Stephen Henighan

Stephen Henighan’s most recent books are A Grave in the Air (Thistledown), short sto­ries, and the forth­com­ing A Report on the Afterlife of Culture (Biblioasis), essays. Hear him read at stephenhenighan.com.

Stephen Henighan on Geist.com

Phony War

Within 20 to 30 years, many parts of the world will face mass star­va­tion. 150 mil­lion well-armed and starv­ing Americans will look North.

Building Bohemia

Since the Wall came down, East German social­ists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip cof­fee and talk about art.

Latinocanadá

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilin­gual labels in Canadian big box stores.

The Colonized Investor

When the crash came, Canadians paid the price for the col­o­nized men­tal­i­ties of their invest­ment advisors.

Before Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

Urquhart’s Choice

In 2007, when The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories was published, Urquhart sent me a copy. As I examined the table of contents, I felt a dull thunk in my chest.

Separate Crossings

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.

Bologna Erases Canada

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.

Lost Nationalities

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

Witch Hunt

In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.

Traitor’s Dirge

“Get it right,” Rob Allen told me. “You have no idea how few novels you will actually write in your life”

Moribund Multiculturalism

My neighbour Jiwani immigrated to Canada from Africa with her husband and three children. A medical doctor, she was barred from practising in Ontario. Jiwani set up her own business, giving classes in traditional African arts. Last summer Jiwani and her husband were awarded a prize by an association in Toronto devoted to promoting the culture of their country of origin. When I congratulated Jiwani on the award, she grew restive.

White Curtains

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.

Writing the City

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.

How They Don’t See Us

During the 1980s the literary critic Edward Said organized occasional research seminars at Columbia University in New York. Unlike most such seminars, Said's gatherings were not advertised: admission was by invitation, supplemented by word of mouth.

In Praise of Borders

I remembered past ordeals: a U.S. official who squeezed out my toothpaste tube on the train from Montreal to Philadelphia, another who hauled me off a bus for a lengthy interrogation that culminated in his shouting that the friend I was visiting in Boston could not be American if she had a Hispanic name.

Kingmakers

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.

Nations Without Publishers

In 2002, when my essay collection When Words Deny the World was published, people started behaving strangely. Ambitious young writers scurried out of sight when I entered a room, as though afraid that irate authors might banish them from Toronto for having spoken to me.

Phenotypes & Flag-Wavers

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.

Reading the City

A city is an atmosphere defined by a history. A great city's streets may reflect its past, but only art makes a city's history, like its distinctive mood, present to the world.

The Insularity of English

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.

Totalitarian Democracy

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.

Translated from the American

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.

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.

Bad Spellers

Mordecai Richler, in a withering put-down, once dismissed the novelist Hugh Garner as “a good speller.” In the summer of 2003, grinding through 160 Canadian books as a jury member for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English, I learned that for many contemporary Canadian writers, Garner’s level of dubious distinction remains out of reach.

Becoming French

For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane.

Cakchiquel Lessons

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.

Court Jester

One of the indis­pens­able fig­ures of con­tem­po­rary jour­nal­ism is the cutting-edge cul­tural com­men­ta­tor. The colum­nist who offers sar­donic insights into trends, fash­ions, tele­vi­sion shows and pub­lish­ing per­son­al­i­ties has become an institution.