When Catharine was a child, her parents told stories. Some were written in books, others improvised or recited from memory. Catharine’s mother would sit on the edge of the bed in lamplight, reading. “Why?” asks Catherine: for every story, Why…. Read More ›
Personal Essay
Non-fictional writing of a personal nature.
The last Neanderthal
Vaja has crossed the water alone after burying Tahna under darkness, debarking at sunrise below the eastern face of the limestone promontory. The windswept yellow sand of the savannah is in his beard and mouth as he makes his way… Read More ›
Connected
[June 21, 1975] I am on my back a half-naked animal fever bitten with a blade of noonsun dissecting my sweaty torso and the ceiling pulses I may heave again into the blue plastic bucket at my bedside. When I… Read More ›
A brief study in time
You were a fool but then youth is wasted on the young. Suppose I could go back. I told myself if only I knew then what I know now without considering that there are always new mistakes to be made…. Read More ›
The autobiography of a spoon
I am a spoon in a laminate pressboard drawer, my pitted bowl heavenward to the darkened underribs of the countertop. My back and my tip are scarred, and, yes, I have lost plating in spots. But my neck is strong,… Read More ›
Creation
You have to understand My darlings. Yes I’ve come back but not in a conflagration or with the fanfare of a host of angels or a wrenching of the firmament and such. Drama like that belongs to an earlier period… Read More ›
My fellow citizens of shopping
I’ve come for socks and I am leaving with a glass vase that I don’t need. The clerk dispenses my change like a backhoe grapple. A coin falls to the counter. It is flu season and I have not washed… Read More ›
There is a time
People are cunning and determined and focused. As you read these words, people are busy at the relentless work of ruin. I know that evil exists and I know that evil exists because I know that people exist.
Mr Chopin, are you suffering greatly?
Brahms was a perfectionist so overwhelmed by Beethoven’s influence that it took him twenty-one years to complete his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68. My college music professor told me this story, and soon I’d embellished it with… Read More ›
Mo
Morrie is from Valley East in the Sudbury Basin, a long way from this west-end Toronto bench. Call me Mo, he says, shaking my hand. He tells a fishing story that begins with his wife giving him 30 dollars and… Read More ›
The Gettysburg Address
It was a huge number of years ago. I mean, I don’t know, like a hundred years. A hundred? Yeah, say about a hundred. It doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. A tremendous number of years and our fathers, folks they were… Read More ›
All the things we can’t do without
From the somewhere beyond a pedicel has pricked the baseboard and attached itself to the telephone. Or perhaps it’s the opposite, a root burrowing outward to the world. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that I have permitted this stubborn… Read More ›
To boil a frog
I was in an Upper Manhattan bar with Herbert J. Gans, around the time he was writing The War Against The Poor, and once again we were discussing media bias. Journalism would be better without objectivity, I argued. Better to… Read More ›
Celebrities
Everywhere I go, I see them. I am talking about the celebrities. The day arrived when I understood. I had not found them, they had found me. It made sense. I wasn’t looking for the celebrities: it was the other… Read More ›
The Pirates of Memory
My brain was on a loop, forever reprocessing the same irrational thought, so I slept poorly. In the morning, I couldn’t recall the idée fixe over which my subconscious had obsessed for what must have been hours. Tell me what… Read More ›
