In January 2021, I pitched a scripted television series to the CBC. My story focused on several Deaf characters, not only because I myself am Deaf, but because disabled characters seldom form the nucleus of scripted TV shows. Reality TV, however, is a different story. Reality series such as Deaf U, The Undateables, Born This […] More »

Every week, when I was a teenager, I used to squirrel my hand-me-down laptop away to my bedroom and scour the internet’s sketchy streaming sites for the latest episode of Gossip Girl. (I couldn’t watch it on the family TV—after all, it was, per its marketing, “every parent’s nightmare.”) From quippy dialogue, to attempts at […] More »

“Sometimes people’s … personal life becomes bigger than their work,” says pop star Britney Spears at one point during Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times-produced documentary released in February 2021. Though the complaint backgrounds a montage of Spears being chased around by paparazzi in the late 2000s, it may as well have been issued […] More »

Growing up as a biracial child, Beige Blum longingly wished to see fictional characters and media personalities that resembled part of her identity. Being of German and Filipino descent, she grew up noticing that Asian characters hardly made an appearance on screen, and if they ever did, they were almost certainly not Southeast Asian. Instead, […] More »

“Bent out of joint / in order to hold every-thing together. Won’t snap, won’t dissolve in an acid bath.” These are the opening lines of Self-Portrait as Paperclip, from Fredericton-based writer Triny Finlay’s third book, Myself A Paperclip, in which she transforms an inconspicuous office article into a clever metaphor for those attempting to hold […] More »

  Things I have been involved with in my life include anti-gentrification activism, a sex worker arts festival, protesting a youth superjail, harm reduction work, community radio, a feminist bookstore, and independent publishing. I’ve also watched 11 years of The Bachelor franchise, likely more than that of The Hills and related shows, and could draw […] More »

I was 14 years old when I first kissed a girl—and there were more after that—but it took a global pandemic and months of self-reflection to get to a place where I felt comfortable calling myself bisexual. I’m far from alone. The pandemic presented an opportunity for many closeted queer people to look inwards and […] More »

Over a decade out of art school, Vancouver-based artist Ami Sangha has found her niche. Sangha is the owner of Ami Like Miami, an online shop where she sells handmade ceramic dishes, painted with funky patterns and bright colours. During her undergraduate degree, Sangha studied printmaking. In her late twenties, she fell into a deep […] More »

In These Lifeless Things, by Edmonton writer Premee Mohamed, a character looks at her partner in a post-apocalyptic landscape. “We could make love right here!” she thinks. “Who, in this dead city, would stop us?” Amid pandemics, rising fascism and climate disaster, science fiction writers are imagining new futures in new ways. Mohamed is a […] More »

Black lesbian poet Victoria Mbabazi’s poetry collection, chapbook, was published by Anstruther Press in January 2021 and is now in its third printing. Their poetry’s No Name Brand design and style was inspired by the advertisements they saw commuting to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus last summer, a time when they were also searching […] More »

The magic of a bookstore arises not only from books and stories, but from community and conversation. Glass Bookshop Radio, the new podcast from Edmonton’s Glass Bookshop, founded by Jason Purcell and Matthew Stepanic, celebrates its first year this fall. Purcell, Stepanic, and podcast producer and co-host, Makda Mulatu, have built their working relationship on […] More »