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From the archives

Chartered Fight

When provinces and the bench butt heads

In Little Jamaica

Stories from a changing neighbourhood

The Devil Is in the Details

Canada’s legalization of marijuana raises a host of policy and health questions

Kevin Shaw

Kevin Shaw is a poet and essayist in Ottawa.

Articles by
Kevin Shaw

The Departed

An affecting novel by Ellis Scott June 2026
During the spring of 2003, the unnamed narrator of Ellis Scott’s Night Terminus travels to a hillside town in the Western Himalayas. He grows close to a Dutch-born Buddhist monk, Rudolph. Their mutual friend, Gloria, explains that she has known the “fit, distinguished-looking man in his sixties” since the 1980s. She was working as a nurse on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in San Francisco when Rudolph brought his…

Double Trouble

Eddy Boudel Tan launches an investigation October 2025
When I open Instagram, I’m often presented with an ad for the streaming service Mubi. Over a curated selection of queer films, a bolded line reads, “This is not a coming out story.” The implication seems to be that our community, that nebulous alphabet of sexual identities, has transcended the need for stories of our emergence from the…

The Rule of Jane

A writer’s lessons for today June 2020
In a July 2019 essay for The New Republic, the gay American novelist and rabble-­rouser Dale Peck referred to Pete Buttigieg, the first openly gay man to make a major bid for the White House, as a “neoliberal,” a “Jeffersonian meritocrat,” a “gay teenager,” a reluctant bottom (in so many words),…