Having paid my accommodation penance, the magazine assignment gods – or ‘goddesses’ in this case – are sending me here:

That’s the place on the right, the Fairmont Dubai. Looks rough.

I remember a time, when I first started traveling in the 1990s, when I would’ve been appalled at the idea of staying in such a ostentatious place. No more. At least not if I don’t have to pay for it.

So if anyone needs me next week, you can find me here, third deck chair from the left:

The May issue of Alberta Views magazine contains my profile of Calgarian Chaldean priest Abbé Noël Farman. Farman was born and educated in Iraq, was part of Saddam’s army in the 1970s, and fled the Iraq for Canada in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. He speaks a handful of languages – including ancient Aramaic – and can read the New Testament in its original language. In fact, on Holy Thursday, Farman recites Christ’s actual words at the Last Supper in the language he would’ve spoken. Even a retired Catholic like myself can sense the beauty in this cross-millennial linguistic connection.

Perhaps the greatest joy I derive from writing comes when I discover men like Farman, men with incredible personal histories who, somehow occupy the same city as  I do.

(James May took some fabulous photos for the story. Only one appeared in the magazine. Here are two more.)

Active Stills is hosting a great series of images of the West Bank Wall by photographer Anne Paq. Many of the photos are of the Wall at Jayyous and Qalqilya, two Palestinian towns that feature prominently in my chapter about the Wall.

I especially like the images of IDF soldiers posing for photographs in front of the barricades. Almost the Walls I visited for the book have become, in one way or another, ‘tourist attractions.’ Structures visitors are compelled to see. (I’ve contributed to this phenomenon in Westjet’s inflight magazine by including the l’Acadie fence in my list of things to see in Park Extension, Montreal.)

What is it about the Walls that attract us? What does it say about us that we want to pose in front of them? And does it mean something else entirely when those charged with ‘guarding’ the Wall also pose before it?

See the photos here.

I’m a couple of days late on this, but my story about Calgary Italian Bakery – and the charming Bontorin family who operate it – appeared in Friday’s Swerve Magazine. Luigi Bontorin came to Calgary in the 1950s, married his landlady’s daughter, and the two of them founded the business in 1962. Now, a half century later, the place is more a bread factory than a traditional bakery but there is a kind of mechanical alchemy about the operation.

Find the story, and George Webber’s fine photographs, here.

There is, of course, much work left to be done on the book. Aside from the copy edit, a cover needs to be designed, early reviewers found, and marketing plans conceived. Even the book’s title is in flux. Turns out there are already a few books out there called In the Shadow of the Wall. My book will drop the shadows all together and stick with a more emphatic Walls: Travels Along the Barricades. (I learned a lesson from my first two books, Harmattan and Poets and Pahelvans: putting a foreign, unfamiliar and difficult-to-pronounce word in your title does nothing to help a book’s sales.)

The book comes out in the latter half of September. Watch this space for details.

Until then, my time will be taken up more with teaching than with writing. Currently, I am in the second half of a residency with Calgary’s Alexandra Writers’ Centre. I also lead a monthly nonfiction writing session with clients of The Servant’s Anonymous Society, a nonprofit that provides support to female victims of sexual exploitation. I’ve never met a group of more heroic women. Their stories are heartbreaking and inspiring.

In June, I will return to the Middle East, first on assignment in Dubai for a magazine, then to Birzeit, Palestine where I will be installed as the writer-in-residence for the Palestinian Writers Workshop. I will run a creative nonfiction workshop for Palestinians in the West Bank and, via Skype, in Gaza. Upon my return to Canada in July I will be an instructor at Wordsworth, a creative writing residency for youth at a summer camp just outside Calgary. The Wordsworth webpage is billing me as being “fresh from Palestine.” We’ll see how fresh I am come July.

This photo of the U.S.-Mexico border fence in Lochiel, Arizona, is by musician Glenn Weyant. I’ve written about Glenn’s soundings of the border Wall previously on this blog. (Glenn also appears in the Walls book and in my TEDxCalgary talk.) I love how the fish-eye photo serves to subvert the fence it portrays. The barrier is meant to striate and limit the landscape, but the photo distorts the fence and imposes a sort of strange boundlessness to the scene. I’ll add this to my growing collection of art that defeats the Walls.

In one of the chapters of my upcoming Walls book, I travel to the northeast India to investigate the fence India is building along the border with Bangladesh. Last month, The Economist featured a wonderful story about the absurdity of the Indo-Bangla border and issues surrounding enclaves along the line that are not quite Here and not quite There.

Find the story here.

My story about Calgary’s century-old City Hall clock and Doug Sinclair, the horologist who cares for it, appears in today’s issue of Swerve Magazine.

I first learned of Sinclair when I visited the clock tower with Mayor Nenshi in November. (My story about Nenshi is finally finished and will appear in May’s Readers Digest Canada.) I spent an afternoon at Sinclair’s place talking timepieces in his dining room and seeing his fabulously cluttered workshop. You’ve got to love a tinkerer.

Find the story here.

And I absolutely love this: