Stephen Osborne reflects on the Vancouver Poetry Conference, the Occupy movement, and a brunch with NaNoWriMo novelists.

The facts (and fictions) surrounding the tale of Quebec's most famous murderess, La Corriveau.

Joe Bongiorno goes in search of enlightenment and finds the Shī Fu.

My great-grandfather exists now only in memory, unacknowledged even by his tombstone

He said he just wanted towels. There was no reason to be afraid.

It is a Sunday in August. We drive from London, Ontario, to the Pinery Provincial Park in a new green 1964 Mercury Comet.

A poem about a postal code.

On Halloween in 1966, John Patterson's father burned down the Jones's house to give the neighbourhood kids a thrill.

We got paid once a week in cash - it made you feel special the first few times.

Very quietly, very slowly, happiness can take over a person's life

Leaving Thunder Bay isn't one of the things that gets easier with practice

Forgotten cutlery, missing mushrooms and lingering doubt: a recipe for bewilderment.

"A folder full of awards proves to the psychiatrist I wasn't always this way."

Battenbergs and Victoria sponge at Buckingham Palace.

A young Indigenous woman deals with hippy-artist-pothead boyfriends and car troubles.

Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.

The restaurant had white concrete walls and chrome lights dangling from the ceiling that gave the place an operating theatre vibe.

Christine Novosel reports from Glasgow on art school, apiary management, Brexit and being a junkyard dog.

Evelyn Everett-Green wrote novels for young people, of a morally improving nature. Her books were also meant to entertain, with tales of wholesome adventure and romance, often set in heroic times or picturesque locations.

Despite attempts to reattach my pinkie, I woke up with nine fingers.

A short film featuring "Sewing Cabinet" by Julie Vandervoort, originally published in Geist 74.

David Koulack spends Yom Kippur in a packed gymnasium in Paris among a beehive of activity and a cacophony of sound.

Eve Corbel draws emoji you can use when Mercury is in retrograde, when you've eaten too much hot sauce and during other specific times of need.

Angela Wheelock meets a stranger at a bus stop and discusses Rumi, Hafiz and other great poets who were terrible leaders.

Picture Harper lounging among pastel cushions, his stiff grey hair tight as a helmet on his head.

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.

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

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

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

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

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

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

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

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

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

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

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

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

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

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

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

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.

Review of "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.

Review of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings" edited by John Lorinc.

Review of "Shaman" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Review of "Landlines" by Raynor Winn.

Review of "And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life" by Helen Humphreys.

Review of "The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation" by Rosemary Sullivan.

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.