Debut novelist explores themes of masculinity and representation
Nadine Bachan
When Omar, a cook working for cash-in-hand at a Toronto restaurant, learns about the suicide of his ex-girlfriend Anna, he becomes caught in his grief and rage and is unwilling to accept what he’s been told: she didn’t leave him a note. He finds some respite from his woes when he meets an attractive and […] More »
The girl detective Nancy has always been inspirational and questionable—until her newest incarnation
Emily Pohl-Weary
At three-thirty, when local high schools let out, I regularly caught the Dufferin bus near my place in downtown Toronto and used the long ride northbound to Yorkdale Mall to snoop on teens’ conversations, Shazam songs they were playing too loudly on earbuds, and read flirty chat messages over their shoulders. While I kept a […] More »
When You've Built a Shrine to Your Problematic Fave
mel monoceros
Dear Bjork, The year leading up to my 30th birthday almost killed me, quite literally. The stress from my living situation at the time was pushing me to the edge of my sanity. I was living in a place I didn’t want to be in because I had gotten priced out of the place I’d […] More »
It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m tired. Matthew and the three or four remaining guests are in the living room and I smile as I hear their laughter. I’m sneaky. I grab the speakers’ remote-control and lower the volume gradually, every minute or so, until Dolly Parton is hushed in her desperate pleas […] More »
One might be tempted to call Transmeditations, a new book of poems by David Bateman and Patricia Wilson a “match made in Heaven.” But to paraphrase Mae West, Heaven had nothin’ to do with it. Legendary figures on the Canadian queer arts scene, neither poet has their head in the clouds: Transmeditations is blunt, raw, […] More »
Meet This Magazine‘s new Poetry Editor, David Ly, and Fiction Editor, Jenny Ferguson. Jenny Ferguson is Métis, an activist, feminist, auntie, teacher, and accomplice with a PhD. She is the author of Border Markers (NeWest Press), a collection of linked flash fiction narratives. Jenny believes writing and teaching are political acts. David Ly is a […] More »
Has messy love on screen killed the rom-com? We sure hope so.
Lisa Whittington-Hill
I blame John Hughes for my great sleepover shutout of 1984. It was a Betamax copy of his teen romantic comedy Sixteen Candles that was my downfall. While my friends clapped their hands and cheered at the final scene that brings together Samantha Baker and Jake Ryan, I was silent. I just couldn’t buy it. […] More »
After her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, Debbie Patterson quit acting. Twenty years on, her second act is transforming Winnipeg’s theatre scene.
Hannah Foulger
Debbie Patterson stands in a circle with her castmates, swaying from side to side, from crutch to crutch. The group is performing The Threepenny Opera, a 1928 German musical critiquing capitalism. The cast consists mostly of disabled theatre artists—and that’s especially powerful in this context: Living with a disability directly challenges capitalism, according to Patterson, […] More »
Canadian art is about so much more than documenting our picturesque landscapes. Artists Lezli Rubin-Kunda, Sandra Rechico, and Susan Fiendel say home is where the mind is.
One of the crumbliest of the many old chestnuts rotting away in Canadian art discourse is that all Canadian art is ultimately about the landscape that surrounds us. This is of course true (that’s how antique ideas last) and also very much not true, especially in an era when the digital presence of art and […] More »
How do Canadians view themselves through the lens of national massacres?
Brigitte Pawliw-Fry
ON A COLD NIGHT IN DECEMBER 1989, Rachel, a first-year student at McGill University, was sitting in the emergency room with a friend suffering from a migraine. About an hour after they first arrived, paramedics began rushing women on stretchers through the ER. Rachel’s first response was confusion: She couldn’t understand why so many […] More »
Anne Thériault on what she's learned from Netflix, iPads, and her seven-year-old
Anne Thériault
Now that my son is seven, our weekend mornings have gelled into a proper routine. He wakes up at some ungodly hour—earlier, by the way, than he gets up on weekdays—and plays for a while in his room. When he’s tired of that, he’ll grab a couple of granola bars from the kitchen and then […] More »