Roy Kiyooka’s reputation as an artist has long been recognized. Such is not the case with his writing and poetry, even though his engagement with language as a medium of artistic consciousness had bee
A northern Canadian village, one of many remote settlements dotting the Quebec landscape, is in transition. Originally dependent on subsistence farming and logging, supplemented by winter hunting, its
Newly unemployed baby boomers Gwen and Ned appear to be -completely different people: Gwen, a practical, down-to-earth Latin teacher; Ned, an impractical investment advisor constantly dreaming up new
Zanzibar, an island set like a jewel in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa is rich in cultural heritage: inhabited since the last Ice Age; birthplace of Kiswahili, the purest form of the Sw
When naive small-town boy Dillon meets the sophisticated urban Jack in a gay bar, it’s love at first sight, and not just for a one-night stand either! While these star-crossed lovers manage to bring t
In a world where the corporate iron fist clad in the velvet glove of the state has appropriated all that is authentic and authoritative in language, there seems little left for us to say to each other
In the gold-rush era of the 1850s, the McKinnons settled on an island off the west coast of Canada, where the first thing they did was to turn this ?wilderness” into an English country garden complete
In Floating Up to Zero, Ken Norris introduces us to ?a traveller from an antique land,” though in this case that traveller’s story is not Shelley’s meditation on the vanity of ancient kings, but rathe
With breathtaking virtuosity, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver, retracing Captai
Marie Clements’s latest play sears a dramatic swath through the reactionary identity politics of race, gender and class, using the penetrating yellow-white light, the false sun of uranium and radium,
In Albertine in Five Times, Michel Tremblay portrayed one of his most unforgettable characters during five decades of her life, beginning in her thirties. Now, in Past Perfect, we meet Albertine at tw
Although internationally recognized as a pioneer of visual, concrete, sound and performance poetry, few people recognize bill bissett’s work in the visual arts to be of equal aesthetic importance. Whi
Composed in three sections, Glengarry is a return in writing to the landscape of rob mclennan’s youth and a headlong rush into the fractures, slippages and buried surfaces of what the text leaves undi
Dead White Writer on the Floor uses two literary conventions?theatre of the absurd and mystery novels?to create one of the funniest and thought-provoking plays ever about identity politics. In Act One
Gordon was always an odd little child, given his penchant for setting the neighbours’ sheds on fire with their pets locked inside and his fascination with the funeral rituals at the church across the
In 1965, Africville, the largest and oldest black community in Canada was bulldozed into memory. What was lost to the politicians of Halifax was an inconvenience, an eyesore. But what was lost to the
That both autobiography and biography have acquired a position of unprecedented importance over the past 30 years is now obvious. Less obvious are the reasons for this phenomenon. Theorists and studen
As all the great dramatists since the Greek tragedians have known, class and gender roles continue to remain the two fundamental determinants of the social fabric of any culture?even one, like our own
Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the emotional story of a woman’s struggle to acknowledge her birth family. Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to re
London, 1483. From the aged Duchess of York, who is 99 years old and will never sit on the throne, to the young Lady Anne who will marry Richard III in order to reign, Chaurette traces the shifting pa
