Culture

The black and white photograph, such as those taken with a Brownie box camera, shows a man, perhaps 40 years old, with the sun- and wind-burned face of a farmer, a thick hank of dark hair falling [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The newspaper business has been in trouble for a long time. One of the gaudier proofs was last year, when Torstar and Postmedia traded a bunch of newspapers for the purpose of killing them. That [...]

I attended classes and read books. I learned the mechanics of back labour and the action of intravenous pitocin. Experts taught me all about breech birth, water birth and afterbirth. Nobody, [...]

A couple of municipal elections ago, a would-be alderman knocked on my door suggesting I might wish to vote for him, and asked if I had any concerns about the city of Calgary. I asked him what he [...]

In Grade 6, Lois told me her mother lay on the couch all day, eating chocolates and crying. Astonishing. But not entirely. I believe I knew, deep down, that the place was filled with unhappy [...]

Critics of the culture of cyberspace note the link between ongoing privatization of public space and the Internet junkie’s loss of contact, while blithely cruising the cosmos, with the [...]

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 [...]

At the Bar U Ranch National Historic Site south of Longview they tell a story about John Ware. The Black cowboy and rancher, a former slave in the US, was hired in 1882 to help bring 3,000 cattle [...]