Many years ago, not long after my one and only book of poetry came out, I mentioned to a friend that I had no intention of ever writing another poem, let alone a book of poetry. She was aghast! Well, not really but she was surprised by how casually I said it, by the very idea itself. How could I be so definitive about something like that? Normally I know better than to say that I’ll never do something. Things change, people change, circumstances change. Everything can change! You just never know what will happen. But at that time—and for the next 19 years or so—I felt pretty certain about that statement. So certain, that I said it again more recently, and when I did, another friend asked if I really meant it. Yes, I mean it! That was only a few months ago.

There is a collection of stories by the writer Elyse Gasco called Can you Wave Bye-Bye Baby that came out in, I think, 1999. It’s a great book about adoption and parenthood, about motherhood, about post-partum depression, about life. The book did really well, especially for a collection of stories. It got a lot of attention, won some awards, was shortlisted for others. After I read the book, I came across an interview with Elyse Gasco in which she said that she had no plans to ever write another book. She had written the book she wanted to write and that was that. At the time, I could not wrap my head around her saying that. Like, what? I was younger then. I had just published my first book and was working on what would be my first collection of stories. I couldn’t imagine walking away from all of that. Or I couldn’t imagine a world in which I would have said all that I have to say. The world is vast; there’s a lot to say about it. I was only just getting started.

But I get it now. The world is vast and there are, perhaps, better things to do than sit around and write a book about it all.

Despite saying I’d never write a poem again, I continued to read poetry. More than the average person; less than the average poet. There’s a lot to learn about the craft of writing by reading poetry; there’s a lot to learn about all kinds of things from reading poetry. In those intervening years, I did actually write one poem. A single poem was commissioned by an art gallery for an exhibit by a favourite artist of mine. I was willing to make an exception for her. But afterwards, I went right back to my no-poetry way of life.

But then two things happened.

I stayed at Elizabeth Bishop’s house earlier this year and reread most of her poetry, read through her letters, read a biography. I immersed myself in poetry, in the life of a poet. And I liked it there. It made me think about language in a slightly different way from how I might think about it when I’m writing prose. It made me excited about what is possible in poetry that is maybe less possible in prose. There is less room for error; you can let imagery do a lot of the heavy lifting; and then there is the brevity and what that allows to happen—there is more unused space on the page. Even that makes a difference. I returned home from that trip excited about poetry—reading it, not necessarily writing it.

That’s when another thing happened. Over the course of this summer, I have read over a hundred books of poetry. And an unexpected outcome from all that reading (is it unexpected?) was that I became excited about the idea of writing poetry again—not just reading it, but actually writing it—or trying to anyway. I started thinking about exploring what I might be able to do with poetry after all these years away. I wondered how it might be different from the poems I wrote when I was young. I wondered if I could write anything I’d be happy with, proud of. And so that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m not sure where it’ll go. And sometimes it feels like exercise—in that I know it’s good for my writing to try to express ideas this way but it sort of hurts muscles that I haven’t used in a very long time—or possibly ever.

The writer Raymond Carver, a master of the short story, said in an interview that he was most proud of the poems he published, more so than the stories. I came to feel the same way back when I was publishing poems. Each poem that came out in a magazine felt like a surprising little win. Having worked on the editorial board of a poetry journal years ago, I knew how tough it was to publish poems; I knew how discerning editors can be. So to have a few poems slip through felt special in a way that somehow differed from the stories I was publishing back then. I think I felt like I could trick people with the stories in a way that was harder to do with the poems. Less room for error and all that.

In the meantime, I do have two other books to finish before I truly begin another one. I have a collection of essays coming out in the spring. It’ll be called Everything Is Interesting, Everything Is Material. Or maybe the other way around? I’m excited and nervous about that one—it contains some of the most personal work I’ve ever done. Whatever that means. And after that, I have a novel coming out the following spring. I keep changing the title of that one. So lets call it Title TK for now.

It has been nice to be immersed in poetry again, both reading it and writing it. If you have a favourite collection to recommend, please do! Or a favourite poem? I am always so impressed when someone can just pop off a few lines of a favourite poem from memory. I feel like that used to be a great party trick, but maybe not so much anymore.

I just went for a swim and then cooked some veggie dogs on an open fire. That’s summer for you.

IR

One of the things I remember most about the night of the launch for my poetry collection, Red Bird, is getting home and cleaning off my desk of all things related to that book so that I could make room for working on my next book. I had done a series of linocut prints for Red Bird—something I’d taught myself to do expressly for that purpose—and they were still next to the scanner on my desk. Those got filed away somewhere. (Haven’t seen them since!) There were a lot of poetry books stacked up on the corner of my desk, books I’d read while writing my book. Those got put back on the shelves. And there were more books piled up on the floor and under my desk—books I’d used for research purposes; books on artists like Francesca Woodman and Nan Goldin, both of whom I’d written about in that book. There were scraps of paper with ideas and lines scattered around. Those got recycled. There was also a stack of paper—drafts, corrected proofs. Those got put into a box and hidden away somewhere. Even though the book had been finished for a while—the publishing process moves at a glacial pace—I usually leave all that book-making detritus out until the book is really done, completely out of my hands. Cleaning up and filing all that away felt almost triumphant: the feeling you get when having accomplished something, anything. (I’m a compulsive list-maker; the feeling was akin to crossing things off a list!) But it also felt sad, mournful: the end of something I’d spent a lot of time with; I’d grown attached. It can take days to recover and get back to work. It’s a real mixed bag, finishing a book. An emotional ride, for sure.

I’m only just returned from the second little book tour for Astrid, Aghast. This time it was around Ontario with my friend Jon Claytor. We read at bookstores in London, Guelph, Toronto, Port Hope (actually not a bookstore, but outside under the setting sun thanks to artist Nora Camps!), Kingston, Peterborough, and Ottawa. Publishing a book and going on a book tour means constantly reevaluating how you define success. I was reminded of a story a colleague told me years ago. Her friend, a famous Canadian author, was invited to LA by Oprah Winfrey to discuss her novel for Oprah’s Book Club. A huge deal for any writer. She was flown to LA, picked up in a limo, and put up in a nice hotel. The evening before appearing on Oprah’s show, the writer was driven (in a limo) to a bookstore for a signing. Only no one showed up. It can be like that. Well, the part about no one showing up.

Doing this with a friend made all the difference. Arriving at a bookstore before your event and finding the doors locked could send one into a humbling, disorienting existential crisis. When this happened with my pal next to me, we laughed; we were giddy at the thought of the bookstore having forgotten us and of having to drive 3.5 hours back to where we’d started from; we began discussing where we’d go eat before leaving town. Part of embracing such a thing is, of course, simply about being a writer: that kind of experience is material after all. And part of it is about embracing the absurdity of doing a book tour at all in this economy! (It turned out that the bookstore hadn’t forgotten us at all! Thank you Take Cover Books!)

And now that I’m home, the first thing to do is clean my desk of all Astrid material. The part of cleaning up I’ve reached is clearing off the desktop on my computer of all the Astrid related files. And there are many. I’ll put them all in one folder and send them to an external hard drive that I hope doesn’t get corrupted. (That has happened in the past. And while it’s upsetting, it’s also kind of freeing. But mostly upsetting.) And once that’s all done, it’s time to get to work on the next book. Sometimes I don’t know what that is. Sometimes I do. In this case, I do. In fact, I know what the next two books are. I’ve just signed contracts for two more books with Gaspereau Press. The first is a collection of essays due out next year, and the second is a novel due out the year after that. It’s a relief to know what I’ll be doing for the next couple of years. And also daunting and a bit overwhelming. But a relief. What a strange business this is.

There was a ferret outside the Aberdeen Cultural Centre on the afternoon of my Frye Festival event last month. It was part of a petting zoo for the children’s festival. There were other animals there, but my hatred of ferrets made it difficult for me to see any of the other animals (save for the miniature horses; they were adorable). A ferret bit my toe one night when I was a teenager, and I have hated ferrets ever since. All ferrets. No exceptions. I’ve been bitten by dogs and cats and other small mammals, but I don’t abhor them the way I do ferrets. There’s just something about that animal that fills me with loathing. I once saw a man walking down the street with a ferret peeking out of his jacket. A fire truck drove by and the man stopped and pointed it out to his ferret: Look, said the man to his ferret, a fire truck! Had this been absolutely any other animal, I would have thought it cute. But it was a ferret, so I frowned at the man and kept walking.

There are a lot of animals mentioned within the stories in Astrid, Aghast: bears, birds, cats, dogs, eels, horses, rabbits, turtles, wolves but not a single ferret. And that’s not by accident.

Astrid, Aghast has been out for a couple months now, and we’ve been here and there. I had a great time in the Maritimes, and then a lovely launch in Ottawa at Octopus Books. Almost all of these events have been with Jon Claytor and his new book Nowhere, and we’re not done yet. We have some Ontario events coming up in London, Kingston, Toronto, Guelph, and Peterborough (with some other dates in the works). Here’s a link to the events page on my website.

I’ve also had a few essays come out this spring. I wrote about that cabin I lived in when I was a teenager and in the habit of making bad choices for The New Quarterly (It’s only in print for now but I also wrote a little thing for their website about skateboarding and eels, naturally.) There’s also this one about my grandmother that came out in The Ammonite Review. And one more about how I get asked for directions everywhere I go that came out in Geist (also only in print for now). People pull up next to me in their cars all the time and ask for directions. This has happened in small towns around Iceland, in Los Angeles and New York, Montreal and Toronto. And of course, here at home. Once, a man even knocked on my door and asked for directions to my neighbour’s house. It’s wild out there.

Back at that Frye Festival event, I walked past the ferret and made my way inside and up to the green room where I met the other writers. One of the writers, a serious-looking academic, introduced herself with a stern, intimidating nod. I took a step back. But then, I saw her glance out the window and heard her let out a small gasp. I expected her to say something about the ferret, but it was the two miniature horses that caused her to melt a little. She got her phone, took some photos, and turned to face me. Beaming, she pointed out the window. I saw them, I said. They’re adorable! Shortly afterwards, we were called to the stage. The event was a success. Ferrets be damned.

I’ll have some exciting news to share pretty soon. But in the meantime, my publisher said if we sell out this run of Astrid, Aghast, he might print an alternative cover with an eel on it. Please help me make this dream come true! (Astrid is slowly making its way into bookstores and libraries. If yours doesn’t yet have it, ask them to order it! Do it for the eels.)

Yours truly,

IR

I found half a tube of KY Jelly in the medicine cabinet this morning. And now I’m forced to imagine couples coupling on the bed I’ve been sleeping in. In? On? On the bed. On the couch? In the bathroom? In the shower? On this chair? But I thought one only came here to write? And drink coffee. And sleep. And then write. Have I been doing it wrong? Because all I do all day is write. And sometimes even into the night. Though at night I also read and occasionally look out the window at the Irving station across the street with its glowing red and white fluorescent lights that somehow feel (to me) as incongruous in this village as that tube of KY Jelly in the medicine cabinet next to the Comet (“For institutional use”!). And later still, I lie awake in bed wondering at the ghost I’ve been told haunts this house. A colleague directed me to read all the references to ghosts in the guest book (ghost book?) but I refuse to do that.

Before arriving here, a friend asked, Do you believe in ghosts?

I said no without pause, without thinking.

But now I’m not so sure.

I’ve taken to sleeping with a light on. I’m only a little embarrassed to admit it. I’ve even checked under the bed. The closets, too, if I’m honest. The first thing I did upon arriving was open every single door, check inside every room, every closet, every cupboard, and every drawer. There are so many drawers. I wanted no surprises. I don’t like surprises. That first night, I was awoken at exactly 2:54 AM by two loud electronic screeches—like an amber alert. But when I checked my phone, there was no amber alert. And no alarm had been set to go off at exactly 2:54 AM. There was no explanation for the sound I heard or thought I heard. Did I dream it? Possibly.

I’ve been reading Bishop while I’m here. John Ashbery called her the “writer’s writer’s writer”. And she was, I suppose. Or is. She still is. I was enamoured of her poems from the first time I read them in college. The Fish. The Moose. The Armadillo. Sandpiper. Roosters (which Marianne Moore and her mother tried to (innocently?) re-title The Cock). It is only now, writing those titles down, that I see a pattern. There are other poems, of course. “Questions of Travel”: “There are too many waterfalls here.” She was writing about Brazil, but it could just as easily have been Iceland; that place is lousy with waterfalls. Or “Filling Station”: “Oh, but it is dirty!” Hard not to imagine the gas station across the street—but in another, earlier era. The ending of that poem is perhaps my favourite ending of any of her poems:

     Somebody embroidered the doily.
     Somebody waters the plant,
     or oils it, maybe. Somebody
     arranges the rows of cans
     so that they softly say:
     ESSO—SO—SO—SO
     to high-strung automobiles.
     Somebody loves us all.

The image of oiling the plant. (Ha!) And that ‘maybe’ slipped in there. The Esso-so-so-so. And then the echo of all those S’s in the last line: Somebody loves us all. And that sentiment, of course. And then the effect of all of it together. It makes me dizzy.

I read her story “In The Village”—a story that takes place right here in this house, in this village. And begins with a scream in the very room in which I’m sleeping. (That sound that woke me the other night?) Bishop wrote the story in Brazil, far away from this house in Nova Scotia (is there any other way to write about home?), and said in a letter to a friend that it was “entirely not partly autobiographical”. It’s about her, about her mother. Her grandparents. Her aunts. It’s about this village. The most nakedly autobiographical thing she wrote, I think. Bishop’s father died when she was eight months old. Sometime after, she and her mother came to live with Bishop’s maternal grandparents here in the house where I’m writing this. Her mother came and went, hospitalized periodically in a mental institution. And then, when Bishop was five, her mother was institutionalized permanently and Bishop never saw her again. It is hard for me not to see some mild echoes (there’s that word again) from my own childhood—a stress on the word mild. The baggage we bring to everything we read.

I read Colm Tóibín’s On Elizabeth Bishop. The first line of which reads: She began with the idea that little is known and that much is puzzling. An idea I can get behind. Tóibín’s book taught me some more things about Bishop. For example, her penchant for striving for the truth not only in her poetry, but also in the poetry of her friends and colleagues, and in the work of critics and reviewers. “I can’t tell a lie even for art, apparently; it takes an awful effort or a sudden jolt to make me alter facts.”

There are letters to Robert Lowell in which she corrects lines, corrects translations, corrects facts; gently scolds him for having the temerity to write poems based on her letters to him—things said in confidence, perhaps. And there are letters to reviewers admonishing them for misinterpreting a line that could have the effect of having others misinterpret that line down the road. A domino effect of misreading. What could be worse? Be precise, she says.

There is, however, a swerving away from the truth in some of the letters, some of the essays. In another letter to Lowell, she wrote: “It’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry, I think, but in prose it keeps eluding one in the funniest way.” Poetic licence was something she criticized in some of Lowell’s poems, pointing out the inaccuracy of certain lines, but she was guilty of it herself now and then. Of the five big hooks in the fish’s lip (“—if you could call it a lip—”) in her poem “The Fish”: she wrote that in reality there were only three hooks, but five was better for the poem. And in “The Moose”: “a lone traveller gives/ kisses and embraces/ to seven relatives”. But in truth there weren’t seven of them. More like five. Or was it three?

(Her voice, admonishing me now: Be precise!)

In that same poem, the bus travels from Great Village: “One stop at Bass River/Then the Economies—/Lower, Middle, Upper;/Five Islands, Five Houses”. I did that drive just the other day, noting the names of those places I passed with a suspicious eye. Back at the house later, I read a letter Bishop wrote to her editor at The New Yorker admitting that the ‘Economies’ “would really come in the other order driving to Boston—’Upper, Middle, Lower’ and I changed them around for the sake of a rhyme”. Unlike Bishop on that drive, I did not see a moose. I did see a weir, though. The tide was out, so I ventured out for a closer look, and while I looked, the tide turned, and in a matter of exactly 24 seconds (don’t ask me why I was counting), I went from standing on dry land to standing in one inch of water. A reminder to always pay attention—which I was doing, only I was paying attention to the wrong thing at the wrong time. How often does that get you in trouble?

Bishop and Lowell referred to one another as best friends. And they were, though they spent very little time in the same place at the same time during the many years of their friendship. (Is that the key to maintaining friendships?) Their friendship mostly took place in the letters they wrote to one another over the years. In one of those letters, Lowell reminded Bishop of something she said years earlier while the two were swimming: “you said rather humorously yet it was truly meant, ‘When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived’”. In that same letter, he goes on to say that he had considered proposing to her back then and that he expected she would have said yes. Bishop, in her next letter to Lowell, makes no reference to that admission of his. That’s how you maintain a friendship. I’m reminded here of a lyric in Arthur Russel’s song “Maybe She”: She might think I’m very strange/ She might think I want to date her/ That would be hard to arrange/ Maybe I should ask her later. Like Russell, Bishop was also gay. For that, and other reasons, a marriage to Lowell would perhaps have been hard to arrange. Not to say many haven’t done it before or since.

Bishop spent many years living with Lota de Macedo Soares, a woman she referred to in her letters as her Brazilian friend. A friendship that lasted twenty-five years. There’s a beautiful poem in Bishop’s collection A Cold Spring about Lota de Macedo Soares called “The Shampoo”. It ends like this:

     The shooting stars in your black hair
     in bright formation
     are flocking where,
     so straight, so soon?
     —Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
     battered and shiny like the moon.

Bishop wrote about her sexuality obliquely—but it was there in some of the poems. There’s a beautiful and telling dedicatory epigraph^[1] for Lota De Macedo Soares at the beginning of Bishop’s book, Questions of Travel. The epigraph, from Camões, is written in the original Portuguese, making it unreadable to most readers back in North America, a neat trick to keep Bishop’s personal life just a little veiled to readers back home. Lota de Macedo Soares took her own life in 1967, something Bishop spent a long time not writing about. That is something else I can relate to in her work, in her process—this need for pause. In a line from some notes to an elegy to Lota de Macedo Soares that Bishop worked on but never finished in the 1970s, she writes: “no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake y”.

I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned from Bishop over the years, and how it has manifested in my work. I am realizing how much she influenced my one and only book of poetry (I’ll never write another), and all that came before and after. I wrote, in that book, of fish-houses and fish. That was a direct nod. Birds and other creatures, too. Where Bishop chose to write with a straightforward language, I had no choice; it was the only language I had. But unlike Bishop, I was confessional—although I admit now that most of those “confessional” poems were fictions. A little trick I played. So maybe that was another influence? There is also a mistrust of language in Bishop that I feel akin to—or maybe it’s an acknowledgement of the limitations of language: a mistrust while also acknowledging that, as writers, these are the tools at our disposal, so we might as well make the most of it. I love how Bishop shows us within some of the poems themselves how she got to an image, to a line; how the words are never quite right, never quite enough and sometimes have to be corrected, changed, fine-tuned in the poem itself to get closer to some sense of precision, some sense of truth. She is showing us how it’s done. This is something I consciously brought to the stories in Astrid, Aghast again and again: small, in-story corrections that show a character (and me, too, I guess) trying to get to the truth of a thing. Words are tricky. The truth is even trickier.

In her poems, Bishop shows us how she makes these adjustments along the way.

     Our visions coincided—“visions” is
     Too serious a word—our looks, two looks
     (from “Poem”)

And:

     He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes.
     —Watching, rather, the spaces of sand between them,
     where (no detail too small) the Atlantic drains
     rapidly backwards and downwards.
     (from “Sandpiper”)

And also this:

     Once up against the sky it’s hard
     to tell them apart from the stars—
     planets, that is.
     (from “The Armadillo”)

That is, rather, too serious a word.

There’s a playfulness and a seriousness—combined—that I find thrilling in her work. And the restraint: she tells us only so much, only goes so far, distracts us with details. The rest, the rest is hers alone. I am reminded here of the poetry of Ian Hamilton, who wrote a biography of Lowell (which I mean to read when I get home), and whose poetry is restrained in ways similar to Bishop. He’s one of my favourites. I’m here in this house for a little longer. I’ll keep at it. I’ll pace around. I’ll read and write, I’ll sleep on (in?) the bed where couples have coupled, and I’ll try not to think about that but instead think (reluctantly) about how it might feel to be watched in my sleep by a sad and hungry ghost, a ghost to whom I have been trying to project nothing but good intentions.

Great Village, NS. April 2026

^[1] …O dar-vos quanto tenho e quanto posso,/ Que quanto mais vos pago, mais vos devo.

I recently found the first draft of the title story from my new book, Astrid, Aghast, in a notebook dated May 27, 2023. On May 27, 2023, I was sitting in a library in Iceland where I’d gone to work on some of the stories that would end up in this book. (The photo above was taken in the library on that same day.) A few years earlier, I also wrote a chunk of my children’s novel, The Girl Who Could Fly, in that same library.

In that first draft of “Astrid, Aghast”, the story is called simply “Aghast” and is mostly narrated by Astrid—although that name didn’t come until a later draft written in July of that same year. I have no idea how I landed on that name—other than I wanted something alliterative and, I guess, Nordic.

Here’s how the story originally began:

She said, why don’t you write a very short story called aghast?

What should it be about? I asked.

It should be about us. About how we met and how you said you didn’t’ like me very much at first—don’t think I don’t remember that. But then you grew to like me and even love me. All because we shared that time together stuck in the elevator at work. Two hours. That’s all it took for you to fall in love with me. You and me in the elevator. At the library.

The story was sparked by someone asking me around that time if I was aghast. I don’t remember why they asked; I don’t remember the context. But I do remember repeating the word to myself a few times, and then writing it down in my notebook. At the time I also remember thinking: Have I ever been aghast? I’m sure I have. Throughout the stories in this book, characters are often conscious of the words they (or other characters) use, how those words sound, how they feel coming out of their mouths. It’s something I do all the time. I love words. But of course I do; I’m in the business of words. In the story, Astrid has a tic whereby she must count the syllables in all the multi-syllabic words she hears. Without my knowing, my publisher ran a program through the manuscript to catch all the words with three or more syllables and then he put them on the cover, under the jacket. An ode to Astrid, and to lovers of words.

I’m also in the business of libraries—in so much that I spend a lot of time in libraries. My first real job was in a library; many of my jobs were in libraries: from Ottawa to Halifax to the Yukon. Anytime I travel to a new city, I head for the library. When my last book came out during the pandemic, I donated copies of it to libraries across the country—from Vancouver to St. John’s. (I also donated copies to libraries in Iceland since there was an Icelandic connection with the book.) Whenever a new book comes out by a friend or acquaintance, I fill out a request-to-purchase form at my local library. It’s a small way to help out writers (and small presses) by getting their books in front of more readers. Most libraries have a link on their website to do this. My library has a limit of three suggestions per month, and I often meet that monthly limit. Maybe your library has this option? I do plan to donate copies of Astrid, Aghast to libraries at some point, but maybe before I do that, you’d consider asking your library to order a copy? I’d be eternally grateful!

I’ve added some dates to the events page on my mostly-neglected website, which can be found here. The very first launch for Astrid, Aghast will be in Sackville, NB, home of Gaspereau Press and, incidentally, the place where the very first story in my book was written during a SappyFest residency several years ago. I’ll be doing launches with friends all over the Maritimes this spring (most of those events will be with Jon Claytor for the launch of his fantastic new graphic novel, Nowhere). I’ll also be at Frye Festival in Moncton for an event which I’m really looking forward to. After that, I head back to Ontario for a couple events in Ottawa, followed by more dates in other parts of Ontario to be announced soon.

The best part of releasing a new book is heading out to talk about it in front of an audience. The worst part is probably having to do promotion. So… thank you, I’m sorry!

In the meantime, here’s a short excerpt from Nowhere. Even though it’s not officially out until March 17, copies have already started mysteriously appearing on bookstore shelves. For more information about Claytor, you can visit is website.

But then something happened. I heard Change of Heart’s song “Pat’s Decline”, which asks the question: Was she really lonely or just singing a song? The song reads as a tribute to Patsy Cline, and to her music. And that surprised me a little when I first heard it. Here was a song that bridged the gap between the music I listened to with my grandfather as a child and the music I listened to later as a skater-kid interested only in punk rock. The song made me nostalgic for those afternoons and evenings in my grandparents’ basement, so I went back and listened to a Patsy Cline record. And I fell in love. I remember telling my grandparents that I had finally come around to Patsy Cline. They hadn’t realized that I wasn’t already on board all those years earlier.

I had started writing stories and poems around this time, and I was thinking a lot about the separation of a writer’s biography from their written work, especially in poetry where we often assume the poem is somehow autobiographical. In most of the poems in my book Red Bird, I was trying to blur the lines between the autobiographical and the fictional in poetry: very few of those poems are autobiographically true; most could be more accurately described as little fictions. There are emotional truths throughout the book, as well as some other truths, I suppose, but the gist of it is fictional. My interest in trying to do that stemmed in part, I think, from wondering about Patsy Cline and whether or not she was really lonely or just singing a song.

The name Patsy Cline appears almost twenty times in my book of stories, Astrid, Aghast. One story is actually called “Patsy Cline”. Another is named after one of her songs.

In “Have You Ever Been Lonely? (Have You Ever Been Blue?)”, an old man finds a young boy lying in the middle of the road. The boy went out there to escape the chaos of his family life. They chat out there on the road for a little while, and eventually the old man talks the boy onto the sidewalk and then safely back home. The story begins and ends with the old man listening to a Patsy Cline CD in his kitchen. (That story was originally published in The Quarantine Review. You can listen to it below.)

The other story, “Patsy Cline”, is about a young woman, her elderly neighbour, and the neighbour’s pet rabbit, Patsy Cline.

I once found a rabbit in my yard. I thought it had been abandoned, so I brought it into my house. I even bought it a cage and the biggest bag of hay you’ve ever seen. When I announced to my wife and sons “we’re a rabbit family now”, they were unfazed. While it was the first time I’d brought a rabbit into the house, this kind of thing was not out of character for me. We called the rabbit Buddy—which, coincidentally, turned out to be his actual government name. Within a few days of finding the rabbit, I discovered that he belonged to my neighbour and that she’d been looking for him for almost a week. It was nice while it lasted.

I’ve always loved what Tennessee Williams said when asked about the biographical elements found within his work: My work is emotionally autobiographical, he said. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. Both “Have You Ever Been Lonely? (Have You Ever Been Blue?)” and “Patsy Cline” are a nod to my grandparents, and to growing up in their house; both are about a young person affected by their relationship to a much older person in their life. And while the details of the stories are not biographical (save for the part about the rabbit showing up in my yard), the emotional currents of the stories are true—or as true as can be in a work of fiction.

Astrid, Aghast comes out on March 7 with Gaspereau Press.

Here are ten of my favourite books from this past year.

1. I bought a copy of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain before I left for Iceland in the spring. I was heading into two-months of mountain living, so it seemed appropriate. And it was. I loved this book, and I’m so glad it is finally getting its due. Before heading back to Canada in the summer, I gave my copy to a friend. She later sent me a photo of it soaking wet in a cabin in Columbia—a book that has traveled the world!

2. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. This was, perhaps, the biggest revelation of the year. Baldwin’s writing is so profoundly beautiful, I was constantly stopping to reread passages and write them down in my notebook. One of my absolute favourites of this past year.

3. I borrowed Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death from a librarian’s personal book collection while I was in Ísafjörður this past spring. I was very nervous about getting it back in time, so I read it in one sitting. This wasn’t the only book about the death of a writer’s mother that I read this year, but it was my favourite. A very moving book.

4. Did I read another book about eels this past year? Yes, yes I did. Did I learn even more about eels than I ever thought possible? The answer is again: a resounding yes. Ellen Ruppel Smith’s Slippery Beast is full of interesting eel facts. Was it my favourite eel book? No, not quite, but it came in a close second.

5. I’ve read Jón Kalman Stephánsson’s Heaven and Hell three or four times. I love this book, and I love Jón Kalman’s prose: it’s beautiful, poetic, and un-rushed in the best possible way.

6. I saw Miriam Toews read from her new book, A Truce That Is Not Peace, at an event in a church this year. The interviewer asked odd questions that were always just a little off the mark, but Miriam Toews was wonderful: forthcoming and funny as always. She truly is one of my all-time favourites. I loved this book; I’ve loved all her books. The humour, the pathos. Oof. After that reading in the church, my wife and I got sandwiches and biked home under a moonless sky. A perfect night.

7. A talented young artist I know from the skatepark loaned me David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You because the title, and the book itself, made him think of me. I was so touched. I read it immediately and loved it.

8. For years, I had a copy of Helen Macdonald’s H Is For Hawk in my to-read pile. I bought it because I love hawks and the cover is fantastic. But for whatever reason, I could never get into the book. I just didn’t care for it. So one day I left it in one of those little free libraries. Fast forward to this fall: I bought Macdonald’s Vesper Flights on a whim—almost entirely because of that cover. It’s so good! (Forget what they say, you very much can judge a book by its cover.) After reading (and loving) Vesper Flights, I tore my house apart searching for H Is For Hawk… only to remember I’d gotten rid of it. Fool!

9. Sadiqa de Meijer’s In the Field was one of those books that made me reconsider how I write. de Meijer is so obviously a poet: her prose is beautiful, restrained, poetic. It makes me feel like my own prose is a tad boring, pedestrian! But I’m not mad. I loved this book.

10. Since first visiting Iceland on a research trip for my children’s novel almost ten years ago, I have continued to read a lot of Icelandic literature. Pretty much whatever I can find in translation. I had to order Gunnar Gunnarsson’s Advent from a bookstore in Ireland for some reason. By the time it arrived, I’d forgotten that I’d ordered it. What a pleasant surprise to find this little book in my mailbox. This one is a classic. And for good reason: it’s brilliant. So simple, so lovely. It transported me right back to that landscape I have come to love.

And one more because I miscounted… (The math does not check out!)

11. There are two kinds of foxes in Iceland: the white morph (white in the winter and greyish brown with a sometimes whitish underside in the summer), and the blue morph (which doesn’t change colours with the seasons, though it is usually a little lighter by the end of winter due to the sun bleaching its fur). The blue fox makes up nearly 80% of the population of foxes in Iceland, unlike most other places where the white fox dominates (like here in Canada). I tried to find a copy of Sjón’s The Blue Fox in translation when I was in Iceland in the spring because I was writing an essay about foxes, but my friends there only had it in the original Icelandic. I put it on request at the library when I got home, and only got it this past week. I met Sjón at a poetry festival near my home several years ago. I happened to be leaving for Iceland a few days after the festival. I may have mentioned that to him. This is a gorgeous book. It was also the last book I read this year.

Hope this coming year is a good one for you all.

IR

I used to work with this grumpy old volunteer at the public library. He had a constant frown and could often be heard muttering under his breath about the sorry state of affairs at the library. He took every mis-shelved book as a personal affront, and wasn’t shy about letting people know they were idiots every time they put a book in the wrong place. Sometimes he’d swear at patrons or coworkers if they got in his way while he was trying to do his job. Most people were afraid of him. And rightfully so. He was a little unhinged. But for some reason, he seemed to like me, and sometimes we’d sit and chat during our break. I think he thought we were on the same page somehow, kindred spirits. I mean, it’s not that we weren’t: I took my job seriously over there—just not that serious.

One day while we were talking in the break room, the subject of haircuts came up. The volunteer started in on a rant about what a rip-off barbershops and hair salons were. He told me, proudly, that he’d been cutting his own hair for more than thirty years. I smiled and nodded, which was my contribution to most of our conversations back then. As he turned to leave the break room, I noticed an errant strand of hair about five or six inches long at that back of his head—obviously unintentional. I knew it wasn’t new wave, it was human error. He had just missed a spot. And by the looks of it, he’d been missing that spot for a long time.

The thing is, I’d been cutting my own hair for years at that point. And it was working for me. I had nothing against barbers or hairstylists, I just liked that I could get a haircut without leaving my home. But when I saw that unintentional rat-tail on the back of the volunteer’s head, my first thought was: there but for the grace of god go I. That man, that cranky old man, gave me a glimpse of the man I could so easily have become—could still become yet.

I went out the following day and got my hair cut by a professional barber named Pino. Pino was not a very good barber; he was sleepy and uncommunicative. Instead of asking me if I was happy with his work when he was done, he’d pull off the chair-cloth and point at the cash register. A true artist!

The truth is, I almost always had to straighten out my haircut when I got home from Pino’s. But there was something about Pino that made me go back every time I needed a haircut. That, and visions of the library volunteer’s rat-tail. I continued to get my hair cut by Pino for the next few years—until he retired and his barbershop was demolished to make room for a condo.

I cut my own hair this morning. And then I left the house without spending a lot of time looking over my work. I had a hat on at first, but it was mild outside, so I took it off and put it in my pocket. As I was walking past a restaurant while running my errands, two women seated next to the window stopped eating and watched me pass by. They both turned and smiled at one another, not quite laughing—but basically laughing. I was reminded of that old man at the library just then, his disdain for barbers, his rat-tail. And so I put my hat back on, and walked a little faster.

That old grumpy volunteer was eventually fired from the library. I was there the day he was asked to leave. He did not go quietly.

Biblioasis published their Best Canadian Essays 2026 anthology this week. My essay, “Have a Good Life” (originally published in The New Quarterly) is included in the anthology. I feel kind of ambivalent about it: it’s a personal essay that I had misgivings about publishing at all—let alone in an anthology that is available all over North America. So be it. It’s out there. And despite these misgivings, I hope you’ll read it. And read all the other wonderful essays in the anthology, as well. I’m so pleased to share the pages with so many great writers. And to be published by the same press that publishes Iceland’s Jón Kalman Stefánsson in translation is pretty sweet. I love his books. Oh, and Biblioasis also published Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport which is an astounding book. Good company!

Speaking of library staff, the title story from my forthcoming book, Astrid, Aghast, was recently published in The Dalhousie Review. And not to put them on blast, but I thought it was pretty funny that they mis-dated the issue by a whole year: Autum 2024 instead of 2025. My old friend from the library would have lost his mind over that. Not me! I’m a chill dude.

IR

The house is big and white and falling apart. Some windows and doors are covered in plywood; the chimney fell off a few years back—there’s now a boarded-up hole on that side of the house. The garage door is stuck half open. Or half closed, depending on who you ask. Now and then kids break in and do what kids do inside of abandoned houses: drink, mostly, but also vandalize things. Lately though, even they won’t enter the house anymore—the walls are covered in black mold; the ceiling appears to be caving in in some spots. It has been empty for years. The neighbours complain about it periodically, but nothing ever gets done. It should be condemned, but it’s not. It should be torn down, demolished; it should be carted off to a landfill in its entirety. But it sits there still, empty and in a state of slow decay.

When I was a teenager and desperately in love with skateboarding, my family moved from the city to the country. I hated it. I hated it so much. The house was already old then. It smelled old; the wallpaper that covered many of the walls inside was faded and looked as if from another century. I tore the wallpaper off the wall in my bedroom but never painted the walls because I didn’t want to be there. Painting the walls, making the room my own, would have been giving in. I didn’t want to give in. So I lived like that for the years I spent in that house—in a room with unpainted walls, the remnants of the old floral wallpaper still visible in some spots. After I moved out, my sister took over the room and had it painted. Last time I was in there, the paint was peeling off the walls in large sheets; the window was board up. There was a hole in the floor.

But here’s the thing, I drive out there to that house pretty regularly. It’s where I go to think when I’m working on a story. Sometimes I park in the driveway and walk up into the forest behind the house. More often these days, I park down the road and enter the forest from the top of the hill behind the community centre. My wife and I got married on that hill about a hundred years ago. We were supposed to get married in the yard at my family’s house, but, for various reasons, that didn’t happen. We were also supposed to move into that house a couple years later—but, for various reasons, that didn’t happen either.

Despite these negative associations with the house, and despite its state of almost unfathomable disrepair, it is still where I want to go when I’m in a certain mood—not happy, not unhappy, but not neutral either; it’s when I’m in my head in that way I get when I’m writing. Which is most of the time, I guess. (This is why, when people ask if my wife is a writer, I always answer by saying that I’d never marry a writer. We’re the worst. Or I am, anyway.) A certain feeling will come over me when I’m in the middle of working on something, and I’ll know exactly where I need to be. I stop what I’m doing, get in the car, and drive out there. I did exactly this thing a few days ago.

There’s a new private-property sign up on the hill behind the house. My family still owns the place, but the property line stops close to that sign. Someone else owns all the land that extends beyond the hill and deep into the woods. When I was there the other day, I stood far back from the sign and threw snowballs at it. Once I hit the sign—it took three tries—I passed through and into the woods. As a kid, I spent most of my time either in my bedroom reading and listening to records or in that forest. I came to know it very well—I’ve climbed its trees, I’ve sat on its rocks, I’ve chased its rabbits through brambles, I’ve stood among its trees and watched deer pass by so close I could almost touch them. I made my own trails through the snow, sometimes on skis, sometimes stepping through the hard crust of deep snow. Several years ago, I went up there with a video camera and made a short film for a festival that went online that year because of the pandemic. (The story the video was made for will be coming out in my new book—Astrid, Aghast—in February. It’s a story about a complicated familial dynamic. Ahem.)

That was the second time I went up there with a camera. Years earlier, I got a grant to make a film about the house. I wanted to document its decay; I wanted to do this before it either became too dangerous to enter the house or before it finally sank into the earth. I spent days in and around the house with an expensive video camera I barely knew how to use, shooting every room, every wall. There was a beauty in its decay: the faded colours, the way the paint was peeling off the walls, even the pattern of mold on the ceilings and walls. I asked my brother to help with the soundtrack—and he created a beautiful and complicated piece of music to accompany my little film. It ended up playing at some festivals, and when people asked what compelled me to make it, I said that there was, for me, a romance in seeing nature reclaim something that was human-made. That’s part of it. But mostly, I said, I just found a perverse pleasure in seeing the place I hated so much as a kid finally gets its due.

When I was there the other day, I barely looked at the house. I drove past and glanced over at it: still falling apart, still an eyesore, still a hazard. There comes a time when a house you once lived in becomes something else: it either becomes someone else’s house or it gets demolished and it becomes the place where the house you once lived in used to be. This, this is something else. This house has lost most of its memories, as far as I can tell. It has stopped being what it was and is now in some liminal space. Can houses inhabit the bardo? If such a thing is possible, that’s where this house is. Someday it will be gone, but for now it sits there—a complicated mess of wood and glass, almost but not quite divorced from its original purpose.

I recently wrote on here about my failed attempt to get to the remnants of Okjökull glacier on my last morning in Iceland this past spring. I wanted to go see it because I wanted to write about it. I guess I am writing about it, so in a way it worked out.

On the drive from the Westfjords to the edge of the highlands, I stopped at a hot spring for a little break. As I was approaching the pool, my towel slung over my shoulder, I saw that there were about seven or eight young drunk Icelandic guys splashing around in the pool and talking loudly. And as I got closer still, I saw that there were dozens of empty beer cans piled up next to the pool, and I could hear one of the guys singing. I stopped and weighed my options: did I want to sit and relax in a tiny pool with a bunch of drunk guys or did I want to keep driving? I got in the pool.

The guys could not have been more welcoming, nor could they have been more curious about just what I was doing in Iceland for two months. I ended up staying and chatting with them for about an hour. It even turned out that we had friends in common—not surprising at all in the Westfjords. They asked where I was headed and when I told them I wanted to go see the remnants of Okjökull glacier, one of them asked if that was why I had the letters OK tattooed on my chest. I looked back at him like I didn’t know what he was talking about because, in my typically dense way, I hadn’t made the connection. I explained the real reason why I had OK tattooed on my chest and then we started talking about birds.

When I got back to my truck, I texted my friend Rhonda, who had tattooed those letters on my chest, and told her about the hot spring and the drunk guys. I told her that they had asked about my OK tattoo. She wrote back immediately to ask if they were making fun of me. No, I wrote back, they liked it! Were they naked? she asked. No, I said, but one of them was in his underwear.

When I was in Iceland a few years ago, I bought Rhonda and I each a box of Royal baking soda because we both loved the packaging and design so much. Other than my wife and sons, Rhonda was the only person I ever bought something for while in Iceland. (I’m not much of a shopper.) The day after arriving in Iceland during that last trip in the spring, I bought myself a box of baking soda at the grocery store—not for the box, but for actual baking—and sent a photo of it to Rhonda.

We messaged back and forth during my stay: about art and design stuff, about stretching. I was looking forward to sitting on her porch when I got home and talking about all of these things with her in person. I was also planning to tell her that she would be the only person other than my wife who would be named in the collection of essays I was working on in Iceland. On the day I returned home, just a day after texting her about those drunk guys in the hot spring, Rhonda died. I am still not quite able to process this. Will I ever be? Rhonda was a very special person, loved by everyone who met her. She was funny and generous and just so incredibly lovely. So much of her life and work was about connection. I loved that about her, and I’ve tried to learn from her example.

A week or so after Rhonda died, I had a dream about her. We were sitting at a table drinking tea and talking—both of us whispering even though we were alone. We turned briefly into orcas and then back into our human selves. (What does that mean?!) Neither one of us said anything about it, just went on talking and drinking our tea like nothing had happened.

When I didn’t make it to Okjökull in the spring, I messaged my friend Anna and told her about my failed attempt to drive out there. A couple weeks later, she sent me a message to tell me that the road had opened and she was on it. She even sent me some photos of the sign pointing the way to Ok. It made it feel a little like I had also made it there, and I was grateful to her for thinking of me out there on the road. I later asked if I could use one of her photos for a screen print project. So this year’s calendar is a collaboration with two friends—it’s about connection and friendship, but also about what we lose along the way. It’s also just a calendar. (This year, as a little joke, I deliberately made the dates hard to read. Time is a construct!) One of the things I like about making calendars is that they will get recycled after a year. Printed ephemera! Kinda like us. We come and we go—so we might as well make the most of it while we’re here.

The place is lousy with cats. That’s the first thing I noticed when I arrived in Reykjavik that morning in 2016. Cats everywhere. Nice cats, polite cats. They come when you kneel down and pss pss pss. They submit themselves to having their heads scratched. They wind themselves around your legs until the cuffs of your pants are covered in fur. They sit on cars and watch you walk past, daring you to not stop and scratch them under the chin. You can easily spot tourists on the streets and sidewalks of Reykjavik because we’re the ones kneeling down and calling the cats over, petting them, taking photos, and telling them how handsome they are.

It was my first time in Iceland; I was there on a research grant: I’d spend a few days at the National Library in the city, and a few more days exploring the countryside and visiting a small research centre in the western part of the country. My flight arrived at Keflavik airport at 6:30 in the morning, and then a bus dropped me off in Reykjavik less than an hour later. I hadn’t slept in about 24 hours and was looking forward to a nap. The woman who owned the house where I was staying had told me where to get off the bus but had failed to give me her actual address. In my sleepy, jet-lagged stupor, I thought maybe they didn’t use street numbers in her neighbourhood and instead residents posted their family names on the outside of their homes. It seemed plausible in the moment, okay? But Reykjavik is a city not a village, and, not surprisingly, the houses and buildings all had numbered addresses.

I had seen a photo of the back of the house where I was staying. The yard backed onto an alleyway, and I thought I might recognize the fence and yard if I walked around long enough. Which is what I did for close to forty minutes, my suitcase dragging noisily behind me the entire time. After knocking on a few doors and trying to explain my predicament, I gave up and wandered into the city centre. I didn’t have phone service in the country, so I went in search of a free wifi signal. It was May 1^st and everything was closed, but I eventually found a restaurant with a signal and sent a message to my host. She replied almost immediately with directions to her house, and an apology.

Later that morning, after a short nap, I opened my eyes and found a cat sitting inches from my face, staring at me. I said hello and reached out to pet the top of its head but it got startled and jumped up and out the open window above the bed.

When I told my host that I woke up with her cat lying next to me on the bed, she looked at me strangely and told me that she didn’t have a cat.

Maybe it was a dream, I said.

Probably not, she said. Welcome to Reykjavik.

It’s an early June morning and I’m standing in the middle of a dirt road leading into the highlands. To my right is a small lake with a rocky shoreline. A few birds flit around above the water—snipes, plovers—and call out occasionally. Across the lake, a large white rock stands out against the otherwise brown and beige landscape. The road I’m standing on is closed, or closed to me and my little 4x4 anyway. A couple mountain vehicles with oversized tires drove past a few minutes earlier while I stood staring dumbly at the sign next to the road that read Ófært Impassable. I have a plane to catch later in the day but I was hoping to drive down this road to see Okjökull—the remnants of Iceland’s first glacier lost to climate change. Glaciers cover about 11% of Iceland. Scientists worry that by 2200, they’ll all be gone. When Okjökull was measured back in 1890, it covered more than 16 square kilometres. By 2014, when it lost its glacier status, it measured less than a single square kilometre. In classic Icelandic fashion, a funeral was held for the glacier in 2019. Around a hundred people attended, including Iceland’s then prime minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir. There’s a bronze plaque at the site with a dedication written by Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason that reads:

Okjökull is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.

Only you know if we did it. There’s no gate or chain blocking the road. I could technically drive on it but I don’t want to get stuck and miss my flight. I also don’t want to be one of those tourists who has to call for help because he got stuck driving on a road he shouldn’t have been driving on. This happens frequently, I’m told. I check my phone. No service. Another reason to turn back.

As I contemplate my options, I see a cloud of dust getting kicked up in the distance. Before long, I hear the distinctive roar of another large mountain vehicle approaching. A monstrous truck with huge tires rounds the corner and barrels towards me. I move to the side of the road to let it pass but the truck pulls up right next to me and the engine cuts out. The driver leans out his window and nods. I have to tilt my head way back to make eye contact with him.

Góðan daginn, I say.

He says it back to me and asks, his brow furrowed a little, if I’m Icelandic.

No, I say. Canadian.

I wait for him to tell me that he once had a romantic encounter with a Canadian writer. But he doesn’t, and I’m a little disappointed.

He glances over at my 4x4—puny next to his monster truck—and asks if I’m planning to drive on the F Road. F Roads, or mountain roads (the F is for fjall, the Icelandic word for mountain), are even more rugged than the already rugged roads in the rest of the country. F Roads aren’t maintained in the winter, are barely maintained the rest of the time. It’s illegal to drive on them in anything other than a 4x4—the bigger, the better.

I tell him that I was considering it, but that I’d decided not to.

He nods and tells me that the reason the road is still officially closed is because there are two sections where the snow has yet to melt. This is June in Iceland. He glances over at my 4x4 again and asks if I have a shovel. I do not.

If you really gun it through the snowy sections, you might make it. He smiles, and adds: But you might not.

I’d better not risk it, I say. I don’t want to be one of those guys…

He laughs.

So what are you doing here? he asks.

I look at the barren, rocky landscape that surrounds us—no person (or tree) in sight for as far as the eye can see. I look back up at him and shrug.

He clarifies: Here in Iceland, I mean.

I tell him that I’ve been in the country for a couple months working on a book and that I was hoping to see where the glacier once stood.

Two months, he says, raising his eyebrows. That’s a long time.

I’m heading home later today, I tell him.

You’re a writer?

I nod.

He asks if I’ve read many Icelandic authors.

I nod again.

Everyone talks about Halldór Laxness, he says, but have you ever heard of our most famous writer, Snorri Sturluson?

Yes, I say, excited by the coincidence. I got coffee at his house just this morning!

Which I had. In a way.

Snorrastofa is a research centre in western Iceland, and the former residence of Snorri Sturluson—who died in 1241. Like most places in Iceland, they serve strong coffee.

I first visited Snorrastofa ten years earlier to research the book I was writing at the time. There is an illustration on one of the walls of the small museum in the research centre that depicts a bird burning a feather and blowing the ash into the eyes of another bird to give it human wisdom—for better or for worse. A librarian at the research centre told me the passage depicted in the illustration that could be found in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda—so I read it when I got home from that trip. I also read Egil’s Saga, which Sturluson is also thought to have written. Some of what I read in those books made its way into the book I wrote back then, including that image of the bird and the burning feather.

I tell him all of this.

He tells me some things he knows about Snorri Sturluson, including the final words he uttered before being killed for betraying the king of Norway: Thou shall not strike! I say the words at the same time, and we smile back at one another.

You’ve read Halldór Laxness? he asks.

Yes, I say. I’ve even visited his house on a couple occasions.

You’ve done your homework, he says.

I have, I say.

He asks me my name, and tells me his. I mispronounce it. But then try again and get it.

He points at the white rock across the small lake.

Those are Iceland’s oldest pair of mating swans. At least that’s what we tell the tourists, he says with a wink. They return to this lake every summer. Swans mate for life.

I squint. Swans. Not a rock. I see them both clearly now.

He looks back up the road and tells me his boss will be coming along in about an hour.

So if you do decide to drive out to Okjökull and you get stuck, he says, he might help you.

I smile up at him and say, But he might not?

He laughs and starts up his truck. It rumbles noisily and I take a step back. I can feel the earth vibrating beneath my feet. The driver says something I don’t hear and I ask him to repeat it.

Bless, he says.

Bless, I say back, and then I watch him drive off.

I’ll share some more of these in the coming days/weeks.

This is how I remember it. My two cousins and I standing side by side on our grandparents’ front lawn, arranged in order of height, shortest to tallest. I’m on the far left, the shortest. My cousins, perhaps six and eight, are standing to the right of me. I must be around five years old. Our socks are pulled up almost to our knees; our sneakers are scuffed and worn, the laces all tied in messy bows. We’re wearing shorts and matching blue t-shirts with a stick drawing of a child and the words ‘I need a hug’ printed on them.

None of us is wearing a baseball cap.

But then suddenly one of us is wearing a baseball cap.

We’re smiling, we’re giggling. My older cousin starts making faces at the camera: sticks out his tongue, rolls his eyes. His younger brother and I start doing the same, tentatively at first, but then with more enthusiasm. The baseball cap moves from one of our heads and then over to another as if by magic. And then it moves again. And again. A trick with the camera.

We’re bouncing on the soles of our feet, our mouths open in silent laughter. The sun is shining. A car drives past in the background and looks like a bar of gold glinting in the sunlight. The grass is so green. All the colours are vibrant, saturated, blurry at the edges. The baseball cap continues moving from head to head to head. My cousins are in on the joke—it’s their mother behind the camera; they both know how this works. They know what the film will look like after it gets developed and processed and projected onto the living room wall. I appear less sure. I smile and laugh like someone who wants to be in on the joke but doesn’t get it, not quite.

One of us falls to the ground laughing, and then we all fall. The screen goes black.

This is a genuine question. And one I think about a lot. My wife and sons show up in some of my work, but never too directly. Maybe it’s like staring at the sun? Same goes for writing about skateboarding. Full disclosure: it was skateboarding that got me thinking about this recently. I was talking with a friend a couple weeks ago about all the skateboarding books we’ve read but didn’t like. In some cases, we both felt like the author was trying too hard to sell it—intellectualizing it in a way that felt unearned or inauthentic or, and I’ve almost been guilty of this—gratuitous. I get it: it’s niche, it lacks broad appeal. I love skateboarding but I don’t really want to read about it. That said, I do spend a lot of time thinking about it. A lot. I sometimes go to sleep thinking about it; I sometimes wake up thinking about it. What am I thinking about exactly? Tricks, usually—some little thing I’m trying to learn how to do. I’ll work through the movements in my head: the foot placement, the weight distribution, etc.. As if on a loop, I’ll cycle through this endlessly—making micro-adjustments along the way. It often works; it often doesn’t.

Sometimes I’ll simply think about the act of skateboarding itself: the feeling of riding down the street, rolling—the wind in my hair! (Metaphorically speaking.) I feel lucky to have something I’m so passionate about. And I am. Lucky, that is.

Maybe not writing about it is about not wanting to examine it too closely, and in a way that might ruin it somehow, turn it into something it’s not. Same goes for all the other things I love and don’t write about. I mean, truly love—not, like, eels, for example, which I’m enamoured of, enthralled by, curious about. But maybe not in love with…

And as for my loved ones…

I think that what I tend to examine in my writing is when things go wrong—have gone wrong. That’s interesting to me, that’s material! My love for my family is boundless; they can do no wrong. That makes for boring writing, I guess. Who wants to read about that? Not me. Show me your broken hearts, your broken homes! That’s what I want to see and write about.

There are exceptions to writing about what I love. Of course there are exceptions. I write about my grandparents a lot in the book I’ve been working on. Writing about them is entangled with grief, so that changes things. One could argue that what I’m actually writing about is grief itself. Which I think is mostly true. It’s about trying to better understand grief. And to do this, I find myself writing my way through it. That grief—as subject—reaches beyond my grandparents to include friends and relatives, and further beyond that, too. The world is a mess; loss is part of life and living, but it doesn’t make it easier to grapple with. And for me, the only way through that, the only way to try and make sense of it is by writing about it—trying to write about it.

But that’s not what this is about. Or is it? I went to the dump yesterday to dispose of an old appliance. The last time I went to a dump was way up in northern Canada—and the reason I went that time was not to drop off garbage, it was to watch bears. I didn’t see any bears yesterday. But I did see mounds of trash. So much trash! So much scrap metal! I stopped to take a photo. And I thought: Oh, this is interesting! Garbage! Here’s something I could write about! And as I had that thought, I imagined my family watching from the sidelines, questioning the choices I make on the page, questioning what I choose to write about. And in that scenario—me, at the dump having an imaginary conversation with my family—I told them I do it because I love them too much! You don’t belong on the page, I said! You belong everywhere else but the page.

And as I stood there next to a pile of scrap metal, talking to myself at the dump, I imagined my family nodding back at me with understanding—and with a boundless love. And afterwards, we hugged, the four of us in a group hug, the three of them telling me how wise I am, me smiling knowingly, nodding back at them, thinking but not saying, I know. That’s how it played out in my mind, anyway.

There are boxelder bugs outside my window and wasps everywhere else. The squirrels are digging up my garden to hide nuts that there’s a 74% chance they will forget about. Some geese just flew past, honking overhead. And already the leaves on the trees in the yard are slowly turning. This is the first September in more than 20 years that neither one of my sons is starting a new school year. That’s something. Back when I was teaching, the beginning of September filled me with a nervous excitement, not unlike the feeling I had as a student—something new was about to begin. (More geese just flew past.) This September continues to feel like a new beginning of sorts. I submitted the manuscript for another book that I recently “finished”. (It’s never really finished at this stage.) There’s still lot of work to do on it, but for now I can put it aside while I wait to hear back from potential publishers. It also means that I can get to work on the next project. I don’t like idleness. It makes me antsy, a little untethered. Writing keeps me on the ground.

I heard an interview with Miriam Toews on the radio yesterday, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. She was talking about her new book, a memoir called A Truce That Is Not Peace. She mentioned how being a writer made her feel guilty about her parenting. Her concern was that she was never fully present when her kids were young—or ever. I worry about this same thing, even now. As writers, we spend a lot of time in our heads—the world around us serves as material, as inspiration, as something to be curious about. Rarely do I see or experience something and not feel the instinct to immediately write it down—which then leads to thinking about how I might use it or how it might feed into what I’m currently working on. I can’t help it. I mean, I truly can’t help it. At any given time during a conversation, there’s a 74% chance that I’m thinking about something related to writing.

Which reminds me of something Bob Dylan said about creativity. “I’ll take a song I know and simply start playing it in my head. That’s the way I meditate…. I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly—while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to a song in my head.”1 I do this too, but with stories. I’m constantly working out writing-related problems in my head or thinking about whatever it is I’m working on. Sometimes at the dinner table, my wife will recognize the look on my face and ask, Do you need to go write something down? The answer is usually yes. When people ask if my wife is also a writer, I often make this joke that is not really a joke at all: I say, I’d never marry a writer. And I wouldn’t, and this is partly why. I’m so much in my head, it must be infuriating to the people around me. I’d ask, but I’m afraid of the answer.

At the skatepark this morning, I saw that woman I wrote about here awhile back. The first thing she asked when she saw me was how old I am. I told her that I’m still the same age I was the last time she asked. I forget, she said. I told her my age. She clapped her hands. Life is full of circles.

I haven’t been too active over here lately, and I apologize for that. What can I say… there’s a lot going on.

Another flock of geese just flew past. Honk.

xo

I’ve written here before about how my grandfather used to say good luck as a farewell. From the front porch as I was getting in my car, he’d call out “good luck” with a wave, and then he’d watch until I drove to the end of the street and turned the corner. He’d do this just about every time. I thought about that yesterday when I was at the skatepark.

A man and a woman around my age were sitting at a picnic table next to the skatepark, drinking and laughing. Whenever I skated near that end of the park, the woman would call out: Hey, old man! Come over here! I did my best to ignore her because once you start answering to “hey old man” at the park, there’s no turning back. So I skated around and did my little tricks for about half an hour until I fell and my board rolled right over to them. I watched it roll over there as if in slow motion and thought, Here we go! The woman saw it too and got up off her seat and walked toward me unsteadily.

Hey old man! she called out again.

I wasn’t feeling very playful, so all I said was: Did you just call me old man?

Yes, she said, smiling, unapologetic.

Okay, I said. I stepped on my board and prepared to skate away.

How old are you? she asked.

I stopped and looked at her.

How old do I look?

50.

She didn’t even have to think about it.

Close, I said.

She indicated her friend who was still sitting at the picnic table—he nodded shyly; he was used to his garrulous friend—and then she said: We were watching you rolling around, doing tricks, and I kept saying: Look at that old man go! Just look at him!

I laughed. I felt like a Dr. Seuss character.

So how old are you? she asked again.

Sometimes I’m in the mood for these conversations. Sometimes I’m not. There was something about this woman—the earnestness, the joyfulness—that made me soften.

Okay, I said. And I told her my age.

We ended up chatting for about 20 minutes. She told me that she works in a goldmine up north—two weeks on, two weeks off. And she told me that she doesn’t have a TV, so sometimes she comes to the skatepark because: This is my TV. She asked if I ever fell and hurt myself. All the time, I said. She told me that she broke her foot last month—and proceeded to show me photos of her swollen foot on her phone, despite me telling her that I believed her and didn’t need to see the photos as proof. We talked about her foot for quite some time. For some reason, she had a lot of photos of that foot on her phone.

After a while, she said she was stressed that she’d be turning 50 in a couple years. I told her I was stressed about 40, but 50 felt great. I said that I felt lucky to get to 50 because not everyone does. She told me that her father died young, and her mother died years ago.

She asked: So you’re saying I’m blessed to make it to this age?

Yes, absolutely. Look at us, I said: alive, thriving, at the park on a sunny afternoon!

She smiled.

Yeah, she said. You’re right.

She asked then if she could have my phone number, so we could stay in touch. I politely declined. I don’t really give out my number to many people, I said. She told me she respected that.

I’m sure I’ll see you here again, I said. I’m here all the time.

Me too, she said. No TV!

I told her my name and she told me hers, and then we shook hands. As I rolled away, she called out Good luck, and I said it back to her.

Last time, I mentioned a few things that were coming out this summer. Like this essay over at Maisonneuve. And this story at Long Con Magazine. And today, another story came out with Galaxy Brain. It’s called “You Kiss Your Mother With That Mouth? Before he died, my grandfather was in the hospital for a while. He got kind of restless in there, so I brought him my Polaroid camera and some film. I said he could take photos of all of his visitors. He said he was going to use it to take photos of his nurses. I said okay. After he died, the camera and photos disappeared. That’s in the story.

It’s beautiful outside today. Go enjoy it!

IR

I learned yesterday that the Algonquin word for eel is pimisi… which is the name of one of the LRT stations nearest to my home. Interesting, I thought. And then I learned that there is a 30-foot-tall chrome eel sculpture by the artist Nadia Myre that sits in the river next to the station. I saw it for the first time early yesterday morning. How did I not know it was there? A reminder to be more curious! It’s a beautiful sculpture—look how it reflects the sky, the trees! Look at those curves! The movement suggested by those curves! I love it.

I don’t often share work in progress (I know this is not the first time I’ve said this!) but I find myself talking about eels with people all the time these days and they keep asking me why eels?

So here’s a part of the eel essay I’m currently working on that tries to answer the question...why eels?

I admire the eel’s tenacity, but I think what appeals to me the most about them is their mystery: that inscrutability, that secretiveness. There continues to be much that we don’t know about eels—and I find that refreshing. There is comfort in the fact that we don’t know everything; if we still have questions to ask, we have a reason to live. Without questions, without curiosity, what then? We know so much about so much; a little mystery is nice once in a while. For example, no one has ever witnessed an eel spawning in the wild—no scientist, no one in the fishing industry. It has only been recently confirmed that American and European eels begin and end their lives in the Sargasso Sea. While scientists suspected this for many years, it wasn’t documented until 2022. Secretive, moisturized, and unknowable. In their lane. Locked in to the very end. What’s not to love? But it’s not just scientists and naturalists who are curious about and enamoured of eels; artists, too, have long been fascinated by this enigmatic creature.

When I was young, and for reasons that are unclear to me now, I thought I had to choose between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. I chose Plath and her Creel of eels, all ripples. There was something of the depressive in me when I was a kid. I could be sullen and introspective, even at six, even at five. And so of course I would feel right at home in the poems of Sylvia Plath: I can stay awake all night, if need be— / Cold as an eel, without eyelids. A creature that hides under rocks and only comes out at night is exactly the kind of animal a weird little kid would be drawn to—it just makes sense!

It wasn’t until Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters came out that I relented and read one of his books—but only because it promised to be Hughes’ most direct response to Plath’s suicide. I liked Birthday Letters for its seeming honesty, for the emotion laid so bare within its pages—and for the story of a life that it shared. But more than that, I remember being moved by something Hughes said about the experience of writing that book. “How strange that we have to make these public declarations of our secrets. But we do. If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago, I might have had a more fruitful career — certainly a freer psychological life. Even now the sensation of inner liberation — a huge, sudden possibility of new inner experience. Quite strange.” Quite strange indeed. But relatable. Reading Birthday Letters also had the effect of leading me deeper into Hughes’ other work. And, eventually, to his poem “An Eel”, which acted, at the time I first read it, as a trigger for that memory I had of those eels in that bucket next to the river.

The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely
      ripened
Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles
For some large containment. Lobed glands
Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.

I do love how Hughes gets right down to the eel’s uncanny beauty and mystery. The poem provides us with a clinical description of the eel; it’s a physical and metaphysical taxonomy: from its ripened dome to “her patience / Global and furthered with love / By the bending stars as if she / Were earth’s sole initiate.” My main takeaway after first reading this poem (as a young person compelled to write poems of my own) was the realization that Oh, okay, you can write a beautiful poem about slippery, slimy, ugly eels. That’s good to know.

There are other eel poems. Indeed, there are many. Ogden Nash wrote one that goes like this: “I don’t mind eels / except as meals / And the way they feels.” Short and to the point. I get it. To the average North American palate, eels are not very appetizing. And they’re covered in slime. An eel’s slime is more than just a vibe (though it is also a vibe), their slime provides protection (they’re slippery!), aerodynamics (they’re fast!), and it regulates the balance of water in their bodies (osmoregulation!). I’ve never eaten eel, but I can imagine the texture in my mouth—and frankly, I don’t think I’d care for it. I can’t read that Ogden Nash poem without thinking about 8^th century Japanese poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi’s eel poem. Here’s what he had to say about eels:

To Iwamaro
I say this:
If you've slimmed down in summer
There's one thing that works:
Catch and eat eels!

Yakamochi’s poem can be read as a time-traveler’s rebuttal to Nash’s poem. Point. Counterpoint. Or why not vice versa? While we’re in Japan, I am also reminded of Shohei Imamura’s beautiful Unagi (or The Eel), not a poem but a film. Caspi and I watched this film shortly after we got married and moved to Halifax. We watched a lot of films during that time, many of them dark and depressing (I don’t know why?! We were terribly happy back then!) but this one stood out for both of us. Caspi was the one who brought it up recently when I was going on about eels again. Imamura’s film is about, well, a lot happens, but the protagonist Takuro, who has murdered his wife and has served jail time for it, moves to a small town upon his release and opens a barbershop. He brings with him a pet eel that he keeps in a tank and talks to on occasion. His relationship with his pet eel is the only contact he really allows himself. But then one day he saves a young woman from committing suicide, and he suddenly finds it harder to isolate himself, to keep others out. There’s love, there’s drama, there’s forgiveness. There’s connection. And there is redemption. That you find yourself rooting for a man who killed his wife is only one small part of how complicated this film is. Just like eels.

What I love most about all of these works of art is that these artists considered the eel special enough, worthy enough of this kind of consideration. And it is! It brings to mind for me Albrecht Dürer’s 1505 painting of a stag beetle: it was mostly unheard of at that time to devote an entire painting to a lowly insect. Dürer’s concern (and abiding interest) was with nature—and not with what was considered a worthy or unworthy artistic subject by his contemporaries. Here’s Dürer on art and nature: “It is indeed true that art is omnipresent in nature, and the true artist is he who can bring it out.” Dürer was also telling us that to better understand the bigger world, we must look at the smaller world—and look closely. Pay attention, be curious! If I was the kind of guy who had a motto, that would be it. Pay attention, be curious! Don’t litter!

/IR