studio

armed with memorable massacres I look for peace without really knowing what it looks like I dip in and out of a project on peace which I started around the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Christmas seems like the only time most of us truly give some thought to peace on […]

Still Life with Snowball Listen to my reading my poem Advent on today’s Word on the Hills radio show… …or read it to yourself, silently. Advent The coming starts with the going of the geese in noiseless flight, solemn thoughts about the broad, black-shouldered night, and the long shadows even at noon. With a sigh

Is that what I’m doing? I’ve collected many stories from many people – about my father, about the ranch – and am puzzling about how to get at the truth when it’s different for everyone. It’s like having a pocket full of nickels. You put your hand in and they all feel the same, but

Via Train 2 between Kamloops and Jasper Blue River Dawn – a diversion When I first raised the blind in my sleeping cabin the darkness outside was complete. One and then two logging trucks slid past in the distance, like jeweled ships. Slowly the grey serpentine form of the train became discernable, meandering along the

….really slow! Two years ago I finished my altered-book-poem-setting on the Montreal Massacre after working on it off an on for eight months (almost a baby!) Two years ago was the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I started sketching ideas for an assemblage-poem-setting about Peace. Two years! It just seemed

these white butterflies how to write about them without killing them

Twenty years worth of journals are a double-edged razorblade. Looking back, some cut, some shine. Ten years ago I wrote, “Here is a blank page, waiting for whatever I turn it into. This would be a good way to expunge the “me” from my writing, as Anne Carson said on Writers and Co. She was

I went to The Workroom in Toronto, looking for something else, of course, and spied a Merchant & Mills pattern (from Britain) for a woman’s boilermaker suit. I had 6 yards of fabric that I had retrieved from my late aunt’s place, that she had bought at, yes, Simpson’s…. …buttons from an old trenchcoat, linings

My dear cat caught a bird the other day, leaving a feather and bloodstain on the patio. The next morning I noticed the feather sticking out of an ant hill. This is where the ability to carry X times your own weight fails. What optimism, though! I will take it as a lesson, one I

Now is the time to write about roses. My friend, Kim, painted this scene, and she cherishes it’s dramatic colour. It immediately brought to mind the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, called The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World. Between the image, the story, thoughts on consecration, and news from Europe of desecration, I