Cherry red armour
I had a boyfriend once who said “sometimes when you talk I just watch your bright red lips move.” I wasn’t even insulted. I could probably trace every tube of red lipstick I own to an […]
I had a boyfriend once who said “sometimes when you talk I just watch your bright red lips move.” I wasn’t even insulted. I could probably trace every tube of red lipstick I own to an […]
Before I became a teenage Bolshevik I was a hippy kid, hitchhiking three thousand miles from Quebec to California with a member of our commune. “When the drivers slowed down to look, I tried to catch […]
Getting the finger from an 8 year. Is that funny or fucked up? When you work with kids you learn it can be both. Sometimes it has to be. Her tiny little hand shaking in rage. […]
This past week was pretty hard for me. Even after sixteen years of working with vulnerable kids, kids beaten up by poverty, cultural genocide and addiction, it is still hard to know that a kid who is talking about suicide can’t get a bed in a hospital for a night. To know that when you call for help for a kid what you’re going to get is cops with guns questioning them. Some cops are nice and some are not but everything about them: their handcuffs, their tazers, tell a kid they’re in trouble. And after they talk to the kid they will more than likely leave them behind because they know when they get to the hospital they won’t admit them. “I’m happy to sit in a hospital waiting room for five hours until they send her home,” the cop tells me. “But my boss is not going to like it.” Sometimes even if the hospital takes them they release them a few hours later in a taxi alone.
It’s like a kid coming to you with a broken arm and having to tell them: It’s not broken enough.
The publishing contract says I need 12 photographs. 12 photographs. It doesn’t seem like a lot. My agent says Do you have any photos from the commune? No? What about the cult? I laugh. They weren’t taking […]
That year my room-mate Francois was a med school drop out who was studying pharmacology, both academically and personally. He had drugs for waking up, falling asleep, calming down and perking up. Still it never occurred […]
Books Red Star Tattoo My Life as a Girl Revolutionary (Penguin Random House Canada 2016) Winner of the 2017 Edna Staebler Creative Non-Fiction Award. Shortlisted for the 2016 Hilary Weston Creative Non-Fiction prize Listed on CBC, National […]
“The lovers sit nearly naked on the bed in the hot summer night, drinking wine and telling stories. They are new and still telling stories, still taking inventory of each other. ” read more of Witnesses […]