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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…
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Waving, not drowning
Today I took my broken heart to the edge of the sea and I reminded it that every breath that’s ever been heaved in this world is still here to be breathed anew. That everyone who ever stood on this earth and did the simple miraculous work of inhaling and exhaling is connected to every…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Three sixty five
It’s been a year. I regret nothing.
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Oh, the places you’ll go
What a time it’s been! November passed in a blur of airports and timezones and visits with nieces and nephew, mother and siblings, aunts and uncles and friends. I travelled from Halifax to Toronto in early November and from there on to San Francisco and Half Moon Bay, to oversee the gorgeous launch party for…