Posts Tagged ‘ The Winnipeg Review ’

I write a column for The Winnipeg Review, an online literary magazine. My fourth column was published June 27, 2012 and is online here.

Excerpt:

I crave an apocalypse. Not the sort where the earth implodes, or even the kind that wipes out half the population and creates a Lord of the Flies society. I want an apocalypse where we no longer have electricity, fossil fuels or chequing accounts. (Okay, maybe I’m not pro-apocalypse: maybe I’m just a Luddite.) For years I’ve felt that our decadent, hedonistic North American society is a single Jenga block away from collapse. Call it “peak oil” or “climate change” or “I can’t afford to stay home with my new baby because child care is cheaper than me not working”— call it whatever you want. We’ve built a tower so high that we can’t remember how or why we started. I want to see what happens when the pieces fall and we have to rebuild.

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p.s. I’m not the only one.

I write a column for The Winnipeg Review, an online literary magazine. My third column was published April 9, 2012 and is online here.

Excerpt:

On a hot August day a middle-aged Greek man strides through the farmers’ market, sees our sandwich board, and stops to read it again. “Makaria Farm!” he announces, and comes over to my table. “How is it that everywhere there is Hopping Rabbit Farm and Singing Bird Farm, and here you have Makaria Farm?” He is mispronouncing “makaria” but he’s Greek and it’s a Greek word, so it’s probably us who have been mispronouncing it for two generations. Awkward.

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I write a column for The Winnipeg Review, an online literary magazine. My second column was published February 21, 2012 and is online here.

Excerpt:

I invented the iPod. I was walking past an antique store and saw a jukebox, and thought: “how amazing, to own a personal jukebox – you could have all your favourite music in it. If only it were portable, so you could take it with you around town.” And then I realized: the iPod. It was 2005 – the iPod had been launched four years earlier.

Once we started our farm Brock and I began to (re)invent all kinds of things. We planted our fruit trees in aesthetically-pleasing locations. When they died from lack of watering, we decided it made sense to plant in rows for easier irrigation – or “orcharding” as this strategy is commonly known. We mourned our rusting tools and exposed equipment, and concluded that what we needed was a very, very large shed. Oh … that’s called a “barn.”

And then I invented the farm wife.

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I write a column for The Winnipeg Review, an online literary magazine. My first column was published January 18, 2012 and is online here.

Excerpt:

In the spring of 2007 we decided that our city life would not be enough, no matter how many karaoke parties we hosted.

Brock and I were renting the penthouse of a twenty-second storey building on the West Coast: if there was a perfect place to be, this was it. Our balcony was the size of most city dweller’s condos, with an uninterrupted view of the Georgia Strait and Beacon Hill Park. We were in our late twenties, had university degrees and good government jobs, and had found each other: we’d done everything we’d been told to do, and were living the dream. Or at least, the dream we thought we were supposed to have.

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