Staff Rumble

Dear readers,

My uncle has had horses since he was a kid growing up in the Okanagan, and he’s eighty now. Months ago I asked if I could go for a ride, and when I arrive at the stable one bright July morning he has me brush the horse first, before anything—builds trust. Half Appaloosa, half Quarter Horse, the colour of an overcast sky, and dappled. I slip my foot into a stirrup and swing my leg over the saddle. My uncle offers a few riding pointers, then leads us into a small circular paddock.

“Hold onto this with both hands.” My uncle taps the saddle’s horn. He’s got the reins. “Close your eyes.” As we trundle in a slow, wide circle, he instructs me to pay attention to the way each hip drops as the horse walks, to feel the rhythm of the animal’s movement. “Now hold your hands out to your sides.”

Letting go of the horn, I spread my arms out like I’m about to fly, eyes closed. We turn in a tight figure eight and pick up speed. I remind my body to relax, to move with the animal. No hands, no looking. We’re trotting.

“This is how you can connect with the horse. It’s like a meditation,” my uncle explains. “Do this any time you need to reconnect.”

Out in the pasture, eyes wide, hands on reins, I focus on dropping my hips to the beat of the hooves. But the horse grunts when I hold the reins too close. My feet flop around on the stirrups. The horse whines, sounding a little pissed off. Then he bucks. It’s a light one, but no longer am I one with the horse as my butt separates from the saddle. Thankfully, it reconnects.

“Nice work!” my uncle calls from the other side of the pasture. Later, he tells me that the horse didn’t know what I wanted him to do and got frustrated, so he let me know—buck.

It’s a familiar feeling. A character in my short story draft has bucked so often of late I feel less like I’m writing and more like I’m trying to stay upright. A sign that it’s time to slow down. Go back into the ring. Close my eyes. Reconnect.

—Dayna Mahannah, Events & Outreach Manager

August 19: Writing Workshop with Minelle Mahtani

Geist is thrilled to present a creative non-fiction writing workshop facilitated by Minelle Mahtani, author of the memoir May It Have a Happy Ending and current Chair of Canadian Studies at the University of British Columbia. The workshop will take place at the Geist office downtown Vancouver from 6 to 8pm on Wednesday, August 19, 2026.

Writing What We Cannot Fully Remember

Do you ever feel that you can’t possibly write your story because, if you’re honest, you feel like you can’t remember everything? Well, don’t let that stop you. Writing What We Cannot Fully Remember is a creative non-fiction workshop led by Minelle Mahtani and inspired by her award-winning memoir, May It Have a Happy Ending. Through guided prompts on memory, contradiction, objects, voice, digital traces and unfinished endings, participants will explore how to write from partial or uncertain recollection without forcing false certainty. The workshop treats memoir as inquiry and gentle exploration, offering practical ways to move between scene and reflection while writing ethically about family, loss and the past without judging ourselves. It’s a chance to be creative on your terms! Participants will leave with several short drafts and new strategies for turning fragments into compelling creative non-fiction.

About the facilitator:
Minelle Mahtani is a Muslim Iranian/Indian/Canadian writer, former TV producer, and radio host. She is Chair of Canadian Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her memoir May It Have a Happy Ending (Doubleday) has been called a “magnificent and stunning debut.” It won the 2025 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for best original work of literary non-fiction. She has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards and won a gold medal for Best Personal Essay in the Digital Publishing Awards. Mahtani is the author of the book Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality (UBC Press). Her work has appeared in The Walrus, Geist, Maisonneuve and Southeast Review. She is currently working on a book about erosion with UBC Press.

There are 12 spots available. Refreshments will be provided! Tickets are $15 (plus ticketing fees). Register on our Eventbrite page.

On Dek: Geist’s fall issue!

With Geist 133 hitting newsstands at the end of August, we’d like to share a sneak peek in the form of deks. In publishing, a dek is the sub-headline that appears below the hed (main headline or title of an article or story). The dek offers information about the story in a pithy line or two. In Geist, deks take on a less lucid quality than those of our journalistic counterparts, but rather gesture to the spirit of a piece of writing. Often we extract deks from the text itself. Below is an incomplete collection of authors published in no. 133, with the accompanying dek to their story, essay, or poetry. (Missing here: titles!)

Jill Boetger: a shape, a smell, the curl of her hair

Deborah Ostrovsky: playing a character that soothes the psychic injuries of childhood

Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri: a whisper that said, begin again

Sadiqa de Meijer: cities are a concentration of the life of the surrounding land

Jacob Lee Bachinger: eternity can pass in less than a breath

Emily Horton: worse still, I wasn’t even sure I wanted her gone

Ysh Cabana: the water that won’t be told where to go

Jen Currin: code words with every trusted person

Cynthia Liu: you have your lifetime to complete this test

Evelyn Lau: vibrating to the drip, drip, drip of another sprung leak

Angela Schmold: an empty-ish lot beside the highway

Christine Lai: what is a photograph unable to capture?

RECAP:Geist 132 Issue Launch Party

On a balmy July evening, a little crowd gathered at Enabling Arts in the Railtown neighbourhood of Vancouver to celebrate issue 132. Thank you to our featured readers Alex Leslie, Cole Nowicki, Christine Lai and Erin Vosters for sharing your stories, essays and poetry. Shoutout to Franz at Enabling Arts for hosting us at your beautiful space!

We’re considering renaming our open mic portion “Mic Drop.” Truly impressive stuff. One open mic-er even spent their allotted five minutes testing some stand-up comedy material—a first for a Geist event!

Unswipeable Stories

Sometimes gold hits the cutting room floor. Earlier this year, we collected messages from a couple of Geist’s board members, which we posted during our fundraising campaign. Below: writing advice that got cut; the long version.

My favourite section in the magazine is Notes & Dispatches, because not only does it embody Geist’s ethos but it offers refreshing testaments to what storytelling is all about. Getting published in that section is a great way for new and seasoned writers alike to test the most basic skill of their craft: how to tell your story well. That is, how to string words together to communicate or recount something that happened to you.

I think Walter Benjamin’s ideas on storytelling are as relevant today as they were in the last century. I hope Geist will play a big role in reminding us of the relevance of creative non-fiction in the context of headline onslaughts and hallucinatory (AI) fact overload. Geist is about facts just as much as it is about fiction, yes, but the creative non-fiction we’re interested in is not the same as the ingestion of processed, sugary facts. I want Geist to be stubbornly unswipeable, to keep providing slow, deliberate consumption of facts through storytelling.

—Anson Ching, Secretary, Geist Board of Directors

The same advice that [Geist co-founder] Stephen Osborne gave me in 2012 I’m now giving to young writers who ask me how they can be a better writer. The advice was, generally: Write economically; use powerful verbs and you won’t have to use as many of them; get your point across as simply as possible.

—Roni Simunovic, President, Geist Board of Directors

Micro-horoscopes for the Lit-Lorn

Divinations composed by Geist’s in-house bootleg astrologers.

Image credit: Geist Horoscopes drawn by Dayna Mahannah