The Last Word

    July 6 – 10, 2015 That about wraps up our Snark Week 2015, but don’t worry, there are plenty of other seemingly adorable animals that want to tear you limb from limb, and we’ll tell you about them next year (if you survive to read about them). To recap this year’s horror show, we […]

Dip, Dip and Swing

Another Canada Day has passed, eclipsed in my part of the country by the festivities of Aboriginal Day, which falls just a week beforehand. Bizarrely, it was the Google Doodle this year that most roused my patriotic spirit on July first. In the image, a woman kneels up in the bow of a canoe — possibly […]

The Last Word

June 14 – 18, 2015 We begin with a backward glance to a favorite post of Christie’s about the distance between email and postcard on the spectrum of serendipitous stumblings-upon. I make a case against the multimedia approach to long form writing. It’s spectacular but it invites superficial reading. Cassie plans a camping trip to […]

Interesting Fact:

There are two ways of reading, according to my local primary school teachers. You can sound out the words or you can just look at the pictures and infer a story. Of course, this position encourages exposure to text for non-readers, but the idea pervades adult culture too. Scanning photos and skimming headlines passes for […]

The Last Word

June 1 – 5, 2015 The wind in the Columbia River Gorge is not the kind that garners fame with its own poetic name, but Michelle thinks of it as the secret wind of the desert. I look at the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and what it would mean for wolves and ungulates. Sally’s […]

Wolves at the Door

Four years ago when I had a powerful encounter with a healthy wolf pack just meters from my home, I knew it was a quintessentially Northern experience. The million-odd square kilometers of the Northwest Territories are so sparsely populated by humans and so well-stocked with wolf prey that wild canids have fewer problems than their […]

The Last Word

May 25 – 29, 2015 Ann’s Uncle Bundy had the kind of raw competence that solves problems with elegant ingenuity. We revisit him on Memorial Day. Helen sings songs about songbirds in Washington, D.C. and in so doing brings a piece of the English countryside to America. LWON alumnus Heather says the slave trade has […]

The Last Word

May 11-15, 2015 This week, LWONers had a variety of encounters with nature. Jennifer enjoyed a transcendent moment with a tiger shark, and Cameron’s van was mobbed by sphinx moths. Craig’s new location isn’t home until he has learned to read the calendar of his natural surroundings. With each shifting Spring dawn, he gets closer […]