Deactivated West 100 is Don McKay’s latest set of variations on a poetics of place. Armed with lunch and relevant reading material, McKay invites us to join him on Vancouver Island for a series of explorations that depend on first losing our way. In the spirit of Vis à Vis (Gaspe...

For the past several years, Jan Zwicky has been developing a definition and working examples of the word “lyric.” Her writing has taken the shape of poetry and philosophy, neither necessarily confined to the traditions of those genres. Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences is th...

"Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough." With this concise and broadly informative essay, renowned poet, typographer and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a brief history of ...

In an unusual fiction about memoir, Andrew Steinmetz tells the story of his great-aunt Eva who performed in the first workshop production of Bertolt Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera, in 1928. Steinmetz takes the story back to Eva’s childhood in Germany, with her invalid mother...

The Chisholms are a rollicking, unpredictable family living in the north end of Sydney, Nova Scotia. At the start of the summer, fourteen-year-old Michael, his older brother Sidney and two of their friends build a raft on the tar ponds. It seems the ideal start to the holidays. But over the cours...