Song for a Winter’s Night

Yes, it’s the same name as the Gordon Lightfoot song – which (sorry Gordie) is rather simple in lyric, and only any good when sung by someone like Sarah McLachlan, anyway – but the song title keeps popping into my head as we feel the second heavy snowfall near what should be winter’s end. The [...]

The Emperor and the Snowflake

A while ago, we were at an NHL hockey game with the kids. And, as is my kids’ custom with new places, they wanted to go to the bathroom. Many times. (I don’t know. I think it’s a boy thing). At one point, exasperated as I was to accompany yet one more time, I let [...]

The Poetry of First Aid

I don’t remember first aid recertification being a day of poetry before. There was lots of it in the class – immediate, vital stories of events as illustrations, discussions, all spilling over with the emotions of life and death, an attention-deficit candy store for me, as I kept envisioning lines, ideas, kernels of poems, the [...]

Celebrating Poetry

National Poetry Month.

The Canadian Government, A Cultural Vacuum

Canada is one of the most socialist countries in the world, when it comes to things like healthcare, and – increasingly in the past – public programmes.  But when the Canadian Government warned – and recently confirmed – that it will cut funding to pretty well every literary periodical in the country (those with a [...]