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Review: Cataclysm Baby, by Matt Bell

I was present at the birth of both my children. To bastardize R.E.M., it was the end of my world as I knew it. Both children arrived via C-section. More than two decades later, my wife still complains that I gave her no support through the deliveries because I was so mesmerized by the surgery. [...]

Cream & Sugar – St. George

In the second installment of Cream & Sugar, Elton Pierce decides on a whim to go to church. It’s probably a mid-life whim. There, he meets his father, or (since his father is dead) the ghost of his father, or at least the spirit of a stern paternalism that questions his motivations, judges him, weaves [...]

Learn to Write a Novel in Just 2 1/2 Hours

I found a flyer in my mailbox advertising a piano lesson. Not piano lessons. But a single lesson. It said I could learn to play the piano in 2 ½ hours. The flyer made me angry. My parents had forced me to start piano lessons when I was seven, but they didn’t send me to [...]

Billy Collins does TED!

Story: The Volume Knob

This story is a parable. I wrote it as an explanation for my decision to stop using slacktivist web sites like leadnow.ca and avaaz.org. I fail to see how signing an online petition gives me, or anyone else, a voice. It ratchets up the volume of public discussion, but at the expense of quality. I’ve [...]

Where did you read your favourite books?

I have discovered that I develop strong associations between the books I read and the places where I read them. I don’t know why, but it helps me remember my books, especially the books I’ve read in distinctive places. Here is a sampling of books and the places I’ve read them, offered in roughly chronological [...]

Review: My Only Wife, by Jac Jemc

I want to talk to you about horses. Or at least the idea of horses. I want to talk to you about Plato’s idea of horses – the horseness of horses. The idea that all real horses – the ones that drop steaming platts in fields and swish flies with their tails – are instances [...]

Cream & Sugar – Mocha Latte

A brand new novel – chopped up and spat out in serialized form for your reading pleasure! The novel is Cream & Sugar – a coffee-coloured mixture, sometimes thick & sweet, sometimes hot and bitter. Read more about the novel here. For week one, I offer the first chapter, Mocha Latte, where we meet the [...]

Express Yourself

I haven’t posted much on my blog for the past two months. It’s not that I’m afraid of what people will think about my writing. It’s more a case of being afraid that I’ll be misunderstood. Sometimes, I would rather say nothing than be misunderstood. But I inadvertently heard an oldie but goodie from Madonna [...]

Flash Fiction: Old School

George found it amusing, Martha’s attachment to old technologies. There was the grandfather clock in the living room with its big brass pendulum and the Latin inscription on its face—tempus fugit—or as Giuseppe the barber liked to say: Time, she fly. There was the old electric typewriter and pack of postage stamps at her work [...]

Cage Match: Jonathan Franzen vs. Ursula Franklin

It’s been a long time since I last held a cage match here at nouspique—where I throw disparate thinkers into collision with one another and see if anything shakes loose. With the furor which has arisen since Jonathan Franzen’s disparaging comments about ebooks, I have decided to resurrect the practice. And so … in this [...]

Blueshifting, a poetry chapbook by Heather Kamins

Blueshifting is a physics phenomenon – the Doppler effect applied to light: if the source of the light is approaching, the light waves get scrunched together so they have a shorter wavelength (higher frequency) which shifts them to the blue end of the colour spectrum. Redshifting is the opposite; it happens when the source of [...]

Poem: There’s a thread runs through everything

There’s a thread runs through everything and a seamstress with a camel the size of a needle’s eye, though it’s not the eye that worries me, but the other end, a steel point that runs me through like the pin the entomologists use to fix their bugs to the mounting board. The Fates don’t clip [...]

Graffiti Mural Time-Lapse in Victoria

I recognize this wall from a visit to Victoria last September. At the end of the video, the camera pans the wall and you can see a face by the KWOTA crew on the side of the building. That tipped me off that it’s near Douglas and Bay St. There used to be circus themed [...]

Can Farm Animal Pasta be Vegan?

Friends who know about my intolerance to gluten (and my love of irony) brought over a box of gluten free Farm Animals Rice & Corn Vegetable Pasta which is a vegan product. But is it really vegan? Once you cook it up and put it in a bowl, aren’t you eating animals? And how do [...]