My friend Teri has an article in the latest Ricepaper, titled Between Representations: Filipinos in Canadian Literature. Teri’s one of my favourite writers so I am always eager to read anything she writes, but I was especially excited to read this. She and I are both half-Filipino, and have talked in the past about how we […]
Writing and Filipinos. Read More »
Some of my fondest childhood memories are of playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo games with my brother, and making that long suburban walk to the arcade on summer afternoons. In high school and my early twenties, I dropped the hobby for a while mainly due to lack of a console and a lack of funds
Books and video games. Read More »
One of Decca’s favourite words. In a 1977 essay in the London Daily Mail (reprinted in the New York Times and later in Poison Penmanship), she wrote that “frenemy” (which she sometimes spelled “frienemy”) was “an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary, coined by one of my sisters when she was a small child to describe
Arrived back at Joan’s just in time for dinner. To it came Doris Lessing (you know who she is, a best-selling English writer of the Angry Young school) . . . and, joy of joys, 12-year-old Peter Lessing, who had learned about Benjy’s arrival and has planned his whole Easter vacation around showing Benj London!
Decca and letters. Read More »
But then one day, you know, I suddenly realized with an absolute shock that there never was going to be a convenient time, and that if I didn’t make a beginning, I would be saying to my grandchildren, ‘What I really wanted to be was a writer.’ So I had to make time. – PD
PD James interview Read More »
Since I last cooked from my c.1938 copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management, I’ve wanted to try another recipe. I marked out a few contenders that didn’t necessitate sourcing a pheasant or a sheep’s head, and today’s lunch was: Carrot Soup with Rice. Here’s the recipe: Ingredients – 2 pints of white second stock, 1 pint of
Another Mrs Beeton recipe: Carrot soup with rice Read More »
I recently picked up an uncorrected proof copy of Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean at a secondhand book store. I liked the book overall, but I think this section was my favourite:
The fun of the uncorrected proof. Read More »
A couple of months ago I stumbled upon my dream book in a secondhand book store. Despite the name, Mrs Beeton’s Household Management isn’t my dream book because I yearn for the upper echelons of hausfrauness or anything. I discovered an older version of the book in 2008, and since then I’ve been interested by it
Mrs Beeton, and a recipe Read More »
Jonna filled the teakettle in the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, looking at her own face, she thought with sudden bitterness that it couldn’t go on like this, these short stories that were never finished and just went on and on getting rewritten and discarded and picked up again, all those words that got changed
I know the feeling. Read More »
It seemed to happen all at once, this colour and coolness. My husband and I had patio beers with some friends on Saturday, and barbecued in our backyard with other friends on Sunday, and now this. It seems cliché to be this excited for this particular month and the season it shows off so well. But
