arts

Ever since Ellen was cancelled, we have been starving for a TV show featuring a loud, proud, leaping lesbian. While Ellen Morgan the character didn’t survive, Ellen Degeneres has.

“Less evil and more glamour for daytime,” is what she promised of her new television talk show. Dressed in tailored suits, open collar and white runners, Degeneres exudes lesbian on her talk show. But it doesn’t deal with queer issues.

nah-ee-lah and d’bi young are creating sparks with their word sounds. These second- generation dub poets—who are also noteworthy playwrights and actors—rhythmically fan those sparks into flames of resistance against injustice as they burn new pathways toward social liberation.

Ann-Marie MacDonald's second novel, The Way the Crow Flies (Random House of Canada, 2003), follows her award-winning Fall On Your Knees, a first novel that sold more than 300,000 copies in Canada and was selected for the Oprah Book-of-the-Month Club.

MacDonald is also a playwright and actor, and the current host of CBC-TV's Life and Times. She spoke with Sara Cassidy in September, over the phone from her "roundy Edwardian" home in Toronto, which she shares with her spouse, Alisa Palmer, and their infant daughter.

In this feature interview from Herizons arachives from Spring 2004, contributor Irene D'Souza spoke to Margaret Atwood about her childhood, her prescient gifts and her research into the trajectory that marks women's progress.

Herizons: What arouses your interest in reading?

In this article, Afua Cooper blows the whistle on Canada's history of slavery and gives a voice to unsung heroes of the past.

Afua Cooper is a poet and writer whose work includes Memories Have Tongue, Utterances and Incantations: Women, Poetry and Dub, and (with co-editors Peggy Bristow and Dionne Brand) We're Rooted Here and They Can't Pull Us Up: Essays in African Canadian Women's History.

We 'd barely sat down, Elvira Kurt and I, for double moch-a-cinno lattes (don 't laugh-this is Vancouver, after all and there 's an espresso bar on every corner) at a funky Yaletown cafe, when we were hounded (or rather, she was) by a small group of fans wanting autographs.

In June 1999, Lynne Stopkewich was preparing to shoot her second feature film, Suspicious River, when she got a call from her partners, Dean English and Jessica Fraser.

Boneyard Film Productions had just negotiated with Sarah McLachlan and Nettwerk Productions to create a documentary about Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan's all-woman travelling music festival. McLachlan had already said 'yes' to the team going on the road to document the last year of Lilith Fair. But there was a caveat. She wanted a woman director. And she wanted Lynne.