Photo by Pavel Danilyuk via Pexels I was struggling in school: distracted, restless, and falling behind. I was an undiagnosed ADHDer and autistic kid, but it was the ’80s, so my fidgeting was treated as misbehaviour rather than a learning difference. I was rescued by the unstoppable hero known as creativity. My mom, a teacher […] More »

Illustration by Teddy Kang Ben wandered past the bedroom. Inside, he could hear, his mother was helping the boy get dressed. Snaking his ankle down through the cuff of the jeans she’d pooled on the floor, cajoling him to raise his arms and draping the sweater from his own closet over that other boy’s chest. […] More »

Photo by Alexander Arvelo McQuaig When Broken Pencil magazine abruptly shut down in 2024, it left a gap in the Canadian zine community. Broken Pencil launched in 1995 with a distinct focus on zines and independent culture. It also hosted Canzine, one of the country’s biggest zine fairs. Running for nearly 30 years, Canzine gave […] More »

Wikimedia Commons / James Lee via Pexels / Corrie Maurik Like many, the first time I heard the term “Wasian” was through social media. The Gen Z term for East Asian–white mixed people was passed to me through a white friend who had come across it on TikTok in the summer of 2021. Recently, the […] More »

Photo courtesy of Explore Edmonton Urban Farm On the north side of Edmonton, at the corner of 113 Avenue and 79 Street, several lots laid vacant for years. That was until Northlands, an agricultural society, took over management of the land. An employee of the society worked to establish an urban farm on the site. […] More »

Photo by K via Pexels Wildfires play an integral role in forest regeneration by clearing underbrush, recycling nutrients, and triggering seed release. But with climate change, their severity and scale have increased sharply, often surpassing the natural range in which they provide ecological benefits. Reliable data on deaths and property loss is limited, since most […] More »

Photos courtesy of Grilled Cheese Catherine Ouellet-Cummings was working from her old home’s dimly lit basement, scrolling on Facebook, when she saw her friend liked a Belgian kids’ magazine’s page. It was called Cuistax, which published in Dutch and French—two of Belgium’s official languages. She immediately informed her husband and work partner, Julien Boisseau, about […] More »

Photo by DONOT6 As Zhi Jia finished junior high, his father was diagnosed with cancer. The two had only recently moved to Canada from China—just father and son—and were still settling into their new life in Calgary. Jia’s father’s cancer was a rare and often aggressive form called a neuroendocrine carcinoma that occurs in the […] More »

Joshua Miranda / Pexels This past January, lesbians and queer women flocked to the Montreal queer bar Champs to watch a Heated Rivalry marathon. Despite my lack of interest in men (and my lack of being a man), I was one of many lesbians who found joyful solidarity in the queer male romance featured on […] More »

Image courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada, Lantern Films, and Experimental Forest Films. For the First Nations communities who coexist with the Nechako River, there’s a deep understanding that they will persist. Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again, a documentary directed by Lyana Patrick and co-produced by the National Film Board […] More »

Photo by Hadeel Ibrahim Hadeel Ibrahim was a reporter for the CBC in Saint John, New Brunswick in 2023 when then-Premier Blaine Higgs made headlines. He’d removed protections for trans and gender-diverse students, a move that prompted Ibrahim to eventually switch careers. Higgs’ government revised Policy 713, an education policy effected in 2020 that established […] More »