studio

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

Here, freedumb fighters, already free, seek to be free. There, Vladimir Faire la Putain, seeks to free those who are already free. Be on guard against the union of those two sets! Lao Tzu writes: People whose power is real fulfill their obligations; people whose power is hollow insist on their claims. Be on guard

…I honour the moments when words fail.

It’s the last day of January. Housemouseish, I nibble at the edges of this and that. Write? Perhaps not. Edit? Here and there. Listen to music? It’s in the background. I continue work on and contemplate Silence(d), my altered book/poem, in which I demonstrate silence by excising, silence by redacting. Yesterday, I wrote a letter

A vow of silence for a lifetime or a day is observance, renunciation. Add ill intent and it becomes subservience, humiliation. In July 2021 Timothy Snyder wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/magazine/memory-laws.html in the New York Times magazine. Last night, CBC played https://www.thisamericanlife.org/758/talking-while-black . In between I’ve been working on a talmudic study of silence, of how we silence,