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.
On the same day that a parliamentary committee scolded the governor general for profligate spending by slashing her annual budget by ten percent, a book that purports to give the full story about life at Rideau Hall arrived on my desk. Working on the
Geist is the Canadian magazine of ideas and culture—every issue brings together a sumptuous mix of fact + fiction, photography and comix, poetry, essays and reviews, and more of the weird and wonderful from the world of words.
Geist distills the Canadian imagination into a tactile, stackable, admireable, finishable and entirely shareable magazine.

Notes & Dispatches from ANDREW UNGER, ADÈLE BARCLAY, KATHERINE J BARRETT, and WILLIAM BESSAI-SAUL; Fiction by SHERI DOYLE; Feature essays from ERIKA THORKELSON and KASIA VAN SCHAIK; Poetry by OWEN TORREY and MORGAN LEATHEM VENTURA; and much more!
