Amanda Lee

My biggest failure tasted of liverwurst on rye bread, smelled of 4711 Eau de Cologne, sounded like the opening credits of Days of Our Lives and felt like fear.

I expected the night sweats, brain fog and weight gain. But I wasn’t prepared for the low mood that clouded my days.

The closure of a drive-in rarely makes the news but Coober Pedy’s is no ordinary drive-in. Since it was built by volunteers in 1965 it has served as a meeting point for the remote opal mining community, itself immortalised on film in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

I’d waged a battle with my body for much of my life, tying my self-worth to the number on a scale. How could I pass that baton of guilt, shame and diet culture on to my kids?

Social media, store displays, and youth-savvy flavours—behind the smoke screen on how young people are being marketed to.

Watching a report on the fires in New South Wales, Australian YA novelists Nova Weetman and Emily Gale decided to organize a small fundraiser over Twitter for the volunteer firefighters (affectionately known as “fireys” in Australia), who tirelessly battled the blaze.

Known as the opal capital of the world, Coober Pedy is one of the country’s most unusual and unique places to visit.

It’s said Coober Pedy is the type of place where you can come with just the shirt on your back and leave a millionaire. I wanted to visit for myself, to understand why my dad loved this life so much.

Ankixa Risk places a frozen rat onto the old food tray in front of me, then does the same for the others in this taxidermy workshop. I look past its dead eyes and examine the white and grey fur, needle sharp teeth and tiny pink hands and feet. As a first time taxidermist, I am going to learn how to give this sad looking rat human qualities in Risk’s daylong anthropomorphic rat workshop.

Like the heroine of her favourite film, Educating Rita, Amanda Lee found herself in graduate writing school as a mature student.

You’ve seen it on the news or even outside your kids’ school. Here’s what you need to know about the growing popularity of vaping and JUULing among teens.

A light fixture descending like a star from a soaring ceiling draws the gaze upward as one steps through the front door of a stunning new home built close to the shores of Lake Ontario in Oakville.

Most doctors don’t go into medical school with visions of rebuilding a hospital in Cambodia and working with refugees and displaced persons in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. But for the founder of Doctors Without Borders Canada/Médecins Sans Frontières, Dr. Richard Heinzl, that future was always on the cards.

Part of what makes the holiday season special is revisiting family traditions. For some, it’s trimming the tree, for others it’s watching The Santa Clause (which was partly filmed in Oakville). For author Karma Brown, whose first novel, Come Away With Me, was an international bestseller, it’s baking her family’s vintage Christmas cake recipe with her mom and sister in her Oakville kitchen.