In the hour’s following her mother’s death, Martha Baillie undertook two rituals — preparing a death mask of her mother’s face, and washing her mother’s body. That intimacy shaped her grief. She had learned earlier to witness death and be present, living with regret after she left the room to get a nurse when her father died. It was very hard for Baillie to see mother's body as a corpse that has no life. To her, it would "always be something alive." The novelist and writer explains what signified the difference in her book, There Is No Blue, the 2024 winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Brett Popplewell used to dread growing old. Until he befriended Dad Aabaye, an 83-year-old former stuntman and professional skier who lives in the deep forest of B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. Their relationship gave the sports journalist a new way to think about life, death, and the limits placed on us as we age. Aabaye lives alone on a bus, on a mountain and runs for two to six hours daily. He has run through blizzards, heat waves, and even 24 hours straight. For him, running is “life itself.”

Popplewell chronicles the extreme athlete’s life from childhood to the silver screen in his book, Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past. The book won the 2024 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Last month, Popplewell accepted his literary prize and delivered a public talk at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

The cowboy, a quintessential hero who worked hard, didn’t rely on the government and did what he had to do to protect his family. Historian Heather Cox Richardson calls this rhetoric “cowboy individualism” and says this myth is the basis for 40-year-old Republican ideology. Now with President Trump serving his second term in office, Cox Richardson says the U.S. administration has taken cowboy individualism to an extreme, gutting the government and centring power.