This month, I took a denim dress that no longer fits and cut a long strip to crochet with. The trick to cutting up fabric to make yarn is to create one long piece, rather than many short ones (creating lots of annoying ends to sew in later). I did it by cutting in a big circle starting from one corner of the dress. I’m not really one for following patterns (or recipes or rules), so I just crocheted a circle in single stitch using an enormous hook and then let the sides grow by not adding a extra stitch each time around. There are lots of YouTube videos that will show you how to start a circle, and how to build a simple bowl/basket. When I ran out of the denim purloined from one half of the dress, I decided I was done. I washed the finished product and let it dry over a big mason jar to hold its shape. And now it has been dropped at an undisclosed location for someone to find and use to contain I’m not sure what - strawberries maybe, or hair bows or receipts?

When I was bagging this second item, I suddenly remembered that time I was immortalized in a play! I’m not even making this up.

In 2012, I was a character in This Must Be The Place: The CN Tower Show, created by Architect Theatre and produced by Theatre Passe Muraille. It was developed using my favourite storytelling method - oral history interviews - by Georgina Beatty, Charlotte Corbeil-Coleman, Greg Gale, Ingrid Hanse, Thomas Olajide and Jonathan Seinen.

I met Jonathan when he was working at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and I was on the board. We got chatting and he seemed to think the kind of stuff I was doing might make a good scene for a show he was working on about the vagaries of life in Toronto. So that’s how it came to be that Georgina Beatty played me (below), stitching knitting to a pole while she quoted some thoughts I’d shared about art, work and my gentrifying neighbourhood. Here’s an excerpt:

“How did I end up here, knit-bombing the Junction? Well, I was burnt out. I had a knack for joining an organization just before its funding was cut… So now I practice craftivism - activism through crafting.”

After many lay-offs, I had left the non-profit sector to open a retail shop and studio called Wise Daughters Craft Market. To my surprise, I found a promotional video about the business still on YouTube, which also documents my most ambitious guerilla art project ever…

In 2010, organizers of the Junction Arts Festival (long defunct), asked me to participate by yarnbombing the neighbourhood. It was fantastic. A team of volunteer knitters and crocheters went out the night before the festival began and attached handmade items to public property all along Dundas St West. I made felted snacks and hung them from trees. Someone put little sockettes on the garbage can foot pedals. The fire hydrants all wore beanies. Of course, everything got swiped, but that was expected. We were leaving gifts, just like I’m doing again all these years later. (For some months, I’d still see the odd felted sandwich or cookie I’d hung too high up to reach without a ladder.)

The weekend’s ultimate project was to knit a car cozy. A whole bunch of people got a headstart, knitting up squares. But we also gave knitting lessons all weekend so passersby could contribute. Tireless stitchers put the squares together in a race to cover the car by the end of the festival on Sunday. And we did it! Then we took it all apart and sewed it back together into blankets to distribute to unhoused Torontonians via Street Knit, a grassroots group that used to meet at my shop. The organization still exists (find them on Instagram and Facebook) and accepts donations of useful items like hats, mittens and socks.

Here is an example of a felted pizza, accompanied by a crocheted ice cube tray, which became part of a whole yarnbombed exhibit I was commissioned to do at Harbourfront. It was called Domestic Bliss, and I was able to hire a team of spinners, knitters and other craftspeople to hold workshops over the 2013 May long weekend, which happened to coincide with my 50th birthday. Again, enormous fun. For a few years, Harbourfront brought in Wise Daughters to staff a hands-on craft tent at its annual children’s festival, but there just doesn’t seem to be funding for things like that anymore.

Onward I go in my modest crafty crusade, inspired by these memories.

Ivy Johson

By Mary Fairhurst Breen, Contributor

On a recent Friday afternoon, just as I left my apartment building by the back door to take a shortcut to the subway, en route to collect my grandchildren, a teenager jumped to her death from the neighbouring highrise. That is a sound I will never forget, and a tragedy that has affected all the tenants in our housing complex in disparate ways. There has been much gossip, mostly well-meaning, characterized, I think, by fear that the unhappiness of the world is closing in on us.

On the Facebook page created for our building by a community-minded tenant during COVID, somebody posted, “Don’t go into the parking area right now, especially with children.” A lot of people decoded the message correctly, as this was the third such death within a short period. After each one, there were generalized posts about the need to support one another. In this instance, another tenant shared a list of mental health resources, which was a fine idea, but unfortunately only visible to the slim minority of residents who still look at Facebook.

I am among those who have left social media for my health but felt a need to reach out with a message of my own. I’d been thinking about ways to connect with my neighbours ever since I saw the stage show “What You Won’t Do For Love” with David Suzuki and Tara Cullis in March. They talked about how emergency planning — climate-related or not — really falls to us as neighbours. For example, in the increasingly likely scenario that the power goes out for any one of a dozen reasons, all we can do is band together on our blocks or within our apartment buildings to make sure everyone has what they need. Suzuki suggested preparing by taking an inventory of who has which tools, skills and knowledge, as well as who is most vulnerable. The Finnish government has issued a booklet on emergency preparedness with a focus on such civilian efforts. The Tyee has written about how far ahead most Nordic countries are in this regard.

So, I posted a flyer online that said, “Did you know that trusting your neighbour is the key to happiness, according to the World Happiness Report? There’s so much distrust, despair and isolation in the world right now. How about we try to change that with teeny steps in our own building? In chaotic times, it makes sense to find out which neighbours might need help and which might be able to help in an emergency. Even in calm times, hanging out with other people is important for human health!”

I invited neighbours to email me if they were interested in perhaps incubating a few casual social groups based on mutual interests: balcony gardening, walking in High Park, sharing meals, board games. A couple of people volunteered to help get the ball rolling. A bunch more “liked” my post, which is of no practical use, but this was not my primary communication strategy. I posted a flyer in each of the three elevators of my building and the area that would be a lobby if it had any furniture.

My apartment is in one of three mid-century buildings inspired by the “towers in the park” style of Swiss architect Le Corbusier to increase urban density while preserving green space, light and air. When the complex was new, there was a generous amount of lawn, benches and even a fountain outside, creating a town square kind of vibe. Longtime residents fondly remember everyone sitting around on summer evenings chatting. The value of chatting cannot be underestimated. One might not be a fan of small talk, but a remark about the weather can lead to a conversation about the challenges of living in Toronto, which can spark a little bit of camaraderie. It doesn’t require a full-blown friendship to find points of kinship. In this place, everyone finds common ground in complaining about our landlord, with good reason. Case in point: management swiftly hamstrung my effort.

I hadn’t foreseen any grounds for objection, but I emailed a copy of my flyer to the site office and building super as a courtesy. On it, I had introduced myself: “I’m Mary. I’m over 60 and live alone (with Freddie the giant friendly dog). Maybe others in the same situation would feel like getting together for coffee now and then.” A couple of people who saw the flyer before it was removed an hour later said to me, “Oh, nice to know your name! I only knew Freddie’s.” Such is city life.

The reaction from the property managers was defensive. It was clear that they attributed my initiative entirely to the most recent suicide. I was told the young person who died was not isolated, she had family. And that this happens all over the neighbourhood, not just in our buildings. I was also told that I was “soliciting” and offered the classic lazy argument that if they allowed my flyers, they’d have to allow everyone’s. They said I could post one in the laundry room for a brief time (where it will be immediately obscured by notices for used dining sets and lost items).

After my exasperation wore off, I understood two things. Stigma was playing a huge part. Management was expressing inadequacy and shame but also wanting to distance themselves from this thing that’s not supposed to happen where we live. And of course, they were apprehensive that if neighbours become genuinely connected, we’ll be better equipped to challenge their frequent above-guideline rent increases, shoddy repairs and aversion to amenities of any kind. But the upshot is that it will be virtually impossible to invite tenants to so much as share a coffee outside on a Saturday morning if we can’t post anything on the property.

There’s a reason all the benches were removed years ago. A resident even told me that tenants brought their own lawn chairs to the little outdoor pool deck for a time, since none were provided, but management scooped them up and took them away, understandably pissing people off. Sitting is subversive, because it leads to chatting, which leads to community-building, which might lead to effective tenant advocacy.

The neighbour who told me this story was busy watering the expansive, beautiful garden he has somehow gotten away with planting on the property at his own expense. At dawn on summer mornings, while it’s still cool, my dog drags me over to where he has the hose going, because his favourite activity in the world is to play in the spray. Our generous guerrilla gardener indulges Freddie, and (subversive) merriment ensues.

I had a look back at an opinion piece I wrote three years ago about the importance of preserving civility. I said, “It’s a fair assumption that many of us are in distress at present. Even if nothing dire is happening directly to us, there is a sense of impending doom. We can make our communities a tiny bit more livable (while also pushing governments to remember their purpose) one human interaction at a time.” From the vantage point of 2026, I feel like I was describing the good old days. The dire things are here and affecting us all, or our closest loved ones, whether it’s food insecurity, poverty, poor mental health, or the rollback of human rights and violent conflicts in our home countries.

Because nobody who’s been a tenant for any length of time can afford to move out of a rent-controlled apartment, my complex is very slowly becoming what housing experts call a naturally occurring retirement community (or NORC). I’m dejected by the reaction to my very small attempt to make things better, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m on a 15-year waiting list for artist housing, and about seven years from the front of the queue for subsidized seniors’ housing, which I’m pretty sure will involve significant compromise. My home may be shabby and managed rather contemptuously, but I’m lucky to have it.

The We Were Here project is over for now, though I’m hoping there’s another film in its future. I’ve been submitting op-eds and creative nonfiction pieces on various topics hither and yon, but I don’t have a specific writing project occupying my brain and time.

During the year leading up to my 50th birthday, I took it upon myself to try 50 new things, and blogged about them. It was great fun, but I decided against a sequel because it’s hard to pull without spending money, and it’s something lots of other people seem to be doing these days.

At present, I am back into handmaking in a big way. It calms me, which is hugely important. Here are some random items I’ve made of late. I dug my block and screen printing supplies out of my storage locker and found I had enough fabric ink to help the grandkids print their favourite animals on some t-shirts, with extra scrap fabric besides (the pink is the last of a leather jacket I loved dearly, the denim from jeans that I turned into shorts with goofy hems.)

Anyway, I had an idea. I’m going to make 12 items and leave each one in a public spot for a stranger to take. I’ll tell you how to make the item. If that sounds like something you’d like to read about, please keep opening these newsletters when they arrive in your inbox! I’m suspending paid subscriptions, with profound thanks to the people who supported my writing this past year.

Yesterday, I made the first drop, at an undisclosed location.

The bag contained a concrete candle holder. I confess, I made this a while back, when I couldn’t stop playing with concrete. (The remaining 11 items I will make fresh.) It’s very cheap and easy to make concrete plant pots and candle/pen holders. You just buy a small bag of concrete mix at the hardware store, add water and fill any receptacle you like. Yogurt tubs and paper cups are ideal, because you might need to cut or peel off the mould. To get the hole in the middle, insert a smaller receptacle (stopping an inch from the bottom) and fill it with water to weigh it down. Pill bottles are great for bud vases, peanut butter jars for plant pots. You can add colour to the concrete if you want, or even sprinkle glitter in there (if you don’t mind your cohabitants railing at you for the glitter litter that will stick to their socks and hair for the rest of their lives).

My tentative list of future guerrilla craft projects includes a collaged bookmark, an origami box, a printed tea towel, a felted gnome, a mini macrame plant hanger and maybe a little denim crocheted basket, because I have more jeans that need chopping up.

I’ve been particularly smitten with embroidery for the past year or so. I never use a pattern, just make it up as a go along. I’ve made and sold a bunch of these little items (see more examples in my November newsletter). Then it occured to me that they might work as notecards. I’ve been reading about how snail mail is having a revival - people have even made businesses out of writing to strangers for a fee. I love writing letters, and of course receiving mail that is not from my MP or the CRA.

Adorable Aside: My darling granddaughter Mabel wanted to send me a picture she’d made. She had figured out that her mail - Chirp magazine - comes through the slot in her front door. So she logically pushed her artwork out the slot in order to get it to me. Her darling mother took the time to explain mail, found and addressed an envelope, took Mabel to buy a stamp, and let her pop it in a mailbox. I reciprocated with brief letters to each of my granddaughters and they were delighted. I am going to make a routine of mailing notes to them.

So then I had the idea to photograph some of my embroidery, to see how it would look as a card. I liked the result! I made a few prototypes, trying different printing services for quality, and experimenting with size and card stock. Here’s the test batch.

Dear reader, if you would like one or more of these blank cards, I’m selling off my small initial run at $5 each until they’re gone. When I do a reprint, they’ll retail for $7 each, and I’m going to see about wholesaling singly and in sets this fall. I’ve created a page for crafty stuff on my website. Seems worth a try. Embroidery takes a long time, and no two are the same, so maybe they can enjoy a longer life this way. If you’d like some, please email me.

I hope you’ll continuing following my adventures in Random Acts of Beauty, but if you don’t want to, I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe.

All the stories from this series are now available to download, print and share (with credit) from my website. I hope the We Were Here project will have another phase, but it all depends on funding (of course).

At the end of July, I’ll be marking the end of this newsletter’s first year with a relaunch of sorts, taking it in a different direction. I’m suspending paid subscriptions, because I’m taking on a new challenge just for fun. Please stay tuned!

Chris grew up in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, where his father was a coal miner. As a kid, he was a competitive figure skater. He unintentionally came out at seventeen. Someone had pressured him into revealing what was on his mind and then “the genie was out of the bottle.” He came out to his mom and classmates in grade twelve, which was highly unusual in Cape Breton in 1981, and not without its challenges. Chris never had a conversation about his sexuality with his dad, even after his partner started attending family gatherings in the early 1990s.

Once at university in Halifax, Chris realized he didn’t have to figure everything out right away. He took some time to unpack what he calls the luggage of growing up working class and Catholic. He studied psychology and planned to become a psychiatrist, but the lab work proved problematic. because it turned out Chris has a severe chemical sensitivity. He got involved in campus theatre where he met his first openly gay people. Hanging out with them made it easier to be himself.

His first awareness of HIV/AIDS came from a TV report about gay men dying in San Francisco. A few years later, he remembers walking down the street in Halifax and seeing an old acquaintance a year younger than him, who shared that he had AIDS. That brought the reality of the disease home.

After his undergrad degree, Chris needed to make some money to pay off his student loans. His most marketable skill being skating, he got a gig with the Ice Capades. Touring took him all over the States, including to San Francisco, where he immediately felt the heaviness of AIDS in the air. He remembers the Ice Capades bringing in a speaker to give a rudimentary talk about safer sex. After Chris left the company, another member of the touring group died of AIDS. Chris recalls that this young man was on the gaunt side of thin, but that body shape was not unusual for a skater, so no one suspected he was sick.

Back in Halifax, Chris saw a posting at the Gay and Lesbian Association of Nova Scotia. The job involved program development, financially supported by the local gay bar, which the association owned - an early example of social enterprise. Chris found himself going back and forth across the street to the Nova Scotia Persons with AIDS Coalition to use the photocopier. Spending time in their offices, he soon got to know many people living with HIV or AIDS.

Chris notes that many people assumed he was HIV-positive long before he ever was, just by virtue of being part of that social scene. Chris consulted his doctor, who strongly discouraged him from getting tested because there was no treatment at the time, and the doctor said he was seeing patients emotionally destroyed by what felt like a death sentence while they were physically asymptomatic. He told Chris that as long as he kept taking all the precautions he was already taking and being proactive about his health, there was no point in knowing. Chris couldn’t find fault with his logic at the time. The same doctor later gave him the advice to dump his HIV-positive boyfriend, which Chris disregarded.

Chris met his first long-term partner in 1991. Bob was HIV-positive, and had decided to use whatever time he had to follow his dream of studying marine biology in Halifax. He expected to be dead within a year or two. So when he and Chris quickly got serious, there was a lot at stake. When Bob told Chris he was HIV-positive, Chris put his arms around him to let him know he wouldn’t be going anywhere. (Bob is a pseudonym. His family was determined to keep his sexuality a secret, even after his death, and Chris has reluctantly respected their wishes.)

Luckily, Bob was still alive when the drug cocktails that saved so many lives became available in the mid-1990s. He and Chris were together for ten years. Tragically, their break-up had everything to do with Chris’s eventual HIV-positive diagnosis. Bob was convinced he had infected Chris, and could not cope with the guilt. In point of fact, the couple had an open relationship and Chris is sure he contracted the virus elsewhere, on a very specific occasion that involved an unforeseen small risk. Even though Chris told him all this, Bob was unable to believe he wasn’t the cause.

When they split up, Bob moved away to Ottawa. A few years later, the two of them were starting to talk about reconciling and Chris was preparing to leave Halifax to give their relationship another go. Before Chris was able to make the move, Bob was killed by a drunk driver.

Twice when they were together, Chris had thought Bob was going to die. He struggled to recover from a flu virus about a year into their relationship, but eventually bounced back. Then, when he first took an experimental drug cocktail, he had a life-threatening allergic reaction. Such stress in early adulthood takes a huge toll. Chris also went through the heartbreak of watching numerous friends die, taking part in their home palliative-care teams, as many gay men did.

Chris pursued a Master’s degree in educational psychology, and has always been a student of human behaviour, quietly watching everyone around him even as a young kid. He did a great deal of internal work to sort out the feelings of shame that came with his Catholic upbringing, as well as the impacts of having an alcoholic father. Once he was settled into a job he loved and a caring relationship with Bob, he realized he still wasn’t happy and sought treatment for depression, with positive results.

Chris has been in the not-for-profit sector for many years, his work leading him to his current role as Executive Director of HEAL Nova Scotia, which was once the AIDS Coalition of Nova Scotia. Like many such organizations, its mandate has changed and continues to evolve with time. Chris tells me that having AIDS in the name always made fundraising harder. In any case, AIDS has not been the main focus of their work for about twenty years, but rather one aspect of the group’s support and education around HIV, hepatitis and sexual health. Chris has also studied graphic design, his posters gracing the walls of many gay bars and businesses over the years. He is part of the Halifax Gay Men’s Chorus and is working on a play about the loss of Bob and how grief has shaped who he is today. Chris also curated an exhibit on the history of Halifax Pride which you can read about here.

And hot off the press, check out the book Amazing 2SLGBTQIA+ People in Atlantic Canada by Rebecca Rose.

The initial set of stories from Ontario (that went into the We Were Here films) are also online here.

Next month, all the stories from the series focusing on the AIDS era will be available online as well. And that will be the conclusion of this multi-year We Were Here project… unless funding allows for more film. Stay tuned.

Leslie McBain imagined writing poetry and dandling a grandbaby on her knee in her quiet refuge on Pender Island, BC. Instead, she has spent the last decade as a fierce activist. Two years after the death of her son Jordan in 2014, she and two other bereaved mothers founded Moms Stop the Harm (MSTH), a national nonprofit that supports grieving families and advocates for solutions to the catastrophic toxic drug crisis that is claiming so many young lives. Since then, membership in MSTH has exploded. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, nobody wants to belong to this club that will accept them as a member.

Leslie still looks like the hippie she used to be, a little peace sign around her neck. But people listen when this unassuming, unguarded gray-haired woman hits them with her truth bombs.

• Dead people don’t recover

• Prohibition is an abject failure

• Nice people use drugs

With much practice, Leslie has become mistress of the sound bite. She is unafraid in front of a microphone or even a Prime Minister. It’s something that happens when you have nothing to lose.

Leslie’s path to motherhood was not an easy one. But the moment Jordan was born, she looked into his eyes and thought, “I know you.” Leslie had just delivered her son, who was in too much of a hurry to wait for the midwives to arrive. Her dear friend Kim had offered to be a surrogate to Leslie and her husband, after their years of agonizing miscarriages and unsuccessful IVF treatments. And now, they had the baby they had longed for.

Jordan was an infant who barely slept, which foreshadowed the constant movement and energy that would characterize his entire childhood. Fortunately for his frazzled parents, he was rarely cranky.

When Jordan was five, the family settled on Pender Island off the coast of BC after many adventurous years of travel in a Volkswagen van and a stint running a plumbing business in California. Leslie and Carl bought a large oceanfront acreage with a musty little wood cabin, which they transformed into a beautiful sanctuary. There was no plumber on the island, so Carl had plenty of work. Leslie began running writing workshops, and open mic poetry nights.

Jordan’s ADHD was diagnosed in grade four. He was doing okay in school, thriving socially but unable to sit still. He was a good-natured prankster whose charm helped him get away with a lot. Nobody could stay mad at him. His favourite place was on a skateboard and his adventurous nature made him an intrepid young traveller on long trips with his parents. Underneath his thrill-seeking behaviour, he was a gentle and deeply caring kid.

In high school, Jordan found himself among the hard-partying skater crowd. He used alcohol and drugs recreationally, as youth are wont to do. In retrospect, Leslie understands that he was treating his ADHD, seeking a bit of calm for his agitated mind. Jordan would often sit in the shower, letting the hot water cascade soothingly onto his head until it ran cold.

Leslie could see that his drug use was becoming problematic, but didn’t know what to do, apart from keeping their line of communication wide open. When Jordan recognized that he was in trouble, he sought addiction treatment. It was expensive, poorly run and didn’t stick.

Jordan had been prescribed oxycodone after an injury, and became dependent on the pills, which has been proven in court to be exactly what its manufacturers intended. Leslie accompanied him to his doctor’s office, where they explained that, after many refills, Jordan had an opioid addiction. The doctor lashed out at Jordan for misleading him about his pain level, and fired him as a patient (this person paid for his actions when Leslie complained to the College of Physicians and Surgeons). Jordan easily got prescriptions from walk-in clinics instead (two of the five he frequented also later faced sanctions). He also turned to an illegal supply.

Despite his drug use, Jordan was growing into a successful entrepreneur. He had a business called Island Sweeps, providing chimney sweeping and wood stove installation to Gulf Islands residents. He was reliable and always affable with his customers.

One day when he was twenty-five, Jordan’s heart stopped. The coroner’s report found no one drug in a lethal concentration, but a toxic combination of many different substances.

Before I tell you about John, I will relay what my friend Jim Tennyson said to me when I asked him if he’d care to be interviewed for the We Were Here project.

“The reaction to the fentanyl/opioid crisis has much in common with the AIDS crisis of the eighties. Of course, the most depressing parallel is the apparent hope, on the part of the powers that be, that if they ignore the issue, it will just go away like an unpleasant dream. Some would say that those affected have only themselves to blame. This view seemed particularly prevalent at the Reagan White House; they did not appear concerned when gay people were the ones getting sick and dying from a mysterious illness. People talked callously at the time about AIDS affecting only members of the 4H Club: Haitians, Hemophiliacs, Heroin Addicts and Homosexuals.

It wasn’t quite as bad up here but the attitudes weren’t pretty. I was a founding member of the AIDS Committee of Toronto so I was on the front lines. I was also part of a University of Toronto epidemiology study - one of the earliest in the world - which followed the health of a group of about forty guys who were either infected, or had been with those who were. I was certain that I was HIV-positive, but by a twist of fate, this was not the case. I remember when the first antibody test results arrived about six months after the study began. The doctor said, ‘Well, Jim, you’re negative.’ I thought I was going to faint. I had certainly had unsafe sex with guys who would soon be dead. You have to remember that unsafe sex was just sex up to this point.

I watched most of my close friends die or come very close to it before the introduction of antiretroviral therapy. But in terms of an interview, I’m going to respectfully back out, unless you’re really stuck for subjects, and I’m sure there are some of us still stumbling around. It’s not something I don’t talk about, but to have to confront in a serious fashion the utterly tragic events of those years is still too draining. I always say that my experiences beside deathbed after deathbed would fill a script for a miniseries. One of those beds held a man with whom I was in love and he with me.”

In not being formally interviewed, Jim spoke volumes, and he gave me permission to share his reasons.

I met Jim years ago through the Toronto queer theatre company Buddies in Bad Times. I later served on its board with Gordon Floyd. Both men are in their seventies now, and both gave innumerable hours to HIV/AIDS peer support and political activism from the beginning. Gordon agreed to tell me about his dear friend John, and shared with me the detailed records he kept pertaining to John’s life, palliative care and death.

Gordon prefaced his memories by describing a line from the play The Inheritance by Matthew López, mounted in Toronto last year. A character cries out to the younger players, “Don’t you understand? I don’t have any contemporaries!” This is Gordon’s truth too. His current gay friends are all fifteen to twenty years younger than he is, because his former gay friends are all gone. He’s been HIV-positive for thirty years and considers himself one of the lucky ones because he was infected late, once antiretroviral drugs were available and effective. Shorthand for this historical milestone is “post-cocktail,” which contrasts starkly with the deadly years “pre-cocktail.”

In the mid-1980s, John Helliwell wrote an award-winning personal computing column for The Globe and Mail, touting the potential of email to save on courier costs, and the futuristic prospect that cellular telephones combined with microcomputers would create an “office in a briefcase.” He was way ahead of his time and a leader in the field, becoming an executive editor at PC Magazine based in Boston. His career then took him to New York, where he was living when he became ill.

John returned to Toronto to die. Gordon says, “He was sick, he was weak, he knew it was over.” Gordon went to New York, rented a van, and drove him back. He assembled and led his palliative care team, and agreed to serve as executor of his will.

The two met in university and bonded over politics and theatre. When they were both still in Toronto, they often travelled to New York for long weekends jam packed with Broadway shows. They caught Liberace’s holiday extravaganza at Radio City Music Hall, where the flamboyantly campy but closeted star had the audience in the palm of his hand. Gordon recalls with a laugh, “The blue-rinse ladies from New Jersey hadn’t a clue what they were witnessing.” The two rather serious and sophisticated men would let their hair down at The Saint, the cavernous East Village club at the epicentre of gay nightlife in the 1980s. Like many of its patrons, the place fell victim to the AIDS crisis, closing in 1988.

In a lot of ways, the gay community invented the good death inside our grief-illiterate culture. “There was no blueprint,” notes Gordon. He’d lost a couple of dozen friends, which gave him enough exposure to lead John’s care team. Having put on hazmat suits to visit friends in hospital, and carried their meal trays in from the hall when staff wouldn’t go in the room, he says he had the stomach for it. In the absence of proper health services, amid the swirl of fear and bigotry, dying men and their friends designed their own end-of-life care.

The log books filled in by John’s caregivers include tender observations from his final weeks. One writes that, “John has promised no more macho cowboy stuff” after he went to the bathroom on his own and fell. There are records of the numerous visits from friends, who keep him sitting up a bit too long. Someone notes that John would like to reread A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but time runs out before a copy can be acquired.

John was an only child, predeceased by both his parents. He was still close to the family of his former partner, who joined the care team along with some of John’s recent friends from New York and some very old friends from his high school in Marathon, Ontario. One of those classmates happened to be the CEO of a hospital, who surreptitiously helped the team access medical equipment and other essential resources.

I asked Gordon why he thought so many people from different periods of John’s life would volunteer for such a heartbreaking task, some dropping everything to travel to Toronto for a week or more. He thought about it for a minute, and said, “John was a person of incredible integrity and passion. He was successful because he was brilliant, but also great fun, with a wide range of interests that he shared with a wide range of people.” I think the same could be said of Gordon, who would have received a similar outpouring of support had he not been one of the “lucky” ones.

It took Gordon a good decade to process the aftereffects of attending nearly weekly funerals for several years. He acknowledges that loss of this magnitude makes one reluctant to get close to people. He made a sharp career turn in the mid-1990s, leaving both public service and business behind to move into the charitable sector. His last ten years before retirement were devoted to children’s mental health. Gordon had lost faith in government, and become cynical about the private sector. While grateful for the drugs that keep him alive, he felt dismayed by the egregious opportunism and profit-driven actions of pharmaceutical companies in the face of a public health catastrophe. And this was long before the opioid crisis.

Their stories raise the same fundamental questions. What if, as very ill young boys, they had been treated with the same urgency and compassion as a kid with, say, leukemia or cystic fibrosis? What if every healthcare provider they encountered had all the latest rigorously researched scientific knowledge about mental illness and addiction? What if this information was politically neutral?

Life expectancy in Canada is actually dropping as a result of drug-related deaths, which are so often linked to mental illness. In the future, people will be shocked to learn that so many died because they didn’t get the care they needed - many because it wasn’t available or they or couldn’t afford it, some because the right treatment doesn’t exist yet.

Alex was born in Saint John, NB, when his mother Melissa was seventeen. Her relationship with his father didn’t last, but both sets of grandparents were involved in his upbringing. They were known as Nanny and Grampy Down the Street and Nanny and Grampy Farm. Alex got to experience both an urban and a rural childhood.

Alex was a happy, healthy baby. He never really “misbehaved.” Adults would always remark that he was very polite. He was inquisitive about everything. At his grandparents’ farm, he cared for the chickens and barn cats and grew vegetables. Alex took part in all kinds of afterschool sports programs; his favourite was basketball. He had one very close childhood friend who was at their house much of the time, almost like a sibling.

Melissa pursued higher education despite the challenges of being a young single mum, completing a university degree and succeeding first in the corporate sector and then in government. When Alex was seven, he gained a step-dad. They spent many happy hours off-road cycling and snowboarding together. The family was eventually able to buy a home and a cottage, where Alex loved swimming and boating.

They travelled often, camping in the Atlantic provinces and New England. Theme parks were a favourite destination. Alex was a thrill-seeker who loved wild rides and zip-lining. To him, mundane activities were scary while scary activities were a source of delight.

Things started to go wrong in grade five. Alex was sick with scarlet fever and started school a week after his classmates, which made him particularly anxious. Because he had a healthier home life than many of his peers, it was easy for him to escape his teachers’ attention and fall through the cracks. As middle school progressed, his teachers described him as stubborn, but the issue was a learning disability, exacerbated by anxiety.

Once he’d had an assessment, Alex was reluctant to accept supports that would further single him out as different. He struggled with the misperception that he was stupid. Melissa deeply understood his dread of school, having experienced the same thing herself, but tried hard to encourage his education, turning to homeschooling as an alternative.

As he grew older, Alex began drinking and his behaviour became unpredictable. He had a lot of anger about his absent father, whose own addiction issues meant a relationship wasn’t possible.

Alex’s anxiety could be crippling, making it difficult for him to leave the house. At home, he found joy in music, creating beats and free styling. He streamed record numbers of songs by Canadian artists. His absolute favourite was Nova Scotia rapper Classified, whose lyrics resonated with him. He also found comfort in his little dog, Diesel.

Alex sought treatment and was hospitalized for his acute anxiety, but while some doctors are quick to prescribe benzodiazepines, none of his would consider this option due to the risk of addiction. Alex felt compelled to source his own, desperate for relief. His unsupervised drug use led to a seizure disorder, and he experienced psychotic episodes. It was hard to know which symptoms were cause and which were effect.

When he couldn’t get the drugs he depended on, Alex turned to even less safe alternatives. More than one doctor expressed shock at the quantity and quality of the substances he frankly admitted to taking, but still no one would help him with proper supervised medication. When his foot was crushed in a car accident, he was denied pain relief at the hospital, stigmatized as being drug-seeking. It was suggested he had arranged to be run over.

By the time Alex was eighteen, the situation at home was not safe or sustainable, so Alex moved in with his girlfriend. They were together from the time he was seventeen until his death six years later. Melissa checked in on him every day. She and his girlfriend Amy did everything they could to keep him alive.

Alex developed a very serious lung infection which turned into lobar pneumonia. His fear of hospitals and history of mistreatment at the hands of medical professionals meant that the infection spread unchecked and ultimately led to organ failure. Alex seemed to know and accept that he was going to die, but his decline was sudden. Covid protocols were in place when he was rushed to hospital, where everything was chaotic and communication confusing. Melissa was with him when he died, but his step-dad and grandparents weren’t able to get through the Covid screening procedures in time.

A spiral of ignorance, negligence and stigma contributed to Alex’s death. Melissa feels it would be futile to demand accountability or seek justice for her son, but often speaks publicly about him. In the small community of Saint John, her story has reached the ears of politicians and decision-makers, as well as friends, neighbours and strangers who have all been impacted by addiction.

She keeps a purple chair on her porch - a symbol of remembrance for those lost to drug-related deaths. People have left her gifts and notes, sharing glimpses into their own grief. In the publication “Gone Too Soon,” by Moms Stop the Harm, Melissa wrote, “Alex was so much more than his mental illness and addiction. All he wanted was to live with dignity.”

As do we all.

Sheila Kastner had a clear plan to get out of Cornwall, Ontario and become a journalist. At the age of seventeen, she was accepted into Carleton University in Ottawa. The only other Jew in the program was Earl Whitzman, back from WWII and starting his post-secondary education on a military scholarship. Their studies were cut short by the arrival of a baby boy, Peter.

Young Peter Whitzman hated Cornwall and Cornwall hated Peter back. At an early age, he gave off a vibe of otherness. Instead of taunting him with homophobic slurs, which were perhaps too exotic for that time and place, his classmates relentlessly chased him down the street shouting, “Jew Boy!” His younger brother Stephen wasn’t bullied, though he was also a boy who was a Jew.

When Peter was ten, he shone as Ebenezer Scrooge in the school production of A Christmas Carol. He decided at that moment to pursue acting. The Whitzmans were theatre buffs and supported his aspirations. They travelled to the Stratford Festival in its early years, and to New York for all the big Broadway shows. The soundtracks from Carousel, Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady were in constant rotation on the family turntable. Peter and Stephen, like their mother before them, were bright enough to skip grades and also hightailed it to university ahead of schedule.

It becomes even clearer why Peter was eager to get away when Carolyn shows me an assortment of family photographs, each with an obvious slice where Earl has been cropped out. By the time Carolyn was born, sixteen years after her eldest brother, their mother loathed their father “with the heat of a thousand burning suns.” Their scathing verbal abuse and constant passive aggression would put them in the same league as George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. They finally separated when Carolyn was four.

Peter left to study drama at McGill University when his baby sister was still in diapers. At a distance of a hundred kilometres, Montreal was still much too close to home. He travelled to Israel and spent time on a kibbutz, where he experienced the freedom to start living as an openly gay man. He won a scholarship to attend the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and remained in London for the rest of his life.

Peter had an equivocal relationship with the English, who perceived him as “ethnic,” but was in the right place to pursue the life he wanted. He became one of the founding members of the Gay Sweatshop Theatre - a gutsy move in 1971. That same year, he met the man who would remain his partner for the next quarter century.

When Carolyn was eleven, her mother took her to London for a visit. En route, Sheila said to her, “You need to understand that being an actor doesn’t pay very well. Peter has to share a tiny one-bedroom flat with his friend Alan.” Carolyn rolled her eyes, as she was wont to do around her mother. But this was the story Sheila stuck with for another five years, until Peter finally wrote her a coming out letter, ending all attempts at obfuscation. Sheila was initially furious with herself for somehow causing Peter’s homosexuality, but eventually adjusted, even joining PFLAG.

Carolyn got herself back to London two years later, using her Bat Mitzvah money for the plane ticket. She established a pattern, staying with Peter and Alan every other summer until she was nineteen. She was only too willing to receive some alternative parenting from her big brother. He and Alan modeled the kind of relationship Carolyn aspired to, listening to one another and working through their issues. While consensually non-monogamous, they were deeply committed to one another.

Carolyn was in awe of Peter. They bonded during those London summers over their fondness for old movies. Peter had a huge collection of VHS tapes and was something of a film savant. He could tell you who won the Oscar in every major category in any given year. And he had the requisite abiding love for Bette Davis and Judy Garland.

Though he went by the name Whitman professionally, Peter tended to be typecast as a neurotic Jew. He had a fine singing voice, and once shared the stage with Topol in a production of Fiddler on the Roof. Amazingly, Peter never had to work a day job. He supported himself as an actor - on stage in London’s West End, with small parts in major movies, and with voiceover and narration gigs.

Carolyn remembers meeting Simon Callow and Ian McKellen at parties, where Peter would invariably be inside a circle of people hanging on his every word. Carolyn says, “He was the most loved person I ever met - he had that thing.” He was brilliant with accents and a superb mimic, sometimes to Carolyn’s chagrin. He had a perennially popular party piece in which he portrayed their parents as a dog and a cat. At the same time, he was a bundle of nerves, throwing up before every live performance he ever gave.

Peter knew he was HIV-positive at least eight years before he started to become ill. It was a rough waiting period, especially given that he had always been prone to hypochondria and convinced he was coming down with something. The family made hay out of Peter’s assertion one morning, when he woke up feeling a bit peaky, that he’d had a mild stroke. To this day, when one of them is under the weather, they’ll say, “Staying home today, I’ve had a mild stroke.”

In 1994, Peter brought Alan to a family gathering in celebration of his father’s seventieth birthday, which was highly unusual. Carolyn sensed that his tension was more generalized and soon learned that it was due to his declining health. He was recovering from a bout of pneumonia, but rallied to play Shylock in Manchester a few months later. He won an award for his performance, which was a high note to finish on, as it would be his last acting job.

In January of 1995, Peter was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which has symptoms similar to ALS. Carolyn visited him that March, when his body was beginning to shut down. She had to interpret the situation for her parents, pressing upon them the urgency to visit him. They were by his side when he died in July, having mustered the decency to be in the same room.

The year Carolyn turned forty-seven - the age Peter was when he died - she found herself reflecting on her brother’s life. He should have had decades ahead of him, but the years he had were good. He would have made the perfect “alte kaker.” He was already kind of a fussy old fogey, in a mostly charming way.

Toronto’s public libraries remain one of the last places where everyone is welcome to hang out undisturbed all day without spending a nickel. That openness makes them cultural spaces — and social ones, writes Mary Breen.

TORONTO PUBLIC LIBRARY

By Mary Fairhurst Breen, Contributor

Mary Fairhurst Breen is a Toronto writer, film maker and library worker.

I’m never without a book. I’m also a writer, and a cardigan carrying member of Toronto Public Library Workers Local 4948. I earn my bread-and-butter at the Toronto Reference Library — an architectural wonder I visited frequently as a high school student. After a long and circuitous career in the not-for-profit sector, I was hired as a page at the age of 58, when most employers considered me past due for renewal. Now I serve patrons at the desk and on the phone.

My earliest memory of the library involves getting ejected from one. I was a preschooler and had apparently been chatting through Storytime, so the librarian asked my mother to take me home. Expectations of small children were different in the 1960s. Today, libraries go out of their way not to eject anyone.

Libraries are often pictured as kids’ circles, cosy cardigans and cat’s eyeglasses, but there is much more going on. At the library, you can’t look away from the human cost of economic inequality. Yes, visits to the Toronto Public Library are up. Circulation and reference inquiries are on the rise, but so are poverty, homelessness and food insecurity. And while the city doesn’t track despair, I encounter enough of it to add it to that list.

Libraries have always been about knowledge. They are the place where in Grade 10, I listened to LPs of Shakespeare’s plays trying to grasp the language. Most of the turntables have been replaced by 3D printers and a treasure trove of other digital resources, but this fundamental role is unchanged.

Toronto’s public libraries remain one of the last places where everyone is welcome to hang out undisturbed all day without spending a nickel. That openness makes them cultural spaces — and social ones. As gaps widen elsewhere in the public safety net, the Toronto Public Library is constantly evolving to fill them. It now employs Library Safety Specialists to lend an ear and help de-escalate situations. Staff routinely save lives with naloxone. Reading rooms offer refuge.

It’s interesting to note that Andrew Carnegie, the “granddaddy of libraries,” was fine with economic disparity. He famously believed in an unfettered free market and argued that the rich should bear responsibility for uplifting their fellow citizens. He was disinclined to pay fair wages, preferring to use the vast profits he made as an employer to fund his vast philanthropic vision. He built thousands of libraries in Canada and the U.S., and he felt everyone should foster their own opportunities, just as he believed he had. His legacy is complicated.

According to a 2023 report by the Centre for Policy Alternatives, more than 80 per cent of Torontonians in both the lowest and the highest income brackets visit the library. In an increasingly polarized and antagonistic world, this statistic helps get me out of bed and onto the subway in the morning.

Libraries are sanctuaries for all kinds of people — those cramming for exams, those browsing the internet for big-bosomed ladies, those who object to the gender-neutral washrooms and those who depend on them.

Libraries also serve as sanctuaries for all kinds of ideas, including those that may offend some users.

My children’s book “Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism” is not only on library shelves, but the Canada Council sends me a welcome bit of money every February as part of its public lending rights program. It makes me prouder than any other fees I receive for my work. By contrast, this book has been boxed up and sent back to my Canadian publisher from libraries across the United States, thanks to a new wave of book bans and censorship.

We can’t know what Carnegie would have thought of all this, but libraries that still bear his name are actively involved in the freedom to read movement.

Libraries are also on the front lines of the fight against loneliness. People come to read the paper or use the computer even if they could do those things at home. Sometimes it’s obvious that the few words they speak to the staff at the desk might be the only ones they utter all day.

That need for connection extends beyond the buildings. Those who can’t easily get to a branch rely on the Toronto Public Library’s phone service. Some callers need a human search engine to look up free movie screenings — and summarize the plot of whatever is showing. Some want to argue or complain about something unrelated to whatever is causing them distress. And some just want to talk about that time they saw Santana before two members of the band split to form Journey.

With or without cardigans on, we listen.

Full article with photos available to Star subscribers or with your Toronto library card here.

Devin was very much a wanted baby. His mother Sandra had difficulty conceiving and was given a short window to make it happen after undergoing surgery for endometriosis. Happily, everything went according to plan. Caring for a newborn during a Winnipeg winter can be quite isolating, but Sandra would bundle up the baby and venture out. She and her husband had their parents nearby to help.

Sandra was back in Winnipeg after pursuing a PhD in Toronto, working as a sessional instructor while building her academic career. Her work was challenging and satisfying. Life was good when Devin was young. He was a quiet, sweet and easygoing kid. He enjoyed martial arts and stayed with it for several years. He deeply loved the family cats. When he was ten, his parents got him his own cat, Oliver, who was with him for the rest of his life. He relished time at Lake Winnipeg, and hours jumping on his backyard trampoline… the simple joys of childhood.

School was never a comfortable place for Devin. He didn’t get into any trouble, but he couldn’t wait to come straight home at the end of the day. As early as age nine, Devin was using the word “depression” to describe what he felt. He was assessed in grade four by several professionals who identified anxiety as an issue, but were unable to shed much more light on the situation or offer concrete advice. Devin would much later be diagnosed with ADD and a serious mood disorder.

Towards the end of grade nine, Devin was becoming more isolated, holing up alone to play the video games he enjoyed to excess, and becoming more fearful of stepping out into the world. In grade ten, he asked to move into auto mechanics vocational program, not because he had a keen interest in cars, but because he wanted to leave the daily grind of regular school. Much of this only became clear in retrospect, as Devin was very private.

Devin managed to graduate high school, a remarkable achievement. He was motivated to complete the requisite volunteer component at St. Amant, a residential program for developmentally disabled adults. He loved it there, ultimately putting in five hundred volunteer hours. His care and kindness had a huge impact on the residents, staff and other volunteers.

In his late teens, Devin experienced a major depression. By eighteen, there were psychotic episodes; it was hard to know what was organic and what might be drug-related, as he was self-medicating by this time with illegal substances. It was all impossibly confusing, but several signs pointed to schizophrenia. Devin entered an early psychosis prevention and intervention program which involved intensive treatment and medication. Sandra’s lifeline during that time was a nurse named Todd, who talked her through it as often as she needed.

The situation at home became untenable. Eventually, to protect their own mental health and marriage, Devin’s parents had to insist that he move out. They were able to pay for a nice apartment, so he wouldn’t have to live in the kind of unhealthy or unpleasant rentals his social assistance would cover.

Having not heard from him for a while, his worried parents went to check on him one winter day when Devin had just turned twenty-two. Their worst fear was realized. He was dead from a lethal combination of cocaine and opioids.

When Sandra contacted St. Amant to tell them the news, there was such an outpouring of emotion and support that the family ended up working with the program to create an outdoor sanctuary in Devin’s memory. The St. Amant Reflection and Connection Space has become a place of solace for Sandra too.

Sandra is active in advocacy and education. She does public speaking about her son, working to dispel myths about mental illness, substance use, and the relationship between the two. In an article for CBC Winnipeg, she wrote in 2023:

“Devin suffered from two potentially fatal diseases: schizophrenia and addiction. Both of these robbed him of the ability to live out his life. And while you may recognize schizophrenia as a disease, I suspect there are many out there who question whether addiction deserves that label. Until this tragic outcome, I was one of them, having had no prior exposure to it and a lot of bias. I thought it was a choice. Now I know better and see addiction for what it is: a chemical, brain-based compulsive disease. My son did not choose the path to addiction any more than he chose to become mentally ill.”

Attention East Coasters! Coming up in Halifax this month, animator Jessica Hiemstra has organized a screening of the We Were Here films.

There is a wonderful photograph of Bill Dendy at home in 1987, now housed in the Toronto Public Library’s Special Collections. The caption reads: “William Dendy’s favorite room has over 500 shelf-feet of books relating to architecture.”

Bill bequeathed 3,500 books, 2,500 issues of architectural and related periodicals and over 38,000 slides representing architecturally important structures and features to the University of Waterloo. The description of the collection states, “Documenting locales ranging from small communities to a detailed series depicting Toronto structures both past and present, the collection represents virtually a complete document of architecture in this country.”

The vast William Dendy archive is, I hope, proving an invaluable resource for architects, architectural historians, heritage conservationists and urban planners. His work was nowhere near done. In fact, he would have been at the peak of his career when he succumbed to AIDS at the age of forty-five. He was in the middle of a detailed study of domestic architecture in the Forest Hill neighbourhood of Toronto.

Bill was born in Edmonton, earned a Master’s degree in architectural history from Cambridge University, followed by a PhD from Columbia University in New York. He spent most of the 1970s in England and the US, but he loved his adopted city of Toronto. He worked as an architectural historian for the Toronto Historical Board and taught at the University of Toronto, Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (now Toronto Metropolitan University) and the Toronto Urban Studies Centre, as well as at the University of Waterloo and Carleton University in Ottawa. He was a consultant to many Toronto-based architectural firms, developers and government agencies, and also led architectural walking tours of Toronto.

Bill’s two published works, Lost Toronto (1978) and Toronto Observed: Its Architecture, Patrons, and History (1986), both won Toronto Book Awards. Bill intended his work to be a call to action. In the introduction to Lost Toronto, he wrote:

“Lost Toronto is not meant to be a depressing litany of destruction and loss. It is rather a filling-in of the gaps in our streets, of the blanks in our understanding of the city. Instead of ‘depressing,’ I would hope that it would be acutely ‘distressing’ for many readers - encouraging a vehement and committed argument in favour of preservation… It is to be hoped that Lost Toronto will make unnecessary an additional publication detailing the losses of the last quarter century.”

In 1993, he was awarded an honorary membership in the Ontario Association of Architects, and received an Allied Arts Award for his lectures and books on historical architecture.

One of his friends, Jim Tennyson, sums up his impact this way:

“Bill had that fierce light of conviction in his blue eyes. He wrote a study of the architectural gems Toronto had torn down. He was a charismatic protectionist for all things to do with city planning. His status at U of T meant his ideas had clout. I’m sure the downtown would be a more attractive place than it is at present had he not died in 1993.”

Jim remembers, “Like so many, he went fast. One week I was giggling with him at Hart House, the next someone was telling me he was sick.”

Activist, writer and historian Ed Jackson describes Bill as “tall, handsome, gregarious, energetic and passionate.” Their paths crossed when Ed was a researcher at OISE in the 1970s. He needed help with a survey of heritage buildings along Sherbourne St. north of Dundas, which Bill agreed to do willingly and for free. The buildings were saved, with low rise rent-geared-to-income apartments infilled behind them, designed by architect A.J. Diamond. It was a successful project that gave equal priority to preservation goals and urgent housing needs. In the decades since, Toronto has done a poor job at both.

The Toronto Star’s architecture columnist Christopher Hume honoured Bill as one of Canada’s most knowledgeable and committed architectural scholars, writing:

“The breadth of his knowledge was amazing. He was the kind of person a newspaper reporter could call with a specific question about a specific building - and get a specific answer…The underlying purpose of his scholarship was to make us cognizant of the facts of architectural life. In so doing, he believed, we would develop more sophisticated tastes and be less willing to settle for the built mediocrity that surrounds us.”

Housing expert Carolyn Whitzman, author of the 2024 book Home Truths, notes:

“I never met Bill Dendy personally but I have used Lost Toronto to summon stories of buildings, streetscapes and neighbourhoods that are now gone. Toronto is very good at erasing its past, along with any lessons the past may hold for the present and future.”

Have you always wanted to do something with your family photos, letters and ephemera? To somehow record the stories you’d like future generations to know? To give more thought to your own history in order to make sense of the present?

Putting together a family history from boxes full of stuff and a head full of jumbled memories can feel daunting. But the beauty is, you can start anywhere. One photo caption or anecdote at a time. I’ll help you take the first steps!

Registration details here.

That’s me and my chic mum.

Ben and his twin sister Sarah were raised in the affluent Dunbar neighbourhood of Vancouver. Their parents grew up in Trail, BC and got together when they were quite young. Their mum was one of ten kids in a proud Italian family, while their dad was an only child. As a result, their mum wanted fewer kids, so she could have a close relationship with each one, and their dad wanted more than one so they’d have a playmate. Their first child was born with a heart defect and died at seven months. The couple needed time to grieve, and then had some difficulty with fertility. When the twins came along, the entire extended family was thrilled.

The babies almost had different birthdays, as Sarah arrived shortly before midnight, eyes open and eager to greet the world. Ben had to be coaxed. Family lore includes the story of their conception - their parents were travelling that particularly month and diligently engaging in baby-making whether on a nice plush bed or a mat on someone’s floor. Their efforts paid off.

Both twins were high achievers, excelling in school, sports and music. Sarah describes their childhood in glowing terms. The two of them got along well and had close friends and a rich connection to their mum’s huge family. They spent time at an off-grid cabin where they had lots of freedom to roam. At the same time, there were high expectations placed on them, but Sarah says they thrived in this environment. Their parents were very loving, both with their kids and with each other.

Graeme remembers meeting Ben in grade one and being thrilled that this fun, athletic kid also had a deeply nerdy side and would happily spend hours playing Lego with him. In grade three, Ben moved on to a gifted class, but they stayed friends, bonding over Star Wars and video games, and were reunited in grade nine. Graeme says,

In high school, mystery of mysteries, he continued to hang out with me and my other unpopular friends. He was the best player on a very bad rugby team. He was an excellent soccer player. He downhill skied. He never sought the limelight but begrudgingly played piano and sang in our band, and joined the theatre club with us to take part in an awful production of The Crucible. We all had long hair but he was the only one who could pull it off.

Ben, Graeme and their crew had marvelous adventures riding around on their bikes with detours to the McDonald’s drive-thru, eating Sour Patch Kids at the movies until their mouths were raw, and learning to sail - or more often flip - tiny boats at Jericho Beach.

Ben and Sarah went through a huge upheaval when they were ten. Their mother got cancer and died two years later. After her diagnosis, she devoted the time she had to supporting her children. Sarah had matured quite early, and was able to fully engage in those final months of mother-daughter talks, and even to start the grieving process with her mum to guide her. Ben wasn’t quite in the same emotional place, and was slower to process what happened. Both kids remained high functioning, and watched their father take care of all the pragmatic responsibilities of family life. But the effects of their loss naturally lingered.

Their dad John moved on soon afterwards, remarrying after six months. It was too soon for the twins, and their grief was compounded when, three years later, the family home was torn down to build a bigger one that would accommodate their merged family, including two step-children, a few years younger than the twins. He sold the beloved family cabin to help finance this undertaking. He was trying to do right by everyone, and create an investment for the children’s future, but Ben and Sarah felt upended, further removed from the memories and places that anchored them.

Ben went to UBC with members of his childhood cohort. Graeme told this story at his funeral:

In our second year of university, Ben took the first semester off to take up smoking, skateboarding, and working at American Apparel. He was really cool. That year he got very excited for Halloween, and he worked on his costume for weeks.

Because Ben took up skateboarding, I tried to as well. I was not good. So I hop on my skateboard with a beer bottle in hand, only to make it about a half-block before I fly off and manage to fall onto the beer bottle, shattering it with my arm. I show up and someone’s dad opens the door. “I need help,” I say, bleeding all over the porch. All he says is, “Have you been drinking?”

But then Ben appears, in the most amazing Wolverine costume you can possibly imagine. Completely homemade with pieces cribbed from the backroom of the American Apparel on Granville. Ben takes charge. There is no question of missing the party. Dressed as Wolverine, he takes me in my bloodied spotted owl costume to Shoppers Drug Mart, and grabs first aid supplies. We get to the party and he bandages me up in the bathroom. And then we have a great evening.

The next morning, I go to the hospital. The doctor who finally sees me says, “It’s too late for stitches, you’ll have these scars for life. But whoever bandaged these wounds did a hell of a job.” I’m so thankful for these scars.

Ben got into cannabis as a young teen. Towards the end of his undergrad degree, everything came to a head. He had a painful break-up and went travelling, but was clearly not himself. He seemed to have lost his footing. Sarah went through a shake-up in her twenties as well - albeit a healthier one - rejecting some of the pressures and priorities she’d grown up with and taking time to explore alternative ways of living before landing on a new career in Haida Gwaii.

Ben found his way back to university, starting a Master’s and doing meaningful work in health, including AIDS research, but he couldn’t quite find a comfortable fit anywhere. Being the smartest one in most rooms, he didn’t always take kindly to being supervised. One of his friends coined the term “Bensplaining” to describe his tendency to interject with more complete or correct information during conversations.

Ben loved being around people and partied hard. He pushed boundaries and was up for anything. Frequent visits to the emergency room ensued. His roommate raised the alarm about Ben’s cocaine use, and the family intervened to help, but his drug dependence ultimately became more dangerous. He started using intravenously and turned to fentanyl. Ben’s behaviour could be erratic and manic, but it was hard to know whether the underlying cause was addiction or a different mental illness.

For more than ten years, Ben lived in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. He built meaningful connections, working as a peer researcher for the Ribbon Community (formerly AIDS Vancouver) and organizations involved in harm reduction. A video called What’s in My Drugs, produced by the BC Centre on Substance Use is dedicated, “In loving memory of Ben Stevenson.”

He always welcomed communication with his family and friends, though they often had to go look for him on the streets. There were get-togethers for birthdays and holidays. John and Catherine, Ben’s step-mom, checked up on him regularly, bringing care packages and going for coffee dates, playing frisbee golf, or strolling the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood with him. It was harder for some family members than others to accept Ben’s situation. Like many parents, John held onto the hope that he would get better and fulfil the hopes he’d always had for his son.

Graeme left Vancouver after his undergrad degree but returned in 2015 and was glad to be near Ben again. They saw each other often, even when Ben’s deteriorating health made things rocky. Reflecting on who Ben was and what he meant to his longtime friends, Graeme says,

He had the kindest, gentlest, most beautiful soul. He had this incredible magnetism - a combination of joie de vivre and sweet tenderness. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was that even when he was hurting so badly, he was always driven by his desire to help others. He was a brother to me, and I loved him very much.

Sarah worked hard to understand Ben’s world and accept the reality of her brother’s life, but was also acutely aware that there is often only one exit from fentanyl. As had been the case with her mother, Sarah had some capacity to grieve in advance of Ben’s death. After Ben died, she shed the relationships and patterns that didn’t serve her, as so many of us do after a traumatic loss. There can be a kind of bitter beauty in that process, and even a sense of gratitude towards the person whose absence quite starkly clarifies what matters most.

When Dakota came out in the 1980s, he was in his early twenties and living in Ottawa. Much of the nightlife happened across the Ottawa River in Hull (now Gatineau), Quebec. One night, a co-worker at the hotel where he worked invited him to a spot across the bridge, where he remembers seeing a dance floor full of only men, “moving their butts to Donna Summer’s Love to Love You – I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Dakota soon discovered that, “There were lots of gay-friendly clubs in Hull. The discos would spin their tunes and serve alcohol until 3:00, while on the Ontario side, bars would close at 1:00. So, there was a very entrenched thing in Ottawa that people would go to the bars and drink until 1:00 and then drive across the bridge and carry on.”

Dakota was promoted by the hotel and transferred to Whistler, BC. After a year, he moved to Vancouver, where he was amazed to discover not just a handful of gay bars, but fourteen! It was what he imagined San Francisco to be like. The bathhouse scene was also thriving. Dakota met his first long-term partner at a bathhouse. He remembers the awkwardness of being asked by parents or straight friends, “Oh, where did you guys meet?” You’d have to say, “Um…We met at the gym.” In the pre-Internet days, bathhouses or bars were really the only places to meet men. And they were where real community connections formed, in the absence of more mainstream queer spaces.

Photo courtesy of BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, City of Vancouver Archives

By the middle of 1985, Dakota and his partner André were starting to hear rumours and read about the mysterious illness killing gay men. As soon as testing became available, they learned that they were both HIV-positive. Dakota says their strategy was, “Well, let’s just keep living our lives and not make any changes until we need to.” They had heard that symptoms might remain at bay for ten years, so when André started getting sick in 1989, they felt cheated. André had to stop working and Dakota moved from hospitality to a job in insurance, where he’d have at least some paid sick leave, even if he couldn’t get his own life insurance policy due to his HIV status.

Before long, it became impossible for Dakota to care for André on his own. His physical symptoms could be severe, but his increasing dementia was the challenge that proved untenable. He was no longer himself, behaving erratically and becoming reckless with money. Friends took him in, but couldn’t cope either. André’s mother took him home with her to Montreal, where he soon died in palliative care. It was a harrowing end to their relationship.

Dakota had joined an organization called Positive Living, where everyone could talk openly and vent about the medications that often caused worse symptoms than those they were intended to treat. Dakota says, “The disease and the drugs and the pharmaceutical companies, they were all finding their way. And there were no answers.”

A couple of years after André’s death, Dakota received a package in the mail.

“I start opening it and there – oh my god, it was André’s ashes. His mother sent them without telling me. So he came back to me in a box. He told me before he got dementia that if he ever were to die - of AIDS - he wanted his ashes spread at the Southlands Riding Club down in the horsey part of Vancouver. He used to be an equestrian long before I met him and he loved horses. So, I went down under the cover of night, ‘cause it’s illegal to spread ashes on private property (and public property for that matter). I spread his ashes all around the riding circle. I was able to have closure with it all and then move on, so I felt lucky for that experience.”

In 1991, Dakota met Robert, who had spent a year coming to terms with his HIV-positive status by living in a log cabin near Squamish, developing healthy habits which Dakota gratefully embraced. They moved to Robert’s childhood home and undertook its renovation. They were in their early thirties. Before long, they both started feeling a bit unwell - nothing specific, but just run down. Sensing that their time was limited, they took a few cruises and hosted lots of dinner parties. They had three great years before Robert started wasting away - becoming thinner and weaker until he died in 1996.

Dakota had spotted his first Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion some months before Robert’s death. Suddenly they were everywhere, including in his throat, causing trouble swallowing. He underwent treatment, travelling back and forth between the cancer centre and the hospital where Robert lay dying. He describes it like this: “The chemo and the radiation were external treatments that were like throwing a thimble of water on a forest fire. Something would shrink and a week later it would be back.”

Our confidence may have been shaken when Covid stopped normal human activity for a while, but it’s hard for people who didn’t live through the beginning of the AIDS crisis to fathom just how helpless and furious people felt. Not just patients like Dakota, but doctors too. In his autobiography about practicing medicine in the 1980s in rural Tennessee, Dr. Abraham Verghese (now also an acclaimed novelist), writes, “Seven years into the epidemic, four years after the virus that causes AIDS was discovered, two years after I saw my first HIV-infected patient… I still had no treatment to offer. Hand-holding, counseling, moral support, platitudes, bromides, prognostications, homilies. But I had nothing in the way of a remedy.”

Dakota had entered palliative care, anticipating that his cancer would be terminal, when a doctor came around and told him about some new medications, not yet widely available, that seemed to be suppressing the virus much better than AZT alone had ever done. Dakota started on a combination of the earliest versions of Crixivan, Stavudine and Lamivudine. They were very rough on the body. But they worked. Within a week, the cancer treatments that had seemed futile started having an effect. The doctor said, “You might make it.”

Dakota’s parents had come from Ottawa for Robert’s funeral and took him back with them to recuperate for a year. He reflects, “As a thirty-eight-year-old grown man, I moved back in with my parents, which was a wonderful thing for me to do. You know, Mom’s home cooking, and not having any responsibilities or worries really helped me heal. I started exercising and I gained twenty pounds. From being really sick, it took a while for me to come into my full health. In ’98, I returned to Vancouver and started a completely different life.”

In the worst years of his partners’ illnesses and his own, Dakota had felt like he was barely keeping his head above water. He had no energy for marches and protests. But he did benefit from peer support within the HIV community, and when he resettled in Vancouver, he found his purpose as a volunteer, facilitating similar kinds of groups. During the decades before HIV became undetectable with treatment or untransmittable with PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), Dakota describes many gay men he met as “living their stigma,” feeling frustrated and bitter about their situation.

And yet there he was, someone who had come back from the brink - the brink of death and the brink of hopelessness after losing two partners and countless friends. He married an HIV-negative man, remained close with his family and became strong in spirit as well as in body. Dakota reflects that an HIV diagnosis today just means taking some pills alone in your bathroom. There isn’t the need for support that was so crucial thirty or forty years ago. And that comes at a cost.

Photo courtesy of BC Gay and Lesbian Archives, City of Vancouver Archives

Nobody would choose to go through what Dakota did, yet he’s quick to state that he wouldn’t want to be a young man now and that he’s grateful for the path he wound up taking. With loneliness and isolation proving such a social scourge and health risk today, he observes: “This AIDS community has been my life for twenty plus years. I mean, this is the community I walk in… the community of my volunteerism, of my leadership, of my support, of being supported. I feel a connection to everybody that has been a part of this community.”

Miranda couldn’t help but observe that Mike seemed to find any excuse to pop into her office and chat. She was in a new job with a Vancouver film production company, where he was employed as a driver. She was immediately drawn to him, appreciating how easily he put people at ease, and how attentively he listened to her. For their first date, he got them tickets to see the Canucks, Miranda’s first hockey game. She had recently arrived from Australia. Mike was originally from Toronto (and a diehard Leafs fan).

Miranda enjoyed how appreciative he was of little things she did for him. She noticed that he saved notes and keepsakes from their early days together.

By moving to Canada, Miranda’s plan was to get a foot in the door as a screenwriter, then make her way to LA. Events conspired against that, starting when the US cancelled the green card program that would have allowed her to work there. She and Mike had talked about getting married to allow him to move with her, but the disruption in their emigration plan didn’t change that. He proposed on a beautiful winter day at Wreck Beach.

A month later, everything shut down due to Covid, so they ended up with a seaside Zoom wedding in April 2020, dressed in bride and groom hoodies. There were only six people on the beach, with their friends and families watching from multiple time zones. One advantage of the digital ceremony is that Miranda has footage of the beautiful toast Mike gave.

“It started raining on me this morning while I was running, but we stuck with the plan, and sure enough, it’s a beautiful almost cloudless day out here. We’re in some pretty scary times right now with this virus, but it got me thinking about just staying the course and taking care of those you love. The sun will always come out. Mazel tov!”

Their honeymoon period - and in fact their entire marriage - was spent in lockdown, both of them out of work while film production was on hiatus. It was a strange but precious time when they could focus on one another. There was lots of hiking and paddleboarding for their physical and mental health. Mike tinkered with his motorcycle, customizing it and fawning over it to the point they often joked he loved the motorcycle more than Miranda. He dabbled in photography and made YouTube videos where he interviewed people he found interesting. He DJ’d for an audience of one: his new wife.

In an effort to replace some of their lost income, Mike took up day trading, which may have been too close to gambling to be safe for someone in recovery from addiction. Miranda knew that drug dependence had been part of Mike’s past, but he assured her that it was no longer an issue. On the day he died, he had made some trades that lost money, which Miranda believes may have triggered his relapse.

Miranda was completely shocked to find his body in their washroom, and couldn’t imagine what had caused his death until the police surveyed the scene and explained that evidence pointed to drug use. She has to constantly remind herself to accept what she didn’t know at the time. Immediately afterwards, she felt like she was on the world’s worst scavenger hunt, trying to piece together his history with addiction and come to some kind of understanding about what Mike might have been going through. She learned he had been on suboxone (a harm reduction medication) but weaned himself off it, perhaps at the wrong time, given the ensuing stress brought on by the Covid pandemic.

Miranda is still writing in various forms but is no longer attracted to the hectic life of a Hollywood film career. She facilitates a grief support group for people who have lost a partner to a drug-related death. She has also started a website and newsletter, where she shares her experiences as a young widow. In 2025, a personal essay she submitted to the Canadian Nonfiction Collective took third prize in a national competition. She explains her purpose in putting her writing out into the world:

When I was 35 my beloved husband died from an unregulated toxic drug supply. It altered everything irrevocably. I found myself dealing with a traumatic loss that affected everything in my mind, body and soul in a world that didn’t understand.

I share my grief experience and some of the hard-earned truths I’ve discovered along the way. If you’ve lost someone, I’m sorry, and I hope this helps you to feel seen. If you want to support someone who’s grieving, welcome, they really need you. And I also hope to reduce some of the stigma around substance use related deaths.

With a bonus cancer diagnosis and treatment thrown in the mix to keep me on my toes – as if I didn’t already know how precious life is – I persist. Thriving? Not quite. But despite having fear and anxiety as my constant companions, I remain cautiously optimistic enough to buy tea bags in bulk and endeavour to have a meaningful life.

Miranda writes thoughtfully about the dark side of “bright-siding” and the importance of letting anger and sadness be. She shares some things that have helped her, like tending the rare orchid Mike bought her, and indulging in the occasional ugly cry among some non-judgemental trees and rocks. She also explores questions about what happens after death, taking comfort in the principle of physics that says a person’s energy can never be destroyed. Miranda introduced me to this magnificent quote from writer Aaron Freedman:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

Storylinks took it further, allowing literacy groups to collect stories and turn them into a travelling exhibit. Then it became its own freestanding little nonprofit group, and I was its staff for the four years until funding suddenly stopped - four of the best years of my working life. I got to visit literacy groups all over Ontario to help them use oral history in innovative ways that also integrated seamlessly into the creation of literacy learning materials. Several booklets of oral histories were published not only for adults working on their reading skills, but for a wide audience of readers at any level. They had artistic and historical value as well. They all went to reside at Alpha Ontario, a special library branch for literacy resources that fell victim to Mike Harris’ right wing crackdown on everything that mattered, closing in 1998. I don’t know where they might be now.

But while the money flowed, I also got to partner with the Canadian Museums Association on a program called Reading the Museum. I still remember the guy in charge calling Storylinks when I was just about to go on mat leave in 1992 to invite me to be the trainer for this program, which would pair literacy programs with museums across Canada to do the most amazing things. A Dene group developed a play that was performed at the Prince of Wales Heritage Centre in Yellowknife - a first, not surprisingly. Participants in a rural literacy program served as consultants to a heritage site, redesigning the signage for an outdoor display so that both the content and wayfinding were much clearer. I went to communities in every province and territory except the Yukon and Nunavut (which didn’t exisit yet). The baby I had at the outset of this initiative came along with me for the first year because I was her food source. I led workshops with her strapped to me and nobody minded.

Museums have become much better about equity, diversity and inclusion over the years, but back then, this was hugely innovative. In workshops for museum professionals, I would get them to assess the reading level of some of their exhibit and promotional materials. They would be embarrassed to discover that they were catering to an audience of only the university-educated, ignoring 60% of the communities they served. And they were failing to tell the stories of a much bigger swath of the population than that.

I didn’t leave oral history entirely after Storylinks folded. I got to be the director of a labour museum that used a lot of the same principles. But it wasn’t until I worked on Pride and Persistence: Stories of Queer Activism, that I really dived back in. I interviewed over a dozen people and wrote up their stories for a book geared towards middle-grade readers. It was so much fun. I had the oral history bug back, so my next project, We Were Here, is rooted in the collection of memories as well. A harder journey, but an invaluable one.

I teach workshops on this. I know that putting together a family history from boxes full of ephemera and a head full of jumbled memories can feel daunting. But the beauty is, you can start anywhere. Captioning photos is a great first step, before the stories of the people in the pictures are forgotten. I made my first granddaughter a simple photo story book that starts with her parents the year they met and travels back in time on my side of the family to the generation that first came to Canada in the early 1900s. I hope she’ll enjoy seeing how phenomenally alike her mother looks to my mother and grandmother. We seem to have strong genes, so she may grow into the family face herself.

If any of you, dear readers, need some help getting started or even want someone (me) to work on an oral history project for you, just shout!

The story of Rachel’s birth has always been a family favourite. At a regularly scheduled appointment, Heather’s doctor advised her to nab her husband and dash to the hospital, as her baby was arriving imminently. Heather had not felt so much as a twinge. They rushed to the local hospital, where Heather was told to sit tight because they had to make way for an emergency patient coming in. So she sat waiting until her doctor burst through the door and said, “What are you doing here? Let’s go!” Heather was the emergency patient. Rachel arrived thirty minutes later. Heather’s boss joked that she didn’t need to take mat leave, just her regular lunch hour.

Rachel’s older sister Taylor had arrived two years earlier after a more traditional twelve-hour labour. The two girls were complete opposites but adored each other. Taylor was very vocal and extroverted, Rachel was quiet and reserved. She idolized her sister. They did all the classics together as little kids: skating, swimming, Brownies. As teens, their interests diverged. Taylor (below right) was all about language, while Rachel (below left) was keen on facts and figures.

Rachel also had a creative side, with a talent for music. She practiced where nobody could hear her, becoming proficient in trumpet, oboe and guitar. Although she didn’t enjoy attention, she lit up while performing in school concerts. She put herself out on a limb by trying improv, but ultimately preferred being backstage doing tech and lights.

Rachel excelled in school, but hated it all the way through. She was exceptionally shy. She was also very private. Despite its overwhelming popularity among teens, social media was anathema to her. She didn’t like having her picture taken, much less posting it online.

In high school, Rachel experienced depression and anxiety and sought treatment, though she didn’t tolerate the medication prescribed to her. She also tried therapy, but due to the counsellor’s workload, Rachel was only able to see her every 4-6 weeks, which proved too sporadic to be helpful.

She pushed on, fulfilling all her high school requirements six months early. Then she spent an extra term taking additional courses to improve her odds of getting into a top university for computer sciences. She chose the University of Alberta in Edmonton and went off to her first year, living in residence. Without offering a lot of detail, she reported to her parents that she was enjoying university life.

Rachel had a very specific and clear plan for herself. She loved drawing as well as all things STEM, so she was going to start her own business developing animation software and employ other talented computer geeks. Her sister pursued an English degree, and the two would joke that Rachel would have to bankroll Taylor’s literature habit.

Despite her intense shyness, Rachel was always willing to speak up for others and would approach strangers on the street to offer help. Taylor says she learned compassion from her sister and makes a point of living by her example.

Rachel came home for the Christmas break in December 2018, and the family did all the usual holiday things. There was nothing about Rachel’s behaviour or mood to cause concern, though she was a bit preoccupied by a make-up exam she had to write when she returned to campus. When her family saw her off at the airport after New Year’s, they had no idea it would be for the last time.

Heather had a long phone conversation with her daughter on a Friday in early February. They talked about what they’d do during a visit over Reading Week. They had a lengthy debate about whether Rachel should see about having her teeth straightened by an orthodontist in Edmonton or back in Regina. It was a conversation extraordinary in its ordinariness. Then Heather’s messages went unanswered over the weekend and into Monday. By Tuesday, she was frantic and called the dorm, asking someone to check on Rachel. Hours passed. Then four Regina police officers came to the door to report that Rachel had been found dead in her room.

Everything was a blur for a long time after the initial shock. Months later, the coroner’s report showed that Rachel had a lethal amount of fentanyl in her system and some evidence of previous drug consumption, but there was insufficient information to draw any conclusions about a history of substance use. Rachel left no clues. Her parents can only guess that she was self-medicating to ease her stress, and have had to accept that they’ll never really know what happened to their brilliant, ambitious daughter.

Since Rachel’s death, her family has honoured her in various ways, usually around her birthday in October. One year, they held a fundraiser in partnership with a local restaurant, raising over $3,000 for Canada Learning Code, to help support other computer scientists with their training. Taylor has published a book of poetry dedicated to her sister. Heather has had the courage to speak to the media and accompanied her MP to the House of Commons to address the opioid crisis last year. You can watch her interview on CBC News prior to the most recent federal election. What stands out for me is Heather’s point that we all lose when these young people aren’t here to contribute their unique talents to the world.

I wish I had more to say about what I’m working on, but I’m waiting for inspiration to strike (or another arts grant, whichever comes first). I’m planning to wrap up the We Were Here project with the completion and online publication of the stories I’ve been working on about gay men who died of AIDS a generation ago. I’m also waiting, as a writer always is, for a magazine publisher to say yes to one of the stories I’ve submitted about young people who died of opioids (stories from outside Ontario that didn’t become part of the film series). Pending a bit more funding, I’d like to assemble the people I interviewed for a conversation about the highly charged grief of both health crises. And I’d like to make a video of that conversation for the historical record. And then I might finally be done writing about illness and death. But I’ve said that before…

I’m treading lightly into 2026 for a bunch of reasons. One, it feels like the world is full of landmines. Every day feels more dangerous and ominous than the one before. Two, I can’t physically tread with any energy or enthusiasm because arthritis has taken over my joints. Managing pain has become nearly a full-time preoccupation. When I’m not doing my exercises or lying on ice, distraction is more realistic than creativity right now. This is the scene much of each day:

I’ve read some really good books while on my small couch with my large dog. I wouldn’t remember any of their titles but for the magic of Toronto Public Library’s borrowing history tab. These would probably be my top 10 of 2025:

• North Woods, Daniel Mason

• The Riveter, Jack Wang

• Pick a Colour, Souvankham ThammavoAngsa

• The Trial of Katterfelto, Michael Redhill

• The Adversary, Michael Crummy

• Happy Land, Dolan Perkins-Valdez

• A Different Hurricaine, H. Nigel Thomas

• Curiosities, Anne Fleming

• Our Evenings, Alan Hollinghurst

• Greta and Valdin, Rebecca Reilly

And now I’m loving Alison Bechdel’s new graphic novel, Spent, if for no other reason than one of the more nefarious characters is called Cedilla Umlaut. It’s about aging and ethics, and gently mocks Alison’s younger earnestness in ways I thoroughly enjoy.

I don’t have any streaming services, but over the holidays I just about scorched my eyeballs taking advantage of my daughter’s TV to catch up on The Guilded Age, Only Murders in the Building, A Man on the Inside and of course Heated Rivalry. Despite my total lack of interest in hockey or shirtless men, it gave me all the feels. Are we saying “all the feels” anymore, or just “six-seven?” I can’t keep up.

Wishing you small pleasures,

Mary

When I was holed up in a funny old converted classroom at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island in August 2024, I had no idea the stories I was writing were going to become a series of animated shorts that would screen at film festivals - much less win some awards. I just said to the kind and talented Jessica Hiemstra, “I feel like these stories need to be videos somehow.” Jessica figured out the somehow and it was perfect.

The series won a lovely Legacy Light Award from Web Series Canada in September, where Lucy Silversides was also nominated for Best Editing and Eve Goldberg for Best Original Score. What a dream team! Then Sophie’s film won Best Documentary at the Voices Rising International Film Festival in New York. And now it’s won an Award of Distinction from Canada Shorts - the Canadian and International Short Film Festival. What these awards mean to me is that the lives of our children mattered. And that’s what I wanted to say.

When I was in New York for Voices Rising, I had a chance to see some wonderful work. I’m not a film buff, really. I rarely get to see shorts, but now a whole new world of art has opened up to me! I wanted to share a couple of real gems here.

The first is called The Last Words and won Best Student Film at Voices Rising. It was made by a couple of high school students, who were just delightful to meet and are just getting started. It opens with real news clips about book bans all over the U.S. then fast forwards 15 years to a high school where kids are urged to rat each other out for possessing or reading books. One intrepid reader is part of the underground and we see her defying authority to share the written word.

The second is part of a much bigger community oral history project based in Brooklyn called Stoop Stories, which reminds me of the kind of work I was very happily doing back in the early 1990s when stuff was funded. I saw the short called Maani and Mr. Sweat, in which a teenager talks to an older neighbour about life as Black men, the choices that have to be made as adults, their wonderful community of Bed-Stuy, and the simple pleasure of stoop ball. Check it out.

For those of you in Toronto, a reminder that this Saturday, December 6 from 2 - 5 I’m hosting a cozy little home craft show/sale/social. Email for address.

I’ll be selling the embroideries I can’t seem to stop making. Melissa McColl, who worked and taught at Wise Daughters and then shared the space with her own yarn and jewellery supply business, will be selling the gorgeous paintings she’s been doing in recent years. Anna Redish (Art with Anna) will be selling art journals, travel journals and art journaling kits, perfect for anyone on your list who loves to create or might welcome a little nudge to put some marks on paper using pen, paint and collage. Anna teaches art journaling, so you could even gift someone a class to go with their supplies.

But wait, there’s more!

No matter where you’re reading this from, I can assist with your holiday shopping by alerting you to these beautiful offerings from Jessica Heimstra, the artist who animated the We Were Here videos. Jessica has made prints of the pen-and-ink drawings she used, and has put together a beautiful calendar honouring the 11 young people featured in the series. A portion of sales will go to support Street Health in Toronto, which is overwhelmed by the need for harm reduction services since the closure of so many sites. Order here by November 30 for holiday delivery.

Finally, a few New York tidbits…

I was in Brooklyn last weekend for the screening of Sophie’s film - the first in the We Were Here series (now available online). Unfortunately, my daughter and I got stranded by the aviation mess caused by the federal shutdown, and had to take a very long train ride to get back to Toronto a day later than planned. But before that snafu, I enjoyed meeting the other film makers at Voices Rising, walking around Brooklyn, catching a fabulous Broadway show about women’s lib, seeing Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party for the first time in over 40 years (I fell in love with it when it was at the AGO in the 70s and always remembered the plate dedicated to Sophia, goddess of wisdom), and of course chowing down on some street pizza (also iconic NY bagels and cheesecake).

Thanks for supporting this newsletter!

Mary