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“After the rest of it had gone”
Our bedtime book, at my house, is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland again. My daughter and I have read it together once before and it’s such a pleasure to reread books like this. We recently finished Charlotte’s Web for the eighth or ninth time. It’s so much fun to get to know the language and the […]
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Those who insist on listening nonetheless
“The discipline of the appreciative review is, I believe, among the great unsung arts of our culture. I suspect it remains unsung because, appearances to the contrary, it is not actually a species of speaking, but a species of listening; and our culture tends to regard listening as a passive activity. But listening — real […]
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Art, “personal necessity,” and radical particularity–some thoughts on response
I’ve been thinking these days a lot about how to make something that matters. I’ve been working on a novel for six (!) years now, trying to apprentice myself to that genre, that craft–and increasingly I think the work is figuring out how to get the work to happen along the grain of my actual […]
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On winning and losing
Congratulations to all the winners of the Alberta Literary Awards! Find a list of all the winners here. Last time I was at the Alberta Literary Awards, in 2009, I had been nominated for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, for my first collection, One crow sorrow. My first baby was a year old […]
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National Magazine Awards 2012
I woke up this morning to find an email from Kim Jernigan, the editor of The New Quarterly, with news from last night’s National Magazine Awards gala. My essay, “A Container of Light,” published in TNQ issue 120, has been awarded the silver medal in Personal Journalism at the 2012 National Magazine Awards! I am […]
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“The best review I know how to give”: Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry
I’ve just finished reading Lorri Neilsen Glenn‘s amazing book of essays, Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. This is a book that blows my mind—that blows my mind and my heart wide open. It is a book of gifts, a work that gathers the diffuse gifts of a life and slowly, lyrically—with great attentiveness […]
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Mother’s Day
#1–Mother’s Day brunch at my in-laws’ place, a trip to the playground, a drive-home double-nap, beer with my sweetheart on the front lawn, sun and a breeze–ah. I even managed to sit solo beneath the birch in the sun and read a bit of last year’s Griffin International Poetry Prize winner Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s Heavenly […]
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The Hook of the “Mommy Wars,” and Feminism
You’ve probably heard the hubbub lately over the recent cover of Time magazine that has frustrated and angered many mothers because of its deeply problematic representation of extended breastfeeding. Leave aside the many, many reasons for which this photograph and its accompanying title “Are you Mom enough?” are ridiculous, merely provocative, and not at all […]
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Some exciting news, and two readings coming soon…
My essay “A Container of Light,” originally published in The New Quarterly, issue 120, has been nominated for the 2012 National Magazine Awards in the Personal Journalism category and has also been shortlisted for an Alberta Literary Award (the James H. Gray Award for Short Non-Fiction). I wrote the essay, which is about (among other […]
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Writing and Motherhood
In honour of the fact that I’ve been solo-parenting and giving pretty much all of my attention to my little ones over the past several weeks, and having very little time for writing/reading/dreaming of my own, I want to post a link to a blog that I first found a couple of years ago when […]