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.

In a perfect world, the writers we love would have all their stories published as beautifully as The Red Tenda of Bologna has been.

David Cayley, whose work is often heard on CBC Ideas, has done a great service in preparing The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (House of Anansi), a text that makes a perfect companion to The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsc

My friend wrote that the first part of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader (Vintage) is "brilliantly erotic, hauntingly poetic and very romantic." Part Two, my friend wrote, is "a hideous trial of Germans by Germans. Post-war youth condemned their parents

The River Midnight by Lilian Nattel (Knopf) made me miss men a little, because it is a very sexy book. This is surprising, because it is about life in a Jewish village in Poland at the turn of the century, a place where women cut off their hair and w

Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home and The Presence of the Past, continues to have good luck with book titles: his new one is The Sense of Being Stared At (Crown). For those of us who have been haunted from t

Kris Rothstein reviewed the 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival. For more reviews, visit her Geist blog at geist.com/blog/kris.

Kristen Cheung reviews The Secret Lives of Litterbugs by M.A.C. Farrant (Key Porter).

Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Road (Knopf) presents a vision of unrelenting grimness as two nameless characters, a father and his young son, make their way beneath a sunless sky through a world adrift with ash, trudging across a post-apocalyptic Am

The Search Warrant (Harvill Press) is the English title given to Dora Bruder, Patrick Modiano’s account of his attempt to find out what happened to a fifteen-year-old girl who ran away from school in Paris on a winter night in 1941.

This year my brother supplied me with Ted Allbeury's The Seeds of Treason (New English Library), about a loyal British spy who falls in love with a Russian agent's wife and is manipulated into committing an act of treason. It's an intelligent story w

I picked up The Romance Reader by Pearl Abraham (Riverhead Books) from the New Arrivals shelf in the local library, probably because the back cover blurb said it was about life in a Hasidic family—from a woman's point of view. I haven't had much expo

On the same bill with The Harp was The Score, a full-length Canadian movie (directed by Kim Collier and produced by Trish Dolman and Leah Mallen) that was adapted from a play by the Electric Company Theatre. The film considers the ramifications of re

After the salt men pass a certain rock they all speak the salt language. Women are not allowed to hear this language, nor are they allowed to look in the direction of the lake where the salt language is spoken....The film is called The Salt Men of Ti

The Black Cat Collective, a group of young Vancouver writers frustrated (in their own words) by "Vancouver's lethargic literary scene," has taken matters into its own hands with The Skinnier Leg of the Journey, a collection of short stories by Lisa M

Patty: What I liked about Alan Cumyn’s The Sojourn (McClelland and Stewart) is the way he thrusts us into a muddy trench in the middle of World War I, where the narrator is carrying a load of something called iron pig’s tails on his shoulders and his

Stan Persky’s The Short Version: An ABC Book (New Star Books) is a “miscellany” that Persky defines as a book “composed in alphabetically arranged entries of indeterminate length that can run from an aphorism to a complete essay or story.” Persky got

Two days later I took Wayman’s workshop, Catching Fire, which was guaranteed to inspire us to get writing. He told us, among other things, that once we became writers we would no longer read for pure pleasure because we would always be analyzing what

The Shipping News is a novel about Newfoundland written by E. Annie Proulx (Scribners), an off-Islander who states frankly in her disclaimer that "the Newfoundland in this book, although salted with grains of truth, is an island of invention." Nevert

J. G. Farrell’s version of a prison is the British Residency in the fictional Krishnapur. There a group of ex-pats take shelter when Indian peasant soldiers turn on their British colonizers and slaughter four hundred of them in a nearby settlement.

The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence is a classic Canadian novel, and nothing short of a great film would do it justice. Kari Skogland's film is a subtle meditation on Prairie social life and taboos in the mid-twentieth century. It’s also a complex a

The dysfunctional family is a familiar theme in literature these days, and Sarah Sheard's new novel The Swing Era (Knopf) is an exception only in that it is so good. It's the story of a young woman who returns home from abroad following her mad mothe

Tim Winton’s elegiac collection of seventeen linked short stories, The Turning (HarperCollins), explores the frailty and foibles of human existence, the power and pain of memory and the mighty wildness of western Australia. Characters reappear in lar

My local library has introduced a program called Speed Reads. In the interests of increasing the circulation of the most popular books, a patron may borrow a best-seller for just a week, and very steep fines are imposed for late returns. Under these

For many years, the poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst has immersed himself in studying the Aboriginal cultures and languages of the Pacific northwest coast, studies that culminated in his acclaimed Masterworks of the Classical Haida My

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

"Canadians have long been convinced that we do not know much, or care much, about our own history, but a new study suggests that this truism is not true."

A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language.

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas.

The canoe as a fetish object, a misreading of Canadian history and a symbol of colonial oppression.

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible.

In this essay, Daniel Francis discusses how Gerda Munsinger—a woman with ties to the criminal underworld—shaped Canadian politics in the 1960s.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

Reflections on John Updike's death.

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Slot machines sing their astral music. The tape recorder turns off. “Do you talk to friends about sex?” he asks.

There may be more to reality TV than meets the eye.

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York.

The books we love become our cartography.

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

Is it the icons of Canadian pop culture—hockey fights, Tim Hortons coffee, Don Cherry’s haberdashery, Rick Mercer’s rants—that reveal the deepest truths about us?

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.