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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."

M.A.C. Farrant
Selected Days

On Dorothy Parker Day we wear wool suits and little hats, smoke with cigarette holders and have a liver-coloured dachshund on a lead.

Shelley Kozlowski
Revving

It was the big sort of rhmmm-rhmmm you hear at demolition derbies and ball-busting monster truck rallies. It was loud. Who could be sitting in their car, revving the engine?

Thad McIlroy
Check-Out

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

Michał Kozłowski
In the Flesh

From Jean Talon to Lenin’s Tomb

Evel Economakis
Leningrad Redact

“If we paid protection money to the KGB, there’d be nothing left for salaries. And we call it the FSB now.”

Christine Novosel
Stuck on the Grid

Christine Novosel talks life in Scotland: "What Glasgow lacks in beauty and brains, it makes up for with wit and resilience."

Stephen Osborne
The Orwell Effect

Stephen Osborne on the origins of the International 3-Day Novel Contest, the time-honoured writing contest that flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce.

Sheila Heti
Law of Small Numbers

Forty percent of people believe that if they practice enough, they can predict the outcome of a flipped coin. Would my current love end the way my past ones had?

Margaret Nowaczyk
Ad Infinitum

"I stared in awe at the pink-petalled flowers of human tissue blossoming in the mass of a collapsed grey-brown lung as it was reinflated during a thoracotomy."

Alex Khramov
Walrus Keeper

One of the advantages of life back then was that people had jobs that could be easily defined. None of your strategic walrus initiative development consultants or anything.

Jane Silcott
Ducks

At first no one notices when the dog rushes your daughter as if she’s some kind of game and your daughter runs as if it’s some kind of chase.

Antoine Dion-Ortega
South Side Malartic

People are getting either sick or mad, or both.

Mandelbrot
Zero Degree Dining

The Kathmandu Café in multiple dimensions.

M.A.C. Farrant
4-Day Forecast for Wendy

"Today your dog will decide to end things. Your dog, who is wearing a red vinyl jacket and is tied to the tree on the boulevard outside the thrift store."

Sarah Pollard
Mavis in Montreal

Sarah Pollard makes a pilgrimage to Montreal to hang out and write where Mavis Gallant hung out and wrote.

Marjorie Doyle
Goin’ to MUN

"'Goin’ to university' was a cover or alibi, rather than a statement of fact, providing the indolent and the imaginative with richer lives than simply having a job."

Stephen Osborne
Grinkus and Pepper

Stephen Osborne is entranced by a pair of eccentric, high profile students while on a university tour in 1964.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Petites Pattes

Montreal was once the “City of a Thousand Steeples.” Today it’s the city of a thousand church bazaars open on Saturdays to keep the cash flow up.

Eve Corbel
Guide to Literary Footwear

Espadrille, paduka, chopine—Eve Corbel illustrates a guide for readers on some of the fanciest footwear found in literature.

Robert Everett-Green
Checkered Past

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

JEROME STUEART
Road Trip

A collection of Jerome Stueart's Greyhound sketches, including one Vitruvian bus driver.

Katie Addleman
Greyhound

The driver said, “Are you fit to travel, sir?” and the crack smoker said, “Are any of us fit to travel?"

Eve Corbel
The 99: Bus Without Pity

How did the 99 B-Line bus route come to be the locus of the most heartless transit rides in Greater Vancouver?

Stephen Osborne
Insurgency

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Luke MacLean
Je M'Appelle Raphael

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

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.

Kris Rothstein
The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Cant be Jammed

From its title, The Rebel Sell: Why Culture Can’t be Jammed (HarperCollins) looked like it might be a source of new ideas about resisting the fast-paced corporate world. But the polemic of the authors, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, informs us that

Carra Noelle Simpson
The Rice Queen Diaries

In The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp Press), Daniel Gawthrop grapples with his own version of white male seeking Asian girls: gay white male seeking Asian men. He starts with a high-school crush on Bruce Lee, then describes his initiation and expe

Patty Osborne
The Return

Fans who are missing Inspector Morse, the famous fictional British detective who, unfortunately, has been killed off, should try reading the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries by Hakan Nesser (translated by Laurie Thompson; Doubleday).

Michael Hayward
The Red Tenda of Bologna

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

Stephen Osborne
The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich

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

Norbert Ruebsaat
The Reader

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

Patty Osborne
The River Midnight

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

Stephen Osborne
The Sense of Being Stared At

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
The Rest Is Silence

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

Kristin Cheung
The Secret Lives of Litterbugs

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

Michael Hayward
The Road

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

S. K. Page
The Search Warrant

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.

Barbara Zatyko
The Seeds of Treason

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

Patty Osborne
The Romance Reader

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

Patty Osborne
The Score

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

Norbert Ruebsaat
The Salt Men of Tibet

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

Geist Staff
The Skinnier Leg of the Journey

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

The Sojourn

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

Norbert Ruebsaat
The Short Version: An ABC Book

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

Patty Osborne
The Sound and the Fury

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

Mandelbrot
The Shipping News

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

Patty Osborne
The Siege of Krishnapur

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.

Kris Rothstein
The Stone Angel

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

Geist Staff
The Swing Era

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

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.

Anson Ching
the universal human

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

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

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

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

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

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

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

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

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

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

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

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

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

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

Christine Lai
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

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

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

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

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

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

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

JILL MANDRAKE
POINTS OF INFLECTION

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