And then I remembered an important event. It happened at a funeral in St. Paul’s chapel for a twenty-four-year-old prostitute who had overdosed in her Gastown hotel room. The small chapel was half full, and very quiet. There were a couple of fresh flower arrangements in front of the cheap, closed coffin. Most of the congregation were other prostitutes dressed in their working clothes, and a few pimps. One woman apologized to Brother Tim for having nothing black to wear, except for lingerie and a leather miniskirt.
Among the people who live outside the Dominion building in downtown Vancouver, across the street from the cenotaph at Victory Square, is a woman who might be in her late forties and who occasionally turns up in a wedding dress. I’ve never seen her speak to anyone. She simply walks up and holds out her empty hand toward you.
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 EMILY MOORE, SAGE TYRTLE, IAN ROY, and JESS HOUSTY; New fiction by ALEX LESLIE; Feature essays from KATE REIDER COLLINS and NIKKI CELIS; Poetry by JADE RIORDAN and ERIN VOSTERS; and much more!
