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 [...]
Steven Ross Smith
Steven Ross Smith
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 [...]
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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 ...