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On a cool night, Denys, Andrej and I make our way to what will likely be our last evening with Coach Peter. The ice on the rink is thin, and there are bits of weeds and twigs poking through.
As I’m climbing up the chain-link fence, the last one over, I see a man emerge from the shadows. He moves differently than Coach Peter. I do a double take in the darkness. He is definitely shorter than our coach, and his back is more curved.
Denys and Andrej see him, too.
That first night, the audience seemed to know the music was about to begin even before the bright lights of the concert bowl went down. There was a tiny, brief silence; a wave of anticipation that rippled through the stands—and then everything changed. Lights out, plunging 26,000 screaming Yellow Birds into a momentary darkness somehow made even more impenetrable by the roar of the audience. Soon, spotlights brightened the stage, illuminating the drumkit, the guitar stands, the keyboard, moving across the stadium over hands raised above heads. And then the lights returned to the front as the five members of the Open Road walked onto the stage, walked to their instruments, and paused.
Toronto’s Daniel Maluka may be a debut poet, with his collection, Unwashed, recently released by Mawenzi House Press, but he’s no stranger to the world of art. Daniel has been writing much of his life and his striking visual art has been exhibited throughout the city and beyond. Both Daniel’s writing and visual art are a means to share narratives and he does this with an intricate yet unadorned style that’s singular and absorbing.
Daniel joins us for this Power Q & A to talk about being a multidisciplinary artist.
Whether you know it or not, you have probably seen the art of Ruth Abernethy. Ruth is the sculptor who created the installation of Queen Elizabeth II at Queen's Park, the Glenn Gould sculpture in front of CBC studios, and the Liu Xiaobo piece in Ottawa. Her art, which has been installed coast to coast, has inspired many conversations among many Canadians. (She's also the only non-American to sculpt Abraham Lincoln!)
In The Dialogues: The Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, award-winning author Armand Garnet Ruffo brings to life not only the story of the famed WWI Indigenous sniper, but also the complexities of telling Indigenous stories. From Wasauksing (Parry Island) to the trenches of WWI to the stage, Ruffo moves seamlessly through time in these poems, taking the reader on a captivating journey through Pegahmagabow’s story and onto the creation of Sounding Thunder, the opera based on his life.
In a Tension of Leaves and Binding is an exploratory journey that examines our relationship to the natural world through the lens of a single garden. Enunciated from both a human perspective and from the imagined voices of the plants and animals that actually live in the garden itself, this collection also explores conceptual and visual articulations that function to disrupt our assumptions about poetry, meaning, and language.
Gloria Blizzard’s collection of essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) has been on our radar for a while. Earlier this year, it even made our Mother’s Day Book Gift List.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of The Old Man in Her Arms, has praised Gloria for how she “effortlessly weaves elements of her life — its challenges and its gifts — into contemporary conversations about identity, feminism, the diaspora, art, and belonging.”
In November, my social studies teacher gave the class an end-of-term assignment. The instructions were both specific and vague. We were tasked with submitting a project on our upbringing. But we were left to decide how to tell this story, whether it was by creating a family yearbook, a short story or a comic strip. We all had to incorporate one aspect into our finished product: a family tree with pictures. Students were able to go as far back as they wished, depending on how much information they could get, or just focus on their immediate family unit.
With the formalities of the funeral behind her, Kate felt herself begin to relax.
A giddy shriek of female laughter drew her attention to a crowd of older women surrounding artist David Sutherland, Meredith Island's most famous native son, and according to Alex, the A-list of contemporary British artists. Kate reckoned he must have been going on seventy but looked younger with a full head of faded blonde hair. Unlike so many older people whose faces fatten to blur their original features, his face had managed to retain its high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a jawline softly rounded yet remarkably unbroken by jowls or creases around his mouth. As a young man, he must have been stunningly attractive.
My father was my first competition. He got the words down fast. Stories would spin from dad’s brain, dusting our dinner table with whimsy and adventure. The children of writers talk about the sanctity of the study, the private magical terrain of the parent’s imagination. I guess I experienced some of that, but it also felt ordinary. Writing was Dad’s occupation and he went to work like I supposed other parents did, except he was around. He found the job lonely, so when he carried his brown leather briefcase into the car and drove the hour to Toronto for rehearsals or meetings, those were good days.
Nora sat in the train compartment by herself, an open book on her lap, watching the fields drift past. The engine was chugging away somewhere behind her, pulling her along. She was falling backward through the landscape, into a forgotten space that lay beyond it. As she fell, she thought about the argument she had heard the day before, through the closed door of her grandparents’ bedroom.
“Why should we send her to live with that horrible woman?” her grandmother had demanded. “She’s perfectly happy here.”
“Hush,” replied her grandfather. “She’s only twelve. That woman is her mother, and she loves her. And there’s the brother.”
Nora had wondered if her grandfather meant she loved her mother or that her mother loved her.
“Brother! Half of a brother. Partial.”
Harriet woke abruptly. She’d been dreaming she was hurrying across a frozen field under a darkening sky. She was being chased by something unseen and dangerous. A portentous dream voiceover told her she wouldn’t like what lay ahead any better.
Patricia, sitting kitty corner to her in the facing seat, where they had spread themselves large for the trip from the regional mother house, didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Anyway, her square impassive face gave nothing away.
Sister Harriet smoothed her habit, feeling unsettled. She blamed her summer bug, with its fitful fever. She’d have a few days, thank God, to get over it. But did she thank God? That was the problem, beside which her secret weakness in mathematics paled. Although not entirely since she would be teaching upper year science at Saint Reginald’s. She darted another furtive look at Sister Pat.
After Father died, I had all the wrong thoughts.
Step-Father, a Man of Science, prescribes Spiders:
For My Condition. Both Common, and Endangered,
crumpled onto teatime curds, or confined within
sentient globules of butter. One writhes in a nutshell,
when threaded at the neck. For Fever, or Ungovernable Emotion.
Rose didn’t know that eleven weeks after Quentin left Big Rock Lake to return to New York, I’d spent the night in this hospital. The abortion clinic.
I wanted children. But one day, not now. Having children was not something Quentin and I had discussed, but I could imagine his reaction if I told him I was pregnant, and it would not be positive. I wasn’t willing to risk losing him, so by myself I made the choice between him and our baby.
A meeting with a counsellor to discuss my options was a prerequisite for the surgery. I talked about being young, and unmarried, and having plans for graduate school. That was easier than admitting my real fear that my boyfriend of not quite four months would leave me.
A few weeks after Ginny and Matt move into their new house they are having a dinner party for their new neighbours, a kind of meet-and-greet on a beautiful, warm, almost muggy evening. Might as well start off well, Ginny had said, even though there was still so much to do here, with their dining room, with the fact that they don’t have much furniture yet.
Matt is down the table from Ginny, sitting on a box instead of a chair. On Ginny’s left are Pierre and Ruby from next door, the house towards the park. Michael and Pat are on the right, from the house on the other side, closer to town, the one with the huge addition. And then there’s Rain, the hippy, young, single woman from directly across the street. She’s down by Matt.
The night pressed in so that the lamps had been turned on in the apartment upstairs. The store was closed and there was a dance being held that evening in the community hall, so the girls were getting themselves in order—brushing and curling hair, adding ribbons, and choosing the right evening dresses and shoes. Lizzie thought that it was one of the loveliest things about growing up in a family of mostly girls, that you could look around this large room and imagine they were all part of a Life magazine photo, like starlets from Hollywood.
There was a sharp knock at the door and in came Mama. She was dressed in one of her prettiest evening frocks.
In the beginning was an angel, a church and a knife.
I hunted down the angel, Remiel, in Barcelona. He was working as a living statue, one of those street performers whose job it is to separate tourists from their money before someone else does. His office was a wooden pedestal on La Rambla, the pedestrian boulevard by the harbour that every visitor has to hit before they start exploring the real city. He was tucked away among the kiosks that sold everything from postcards and magazines to live birds. A silver robot stood on a box to the left of him, while a clockwork man dressed in gears, wheels and pistons was on his right. Remiel was made up like a demon with golden skin, bat wings and two tails, holding a leather tome bound with three locks. He looked like just another out-of-work circus performer vying for tips. Apparently even angels have to make a living these days.
The pendulum of literary fashion usually swung violently once it began.
The disillusioned young moderns of the new century turned their backs on their elders under the impression that they had made a completely new discovery about the world they lived in. For that great Renaissance characteristic – love of action – they substituted the conviction that the world was a pit of iniquity and the only thing worth doing was to sit down and point out its sins. For that other great Renaissance characteristic – love of beauty – they substituted a kind of horrified fear of sex coupled with a fascinated interest in its abnormalities. And for vigour they substituted cleverness: “I’m not insulting you; I’m describing you.”
Drunks, children, and Tommy Middleton always told the truth.
Having your heart broken is like finding out you have bedbugs—not in an emotional sense, but practically. Both broken hearts and bedbugs require extreme treatment. You can’t just wash your sheets and think that’s enough. Not only is it not enough, you’ve likely made the problem worse by carting your dirty laundry all over the place.
You can get your house fumigated (this could be a metaphor for therapy), but even that won’t be enough, because the memories will be as bad as the bugs themselves. They’ll continue to plague you whether they’re there or not, crawling all over your legs and feet as you lie awake at night, unable to sleep. When you put on that T-shirt, you’ll feel them running up your neck into your hair. They’ll make their home in all the quiet, innocuous places in your life, burrowing into memories and holidays and songs and smells, and every time you think you’ve gotten rid of the last one, you’ll discover that you were an idiot to think there would ever be a last one.
That’s not how bedbugs work, and it’s not how broken hearts work.
