fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
Sadie McCarney
Christmas in Lothlórien

It was a gruesome war, Santa added in Papyrus font, but the forces of Good eventually emerged victorious

Peggy Thompson
Opioids and Other Demons

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Madeleine Pelletier
Dummies Raising Goats

Time to call a professional

Kris Rothstein
An Ordinary Life?

Review of "There Was a Time for Everything" by Judith Friedland

J. Jill Robinson
One Night at the Oceanview

Did that really happen?  J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.

Peggy Thompson
Grab Your Feather Boas

Review of "Stories from My Gay Grandparents" directed by J Stevens

Anik See
The Crush and the Rush and the Roar

And a sort of current ran through you when you saw it, a visceral, uncontrollable response. A physical resistance to the silence

Rose Divecha
Clearing Out My Mother's House

The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

KELSEA O'CONNOR
The Quiet Hunt

Review of "Mushrooming: The Joy of the Quiet Hunt" by Diane Borsato

Cornelia Mars
Once Upon a Talking Goose

Review of "The Capital of Dreams" by Heather O'Neill

S.I. Hassan
Becoming Canadian

I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

Anson Ching
Beach Reading

Review of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

Michael Hayward
Insecurity Blanket

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

Rayya Liebich
Righthand Justified

Language built on sounds of delight, coloured in the gardens of Beirut

Adrian Rain
Schrödinger’s Kids

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

JEROME STUEART
The Dead Viking My Birthmother Gave Me

“The first time I met him, he caused me to float to the ceiling"

Dayna Mahannah
The Academy of Profound Oddities

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

Joseph Pearson
No Names

Sebastian and I enjoy making fun of le mythomane. We compare him to characters in novels. Maybe he can’t return home because he’s wanted for a crime.

Kelly Bouchard
After the Flames

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

ERNIE KROEGER
Acoustic Memory

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

J.R. Patterson
True at First Flight

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

Minelle Mahtani
Looking for a Place to Happen

What does it mean to love a band? A friend? A nation?

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sadie McCarney
Fact
Christmas in Lothlórien

It was a gruesome war, Santa added in Papyrus font, but the forces of Good eventually emerged victorious

Madeleine Pelletier
Fact
Dummies Raising Goats

Time to call a professional

Rose Divecha
Fact
Clearing Out My Mother's House

The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense

S.I. Hassan
Fact
Becoming Canadian

I traffic deep time in a great storm, guilty of ignorance and omission

Adrian Rain
Fact
Schrödinger’s Kids

The log jam is tall and wide and choosing wrong means we don’t make it home

Dayna Mahannah
Fact
The Academy of Profound Oddities

The fish is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath

Kelly Bouchard
Fact
After the Flames

A wildland fighter witnesses an old burn's second act

ERNIE KROEGER
Fact
Acoustic Memory

Memories sneak up, tiptoe quiet as a cat. Boom like a slapshot

J.R. Patterson
Fact
True at First Flight

The unmistakable buzz of an approaching aircraft is enough to send my family onto the lawn

Eimear Laffan
Fact
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

rob mclennan
Fact
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Sara de Waal
Fact
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Margaret Nowaczyk
Fact
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

Ian Roy
Fact
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Sara Graefe
Fact
My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain

No Skylab buzz in East Germany.

Sara Cassidy
Fact
The Lowest Tide

Nature’s sanctity is the only portal to the future.

Kathy Page
Fact
The Exquisite Cyclops

A writer roams her sleepscape in search of the extraordinary subconscious

Hollie Adams
Fact
A Partial List of Inconvenient Truths

In search of a big picture at the end of the singular world

David Sheskin
Fact
PRESS 1 IF

PRESS 1 IF YOU THINK YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THE BIG BANG.

EVELYN LAU
Reunion

He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I almost recognized, a translucent and shifting visage, as of someone I once knew. He looked vaguely familiar— there was a sort of outline around his ­features that I al

Craig Taylor
Punch

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.

Stephen Osborne
Fields of Time

With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.

Michał Kozłowski
Wild World

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.

Mary Vallis
Waiting for Michael (Jackson)

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

Andrea G. Johnston
The Fallen Man

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.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

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.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Daniel Francis
The Artist as Coureur de Bois

Tom Thomson, godfather of the Group of Seven, drowned in an Ontario lake under mysterious circumstances, and ever since, his reputation has been the stuff of legend.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

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.

Stephen Smith
Rinkside Intellectual

Stephen Smith investigates the hockey lives of Barthes, Faulkner, Hemingway, which were marked by dismissal, befuddlement and scorn.

J. Jill Robinson
Hot Pulse

I am sorry I caused you pain. But I thought it was okay.

HOWARD WHITE
How We Imagine Ourselves

When Geist first approached me with the idea of speaking here, I made it known that of all the things I ever wanted to be when I grew up, being an after-dinner speaker was very low on the list.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

Ann Diamond
How I (Finally) Met Leonard Cohen

On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.

JILL MANDRAKE
Elementary

On the merry-go-round, you just shouted out a des­ti­na­tion and all the kids pushed until every­one agreed we’d arrived.

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Annabel Lyon
Eye for Detail

What is at the heart of this Edith Iglauer profile by Giller nominee Annabel Lyon? Hint: Ice Road Truckers.

Alberto Manguel
Cri de Coeur

Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.

Life in Language

For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.

M.A.C. Farrant
Notes on the Wedding

The mother of the groom measures the distance between two weddings: twenty-six years, six thousand miles, and a donkey covered with flowers. It’s outtasight.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

DAVID COLLIER
The Last Grain Elevator in Regina

When you live in Saskatoon, you find yourself caring more about the details of grain farming then you did when you lived in Toronto or Windsor.

Stephen Osborne
The Great Game

The British called it the Great Game. The Russians called it Bolshoya Igra. The playing field was, and still is, Afghanistan.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Free to Be

Her story powers along; eventually she will arrive at the start, returning to the losses set down in the preface, losses so terrible we won’t mind if she chickens out.

Michael Hayward
Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems

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

Patty Osborne
Frenetic, Instructive, Bossy

Patty Osborne reviews four new books from Mansfield Press.

Stephen Osborne
Forty-One False Starts and a Two-Headed Waiter

Stephen Osborne reviews Janet Malcolm's book of essays and discusses the worst novel ever published in Canada.

Jon Burrows
eye-Dentical Twins

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

Patty Osborne
Forgetting the Question

Patty Osborne on licking fish, erotic hallucinations and the mystery of the missing anthropologist.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Eros the Bittersweet

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

Stephen Osborne
Enchantment & Other Demons

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

Michael Hayward
Divisadero

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

Eve Corbel
Alter Ego Comics

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

Patty Osborne
Confessions of a Shopaholic

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
All Zeit, No Geist?

Kelsea O'Connor reviews Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland, a "humanizing portrait" of Alcatel-Lucent, the company that developed the internet we know and love today.

Mindy Abramowitz
A Philosophical Investigation

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

Alberto Manguel
Role Models and Readers

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

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

Alberto Manguel
Reading the Commedia

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Alberto Manguel
Reach Out and Touch (Somebody's Hand)

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

Rob Kovitz
Question Period

Rob Kovitz compiles the pressing questions of the day—"How are they gonna beat ISIS?" And, "On Twitter, who cares?"

Stephen Henighan
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.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

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

Daniel Francis
Afghanistan

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.

Daniel Francis
African Gulag

The atrocities were carried out in the name of some version of “civilization” that the Queen represented.

Daniel Francis
Acts of Resistance

"Resistance to wars is as much a Canadian tradition as fighting them." Daniel Francis discusses alternative histories, anti-draft demonstrations and the divisive nature of war.

Alberto Manguel
A Novel for All Times

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Stephen Henighan
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.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

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

Alberto Manguel
A Brief History of Tags

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

Alberto Manguel
Face in the Mirror

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

Annabel Lyon
Ethical Juices

Parables, cautionary tales, morality plays, allegories—the notion that we can study literary works as texts of ethics is as old as literature.

Stephen Henighan
Ethnic Babies

Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality.

Daniel Francis
Come to the Cabaret

The Penthouse, the notorious Vancouver night club, shares a history with several of the city's missing women cases.

Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China

A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.

Stephen Henighan
Caribbean Enigma

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

Daniel Francis
Canada's Funnyman

A misogynist, a racist and an academic walk into a bar...

Stephen Henighan
Campus Confidential

"In the public eye, universities have never recovered from the antics of Donald Sutherland as Professor Jennings in the 1978 film Animal House."

Alberto Manguel
Burning Mistry

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

Clare Coughlan
The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess

Clare Coughlan reviews her experience seeing (and before that, waiting in line to see) The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess.

S.K. Grant
The Joy of Cooking

"Scallions are eaten raw by self-assertive people": Why S.K. Grant was surprised to discover The Joy of Cooking as a literary work.

Jocelyn Kuang
The Jonathans

Two different novels about family dysfunction—This Is Where I Leave you and The Corrections—written by two different Jonathans. Reviewed by Jocelyn Kuang.

Patty Osborne
The Girl Without Anyone

The Girl Without Anyone is a series of linked short stories by Kelli Deeth, dealing with a teenage girl's budding sexuality, self-doubt and confusion. Reviewed by Patty Osborne.

The Eyre Affair

Karen Schendlinger reviews The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde, two smart, allegorical crime novels starring a detective named Thursday Next.

Patty Osborne
Hunger

It takes Patty Osborne a month to get halfway through the 462 pages of the Giller Prize-winning novel The Polished Hoe, which is only halfway through the 24 hours during which the story takes place.

Sarah Leavitt
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Sarah Leavitt reviews Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel's first graphic novel full of vibrantly alive, expressive characters and richly satisfying extras.

ARLEEN PARÉ
Between the Door Posts

Between the Door Posts, by Isa Milman (Ekstasis Editions), begins with this quote from Kafka: “How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?”

Eve Corbel
Bannock, Beans & Black Tea

Bannock, Beans & Black Tea by the writer/comix artist Seth, is a small, beautiful, disturbing and touching book in which Seth has compiled, edited and illustrated his father’s stories of growing up poor—really poor—in St. Charles, P.E.I.

Sam Macklin
Asterix the Gaul

Asterix the Gaul (Orion), a comic book classic recently reprinted, tramples over all sorts of contemporary niceties.

Derek Fairbridge
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album

Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, a lovingly detailed account of the creation of John Coltrane’s classic album of the same name, is a cause for celebration.

Jill Boettger
A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends

Just five pages into A Date With Destiny: Night of a Thousand Boyfriends by Miranda Clarke, I can’t decide whether to go to a hotel with an importer/exporter named Chaz, or ditch Chaz and go dancing at Club Neptune with a woman named Danni.

Derek Fairbridge
Da Capo Best Music Writing

The fourth volume in the Da Capo Best Music Writing pulls together some of the finest music writing published in 2003. It is rife with typos, but the articles are compulsively readable and they cover “rock, pop, jazz, country and more."

Sam Macklin
Complete Peanuts

Each book in the ongoing Complete Peanuts series (Fantagraphics) is beautifully designed by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, and features two years of thoughtfully reproduced daily and Sunday newspaper cartoon strips.

Stephen Osborne
Marie Tyrell

“I knew that I would dream that night of the city in flames, the brown-brick towers falling, caving in on themselves (in slow motion, great clouds of burning dust), proud lights flickering out, psssfft, all the messages going dark one by one."

Jill Boettger
Field Guide to Stains: How to Identify and Remove Virtually Every Stain Known to Man

Did you know that you are more likely to encounter Worcestershire sauce stains in winter and that correction fluid stains are most common in April?

Stephen Osborne
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580, by Samuel Bawlf, completes the story of European adventure in the north of North America in the sixteenth century.

Stephen Osborne
Snow Walker

Snow Walker, the film made from Farley Mowat’s book of stories, contains much cornball scripting, some wretched dialogue and a ponderous, bellowing soundtrack that equals the worst excesses of Cecil B DeMille’s Bible epics.

Kevin Barefoot
Soccer in Sun and Shadow

Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow (Verso) collects his ruminations on the history and future of soccer, and consists of vignettes describing famous players, unlikely goals and every World Cup final since 1930.

Stephen Osborne
Weave

Lisa Pasold’s poetry collection, Weave, reads as a memoir of the twentieth century in a world bounded by Prague and Peru and the Russian front and the shores of Lake Ontario.

Kris Rothstein
The Nervous Tourist

Bob Gaulke’s description of his travels in Salvador (a region of Brazil), in The Nervous Tourist, evokes the age of imperialism. This modest chapbook contains insightful, engaging and funny writing about the eye-opening experience of travel.

Norbert Ruebsaat
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and in the film it is based on, turns notions about corporate responsibility and accountability into oxymorons.

Lily Gontard
The Cripple and His Talismans

The protagonist of The Cripple and His Talismans by Anosh Irani (Raincoast) is a self-centred, self-absorbed, wealthy-but-have-chosen-to-live-among-the-crippled-and-poor-in-Bombay man.

ARLEEN PARÉ
Invisible Lines

In Astrid van der Pol’s poetry collection, Invisible Lines (BuschekBooks), the past is the most hopeful, whereas each new future enters some form of sadness.

Patty Osborne
I'll Be Right Back

Writing on the Rock, which takes place on Denman Island, B.C., in early August, is now my favourite writers’ festival.