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Kris Rothstein
Chinese Restaurant: On the Islands

Most ambitious debut project: Chinese Restaurant: On the Islands, by the Canadian director Cheuk Kwan. Intrigued by the worldwide omnipresence of Chinese restaurants, he travelled to a dozen countries to investigate the experiences of the Chinese dia

Kris Rothstein
Chuck Dugan is AWOL

The eponymous hero of Chuck Dugan is AWOL by Eric Chase Anderson (Chronicle) isn’t from Montreal or Toronto but he is struggling through early adulthood in this illustrated old-fashioned adventure story filled with innocence and charm. Chuck Dugan de

Patty Osborne
Certain Dead Soldiers

Christine Slater's Certain Dead Soldiers (Key Porter) takes place in Ireland. It starts out being about a young drunk and ends up being about his young wife.

Rob Kovitz
Certain Embarrassing Questions

Cyberslang, Robert's Rules of Order and The Forest of Rhetoric collide in a series of queries, inquiries and FAQ from Rob Kovitz.

Lily Gontard
Charles the Bold

Charles Thibodeau is the hero of Charles the Bold (McClelland & Stewart), a novel by Yves Beauchemin (translated by Wayne Grady) that is truly Dickensian in style. Charles is a good and beautiful boy who endures tragedies and indignities that would d

Alana Mairs
Certifiable

The cover blurb on Certifiable, a collection of short stories by David McGimpsey (Insomniac), describes it as “funny and twisted stories of American culture.” Topics range from the biological makeup of the McDonald’s character Grimace to fragmented l

Lucianne Poole
Chainsaw Man

A man with a chainsaw boarded the number 7 bus at about 7:45 a.m., when I was on my way to work in downtown Ottawa.

SIMON ARMITAGE
Causeway

Three walked barefoot into the sea,mother, father and only childwith trousers rolled above the knee.A stretch of water—half a mile;granite loaves made a cobbled road when the tide was low. Tide was high.

Stephen Osborne
Cartouches

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
Cast Out of Eden

Michael Hayward on Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions by Alberto Manguel.

Stephen Osborne
Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree.

Kris Rothstein
Cat Book

I thought Cat Book by Emily Eve Weinstein (Beau Soleil) would be a collection of too cute stories about people and their cats, but I soon learned not to be fooled by the easy beauty of Weinstein’s cat paintings, which dot the pages, or by the text it

Alberto Manguel
Cautionary Tales for Children

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Michael Hayward
Celine and Julie Go Boating

Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film Celine and Julie Go Boating (British Film Institute dvd) is set in a Paris that is half Wonderland, half real, a Paris in which events unfold according to the same dream-like logic that astonished Alice, and that entrances

Gillian Wigmore
CBC Shows an Interest in the Pine Beetle Epidemic

The National calls from the cbc in Toronto. They want me to be their “eyes on the ground.” I try not to laugh—I’m a part-time poet who lives in the suburbs. The woman on the phone asks what it’s like to live in a city in a forest. Does she mean here? In Toronto, she explains, that’s how they described it to her. She must be picturing deep woods with houses and corner stores tucked in among the paths, and roads more like wagon trails. When I drive past Winners and Costco I don’t think “forest.” No, I tell her, Prince George is a lot like the outskirts of Guelph. She falls silent and I amend it: Prince George is like Edmonton but planned by drunken loggers. She seems to like that better, so I carry on: it’s like living in a logging camp but with easier access to big box stores. What about the trees, she asks. Oh, they’re fine, I say, just shorter and mostly gone.

Barbara Stewart
Captain Alex MacLean: Jack London's Sea Wolf

Barbara Stewart reviews Captain Alex MacLean by Don MacGillivray (UBC Press).

Stephen Osborne
Capitalism Lurches into Expressionism

Stephen Osborne on The Hotel Years, a collection of short pieces by Joseph Roth.

JILL MANDRAKE
Caprice

Jill Mandrake reviews George Bowering's Caprice, "a poetic eulogy for a shrinking literary landscape."

S. K. Page
Cape Breton Road

The opening pages of Cape Breton Road by D. R. MacDonald (Harcourt) are as good as it gets: a brilliant evocation of person and place. But soon after that, things began to settle down into mere realism, and then I had to put the book aside when I hit

Jocelyn Kuang
Candy Cap Magic

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

Stephen Osborne
Canadian ten-dollar bill

The dreadful effects of “computer-assisted publishing” can be observed in the new Canadian ten-dollar bill, a specimen of which I had been carrying around for days wondering where I could have picked up such a miserable-looking coupon.

Sam Macklin
Captain Beefheart: The Biography

Attention-grabbing fact: ninety-nine percent of “serious” writing about “popular” music is one hundred percent useless. One reason for this is an ingrained belief that the social significance of the entertainment industry is more interesting than any

Patty Osborne
Canadian Dystopia

Patty Osborne on an engrossing world where nothing monumental happens.

Stephen Henighan
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.

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.

HAL NIEDZVIECKI
The Life and Death of Zadie Avrohom Krolik

Hal Niedzviecki com­mem­o­rates his Jewish grand­fa­ther—a heavy drinker, a bad driver and a Polish refugee.

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

M.A.C. Farrant
Strange Birds

We don’t know why the budgie did it. He must have been unhappy. It can’t have been easy for him—pecking the bell, hanging about on the pole.

Ivan Coyote
If I Was a Girl

Femme girls get free Slurpees, but boyish ladies get free cavity searches at the border.

D.M. FRASER
Surrounded by Ducks

D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.

Daniel Francis
Red Scare

The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

Patty Osborne
Beyond Recall

Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.

MARY MEIGS
Being in the Company of Strangers

Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would

M.A.C. Farrant
Attila the Bookseller

I answered the ad: SWM likes to dance. Called him up (said his name was Jay), suggested we meet at the local cafe Tuesday night, something different, a performance poet performing. Free coffee and cookies, the place rocking with middle-aged angst.

Bill MacDonald
An Ounce of Civet

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

Sarah Leavitt
3 Girls

Sarah Leavitt is more than just a clever cartoonist; she also paints pictures with her colourful prose.

Daniel Francis
Double Life

The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Burma Media Event

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar), Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangon. They were hauled out of their diplomatic Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, at the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official.

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

CONNIE KUHNS
Life After Virginity

A flower child looks back, to the time between Motown and acid rock.

Robert Hunter
Launching Greenpeace

A first-hand account of Greenpeace's first expedition to stop U.S. underwater nuclear testing on September 15, 1971.

Patrick Lane
Natural History

It started with a note I found tucked into an anthology of poems edited by Selden Rodman, a book I opened rarely, though there was a time when I was young I had read it so closely and so many times I had most of the poems memorized. The note lay in the spine of the book against a poem of Arthur Rimbaud's titled, I think, "The Twelve-Year-Old Poet." On it are four names printed out in my sure and youthful twenty-one-year-old hand: Baghdad, Koweit, Sakakah, Jaffa.

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

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

Edith Iglauer
Sitting on Water

During my thirty years living on the waterfront of British Columbia, I have always had some sort of container in which to sit on the water. My first boat was a ten-foot dinghy that my late husband John Daly, a commercial salmon troller, equipped with a small electric motor to surprise me. He had the bizarre idea that I, a sometime canoeist from Ohio, could manoeuvre a boat on my own around our capacious Pacific coast harbour. The electric engine would be ideal for me, he thought. No rope to pull to start it up! No gasoline tank on board!

Bart Campbell
The Real Woman

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.

Stephen Henighan
Third World Canada

Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.

Robert Everett-Green
The Main

Last summer, during a visit to Vancouver, my nine-year-old son climbed the pediment of a cast-iron traffic-light standard and put his palm on the glowing hand that warns pedestrians to stay put. My mother pointed out afterwards that my photograph of the event contained its own French caption, in the word visible over his shoulder: main.

CONNIE KUHNS
Strange Women

Connie Kuhns' major profile of punk, politics and feminism in 1970s Canada: the Moral Lepers, the Dishrags and other revolutionary bands.

Liam Mcphail
Fact
Memories of Two Boyhoods

Review of "Memories Look at Me" by Tomas Tranströmer

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Opioids and Other Demons

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

Kris Rothstein
Fact
An Ordinary Life?

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

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Grab Your Feather Boas

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

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
The Quiet Hunt

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

Cornelia Mars
Fact
Once Upon a Talking Goose

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

Anson Ching
Fact
Beach Reading

Review of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

Michael Hayward
Fact
Insecurity Blanket

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

Kris Rothstein
Fact
Dogs and the Writing Life

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

Peggy Thompson
Taken to a Place of Life

Review of "Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love" by Sarah Leavitt.

Shyla Seller
Fact
About the House

Review of "House Work" curated by Caitlin Jones and Shiloh Sukkau.

Patty Osborne
Fact
On a Train to Anywhere

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Kris Rothstein
Fact
An Ongoing Space of Encounter

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

Jonathan Heggen
Fact
The Boy and the Self

Review of "The Boy and the Heron" directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

Michael Hayward
Fact
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

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

Michael Hayward
Fact
Conversations with the past

Review of "Conversations with Khahtsahlano, 1932–1954" reissued by Massy Books and Talonbooks.

Maryanna Gabriel
Fact
More Than one way to hang a man

Review of "Hangman: The True Story of Canada’s First Executioner" by Julie Burtinshaw.

Helen Godolphin
Fact
Pinball wizardry

Review of "Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game" written and directed by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg.

Peggy Thompson
Fact
Rollicking and honest: LIKE Me

Review of "Queers Like Me" by Michael V. Smith.

Meandricus
Fact
Wordy goodness

Review of "Rearrangements" by Natan Last, published in The New Yorker December 2023.

Michael Hayward
Fact
Circled By Wolves

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

Cornelia Mars
Fact
On MOtherhood: Transforming Perceptions

Review of "Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood" by Lucy Jones.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Fact
WEST COAST FORAGING

Review of "Edible and Medicinal Flora of the West Coast: British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest" by Collin Varner.

Anson Ching
Fact
A history of outport rivalry

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

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?

Lily Gontard
Fathers and Daughters

Lily Gontard reviews A Rock Fell on the Moon by Alicia Priest and The Stone Thrower by Jael Ealey Richardson.

Stephen Henighan
Phony War

"We know that life-altering and possibly cataclysmic change is coming, and we continue to live as we have always done."

Michael Hayward
Dream-Life of Cities

"If cities can be said to be alive, how many of them dream of growing up to become Paris?" Michael Hayward reviews How Paris Became Paris by Joan DeJean.

EVE JOSEPH
Death Matters

It is not uncommon for there to be periods of agitation shortly before death. People often try to rise from their beds as if they have to get somewhere.

Rob Kovitz
What Kinds of Questions

So much of how life feels lies in the phrasing.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Ice & Fire

Over Christmas I read my friend Stephen Osborne’s book Ice & Fire (Arsenal Pulp Press), which is also a Geist Book, and felt I was reading a handshake: familiar and new.

Stephen Osborne
Insurgency

Stephen Osborne discusses the past, present and future of literary magazines in Canada.

Kris Rothstein
All Folked Up

Kris Rothstein recounts her experience at the Pickathon, a music festival in Portland, Oregon.

Luke MacLean
Je M'Appelle Raphael

Possum-style or straight up dirty.

Patty Osborne
Spectrums

Patty Osborne reviews Do You Think This Is Strange? by Aaron Cully Drake, a look into the mind of an autistic teenage boy.

ANNMARIE MACKINNON
Einsteinium Ist Nicht Geil

AnnMarie MacKinnon reviews Einsteinium (Es), an element discovered by a non-Einstein Albert.

Michał Kozłowski
Centre of the Universe

Michal Kozlowski reports on the state of publishing: s'mores, Titantic metaphors, Celtic jigs, steak canapés and mechanical bull riding.

Daniel Francis
Toronto The Good

Daniel Francis reviews Toronto: Biography of a City, a book bound to irritate readers who live outside Toronto—the "centre of the Canadian universe."

Stephen Osborne
Last Steve Standing

Stephen Osborne says goodbye to Stephen Harper.

Alberto Manguel
Power to the Reader

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

D.M. FRASER
Surrounded by Ducks

D.M. Fraser on the myth of cultural identity.

Stephen Osborne
Martin John and the Demon Mother

"In Martin John, Anakana Schofield’s new novel, the reader is beckoned, saluted, enticed and then drawn inexorably into the life of a demented young man."

Daniel Francis
Birth of a Nation

Lacking in drama and embarrassingly undemocratic, Canada’s origins owe a lot to old-fashioned politics and not much to European battles or transcontinental railways.

Anna Banana
45 Years of Fooling Around with A. Banana

An exploration of art and pop culture by Anna Banana.

David Albahari
Dangerous Times

David Albahari visits Canadian cities and remembers a slogan from the former Yugoslavia: Get to know your country in order to love her.

Eve Corbel
Gagster Movies

Eve Corbel reviews two short biographic documentaries: Seth's Dominion and I Thought I Told You to Shut Up.

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.

Rhonda Waterfall
Les Joyeux Lémuriens

“Thank Christ,” says Dieter when I finally wake up. “I thought you were dead.”

Alberto Manguel
In Praise of Ronald Wright

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Roni Simunovic
Space-time Queertinuum

Beyond: The Queer Sci-Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology is an action-packed, swashbuckling collection of short comics produced by twenty six writers and artists of diverse sexualities and genders.