The organizers of tonight’s talk have branded it as a “raw exchange”—part of a series of uncensored literary gatherings around the city—and so they’ve invited three biting B.C. writers to get down to brass tacks for a group of strangers in the basement of the Vancouver Public Library. By some freak of programming, a punk-metal band is slaying the kids in the room down the hall tonight, which means every time a bookish-looking latecomer wades into our midst, a foul-sounding wave of hellish power chords does, too.

Here they are our people.

What was a lone hen doing in the yard, a few feet from a busy city street?

"At the back of the line a woman with no teeth was trying to hold an eighteen-pack of budget toilet paper with one hand."

For me, the jacket is a piece of menswear history that I can actually put on, and a link to the tragicomic tale of an underachiever with a famous name.

The time had come for our marathon trek through Europe. I was ten, and hated it already.

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.

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.

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.

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

Opa, you know that sometimes people say things, well, indirectly? They don’t say everything that they mean?

On her first communion, a young girl searches for peace of mind in a world of purgatory, UFOs and the Lennon Sisters.

According to legend and prophecy, this child would possess the second sight.

Randy Fred reports on migrant workers, then and now.

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Salmon runs, voodoo juice and chewing the fat in Mission.

Michel Lambeth's photo of Milton Acorn brings back memories of dancing, love poetry and a revolution.

We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.

Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.

Shiny bras and worn-in sweaters—the clothes do make the woman.

If marriage was a television show, it might look something like this.

One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers.

Veronica Gaylie encounters invisible lamps, uncooperative clerks and a cushion with a bear and/or badger on it during a trip to London.

Shared family memories of burnt baked goods.

At the Jubilee Cinema, the manager carries an imitation pistol in the John Dillinger style.

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

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

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.

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

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

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Violence could not reach them only when they were distant as the moon, not of this world

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

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"Leading Men” is taken from a work-in-progress, Cinéma-Verité and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures.

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Derek Matthews has to be the ugliest boy in the class but I like him. I’ve liked every boy except Barry Pumphrey now. Barry Pumphrey likes me.

These stories and conversations took place in a Media and Communications Studies class at a Canadian college. Students come to the college from many countries, in the hope of enrolling eventually in a North American university.

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Remembering her father's last days in a hospital in Wyoming, Connie Kuhns struggles with questions of mortality, memory and how to fulfill her father's dying wish.

A new anthology of reviews, interviews and commentary on Joni Mitchell's music reveals the star-making machinery.

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.

Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

World War I, Canada’s “war of independence,” marked a turning point for a young colony wanting to prove itself as a self-reliant nation, but at what cost.

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

The death and life of Diana, Princess of Wales, provides Tina Brown, the well-known Diana tribute artist and lookalike—her Di-likeness fills the back cover of The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday), which makes it uncomfortable to read this book on public

Carra Noelle Simpson reviews The Deserters Tale by Joshua Key, an "honest, accessible, first-hand experience of the war in Iraq that is missing in mainstream media."

In The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner (Frog Ltd/North Atlantic Books), Minnie Goetze shares her story of growing up in anything-goes 1970s San Francisco, using words, drawings and comics. It’s the year Minnie becomes sexually curious and

The Dam Busters (Anchor Bay dvd), Michael Anderson’s 1955 movie version of the attacks, is still considered a classic war movie, and despite special effects that look tame when compared to modern cgi sequences, the pacing of the film and the power of

Several journeys go on in the three parts of The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert (Knopf). First we meet Helmut, a young man who doesn’t go far from Berlin but spends many hours on the platform of his local train station watching his city empty of people

You'll need more than one cross-town bus ride to polish off The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (as abridged for Dell). But this book remains pre-eminently a great read, and it's rife with graceful periods and rolling paragraphs

Michael Hayward reviews The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher (Criterion).

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.

Pocket Canon #4, The Complete Life of Harmon du Prés, is a masterpiece of meandering nostalgia. An unnamed narrator reminisces about youthful encounters with Harmon in sometimes baffling vignettes, constructing a mysterious tale that is anything but

Alexander Wilson, in his book The Cult of Nature (Between the Lines), makes the following remark in passing on page 25: By the late nineteenth century, almost half of North Americans lived in cities. It was not until then—the moment that in the Unite

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.

Receiving books for Christmas raises the question: What possible reason did anyone have to give me this? ... This year it was my uncle's turn: why exactly did he send me a copy of The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost H

The Complete Peanuts: Volume 1, 1950 to 1952 by Charles M. Schulz (Fantagraphics) is the first in a series of deluxe hardback editions in which every single Peanuts comic strip will be reprinted, in order.

In his book of poetry, The Cold Panes of Surfaces (Nightwood), Chris Banks takes the incidental moments of our lives and raises them, with stunningly precise language, to the level of the divine. In lines like these: “Today, field crickets with hum-b

This edge-of-your-seat film follows a Spanish chef on his quest to win the prestigious cooking competition, the Bocuse D’Or. Review by Leah Rae.

Geist readers who take in the Globe and Mail will have seen a sobering feature not long ago reporting the jailing, flogging and even murdering of cartoonists who dare to satirize the governments of various countries, official religions, prominent cit

An unnamed cellist plays Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio for twenty-two consecutive days in a bomb crater.

Child-rearing manuals cropped up with a vengeance in the latter half of the twentieth century after Dr. Benjamin Spock produced Baby and Child Care—the all-time best-selling book in American history, second only to the Bible, despite advice such as “

Even the healthiest reader can uncover the fatal illness within thanks to The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You: A Guide to Self-Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs, reviewed by Michael Hayward.

Michael Hayward reviews a new compendium of The Chicagoan, the “Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age.”

I almost didn’t read Luanne Armstrong’s book The Colour of Water (Caitlin) because the cover put me off, but when I was reminded of how much I had enjoyed an earlier Armstrong book, Annie, I gave the new one a chance. The Colour of Water covers four

Lily Gontard Reviews The China Fantasy by James Mann (Penguin).

A review of The Complete New Yorker, a vast treatise on writing and reading, editing and publishing in the twentieth century.

Thad McIlroy reads Kilodney Does Shakespeare and Other Stories by Lorette Luzajic, the only book that discusses Crad Kilodney’s life and writing.

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

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

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

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

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

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.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unravelling the mysteries of Alejo Carpentier

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

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