The American writer and steadfast naturalist Henry David Thoreau is perhaps best known for his intricate memoir, Walden, from 1854, and his passionate essay “Civil Disobedience,” from 1849. With her latest novel, Followed by the Lark, Helen Humphreys reimagines his relatively short life. The story begins in 1822, when Thoreau was…
Michael Strizic
Michael Strizic was previously managing editor of the Literary Review of Canada.
Articles by
Michael Strizic
The Grateful Dead’s lead guitarist and principal songwriter, Jerry Garcia, once insisted that his band catered to a selective palate: “We’re like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice.” Ray Robertson must really like licorice. This past spring, he contributed liner notes to a pair of the band’s archival…
Canada has roughly a thousand overnight summer camps, many of them costing up to $1,800 a week. For those whose parents can afford it, this time away from home is a chance for a young person to gain self-confidence, environmental awareness, and emotional intelligence. Such opportunities have been less accessible to lower-income families, of course, and as fees continue to…
In 1961, the geophysicist and geologist John Tuzo Wilson looked out over the world’s largest active volcano, Mauna Loa. He saw how, beyond its “smoking crater rim,” the Pacific islands of Maui, Moloka‘i, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i trace a shallow curve and recede into the distance, “much like a convoy of ships some 600 km long.” Inspiration…
Lenore Newman and Evan D. G. Fraser, two long-time friends and colleagues, were accustomed to travelling “around the world, studying the global food system.” But in March 2020, while bored and locked down, they began to feel that “all those other countries might as well have been on another planet.” From the comfort of their homes in British Columbia and…
If the devil is in the details, Michael Barclay may well have written this hefty book with flames shooting from his ears. Barclay, whose previous works chronicled the life of Gord Downie (The Never-Ending Present) and the 1985–95 Canadian rock renaissance (Have Not Been the Same, co-authored with Ian…
Several months after Helen Humphreys’s calm and dignified vizsla Charlotte passed away, she met someone at a park who had known her old dog. The person commented that it must be hard to move on to another puppy after losing such a faithful companion. “I thought what a strange comment that was, really,” Humphreys writes in her latest…
The call of a loon transforms an ordinary body of water into an otherworldly landscape. In it, we hear the stewards of stillness and wilderness, but how many of us can claim to know these enchanting birds beyond their mournful cry or the coins weighing down our pockets?
James D. Paruk certainly can. His new…
On a July morning in 2015, a raccoon died at the corner of Yonge and Church in Toronto. That evening, Conrad’s passing was marked by a candlelight vigil, his furry body surrounded by framed photographs, flowers, and notes of heartfelt remembrance. One city councillor proposed leaving compost bins open in Conrad’s honour, and NPR would later declare Toronto the “raccoon capital of the world.”
This is just one of many stories that Daniel Heath…
Everyone loves a good pirate yarn, and history’s seafaring rogues have firmly cemented themselves in the collective consciousness — the peg legs, the parrots, the eye patches — often in the form of Halloween costumes or scenery-chewing Hollywood types. But, as the latest from Clifford Jackman points out, pirates were actual people, who lived real lives and made real…
In September 2017, I stepped out of a Zodiac into ankle-deep salt water, gravel rasping at its rubberized hull. I set an anchor into the beached pack ice and turned to offer my arm to the ten passengers who had endured the wind and waves that dogged our passage through the Foulk Fjord, in northern Greenland.…