Canada Day, 2022

A timely prompt allowed me to process how I spent my Canada Day.

Hop-on, hop-off

I think of that day every time I ride the LRT and remember those conversations when I walk through a station. I notice what would probably be only a blur if we hadn’t taken that time to be curious, if each piece was not now invested with the memory of the voices of friends.

Order

This piece is the result of the final prompt in the final workshop of a series I recently facilitated on the craft of description. The prompt had us first choose a mundane object from the rooms we were writing in, then describe an emotion as if it were that object.

Frozen bread

Another short piece from my workshop series about describing action. The prompt was related to pacing and using sentence length to alter the pacing of action.

Moth

From a craft prompt focused on describing places, this emerged...

Miss Patty

From my own writing prompt about describing people, a dance teacher came to mind even though I haven't thought of her for decades.

5 minutes in a carwash thinking about love

It's National Poetry Month #NPM22 and the theme is #intimacy, which also happens to be my personal Word of the Year! This is a playful new poem a friend suggested fits the theme.

We dreamed

When I was small, I dreamed in greyscale...

Sex is a French crepe

Ah, the power of poetry: to explore a simple image or metaphor and discover a whole world in there...

Hexagram 63: Water Over Fire

I read this piece at the WCC Ottawa Spoken Word Cafe recently. It's a poem from one of my own prompts. I've been playing with the Yi Ching as a tool for writing inspiration and when I threw hexagram 63, this poem came forth...

Two legs and a bum

It's interesting to observe the unconscious mind, to see where a random suggestion or starting point can take you once the words start to flow.

The Lamp

A simple object became the entry point for a poem about the luxury of words.