fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

Michael Hayward
The Library of Roguery

Jim Christy and the editors who worked on Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too should be congratulated for their uncanny ability to squeeze every last euphemism out of their thesauri.

Alberto Manguel
I Believe Because It’s Impossible

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Robertson Davies
Novelist, Playwright, Sex Machine

Robertson Davies' diaries reveal his zest for life and penchant for an act he refers to only as "h.t.d."

Thad McIlroy
Conditionally Paris

Thad McIlroy reviews Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano, a Nobel Prize-winning author.

Stephen Osborne
Frozen, Not Forgotten

"The miscellanist Rob Kovitz in his new book Dead and Cold has assembled, coordinated or otherwise summoned into being the best, the most spellbinding and the most chilblain-inducing account of death in the Arctic that you will ever read."

Kris Rothstein
Elixirs

Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.

A.D. Peterkin
Pulling the Goalie

Auto pilot, devil's handshake and four sisters on Thumb Street.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice

Leonard Cohen pays a visit to the neighborhood in song.

Rob Kovitz
Because a Lot of Questions Are Complex

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

Lily Gontard
Passage

Lily Gontard reviews Passage (2008), directed by John Walker.

Jane Silcott
Ducks

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic

People are getting either sick or mad, or both.

Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay

Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.

Michael Hayward
Cycling in Cities

"To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, an extended essay about 'the bicycle in the cultural imagination.'"

Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining

The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Martel’s Mountains

In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.

Stephen Henighan
Power of Denial

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

roni-simunovic
Teledildonics

"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."

Michael Hayward
Following Wind, Following Water

Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.

M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy

"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."

Stephen Henighan
Treason of the Librarians

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Grey Matters

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested

Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.

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.

Kristen Lawson
Anti-Apocalypse

Kristen Lawson on the hero's journey through "queer/feminist/Asian/West Coast/Rocky Mountain sensibilities."

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Castles, Countesses, and Cat Women

Kelsea O'Connor on queer lovers, gothic horror and fairy tale themes.

Kris Rothstein
You've Been Warned

Kris Rothstein on a no-nonsense Irish heroine.

Michael Hayward
An Atlas of Noir

Michael Hayward on an anthology of noir fiction set in neighbourhoods around Vancouver.

Michael Hayward
No One Knows

Unreliable narrator, post-modernist self-reference and contemporary literary references—Michael Hayward on the nature of the autobiography.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
A Matter of DNA

Mary Schendlinger on Fay Weldon's 48th or 53rd book, After the Peace.

Michael Hayward
Japanese Beatniks and Revised Boy Scouts

Michael Hayward on a selection of work from the writing collective known as "the Beats"

Thad McIlroy
The Smile Test

Thad McIlroy on Jan Morris's "Smile Test" throughout Canadian cities.

Patty Osborne
Queerspawn

Patty Osborne on twenty-four essays of "rants and reflections on growing up with LGBTQ+ parents."

Stephen Osborne
White Wampum

Stephen Osborne on Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson's Writings on Native North America.

Patty Osborne
With An Albanian Twist

Patty Osborne on Slow Twisting by Anonymous.

Anson Ching
Transpacific Trade, circa 1800

Anson Ching on Anna, Like Thunder.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
News in a Nutshell

Mary Schendlinger on Vox.com's podcast Today Explained.

Michael Hayward
Cast Out of Eden

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Coming of Age in Winteridge

Kelsea O'Connor on Our Animal Hearts by Dania Tomlinson.

roni-simunovic
Express Recycling Depot

Roni Simunovic reviews the Yaletown Return-It Express Depot.

Michael Hayward
Brion Gysin: Honorary Canadian

Michael Hayward on a collection of conversations with Brion Gysin—writer and counterculture legend.

Patty Osborne
Perfectly Adequate Expectations

Patty Osborne on the mixed review of Crazy Rich Asians.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
What They Say

Mary Schendlinger on Natalia Ginzburg's narrative of her family during the rise of Hitler and Mussolini.

Michael Hayward
Karl Ove Knausgaard: A tale of the tape

The final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle allows us to compare Karl Ove’s literary edifice with others of similar ilk—and bulk.

Michael Hayward
Mythos-Maker

Michael Hayward drove across the country to see Stephen Fry's Mythos.

Kristen Lawson
Cake Fails

Kristen Lawson on Nailed It!, a Netflix Original

Michael Hayward
Women at War

Michael Hayward on the newly translated The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich.

Michał Kozłowski
From the Heart

Michal Kozlowski on From the Heart of It All: Ten Years of Writing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

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.

Adam Lewis Schroeder
Seasons in the Abyss

My friend Eric moved to Los Angeles five years ago to become a rock star, only to learn that drummers and bass players in L.A. are unreliable, that nobody in L.A. goes to see live music and that the chicks in L.A. are all crazy. Once he got to wait at a stoplight behind Patricia Arquette, once Britney Spears came into the gym where he worked and one time a bouncer let him into a club ahead of Fabio, and none of these things made him famous.

Daniel Francis
Dates with Destiny

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned tha

Janet Warner
Remembering Andy

The first time I met Andy Warhol he was wearing a black sweater and pants; the second time he was wearing white tie and tails (it was at Lincoln Center). The third time I met him, at Arthur, the disco opened in the sixties by Sibyl Burton, he was wearing a jersey made of silver mail.

Michael McLeod
Strays

In early March 2003, when I arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I took to the streets of Taoyuan County to take some photographs. I was looking for anything—signs, market scenes, strange faces, cityscapes, bus stations, barber shops—but all I could see was dogs. These dogs were not pets, though they may once have been. They were strays—dogs that lived on their own.

Stephen Osborne
The Sweetness of Life

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book.

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?)

MARY MEIGS
Freewriting

Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that "prompt," both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).

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.

Annabel Lyon
Dark Hearts

I first tried to read J. M. Coetzee in 1994, when I was twenty-three. I failed.

Daniel Francis
Re-hanging the National Wallpaper

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

Stephen Henighan
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers

Last summer, in anticipation of the opening round of the World Cup of soccer, the largely immigrant population of the narrow side street in Lisbon where I was renting an apartment draped their windows with flags. The green and red of Portugal predominated, but the blue planet on a gold-and-green background of Brazil also hung from some windows.

Stephen Henighan
The Insularity of English

Over dinner, I asked the Québécoise writer Sylvie Desrosiers, the author of successful novels for both adults and younger readers, whether her books had been translated into English. “Non, pas en anglais,” she said.

Stephen Henighan
Translated from the American

In 1999, when I returned to Canada from London, England, to teach Spanish at the University of Guelph, I was handed an introductory Spanish textbook and told that two-thirds of my teaching load was basic language instruction. The textbook was American.

Stephen Henighan
White Curtains

During the power cut that paralyzed Ontario in August 2003, the residents of my townhouse condominium complex began talking to each other. It was an event that took me by surprise.

Stephen Henighan
Totalitarian Democracy

In 1982 I had my first argument with an American about Saddam Hussein. As an undergraduate at an American liberal arts college where everyone read the New York Times, I supplemented my reading by browsing the British papers.

Stephen Henighan
Writing the City

As Canada is one of the world's most urbanized countries, a reader knowing nothing of contemporary Canadian writing might expect to find a surfeit of urban novels in our bookstores. Yet novels explicitly set in Canadian cities form a mere sliver of our novelistic production.

Stephen Henighan
Kingmakers

The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much damage as the throttling of the book market by the Chapters-Indigo chain.

Stephen Henighan
Cakchiquel Lessons

Cakchiquel, the third most widely spoken of Guatemala’s twenty Mayan languages, is understood by more than 400,000 people. It is blessed with a larger population base than most Native American languages but is cursed by its location.

Stephen Henighan
Bad Spellers

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

Stephen Henighan
Reading the City

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

Marjorie Doyle
Child Traveller

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

Stephen Henighan
Lost Nationalities

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

Stephen Henighan
Witch Hunt

In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.

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.

Alberto Manguel
Idiot’s Fare

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.