Stephen Osborne reflects on the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Occupy movement, and a brunch with NaNoWriMo novelists.
Andrea King
Great Historical Curiosity
The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.
Joe Bongiorno
The Shī Fu
Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.
Carmen Tiampo
What Survives
My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone
KATHRYN MOCKLER
I Won’t Clean the Tub
He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.
Carolyne Montgomery
In the Pines
It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.
BILLEH NICKERSON
V4G 1N4
A poem about a postal code.
John Patterson
Devil’s Night
On Halloween in 1966, John Patterson's father burned down the Jones's house to give the neighbourhood kids a thrill.
GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Working Life for a Girl in the 1960s
We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.
M.A.C. Farrant
Stories from a West Coast Town
Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life
Jennesia Pedri
T-Bay Notes
Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice
Jocelyn Kuang
Candy Cap Magic
Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.
Erin Soros
Carbon
"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."
Jocelyn Kuang
27,000 Cups of Tea
Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Treaties
A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.
Randy Fred
Borderless
Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.
Michał Kozłowski
Corpse Reviver
The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.
Christine Novosel
Hived Off
Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.
Robert Everett-Green
Wholesome Reading
Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.
Barbara Zatyko
Stumped
Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.
Julie Vandervoort
Sewing Cabinet: Short Film
A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.
David Koulack
A Different Sort of Synagogue
David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.
Eve Corbel
Some Lesser-Known Emoji
Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.
Angela Wheelock
Something Like Armenian
Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.
EVELYN LAU
24 Sussex
Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.
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.
Jasmine Sealy on "You Can't Stay Here" by Jasmina Odor.
Stephen Osborne
Espresso Nerd Heaven
"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."
Rose Burkoff
Sun in Winter: A Toronto Wartime Journal 1942-1945
During World War II, Gunda Lambton and her two young children left England to live in Canada.
Patty Osborne
Barnacle Love
A review of Barnacle Love, a collection of short stories by Anthony De Sa.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Free to Be
Her story powers along; eventually she will arrive at the start, returning to the losses set down in the preface, losses so terrible we won’t mind if she chickens out.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Friend in Need
Helen Garner’s novel "The Spare Room" opens in Melbourne as the protagonist and narrator, a middle-aged woman also named Helen (hmm), prepares for the visit of Nicola, her dear friend.
Kris Rothstein
The Native Heath
Stolen honeycombs, a fiancé training to be a missionary in Africa, a picnic marred by quicksand and fog, a fundraising party for pig pensions...
JILL MANDRAKE
Unabashed Drawing
"Drawing the Line: The How to Draw Book" is best suited for young artists who are interested in graphic novels or comic stories.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Notes on Navigation
"This Accident of Being Lost" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (House of Anansi) is a sharp collection of short stories and poetry that resists the colonialism of contemporary Canada.
Mandelbrot
Ordinary Bodies
Together the images in Bathers constitute a supreme study of ordinary bodies, and demonstrate in visceral ways just how unique is the ordinary body: no two alike, each an expression of itself.
Michael Hayward
Jack Kerouac, Francophone
Jack Kerouac, that prototypically “all-American” writer, was born to Québécois parents, and raised in the midst of an expatriate French-Canadian community in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts.
JILL MANDRAKE
Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?
Published by The Writers' Exchange, “this book was created by Division 6, Mrs. Mehnert’s grade 3 class, at Thunderbird Elementary in the winter of 2014.”
roni-simunovic
VQFF 2017: Signature Move
Fawzia Mirza on the white, Western concept of coming out: "We have to let go of thinking that there’s one right way to be. It’s about finding better words and language to talk about the gay experience."
Patty Osborne
Better Late
A middle-aged man moves to a new city to restart his life, gets to know an old man named Oliver, and after only a few months realizes that he has fallen in love with both the new city and the old man.
Michael Hayward
Bookshop of the Heart
Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris regularly makes it onto lists like The World’s Coolest Bookstores and The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.
Patty Osborne
Anti-Poverty Connection
In 1997, when Internet connections were dial-up and most of us were just trying to figure out how the World Wide Web worked, a group of people had the foresight to see that the Internet could be a powerful tool for the anti-poverty movement.
JILL MANDRAKE
Page's Pages
The poet and artist P.K. Page wrote Mexican Journal (Porcupine’s Quill) from 1960 to 1963, while posted in Mexico with her husband, Ambassador W. Arthur Irwin.
Patty Osborne
Flying Canoe
When I tried to describe the weird and wonderful book Accordéon by Kaie Kellough (ARP) to two Québécoise friends, I had to resort to reading a few excerpts because my own words failed me.
CONNIE KUHNS
The Ove Within
For Ove, the central character in the film A Man Called Ove there is nothing ahead but frustration, disappointment and sadness. “It’s just chaos when you’re not here,” he says to his newly departed wife as he lays flowers on her grave.
roni-simunovic
Middle-Aged Soft Rock Band
The first thing John K. Samson said when he and his band stepped onstage at the Commodore Ballroom on February 2 was, “Hi, we’re a middle-aged soft rock band from Winnipeg, Manitoba.”
Michael Hayward
Another Way of Saying Goodbye
Those who were close to the late John Berger have spoken of his generosity, praising Berger’s collaborative nature and his ability to establish and sustain creative friendships throughout a long and productive life.
JILL MANDRAKE
Seabrook Adventure
In The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, Joe Ollmann begins with a reflective preamble called “Me and Mr. Seabrook,” part of which reads, “I realized that no one knew about Seabrook’s work—all his books were out of print at the time…”
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Graphic Heroism
The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Doubleday Canada) is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel offering feminist adaptations of folk tales wrapped in an epic-feeling love story.
Thad McIlroy
I'm Sorry
In Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Doubleday) the main character Jude says “I’m sorry” over 100 times. And he adds in “I’m so sorry” 30 times.
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.
To Be Read by My Children in the Event of My Demise
In Katie Daubs' short fiction, a father writes a deathbed letter to his children, explaining the surprising way he really met their mother.
CRAIG SAVEL
Traversing Leonard
"He had white hair at every angle, a paunch, and he didn’t bathe much. Colleagues joked about the Leonard Condensate, one whiff of which reduced matter into muck."
MARY MEIGS
Tripwire
They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.
ERIC DUPONT
Trouble at the Henhouse
"I now know that every omelette, every angel cake, every soufflé, and every bucket of Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken brings us closer to a better, more intelligent world, where cruelty and pettiness do not exist."
CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso
"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."
CARY FAGAN
My Father's Picasso
"You know what I think it's worth?" Goldie said. "Fifteen bucks for the frame."
Rhonda Waterfall
Night Kitchen
The phone rings at 11:30 at night and as soon as you hear your father’s voice you know something bad has happened.
No One Explains Things To Dogs
No one explains things to dogs. The voice that’s missing has left its aroma everywhere,along with the faint stale smells of those who used to be here:
ANTONINE MAILLET
Not Really French
So how can we be Québécois if we don’t live in Québec? Well, for the love of all that’s holy, where the hell do we live, then?
GORAN SIMIC
Old People and Snow
My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.
Veronica Gaylie
Old Timer Talkin’
Uncle Tom lies in St. Paul’s Emergency pacemaker jumping like a sockeye salmon while he teaches two nurses four verses of Danny Boy.
Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc.
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers
Jill Boettger
Poem For the Barn
Here is your rickety wooden poem. Here is your red, peeling paint poem, your weather-beaten and abused poem. Here is your hands-full-of-slivers poem, knuckle-broken and arthritic.
SUE GOYETTE
Fidelity
Three poems by Sue Goyette, excerpted from her book Penelope.
VIVEK SHRAYA
First Pluck
A young boy gets his first pair of tweezers after overhearing locker room conversations about body hair in this excerpt from God Loves Hair by Vivek Shraya.
Steven Heighton
Fireman's Carry
In this excerpt from Steven Heighton's new book, The Dead Are More Visible, a firefighter must decide what lives are worth saving in the heat of a four-alarm fire. The official line is that firefighters save people—but what about reptiles?
Five Stories, Nine Selves
That’s what matters to me, these stories, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Tom Walmsley
Kid Stuff
Moth fought his last fight in the basement of a church forty miles out of town. The crowd was polite and applauded after every round, but made hardly a sound while the punches were being thrown. None of the overhead lights were extinguished and there
King of the Lost & Found
BILL BISSETT
Kontest Carnage
langwage binds us 2gethr separatelee n parts n sharing almost replikating nevr reelee xact wun uv th biggest communal spells we ar all bound n unbound in