I did read a bit last year. Ok, I read a LOT last year, but a good chunk of it was for my duties on the Sunburst Award jury.  Much of that reading was pleasurable (if you need something new, just check out the winners and finalists) but it was still a massive number of […]

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One of the not-to-be-missed events of the year is the annual ChiSeries Christmas bash.  This year, the theme was “Putting the X in Xmas” and included some incredible contributions, including: Madeline Ashby doing a biblical rendition of “Go the Fuck to Sleep” David Demchuk, very dapper,  traumatizing us for for life with the story of […]

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So last February, after a year of saying “I think I’d like to do that”, I signed up for an introductory flamenco dance class at a local studio.  When the option came to do another four weeks with the same class, I signed up for that too. And then one more time.  I wasn’t really good […]

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I try to do something during Nanowrimo each year.  Not write a novel, of course. That would just be silly. This year’s goal was 10,000 words and I managed it by writing enough each day I was off work to keep me up with my target word counts.  I built a spreadsheet for that because that’s […]

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One of the advantages of living in a city that Guillermo Del Toro likes to shoot movies in AND that possesses a major art gallery is that you get to see the incredible exhibit “At Home With Monsters” (currently running at the AGO). In fact, in our case, we got to see it twice. I’d go […]

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We had a gorgeous week in September at a cottage in Haliburton, Ontario (essentially the best week of the entire summer). One of the rituals of the cottage holiday and our more extensive travels is the acquisition of the latest Lapham’s Quarterly.  It’s the perfect thing for reading that’s broken by swimming, hiking, and looking up […]

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As the venerable Canadian poet says “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”.  It’s not gone yet but the Chiaroscuro Reading Series (fondly referred to as ChiSeries) needs a bit of help to continue its mission of supporting all that is dark and weird in Canada. If you’re not familiar with this series, here’s what […]

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For a book, of course. My first two novels (The Night Inside and Blood and Chrysanthemums) were set in Toronto, so finding locations wasn’t that difficult.  I just shamelessly stole from the places that I lived and worked.  Other bits I hand-waved as required (mostly deserted industrial lands … yeah, I think there are some […]

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I am not an art critic. These days, I feel barely able to throw together a coherent thought about anything. But I had a lot of thoughts, coherent or otherwise, while viewing the huge show by Damien Hirst (or Damien Fucking Hirst, as one of my friends calls him) in Venice. It spans two locations and includes […]

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We spent two lovely weeks in Italy in May.  This time it was one week in Venice for the Biennale plus a few days in Lucca and in Florence.  Because we’d hit all the big sights last time, we were able to take things at a more leisurely pace, which involved a lot of long […]

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