No Harm Done
Eugene Stickland has written some notable plays. Some Assembly Required was nominated for a Governor General’s Award. A Guide to Mourning and Queen Lear have both been widely produced. But he [...]
Alex Rettie
Alex Rettie
Borrowed Time
All things must pass, George Harrison reminded us 50 years ago, and in Calgary that’s what they do. Here the barely old—neighbourhood confectioneries, low-rise apartment buildings with names like [...]
All The Rage: A Partial Memoir in Two Acts and a Prologue
If you were young and gay in late 1980s Alberta, it seemed you were always waiting. You were waiting for news from the big world in Vancouver, and Toronto, and New York—from friends, from tricks, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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Should Post-Secondary Education be Free?
Hugh Mackenzie
The economist and research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says yes.
Free tuition would redress a massive intergenerational inequity created over the past 30 years. In 1990–91, average university tuition in Canada was $1,464; adjusted for inflation, that would be $2,541 in 2019–20. Today the actual average ...
Not a White-Bread Childhood
Toronto freelance portrait photographer Markian Lozowchuk (disclosure: his mother and I are second cousins) has photographed Justin Trudeau for Toronto Life and Margaret Atwood for Maclean’s, but his editorial shoot of Chrystia Freeland for Toronto Life in 2017, including the cover, was “the most memorable shoot I’ve done.” Even three ...
After the Golden Era
When Nick Zon drove onto the property on Moonlight Bay in 1973, “I knew it was the one,” he says. Willows and poplars shone golden-green in the sun. Lake waters lapped at the grassy bank. Zon, an electrician who owned his own company in Edmonton, drove to several lakes near the city ...