A Quiet Place

We were out for dinner the other night with friends, talking about the dumpster-fire demise of my former publisher, and other examples of egregious business dealings in the small-press world. One of our friends asked, mostly rhetorically, why so many authors allowed...

Min

Min hid, at the beginning of her life with us. She was a three-month-old street kitten, and she cowered under a bed for days. The walls must have felt constricting: where were the plants and trees, the green and earthy places where she’d lived before, alone? Min...

To Play the Game of Men

I wrote a short story once, back in 2007, when my life was falling apart. Julie Czerneda asked for it. She had no idea that my life was falling apart. She might have known that I’d never published a short story before, but if she did, she didn’t let it...

“Hark! the footsteps of the Groan!”

I found Gormenghast in Israel. Twice. # This country. I attempt to process what I’m learning of its past and its present as I follow Adam, our host and guide, through Jerusalem’s Old City, and Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station—but there’s too...

Danger Zone

Goddammit, Top Gun: I kind of love you. I saw you again last night, at Ontario Place’s Cinesphere. The venue alone was enough to prompt a surge of nostalgia: I sat there often in the 1980s, heart hammering in anticipation of EVEN BIGGER Lukes and Leias and Hans,...

I Remember the Ansibles

Last Tuesday night, while I was at Mt. Sinai hospital, Peter texted me that Ursula K. Le Guin had died. I was at the hospital with my friend Megan, who was in labour with a boy she’d already named Monty. Her mother was there too, exhausted from a trip down from...