A few pretty lines from Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence. He was writing about exile here, but reading these words in my East Jerusalem hotel room remind me of travel in general, and of the smell of fresh guava in the markets this week. Cities are smells: Acre is the smell of iodine […]

I will be plain. We’ve reached the point where voting for the Conservative Party of Canada is an immoral act. Instead of appealing to our better natures – instead of invoking the once-Canadian values like inclusion, fairness and compromise – Harper and his cabal have chosen to appeal to the worst of us. This is […]

Last night I returned to Calgary after spending a week as an instructor at the Iceland Writers Retreat. The event, in only its second year, is a marvelous bringing-together of featured authors from around the world with about 80 workshop participants for a week of writing, reading, eating, drinking and – because it is in […]

Kamal al-Solaylee wrote a lovely piece about Song of the Caged Bird: Writing as Resistance in Palestine, and the ‘new’ genre of digital “short books”, in December’s Quill and Quire. The story, called ‘Marcello Di Cintio’s new Journey,” can be found here. (I apologize, in advance, to fans of Eat, Pray, Love.)

A couple of weeks ago, I met Heike Kretschmer at a recent event marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. She told an amazing and tragic story about how the Berlin Wall destroyed her family. Heike’s story appears in today’s Swerve Magazine here.