One of the best parts of summer coming to a close is the rain. Cutting through the heat, the sunny sky takes a pause, implying for the world to follow suit.
Read MoreHow do you know when a pairing is perfect? For me, not only should both individual elements be strong on their own, but together, they should enhance one another.
Read MoreEvery good playlist begins with a banger. A locked-in hit, a punch to the gut.
Read MoreUpon entering the museum, up the stairs and to the right, text lines a panel of the left wall. Of course, before you enter the exhibit, there is a curatorial offering…
Read More
The next blog in our Alchemists Series on interdisicplinary, collaborative and hybrid approaches to writing and creation is the stellar choreographer, dance dramaturge and creator Helen Simard.
Read More
I feel like my creative practice has been this kind of secret wife on the side where I’m committed and betrothed to this person (my practice) who takes all of my energy and all of my time, but then I leave her at home and do my personal life elsewhere and bring information and energy back from these exchanges to put into this secret wife relationship with my work. With Tommi, I feel like we both understood this. We had these other personal relationships outside of creative practice, and then these intense relationships to work. So there was a kind of funny polyamory there that we could share.
I suppose the main thing I love about the process of making things is defamiliarization. It feels critical to the act of paying attention in the world, this investment in what I call “aliveness,” and it disrupts your self-making too, right? It’s like, oh, I can see myself anew because of this artwork, or this poem, or because of someone else’s experience of, and response to, something I’ve made. It’s this beautiful circular thing.
Read More
I’d say right now that I write to resolve the big questions or conflicts I’m contending with. It’s really about how I’m looking at the things I can’t really change. The things I feel powerless with. I tend to then focus on this in writing because I’m not good at letting things go. I write because I can’t let things go, but when I write it, it helps me to let it go a little bit.
Jessica Bebenek is a writer & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). In 2021 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent chapbooks include Fourth Walk (Desert Pets Press, 2017), k2tog (Broken Dimanche, 2018), and What is Punk (2019). She recently completed her first full collection of poetry, No One Knows Us There.
Read More
by Mirabel
It is hard to bring up money while you use silverware to delicately place cheese over crackers, while holding a glass of wine. Surrounded by the paraphernalia of abundance, money appears always as an afterthought.
Read More
by Brandon Wint.
Check out Brandon Wint's audio essay on identity, empowerment, healing, ancestry and his relationship to his Mother in this poignant audio essay.
an interview with Mirabel and Tawhida Tanya Evanson
For the third piece in the carte blanche blog series featuring BIPOC artists, we interviewed Tawhida Tanya Evanson, an Antiguan-Québecoise artist based in Montreal.
Read More
by Kama La Mackerel
What 18-year-old me did not know is that ultimately, there is nothing you can quite fully escape, nothing you can quite fully repress or run away from; one day or another, the ghosts living inside of you start rattling the bones of your present self, demanding that you listen to them and to their grief.
by Bänoo Zan
In our notion of diversity, does truth have a place, or do we make our decisions to spare from discomfort those who do not want to come to terms with the legacy of injustice in their own communities?
Read More
I am a big believer in lists. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Lists on phones and bits of envelopes and bills. Lists are satisfying to write, and even more satisfying to work through. But best-of lists, the kind of lists which flood journals and newspapers towards the end of each year, summarising “The 10 Best Books of 2019” or “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century”—even though we’re only a fifth of the way through that century—are a pet peeve of mine.
Read More
a book review by Zoe Shaw
A variety of histories and subcultures distributed among multiple poetic forms rejects the representation of stand-ins for a single version of Japanese culture.
“We’re thinking of moving to the country,” I told mystery writer Louise Penny when I bumped into her at the Knowlton Literary Festival in 2010, adding that my husband and I weren’t sure if it was the right thing for our writing careers. Penny was enthusiastic: “Do it,” she said, “while you can!” A few months later, we bought a 200-year-old farmhouse in the tiny hamlet of Hatley.For Penny, living in the country proved no hindrance to her career. Her depiction of the fictional village of Three Pines and the eccentric characters who inhabit it launched her to international success. Now on the sixteenth volume of her Inspector Gamache series, she has sold over six million books worldwide.
Read More
The first year after I had a concussion was a blur. I was dead to the world for three months, going in and out of sleep, exhausted. I had vertigo and difficulties with light, sound, and language. No reading. No computers. No writing. Definitely no multitasking. I had to rest for far more hours than seemed viable and consequently had to suddenly quit a few organizations I led, with no succession plan in place. I closed my small press, or as it turned out, put it on hiatus. I simply had no choice.As with a stroke or cancer, a traumatic brain injury can be an opportunity to reexamine one’s life and priorities.
Read More
“What do we call you?” is a question I’ve gotten used to hearing, especially in the writing world. I write now as K.B. Thors, but up until the end of 2017 I was publishing poetry, translations, and essays under the name K.T. Billey. My legal name is Kara Billey Thordarson. If I meet you, I’ll introduce myself as Kara.That might seem all over the place, but the evolution of my nom de plume mirrors the development not just of my writing but of my self. I’d encourage any writer to experiment with their own creative license, no matter what a brand expert might say.
Read More