Here is a very brief excerpt from the piece I wrote in Banff. It is a time of no war and no peace. The ceasefire holds but cracks are starting to show. The refugees wait, and though one man says it is courageous to be patient, it has already been more than thirty years. There […]

Today is the last day of the Literary Journalism Program and my last afternoon in ‘The Hemingway’. It has been a wonderfully fruitful month. With the help of a careful editor and the the suggestions of my writing mates, I have managed to put together a polished first chapter of my ‘walls’ project. I also […]

I have some happy news to report. I’ve been chosen as the University of Calgary’s 2009-2010 Writer-in-Residence. My residency begins in August 2009 – which is perfect, as I should be done the bulk of my traveling for this ‘walls’ project by then – and will last for ten months. I will be responsible for […]

Hello all. I am home now where I will stay until the beginning of July when I begin a month-long residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts. I will use my time in the ‘Literary Journalism’ program to turn my scrawled notes from the Western Sahara into a legible first chapter of the Walls […]

My walls project is in its early stages, to be sure, but I´ve been musing a little lately about what all of it means. What do these various walls have in common? What do they tell us? At first I was thinking that these walls are simply expressions of fear, but I think that might […]

Hello all. The vacation is over and I am back on writer duty. I am in Essaouria now and will head south tomorrow. I will write a proper post soon, but in the meantime I want to pass along a little item from a restaurant menu here in Essaouria. Apparently, at Restaurant des Arches you […]

Five weeks ago, when I first arrived there, I didn’t like Algiers very much. The city disappointed me because it was a place I expected to love right away and I didn’t. In my journal I wrote mainly that the coffee was good and that the men constantly spit on the sidewalk. But the last […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about Graham Greene lately, and not just because of my afternoon drinking with priests. I read Monsignor Quixote on this trip, and am currently re-reading The Lawless Roads. In Roads, Greene describes the Mexican desert and says that he cannot see beauty in landscapes that are “unemployed or unemployable.” For […]

I decided to travel north instead of back south for S’bou. I have only a few days left in Algeria so I wanted to travel to places I haven’t yet been rather than return to Timimoun. So I am in the north where the orange trees are not yet in bloom but the hills are […]