Read More

Conversations during an election

I don’t know who to vote for the woman behind the counter says. This Harper is not so good but these other guys…We can’t even take care of the people here. She gestures around her Downtown […]

Read More

One day and then another

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.

Read More

Quotable – “What is Sweet”

“The snow is coming down, thick and steady and the other kids seem to disappear in and out of landscape, their faces obscured by the mist of their breath and the falling snow.  Some of these […]

Read More

Flash Fiction on Litro.Co.Uk

“Until he pulls out the knife, the young man sitting in the corner is like every other homeless man that comes through the shelter, a little smelly, a little crazy, a little lost among all the […]

Read More

Skid Row Obituary @ Truthola.com

“The photocopy wears away the soft edges, chisels it all down to light and dark. Nobody says anything as she stands over the photocopier, crying. The machine makes a steady motion under her fingers, like rocking, and when […]