Hé Ho! Festival du Voyageur is a go!
Tie on a ceinture fléchée, pull on a toque and head down to Whittier Park — Festival du Voyageur is semi-virtual this year.
Grace Anne Paizen
Vivek Shraya — ‘People Change’
Multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s latest book People Change emphasizes that the mask itself brings out the inner truth of an individual.
What does it mean to be ‘One of Ours’?
Haitian-Canadian director Yasmine Mathurin’s latest documentary, One of Ours, tackles internalized colonialism within Indigenous communities, particularly when it is wielded against one of their own.
A feathery mental health exercise for weary times
Birding, also colloquially known as birdwatching, is a fun activity that can easily be taken on by the most novice of enthusiasts. In fact, it can be done from the comfort of a dorm room, so long as there is a window and a bit of greenery to look at.
Mother of all ‘Tongues’
Art is, of itself, an intersection. Lyrics of poetry come from songs past, evoking powerful imaginings of stories told. One of the current artists who understands this deep connection intersecting art, life, myth and tradition is award-winning Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq. An emotional powerhouse of womanhood, motherhood, community, reclamation and embracing your roots, Tongues may be Tagaq’s best album to date.
One man’s quest for clean oceans
The equivalent of one truckload of garbage is dumped into the ocean every minute. Currently, plastic can be found in 80 per cent of seabirds and it is estimated by the year 2050 plastic will be found in 99 per cent of them. With statistics this staggering, the award-winning documentary Hell or Clean Water is a much-needed alarm bell for the future of the planet’s health.
Have yourself a merry little Victorian Christmas
To say the Victorians invented how Christmas is celebrated as we know it is not hyperbole. The Christmas tree was popularized as a tradition when Victorian periodicals published images of Queen Victoria and her family gathered around their decorated tree, carolling became an institution of Victorian Christmas and Charles Dickens wrote arguably the most famous Christmas tale of all time. Winnipeg is lucky enough to be home to a Victorian-era house, the Dalnavert, and once again the house-turned-museum is hosting Victorian Christmas festivities all month long.
Rick Mercer — ‘Talking to Canadians: A Memoir’
The saying goes that Canada has two main exports: hockey and comedy. Though a blatant generalization of our country, it’s not an understatement to acknowledge that one of the Canadian comedy giants — particularly one oozing of Canadiana — is Rick Mercer. As the pandemic brought comedy to a near standstill, Mercer took to a new project, writing Talking to Canadians: A Memoir.
An awkward moo-ve
The popular phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is perhaps the best way to summarize the events that happened between July 2017 and May 2018 in Markham, Ont. On a July morning that fateful year, the residents of Cathedraltown — a residential neighbourhood of Markham — awoke to find a giant chrome cow on 25-foot tall stilts in the parkette that acts as a front lawn to some houses on Charity Crescent.
Donna Besel — ‘The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family’
In The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family, Besel documents the stresses — physical, emotional and financial — on her life from 1992 to 1995 as she navigates the trials of bringing her father to justice for the sexual and violent crimes he committed against his wife and children.