Our fearless editor-in-chief, Jules Octavian, reflects on a life well-lived, the spaces in-between, and planting trees without expecting shade.
Category: Fence Profiles
Art & Culture
Read more
River’s Place
Audio Version Here River’s ‘studio’ is straight-up the kind of place my parents warned me about. They’d tell me that they didn’t immigrate to Canada so I could hang out at grow ops on the rez without cell service. Yet last week I parked my car beside a cornfield, said…
Art & Culture
Read more
Gentrification
Audio Version Here. The greying privacy fence behind Brenda Hogg’s white aluminum-sided wartime home may look like nearly every other house on the street but what lays behind is an artist, or so our art editor Walter Liu tells me after the dust up at the gallery the other week….
Fence Profiles
Read more
The Haunting of Ginnie Cook
Audio Version Here There’s much more to the roads of rural Ontario than meets the eye. What appears to be a post-war highway project may have a history dating back to the ice age and initially have more to do with cycling than the automobile. But you’re not here for…
Art & Culture
Read more
Inquiring The Way of Jules Octavian
Audio Version Here. The laneway is narrow, a little rough and worn. It leads into a tidy mixed forest of maple, birch, and the odd pine. Mature, healthy, second growth forest minimally tended over generations by expert hands. Something you’d only notice if you were looking for it, and even…
Art & Culture
Read more
Aliens
Audio Version Here If intelligent life capable of intergalactic space travel exists, then it seems likely they would avoid contact with us. At best they may observe us like researchers studying wolves in the arctic. Perhaps we have caught the scent, the odd glimpse, or even been put under long…
Fence Profiles
Read more
From The Archives: Camp Bethel, 1983
Audio Version Here Dear Readers: In light of our digitization program, Greg has asked that I find a piece from the archives. The following is an account of a trip that my intern and I took in 1983 and remains the most curious night of my life. Truth be told…
Fence Profiles
Read more
Mister X
Audio Version Here It has not been since October of 1983 that someone has so captured the interest of the county architectural society’s boundary subcommittee. In those days it was the sheer creativity of Marvin Whitney’s dry motorcycle-frame wall separating his horse shoe arena from the hot tub viewing platform….