Sometimes I complain about teaching. In fact, about three weeks into any given course, I tend to have a fair-to-middling-sized meltdown. I'm working 9 to 5; I'm critiquing 50 pages of student writing a week instead of writing my own stuff; my free time has gone from...

Once, long ago (in 2001), I saw the Shire for the first time. On-screen, it was exactly as I’d always pictured it in my head: verdant and rolling, suffused in golden-green light. And when Frodo leapt up from the foot of that perfect Shire tree, he looked right too. He...

I'm having one of my patented meltdowns. It's midway through one of my U of T terms, and I'm doing a lot of critiquing. Also, I'm now over a month into a new job, still feeling slightly unbalanced, certain I'll screw up big-time, any day. I've been chipping away at...

I never intended to have a rabbit. It wasn't that I was opposed to the idea; I simply never thought of it myself. No, it was my friend Heather who said, way back in 1989, “Um, my roommate's sick and she has to go back to the States for a while; can you look after her...

I alluded to this in a previous post. I alluded to it in Sweden too, when many of the wonderful people we met there asked where we'd already been, and what we'd been doing. "I gave a lecture-type thing!" I'd say. "To a bunch of graduate biology students, plus members...

When I was in Spain, back in 1992, I wrote everything I was seeing down in a notebook and composed long, musing, lyrical posts at night, in an attempt to synthesize all the images (fireflies in the sky above the Alhambra, for example, or puddles drying on the cobbles...

I made it. Took a photo over Germany of this making of it. Here it is, to prove that I wasn't tearing at my hair or lying prone in the aisle or buttoning and unbuttoning Peter's jean jacket for seven hours. No. I was sitting by the window, quite serenely. Toronto to...

I'm seven years old. I'm very small, in the University Theatre seat; I'm clutching the armrests, waiting for the curtains to open. And then, at last, they do. They do, and the screen is dark, except for ten words: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away Music: a...

My fear of flying kicked in out of the blue—or rather, out of the smog—above Mexico City in 1994. My boyfriend and I had decided to embark on an English-teaching adventure in a city called Oaxaca, which we'd chosen based on a couple of paragraphs and a few photos in...

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” It's such a wonderful, agonizing, Kubrickian sequence: the slow approach to the big wooden desk and the typewriter and the neat pile of manuscript paper. We've never seen what's on the paper; all we've seen is the man,...