Paired together, creativity and sorrow provide the engine for Rebecca Hirsch Garcia’s debut, Other Evolutions. After losing her eighteen-year-old son, Oliver, Mrs. Jentsch says, “Love is a powerful inventor, grief even more so.” The university student died in a car accident while driving his fourteen-year-old neighbour, Alma, from Montreal back to their hometown of…
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Shazia Hafiz Ramji is the author of the poetry collection Port of Being. She divides her time between Toronto and London, where she’s writing a novel.
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Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Leila Marshy’s 2018 debut novel, The Philistine, follows a Palestinian Canadian woman’s journey to Egypt in the hope of finding her father. The Montreal author’s latest collection of short stories finds characters who are similarly searching — for purpose, connection, or a better understanding of their paths and choices. With My Thievery of the People…
In Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life, the environmentalists Matt Hern and Am Johal take a road trip to the oilsands of northern Alberta. There they are dramatically reminded how “we are all implicated in the oil economy; every single one of us is bound up with petro-logics. We are all simultaneously…
To begin By the Ghost Light, R. H. Thomson writes, “You who are reading this should know that your family stories are probably more interesting than the ones I will tell here.” This second-person address is a sincere attempt at involving the reader as Thomson journeys through his family’s history in the First and Second World…
In October 1971, in an attempt to decrease tensions between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians, Pierre Trudeau introduced a policy that has come to stand for the right to celebrate and retain a diversity of languages, ethnic groups, and cultures. The understanding of diversity, however, was not always so expansive. With The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-history of Canadian Multiculturalism…
Anyone who goes to Jasper National Park can gaze up at a 3,300-metre peak called Mount Edith Cavell, named in 1916 after a British nurse who was executed by the Germans for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium. Cavell never set foot in Alberta, let alone saw the mountain that now bears her name, but the memorialization reminds park visitors of both her bravery and the colonial connections between Canada and…
In a recent essay in the online magazine Hyperallergic, the Canadian art critic Amy Fung questioned the high costs of ethnic fraud. Specifically, she considered a string of so‑called pretendians: individuals who self-identify as Indigenous even though that’s not their ancestry. She opened with cheyanne turions, the SFU Galleries curator who was called out on Twitter earlier this year for a questionable family…