For the sake of the large romantic gesture

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Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

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No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

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Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

Playing against the fastest chess player in the world.

"You have bruises / There was time / You spent trying to / Heal them. / As in, time wasted."

That’s one for the rice bag!

The maple leaf no longer feels like a symbol of national pride.

"my point that / i is but a : colon grown / too long"

"The following resume / arrived by fax: One ex-military / man, 52, applying / for duty ..."

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

Scrape every last bit of English out of your throat.

Who puts those little stickers on the apples in the grocery store?

Remembering Norbert Ruebsaat.

Destroying books for the greater good.

Losers: you have a lifetime to hunt.

"I never went looking for them."

Tell me again how long the trip is?

Fill the room with a flock of moths.

Any resemblances to persons living or dead are purely vindictive.

The secret is in the velvet.

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would

Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.

Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

L.B. Foote fled Newfoundland to avoid life as a cod fisherman and became Winnipeg's best-known photographer, chronicling Boomtown's growth, energy and struggles.

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.

It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, "The Twelve-Year-Old Poet." On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.

I answered the ad: SWM likes to dance. Called him up (said his name was Jay), suggested we meet at the local cafe Tuesday night, something different, a performance poet performing. Free coffee and cookies, the place rocking with middle-aged angst.

And then I remembered an important event. It happened at a funeral in St. Paul’s chapel for a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had overdosed in her Gastown hotel room. The small chapel was half full, and very quiet. There were a couple of fresh flower arrangements in front of the cheap, closed coffin. Most of the congregation were other prostitutes dressed in their working clothes, and a few pimps. One woman apologized to Brother Tim for having nothing black to wear, except for lingerie and a leather miniskirt.

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.

During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!

Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that "prompt," both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

At the 2005 Vancouver International Film Festival I watched The Harp, a short film that is written and produced by John Bolton, who used to share a music stand with my daughter in the local youth orchestra. John gave up playing the viola years ago, b

Another story about love between two misfits, The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (Breton Books) by Sheldon Currie, should have been called Margaret's Museum, like the highly praised movie that came out of it. If it hadn't been for our astute Geist intern,

Sarah Maitland reviews The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (Random House).

The Girl Wants To, edited by Lynn Crosbie (Coach House) overwhelms its readers with sheer volume. It contains everything from cartoons to photos, to articles and stories and poems, to exhibit documentation.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (Rutgers) was first published in 1857, and is now reprinted as another in Rutgers’ Subterranean Lives series. Described as “the first full-length example of American drug literature,” this account is closely mode

Until I found The Glenwood Treasure by Kim Moritsugu (Dundurn), I thought writers of adult books were ignoring one of the tried-and-true plots of children’s books: the joys and pitfalls of searching for treasure. Blithe is the quiet daughter of swank

Monique Proulx’s long-awaited novel, The Heart is an Involuntary Muscle (Douglas & McIntyre), is the story of Florence, a web designer leading a safe virtual life. When she finds out that her father’s dying words feature prominently in a book being w

Most of the interesting books to be found on the subject of home and place, where we live and how we relate to it, are American, but The Inner Green (Maa Press), is a collection of natural history and personal essays by K. Linda Kivi and Eileen Deleh

One reality of modern publishing is that this season’s new books are next season’s remainders. This harsh fact is compounded by the inexorable disappearance of good used bookstores everywhere, with the result that many excellent books that have had t

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

In my reading life I’ve been locked in YA (young adult) land ever since I found myself surrounded by a gaggle of teenage nieces at a family party. I tried the usual icebreakers about school and friends, but the conversation really got going when I as

I had fun in the gifted class in elementary school because my parents never pressured me to become a sensation in spelling, or science—or, like Maya, the ethereal figure in Nancy Huston’s tense novel Prodigy (McArthur), a brilliant ten-year-old piani

There are few appearances by God in The Interpreter of Maladies (Mariner Books), a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri’s settings are both secular and multicultural, and the challenge facing her characters is t

The Labradorians: Voices from the Land of Cain (Breakwater) is another big compilation (500 pages), this one made by Lynne Fitzhugh from the pages of Them Days, a quarterly journal of oral history that has been published in Happy Valley, near Goose B

During a trip to Ireland last spring, I remembered Charles Foran's The Last House of Ulster: a Family in Belfast (HarperCollins), so when I got back to Canada I tracked it down at the library. It describes Foran's fourteen-year relationship with the

When I was an undergrad, I took a psychology class in which the professor described various types of creativity. One of them was the creative act of taking things already in existence and reorganizing, reordering, recreating them to make something ne

In an interview reported in The Life of Yousuf Karsh by Maria Tippett (Anansi), Karsh said that he strove to bring out “the strength and personality” of men and “the charm and beauty” of women—an aesthetic purpose that he never abandoned, and one tha

Those who have read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Vintage), and those who have seen the film version, will remember that the sole possession of the eponymous patient, Count László de Almásy, was a battered copy of Herodotus’s Histories, an

The Holy Forest by Robin Blaser (Coach House) is not a book about ecology, although it does remind us of the concept of the sacred grove, which is central to aboriginal belief systems in which language and knowledge are said to come from certain land

For Christmas I asked for The Life of Margaret Laurence by James King (Knopf) because I had read the reviews and articles that were published upon the book's release, and they piqued my interest in a literary icon whose life story I had always believ

On the eighth night of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, my girlfriend and I and about 175 other people crowded into the Vancity Theatre to see The Love That Won’t Shut Up, the first production in the Out on Screen Film and Video Society’s Queer His

The Man Who Killed Houdini by Don Bell (Véhicule Press) is the story of J. Gordon Whitehead, who, as the accepted story goes, was chatting with Houdini in Montreal, along with three McGill students, when he unexpectedly punched Houdini in the stomach

In The Living Unknown Soldier (Henry Holt), the French historian Jean-Yves Le Naour tells the story of “Anthelme Mangin,” an amnesiac discovered wandering on the train-station platform in Lyon in February 1918. He was assumed to be a prisoner of war

The current film festival season features two movies written by Geist correspondents Tom Walmsley and Peg Thompson.... Peg Thompson's movie we have seen: it's called The Lotus-Eaters, and it's set in the sixties on one of the Gulf Islands of BC, in

Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.

The Group of Seven “vision” is an inadequate way to describe an urban, multiracial, industrial society like Canada, and pretty much always was.

In Bangkok as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours.

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

The top-selling American novel of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The phrase “the Christ” reminds us that the second word originally meant something along the lines of “the person who has been anointed.” By the twentieth century, the article had been dropped, making “Christ” sound like the family name of Sometime Carpenter Jesus, offspring of Joe and Mary Christ, brother of Jim Christ who keeps cropping up in the New Testament. But a couple of generations after Jesus lost His definite article, His spokesmen on Earth were still “the Reverend” So-and-so or even “the Reverend Doctor” until the editors of Time and their kind followed Samson’s example and warning: metaphor ends in 25 metres—smote them with the jawbone of an ass.

The movie Wordplay, directed by Patrick Creadon (IFC Films, available on DVD), takes us into the arcana of crossword fanatics, who call themselves puzzle heads. Once a year they come from all over the U.S. to sit at long tables in a room at the Marri

Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press) in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.

Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.

Art museums and geographical exp

The theatre is plush, high-ranking and named after the Queen. I don’t know the name of the play but C does. C brings me to the theatre when I go. I undergo a pleas­ant transformation when I go to the theatre. I wear a tie, black shoes and a sports coat. At first it was difficult, “not my style.”

In 1971 I went to work as a reporter at the Ottawa Journal. The newspaper depended for much of its copy on a roster of freelancers who would get their assignments by phone and drop by the office to deliver their articles. One of these contributors was D’Arcy Marsh.

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

I first tried to read J. M. Coetzee in 1994, when I was twenty-three. I failed.

Last summer, in anticipation of the opening round of the World Cup of soccer, the largely immigrant population of the narrow side street in Lisbon where I was renting an apartment draped their windows with flags. The green and red of Portugal predominated, but the blue planet on a gold-and-green background of Brazil also hung from some windows.

Over dinner, I asked the Québécoise writer Sylvie Desrosiers, the author of successful novels for both adults and younger readers, whether her books had been translated into English. “Non, pas en anglais,” she said.

In 1999, when I returned to Canada from London, England, to teach Spanish at the University of Guelph, I was handed an introductory Spanish textbook and told that two-thirds of my teaching load was basic language instruction. The textbook was American.

During the power cut that paralyzed Ontario in August 2003, the residents of my townhouse condominium complex began talking to each other. It was an event that took me by surprise.

In 1982 I had my first argument with an American about Saddam Hussein. As an undergraduate at an American liberal arts college where everyone read the New York Times, I supplemented my reading by browsing the British papers.

As Canada is one of the world's most urbanized countries, a reader knowing nothing of contemporary Canadian writing might expect to find a surfeit of urban novels in our bookstores. Yet novels explicitly set in Canadian cities form a mere sliver of our novelistic production.

The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much damage as the throttling of the book market by the Chapters-Indigo chain.

Cakchiquel, the third most widely spoken of Guatemala’s twenty Mayan languages, is understood by more than 400,000 people. It is blessed with a larger population base than most Native American languages but is cursed by its location.