Category: Getting to know you

  • Letter sent

    Dear Suzy Hansen,  I’m writing you this long overdue letter today to express my deep dismay and heartbreak at the failure of our province to provide housing to folks in need.  I have watched as the numbers of Nova Scotians living in tents where I live, in Halifax, has increased ten-fold. I have felt heartbroken. I…

  • In Tents.

    Sometimes, you don’t get involved in a problem till it’s on your doorstep. Sometimes even then, it’s not enough to galvanize you to action for any variety of complicated reasons. I have been watching, passively, as more and more fellow citizens pitch tents in city parks, feeling heartbroken for those folks, for the circumstances that…

  • Baby, use your damn critical thinking skills, inside and also outside.

    TL;DR: I don’t want to hear you go on about solidarity with women and making space for conversations about mental health if you are being misogynistic in your response to a ban that does not affect you in any material way. Let me just say this about the removal from playlists of a certain holiday…

  • Pour one out for mortality

    You might have predicted you’d see me round here this week, given the news. Between #metoo, and the conversations that have ensued all over your social feeds and mine, and then the expected-but-still-so-sad death of Gord Downie, it’s been—well, it’s been a time. One might hope to be more articulate than that about it, but…

  • All about that bass

    I’ve  been not writing. There are reasons. I’m knee-deep in a non-fiction project with a short deadline. I’ve been sewing madly. It’s gardening season. I’m mentoring a writer, and prepping for an interview series, and a hundred other things. These are legitimate reasons. Also, writing is hard, and I reached a point with my story…

  • May, be.

    I wasn’t sure what May would hold this year. You never can tell. May does what it wants, dancing you madly up and down the thermometer, bringing everything to the point of bursting with life, and then crushing it all overnight with unexpected frost. May, as I have written ad nauseum elsewhere, is a complicated…

  • Time flies and other cliches that turn out to be true

    Back in January, I told you about how I finally unlocked the secret to a daily writing practise, which turned out to be a lot of intervention and advice from others, along with some good old fashioned sitting the hell down and getting to it, and not a moment too soon, as part of my…

  • Owl be sure to tell a whale of a tale

    The goal for January was daily writing on Good Birds Don’t Fly Away. The goal has been elusive. Which is to say, I have in no way been creating the conditions that would allow me to meet that goal with ease. Or even with effort. Instead, I have faffed around, wasted time, complained about how…

  • Light in the dark

    Winter skies—late fall skies, I guess they have been lately, though the thick crust of snow below them sure reads winter these days—are a gift. They are a complicated, sometimes prickly gift, one you’re not sure you want, actually, if it has to come with certain conditions, like snow, wind, slush, ice. Treachery, danger, discomfort…

  • Three sixty five

      It’s been a year. I regret nothing.