A History of My Brief Body
Between climate change, the pandemic, a new civil rights movement and political chaos, alarming predictions of apocalypse have become mainstream. But, as Billy-Ray Belcourt shows in [...]
Vermin
Calgary novelist and short fiction writer Lori Hahnel’s second collection of short stories, Vermin, arrives at an opportune time, when short fiction is being lauded on literary award lists. [...]
All That Glitters: A Climber’s Journey Through Addiction and Depression
Margo Talbot’s newly re-released All That Glitters opens with a meditation on two contrary events in the author’s life. Guiding a client to the summit of Mount Vinson, Antarctica’s highest [...]
Rough
The epigraph to Rough, from The Hobbit—“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, but it is not always quite the something you were [...]
Storying Violence: Unravelling Colonial Narratives in the Stanley Trial
Howard Norman reminds us that “to the Cree, stories are animate beings” and that if nourished properly they are like good friends, aiding our good living throughout our lives. In Storying [...]
If Sylvie Had Nine Lives
We meet Sylvie, the protagonist of Leona Theis’s third book, If Sylvie Had Nine Lives, in 1974, two nights before her wedding day in Ripley, Saskatchewan. She’s 19 and ambivalent about her [...]
The Expendables: How the Middle Class Got Screwed by Globalization
Jeff Rubin has always been an outlier. Traditionally, bank economists are careful folks, perusing data from StatsCan to make forecasts on regional growth rates or unemployment. Rubin, who [...]
A Rogue Conservative
He is a one-man minefield—set to explode whenever Premier Jason Kenney makes a misstep. And there’s not much Kenney can do to defuse him. Say hello to Drew Barnes, United Conservative MLA for [...]
Sacred Trails
In my childhood church we walked a short loop, some evenings, along the Stations of the Cross. They were 14 bas-relief renditions of ordeals suffered on the day Jesus was crucified, arrayed [...]
Ask Questions First, Shoot Never
Blood Tribe Police Chief Kyle Melting Tallow is growing his hair out. When I visited the police station in Standoff on the Blood Reserve in late September, his face was framed by a wave of black [...]
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The Lesson of Lougheed
For 100 years, between 1905 and 2005, Albertans changed their government only three times (1921, 1935, 1971). The last of these elections, the most portentous, happened 50 years ago this August. Alberta has now changed government twice in the past six years. The next election may see yet another new government—meaning ...
The Assault on Higher Education
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it declared that the province’s grant to the schools should be reduced by 20 per cent by 2023. The rationale for this ...
Rediscovering a River
The Cree called it Kisiskâciwanisîpiy—the swiftly flowing river. For the Blackfoot, it was omaka-ty—the big river. It starts in the Columbia Icefield, at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier, and cuts the province in half as it flows through Banff and Jasper national parks, northeast to Edmonton, then east-by-southeast across the ...