“Oh, you should never show people your first drafts.” — A writer friend of mine. “You should never speak in absolutes about writing.” — Me, now. What I said at the time was a more lengthy...
Regarding Opinions
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An Edinburgh Quartet
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I suppose it starts with jazz, as all good tales must. I’m in Edinburgh, the day is July 25th. After a supper of Indian food in old town, I cross the street to the venue of my night’s entertainment:...
Infirmum a loco
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(1)I was only forty minutes away from the house that I was raised in. Lying on a beach. There was nothing disrupting the blue of the sky except for the pale disc of the sun. The temperature was mild...
Imaginary SIR, or Ma’am
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In chapter eleven of the instructional section of Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft —the only King book I’ve ever read—, he expresses his belief in an unattributed notion that...
Spotlights
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If you watched me do the dishes, saw the way I stacked the plates and bowls first, then ran the water. If you could see how I did laundry, how I remove every fold, every crease, while the clothes dry...
WORDS FOR THE MINISTER
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For the first half of my life, both sets of my grandparents lived in Sarnia. When my mom, dad, brother, and I went to visit, we would stay at my mom’s parents house, and spend some of the time...
Never Again
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Success has changed. From the age of five until twenty-three—eighteen critical years— the terms and measures of my success were summated into a quantitative report delivered right to my person...
IF EVER I WERE SO ACUTELY NERVOUS AGAIN, I WOULDN’T HESITATE TO SEEK THE SAME REPRIEVE
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I had a reoccurring nightmare as a child in which I was confined in a large mausoleum by threat of numerous slow moving ice zombies. In this dream, I could always outrun the individual zombies but I...
Confessions of a Young Driver
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In the hallway of the driving school that I attended at sixteen, there was a poster that said the school’s hope for their graduates, with their newly gained knowledge and skills, was for them to be...
Happenings and Takeaways, Sleepover Camp circa 2009
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I’m surely imagining the sounds of snapping bones and rupturing insides when I recall the memory of striking a mouse with a canoe paddle all those years ago. But not imagined are the sudden limpness...