After high school, I got a job at an artificial flower warehouse by the airport. It was my first real job. I took two buses that always smelled of coffee, and squeezed in amongst people trying to navigate a newspaper within their own sliver of personal space. I loved it. I was a cashier, but sometimes I would have to go down our long aisles to retrieve a certain colour of hydrangea or check the […]
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1) A long morning walk with my dog, remembering what a cool breeze feels like. 2) Reading the paper at my parents’ kitchen table. Opening my laptop to write. 3) The familiar sounds of my childhood home – the fridge humming, the kitchen floor creaking, an upstairs door closing as a wind blows through. 4) Standing at the back door looking at the grey clouds, smelling the air for rain. 5) Returning to my work, finally
My friend has loaned me a book. The author is half-Filipino, just like my friend and me. I read it eagerly. It feels familiar. The author’s writing style reminds me so much of my friend’s, and I relish the glimpses of the suburban neighbourhoods we grew up in. I read it on the subway, standing in the doorway. I read it on an airplane, both directions, on a trip where I need the comfort of
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know of grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know
When I say I miss high school, I miss writing terrible poetry in a notebook in a shitty coffee shop that was the closest thing to my house in the suburbs, the kind of coffee shop where someone writing in a notebook for two hours is strange. Wandering around secondhand book stores in Toronto, especially the one on Queen Street that’s gone now, with the really creaky floors, imagining where my books would be. I
Making bread on a cloudy morning, and the soreness in my forearms during kneading surprises me. How long has it been? I remember breakfast and quickly fry some leftover rice, garlic, crack an egg on top. I make the first cup of coffee after a long weekend of illness. CBC Radio is on in the background, the Calgary morning show, which I haven’t been able to stop listening to despite the fact I don’t live
As of late: 1) A short story of mine, “Breathing Underwater”, was published at my friend Leesa’s new site WhiskeyPaper. It’s a really wonderful site, and I’m thrilled to be included. 2) My lovely friend Susanna and I are collaborating on a blog, Lumisilla Mailla, which means “in snowy lands” in Finnish. There are only two posts up right now, but we’re having a lot of fun with it.
You can tell me anything you like about the value of output, of just writing without analyzing. But give me the minutes spent staring at the screen, walking around the neighbourhood, working loose the knots of a story that you feel might never give way. Despite the almost palpable stress of it, it makes me feel connected to the fact of being a writer more than anything else.
More than a week later and I’m still at odds with my city. I venture out of my bubble and quickly return, soothing my jangled old-lady nerves in the ravines and parks and brick homes of my neighbourhood, my strangely sleepy neighbourhood that feels like a held breath. I’ve also been reading, photographing, writing these days. Though I’m only three short stories into my mentorship, everything already feels possible with my work. And I’m realizing
We gather in the theatre to watch a live streaming onstage performance of a talk radio show, and we’re all laughing, everyone, almost the entire time. And that laughing becomes so habitual that I have the space to notice all the individual laughs all around me. I notice, for example, that others are laughing ha ha ha but I’m laughing more like heh heh heh. Even writing that looks creepy. On our way to the subway station,
