She would see him sometimes around Yaletown, her former counsellor, heading glassy-eyed toward a bar or creeping up the back steps of the massage parlour.

The time had come for our marathon trek through Europe. I was ten, and hated it already.

A greying, sunburnt American mis­sionary stopped us in the fruit market and invited us for a drink.

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With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

I am down in the cabin and Ross, who is eighty feet up in the fire tower, sees smoke. He tries to report it but his radio isn’t working and nobody can understand him. They phone him back on the cell: does he need the water bombers? He says no, it’s just a spot fire. In that moment a huge gust of wind blasts through the cabin, blows a towel off a rack, slaps it against the valve of the water cooler and turns on the water.

My mother stands at the top of the stairs, thin as a skeleton and reeking of booze. “Are you drunk?” I ask. “No,” she says. “Have you had anything to drink today?” “No,” she says. Lies, all lies. There are always more.

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

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New bylaws for civic spaces.

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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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.

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.

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."

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

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.

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

Mastery of the self

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

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 returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Jill Mandrake a new series called Christmas Ghost Stories (Biblioasis), selected and illustrated by Seth.

This fast-paced, quirky, heart warming and hilarious novel captures the fast and loose crossovers of language and culture that make southeast New Brunswick unique.

This past December longtime Geist columnist Stephen Henighan did a promotional tour of western Canada for his latest novel, Path of the Jaguar.

Michael Hayward reviews Some Rain Must Fall, part of the six volume memoir by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

"The Orange Grove is dry and sparse and heartbreaking, much like the unnamed country in which it takes place."

When faced with the gnarly writing of Thomas Bernhard readers experience again and again the difficulty of summarizing what they are reading, of thematizing what they have read.

Pym’s loving but sly take on the world is reminiscent of Jane Austen, but I find Pym funnier and somehow more shrewd and gentle in her satire.

barbara findlay describes herself as a lawyer, and therefore a member of a privileged group, who did not herself have the same civil and human rights as everyone else: a paradox that became central to her life and her “lawyering.”

Three generations of the Crosby family live and die, but all you really need to know about Tinkers by Paul Harding is the writer’s exceptional use of language.

First there was the Canadian daredevil Ken Carter who, for five years (starting in 1976), made repeated attempts to jump the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-propelled car.

"Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call by Arthur Manuel is a helluva good read, in which smart people find ingenious ways to fight for change against a Canadian government that has been intractable, no matter which party is in power."

I Cycled into the Arctic Circle: A Peregrination by James Duthie and Matt Hulse (Saltire Society) is a “newly revived and revised edition of deaf Scotsman James Duthie’s rare journal.”

"Like most people who have seen the stand-up comedy and other stage-work of Charles Demers, I sure couldn’t pass up a book of his personal essays."

Gianni Celati’s new book Adventures in Africa (University of Chicago Press), is a wonderful anti-travel book by one of the great anti-literary writers of the day.

Roni Simunovic reviews several short stories by Chuck Tingle, including Slammed in the Butthole by my Concept of Linear Time and I’m Gay for My Living Billionaire Jet Plane.

Anne Michaels’s second novel, The Winter Vault, was published thirteen years after her debut, Fugitive Pieces. Was it worth the wait?

A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam contemplates the pillow, an ordinary object, as the buffer between internal and external life.

Running (Brindle & Glass), the first of a projected quartet of novels, unfolds between 1958 and 1960 in the fictional steel town of Raysburg, West Virginia, the setting of most of Maillard’s novels.

The hilarious story of Audrey Flowers’s mysterious upbringing in Newfoundland, narrated in part by her pet tortoise, is equally enjoyable on the second read.

Overqualified by Joey Comeau (ECW Press) is a collection of satiric cover letters handcrafted to make any HR worker cringe and every job seeker smile.

"Cedar, Salmon and Weed is probably not the Great Canadian Novel—but it could be the Great Bamfield Novel; it seems to have few competitors for that distinction."

Patty Osborne reviews Last Dance in Shediac by Anny Scoones.

In the Rock Clock app, you can set your own wake-up time or choose the Rock Time option, which wakes you up whenever Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is waking up, usually between four and six in the morning. There is no snooze option.

Mary Schendlinger sees The Babushkas of Chernobyl, Inaate/se and A Good American at the DOXA Festival.

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Begging the question of what can be defined as “form.”

The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people.

On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world.

It all started with a zesty little book about getting old.

Donald Creighton was a bigot and a curmudgeon, a cranky Tory with a chip on his shoulder. He was also the country’s leading historian, who changed the way that Canadians told their own story.

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

Lacking in drama and embarrassingly undemocratic, Canada’s origins owe a lot to old-fashioned politics and not much to European battles or transcontinental railways.

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging."

Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?"

Aboriginal people are creating a new version of Canada, and non-Aboriginals can lend a hand or get out of the way—Daniel Francis on the new Canadian narrative.

Daniel Francis discusses Canada's failing mental health care system and its long history of mistreatment.

The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend.

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."

Daniel Francis asks why a high-speed commuter route runs through Stanley Park, Vancouver's precious urban oasis.

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance.