Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.
Stephen Osborne
Hospitals of the Mind
A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N
Tiffany Hsieh
Church on Queen
Here they are our people.
Randy Fred
Resistance and Renewal
After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.
Celia Haig-Brown
Resistance and Relentlessness
The long road to decency and justice.
Rick Maddocks
The Other 9/11
Chileans remember when their government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.
Carmen Tiampo
Wash With Like Colours
People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?
Patty Osborne
Underwire
"We got into Zellers through jewellery, purses and umbrellas, stockings and underwear and into brassieres, where our momentum deserted us. Now we were both in unfamiliar territory."
Myrna Garanis
World-Class Hotel
Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.
Stephen Osborne
Defining Moments
The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment, a you moment, a me moment...
Sara Cassidy
Gravitass
A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Meanwhile, in 1666
Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.
Robert Everett-Green
Licorice Roots
A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.
Margaret Nowaczyk
Contact No Contact
Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.
Randy Fred
Seeing Things
When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.
Stephen Osborne
Reading in Summer
Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.
Marko Sijan
Peace on Earth
"My father believes the world is coming to an end, yet he commits his life to curing the sick." Dispatch by Marko Sijan.
Lucianne Poole
Chainsaw Man
A man with a chainsaw boarded the number 7 bus at about 7:45 a.m., when I was on my way to work in downtown Ottawa.
Kristen den Hartog
Solace
Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.
Jeff Shucard
My Week in Tunisia
Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.
Jordyn Catalano
Goodbye and Good Luck
A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.
Hàn Fúsēn
Soy Alérgico
“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”
Jonathan Montpetit
The Art of Shaving Oneself
In search of a unified self.
Andrea Routley
Thank You All For Coming
25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.
David Albahari
The Art of Renaming
Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way?
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.
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.
Eve Corbel
Getting It Wrong
It's human nature to jump to the wrong conclusion–and stick with it.
Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail
What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.
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
Empires of Film
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.
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.
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.
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.
JILL MANDRAKE
Elementary
On the merry-go-round, you just shouted out a destination and all the kids pushed until everyone agreed we’d arrived.
CONNIE KUHNS
Life After Virginity
A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock.
Kathleen Winter
BoYs
Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.
Ann Diamond
How I (Finally) Met Leonard Cohen
On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.
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.