“Nature is not something else, isolated, out there; it is as much a part of us as we are of it, and neither can be altered without impacting on the whole.” – Adam Weymouth The Yukon River holds many roles—the namesake of a territory, the history of peoples for thousands of years and home to …
The ecological web: A story of salmon caught in the middle Read More »
The sad truth was, you could not live in Syria and have a clean heart. How could you, when you live in a place where you’re randomly shot at and car bombs explode outside your home?
Author Kate Harris shucked her space dreams and, with her friend, Mel Yule, picked up the courage to embark on a different trip: to cycle the Silk Road from end to end.
“To most people, the pack ice looked like a cold, endless wasteland that spread across one’s entire field of vision. But, if one watched it more carefully, one could see it come to life.” — excerpt from No Time to Bury Them by Mark C. Eddy On the surface of national history, the Yukon is …
Winter Child, the first novel by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau to be translated to English, is a lyrical journey through a mother’s grief of losing and outliving her child.
There’s no need to be a closet comic nerd anymore. The genre has exploded into accepted popularity over the last 10 years and it’s definitely something worth openly celebrating. If you’re like me, however, and relatively new to the scene, you might be surprised to find the roots of Canadian comic artists went mainstream more …
Canada’s first superheroine saved from obscurity Read More »
“Ship’s logs, myths, stories of quiet exaltation and wrenching lamentations can all become poetry when the experience resonates deeply with the rhythm of the human heart…”— Anita Hadley in the introduction to Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea. The sea, in Anita Hadley’s view, may not be a tangible part of your everyday, but …
Once again I was about to die. Like every other literary artist before me I was about to die forgotten in a ditch at the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, beneath a blackened train trestle and a faded “dew worms for sale” sign, with a bullet in my brain. At least I didn’t have to …
Every summer, Rose and her family pack up and head to their cottage in Awago Beach. There, the long days melt into lake swims and beach fires, counting stars, five-cent candies, watching movies and running around with her summer-sister, Windy. It’s summertime, and the living is easy, right? But this year something feels off. In …
It was the summer he turned twelve, after his failed attempts to save the fox kits, that he began collecting bones, scouring the grass and pine duff for tracks and finding deer skulls, a pelvis, a sprocket-like vertebrae, the bones reassuringly solid in his hands. –excerpt from The Afterlife of Birds by Elizabeth Philips Henry …
If you grew up with the convenience of grocery stores, basing your diet on foraged foods is a romantic but daunting idea to consider. Luckily, whatever your reason for considering a change is, you don’t have to turn your whole life around to include local and wild foods in your diet. There’s a great resurgence …
… A wind was blowing from the mountains, and the surface of the snow was swirling along like snakes, the way it often did on the lake. The moon was at just the right angle to light up the swirling snow, but not the ground beneath it. We marvelled at the strange sensation of having …
His Naturalist’s Guide to Spirituality, The Road is How, is a lyrical account of Trevor Herriot’s three-day, 40-mile journey
ookbook-cum-community memoir: A Taste of Haida Gwaii: “They love cooking. The only trouble is cooking doesn’t love them back…”
An attack leaves two girls hospitalized. Two families looking for answers. In the Break Metis writer, Katherena Vermette tells the stories.
“As Jack knelt in the bloody snow, he wondered if that was how a man held up his end of the bargain, by learning and taking into his heart this strange wilderness — guarded and naked, violent and meek, tremulous in its greatness.” –excerpt from The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey Often touted as a …
“Think of magic as a tree. The root of supernatural ability is simply the realization that all time exists simultaneously. Humans experience time as a progression of sequential events in much the same way we see the horizon as flat: our reality is shaped by our limitations.” –excerpt from Son of a Trickster by Eden …
Breasts, boobs, tits, tatas. Mind the title, because, yes, this really is a story about tits, but it’s also, oh! so much more than that. Because, what are breasts to women? I won’t overstep boundaries and assume to know everyone’s relationship with their own; however, whether we have them or we don’t, and no matter …
Growing up is hard. And the microcosm of high school — with its changing expectations and responsibilities and the push-pull of social dynamics, while, at the same time, you’re trying to establish emotional coping mechanisms and, above all, dealing with the omnipresent questions about the rest of life…? Phew. It’s exhausting just reading that, nevermind …
“We imagined ourselves free of the hassles and troubles we’d accumulated in Toronto. We imagined a life without rushing, without the subway, without neighbours at each other’s throats, without the noise and frustration of daily commutes. Life with space. Life without the massacre of endless winter, frozen pipes, cracking plaster and mountains of snow to …
The Grass is Greener Wherever Convenience Resides Read More »
How to Survive in the North is a graphic novel where three northern tales — two historical and true, one fictional and set in present-day — are woven together in an artistic cartoon arrangement. While the title suggests the book may provide guidance through an icy winter, it’s more likely to urge you to consider …
“While a part of me was glad I wasn’t like my brother, no part of me wished to be more fortunate than my mother. To be luckier than her was to be different from her, it was to be apart from her, it was to have a life that would take me away from her. …
“Stories are not only words, you know. Words are just the clothes that people drape on stories.” – Brian Doyle, author of Mink River I was drawn to Mink River without knowing the author or the story. But at that time, and since then, it’s reminded me of the lyricism of life and the love of home …
