Archives

The estranged (and deranged) loner who takes refuge in the wilds on the fringes of settlement is a familiar trope in North American storytelling. I think of Rudy Wiebe’s mad trapper, Albert [...]

I used to be in the bear police back in the 1960s and 1970s in the mountain national parks, although the actual policing meant ticketing bear botherers rather than the bears themselves. Lots of [...]

  Garth Martens’s debut performance, in his 2014 book Prologue for the Age of Consequence, set a poetic template, hammered together with a framer’s hammer and a carpenter’s level, for [...]

Vistas of the West is a well-designed, attractive hardback that may grace the coffee table of many a western home for years to come. It would make a good gift to mail to any puzzled easterner who [...]

Publishers and authors have the right to define their books by genre as they please—a book of poetry in this case. But to my eye and ear, the text of Walter Hildebrandt’s Blackfoot Country is [...]

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, [...]

One of the many Canadian communities hit hard by the ongoing fentanyl debacle is Standoff, Alberta, headquarters of the Kainai (Blood) First Nation, where a state of emergency was declared in [...]

Andy, late lamented friend, celebrated author of Wood Mountain Poems, The Ghosts Call You Poor and many other texts: you were too frail and too medicated, the last time I saw you alive, to chew [...]

John “Jack” Cowdry, the author’s grandfather, first came to my attention in L.V. Kelly’s Alberta ranching chronicle The Range Men (1913). The Cowdry brothers were the first bankers to set up shop [...]

On January 24, 2012, the Stop Castle Logging protest had been underway for 13 days in temperatures down to −35 degrees and a wind-chill reaching −45. Alberta Forest Service (AFS) had served [...]