Sandi Somers knows how to bring a character to the screen. Consider the opening scene in her latest feature film, the family-centred dramedy Hailey Rose: “Some people come into your life as blessings; some come in as lessons,” the family’s tough-nut matriarch, Olga, deadpans to the camera. “Blessings are worth shit all when it comes […]
Martin Bauman
Martin Bauman is an award-winning journalist and interviewer, whose work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Capital Daily, and Waterloo Region Record, among other places. In 2020, he was named one of five “emergent” nonfiction writers by the RBC Taylor Prize. As host of the Story Untold Podcast, he has interviewed some of Canada's most notable figures, including Paralympian Rick Hansen, cave diver Jill Heinerth, and Juno Award-winner Shad. A passionate speaker and mental health advocate, Martin has been a youth panellist for the Canada-wide Spotlight on Invisible Disabilities Partnership and bicycled solo across Canada to raise funds for services in his hometown of Waterloo, Ont.
Posted inNews + Opinion
Road salt lowers the risk of deadly collisions—but it’s also killing Halifax’s lakes. What’s the answer?
As Halifax heaves a final sigh of winter this weekend—with up to 20 centimetres of wet and heavy snow expected to fall—the city’s contracted road and sidewalk crews will, almost assuredly, be waiting for one last call to spring into action, plows, shovels and piles of salt at the ready. It’s been a busy winter […]
Posted inArts + Music
The many faces of Hawksley Workman
Hawksley Workman was strung out. It was the early 2000s, and the JUNO Award-winner was hanging onto the twilight of a dizzying—and destructive—period he describes as being “briefly famous” in France. There were tabloid and magazine photo spreads. Television ads with soccer star Zinedine Zidane backed by his music. Shows with Morrissey and Franz Ferdinand. […]
Posted inArts + Music
Matchstick Theatre’s Leaving Home is a fresh spin on a Canadian classic
Jake Planinc has been dreaming of this moment for 10 years. Ever since the Matchstick Theatre artistic director picked up David French’s Leaving Home as an undergrad at Mount Allison University, he’s thought of ways to stage it. How the lighting would look; how the script—which follows the Mercer family on one fateful day in […]
Posted inArts + Music
Pit sweat and drug checks: Dispatches from the JUNO Red Carpet
On second thought, the double-helping of afternoon coffee might’ve been a bad idea. They don’t warn you, upon arriving at the press check-in for the JUNO Awards, that you’re better off arriving with an empty bladder. Or a catheter. Either one, really. Beautiful people in immaculate outfits? The JUNOs has plenty of them. Politicians preening […]
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The Wanderer Grounds podcast: Where does Halifax fall in the CPL’s pre-season power rankings?
Pre-season in sports is a strange and wonderful time. Like the week after New Year’s Day, it’s the one time of year—maybe the only time—that we give ourselves the grace of a blank slate. The detritus of a team’s past—the wins, the losses, the squandered points, the last-minute heartbreaks—is wiped clean, and for however brief […]
Posted inArts + Music
Halifax punk rockers Customer Service spearhead relief concert for unhoused Haligonians
Owen Harris and his bandmates knew they wanted to do something when they saw the HRM had cleared out and fenced off the Grand Parade tent encampment. Raised in Halifax, the Customer Service drummer had watched the city’s housing crisis turn “very severe” in recent years as the province grew and struggled to keep pace […]
Posted inArts + Music
The Coast’s guide to all the JUNO Week events in Halifax
When Nelly Furtado steps onto the Scotiabank Centre stage to host the 2024 JUNO Awards this Sunday, Mar. 24, it will mark a big moment for Halifax: The first time since 2006 that Nova Scotia—or any part of the Maritimes, for that matter—has hosted the annual awards ceremony, and the first time since 2010 that […]
Posted inArts + Music
Aysanabee’s long, winding and wild road to the JUNOs
Aysanabee was snowshoeing across a river in below-40-degree weather when he broke through the ice. He was working in the far reaches of Northern Ontario at the time. His job was to stake claims on land that could be mined. The then-teenaged musician would travel by bush plane and snowmobile with an axe. It was […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
HRM clears out Grand Parade tent encampment amid calls for better shelter options
Update: In a statement released on Thursday, Mar. 14, the HRM says the Grand Parade is now vacant. The municipality adds that “the one remaining individual” who had remained at the public square earlier in the week “accepted an indoor housing option from the Province of Nova Scotia” on the evening of Mar. 13. The […]
Posted inArts + Music
Alana Yorke’s Destroyer got her through trauma recovery. And then a stroke, too.
Alana Yorke ran out of air. Years before the Mount Uniacke musician debuted the art-pop Dream Magic—an album The Coast hailed upon its 2015 release as “vast and otherworldly”—she was a graduate student at Dalhousie researching underwater invertebrates. The work involved scuba diving. She’d been collecting samples at the end of a long day when […]
Posted inArts + Music
Halifax filmmaker shines spotlight on Indigenous women across Atlantic Canada
Growing up in Yarmouth, Stephanie Joline was always aware of her Indigenous ancestry. The daughter of an Inuk mother and Acadian father, she was raised to be “very proud” of the roots she came from. That came, in part, from her maternal grandmother, who helped raise her. “It was beading and drum circles since I […]