Julie McGonegal

In its review of Emily LaBarge’s Dog Days, in May, the New York Times was effusive, praising how the debut braided “memoir with criticism, psychoanalysis with poetry, fiction and even quantum physics.” Dog Days was a testament to LaBarge’s ability to “make even the most complex and cerebral ideas feel urgent and alive.” Peer into the comments…

The heating planet isn’t a distant abstraction: it’s a catastrophe unfolding right now, with disastrous consequences we’re only beginning to grasp. Even as eco-apocalyptic discourses and sobering statistics have predicted the end of the world as we know it, they haven’t yet inspired the individual behavioural or social change necessary to stop a species-wide suicide…

Since starting high school in our small township flanking the agricultural countryside outside of Guelph, Ontario, my daughter has remarked more than once on the copiously white student body. While she’s amused by events like “Take Your Tractor to School Day,” she’s also aghast that there are only a smattering of students of colour, and she occasionally wonders aloud how it feels to be one of the two or three Black teenagers in the entire…

As I write these words, it seems yet another wave of the pandemic is upon us. My three children are working in adjoining rooms, peering at screens, as we all navigate the strange world of online schooling. Every now and then, someone will holler for help, and I’ll put the task of composing aside to rummage through drawers for art supplies or to field another question about long…