We usually imagine environmental concerns in terms of a human-caused litany of losses. We have heard about the loss of biodiversity, deforestation, degradation of land, climate change, toxins in the air, and the disappearance of clean water and soil. Amongst that welter of information, if we were admit the selfish truth, we typically think about how such disasters might affect us. We consider food security, human sperm counts, and endocrine interrupters in the water. Too rapidly for the Pl...

The new ChatGPT tool from OpenAI has rapidly garnered media attention and millions of users. Although less effective sentence generators have existed for years, ChatGPT's novelty has drawn both the public and the reporters' interest, and its possibilities have led to it becoming the fastest growing app in history. But when examined more closely, its seemingly miraculous capabilities are ultimately disappointing, at least when it comes to the academic writing of my discipline. Like many of ...

This collection of essays connected by the thread of media influence is an attempt to trace the logical result of the Gutenberg Press experience through print, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and internet technologies. Using Marshall McLuhan's insights as an impetus, this meandering tale draws upon novels, radio and television shows, film, and trending internet platforms and gaming to discuss the influence of media in a world increasingly wrapped in the fibre optic cables of the t...

This guide is meant to assist the student of literature and the creative writer in their understanding of how literary techniques and narrative devices can inform a reader's interaction with text. Each writer, from experts in the craft—like the writers of the stories I use as examples—to the beginner who wants to exercise control over the story they are writing, choses from a series of techniques or strategies that permit or prevent certain stories from being told. This study is an attempt...

This guide is meant to assist those who want to learn the basics of writing English essays, as well as how to use research to support their academic arguments. Accordingly, it explains the general purpose of the academic English paper, the rationale for its structure and how to incorporate quotes and separate arguments, as well as offers research tips. Many guides on the market are full of information the student does not necessarily need, and tend to be expensive books whose rationale for...

In this project I ground my reading of historiographic metafiction in a series of postmodern texts which work out of and subvert traditional notions of historical writing. I use Linda Hutcheon's construction of this postmodern genre to investigate the particular literary and historical strategies these texts use and abuse in order to write an alternative history. Beginning by reviewing the theory surrounding historical fiction as well as historiography, I investigate the specific textual s...

When Amy set out to write a novel, and thus establish herself as a writer to be reckoned with, she was faced with a problem. Although most novelists begin semi-autobiographically, her own life in the small town of Crooked River—with its endless cycles of mowing lawns and setting tables—was far too boring. No one could possibly be interested in what she had to say if she were the subject.That drove Amy to tell a thinly-veiled and largely-invented story about Kalicia, easily the most...

Telling the other side of the adoption and fostering process in Manitoba perhaps inevitably ends up questioning the failures of the government child care system. In this study, I itemize the difficulties dealing with the foster care system that ultimately led to my unsuccessful attempt to become a Manitoba foster parent.Like the impoverished child in the candy store window, both systemic and personal barriers prevented me from becoming a parent. Although I began this journey innocen...

After washing up on the Winnipeg shore, the arid Midwestern soil kept Sam running in place. His old life behind him, he cleaned his apartment for coins as his girlfriend took away her rent-paying job. After she slammed the door, only his cousin's offer of work kept him from his parents' basement.Hired without qualifications, and surrounded by suspicious and silent colleagues, Sam frantically fished through his desk and paperwork, trying to lift anything into the light which would ex...

After his father died, Tom took the 1971 Impala that his father had bought the day he was born and drifted from one side of the country to the other, grafting limbs on fruit trees but keeping himself unattached. The years were a blur of seasons, and trees he'd nursed to health turned to witches brooms, gone wild on slopes where there had been apples and pears. Now that grafting season has become too dry and he's received word that his mother left a trunk for him before she died, Tom sets o...

The desire to live more frugally, responsibly, and environmentally is loose in the land now. Despite the popularity of a minimalism which had its adherents buying more to pretend they had less, many people have a genuine interest in living more carefully. Learning to reduce our impact runs deeper than saving money or using those savings to buy more consumer goods. Instead, people are starting to question the entire consumer enterprise and to suggest alternatives.Much of the interest...

In this idiosyncratic study I imagine the scientific enterprise to be an edifice of reasoning and experimentation that we share with every animal all the way back to the protozoa. Only recently, in geological terms, did we choose to indulge in fantasies and stories, and although they served to entertain us through the dark nights, and could be used as memetic tools, they sometimes confounded us when confronting real threats. The river is not coming after us to demand prayer, the water is n...