My god, I think as I wait my turn in the wash­room of the Hotel Vancouver, all of these peo­ple look just like Carol Shields.

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We did what we weren’t supposed to do. We paid a local man to take us horseback riding. He was walking up and down the beach, waving papers and shouting, “Horses!” We signalled for him to come over, and we negotiated a price.

I haven’t been in Jerusalem for sixteen years and the first thing my friend shows me is the wall that separates them from the Palestinians.

The main reason that I open up my doors to people on the street is so that they would have a place to sort of come home.

Only when I settle down in the back seat of the cab do I notice that on the dashboard there are several stickers with the letter U, the sign of Ustashe. During the Second World War, Ustashe was the ruling party in the Independent State of Croatia.

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At the end of the Electrolux era, a veteran salesman closes his store to start a new job at Future Shop.

We look back and so much of the past seems to portend what would come later. The man in the seat in front of me on the Greyhound bus was returning to Edmonton from his annual vacation in Las Vegas, where in the off-season you can get a cheap room wit

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The Borderland Foundation documents borderland culture from its headquarters in the Jewish ghost town of Sejny, Poland.

Reporting on the Michael Jackson trial from a Best Value Inn in Santa Maria, California.

How do you have a good time in Warsaw? Sing Neil Diamond songs in a karaoke bar.

Ayurveda massage will leave you feeling like the bones have been secretly extracted from your body.

When I am dying, it would be comforting tobe told that I had been the human equivalent of a good dog. Loving,compassionate, faithful, understanding, dignified, but also goofy, curious,fun, protective, a friend. Let’s leave out obedience.

The next performer, Coco, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, stood on his back legs and hopped alongside a woman wearing white go-go boots who jiggled her hips in time to “ymca.” Coco weaved between her legs, rolled across her feet, lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air. The woman’s brow was furrowed and sweat ran down her face. Coco bounded in front of her, then backed through her legs and sneezed twice. The judges looked at each other and one of them wrote somethingdown.

It’s dark when I get off the bus by the corner store. Not the best area of town. The only other person in sight is lying on the sidewalk.

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

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This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.

Mr. C.F. Keiss, awealthy American visitor from Bucyrus, Ohio, met death with “tragic suddenness”under the wheels of the new City auto ambulance at the corner of Pender andGranville Streets yesterday afternoon.

When we hitchhiked back to Castle­gar it was dark and the lights on the car dashboards flickered and their glass reflected the faces of the men who’d picked us up and who, I imagined, knew everything there was to know about electricity.

Not long ago on a sticky Saturday night at a comedy club in Madison, Wisconsin, the funeral director with whom I was having a drink told me how long it takes for the formaldehyde to replace the blood in a dead person’s arteries. He drank a light beer

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At the Tim Hortons on Young Street in Halifax, a man clears his throat, a rough-looking older guy in the back corner, staring out the window. One knee, angled out from the table, jigs up and down; the rest of him is quite still. A sheet of notepaper

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One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected ­butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.

I don’t take public transit very often, which is a failing—not just environmentally, but also personally, because sometimes that forced contact with the rest of the populated world can be profound. In Japan, many years ago, I was trapped in the small space between train cars by a crowd of schoolboys; my claustrophobia reached such a level that one leg began to judder up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, and the only thing that prevented me from climbing out over the tops of my fellow passengers’ heads was the gaze of a man about a foot away who conveyed calm to me by keeping his eyes trained on mine.

A group of university exchange students from France at the next table watch the entire interaction as if they were on a field trip for Lessons in North American Social Behaviour. They discuss the annoying aspects of the life they’re having here. Quebec is more American than they expected, they say. You can’t smoke in restaurants. The Québécois accent is drôle.

The National calls from the cbc in Toronto. They want me to be their “eyes on the ground.” I try not to laugh—I’m a part-time poet who lives in the suburbs. The woman on the phone asks what it’s like to live in a city in a forest. Does she mean here? In Toronto, she explains, that’s how they described it to her. She must be picturing deep woods with houses and corner stores tucked in among the paths, and roads more like wagon trails. When I drive past Winners and Costco I don’t think “forest.” No, I tell her, Prince George is a lot like the outskirts of Guelph. She falls silent and I amend it: Prince George is like Edmonton but planned by drunken loggers. She seems to like that better, so I carry on: it’s like living in a logging camp but with easier access to big box stores. What about the trees, she asks. Oh, they’re fine, I say, just shorter and mostly gone.

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.

October 21, 2005, marked the 200th anniversary of the great naval battle of Trafalgar, an engagement in which Admiral Nelson and the British fleet ended Napoleon’s dream of invading England by crushing the French and Spanish fleets off the southwest

Yann Martel's novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel's first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears i

Last time I went to the mystery bookstore looking for something hard-boiled, I came out with A Philosophical Investigation (Doubleday) tucked under my arm. I have since returned to seek out author Philip Kerr's previous novels, the Berlin Noir trilog

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

A review of Michel Rabagliati's semi-autobiographical graphic novels, featuring tales of his boyhood in Quebec.

“Everything is collage,” a character observes in Divisadero (McClelland & Stewart), Michael Ondaatje’s first novel in seven years.

Gregory Scofield's new book of poems is Native Canadiana (Polestar) and it's very good. So is Lola Lemire Tostevin's latest collection, Cartouches (Talonbooks), which came out last year and which we've been meaning to mention here ever since, along w

Ann Carson has written a sensual and thought-provoking book about desire and called it Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Press). My friends tell me you can't theorize about desire, and my lovers tell me (when I begin to theorize about desire) that

When eye-Dentical Twins (eye press) arrived in the office, everyone crowded around. The book is a collection of photographs from the newspaper eye weekly, in which two unlikely celebrities are paired and the resemblance is described in a witty cutlin

This recent collection compiles the very best of the poet's oeuvre.

In Frontier Spirit: The Brave Women of the Klondike by Jennifer Duncan (Anchor Canada), we meet women who escaped the prison of propriety and domesticity by joining the Gold Rush to the Yukon.

Friends I Never Knew by Tanya Lester (gynergy) is an ambitious but less successful first work of fiction. The premise is challenging: a burnt-out feminist organizer, recuperating abroad, pays homage to four women friends and colleagues by trying to w

When I finally got around to reading Postwar, I was amused to discover that Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks was reading it too. This is the first time I have found myself reading the same book as a character in a novel.

From Bruised Fell by Jane Finlay-Young (Viking) is a dark and unrelenting story of two sisters whose lives are dominated by their crazy mother, who abandoned them years ago but who still haunts their thoughts. The older sister, Missy, narrates the st

Marlene Nourbese Philip achieved an inadvertent kind of fame as the woman June Callwood told to fuck off at a writers' conference some time ago. Her new book Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture (Mercury), makes it easy to see why.

What happens when you insert the word Geist into a World Wide Web search engine? Well, there's a brief pause and then Zzzt!

For hard-core Blade Runner fans, or anyone interested in the filmmaking process, Paul M. Sammon's book Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner (Harper Prism) is required reading.

In late May 2003 the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) hosted a discussion forum called Hell No: Designers and the War, featuring the design historian Steven Heller, the design icon Milton Glaser (perhaps most known for the “I Love NY” symbol

The question that pops to mind as you read Ghosts: True Tales of Eerie Encounters (TouchWood) is, “Why does British Columbia house so many spooks?” Robert Belyk does not provide a specific answer, but he does say that ghosts are likelier to manifest

I enjoyed Killer Angels so much that I pursued my Civil War studies by renting a video of Gettysburg, the made-for-TV movie based on the book. The movie clocks in at somewhere close to four hours, and you have to put up with a lot of famous American

Recently I was thinking about the difference between Brecht's poetics and Rilke's. Brecht seems to be entirely ironic.... This conundrum came back to me when I read George Stanley's Gentle Northern Summer (New Star), which is a beautiful and powerful

Ghost Hotel is the new mystery by Jackie Manthorne (gynergy books), first of what will be a series, and it features "Harriet Hubbley: down-to-earth dyke from Montreal." This story is a great window into the lesbian lifestyle, but not a really satisfy

Girl Culture (Chronicle/Raincoast) is a coffee table book that is both attractive and disturbing. Lauren Greenfield’s photographs document how American girls relate to fashion, culture and their bodies as they grow up in the most superficial society

Fuzzy Heads are Better (106 Press) is a small, thick zine with a lovely woodblock print on the cover. Patti Young Kim subscribes to the punk DIY ethic of zine making, including found photos, recipes, receipts.

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

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.

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.