Category: Issues

The Cubans

I sat in a fluorescently lit makeshift office of an albergue with a woman in a cheetah-print dress, Gucci belt wrapped around her waist, and high heels that kept tap-tapping at the linoleum floor. Her face was steeled before me. . . .

Vanishing Time: Portable Country

I. The Drain Vanishing Time (VT) = seventeen years My father went to an art house cinema in Caracas that used to be teeming with young people. I wonder if that is what he sought there, the youth slipping from . . .

Family Life at Clinton Street

The wooden Chinese junk, with its carved crew, used to sit on a small table in Grandfather’s bedroom, before his death. It had been a gift from his friend Burlingame when they were both young. Burlingame had brought it back . . .

A Conversation with Leslie Jamison

The following conversation took place at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto on September 15, 2025, presented by the Writer’s Trust of Canada in honour of Leslie Jamison’s receipt of the Weston International Award, supported by the Hilary and Galen . . .

Two Poems

My face is small, compared to the rest of me,though maybeothers experience my face as large compared to their own faces or those of their precious brats, whose hats are too big for their heads. Small is good, it’s been . . .

Two Poems

First Photograph of My Father, My Brothers and Sisters, and Me, with Migrants from Central America My father is the man on the far left, at the top. He peeks out between the sombrero of Nicolás, a Honduran, and my . . .

Synthetic Strokes: Not Writing from 2021 to 2024

Hongkong seems very quiet, but outsiders do not know whether the Chinese who live here are comfortable or not. Men communicate their thoughts and feelings through writing, yet most Chinese nowadays are still unable to express themselves this way. This . . .

An Interview with Colm Tóibín

I first came across the work of Colm Tóibín when I was doing a special series on Ireland for Writers & Company some thirty years ago, and I’ve admired him ever since. At the time, he was one of the . . .

The Art of the Interview: A Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel

For thirty-three years, Eleanor Wachtel hosted CBC’s Writers & Company. Each week, her hour-long conversations—generous, probing, serious, illuminating—opened windows from every corner in Canada into the worlds of artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers, among them Carol Shields, Mordecai Richler, . . .

Summary of Decision

great riot makes riot riotous, disorderly, intimidating, provocative encouraging the courage prohibited by law fluid assembly so long as the riot ebbs and flows take body armour, googles, a respirator a radio transceiver, plastic ties, laser pointers, and materials to . . .

Exactly

The shop’s sign was posted near the roof for maximum visibility from the parking lot and motorway, but because I walked on the strip mall’s sidewalk, under the overhang, I passed the door once, twice, three times before I saw . . .

Three Letters

Juan José ArreolaParis, 20 September 1954 Dear Arreola, Several weeks ago Emma sent me your two books, and when I opened them I found a dedication that filled me with joy. But all that was nothing compared to the joy . . .

A Conversation with Claire Messud

On May 14, 2024, at the Toronto Reference Library, I spoke to Claire Messud about her new novel, This Strange Eventful History. To prepare, I watched some of her interviews. I wondered what kinds of questions she asked when . . .

Monica Vitti Revisited: A Conversation with Joanna Biggs

Joanna Biggs’s essay “Smarrimento,” featured in the winter 2025 issue of Brick, opens with a description of Monica Vitti’s sleepy eyes, her ruffling hands, her perfectly sculpted hair—hair so animate it literally “feels.” Visual enchantment is an entry point—for . . .

Trees, 1990–1991

Say woodcutter, not tyrant. Repetition, not apocalypse. Love, not disappearance. Melancholy, not depression. Derrida says that the melancholic is one who refuses to forget. That melancholy is necessary. I have learned to keep my . . .

A Guide to the Poetry of Li Ho (791–817)

A crescent moon in winter was a symbol of melancholy. A man with shoulders like an owl’s was assumed to be cruel. A woman’s eyebrows were commonly compared to hills in spring. After a failed coup, the warlord Tung Chou . . .

Unseen Scripts: A Conversation with Dionne Brand

The following conversation took place at the Toronto Reference Library on September 11, 2024, to celebrate the release of Dionne Brand’s Salvage: Readings from the Wreck. David Chariandy: You describe Salvage as a kind of forensics of how . . .

The Reader

The girl is a reader, first and foremost. She lives in an apartment in a city that is not the city of her childhood. She waits tables and attends classes on English literature. Daniel Gluck, the elderly interlocutor in Ali . . .

Beyond the Five Senses: In Conversation with Natalie Diaz

Throughout his career, Paul Holdengräber has chronicled the times we live in by interviewing artists who broaden our sense of creative life. This work continued through the start of the pandemic with The Quarantine Tapes, which he hosted for . . .

Postcards from the Ganges

In the summer of 2023, Amitava Kumar undertook a journey through small towns and cities beside the Ganges, from Devprayag, in the Himalayan foothills, to the Sundarbans, where the river empties into the Bay of Bengal. Postmarked Haridwar The water . . .