Hello fellow Gen-X oldsters (or other indy music fans.) Do you remember St. Etienne? Their album “Foxbase Alpha” from 1991 was one of those albums that got under your skin and became part of your synapses. Have you listened to any of their subsequent material? Doesn’t matter, you’re going to
Some days are not awesome. Today was one of those days. Nothing truly terrible happened to me personally today, but more than one person I love did not have the best day. This is exacerbated by the fact that our environmental degradation is floating in the air, blocking out the
I love chapbooks. I have boxes of them. They’re like singles, like EP’s. A quick listen, enjoyment without the commitment to a full book. They are also, to switch metaphors, like details from paintings in an Art History textbook. They are deep dives, parts representing a greater whole, a way
I’m hot. You’re hot. We’re all hot. Even when the sun goes down, there is no relief. Thanks climate change *insert eyeroll emoji here* We had a pretty busy weekend with kids graduating high school and junior high and annual general meetings of poetry festival boards and visiting our oldest
Today, June 21, is National Indigenous Peoples Day here in Canada and what is driving my creativity today is this amazing Inuk musician: Riit. Coming to us from Panniqtuq, Nunavut, Riit’s cover of AWOLNATION’s “Sail” is living on repeat, rent free in my head right now. This is a case
The title of this week’s post is a pair of lines from Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s fantastic new book, “Deriving.”. Published by the University of Alberta Press, “Deriving” is Delisle’s second book of poetry. Her first book, “The Bosun Chair,” which is described as a lyric memoir, is also fantastic and
Happy Victoria Day Long Weekend Monday for those of you who live in Commonwealth countries. And happy plain old Monday for those of you who don’t. This installment of the Monday Music Video has a lot going on so buckle up. Our destination today is the new Bacxwash video for
On March 5, 2021 NASA announced that it has named the landing site of the agency’s Perseverance rover “Octavia E. Butler Landing,” after the science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. This is perfect and, for those who have read her work, certainly past due. Coincidentally, I finished re-reading the two
For those of you not in the know, the Public Lending Right, PLR, is a program that pays Canadian writers a small sum based on the number of libraries that have purchased their book in any given year. Administered by the Canada Council for the Arts, the program aims to
There are a lot of cool things about having a book published. The latest neat thing for me was getting confirmation from Good Reads that my book is in their database and properly attributed to me. As much as it would have been cool to have written “Maximinus Thrax: From
