I remember the friction of pulling that tag off the shelf, its plastic a perfect fit inside my palm, and how it felt like I was holding a key to something vital. I would carry the tag to the counter where it would be traded in, more often than not, for the 1988 Lily Tomlin/Bette ..read more

The window at Emily Rose Cafe on Palmerston Ave. “The battle for American decency happened to be here this year,” Sherman Burgoyne wrote to a distant sympathizer. “We fought it and won. Next year it may be in your part of America, and I’m counting on you to stand true.” She seems allergic to earnestness, this woman, but also addicted to shock, or attempts at shocking. We get it: you’re cool, you swear, you don’t conform. The older I get, the more I fall out of love with efficiency. I’ve struggled enough mentally to know that many of the experiences that are most edifying and healing for me ar ..read more

In February (for the second year running!), my eldest daughter’s high school drama group won their district-level competition for the NTS Drama Festival (which many of us will recognize from back when it was the Sears Drama Festival), and I’m very excited that they’ll be part of the regional competition at Hart House Theatre in ..read more

I don’t believe in seeds. I just can’t fathom the fact of what happens when you plant them, no matter how many times I’ve watched the miracle happen, which it always does, and it’s still never not blown my mind. That new life is possible*, how this can turn into that, the ordinary miracle. I ..read more

Am currently being haunted by “Holding Out for a Hero” by Bonnie Tyler. I’m not mad about it. We watched Footloose on DVD a couple of weeks ago, and my kids were struck by the wonderful weirdness of Kevin Bacon dancing in a warehouse (especially after having watched Jennifer Beals dancing in a warehouse just a couple of weeks before that in Flashdance, albeit one that’s post-industrial). A few days later, I danced around our living room to the song’s very dramatic Steinmen-esque opening imagining that I was Kevin Bacon, until I ran out of breath about 45 seconds later. Later that day my kids ..read more

My first William Maxwell was his novel The Chateau, which I read a couple of years ago in a reading group all about books about houses that Anne Fernald ran online via the Center for Fiction, and that book was the perfect introduction to Maxwell, who published six novels between the 1930s and 1980s, along ..read more

Karin Wells’ Women Who Woke Up the Law is hardly a feel-good book—it tells the stories of women who had to fight for very little, and often didn’t even get it—but it made me feel good anyway. Not because of good triumphing over evil, because in the end justice prevails, nope, not that at all ..read more

Of all the books in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, A Jest of God is the one that made the faintest impression on me, resonating mostly because Rachel, its protagonist, was Stacey Cameron’s elder sister. Stacey from The Fire Dwellers, the Laurence book that meant the most to me, I think, because of its preoccupation with ..read more

“It is very important to do the right thing, eventually,” writes Omar El Akkad near the end of his new book, One Day Everybody Will Always Have Been Against This, a book which, if/when I post an image of its cover on social media, will make some people angry and disappointed with me. “Eventually” the ..read more

27 years before she won the Giller Prize for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr released her debut novel, Moon Honey, a book that begins with a young white couple, Carmen and Griffin, having sex under a pool table in Griffin’s parents’ basement, the third time they’ve ever done it, and in the ..read more