I wonder when I’ll see her next? This was first answered in 2009. It had been a year since we taught together in Hong Kong. It started with a long hug after an expensive cab ride in Central Manhattan and later that evening, a New Year’s Eve party in Brooklyn. We shivered in sequins outside of a transvestite club that we happened upon with good humour after being denied by a dozen bars and nightclubs. We began the unplanned evening with low expectations […]
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There are all types of quiet. There is a pause when the ocean stops to look over her shoulder of salt and torn seaweed. In the pulse of her approach, she quickly crumbles in a mad fury of surge and riptide. There is the kind of quiet that feels deserved – the brief repose of a new mother, collapsed limbs and tired eyes on the couch. Quiet nuzzles its way into the pores of all things natural and synthetic, in the molecules of cement, steel, mud and root. It is found […]
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This is a repeat post, slightly edited, from several years ago. It was a post that was part of my “book” series. I lived in Hong Kong for three years and wrote about a group of fifty best friends I spent every waking hour with during a three year teaching term. This is an ongoing writing project that will eventually culminate all of its bits and pieces into a book somehow, somewhere…someday. Writing is an outlet for me when a) […]
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Hello, daughter. I can’t believe you’ve come and gone, you did crowd in a lot while you were here. Very quiet tonight. Miss you. Love, Mom I have traveled the planet for the past ten years. Goodbye and I…we know each other quite well. I graduated from McGill after four years of walking the streets of St. Denis, falling off fire escapes after too many sangrias at Saint Sulpice and enduring dark lecture halls with pretentious professors. I packed my bags, landed […]
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DISCLAIMER: To write about Justin Ormiston is, in fact, a risk. As you can see, he is James Bond stealth and sometimes hides in bushes…just for the sake of hiding in bushes. He was born with a superpower ability to capture, with the palm of his hand, inconceivable forces of evil and wrestle beauty out of them onto the most skinful of creatures. They crawl and play off the curves of shoulders, slide down the slopes of spiny notches and […]
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AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT Photos by me “Sharai oozes sexy.” A guy friend of mine shouted this statement to me, matter-of-fact, over the noise of an art auction this past winter in Vancouver. He stopped a passing waitress, grabbed a shot from her tray and pointed his chin towards Sharai while he swallowed. She was prancing through a crowd of Vancouver suits in animal-print stilettos toward a piece of art she just bought. We watched as she handed […]
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I am sitting with my knees tucked into my chest on the cool dust of playa floor. It is day five, I am exhausted and I have just lost Her to the Belly of the Burn. My feet are aching beneath the melt of leather boots that have become akin to the skin of my calves. Their once supple straps now encrusted with white silt making me into a two thousand year old Roman statue from the knees down. And I […]
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This is dedicated to all the women and men whose stories of abuse and violence have been lost within the societal chasms of shame, culturally accepted complacency and worst of all…silence. If we were beside you, we’d pull up eleven chairs and listen to what you have to say. This is the one of the hardest things I have ever had to write about. I have sat with it for four months, not sure what to do other than be quiet. However, being quiet […]
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For Kim Slater, For all the work you have done and will continue to do on behalf of Mother Earth. If you could pick up all the pieces of plastic in the swirling monster the size of Texas, I know you would. One by one. With a fishing net. In a little boat called the Captain Slater that Could. You are about to become one of the best mother’s on this Planet. Simply because you know Her so well. Like […]
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