Last year, as we put the final touches on our Summer Reading Issue, the novelist Stephen Marche recounted a story he’d heard from Alberto Manguel about a man who successfully robbed a bank by threatening to harm a Canada goose. The sheer, silly Canadian-ness of the anecdote prompted an idea: what if The Walrus asked some of the country’s best authors to write the most Canadian story they could think of? In a year when Scotiabank Giller Prize judge Victoria Glendinning decried Canadian fiction’s tendency to “sit, brooding, on Muskoka chairs,” it seemed like an especially pertinent topic. The following stories and poems contain none of the “striking homogeneity” that Glendinning found in our country’s literature. Instead, we’re taken from the bustling newsroom of a Montreal paper, to the bleak taverns of St. John’s, to the bizarre world of a letter composed entirely from the titles of Canadian novels, songs, and films. Such vastly different visions of Canada remind us that our country means many different things to many different people — and that none of these writers, at least, have Muskoka chairs on the mind.

Fiction

“Mask” by Lisa Moore
“The Kit Bag” by Linden MacIntyre
“Waiting for God” by Rawi Hage
“Riff-Raff” by Heather O’Neill
“Say the Names” by Zsuzsi Gartner
“A Few Acres of Snow” by Stephen Marche
“Billy Bennett” by Michael Winter
“Stet” by Miguel Syjuco
“Su-Na, Bird” by Madeleine Thien

Poetry

“My Life as a Canadian Writer” by David McGimpsey