Goth Girls of Banff
Fear not, this book isn’t—despite its title—a collection of goth fantasies or undead horrors. The setting is the Bow Valley and surroundings, and the 10 stories well capture elements of this [...]
Steven Ross Smith
Steven Ross Smith
Air Salt: A trauma mémoire as a result of the fall
Ian Kinney’s poetry is shattered. Or, in more literary terms, in Air Salt he uses disjunctive or cut up compositional methods, a non-linear form in keeping with an “accident” and its [...]
Frontenac House Poetry Quartet 2019
Frontenac House has published its Quartet 2019, a suite of four books of poetry, as they’ve been doing annually since 2001. The release of four poetry books by four authors simultaneously is a [...]
The Stories Were Not Told: Canada’s First World War Internment Camps
Why wouldn’t he talk about it?” Donna Korchinski wonders. “Of course he’s not going to talk about it, because he was ashamed.” She’s speaking of the internment of her Ukrainian step-grandfather [...]
Born in Romance
Peter grew up in Banff, the son of a pioneering family (then the “Whites”). His father, Dave White, first worked for the CPR and then in 1894 acquired, through an unpaid debt, a hardware, grocery [...]
Searching for Mary Schäffer:
In 2006 Colleen Skidmore, Alberta writer, scholar and researcher, edited This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, a marvellous compendium of writings and images by and of women [...]
Deep in the Furrows
I’ve gone around and around fields for a week cutting winter rye and winter wheat. Divining my thoughts are earth’s invisible coils about my head. From “Swather As Threshold” in Afternoon [...]
Optical Illusion
My 94-year-old mother and I are sitting in a southwest Calgary medical office and settling in to spend the day. It will be a long one but by the time we leave, my mother will have a new right eye [...]
MOST READ
MOST READ
The Lesson of Lougheed
For 100 years, between 1905 and 2005, Albertans changed their government only three times (1921, 1935, 1971). The last of these elections, the most portentous, happened 50 years ago this August. Alberta has now changed government twice in the past six years. The next election may see yet another new government—meaning ...
The Assault on Higher Education
The Kenney government proclaimed in fall 2019 that Alberta’s post-secondary institutions were “overly dependent” on government funding—which is an odd thing to say about a public good. Then it declared that the province’s grant to the schools should be reduced by 20 per cent by 2023. The rationale for this ...
Rediscovering a River
The Cree called it Kisiskâciwanisîpiy—the swiftly flowing river. For the Blackfoot, it was omaka-ty—the big river. It starts in the Columbia Icefield, at the toe of the Saskatchewan Glacier, and cuts the province in half as it flows through Banff and Jasper national parks, northeast to Edmonton, then east-by-southeast across the ...