Category: creative nonfiction

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 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

Pandemic Journal 12/2/22: The Bridge – what yoga means to me

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Yoga means “to yoke”, to join, to bridge. “Only connect”, wrote novelist E M Forester when I read his famous novel Howard’s End in my first undergraduate English class in 1969. My professor said: Only connect. For me, now 
more than fifty years later, 
yoga’s connections expand into a rejuvenation 
of the body and the mind. Yoga means holding out for more. Not giving up or giving in. It means giving up. Giving in. Yoga means sensual pleasure 
and the erotic spring. It means contemplative disembodied reflection. Yoga means somewhere between these spaces
of opposition -
an ease in whatever emerges.

Pandemic Journal 11/1/21: a retiree remembers classrooms students hallways colleagues gardens mentors

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Sheena and I (May Day, 2019) Two years after retirement she finds this five-year-old journal entry —Sept 5, 2015: the serendipity of today Such a beautiful first class day. Two courses began - and I returned home to pass out in a deeply pleasurable nap of sheer exhaustion at how intense these initial encounters can… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 11/1/21: a retiree remembers classrooms students hallways colleagues gardens mentors

Pandemic Journal 9/1/2022: Excision

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Today the surgeon Dr. Mary Stephens dug with some determination into the sweet spot where the temple arteries run on the right side of my face directly in front of my ear. The arteries were delicate and elusive and it seems to have taken longer than usual to extract a piece of the artery to examine. A delicate specimen that indicated success in her handiwork. During the hour I was wide awake on the pillow, I turned my head on its side. In my ear throughout the procedure I hear a clanging and squishing and the inaudible gestures of a surgeon's blade. I resort to pranayama yoga breathing in my mind and in my mouth and in my lungs. The discipline calms me as a I think how this day surgery is definitely a very good strategy for torture movie scripts. Excruciating begins to encompass it.