Everything came out, stuff I've been collecting for years. Not one boa but two. Not one gypsy skirt but two. A soft pink 1980s prom dress. A witch hat. A woodland fairy, a hippie, a go-go girl. A disco-dancing alien witch. A woodland-fairy flapper.
Read MoreI come to oil country with a book about radicals who wish for the end of pipelines. But that's not what it's about. It's the friction of prosperity and concern, ability and disability, well-placed outrage and courage. It's banjo song and smoke in your eye.
Read MoreI fly into Edmonton and on from there to schools in Lethbridge and Stand Off—passing through with gifts for them and soaking it up, reading, stocking their library with Missy and airborne resistance.
Read MoreIf you're writing an environmental revenge fantasy, the big story, for now, is under that big sky. Or one of the big stories. All that black gold. A guy from Fort McMurray said over and over again I don't know what happened. Everything's gone.
Read MoreI don't know if it's fair to feel like the luckiest person in the world when there are people in the world who fall from a third-story window and get caught by a street vendor. But I do, god, I do. The book launch is tomorrow.
Read MoreThe dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Our breastmilk is poisoned. We live absurdedly, ridiculously.
Read MoreNow for what's next: lists and mulch and manuscripts, because god knows I'm behind. I'll keep fussing over a growing posse of literary rejects because hope is a warm doughnut, ultimately empty but sweet enough to keep you from drifting off at the wheel.
Read MoreMulch for the garden; the electrician for a back door light; insulation for the dining room; dad's iron fork to rip out sod and make a bed of soil along the back of the house; more trips to the greenhouse; a better axe to chop the scrap wood for kindling.
I love this list.
Read MoreEvery night there were spoons, a fiddle, a snare drum, guitars, everyone piled and sprawled and feeling fat and thrilled and rich, looking at each other bleary-eyed and spinning, all of us teetering on the edge of sickness. Keep going.
Read MoreI start off heavy, with a cast-iron pot of the required stuff of aperture and directional light and focusing modes. I begin as a school marm, a hardass, because inspiration is rootless without the language to self-diagnose. Then we play.
Read MoreThe first SHED workshop was teaching, cheering, running around shooting assignments and creative prompts at the beach and the public wharf. It was a bunked-in, slipper-wearing, sunshiney bunch of people meant to be together.
Read MoreToronto! One week from tonight, I'll be there. Will you? Impressed Photobooks is bringing me to the big city help them celebrate their launch, the first family photography roadshow event of several across the country. This means sociables and creative mojo all around.
Read MoreStealth to catch kids who evade the lens because they are unaware of it (bubbles and worms are more interesting) and to catch grown-ups who are too aware of it. Worrying about what nobody else sees, we flinch in front of unblinking glass.
Read MoreWe assign each other homework: reading and wines, gods and shoes. The phone bleeps. We are 5,043 kilometres apart. There is nothing like fresh sawdust. We are sistering.
Read MoreI am the barest minimum, clean clothes picked out of a clean-enough pile, supper at 9, bedtime when the sun comes up. When it was time to finish, I wrote from 10 AM until 4:30 AM. 60,000 words edited in 18 hours without a blink.
Read MoreThe doctors put me to sleep and went into my belly quick-quick and lifted you out! And you were so little. The littlest! They put you in the incubator and baked you like a cookie until you were big enough to come home and eat toasted marshmallows.
Read MoreWhat if evil thinks that it's good? Doesn't it always? … Never mind. I stare at a 90 year-old empty bottle of Kentucky Tavern Straight Bourbon Whiskey and wonder about the friendship, love, stories, and clouds on the night it was tipped dry.
Read MoreA Month of Sundays, my first published photography credit, is on the Stash Books layout table right now—this summer, it hits the shelves. Pre-order here. In the meantime, here are a few moments—some landed in the book, some on the floor.
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