News & Reviews
In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against “the author of the Satanic Verses book,” arguing that the book “is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an.” The Ayatollah continued, “all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them…
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According to Robyn Curtis (11 May 2021) the problems of Exploration Place go back to its origins. Like all museums, it was started by “elite men.” These men were racists. Saying that men were the creators of museums doesn’t tell us much. Most civic institutions, through all time and across all cultures, were started…
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In his article “Speaking Out” (The Walrus, June 2019), John Semley tells the story of the Wilfred Laurier University (WLU) teaching assistant Lindsay Shepherd, who made international headlines when she was censured by a University examining committee for creating an unsafe learning environment for transgender students. The committee consisted of her thesis supervisor, Nathan Rambukkana,…
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Writer’s Block sessions, led by Marcus Sinclairus and Andrew Burton, have (since Covid) drawn good participation through Zoom technology. Sinclairus is a College of New Caledonia sociology instructor. Andrew Burton is the author of Daymares and other poetry collections, and a freelance creative writing instructor. Burton organizes the local Word Play literary reading events and is founder…
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We are, for good or bad — people with a past. There is no escaping this fact, erasing it from living memory, or rewriting our history books. It’s not that simple. No morality police squad, cancel culture club or “me too” tag team can change the fact that many men in history, who we now…
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What follows is an attempt to understand what organized groups were represented at the January 6 riot at the Capitol building, and what these groups stand for. I’ve tried to be as objective as possible, and make no personal comment, though words are connotative as well as denotative, and are read by individuals who have…
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Organizers of, and participants in, Word Play literary events used Zoom technology to overcome restrictions on the size of public gatherings and hold a poetry reading Sept. 24. From his home in the Hart, Marcus Sinclairus of the College of New Caledonia was moderator inviting participation from poets across a wide region and from…
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The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against systemic racism, happening now all over the western world, feature something that didn’t characterize the American civil-rights protests of the 1960s — the toppling, defacing, beheading and removal of statues of historical figures, in a series of events referred to by some as “the statue wars.” What’s interesting…
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Jeanne Clarke Local History Awards ceremonies drew about 120 people to the Central B.C. Railway and Forestry Museum. There were four awards presented for publication of history books centring on Northern B.C. One was given to Curt Garland for Uphill Both Ways. The second was for Tyler McCreary’s Shared Histories: Wetswit’en — Settler Relations in Smithers, B.C. The third…
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I played baseball a couple of times with Ken Belford. It was in the 1980s, in a league where our team of writers, which had George Bowering, Mike Barnholden, Norm Sibum, and bookseller Jim Allen, played against other print-related teams—Duthie Books had a team, there was a team of newspaper guys run by Vancouver Sun…
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I knew Ken through Barry McKinnon, my colleague in the English Department at the College of New Caledonia (CNC). Barry regularly included Ken in his series of Canada Council readers, a series that started in 1969 and ran into the mid 1980s. Starting in 1972, I worked as Barry’s factotum in this enterprise, printing posters,…
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