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From the archives

Referendum Trudeau

He campaigned in poetry but governed in prose

Rinkside Reading

What does hockey’s literature say about the sport?

Alarm Bells

Fort McMurray and fires hence

John Burns

John Burns is the editor-in-chief of Vancouver magazine, a city staple published in traditional Musqueam territory since 1967.

Articles by
John Burns

Home Invasion

In the end, modern North America’s story comes down to stolen land April 2013
So. It is 1868. In Russia Maxim Gorky is born, in Canada Thomas D’Arcy McGee gets assassinated, and in England astronomer Norman Lockyer discovers helium. In the Wyoming Territory of the United States, meanwhile, the Treaty of Fort Laramie is signed, setting aside for the sole use of the Lakota tribe forever the Black Hills mountain range and all of northeastern…

Reporting the Future

When fiction trumps clean, simple facts May 2012
William Gibson—the ectomorph cage rattler out of Vancouver (via Toronto, via Wytheville, Virginia)—became, with his first novel, science fiction’s reigning monarch. Right out of the box, a category killer, baby Oedipus laying low his fathers. Gibson’s Neuromancer, famously the winner of the SF trifecta (the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards), was so…

An Editor’s Delicate Art

Doug Gibson worked with many of the best authors CanLit ever produced November 2011
“It was Stephen Leacock who brought me to Canada.” What a fine way to start your memoirs—even should the thought continue “Not literally, of course.” Leacock died three months after Douglas Gibson was born (December 1943), but the call from Mariposa was strong enough to lure Gibson across the Atlantic from his small Scottish village of…