"I want to talk to you about life. It’s just too difficult to be alive, isn’t it, and try to function? There are all these people to deal with." These words, lingering in the air like smoke in the intimate space of Variations Mile End, begin Christopher Durang's Laughing Wild.

It was an unseasonably mild Wednesday evening in late October when writers, publishers, agents, and book-sellers from around the city gathered at Riverside St-Henri for Yolk Literary’s second annual installment of Literary Oktoberfest.

Metatron Press is an award-winning literary publisher based in Montréal, Quebec. Founded and managed by Ashley Obscura, this remarkable publishing house is “devoted to publishing new perspectives in literature that reflect the experiences and sensibilities of our time.”

Up a short flight of stairs, above Boulevard Saint Laurent, is one of the city’s top venues. From the outside, the only signage is plain black, but inside hides a true cabaret theatre.

With the summer now in full swing, it may feel as though perhaps the winds of change are finally sweeping through the arts in Montreal.

Back home in southwestern Ontario, it’s a twenty-minute drive to the nearest second-hand bookstore, a place which, for the longest time, I did not know the name of. It’s a long, single-story building with book-patterned posters lining the windows and pictures of the children whom the non-profit benefits placed in the entryway.

Back in February, Director and CEO of Canada Council for the Arts - a governmental entity which supports the arts and literary scene in Canada through grants, services, prizes and payments - issued a letter to the community in which it announced that the Council will be lowering its spending incrementally over three years, as part of the federal government’s Refocusing Government Spending initiative, for a grand total decrease of $9.88 million.

Held Wednesdays at the charming Notre-Dame-des-Quilles in the Mile End, the Polycule set out to provide a safe space where queer, trans and BIPOC performers would be welcomed to try out new material of any artform in a weekly open mic.

The hospital closed in 2017, bought in part by the City of Montreal with a plan to transition the site into a “shared public space”. The reinvented space, now called the Cité-des-Hospitalières, had strict guidelines when considering who would occupy the space, including preserving the spirit of the grounds, and responding to the needs of the community.

According to the Oxford dictionary, busking is defined as “the activity of playing music in the street or another public place for voluntary donations.” People have been busking for hundreds of years, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of (regardless of what your family says).