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. [...]
Jannie Edwards
Jannie Edwards
The Complex Arms
Edmonton writer Dolly Dennis’s second novel, The Complex Arms, tracks the lives of an eccentric coterie of characters who comprise a tenuous community of renters in a four-storey walk-up in the [...]
Chance Encounters with Wild Animals
The title of Calgary writer Monica Kidd’s fourth collection of poetry, Chance Encounters with Wild Animals, suggests an exploration of the risks and rewards of wilderness travel, the kind that [...]
An Honest Woman
Calgary writer JoAnn McCaig’s latest novel, An Honest Woman, has a matryoshka doll structure: It layers the story of a single, middle-aged woman who is writing a novel about a single, middle-aged [...]
Season of Fury and Wonder
Bestselling Calgary author Sharon Butala’s story of how she came to write her new collection of short stories, Season of Fury and Wonder, is wonderfully juicy. The first story, she relates in the [...]
Insomnia Bird
Mordecai Richler once joyfully pricked Edmonton’s civic pride, in 1985 in the New York Times, when he called Edmonton the “boiler room” of Canada. In Kelly Shepherd’s latest poetry collection, [...]
Raising Grandkids:
Edmonton writer Gary Garrison never expected to be called into parenting—again—in his retirement 60s. But having committed to co-parenting his partner’s young grandchildren, he reached out to [...]
Waiting:
On the cover of Waiting: An Anthology of Essays, sculptor Alex Pina’s androgynous human figure seated at the edge of a diving board looks down at its seriously elongated legs. The image elegantly [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
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 ...
Jason Kenney’s Vision for K-12
It was by all accounts, a fiery speech. Standing on a blue-curtained stage in front of a couple thousand supporters at the UCP’s inaugural policy convention in Red Deer in May 2018, leader Jason Kenney went on the attack against anti-oilsands activists and the foreign money he says funds them ...
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 ...