Yutaka Dirks

Whose interests guide the state apparatus that sets the parameters of city development? Yutaka Dirks reviews Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State.

The world of work has changed and the labour movement has to meet this challenge and move beyond it.

War in the Neighborhood, a graphic novel about the struggles of squatters at war with police and developers, is re-read 17 years later with fresh eyes.

If social justice movements are to succeed, they have to be right.

As the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage heats up in Canada, what lessons can low-wage workers learn from the successes of the movement in the U.S.?

Critical reflections on life and labour in the home building trades.

Yutaka Dirks interviews our creative writing contest judges.

Winners and thank yous.

Through strategic organizing, tenants can win increased legal protections from eviction, funding for new social housing, and, eventually, the full control of their own homes. In concert with other movements, these efforts can help build the organizing skills and collective power that are necessary to challenge a political and economic system that privileges property and those who own it above all else.

*Art in its many forms slices through ideology and approaches truth better than any argument, probably because, in the end, art tries to find the heart of the matter rather than the brain of it.

Who am I? At some point or another, we have all asked ourselves this simplest of questions.

Whitetail Shooting Gallery follows cousins and neighbours Jennifer and Jason as they grow up in the stark landscape of the Bear Hills near Saskatoon.

Crass sees “collective liberation” – a term borrowed from an essay by bell hooks – as a “vision of what we want and a strategic framework to help us get there.”

This issue of Briarpatch features the winners of our second annual Writing in the Margins creative writing contest.

How to Get Along With Women is a finely written collection exploring the ways our identities, our most intimate relationships, and our experiences can be shaped by the world we inhabit, a world mapped by dynamics of power.

The Slickrock Paradox, by Alberta-based mystery author Stephen Legault, wraps its twisting plot around one central mystery. There are crimes for the protagonist to solve, including more than one murder, but they are almost peripheral; the core riddle is the absence of a body.

Leslie’s primary interest is in people, and the things that haunt us or turn them into ghosts: love, desire, the search for identity.

Rock Reject shares the chance to share the stories of the ghosts of Cassiar, tales of inner struggle and political solidarity that are tragic but ultimately hopeful.

Briarpatch books columnist Yutaka Dirks caught up with our creative writing contest judges to talk about the writing life and finding the balance between the personal and the political as an author.

In the simplest terms, the book is about the Silver Jubilee of People Park, the Central Park stand-in of Malla’s unnamed island city-state; a city that feels as if it might have been stitched together by hallucinatory cartographers from dream maps of Toronto, Montreal and Manhattan.