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On one warm summer day, the heat was stifling in University Station. As always, I waited, poised, coiled like a spring. When the tones chimed, I would be ready to strike.
I was relieved when we got paged out for a call.
I hit the bay door switch, Fletch started the truck and I jumped in. He hit the lights and siren and we took off. The siren’s wails echoed off the apartment blocks and office towers. Our rig’s lights reflected in the windows of the shops at street level.
I wrote the book in the ‘gritty realism’ style. That’s intentional, I want my readers to feel, see, smell and touch – everything that the main character, Steve Lewis, does. I want them trudging to calls in his work boots. Though it’s fiction, Shoebox is loosely based on calls I did or ones my crew mates were involved in.
Margo LaPierre’s Ajar is a poignant collection on LaPierre’s experience with bipolar disorder 1 with psychotic features. This collection is not one that shies away from harsh realities of Madness; instead LaPierre reclaims and makes real the Mad self with tender honesty. Ajar is an account of “what it is to have [LaPierre’s] body” and how the ill self cannot be separate from the “well” self.
My non-clinical academic interests and research have been in medication safety for nearly 30 years now. In 1998 I witnessed a fatal medication error that significantly impacted all involved. In 2011, I set up the first Medication Safety Program at SickKids hospital with a particular focus on reducing harm caused by opioid errors and accidental tenfold overdosing.
I discovered my love of swimming in 2019. One of my best friends had just died, and I was searching for escapism—away from screens, away from work, and, in some ways, away from my own body. The weightlessness of being submerged in the public pool eased my angst and softened the tension and grief in my neck and shoulders. The quiet beneath the water cleared my mind. The rhythm I could build toward, channel, and disrupt brought me a sense of control and steadiness. Stripping down my body and taking a warm shower before and after felt reverent. Small talk with strangers—those quiet good mornings in the lobby and the lanes—became part of the day’s calm order. The pool, like the poem, became a place of repetition, refining, and resistance.
In her debut novel, A Mouth Full of Salt (Invisible Publishing 2025), author, physician, and filmmaker Reem Gaafar inspires readers to study some of the complex history between Sudan and South Sudan. Gaafar’s novel zigzags along the fringes of western science and cultural belief; contemplates how the Nile gives but also takes away; and challenges how formal education compares with life experience. Gaafar moderates these intersections with sensitivity and care.
The Ark loomed before her now, a green monolith in a sea of white, like a land mass all its own that by its sheer size was able to alter the course of the storm. Martha watched the snow sweep up onto the wide plane of its sprawling roof, slide in wide swaths along the incline until it crested over the peak in swirls and eddies, sifted down the far side to cascade gently over the edge, settle along the wall in a long line white.
It is a cool spring morning, and a boy and a girl are running, breathless and laughing, in ragged circles around their backyard. The girl gallops clumsily, just out of reach of the bigger boy’s grasp. The two-storey house behind them is faded white clapboard, the paint chipped and peeling at the edges. An old shed crouches at its flank, its low roof sagging beneath the weight of tree droppings and decades-long neglect. The sun shines through smudged clouds onto the damp grass. They are both barefoot, and their heels and toes are numb. The tips of fungi tendrils, intertwined in the grass roots and searching upward from dark earth, touch their soles.
We love live literary events. Festivals, reading series, bookstore book launches: we are just about always game for a good ol’ bibliofest. We also know that many of these events operate by the mercy of grants, volunteers, and long, hard, and often thankless hours. No one who loves books and literature should take these vital initiatives for granted. Not only do authors often depend on them to create more awareness for their work, but our culture depends on them to keep the literary arts vibrant. That’s why we reached out to one of of favourite downtown Toronto reading series, Brockton Writers, and asked them to be a guest this month on our Power Q & A series.
The four subversives dug into their backpacks with nervous, twitching fingers. They unzipped the vinyl and openedthe lunchboxes fully to allow themselves full range ofmovement. A pair of nitrile gloves was balled up at the bottom of each of their floppy packs. With as little motion as they could manage, they pulled them over their fingers and up to their wrists.
This past May, I turned sixty-five. Pearl, my beloved, asked what I wanted for my birthday. When she turned sixty-five, she wanted a party. I booked a local venue and chef, put together a 1970s top-ten playlist, and a birth-to-sixty-five video to the tune of “What I Like About You,” by the Romantics. It was a blast.
Me? I wanted a casket. I had stumbled on the Fiddlehead Casket Kits website. “Build your own pine casket in under 30 minutes with this handcrafted casket kit,” it said, “delivered directly to your door.”
I told Pearl, “I want a casket for my birthday.”
Lily released the arm of Mr. Johnstone and turned to look at Coffin. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I’m Theodora Bow, here with the travelling show. Colleen Bawn? Perhaps you’ve seen it?”
Coffin, grinning now, said, “You can certainly act. But you can’t lie about those violet eyes of yours, can you?”
Lily rested her hand on Johnstone’s arm to bring him along with her as she took a few steps towards Coffin. She sighed and said, “Sir, you really are confused,” and then smiling patiently turned to Mr. Johnstone and said, “Mr. Johnstone, what colour are my eyes?”
It is maybe odd to only write about where I live — all four of my novels are set in and around Cobalt, and most of my musings & reflections are also generated from this landscape. Odd maybe, but I feel a sense of the imperative to pay attention to the land I inhabit. Scrappy and used up as it is, and still showing the scars of short-lived but hyper-industrial activity, it is a place worth seeing, as in discovering the minutiae, the magic, the vulnerabilities, and the joy, in and of and around this place that I inhabit. It seems to me now obvious, though I wish I had seen it sooner in my life, that any hope we have of being better, of finding a way of being in the world that is non-destructive, lies in seeking atonement from the land we inhabit, its creatures and beings, wherever that happens to find us.
