Blog!
November 29, 2023
At the outbreak of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, Marina Sonkina decided to travel to Europe to assist Ukrainians fleeing the carnage through the Ukrainian-Polish border at Korczowa. As her book unfolds, we meet an array of refugees, just some of the many hundreds Sonkina encountered as a volunteer at the border refugee centre.
November 7, 2022
Ivan Coyote called it "powerful and poetic". In this piece I grapple with a question that haunted my childhood: What are you doing here? Honoured to have this work acknowledged by PRISM International magazine.
July 9, 2022
"In 1961 my mother committed my father to Crease Clinic, at what was then known as Essondale, the Hospital for the Mind. This was a euphemistic title for what is usually called a mental institution or lunatic asylum." This is the opening from All My Love, Alex, the second-prize winner in Event Poetry and Prose Magazine's 2021 Creative Non Fiction contest.
January 16, 2022
Leave With What You Came With is long listed for the BC Federation of Writers 2021 Literary Contest in the Creative Nonfiction category. This work is essentially a braided essay. It is a glimpse into the story of my father's institutionalization in a mental hospital in 1961.
January 5, 2022
How do you tell time? What signals mark the significant passages in our lives? Weather, nature, the aging body. Time is its own poetry.
December 24, 2021
In The Overstory (Penguin Random House 2019), Dory, one of Richard Powers’ characters, watches the twin towers fall on 9/11. She thinks, Finally, the whole strange […]
December 9, 2021
They say being human is to suffer. How do we embrace this? Mindfulness and self-compassion are key practices as we wade through the muck of our own humanity.
October 17, 2021
On a macro level, there is a big global change going on. Change happens on the micro level, too. Who is this stress-crafting woman, awake before light to swim in a frigid dawn, sewing as the midwinter afternoon darkens, crocheting by moonlight?
October 1, 2021
The objects we surround ourselves with express identity or meaning, revealing what matters to us. The things we collect, gather, curate and display speak to us, and also for us.