Bringing you the issues since 1986 
Normally placid Victoriaville becomes a musical Mecca May 16, as musicians and fans from across North America gather for the 29th edition of the Festival International de Musique Actuelle. With 20 concerts over four days, it offers a panorama of musical territories and sonorities, expanding the possibilities of organized and improvised [...]
In the pantheon of musicians who emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s during the folk revival, holding a prominent place alongside Bob and Joan and Joni is clear-as-honey voiced Judy Blue Eyes. Listening again to the five LPs she recorded during that era, I was transfixed by Collins and [...]
Two very important things happen each May: Mother’s Day (May 12) and International Workers’ Day (May 1). While labour activism has always been a monumental part of Quebec life, in the 1960s women burst onto the scene by forming groups that raised awareness of women’s issues and led to demands [...]
Union leadership usually begins on a voluntary basis, when none of your colleagues wants to accept the challenge of standing up for a worker’s rights, in the office or on the shop floor. It puts you in conflict with management, marks you as “the enemy within” and exposes you to [...]
Debrah Gilmour is a Montreal artist specializing in landscapes and portraiture. She graduated from the fine arts program at John Abbott College and continued her studies in education, literature and art at Concordia University. Gilmour’s works are in private collections across Canada, with four images published as greeting cards by [...]
A group of 25 adults gather around a table in a church hall on a Sunday afternoon to engage with a Montreal professor and his guest. Norman Cornett, 62, has convinced the usually private novelist Rawi Hage to attend a third session in what Cornett calls dialogic learning. It is [...]
Since Chubby Checker’s performances of Hank Ballard’s The Twist ignited the dance floor in the early ’60s on American Bandstand, the artist, the song and the dance are still with us, compelling us to move. And no one can do The Twist without a big smile on their face, no [...]
It’s 9:30 on a Wednesday morning and I’m standing, somewhat bleary-eyed, outside a big kitchen as five women prepare for a very busy morning. By noon there will be a huge pot of orange-carrot soup, pans of manicotti, containers of bran muffin batter and two huge apple crisps cooling on [...]
Last summer, the Montreal SPCA was called to a 4½-room apartment in the Plateau that had been suddenly vacated by an elderly tenant with health problems. When they arrived, the rescue workers were met with one of the worst cases of animal hoarding they had ever seen. “We confiscated 90 [...]
As a fledgling journalist in 1964, I was assigned to cover federal politics for United Press International in Ottawa and it was a tremendous learning experience, including linguistically. As I worked with an older crowd of top-notch reporters on Parliament Hill, I realized I did not speak English the way [...]
What you said