The Only Way Out Is Through

For the past few nights I’ve been waking up at 1:13 a.m. In the spare room, I’ve kept a sort of vigil – reading, thinking, crying, making lists of things I have to do, trying to make plans. If I’m lucky, I’ll write. On Saturday night, I re-wrote the whole plot line of my current […]

Lie Down Within the Night: Behind My CBC Longlisted Poems

Last spring, and earlier, in the previous winter and fall, I wrote some poems about my brother. One came in the night, in a tent, camped on the rocky shore of the arm of Simonhouse Lake that leads into Second Cranberry as J. and I were pushing into wilderness on a canoe trip. The next […]

Circles and Loops

Grief is not linear. It does not come in stages. It loops back, squiggles forward, circles and dips. Like everyone says (everyone who’s been there, I mean), it comes in waves. Buried in novel revisions, focused on creating, I’ve been doing okay. But then I hit send to deliver my manuscript to my agent, looked […]