Another Year, Another Festival, A Grateful Heart
“A grateful heart is a magnet for miracles.” Anonymous It wasn’t too long ago that I wasn’t sure I would have been able to write the words, another year, another festival. They come naturally now as if there is no question we will be back, bigger and stronger next year. When the day closes today […]
Rising Up – The Poetry of Protest
Book review: Poets Rosanna Deerchild, Stephen Heighton, Miranda Pearson, and Gary Geddes. By Mary MacDonald Blackcomb Mountain was flaring blue this morning when I woke, an uncanny beauty that deepens my sense of reverence. But the living mountain is indifferent to me. Half an hour later clouds obscured the massif in a fog that changed […]
Purple Fingers
by Farha Guerrero In the cold, purple fingers are better than white ones. The colour of the skin indicates that there is something moving in the capillary veins – some circulation – some flow of blood. There is hope that my fingers will be warm again. White fingers tell a different story. White fingers are […]
A Trail of Perseverance
By Nicola Bentley Writing is a lot like hiking, the adventurous, in-for-the-long-haul type. Preparedness, enthusiasm, and tenacity must be on hand in equal measure and you daren’t start either undertaking without pack-loads of perseverance. Wading through my scene plan feels similar to a recent week plodding along the mud-ridden West Coast Trail. Seventy-five kilometers of […]
Things that go Creak in the Night
Book Review: She’s Not There by Joy Fielding By Nicole Fitzgerald I can’t read this. I hear buzzing, a clank. I’m up, checking the nursery for the third time tonight. Just like the night before. No perpetrator hangs over my two-year-old toddler fast asleep, however. I move to the open window and look down. No […]
I was a test case lab rat for perseverance
by Rebecca Wood Barrett When I was twenty and attending the University of Victoria, I agreed to be a lab rat in the psychology department for ten dollars an hour. After the first test was finished, I learned something vital about myself. I have the will to persevere. When we hear the word perseverance, we […]
The longing of holding someone’s words in your hands
Book Review: The Pharos Gate: Griffin and Sabine’s Lost Correspondence by Nick Bantock By Farha Guerrero In 1995, when I was an undergraduate student at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, I wrote letters to loved ones on a small word processor, nestled somewhere on the floor between my desk and dormitory bed. Writing letters helped […]
A journalist’s frantic search
Book Review: A Disappearance in Damascus — A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War by Deborah Campbell By Cathryn Atkinson In May 1991, I spent two weeks travelling alone by train from Belgrade, Serbia, to Split, Croatia, by way of Zagreb and rural Bosnia. I was there as a freelance photographer, […]
All Is Never Lost
by Jennifer Cowan Many moons ago when I was living in Whistler I decided to write a book. I gave myself a 1000 word a day minimum and, despite the distractions of skiing, hiking, mountain biking, skinny dipping and happily, paid writing gigs, I managed to complete Lost Summer. It was the story of teenaged […]
The Heaviness of Things That Float – A Novel by Jennifer Manuel
Book Review by Katherine Fawcett “Listen for stories in the wind and the water.” This is the advice given to nurse Bernadette Perkal when she first arrives at the remote Tawakin First Nations medical outpost, on the shores of a tiny island on BC’s rough west coast. But like the wind and the water, whose […]