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From the archives

A Tragedy of Our Own

The Air India bombing and how we live with the past

Playing the Rights Card

A history of Canadian foreign policy as domestic theatre

Two Other Solitudes

The India-Canada relationship has taken a long time to develop

Jo-Ann Wallace

Jo-Ann Wallace was a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta. Her memoir collection, A Life in Pieces, is due out fall 2024.

Articles by
Jo-Ann Wallace

Stomp and Circumstance

Stephens Gerard Malone’s new novel December 2023
When I was growing up in Montreal, way back in the early 1960s, the annual visit of the Shrine Circus was a very big deal. Beginning in 1939, the Karnak Temple chapter brought the circus to the old Forum every May as a fundraiser for the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children (as it was then…

The Melmac Years

My peculiar resin d’être September 2023
I think of them as the Melmac years. That makes them sound like a lifetime — my lifetime — ago. In fact, only about twenty years have passed, and the whole thing began innocently enough with the purchase of an already ancient class C motorhome. It might be kinder to describe the vehicle as “retro”— its upholstery,…

A Sharp Sweetness

Elizabeth Hay revisits a fictional world June 2023
Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station opens fifteen years ago with Lulu Blake, a sixty-two-year-old actor, leaving an unnamed theatre (though clearly it’s the National Arts Centre in Ottawa) and brooding on her performance as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. “She had muffed her lines,” we’re told. The irony is not lost on Lulu that the specific line she couldn’t remember —“O woe is me”— is a sentiment with which her character…

Patina

With characters of brass July | August 2022
My eighty-nine-year-old mother is undertaking her own version of Swedish death cleaning, even though she’s been an inveterate thrower‑out of things as long as I can remember. There’s really not that much to get rid of. But she’s at it again, rummaging through drawers and fretting over the items that have accumulated in her not very crowded condo storage locker in southern…