Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.

The Calgary floods left behind a stew of knee-deep mud, and waterlogged piles of couches, fridges, books, toys, artworks, chairs, carpet, drywall...

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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

Review of "Memories Look at Me" by Tomas Tranströmer

Review of "Demon Copperhead" by Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

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

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

Review of "Slave Old Man" by Patrick Chamoiseau

Review of "The Age of Insecurity" by Astra Taylor

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

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

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

Review of "M Train" by Patti Smith.

Review of "On Community" by Casey Plett.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of "Cabin Fever" by Anik See.

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

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

Review of "The Adversary" by Michael Crummey.

After fol

One of the indispensable figures of contemporary journalism is the cutting-edge cultural commentator. The columnist who offers sardonic insights into trends, fashions, television shows and publishing personalities has become an institution.

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

In Bangkok as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours.

From the trench coat to the Hummer, what does the militarization of style say about us?

The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city.

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.

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.

Stephen Henighan exposes the errors, omissions and problems with the Conservative party's study guide for Canadian citizenship.

Since the Wall came down, East German socialists in Prenzlauer Berg are free to sip coffee and talk about art.

Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.

Richard Stursberg’s memoir of his years in CBC programming raises the question: How did someone with no sympathy for public broadcasting get the job in the first place?

It is not only the children of British mothers who have lost one of their nationalities; Great Britain, too, has lost a part of itself

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores.

The Giller Prize is the most conspicuous example of corporate suffocation of the public institutions that built our literary culture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much damage as the throttling of the book market by the Chapters-Indigo chain.

He is one of the strangest crea

During the 1950s the RCMP used a machine to identify federal employees who were homosexuals. The name of this bogus device? The "fruit machine," of course.

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland