Category: writing

Exploring Mill Creek’s Gardens in Bloom

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Our new Neighbourhood In Bloom program began in 2025 and was developed when the Edmonton Horticultural Society collaborated with city Community Leagues. Each league is charged with sending out amateur garden enthusiasts to evaluate local gardens. And the signage is provided by the Edmonton Horticultural Society. There is not competion or awards ceremony. Thus along with another neighbour I helped to organize our Strathcona Community League and five kind neighbour volunteers walked the streets on the lookout for gardens that shine..

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

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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. “Censorship, testimony, translation, silencing, and listening—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.” —Rinaldo Walcott, author of The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom

Pandemic Journal 26-28/8/22 — Blossoming at Bloom Holistic Retreat

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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 — when “death leaves us homesick” 

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On mourning and melancholia. On the loss of friends and lovers. And the loss of women’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 — “Come into my garden” or Asteya, stealing time

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Experience life just as it is… 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 — “Come into my garden” or Asteya, stealing time