Five Years a Writer

Updated with live link; see below It starts with an idea. If you’re lucky diligent, the idea grows and morphs and attaches onto other ideas…and so it goes, until you have something worth writing about. It starts with a blank page. If you’re lucky diligent, the page becomes populated with words that grow and morph into sentences and paragraphs…and so it goes, until you have a piece of writing.   It starts with one reader. If you’re lucky diligent, that reader, over time, multiplies into others…and so it goes, until you have many readers, some of whom are friends, some of whom you don’t know and are not even related to.  The more you nurture ideas and fill blank pages with words and send them out into the world of readers, the better chance you have of being read and of finding more readers.  Self-evident, of course, so what’s the point? There are three:  One : Ten and a half years ago, I had a personal essay published in The Globe and Mail, which was a lovely unpla...

As the year draws to a close and the darkness of the days begins to lift a tiny bit, I hunker down and try to tidy up the loose ends of 2021, so that I can begin 2022 with a clean slate. Ha! Fat chance, as the loose ends far outnumber the days that remain. Oh well. I’ll just carry on, because, one by one, the to-do list items do get crossed off, just maybe not as quickly as I might like. But, eventually, each box does hold that lovely tick mark to show completion. And, anyway, what is time but a construct that we can understand from a variety of perspectives if we open our mind to them. Take your pick from just these three — Mathematical explanation by Keith Devlin, Dean of Science at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California, and Senior Researcher at Stanford University:   “…Most of us think of the time produced by our clocks as time itself. Yet the only thing natural about the time produced by clocks is that it is originally based on a complete revoluti...

DATELINE: Winter solstice 2021 No matter how you cut it, we are moving through some dark times these days. But, today marks a turning point, if only astronomically speaking. In the northern hemisphere, December 21st marks the winter solstice: the longest night and the shortest day…and hereafter, the days get longer and the nights get shorter. More daylight is coming: Hooray! Sure, it comes only minute by minute, but come it does. Look how those minutes add up, week by week (Winnipeg, MB data): Dec. 21, 2021: 8.09 hours of daylight + 1.28 sky = 9.37 hours total Dec. 22, 2021: 8.09 hours of daylight + 1.28 sky = 9.37 hours total (no change yet) Dec. 29, 2021: 8.15 hours daylight + 1.27 sky = 9.42 hours total = 5 minutes more  January 5, 2022: 8.28 hours daylight + 1.26 sky = 9.54 hours total = 12 minutes more January 12, 2022: 8.48 hours daylight + 1.23 sky = 9.72 hours total = 18 minutes more January 19, 2022: 8.75 hours daylight + 1.21 sky = 9.96 hours total = 24 minutes more Janua...

Another weekday and it’s empty again. The mailbox, that is.  I saw the postal carrier go down the street and, as he so often does, he just kept on going. No detour up our front path. Nothing to deliver to us. Again. Oh well. At least it means no boring white No. 10 business envelopes to deal with.   But it also means nothing to deal with. No unexpected and enticing hand-addressed mail. No intriguing coloured envelopes. No obvious card to be relished in the opening. Mostly, this lack doesn’t bother me, doesn’t weigh on me. But at this time year, when — at least in theory — cards of greeting are flying across the country and around the world, the empty mailbox is rather a drag. A stark reminder that, ahem, I, myself, have not consistently sent out Christmas cards and, so, have no good reason to expect any in return.   Please: This is not a plea for them. This is simply me admitting to myself that I am, this season, quite deliberately giving up even the pretence of sending ...

During my master’s degree, I spent two 3-week stints in residency on campus. It was great — intense days of learning extending into the night, and many new friendships forged over the frustrations and thrills of that same learning. I had a private room, a shared bathroom, and a very shared fridge and kettle in the super-minimal kitchen in the common room. While I loved lots about those weeks in residence, what I missed was the smell of good food cooking. We maybe had a microwave in that common room, I don’t remember, but we definitely didn’t have a proper oven in which to bake or roast anything from which would emanate a lovely mouth-watering aroma. Sunday’s supper in this house was supposed to cook slowly, deliver that delicious aroma, and give us a tasty meal to enjoy at the end of the day. It achieved two out of three, with the missing element being, sadly, the tasty meal. I had tried my hand at using pasture-raised chicken to slow-cook in the old fashioned crockpot, but it wasn’t r...

This is a tale of four ears, two minds, one set of earbuds with microphone, and several assumptions. I’ve been working from home since mid-March 2020. Val and I live in a small house, in which we have knocked down several walls to create an open-plan living space. There is no private office on the main floor; nor is there, come to think of it, a private office on the lower level, aka, the basement. Therefore, I have been using a back corner of the living room as my office space and it has been going swimmingly — until recently, when I took on a short-term teaching contract that required me to, well, teach online. Not just work online, but actively teach a group of students through the screen. What’s the issue, you ask? Well, noise, actually. Before, a simple workday of desk work and meetings was a non-event; Val and I both just went about our business in our small house, managing around each other’s schedules. But when I began the teaching contract, noise became an issue. Specifically,...

The art I create at my collage table is largely personal and of the moment. I have been marking my journey into retirement from full-time work for more than three years and, over that time, I have amassed a goodly number of pieces — some purely visual, others a combination of words and images. Some I have shared with others, some I have posted here on this blog, but many others are simply on my shelf. And that’s fine for me and for my art.  However, there is a place in this world for very public displays of art — art so profound and creative it must live outside. Indeed, it is intentionally designed to take up public space and to say to the everyday person who encounters it, ‘Stop. Look. Think. Feel the experience of this display, of what this represents.’  Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan , Winnipeg-based performance artists, are involved in this very kind of  public art project , designed to pay tribute to the LGBTQ2+ community and, specifically, to the survivors and the...