Five Years a Writer

The PAGE TO STAGE venue: May 8, 2025 THE SHORT STORY It wasn’t the stage I had planned. It was not as big an audience as I had imagined. There were conversations I had not expected. Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And, all in all, it was a perfect evening. THE LONGER STORY Since early last year, I have been incubating the idea of writers performing their work on stage for a live audience . I didn’t know if my idea had ‘legs’, but I did know, absolutely, that I wanted to try it. Thanks to the encouragement and support of my stalwart writing partner and creative collaborator Deborah Schnitzer, I added the course to our online calendar — and people signed up! It would be a process of real-time discovery and creation; I was as anxious as I was excited. The initial group of seven writers met in November, coming together out of our shared interest to not only write our individual stories on the theme of ‘transformation’ but to perform them. By mid-January, we had gelled into a group of si...

I would pack this: my all-time favourite decades-old summertime T-shirt At the best of times, I am lousy at packing. I overpack or under-pack and, often, either way, I don’t end up with the item I really wish I had. Whether I approach it with great thought or without much thought, the task requires that I propel myself into the future and put things into a container that will help me get through what lies ahead.  But how can I know what lies ahead? The weather is unpredictable these days. How I'll feel on any given day is equally unpredictable. And how am I supposed to know just what I will want and need in order to manage what lands in my path on Day X down the road? I have been thinking about this as thousands of my fellow Manitobans have been thrust into making important decisions in the context of urgency, as they pack up and flee from the raging wildfires in the northern regions of this province . I have no perfect answers, just some thoughts, and they presume three things: Ha...

Whether indoors or out, writers took the space they wanted for the work they needed to do.    Question : When is a retreat actually an advance?  Answer : When we join with others to do our creative work with focus and intention. Deborah Schnitzer and I facilitated our second annual Writing Retreat this past weekend and, once again, we and the eight participants experienced the advances that can be made when we give ourselves the time and space to be fully who we are as Writer. During the conversations and the shared reading of our work, I took notes; it is the only way I can (a) remember anything and (b) make meaning of what I am hearing. My practice is to then re/view those notes the day after the retreat ends and to pull from them the key points that resonate with me as a new week begins. True, sometimes I cannot read my own writing and sometimes that writing doesn’t cohere into sense. But when it does, the words captured with pen on paper hold the wisdom arising fro...

  I am Canadian. What does this mean?  Many things, including this.  It means my home country is part of the Commonwealth and of La Francophonie . It means I live in a constitutional monarchy: The Prime Minister leads the country, though the monarch, currently King Charles III, is the head of state; the Governor General , currently Mary Simon, is the monarch's federal representative in Canada.  It means that, while English is my mother tongue, I also speak French as the country's other official language. However, these two languages are far from the only two I hear in my city, neighbourhood and on my block. Canadians come from all over the world, resulting in a vibrant diversity that is as wonderful as it is sometimes challenging, but it is always deeply resonant of the country and its spirit.  I am Canadian.   This means I live every day with the privilege of my birth and the knowledge of the urgent need for Reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of ...