I was an e-reader skeptic. Hard-copy books were good enough for me growing up, and, when they weren’t, well, dangit, I could read EPUBs on my phone and PDFs on my laptop. Why would I want another gadget taking up space in my life and outlets on my precious power…
When I was a teen, the writing books I picked up admonished me to write longhand and edit from printouts. They pooh-poohed using a computer as not quite the same thing. And for a while, that style of writing worked for me: I wrote first drafts by hand, ran through…
Ah, Baby University Instructor Sarah of five years ago. I’m jealous of you because there’s so much for you to learn and do. But I’m also totally not jealous, because there are a few important things you don’t know. Like…
Recently, I was searching for reviews for CBC’s recent podcast Missing and Murdered: Who Killed Alberta Williams? (with Connie Walker). I’d listened and found it informative, engaging, and thoughtful, but I knew my perspective was limited; I wanted to see what others, particularly Indigenous listeners and critics, had to say. What…
Don’t worry, this is my last to-do kick for a while. In Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the White Queen tells Alice that she sometimes believes six impossible things before breakfast. This is in response to Alice’s denial that one can believe impossible things, and I have…
Another day, another dollar. Another year, another… yield of things I shoulda, coulda (but sometimes not woulda) completed. Let’s ring in the new year with a scorecard!
2016 has been a scary, shitty year for a lot of reasons, many of them political. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tally at least a few things on the positive side of the roster, if only for a morale boost. ‘Cause there are plenty of us out there who…
I am pretty full of myself and want people to like and praise me. Sometimes, that means I can empathize with cynicism about writing from a place of privilege, whether I’m writing fiction or essays. I see the argument all the time from white or male or able or straight…
Isn’t it nice to find yourself somewhere different, whoa-oh (Steven Universe, “Island Adventure”) A relatively large number of people I know say they aren’t able to get into Steven Universe because the plot feels too simplistic, which is fair: the series starts slowly and carefully, and it takes almost a…
When I was about sixteen, I was obsessed with Andrew Lloyd Weber’s hit musical The Phantom of the Opera. I’d seen it on a family trip to London, and to my teenage self, it was the epitome of epic: all the well funded special effects anyone could ask for, dashing…