Stephen Henighan’s most recent book is the short story collection Blue River and Red Earth (Cormorant Books, 2018). Read more of his work at geist.com and stephenhenighan.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHenighan.
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Stephen Henighan
Vanished Shore
To build a city on land flooded by the tides isn’t just a mistake—it’s utopic. Read more
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." Read more
Victims of Anti-Communism
Anti-communism, retired by most Western governments, receives monumental status in Canada Read more
Ethnic Babies
Stephen Henighan discusses the crude first steps to finding a new way to talk about racial reality. Read more
Write What You Can Imagine
Like most advice given to writers, the injunction to “write what you know” is misleading. Read more
Power of Denial
The crowds learned that they could not act effectively in the present without confronting the past, specifically the historical treatment of indigenous people. Read more
Treason of the Librarians
On the screen, only the image—not the word—can become the world. Read more
City Apart
The idea of Europe is incarnated nowhere as much as in St. Petersburg—Stephen Henighan on Europe's greatest city. Read more
Immigrants from Nowhere
Stephen Henighan asks: what if you don't have a tidy answer to "Where are you from?" Read more
Cross-Country Snow
"Cross-country skiing offered me the reassurance sought by the immigrant who is excluded from his locality’s history: a viable alternate route to belonging." Read more
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." Read more
Iberian Duet
The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance. Read more
Fighting Words
A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language. Read more
Offend
The writer who is loved by all, by definition, neglects literature’s prime responsibility: to offend. Read more
Homage to Nicaragua
Despite hardships and dangerous slums, Nicaragua maintains a sense of hope that draws back to the democratic days of the Sandinistas. Read more
The Market and the Mall
In the farmer’s market, a quintessentially Canadian setting, much of Canada is not visible. Read more
Not Reading
What we do when we absorb words from a screen— and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading. Read more
Language and Nation Now
Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world? Read more
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