Walking is one of the most appropriate ways to appreciate one’s community, environment, and place in the world. And to walk with intention is to listen. As Rebecca Solnit writes: “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.”1 These three notes resonate in Tanis MacDonald’s Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female and Kit Dobson’s Field Notes on Listening—two expansive perspectives on the necessity of attentiveness and the complications of embodiment a ..read more

It’s that time of year again! As the year winds down, the temperature drops and snow covers the ground, the Christmas season lurks. The holiday tunes start a little earlier each year, stores start getting in their Christmas merch in September, and as we get closer to the “Big Day,” it gets harder and harder to avoid the spectre of holiday cheer. But maybe you like your holiday season with a bit of a darker side, and your ghosts with a bit of bite. That’s where Biblioasis’s A Ghost Story for Christmas collection comes in. “The telling of ghost stories during long, dark and cold Christmas nights ..read more

Have you ever wandered down streets at night, looking in the lit windows of other people’s homes, wondering about their lives? Charlotte, the central character of We Have Never Lived on Earth, spends much of her time wondering, like the cellist in “Houseboat,” if she “has brought her separateness with her, and that, if she could only find a way to release herself from this separateness, she might feel included” (117). We Have Never Lived on Earth is the debut collection of Kasia Van Schaik, a South African-Canadian writer. In this Bildungsroman of linked short stories, Charlotte, a nomadic you ..read more

The cover art for Neils Hav’s Moments of Happiness features a wall with wallpaper and paint partially peeled away, revealing layer after layer of understory. In keeping with this image, Hav opens the collection with the line: “The battered inside of the cupboard under the kitchen sink / makes me happy.” (13) He goes on to describe this unlikely space in detail, reflecting on the passage of time and the many lives lived in the kitchen that contains the cupboard. Remarking on the original nails and a spider who can move about undisturbed, he establishes the playful—rueful, wistful—stripping down ..read more

Lucian Childs’ short stories have been widely published in various literary journals throughout the US and Canada. Dreaming Home is his debut book-length work of fiction, divided into six chapters that focus on different characters spanning a time period of about forty years. So is it a short story collection, a novel in stories, or something else entirely? The book begins in Texas in 1977, with twelve-year-old Rachel Mullen. Her father is a military helicopter pilot with a drinking problem that often frightens her and throws the family dynamics off balance. She finds order in religion and mat ..read more

Books about the craft of writing often make big promises. Typically written for an audience of aspiring authors who long for the guidance of an expert, a lot of writing craft books insist that they hold the secret key to helping unlock the novels, stories, poems, and memoirs that we carry within our hearts, just waiting for the right spark to make the words burst onto the page, the right creative method that will take us from “once upon a time” to “happily ever after.” We can achieve our creative goals, such books tell us, if only we follow the author’s advice. But far too often, this advice f ..read more

After fifty-seven years in archival gestation, Milton Acorn and bill bissett’s I Want to Tell You Love has finally, like a letter lost and deferred in the mail, reached the ears of its public. The work first took shape as a manuscript in 1965 when Acorn and bissett met in Vancouver: Canada’s most quintessentially postmodern city. Both poets of the Maritimes (bissett was born and raised in Halifax, and Acorn in Charlottetown), they found themselves in Vancouver just as the spark of 1960s counterculture caught flame along the coast and set Canada alight. To this day the West Coast is still consi ..read more

The Holodomor, or Great Famine of Ukraine, is another black hole in history. Current scholarship estimates 3.5 to 5 million people of Ukraine died over the 1932 to 1933 year, as collectivization disrupted small farms and Stalin attempted to stamp out resistance with starvation and summary execution. But how do we, almost a century later, comprehend large numbers like five million? As the artist and historian Ernie Kroeger says, “[T]he accounting doesn’t seem to add up to anything, is in a sense meaningless. The numbers are abstract, horrible, unimaginable. There is no sense to be made of such ..read more

            In Earle Street: Poems, Arleen Paré digs into the infrastructure of place. Unearths for us the very foundations of urban life. As if to say “Look! This is who we are”. Not simply people inside buildings. But storm drains and catch basins, trees and their inhabitants, the passing seasons, birds in flight, neighbours observing neighbours, the abiding presence of first peoples on the land. When she writes “… Start from the inside, as though organic, as though building from inside a seed.” (4) she opens up an intimate and profound ..read more

            Animal Person by Alexander MacLeod is a short story collection that defies easy categorization, an exceptional yet accessible work of fiction that explores contemporary relationships and anxieties. As a character thinks in “Once Removed”: You think you are in one situation, but then it turns out to be something else (185). Seemingly mundane situations—a family funeral (“The Dead Want”), a piano recital (“The Entertainer”), visiting an elderly relative (“Once Removed”), or staying overnight in a motel (“The Closing Date”)—are tr ..read more