Creating Sacred Space in Labrador
Religion, she tells me, is about structure and the power to manipulate and control. Spirituality, she suggests, is about creating sacred space.
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Good fences make good neighbours and other lies your father told you
Any number of critics have noted how a poem, play, or novel appears to shift, to evolve, to grow with a reader. The change can feel quite dramatic in some cases, so much so that even a delicate haiku—all seventeen gossamer syllables—appears to become something quite different. You read it when you were thirty, and childless; now in your thirty-third year, your infant daughter has appeared. You have changed—not the three lines—but the profound change can make it feel like you are reading a new poem. This evolution of interpretation becomes even more intriguing when applied to entire cultures, rather than individuals. After the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the fire-bombing of Dresden, after the My Lai massacre, the stirring patriotic speeches of Henry Vread a little differently, perhaps. Or take an example from pop culture: my entire generation has had to learn to reread the classic teen…
The rise of xenophobia and the death of Anthony Bourdain
In 2015 a Canadian Immigration officer handed me a beige laminated card, about the size of a driver’s license, and I breathed a sigh of relief: no longer would I have to worry about being separated from my spouse and my child. After my marriage to a Canadian citizen in 2010, and even more so after the birth of my Canadian-born son, I had grown to expect that my wife would be pulled aside by American immigration authorities, just as I kept a thick dossier of important documents to show to Canadian immigration authorities. That dossier included all three of our birth certificates, as well as my proof of employment by an American university, as well as the sheaf of papers that documented my wife’s application for American permanent residence, as well as my own growing sheaf of papers that documented my own application for Canadian permanent residence. I did…
Imagining the end: an earth without us
The lead editor of this publication, Michelle Porter, in a brief email a couple of weeks ago: “I’m interested in an intelligent, interesting response to this, if it grabs you.” She continued, “I find the idea that they’ve given up on humanity really interesting.” The first words in The Guardian profile of Mayer Hillman she was referring to? “We’re doomed.” I sent the article to an old high school friend, who now works for the American EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). She barely had time to blink, “. . . unfortunately right on point” was the succinct and rapid response. Because Michelle and I likely read many of the same things that funnel through the internet that appeal to people of a certain intellectual and political bent, I had already read the piece. Mayer Hillman thinks that it is well past time for the governments and peoples of this planet to…
Nouns, names, and the continual need for linguistic innovation
Nouns matter. Are you talking about a rioter or protestor? That question implicitly informed any number of rhetorical and legal fights in the American 1960s, when the civil rights movement and demonstrations against the Vietnam war were in fall cry. A feminist or a discontented housewife? During the 1980s, the word ‘feminist’ was rhetorically twisted into ‘feminazi,’ and both terms became convenient rhetorical shorthand for a straw man created by conservatives: a bra-burning, abortion-hungry, man-hating extremist impossible to find on this plane of reality. In Canada we have discarded the word Eskimo in favor of works like Innu and Inuit and Inuk and Yupik ; the first is a catch-all used by European colonial adventurers and exploiters who couldn’t be bothered to recognize cultural and linguistic diversity; the plethora of terms to replace it goes somewhat toward undoing that colonial generalization. Yet no easy and fast guide exists. Those confident of their linguistic righteousness…
The rural used to be radical. What happened?
Rural space is work space, not a leisure space. The city should be a space for working people, not a playground for the rich. Urban workers and rural workers have this in common: consumer capitalism has endangered their ability to live and play in the same place where they earn a living. While both sets of workers are under threat, the rural worker has been rendered invisible by stereotypes, assumptions, and ignorance.
From Newfoundland to the edge of the galaxy: Encountering Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin’s worlds reshaped our own
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Reading utopia to reclaim the University
The university should be a publicly funded place to imagine a better world.
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The hidden costs of exploiting contract faculty
Universities’ growing reliance on the exploitation of contract faculty erodes institutions of higher learning, and MUN is no different.
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