There’s not really any way to describe my pleasure of reading alongside Jane Munro (2015 Griffin winner!), Leah Horlick (curator of Reverb, and new Women’s Centre staff at SFU), and Lana Pesch (author of Moving Parts, in town from Toronto) and to be hosted by the hilarious duo of Sean Cranbury and Dina del Bucchia. […]
This was the second of my ‘hometown’ launches, and I was fortunate enough to have Ali Blythe join me again to launch Twoism, and 2015 Dayne Ogilve-prize winner Alex Leslie read as well. We jammed the maximum amount of bodies possible into the reading corner of the store; we had young folks sitting on the […]
It is the night before your first-ever reading in that minor metropolis known as Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Have you heard of it? Your main decisions tonight are what to eat for dinner and what time to go to bed. What will you choose? A. Eat some protein, vegetables, and grains, and then go to bed […]
We’ve been on the road a lot this fall for launches and book fairs and everything in between – which means we’ve been filling our ears with a slew of new podcasts to help pass the travel time. In no particular order, here are five invisibly-themed podcasts to help you get from A to B: […]
Emotions! They happen, among other places, in poetry. Or, they are witnessed there, caused there, repressed there, and so on. Sometimes after doing a highly personal reading, audience members will kindly ask or exclaim about the challenges of sharing such texts with seeming strangers. I’m never quite sure what to say, though I do sometimes […]
I watched the last eleven games the Kansas City Royals played in 2015, and a few others before that, and rooting interests aside, I don’t believe there was a better team in baseball. That statement should be provable merely by the fact that they hoisted the World Series trophy Sunday night in Citi Field after […]
Rewatching the ninth inning of Game 6 is a bit like autopsying the body: at once informative and gruesome, and divorced from the subject’s life in such a way as to do it—the team—a disservice. Those last three outs—grisly, tragic, possibly avoidable—look nothing like the majority of the baseball the Toronto Blue Jays played from […]
I don’t know what it is about Toronto. I think about this from time to time, and come up with nothing bankable. I usually arrive at something not entirely capturable by language. Its Torontoness, finally, exasperatingly; its feel and vibration and smell and the speed and angle at which the wind comes off the lake. […]
The playoffs are a strange prism that can distort and warp and obfuscate, in which Daniel Murphy can look like Babe goddamn Ruth, or at least someone other than Daniel Murphy, and in which the historically torrid Toronto offense can suddenly flag, and wilt, and disappear altogether. If we were to speak disparagingly of bandwagon […]
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Even if you’re not in the game, even if you’re only watching. Necessarily, you’re invested after so much back and forth, the numbers encouraging, then not, then going your way again. I’m talking about both baseball and the federal election, in case I’m being too opaque here. The campaign, which kicked […]