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From the archives

Alberta and Me

From a land of oil, true enough

Referendum? What Referendum?

A constitutional expert argues that the federal insistence on clarity has paid off

The Grey Plateau

When the world stopped five years ago

Jamie Zeppa

Jamie Zeppa is author of a memoir, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan (Random House, 2000), and a novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye (Knopf, 2011).

Articles by
Jamie Zeppa

On Mahogany and Blacktop

To love freely and to freely be in 1959 Nova Scotia May 2016
It is not a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a motorcycle must be in want of a wife, and yet Carlyle Black, protagonist of George Elliott Clarke’s new novel, spends a good deal of time in pursuit of one. Although it opens with musings on the hard truths of pavement and the allure of the open…

Impossible Journey

In Martha Baillie’s novel, a German photographer looks for Nature freed from history. May 2015
Heinrich Schlögel, son of a prosperous German hop farmer, and his sister Inge first encounter the Arctic as children in the early 1970s, in books. Inge begins teaching herself Inuktitut from a kit she found in the school cafeteria, and Heinrich, at his sister’s urging, reads the 1771 journal of Samuel Hearne. The mode of this encounter—through text—is at the heart of Martha Baillie’s new…

The Personal and Political Entwined

A Canadian’s carefully observed memoir of a dark and violent place October 2009
Early on in Burmese Lessons: A Love Story, Karen Connelly notices something about the way she talks. At a dinner party in Bangkok, while journalists and consultants create in board strokes what might be called the Bigger Picture—the history of Burma and region, an encyclopedia of issues—Connelly finds she is “always reaching for the…