Quiet on the Set
Making movies is the most collaborative, combative and challenging of the arts. Writers believe it begins with “the word,” and they assert that every syllable is sacred. Directors have their own [...]
Fil Fraser
Fil Fraser
The Electric Saskatchewan Acid Test
Oddly, I never considered quitting smoking during all my years trying to help people beat their own addictions. I didn’t get around to it until the early 1970s, when a friend I hadn’t seen in [...]
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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 ...
Herd Memory
On a cold day in February, I flew over the tightly knit stands of black spruce and jack pine in northwestern Alberta, straining my eyes below, eager to catch sight of a woodland caribou. My dad, a wildlife biologist, called them the “grey ghosts” of the boreal. Woodland caribou have ...
The Big Man in Cargo Shorts
Leonard was the first to find him. The man was face down in the school’s outdoor learning space, next to a planter of basil. He was fat, his calves the size of a turkey dinner, his hair a gnarled mess of seaweed. Leonard wondered if the man was dead and ...