In honour of the twentieth anniversary of the Literary Journalism Program at the Banff Centre, Cabin Fever celebrates two decades of writing with thirteen of the finest creative non-fiction pieces written by program participants.

Drawn primarily from the program’s second decade, this anthology includes essays on a strikingly original and global range of topics by some of the best non-fiction writers in the country: Tara Grescoe goes in search of "pure" absinthe; Jeff Warren examines the way whales think; Megan Williams takes driving lessons in Rome; Bill Reynolds writes about the joys and dangers of riding a bicycle; Charlotte Gill gives us the dirt on her eighteen years as a tree planter; John Vigna confronts his relationship with a troubled brother; Margaret Webb takes a sexy road trip to find oysters; Jaspreet Singh ruminates on life in Kashmir in the age of plutonium; Jeremy Klaszus gets to know his grandfather, a Nazi resister who is obsessed with Google Maps; Deborah Ostrovsky explores bilingualism and the "grammar of relationships" after she marries into a Quebecois family; Jonathan Garfinkel goes to Israel to find a house occupied by an Arab and a Jew; Penney Kome writes about a family friend in Chicago who helped invent the atomic bomb; and Andrew Westoll gives up love in order to hunt for a rare blue frog in Surinam.

Unique, engaging, and enriching, Cabin Fever is a testament to the literary talents of each individual contributor and a tribute to the longevity and excellence of Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism program over the past twenty years.

Moira Farr is a writer and editor whose essays, reviews and features articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Ottawa, The Globe and Mail, The Ottawa Citizen, Canadian Geographic, More, Chatelaine, This Magazine, and several anthologies.
Ian Pearson is a veteran Toronto writer, editor and radio producer. He has worked as an editor at Maclean's, Toronto magazine and Saturday Night. His articles have appeared in most major Canadian magazines, earning five National Magazine Award nominations. He was books producer for CBC Radio's Morningside for three seasons and later was a story producer on the television series Gzowski in Conversation. He was a contributing editor of Saturday Night for a decade. He was also a judge for the 2006 Nereus Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Award and the National Magazine Awards. He is the proprietor of the Zedtone record label.

Moira Farr's profile page

Ian Pearson has worked as a writer, editor, and radio and television producer for the last 20 years. He was associate entertainment editor at Maclean's in the early 1980s, and ended the decade as articles editor of Toronto magazine at the Globe and Mail. After a flirtation with film as a development officer of the Ontario Film Development Corporation, he spent three seasons as books producer for CBC Radio's Morningside and later worked on CBC-TV's Gzowski in Conversation.

He has written for most major publications in Canada, including Saturday Night, the Globe and Mail, Destinations, Toronto Life, Toronto, Maclean's and Quest. He has been nominated five times for the National Magazine Award and won silver in 1993.

Ian Pearson's profile page

Marni Jackson is a Toronto journalist, author, and editor whose work has appeared in Outside, explore, The Globe and Mail, Rolling Stone, The Walrus, and Brick, among other publications. Her writing has won numerous National Magazine Awards and she is the author of three books of non-fiction. From 2006–2009, Marni was Rogers Chair of the Literary Journalism program at The Banff Centre, a month-long residency for professional non-fiction writers.

Marni Jackson's profile page