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ARTS & CULTURE
Film Review: Dear You
Growing up, I often wondered about my family’s history. The tales of lost generations and ancestors seemed to reside behind a screen of mist. I liked to ask my parents about their youth, what my hometown was like back then, and compare it with the history I’d learned myself. Sometimes the two accounts stand in stark contrast. Other times, they’re a mirror. Either way, these tales always had a mythical quality, as if they belonged in an otherworldly space and time.
Alaina Zhang
Oct 5
Film Review: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Last quarter, I was lucky enough to take a class called Medieval Dreams and Visions. After reading works by Chaucer, Dante, and other authors who lived centuries ago, we ended the quarter by watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Alaina Zhang
Aug 4
Documentary Review: International Students’ First 48 hours & Life After Graduation
As a Canadian student studying in the U.S., seeing a documentary following the experiences of international students in Canada—a place I’ve called home for many years—brings forth an array of feelings. It makes me wonder what it would have been like to stay in Vancouver and study at the University of British Columbia, which is so close to my home. What could I have gained, and what might I have lost?
Alaina Zhang
Jun 1
Book Reviews
Artist Spotlight
Artist Spotlight: Earth is the Artist
In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, there’s a twenty-page chapter where the characters disappear from the stage. Time passes in the 1920s, and we witness their summer home on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, begin its return to the Earth. That same decade, outside the world of novels but a sure-footed setting for one, a small red brick house was built up the hill from Kempenfelt Bay. A century later, it will be forked from the ground—expropriated for a freeway expansion in a sm
Mikaela Brewer
Oct 5
Artist Spotlight: Patrick de Belen
When you identify so strongly as someone who cares about youth, then lose your little brother to suicide, that just heightens and highlights that responsibility.
But also, in a way, it became a weight for a few years, and I didn’t know if I could continue to bear it after losing the young person that I’d been caring for and mentoring for their entire life. Five years later, I’m more comfortable with that heightened responsibility, which led to the film.
Mikaela Brewer
Aug 4
Artist Spotlight: Wing Lam Chan’s Borrowed Absurdity
“Where are you from?” A typical icebreaker question that everyone comes across. My only answer would be “Hong Kong,” since I was born and raised there. Period. However, my identity tends to be flattened in a sentence—“So you’re from China”—if the questioner is not familiar with Hong Kong’s historical dynamics or holds a political stance.
Wing Lam Chan
Jun 1
Poet's Corner
Poet’s Corner: Two Poems from “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem for Poetry Magazine
A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now.
Mikaela Brewer
Oct 5
Poet’s Corner: “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn
My first encounter with Amanda Gunn’s “Ordinary Sugar” was through Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó’Tuama, not long after I read his bread recipe-poem and reflections on soup. Poems and recipes are kindred spirits, both in form and function. And, as Anthony Bourdain writes in Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook, “the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency” is a vital, fundamental skill. Perhaps the same is true of poetr
Mikaela Brewer
Aug 4
Poet’s Corner: “The First Water Is the Body” by Natalie Diaz
When I read “The First Water Is the Body” in 2020, after Natalie Diaz’s book, Postcolonial Love Poem (in which the poem appears), won the Pulitzer Prize, my consciousness felt diverted like a river around a boulder. I struggled to grasp another poem as this one settled, alive, into my body. Perhaps it didn’t settle at all, like the settler I am in Canada. The poem helped me remember the river that I, too, already am.
Mikaela Brewer
Jun 1
Short Stories (Writers Room)
Writers Room | The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive
At 8:37 a.m. local time, as my mother slept just minutes away from her alarm, she drowned in the Gorkha district of Nepal, along the Nepal-Tibet border. As ice and rock collapsed from a glacier high in the Himalayas, water surged downstream via the Lhende Khola, Bhotekoshi, and Trishuli rivers, sweeping her home away with chunks of bridge, building, and road.
Mikaela Brewer
Oct 5
Writers Room | On the Wildfires: Of Course She Ran Back
Rilla glanced out the window. The smoke was so dense that the teachers’ parking lot was no longer visible. She closed her eyes for a moment and listened: The brush fires couldn’t be seen. Nor could the snapping and cracking be heard.
Mikaela Brewer
Aug 4
Writers Room | Pride Month for Seniors & Elders: Weeping Willow
The willow tree’s branches stroked the living room window, causing the setting sun to twinkle across Raven’s prom dress. Carefully propped on a hanger, it was hooked to the top ledge of the swinging door separating the kitchen and living room. For a moment, Grandpa Wood—as Raven always called him—blended the music of the gentle window tapping with the door’s inability to be still or closed. He was fiddling with the dress’s delicate corset back, stringing the tie through with
Mikaela Brewer
Jun 1
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