David Beninger and Ilyas Gora have won the 2013 Students’ Union Senate by-election, ousting incumbent candidates Pavit Sidhu and Maja Rakic.

Beninger received 19 per cent of the total vote with 480 votes.

Beninger, who founded the Student Empowerment Project after last year’s provincial budget cuts, said ensuring stable post-secondary education funding was his main priority.

I don’t usually read short story collections, but Canary was worth it. The book, by multi-award winning Canadian author Nancy Jo Cullen offers snapshots of the lives of people in non-traditional relationships — whether friends, family or sexual partners.

Cullen has won the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging Gay Writer and has been shortlisted for several others, such as the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Stephan Lampert Award.

Cullen is attending this year’s Wordfest.

Students and faculty from the School of Creative and Performing Arts are collaborating between the dance, drama and music programs for a production of Aesop’s Fables, running Oct. 22 to Nov. 2. The production is the first performance since the departments of dance, drama and music rebranded themselves as the School of Creative and Performing Arts.

Ali Bryan is a Calgary-based writer who published her first novel in April. The book, Roost is about Claudia, a single mother of two who struggles to raise her kids and hold the rest of her family together after the death of her mother. Bryan will be at WordFest on Oct. 19 with Lynn Coady and Cassie Stocks to talk about the desires and the obsessions of their characters.

This article is the second half of an article written as part of the Gauntlet’s summer longform project. You can find the first half (a href="http://www.thegauntlet.ca/story/calgary%E2%80%99s-urban-sprawl">here. Stay tuned for design suggestions from U of C planning students.

We don’t always pick the people we love, and never the people who love us. As the traditional family unit has lost some of its popularity in recent years, more and more people have turned to friendships for replacement therapy. This is hard but not impossible to pull off. The phrase “blood is thicker than water” is an old proverb implying the resiliency of familial ties over friendships.