Shiny bras and worn-in sweaters—the clothes do make the woman.
Stephen Osborne
Everything Is Perfect
In 1946, a young bride writes home about her month-long sea voyage to her new home on Baffin Island.
Ven Begamudre
Memory Game
A writer talks about personal health issues and their connection to his family history.
M.A.C. Farrant
The Outlook for Quirky
Space travel, world religions and quotes from Pascal are just a few of the topics covered in these little phone calls between friends.
Stephen Osborne
Mr. Tube Steak and the Schoolteacher
Former Iranian schoolteacher, Mehrar Arbab escaped execution, moved to Canada and now earns a living sellingAll Beef Smokies.
David Albahari
My Father’s Hands
Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.
David Albahari
My Father’s Hands
Walking along the streets of Paris, watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs.
Stephen Osborne
The Banff Protocols
Banff: a collection of scenic views and a setting for the Avant-Garde?
Stephen Osborne
Stories of a Lynching
On the night of the last Wednesday of February 1884, at about ten o’clock, a gang of armed men entered a farmhouse near Sumas Lake in southern B.C., woke the inhabitants at gunpoint and took away with them a teenage boy who was being held in the cust
Susan Crean
Milton and Michel
Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution.
Christy Ann Conlin
Coming Ashore
The dog turns his butt to the stinging spray and wind but my boyfriend and I face the water, watching the massive waves crash on the shore. We are drenched in seconds and we have to shout over the wind. It’s exhilarating.
Margaret Malloch Zielinski
Boarding with Mrs. Higgins
Mrs. Higgins lived with her legless brother and her blind husband in a tall, narrow old house in Nottingham. The room I rented from her in the 1950s was just below her sitting room, where she kept a life-size portrait of Lenin.
Stephen Osborne
Virtual City
Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages.
Edith Iglauer
Red Smile
When I was living in New York in the 1960s, almost everyone I knew was walking or running to the office of some psychiatrist.
Jill Boettger
Born in the Caul
According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.
Stephen Osborne
Dancing with Dynamite
Public bombings have a profound effect on cities, even if the bomb is a coconut filled with beans and rice.
Rachel Lebowitz
Cottonopolis
"A rookery of dead ends and curved lanes. Everywhere heaps of debris. Pigs rooting in eyes." Explore Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, in poem.
Edith Iglauer
My Lovely Bathtub
First published in Geist #30 and now in the 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition.
Edith Iglauer
Wait, Save, Help
When I was twelve my father enrolled me in a typing course from which I emerged typing with two fingers.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Ursula
She was a conversationalist, a home builder and a deliverer of calves. Those who loved Ursula will miss her adventurous soul.
Edith Iglauer
Snowed In at the Sylvia
I had my car at the hotel but snow was expected, and driving home alone in a snowstorm around the hairpin curves edged with deep ravines on Highway 101 was the last thing I wanted to do.
Stephen Osborne
Stranger
Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table.
David Albahari
Bird in the Willow
Some
Jane Awde Goodwin
Dear Doctor
The Health Hotline can only do so much for the exotic animals swimming in a hole on your forehead.
"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.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Media Studies
These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.
CONNIE KUHNS
Fifty Years in Review
A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.
J. Jill Robinson
Hot Pulse
I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.
Stephen Osborne
The Great Game
The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.
CONNIE KUHNS
Last Day in Cheyenne
Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.
CONNIE KUHNS
Strange Women
Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.
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.
D.M. FRASER
Surrounded by Ducks
D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.
DAVID COLLIER
The Last Grain Elevator in Regina
When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor.
Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail
What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.
Eve Corbel
Getting It Wrong
It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.
HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves
When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.
Stephen Smith
Rinkside Intellectual
Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.
Brad Cran
Fact
Leading Men
"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.
Brad Cran
Fact
Empires of Film
Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois
Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.
Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur
Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.
Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl
Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.
Daniel Francis
War of Independence
World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.
HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik
Hal Niedzviecki commemorates his Jewish grandfather—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.
CONNIE KUHNS
Life After Virginity
A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock.
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.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
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.
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."
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
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
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
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
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
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
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.
That’s what matters to me, these stories, you kick them up in the dust and they get inside you.
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?
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.
SUE GOYETTE
Fidelity
Three poems by Sue Goyette, excerpted from her book Penelope.
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.
Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers
Peops: Portraits & Stories of People
Paul Martin & Companies: Sixty Theses on the Alegal Nature of Tax Havens
Pacific Meats & Frozen Foods, Inc.
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.
GORAN SIMIC
Old People and Snow
My beautiful old ones are disappearing slowly. They simply leave, without rules, without a farewell.
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?
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:
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.
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."
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."
MARY MEIGS
Tripwire
They felt comfortable in their resemblances, too comfortable to note that the resemblances contained differences like tripwires cunningly laid and hidden.
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."
KATIE DAUBS
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.
TROY JOLLIMORE
Tom Thomson in Transit
His wallet’s stuffed with currency from allmanner of countries not in business now;his camera aches for discontinued film.
The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess
EMILY SCHULTZ
Soft Ice Cream
Sadness has no reasons. Sadness is a luxury of spare time, a piece of pie leftover, the blueberry’s skin caught between your teeth, the black blear of happiness.
AMY DENNIS
Skin Graffiti
Use your grandmother’s knitting needles if they are steel and sharp, her crochet hooks. Hell, you could even use the split edge of this table. Slide your inner arm against the jagged grain, watch the splinters scrape you raw.