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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

Krazy & Ignatz 1937
CARY FAGAN
Laughing Heir

"He listened to the message three times, then sent a text to Ciara begging off dinner without giving a reason."

RUSSELL F. HIRSCH
Lemke Overboard

A sleepwalking old man brings a community together in the waves of the sea.

Let’s Go Dancing

A poem from Randall Magg’s book about Terry Sawchuk, the legendary hockey goalie who got his start with the Detroit Red Wings.

Steven Heighton
Lost Diary

At first the sound was like a raw stropping of steel on steel although we had little such heavy stuff along...

ANAKANA SCHOFIELD
Malarky

"Naked men. At each other all the time, all day long. I can’t get it out of my head."

MICHAEL CRUMMEY
Making The Fish

Two motions with the knife, across the throat below the gills and along the bare length of the belly, like a Catholic crossing himself before a meal.

BILLEH NICKERSON
McPoems

Poems of memorable customers: the one who ordered a hundred cheeseburgers, the one who bought three meals a day at the drive-thru, the drunk one in a clown suit, and more.

Katie Addleman
Middle of Nowhere

“Thank god for you,” Polly said one day after work, as she and Ruth sat under the fluorescent lights of the town’s only bar. “You’re the only normal one here.”

JANNIE EDWARDS
Members

Honourable mention in the 8th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

Stephen Smith
Men + Men

We have men on the slope and men on the ridge. In the gully, more men. Men on the main road wait for the men on the esker to move up onto the ridge so that they (the men on the road) can take their (the esker-men’s) place. Men hesitate and grumble. T

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Blood Memory

In the home for unwed mothers, as she waits for me to be born, one word in Cree is spoken over and again in her head—macitwawiskwesis, bad girl.

IRINA KOVALYOVA
Blood Keeper

"Perhaps it was necessary to dissect human beings, to slice into their flesh, before one could begin to understand them."

Patty Osborne
The Sound of Hockey
GILLIAN JEROME
Weeble World

Evil is not darkness, I thought to myself. It’s noise.

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.

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.

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.

Stephen Osborne
War Stories

A question of some concern among my friends when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties was how old you had to be to go to war.

Michał Kozłowski
Pleasant Artistic Experience

An intrepid Geist correspondent narrowly avoids being stabbed by a moose-antler letter opener in Whitehorse.

Katharine O'Flynn
On the Track

I started walking, seriously. It was the bone scan that got me going. The healthy solid green was spongy with rotting black holes.

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.

Anson Ching
Fact
the universal human

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Getting past the past

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

Daniel Francis
Fact
writing from an early grave

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Fact
Sailing the roaring forties

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

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

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
The messy back of history

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
Fact
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Fact
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
Fact
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Peggy Thompson
Fact
A moment with holden

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

JILL MANDRAKE
Fact
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
Fact
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Anson Ching
Fact
THE BELL KEEPS TOLLING

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
DEFINED BY DUMPLINGS

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Common Shaman

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Walk Another Path

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

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.

David Mitchell
Imaginary City

Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.

Stephen Osborne
Snows of Yesteryear

A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.

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.

Michael Hayward
Into the Heart of the Landscape

Michael Hayward on the recursive nature of reading and writing inspiration.

Barry Kirsh
Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships

Barry Kirsch on the juices and nutriments of imagination.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Broken Hearted

Kelsea O'Connor on two comic-obsessed teens in rural Nova Scotia.

Thad McIlroy
Trial by Water

Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Paul DeLorme
Escapist

A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.

JILL MANDRAKE
Unity, Order and Equilibrium

Jill Mandrake on the beauty of crafted visual poetry.

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?

Sewid-Smith Daisy
Three Stories About Moving

The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.

Anson Ching
Zen in Ecotopia

Anson Ching on letting the facts form your privilege.

Patty Osborne
A Korean Friend

Patty Osborne on a North Korean novel from North Korea.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven

Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.

Ivan Coyote
Gender Failure

It didn’t feel like there was any possible way this could really be happening—nineteen years of binding my breasts, even more years trying not to hate them.

C. E. COUGHLAN
Three Days in Toronto

A trip across the country, with didgeridoo and Trudeau too.

Edith Iglauer
Perfect Bite

A warm spring night, a country club dance, a date with an attractive young man—and braces on my two front teeth.

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.

Anson Ching
The City in an Apartment

Anson Ching on a time and place, and the people who live there.

Kris Rothstein
Pencil Pushers

Kris Rothstein on the current state of employment in Bullshit Jobs and Temp.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Hàn Fúsēn
Little Trouble in Chinatown

Limits of the language.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.