SOFIA MISENHEIMER
Reporting from Ottawa
Sofia Misenheimer is an award-winning journalist, currently digital editor at the Ottawa Citizen. She writes cultural features connecting readers to where they live through human-interest stories and the best food and travel destinations.
Some favourites: inside a magic mushroom biotech lab, how trade policy is punishing Canadian booksellers, why you saw fewer fireflies last summer and a visit to Montreal's oldest costume store.
Sofia also produces Out of Office, a weekly arts and culture newsletter dedicated to unearthing the capital's best-kept secrets and local creative communities. Subscribe here for local finds as they're published.
Recent news & features
Check out more published work below.
July 2026
I paddled a glowing kayak through downtown Ottawa after dark
Water warm as a bath carried my kayak up the Rideau Canal at dusk, the hull lit from within like a paper lantern. Reeds skimmed the vessel from murky depths, as I floated nine feet above the path skaters will carve in February. I was on the Light at Night tour, out to gauge the appeal of our famous winter landmark when there’s no ice.
June 2026
Ottawa is bananas for fake fruit. The best versions are more than a trick of the eye
Trompe-l’œil, French for “trick the eye,” describes a painting so convincing that a viewer may reach out to touch it. Renaissance painters made a discipline of the effect, and pastry chefs practise a similar illusion. Local dessert shops are cracking open the trend to hide Hong Kong sweet soup, Ukrainian cake and other fillings under a chocolate shell.
Seances are strange. They also help us to grieve
April 2026
Western societies have, for roughly a century, gotten progressively worse at grief. We have shortened mourning periods, moved death out of the home and into hospitals. We no longer wear black for a year; we are expected to be functional within days, if we are expected to mourn publicly at all.
