April 29th, I was out with two very special women, who’ve been at my side and had my back since I was 10 years old. How fitting that they were the ones to take me to Chapters South Edmonton for a post-dinner rummage around the literary offerings there. Mark Messier’s memoir was prominently displayed in…
Category: memoir
For World Theatre Day: The Great Winfield Chicken Coop Disaster
https://alllitup.ca/Blog/2021/The-Great-Winfield-Chicken-Coop-Disaster Thrilled to have this little story published on All Lit Up. Names changed to protect the sensitive (if not innocent).
Legend…
Every town has its legends. Back in 2017, The Yards published a little article I wrote about one. Image by Janka00Simka0 on the legendary pixabay.com
My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain
Originally posted on O at the Edges:
? My Mother’s Ghost Knits a Scarf of Chain When I look up rust scabs flutter from your clicking needles, subsuming even the brightest link in this moon-drenched room. Communion’s possibility perished in that wicker basket, and we hold close our secrets, looped within circles, joined in these…
The Grove in the Night
It was night in Kyoto. In a grove on a mountain, in July 1995, as I was preparing to leave Japan, I received one of the great gifts of my life. It began with the Kyoto Connection, an international arts gathering. Over several months, I’d taken the stage at the Connection in various guises: as…
Day 5: unmarked
a brag, a middle finger at those ghost moments that, when she was dying burned again through her mind so many years, her birthday a crucible enduring, unpopular outcast youth; beauty seeking wings, and made cruel she sang at Carnegie Hall with grit built in backwoods honed in bully-yards defiant in second hand clothes we…
Day 2: San Antonio Tlayacapán, In the Pocket
In this pocket weighing in pebble by pebble mountains of consequence my passport in that pocket of expat artifice American dollars translate to big houses high walls with shanties built into their pockets poverty that never knocks at carved doors, iron gates shoulder pushed against shoulder on cobbled streets in the same slight tide as…
In the 80s
Back in the 80s, we were going to die of nuclear war, whether instant or over-wintered, in a flash or frozen slowly. In the 80s, we danced to big-hair music genderbending stars with cocaine voices synthesizing freedom, formulaic fun. 80s, and rumours from New York and San Francisco disco drugs and a mysterious…
In Residence
Well, I’m In-Residence now. Following in footsteps of many respected colleagues, peers and mentors, I’m the Writer-in-Residence at MacEwan University. A residency is so much more than a sponsored time and space for pursuing one’s own artistic goals, although that, in itself, makes a residency a wonderful thing. I’m being paid to obey my muse,…
One: sort of a review of Stewart Copeland’s Ben Hur, but really a run on, excitable meditation on music, fandom, family; a cacophonous riot, wherein complexity matters, but never overrules the sheer bombastic roar…
I bought Zenyatta Mondatta with my own money, back when I was a kid, and albums were at thing, and we were that family – openly ‘halfbreed’ and forever under suspicion, building salt enough to resist the constant grinding. I had to have it. It was weird. It fit. I was embarrassed by these guys,…
Reflection: St. Eugene, 2019
“We’re selling an opportunity to understand our history, to know our people and to share our vision of turning a 60-year nightmare around. We’re creating new memories for our children.” – Ktunaxa Chief Sophie Pierre St. Eugene is a former Indian Residential School, which has been made over into a resort, complete with casino and…
Prairiepomes 