Adele Barclay

Zoe Whittall’s third novel, The Best Kind of People, demarcates a pivot point for the Canadian novelist, screenwriter and poet known for her realist novels that depict queer and trans characters’ lives in Toronto and Montreal. The book follows the disintegration of an affluent all-American family in the wake of patriarch George Woodbury’s arrest for attempted rape and sexual misconduct with…

During my first-year music theory course at Queen’s University, Professor John Burge demonstrated a particular harmonic sequence using the opening chords of “O Canada” as an example. The first three chords are basic enough, a riff off Pachelbel’s Canon, but in “O Canada” their resolution is relaxed, making the familiar strong chords tentative—which is a curious construction for what is supposed to be a patriotic…