The Comedian
The Romans get bad press when it comes to literature. When (or if) we think of the culture of pre-Christian Western antiquity, we tend to think of the clever, original Greeks and the imitative [...]
Alex Rettie
Alex Rettie
At This Juncture: A Book of Letters
Dear Rona Altrows, When I was asked if I wanted to review your latest book, At This Juncture, I didn’t really know what the book was “about.” I didn’t need to know what it was about though—I’m [...]
Full Disclosure
Some people just aren’t cut out for retirement. Take Beverley McLachlin, the former, and longest-serving, Chief Justice of Canada, who retired from the bench last December. In the few months [...]
Less Painful Duties:
The once-renowned and far-from-late Calgary barrister C.D. Evans has, toward the end of his eighth decade, delivered himself of a sequel to his 2011 memoir Painful Duties. My first thought on [...]
On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood
If you think about life enough, or too much, it looks like a series of losses. Poems can work as a reckoning of these losses or, in the case of Calgary poet Richard Harrison’s sixth and latest [...]
Party of One
Ernest C. Manning (1908–1997) was an Alberta MLA and cabinet minister for 33 years and the province’s premier for 25 years. When he first joined the provincial cabinet as provincial secretary and [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Plans to Strip-Mine Coal in the Mountains
It looks like spectacular wild country, but some see it more as a big money sandwich.
The top layer of that sandwich is comprised of alpine grasses, forget-me-nots and stonecrop, glacier lilies and ancient, brave pines whose branches have been gnarled and weathered by centuries of wind. In summer, solitaires and ...
Part 1: A Tribute to Charlie Russell
Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, to our “ranchette” near the Crowsnest Pass. We would hear the thrum of the plane’s Rotax motor ...
Alberta’s Black Swan
The best evidence of our conservative government’s cluelessness before the economy tanked in 2020 is the provincial budget. It was passed in a rush on March 18, 2020, two months after the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, had arrived in Canada. Oil demand in China was already down 20 per cent. Oil storage ...