A small family, circa 38,000 BCE, sleeps on a shared bed of bison hides and pine boughs. The family is “warm,” which in their rudimentary but allusive language connotes family, safety and comfort. “When they slept, they were the body of the family. That is how they thought of themselves together, as one body that lived and breathed.” The daughter in the…
Anne Marie Todkill
Anne Marie Todkill is a writer and editor in Ottawa. In 2016 she received the Malahat Review’s novella prize.
Articles by
Anne Marie Todkill
To anyone who accepts the canard that Canadian history is dull, the subject of Keith Henderson’s third novel—the role of the Fenian raids of the mid 1860s in cementing the cause of Confederation—may seem unpromising. So let’s begin with one of the pithiest summaries of the matter in The Roof Walkers:
If everybody and his Aunt Sally are scared to death of…
The last time I stood on a subway platform in Toronto, I noticed a soot-grey mouse foraging for goodness knows what in the tracks. Sad little sight. But nature is enterprising in the modern city—and, it seems, increasingly diverse. Within Ottawa’s limits I have been surprised by muskrats, foxes and deer. This summer at the eastern edge a moose blundered into a schoolyard and got itself…
My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. — Saint Augustine, Confessions, I.5
As an image of the resettlements forced upon the outport communities of Newfoundland and Labrador in the mid 20th…
Years ago, in an earlier life, I spent a couple of days driving the late Peter Gzowski from point to point in eastern Ontario on a publicity tour for The New Morningside Papers. “It’s so weird,” I told him, “hearing your voice from here”—I waved my hand beside my right ear—“rather…