What do you do when you’re an adult woman on a canoe trip in Alaska and a boy on the playground calls you fat? You take the ball tumbling toward you, which you’ve kindly picked up for him, and fling it back, pushing the insult as far from your flabby chest as you can, releasing […] More »

After Patrick Furey, a heartbroken and bullied gay student, hangs himself in his bedroom, there is no minute of silence, no special assembly. Instead, his school’s closeted principal forbids staff to share any information, fearing a teen suicide would damage the school’s reputation and possibly spawn copycats. Furey’s death may happen in the first few […] More »

Equal parts manifesto, thesis, coming-of-age tale, and love letter, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman, breaks the reductive, sanitized gender stereotypes of what it is to be a lesbian—especially ones who don’t look like Ellen DeGeneres, Rachel Maddow, or a cast member of The L Word. The contributors’ […] More »

Imagine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness read by a woman with a girlish, high-pitched voice. How would it affect your interpretation of the text? What elements of the story would be heightened, and which ones muted? What effect can a reader have on a text? These are a few of the questions that arise when […] More »

His illustrated memoir tells all about being a john. Why did he abandon relationships? Chester Brown, 51, is an accomplished graphic novelist whose new book, Paying for It, depicts his decision in 1999 to abandon romantic relationships in favour of paying prostitutes for sex. Along the way, however, he still seemed to find a version, […] More »

Long regarded as the enemy of literacy, comic books and graphic novels are increasingly useful as a way of improving reading skills among otherwise reluctant students, young and old On a cold mid-February afternoon under overcast skies, a school bell rings. The halls of Toronto’s Agnes Macphail Public School flood with children dressed in puffy […] More »

It seems strange to be given the task of “introducing” a man who has written more than 10 books and recently won major literary prizes in France and Quebec, but there it is: I, and presumably many in English Canada, had forgotten about Dany Laferrière. I’d been a big fan of his a decade ago. […] More »

The first year we ran the contest was 1996 (that’s the issue cover at right). That year, Toronto writer John Burton won first place in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Burton’s entry, “Sisters,” was his first-ever published story. It triumphed over some 1,000 other entries. Burton was a virtual nobody in the literary world, […] More »

Even when it’s not faced with an uncertain digital future, the publishing industry occupies a very uncomfortable place at the intersection of art and commerce. “Intersection” may not be the right word; it’s more like art is one end of a teeter totter and money is the other, with publishing in the middle, trying to […] More »

Lorna Goodison’s latest collection of short stories, By Love Possessed, fuses a sharp ear for language with a keen eye for human behaviour. The Jamaican-Canadian poet, memoirist, and short story writer casts a shrewd yet loving gaze on the mores and idiosyncrasies of contemporary Jamaican society. At first glance, Goodison’s world plays into North American […] More »

Memory, for good and bad, is crystalline: fragile, delicate, and with a tendency to distort. But in Subject to Change, it is like a crystal held at just the right angle, revealing some startling moments of clarity and beauty. Surveying a life of writing, motherhood, and activism, Renee Rodin’s prose is both understated and unflinching. […] More »