Single dad Kyle Bachmann was tired of having to change his son on a blanket next to a urinal on a dirty bathroom floor. It’s a situation all too common for dads stranded in public without access to a baby changing table. Fed up, Bachmann started a local campaign in his home of Penticton, B.C., […]

The Island of Books By Dominique Fortier (translated by Rhonda Mullins) Coach House Books, $19.95 An ode to books, Rhonda Mullins’s translation of Dominique Fortier’s The Island of Books captures the emotions of two struggling individuals hoping to find strength in writing. Told from the perspectives of an illiterate, grieving artist from the 15th century […]

Barrelling Forward By Eva Crocker House of Anansi, $19.95 Barrelling Forward, a debut short story collection by emerging Newfoundland writer Eva Crocker, presents compelling tales of the so-called “ordinary” within Canada. Through 14 pieces, readers are acquainted with intensely realistic descriptions of both personhood and setting. The chafing, itching skin of a man is delineated […]

For 34-year-old Samantha Boshart, a practising physician at Hamilton, Ont.’s Aboriginal Health Centre and member of the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation, health care is about more than just prescribing medication. By combining her training as a Western physician with traditional Indigenous healing, she’s helping to tackle unique and particular health challenges facing Canada’s […]

One way to examine a marriage is to look at the pattern of jokes. Fourteen years ago, when Heidi started her daily running practice, when Marley was two, terribly two, Heidi used to joke that she ran because she could pretend she’d keep running and never come back. Sometimes she ran for an hour, for […]

On February 9, 2016, at 3:45 p.m., Gail Benshabat sent a text to her 27-year-old daughter, Lisa, asking if she wanted to catch an early movie. Benshabat was wrapping up her workday at a quiet special needs school in the north end of Toronto, about a 30-minute drive from the third-floor apartment where she lived […]

The Water Beetles By Michael Kaan Goose Lane Editions, $22.95 At times graphic and disturbing, The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan tells the heroic and poetic story of a young boy living in Hong Kong during the Second World War. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of Kaan’s father, the narrative follows 12-year-old Chung-Man […]

Am I Overreacting, or Are You Over Me Reacting? I make myself a moon calendar, the lunar cycle no more or less important to me than checking David Levithan’s Lover’s Dictionary Twitter feed to use as a horoscope. I write myself a moon calendar and it goes: bullshit moon, stupid stupid ugh moon, kill me […]

Here’s the question at the heart of it: Should we be worried about radioactive waste leaching into the Great Lakes? Absolutely we should, notes a coalition of 110 Canadian and American environmental groups. For a year they’ve been calling on both governments to reduce what they believe are the harmful ramifications of radioactive isotopes in […]

Imagine a teenager, face smeared in soot and red and white paint, summoning the crowd to its feet. This was the breathtaking scene at Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory’s pep rally in the 1990s. Pep rallies, stirring and spirited as they are, don’t immediately evoke images of overtly political, much less radical, acts. But for Williamson Bathory, […]

The Inuit of Pond Inlet, Nunavut, have been navigating the sea ice for centuries, relying on their experience and wisdom from their elders to inform when and when not to travel across the frozen mass. But as global warming intensifies, the ice is becoming increasingly unpredictable and unsafe. Now, a project out of Memorial University […]