“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 specification about how I only meant I was showing people early versions of my newsletters, my blog posts, those kinds of writing — implicitly agreeing with his dogmatic belief. People —other writers or readers—...
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: The Jazz Bar. I descend from cobblestone to black steps and the lighting shifts from twilight to the choice LED red, which speckles the basement lounge. It is 8:45, or thereabouts. To the door-keep —...
(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. Despite the lack of clouds, you could tell that the UV rating was only moderate. A cool breeze pushed in steadily off of Georgian Bay’s boundless waters. “Why don’t we come here more often?” I asked...
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 “all novels are really love letters aimed at one person”; more specifically he expresses a belief that “every novelist has a single ideal reader.” He goes on to say that while writing, an author will...
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 on the rack. If you saw my insecurities — how I examine myself in the mirror or how I behave on a first date. If you could hear all the things I’ve ever said when talking to myself, or could witness...
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 visiting my dad’s parents. When I was around thirteen, my mom’s parents moved to Barrie, and trips to Sarnia became only for visiting my grandpa and nana on my dad’s side. The drive from Barrie to Sarnia is...
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. Termly, semesterly, yearly, at four institutions, through each stage of humanly development, I received report cards. We all did. The last report card that I received was one I had to check myself, from...
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 could never outmaneuver the horde; I would duck and weave between the creeping bodies, I would hope over the altar in the middle of the room, circle around the bordering pillars. I would look...
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 accident free until twenty-five. “Accident Free ’Til 25!” Which was a funny way to put it — I know what they meant, but it also kind of sounded like they wanted me to get T-boned on my twenty-fifth...
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 of the body nor the chorus of oohs and ewws when the boys in my cabin saw it dead. It had scurried from under a bunk when we were horsing around one afternoon. “A mouse!” was yelled out. It made a...