Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.
Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN
"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."
Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper
Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.
Rebekah Chotem
American Doppelgänger
"It’s well documented that Hollywood films use Canada to stand in for the US, including Brokeback Mountain, Good Will Hunting, the Twilight series, Rambo’s First Blood and many, many more blockbusters."
Alison McCreesh
Tuque, Socks and Nothing Else
Alison McCreesh encounters snow in May, a bemused gas station attendant and a dumpster to cook behind on a trip across Canada.
M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds
We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.
Annabel Lyon
The Life You Can Save
Hint: It’s not your own.
Norbert Ruebsaat
A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.
Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes
Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.
Michael Hayward
The Muskwa Assemblage
"Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land."
Patty Osborne
A Cockney in China
At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.
Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear
Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.
Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past
For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.
Daniel Francis
Umpire of the St. Lawrence
Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.
Michał Kozłowski
Poets on Film
The Western Front, Canada’s longest running artist-run centre, recently hosted a public screening of two dozen or so films from their archive of readings by poets from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Patty Osborne
The Mere Future
Meet the new bosses of a futuristic New York. Same as the old boss?
Alberto Manguel
Pistol Shots at a Concert
The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.
JEROME STUEART
Road Trip
A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.
Katie Addleman
Greyhound
The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"
Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity
How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?
Rebekah Chotem
Room for the Real
Rebekah Chotem reviews the film adaptation of Room by Emma Donoghue.
Stephen Osborne
National Poetry Daze
CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day by reading a poem written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, which raises the question: are there no living poets who cut the mustard?
Michael Hayward
Coastal Memories
Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.
Stephen Henighan
Phony War
"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."
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.
You are clearly preoccupied with love. See the way you siftthrough the lint from your purse, searching for the backing ofan earring. See the runway of broken leaves and bread crumbscollecting under the emergency brake in your car. Messy, messy.
Gillian Wigmore
Crematorium
She lives in Prince George. in plastic bags on tuesday nights we load frozen corpses from industrial-sized freezers into the back of the suzuki.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
Darker Country
I have never been a success at anything in particular.
JONNY DIAMOND
Dave Is Dead
For a man who’d once picked a shard of glass from his cheek while laughing, Dave sure could write a pretty melody.
JOEY COMEAU
Dear Neopost
"The chance to put my Credit and Collections Management experience to work for your company is something I am willing to die for."
JACOB SCHEIER
Dear Office of Homeland Security
I began to run across 42nd Street, a trail of beer nuts behind me, making my way to TimesSquare, because I thought I should see The Lion King or smoke crack before I die, but could afford neither.
CHRIS GILPIN
Dear Sasquatch
You're the kind of creature who comes to events like these and sits in the corner writing confessional poetry.
BENJAMIN WOOD
Deleted Scene from a Lasting Relationship
Runner-up in the 2nd Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.
Rhonda Waterfall
Director, Saviour, Surgeon
In his hotel room the director took a mouthful of Scotch, swallowed a Viagra and then headed off to the gala.
BILLEH NICKERSON
Dorothy Stratten’s Tent Trailer
When I overhear my parents talkabout the death of Dorothy Stratten,the Playboy playmate first discoveredin a Vancouver Dairy Queen,I somehow confuse her with the womanwho sold my family our tent trailer.
GALE SMALLWOOD-JONES
Down East
My old pal Chuck asked me and my sister Stella to drive down east with him. We weren’t doing anything else at the time and so we jumped at the chance.
Drawn & Quarterly Volume 5
Drawn & Quarterly
KEGAN MCFADDEN
Easy
it’s easy: you pour a mug of beer & then a shot of bourbon. you light a match
CHRIS CASUCCIO
Elephant
sat behind the trailers with julie eatingthe peanut butter sandwiches peter’swife made that morning by the park sink
Enchantment & Other Demons
RAWI HAGE
Empty City
Ten thousand bombs had fallen and I was waiting for death to come and scoop its daily share from a bowl of limbs and blood. I walked down the street under the falling bombs. The streets were empty. I walked above humans hid
MICHELLE ELRICK
Ethelbert: Ten Days in May
Excerpt from Michelle Elrick's Then/Again.
Drunk Family Dog Trip
Leonard Cohen, a troupe of French-Canadian clowns, a person with an antiquated profession, an unusually tall municipal bureaucrat, Gordie Howe and others coalesce in these randomly generated CanLit premises.
MITIARJUK NAPPAALUK
Examinations
“Sanaaq! Qumaq’s blood is too weak and the same is true for Aanikallak’s. They’ll both have to go to hospital!” From Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, the first ever Inuit novel.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
99¢ Bin
A list of things you can get for 99¢.
JACOB WREN
A Kind of Dream Therapy
"And my theory about professional artists was as follows: Artists are not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community."
Always Waking Up in Montreal
"I follow my penis around town for a while, wandering aimlessly through all the women—why do I ever leave this city?"
ADAM GILDERS
Another Ventriloquist
In this excerpt from Adam Gilders' Another Ventriloquist, a father builds his daughter a swan's nest, a ventriloquist revises his act, and a beaver terrorizes a neighbourhood.
Michał Kozłowski
Antonia
Was it fever or was it the heat that made Antonia perspire so heavily?