recently produced film version Love and Human Remains (NeWest).

Jill Boettger
Unfamiliar Weather

Unfamiliar Weather (The Muses’ Company) is a first book of poems by Chris Hutchinson, who isn’t so tempered in his questions but plunges into them head-first and thirsty. These poems are afflicted by rain and sometimes flooded.

Mandelbrot
Vancouver Special

Mandelbrot reviews Vancouver Special by Charles Demers (Arsenal Pulp).

Geist Staff
Vancouver: A Visual History

Books these days, like TV miniseries and major sporting events, come with their own parallel narratives, human interest stories designed to get the consumer's attention. Stephen Hawking's medical condition helped turn his difficult philosophical trea

Stephen Osborne
Urban Coyote: New Territory

The first volume of Urban Coyote, which appeared last year (Lost Moose), was subtitled A Yukon Anthology; the second volume, just released, is subtitled New Territory and only in the cover blurb do we understand it to be a “second Yukon anthology.” O

Vernon God Little

The language on the dust jacket and in the reviews of Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (Faber & Faber) is of the “biting satire,” “hilarious romp” variety, but I was not amused.

Michael Hayward
Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797

Venice and the Islamic World, 828—1797, edited by Stefano Carboni (Yale University) provides a comprehensive overview of Venice’s artistic heritage, shown within the context of nine centuries of commerce between La Serenissima and the Islamic empires

Lily Gontard
Volver

My recent foray into Oscar-, bafta- and every-other-award-nominated films has left me with “movie glow,” that special feeling you have after watching a particularly good film. You are giddy. You can fly. The dvds that I picked up were Volver (Pedro A

Barbara Zatyko
Visible Worlds

Visible Worlds (HarperCollins), by Marilyn Bowering, starts out in Winnipeg, which probably has a lot in common with Windsor. But the story is too out of this world to be contained there.

Michael Hayward
Vinyl Café

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café show on CBC Radio One. Sometimes it seems a bit twee or corny, but if I’m driving around town on a Sunday I’ll always tune in because I know that somewhere along the way, Stuart McLean w

Kris Rothstein
Unknown White Male

In 2003 Douglas Bruce rode the subway to Coney Island, having forgotten where he was going and who he was. His friend Rupert Murray was one of many directors interested in bringing this story of complete amnesia to the screen, and Murray’s Unknown Wh

Blaine Kyllo
Wallflower's Short Cuts Series

The new line of books about film and filmmaking from Wallflower Press in London (available from Columbia University Press here) is a real achievement.

Michael Hayward
Venices

Pushkin is one of those admirable small presses with an eclectic list that suggests the proprietors are interested in more than the bottom line; Paul Morand’s Venices, translated by Euan Cameron, would be a perfect choice for reading on the Lido.

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Waiting for Gertrude

A few weeks ago when I was knocked flat with the flu and afflicted with squinty, puffy eyes and a foggy brain, I looked for light, fun books that wouldn’t put too much of a strain on my system, and I found them in a far-east drama, a tale of reincarn

Patty Osborne
Waiting for Time

A book that I have been recommending to all of my friends is Waiting for Time by Bernice Morgan (Breakwater). This is the story of Mary Bundle, who was sent from a workhouse in England to St. John's, Newfoundland and eventually made her way to an iso

Stephen Osborne
Voice Literary Supplement

The Voice Literary Supplement for October was full of special treats, not the least of which was a profile of Marguerite Young, author of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, a novel that I remembered from the seventies but had never read.

Daniel Francis
Waiting for the Macaws

A few years ago I drove my son to the waterfront village of Port Alice on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island to take up his summer job as an engineer in the local pulp mill. We had settled him into his new digs and I was preparing to return to V

Patty Osborne
Voyageurs

Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone took me back in time even further, to Upper Canada in the early 1800s, when Toronto was known as York, and Yonge Street stretched north past the last farm in Upper Canada into Mississauga Indian country. Into this ru

Sam Macklin
Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922

The Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly has launched Walt and Skeezix: 1921 & 1922, the first in a series that collects Frank King’s seminal Gasoline Alley strips. While these books are fitting testaments to King’s incredible illustrative talents,

Alberto Manguel
A Novel for All Times

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Daniel Francis
We Are Not a Nation of Amnesiacs

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

Stephen Henighan
Fighting Words

A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.

Alberto Manguel
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

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.

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?

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
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.

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.

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.

Stephen Henighan
How They Don’t See Us

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

Alberto Manguel
My Friendship With Rat And Mole

The books we love become our cartography.

Daniel Francis
Afghanistan

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

Daniel Francis
African Gulag

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

Alberto Manguel
Neighbourhood of Letters

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Daniel Francis
Identity in a Cup

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

Daniel Francis
Come to the Cabaret

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.

Jane Silcott
Natty Man

His look is self-concious, but well done.

Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet

Cylinders of oxy­gen rolled past like dolls, propped up in wire bas­kets. After the first few min­utes it all seemed normal.

Stephen Osborne
The Contest of Memory

Stephen Osborne uncovers the genesis of the poppy and how it became evidence of horror, a token of remembrance and a promise of oblivion.

Sarah Leavitt
3 Girls

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

Stephen Osborne
Iceman

Last month I had lunch with a good friend who years ago had told me that her parents, who immigrated to Canada after the war, were Holocaust survivors. I asked my friend, whose name is Slava, to tell me again about her parents, who had lived in Vilna, the ancient Lituanian city of Europe known for three centuries as the “Jerusalem of the north.”

Edith Iglauer
Sightseeing, Anybody?

The police officer turned us back and told us to for

Gregory Betts
Trench Poetry

The last thing in the world I wanted was to be an exhibit, or worse.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Saeko Usukawa Remembered

Senior Editor Mary Schendlinger remembers her friend and Geist contributor Saeko Usukawa.

Stephen Osborne
David Thompson Beats the Devil on the Kisiskatchewan River

Thompson’s free-ranging narrative of the New World must be the only one in which the devil is defeated at checkers.

Edith Iglauer
What?

At home Frank and I are mutually sympathetic to the obligation to face one another and speak loudly; or, when we are away, to supply each other with new batteries when we forget them; but we have no defence against the independent wandering behaviour of our hearing aids. They are always someplace else. I probably have spent one percent of my life, close to a whole year, looking for the damned things.

M.A.C. Farrant
Notes on the Wedding

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Stephen Henighan
Building Bohemia

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

Ross Merriam
Interview with Ann Diamond: Part 1

The first installment of an interview with writer Ann Diamond while she works on her new novel in Greece. Conducted by Ross Merriam.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Berlin Diary

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hakescher Markt became one of hippest neigh

Rose Hunter
c

A shuttle driver at LAX shares his idea for a Valentine’s Day gift.

EVELYN LAU
Reunion

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

Kathy Friedman
Tesoro

The man who told me to sit here is wearing a blue uniform. He asks me questions. “You’re going to sacrifice your body just to save some money,” he jokes.

David Albahari
Shuttle Survivors

On a recent trip to Paris, I met a young woman from Japan. But this is not a story about a sudden love affair, which one might expect in Paris.

Robert Everett-Green
Ordinary Weekly Deaths

If Toronto were like Baghdad, thirty-nine res

Lindsay Diehl
Kuta Beach

Boyfriends are trouble, I said. He leaned over and gave me a high-five.

Shelley Kozlowski
Paid Relationship

A eulogy delivered by email, from a woman living in Berlin to her lifelong friend in Vancouver.

Tom Walmsley
The Eaton Effect

Sometime in the late seventies Osborne and I walked down Spadina from Bloor to Front street, listening to Shein talk about the China Effect.

Linda Solomon
Nobody’s Fault

In multi-cultural Vancouver, strangers come together at a moment of crisis.

Bryan Zandberg
City Lectures

The organizers of tonight’s talk have branded it as a “raw exchange”—part of a series of uncensored literary gatherings around the city—and so they’ve invited three biting B.C. writers to get down to brass tacks for a group of strangers in the basement of the Vancouver Public Library. By some freak of programming, a punk-metal band is slaying the kids in the room down the hall tonight, which means every time a bookish-looking latecomer wades into our midst, a foul-sounding wave of hellish power chords does, too.

Robert Everett-Green
The Main

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.