Without any graduate creative writing programs in town, aspiring young writers must She wears glasses that are not too small. I wish I was a girl like that. I’m a different kind of girl. I wear contact lenses because glasses make me look like I am wearing glasses. I am not saying this properly. When […]
Literary
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Pawnshop Blues: The Coles Notes version
Maybe you’ve been away since May, or maybe you just took a couple weeks off to cottage it up in the wilderness somewhere, or maybe you need a little help getting in the mood to go back to school, but whatever the reason, we figured we’d warm up your reading skills with a Coles Notes […]
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Pawn shop blues – Page 3
I stop in the living room to press play on the cd player. There’s a Tom Waits cd in there I’ve been listening to nonstop. As his dusty voice mingles with the sunlight and the coffee smell, I start to feel a bit human. It’s not a bad feeling. I’m just getting dressed when the […]
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Loot for McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan’s birthday was July 11. Had he not died in 1980, the Canadian communications and media scholar would’ve been 95 this year. Imagine the party. There’s always one whose gifts outdo the rest. In McLuhan’s case, Terry Gordon—who teaches French, Italian and linguistics at Dalhousie—and his body of work on the “media analyst and […]
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Pawn shop blues – Page 2
I always wear it in the way she said will draw people to me. Funny thing, this ring. I haven’t noticed a marked difference in my life. Seems to me I attract and repel people pretty much the way I always have. With a look or a gesture, or a few well-chosen words. For sure, […]
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Pawn Shop Blues
For sure, the fear has got me now. I’m lying on my back in the absolute dark of my room, blinking wildly, trying to keep my eyes open, trying to wake up, really wake up. I’m not sure exactly what has scared the hell out of me, but something has, and I struggle to pin […]
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Writes of passage
Writers are scavengers. They tear the flesh off family lore, historic events or personal experiences, hunting for inspiration. Sometimes the hunt is pragmatic, but in some rare situations, magic—or perhaps destiny—occurs. If you believe in magical intervention, you might attribute the conception of Ami McKay’s gorgeous debut novel The Birth House to old-fashioned serendipity. After […]
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Halifax International Writers’ Festival
THURSDAY APRIL 6 | 7:30pm, $7 Brad Kessler The Vermont writer’s work has appeared in The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Kessler’s new novel Birds in Fall turns its sights northward, as families of victims from an airplane crash, including a New York-based ornithologist, congregate on the fictitious Trachis Island, off the […]
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Lying in wait
Long before Oprah bitch-slapped James Frey for the semi-truths in his memoir Million Little Pieces, confessional poetry—made famous in the 1960s by Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton—tinkered and toyed with autobiographical truth-telling. Written in “I,” confessional poetry draws on the author’s own deeply personal and often painful experiences. Some critics claim these wordsmiths […]
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Wanting
The first time Molly sees a peacock, an expression comes to her: “I never forget a face.” Where the phrase comes from, she isn’t sure. Maybe it’s something her grandmother says. More likely, she’s lifted it from a lipstick commercial, or a movie about a stalker. Late movies on cable are usually about stalkers. It’s […]
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Nightfall
AT 6:00 P.M. , Harvey Jones, the editor of the Daily Echo, stood in the shadow of a row of stone buildings at the end of the Pickford & Black Wharf. He was waiting for the same tug that had dropped Hayes off at the Imo earlier that morning. Pickford & Black were the agents […]
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Nightfall
AT 9:00 P.M. , LIEUTENANT Colonel Frederick McKelvey Bell, assistant director of medical services (ADMS) for the Canadian military, dictated a confident telegram to St. John telling them that he would not need any more doctors. As the ADMS, the military hospitals—Camp Hill, Cogswell, and the destroyed Pier 2—were his priority, but they were filled […]
