Literary

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

“Our group included people born in Texas, in Winnipeg, in Japan, in India, in small Saskatchewan towns, in Africa, in something called Toronto. There were even two writers who were born in [...]

In case you haven’t heard, last year the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canadian fiction’s richest literary honour, was won by Lynn Coady for her book of short stories Hellgoing. The year before that, [...]

  When the frigate-bird called back to me from the road And slow-pokily brought the horse to a meaning walk, I didn’t stand by and look down-around On all the hills I haven’t hogged, And [...]

  As cultures broad see capitals deemed Horse snort less stable than once it seemed Formed there is new wiggle in rooms Scribes awl pin light through prescription doom In blankets gold will [...]

Shortly after the death of Edmonton writer Gloria Sawai, I was invited by her children, Naomi and Kenji, to go through her library and select whatever books I should like to keep. Obviously this [...]

Robert Kroetsch has often recounted the story of the New York editor who took him out for a lavish lunch in 1970 to celebrate the success of The Studhorse Man. After a few libations, the editor [...]

1. The downy hair that forms on a baby in utero is called lanugo; the soft spot on its head, the fontanelle. A pregnant woman is called a gravida, and the dark line that appears on her belly and [...]