I am thinking about Aylan Kurdi and his life cut short. There is so much there to unpack and to understand. A great distance separates Bodrum Beach in Turkey, where he washed ashore, and my comfortable apartment in Montreal. I am feeling restless and heavy. Hours of absorbing reports, exposés and videos on the Syrian […]

Vancouver Broadway Street is buzzing with life. Today is Greek Festival Day. Life music accompanies the celebration of a culture and its people. The smell of food is inviting and people join long patient line-ups to sample Greek cuisine. Greece’s blue-white flags are everywhere, intermingling with the maple leaf of Canada. Pride. Culture. Stories. Throughout […]

And so begin the opening lines of the anthology, Poems that make grown men cry: “weeping betrays not only vulnerability but also an openness that is contagious. Yet so often we try to hide our tears when caught out or in public, as if it is embarrassing to be around such raw tenderness. This is […]

My purpose with this piece is to pull together a few of my recent readings and reflections that have crystalized into something that I find important to express; at least for myself. The readings/pieces are, in no particular order, Kim Anderson’s Life Stages and Native Women, Anthony Griffith’s struggle with grief, Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts […]

One might say that violence is a type of language in that it is a form of expression, a means to convey a message… To have a conversation about violence one may begin with, what is violence? This is a philosophical question as much as it is political. In that violence is an inherently relational […]

Lebensraum is a concept that comes from the German language whose idiosyncratic habit of fusing together multiple themes in one word is at times humorous and at times effective. In this case, we are given leben = (n) life / (v) to live and raum = geographic space / room, and we get, the commonly […]