This week, for the second year in a row, my friend and I met for afternoon tea during the final days of January to celebrate having made it through the darkest season. A ritual that’s come about quite naturally—last year we wanted to have tea together and both appreciated how nice it had been to have something to look forward to when the sky was grey and the earth was frozen. I made a point of making it happen again this year because she picked up the bill last time and I wanted to return the favour. And this time we pondered where we’d like to be next year when we do it again, how far we’ve ..read more

Yesterday I sat on my couch beside a friend who scrolled and scrolled through the vacation photos on her phone, two weeks in Japan, and it occurred to me that I can’t remember the last time I partook in such an activity, and also how much it fulfilled me. How different it felt to see her trip and hear her stories, rather than just aimlessly scrolling through them on my own social media feeds, how such a thing stands for everything I’m yearning for right now, one-on-one contact, live and in person. I have found existing so much on a virtual realm overwhelming and confusing as I try to make sen ..read more

No one got sick on our holiday—no pneumonia, or strep throat, and even the colds were fairly unspectacular. No one threw up on Christmas Eve, which is the first time ever that such a miracle has transpired in recent memory, and could be down to the fact that we ate bread and chicken noodle soup for dinner that night, because it had occurred to me that there could possibly be a correlation between the rich foods we eat every December 24 and the inevitable puking, although it’s embarrassing that it took me so many years to figure this out. With bread and broth, however, all the stomachs were set ..read more

There is no better way to travel then on trains, where the leg room is ample and there is so much time to read. When we booked this weekend away, the train journey itself was the destination, but we had to arrive somewhere, so we chose Ottawa, where we have best cousin-friends and even other friends, and cousin-friends who were kind enough to offer us a place to stay. And it was Canada Day Weekend, so what better place to be…even if the place we mean to be specifically on Canada Day is our cousin’s beautiful backyard across the river in Gatineau. And it really was amazing. As we’d hoped, the ..read more

A few weeks ago, we received a postcard from our friends Paul and Kate who live in Vancouver. I will admit that I did not read the note on it very carefully (the image on the front was a diagram of the respiratory system?), but it read something along the lines of that they’d written the card at a street festival “where they mail postcards to the future.” Which was kind of remarkable, I guess, but then aren’t all postcards letters to the future after all? The salient part for me, however, was the way the postcard concluded: “…and we will eventually be there, in the future with you!” Because w ..read more

I’ve spent the last six weeks revising my third novel, which is actually my second novel, written between Mitzi Bytes and Waiting for a Star to Fall. A novel that, like the others, has a soundtrack, but with a twist—this one’s soundtrack is actually good! And how it came to be has been, I think, such an interesting and organic journey. Beginning as I was brainstorming potential titles, and “Power of Two” by The Indigo Girls kept occurring to me, because my novel is the story of a long friendship and that song’s title, as well as many of the ideas contained within, are just perfectly fitting ..read more

I don’t know if I smiled any wider last week than I did at the news that my friends’ new novel (The Holiday Swap, by Maggie Knox!) had made the Toronto Star bestseller list, and with this news came such overwhelming gratitude that other people’s good fortune could be fuel for my fire. And I’m writing this not to be smug, but just because I’m glad, and I’m still not 100% sure how I got to this place (though I wrote about it in a post a few years ago called “How to Get Over Literary Envy”). I remember many years ago feeling so much more desperate, perceiving other people’s wins as a kind of vio ..read more

“Good reviews…prompt me to borrow a recently-published book on grief from the library. I read the acknowledgements, glance at the author’s photo, and skim the table of contents. Partner, child, parent. Not a word about friends, which causes me to toss it onto the pile of books on my night table.” —Marg Heidebrecht, In the Shade Thankfully, there is no reason related to my own life for me to pick up two books on friendship and grief, except that they’ve both come out this spring, and also friendship has been on my mind of late. Back in March, it was telephone calls to my closest friends that b ..read more

This week in a blog post, Carrie Snyder made a note about her discomfort in receiving, and if her post had been a page in a book, I would have underlined the entire passage and made an annotation in the margin: YES!! But it’s strange for me, because I’m never expecting to feel this way. My instinct is to feel absolutely entitled to everything…until it arrives and then I want to sit under the table and hide. So that the two choices the end up available to me are between not getting what I want and being dissatisfied (and angry and resentful), or getting what I want and feeling tremendously unc ..read more

My friend Rebecca Rosenblum’s forthcoming novel, So Much Love, is publishing on the same day as mine is, March 14, 2017. This coincidence is as delightful to me as it is amazing (or even miraculous). Rebecca and I went to graduate school together more than ten years ago, and when I’d read Ann Patchett’s memoir Truth and Beauty later, about friends Ann and Lucy in their post-MFA years when they were “writing to save their lives,” I’d think of Rebecca, who is the most important thing I picked up at school. About the friendships that can form among writers in a  workshop, the intimacy o ..read more