The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

On a winter morning, my sharp steel knife is cutting through stewing beef, trimming off bits of fat and gristle, preparing the meat to go into the iron Dutch Oven, which is heating on the stove, ready to brown the chunks of meat before they are mixed with vegetables and spices and set to stew for the day, eight hours or so at a very low temperature. A stew boiled
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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

It stands in a corner of the front room, seven feet tall, simple and elegant, a walnut corner cupboard with glass panels in the top doors, a drawer, and two lower doors with wood panels. With its old fashioned shellac finish it has a rich dark glow, and in the dim interior of the upper section stand a few things I wish to protect and remember.

The drawer narrows
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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

I was living in Montreal when the 1992 selection of Best Canadian Stories, which I edited each year with my daughter Maggie, arrived in the mail from Oberon Press. The cover art chosen by the publishers was a bright and whimsical drawing by Stephen B. MacInnis, an odd and charming image with a hint of cartoon and folk art about it.

Four or five years later I
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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

I recently decided to reread, after fifty years, Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son. It is a long novel—814 close-printed pages in my copy, the story first published as a serial, a complicated, sensational and suspenseful tale appearing in monthly parts, a bit like a certain kind of television series.

More than one of Dickens’s novels has been adapted for TV. The
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Susan Buchanan pursues a literary dream

In Her Own Write
by Ann Thurlow

Susan Buchanan has always wanted to be a writer. In fact, she has been one—a writer of curriculum and magazine articles. But, really, that wasn’t the kind of writing she wanted to do. So, as she neared her fiftieth birthday, she decided it was time to get serious—to begin to write fiction  and poetry. And that
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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

Note 1.

Ten years ago I was invited to a poetry festival at Trois-Rivières. A volunteer drove me from Montreal airport to the festival site, and we chatted, mostly in French, on the trip. At some point he told me that he was a federalist.

Later on I ran into him at the festival headquarters, where books by the poets were on sale. He was impressed by the
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Are they real?

by Ivy Wigmore

When my grandson was about five, he turned to me one day and said “We can’t see ghosts, right, Nana?” I told him I thought that we could see them sometimes and he responded, “Yeah. But we’re not supposed to, right?”

It’s often said that children and animals can see things that adults cannot. And that ability can make things confusing for a while as they sort out
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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

The boy is ten years old, and he has recently moved from a big city to an old-fashioned small town, from a small house with a tiny backyard, to a house built early in the nineteenth century, with a huge barn behind it, and behind that a garden with plantings of red and black currants, raspberries, a peach tree. It is a summer night and he is in that wide,
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One Great Thing
by Ann Thurlow

I am harvesting blossoms. I grab a fistful of pink shrub roses and some escape,  scattering on the bright green lawn. My friend Christine Trainor will mash the petals, pulverize them, turn them into paper. I will take a piece of that paper and write a letter to a friend - a real letter, with an envelope and a stamp. “Here,” the letter will begin, “I am
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Profile: Marcia Enman

by Jane Ledwell

What’s the use of wasting all night at home, sitting on the couch?” asks Marcia Enman, publisher of the weekly La Voix acadienne, PEI’s only French-language newspaper. “I don’t think there’s one night I don’t do something, for the paper or for a committee.” Among other things, the active single mother is vice-chairperson of her municipal
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The Other Notebook
by David Helwig

A March day in Toronto, the CN Tower disappearing into the clouds that drop their heavy showers on the chilled streets: I stare out the window of my hotel room and plan my comings and goings for the day. I am here on my own, and given the weather, first snow, then rain, I have found myself returning to my room each night and dumping a sodden umbrella into the
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Publisher Terrilee Bulger ponders the future if funding is cut

In Her Own Write
by Ann Thurlow

Terrilee Bulger is puzzled. When she bought Acorn Press last year, she did it on the strength of the solid reputation of the company and the strong support the company has received across the province and beyond.

So she was surprised to learn that the provincial government was considering canceling the
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