Pióro

Before I look at the nominees for the sports category, I must discuss a recent event that may or may not be influencing my judgement. I am writing this not long after Ryder Hesjedal, the Canadian pro cyclist, made history by becoming the first Canuck to win the Giro d’Italia…hell, the first Canadian to win [...]

Before that upstart World Wide Web came along with its clickable slide shows or the iPad arrived with its two-finger zooming, magazines were the best place to tell stories with both words and pictures. Despite the advances made by those Young Turks of media, the ink-and-paper medium still excels when mixing text and image. In [...]

On June 7, many editors, art directors, writers, illustrators, photographers and a bunch of other magazine types will dress up really nicely and head to The Carlu for what I like to call the Oscars of Canadian magazines. Like the Oscars, the National Magazine Awards cover many categories: art direction for a single magazine article [...]

Polish journalist Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski, who died in January at the age of 74, is the latest public figure to be “outed” as a communist-area spy. The Polish version of Newsweek ran a cover story this week on the late writer revealing that his ability to travel to Africa, Asia and Central America throughout the ’60s [...]

Rudy Wiebe received the $25 000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction for his work Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest in a ceremony at the Windsor Arms Hotel in Toronto today. The three member jury chose Wiebe’s memoir of growing up in rural Saskatchewan from a set of three finalists, [...]

I have a “dis-in-waiting” for the next over-zealous Russophile I meet. It’s not a common practice for me—to store up bons/mauvais mots—but sometimes inspiration hits and you think maybe you’ve got a keeper. For example, just yesterday I found the perfect way to translate “shit-tastic” into French: merde-ific. Truly inspired.
I’ve reserved the Russophile dis for [...]

The Globe and Mail has a contest that has caught my attention. They run part of a recent novel for five days and on the last day readers are invited to submit reviews. This routine will go on for six weeks. At the end of each week, ten reviews are drawn and the winners each [...]

Elif called last night to say that Pebbled has been accepted into the Stratford-Upon-Avon International Digital Film Festival. That’s right. Her work is going to the Bard’s hometown. My voice, which is the only part of me in the film, will float into the Stratford air and I’ve still never visited the place. I wonder [...]

An art project can have a life of its own, especially when Elif is behind it.
Two years ago, when Martha and I were marooned in Whitby, Elif called me and said, “Matt, we’re doing something for the Station Gallery.” Out of nowhere, Elif approached the head of the gallery and said that she was a [...]

Dear Scream Literary Festival,
Thank you for wasting my time. I know artsy types are usually late and start times are flexible. That’s why I arrived at the Metalogos reading half an hour after the posted start time of 5pm. The nice lady at the door then said that the performances by Paul Dutton, Nobuo Kubota, [...]