Poetry: The Urgent News of our Day
I will be offering this workshop at the Ottawa Public Library, Sunnyside Branch, Saturday, June 6, 2020. Read more and register.
Memoir: The tale that won’t let go
I will be offering this workshop at the Ottawa Public Library, Carlingwood Branch, Saturday, May 2, 2020.
Woman at Clothes Line
Strapped sandals lift the lady above the lawn. Hung linens adopt her hippy contours. This is no steamy Tide commercial. Our star is absorbed in cooler, wetter realities. She wears a blue dress, white scarf.
Ziplock Baggie of Seahorse Specimens
Shake it before a patch of light: one dwarf, one lined, one slender.
The new Caledonian, the Eastern Pacific, and—careful, she’s tumbled to a corner— Hippocampus Denise, the smallest of the small, stretching one full centimetre from her Cyrano de Bergerac snout, over her lumpy coronet, down the bony plates (two knobs and a spine at each junction), through the jovial tail, in, in, in. The museum owns 3,000.
The Last Goldfish is coming soon
The Last Goldfish: A True Tale of Friendship available from Biblioasis April 2020. A memoir of youth, friendship and the impermanence of life.
Smell the Cabbage
I can’t stop thinking about the sauerkraut. I’ll give you the scene. A young woman in her Toronto apartment. Some workers arrive to fix the plumbing downstairs, and one comes up to turn on the water.
Prescription: one fine passage a day
‘Henrietta was a literary woman, and the great advantage of being a literary woman was that you could go everywhere and do everything’
Windswept
Part of my own motivation, when we planned a “storm chasing” night for Churchmouse After Hours, was curiosity. Why do people chase storms?
Glimpses in Passing…
We began the “Hauntings” edition of the After Hours Coffeehouse at Churchmouse Books with MacEwen’s poem “Past and Future Ghosts,” which for me suggests a blurring of borders between now and then, what was and what is— a continuity of existence, and perhaps even continuity of awareness.