Discover Kim Echlin’s “Tell Others: Storytelling for a World in Turmoil” – and join Kim for May Events in Edmonton

The talented and accomplished Kim Echlin is launching her new nonfiction book Tell Others: Storytelling in a World in Turmoil. Kim visits Edmonton for a reading and interview May 5 & 6. โ€œCensorship, testimony, translation, silencing, and listeningโ€”these five words are the beautiful and timely spine of this story. Taking some of the most difficult historical violences of our times as the incitement to read otherwise, Echlin shows the ways in which fiction provides readers a moment of respite. In these pages, the words, language, and stories of others quietly provide us the possibility of community, of refusal, of renewal and of what is possible when we make ourselves available to other accounts of what it means to live a life. We read the writer reading and we share a certain unity through words that produce liberating sensations for collective possibilities beyond despair.โ€ โ€”Rinaldo Walcott, author ofย The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom

Pandemic Journal 26-28/8/22 โ€” Blossoming at Bloom Holistic Retreat

This Bloom Holistic Retreat weekend yoga is splendid. Not only are the Octopus Holistic Yoga teachers superb, but the sumptuous setting and convivial fellow participants are thoroughly welcoming. We create a beautiful nourishing community of fellow travelers in just a few days. The retreat is a luxurious reward to myself after a year of heavy steroid and biologic medication to treat the sudden onset in the summer of 2021 of Giant Cell Arteritis, an auto-immune condition - now in remission.

Pandemic Journal 26/6/22 โ€” when โ€œdeath leaves us homesickโ€ย 

On mourning and melancholia. On the loss of friends and lovers. And the loss of womenโ€™s rights to abortion in the U.S. so courageously gained 50 years ago. Melancholia must give way to action. Change via feminist transformation cannot be counted on to remain. Stay engaged! The struggle continues!

Pandemic Journal 27/6/22 โ€” โ€œCome into my gardenโ€ or Asteya, stealing time

Experience life just as it isโ€ฆ Sweet June. Is she of Summer or of Spring,Of adolescence or of middle-age?A girl first marvelling at touch of loversOr else a woman growing ripely sage?Between the two she delicately hovers,Neither too rakish nor, as yet, mature.She's not a matron yet, not fully sure;Neither too sober nor elaborate;Not come… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 27/6/22 โ€” โ€œCome into my gardenโ€ or Asteya, stealing time