Living on an island is a pain in the butt. For example, I have a tripod for my camera, and there is one little screw missing that renders the entire contraption useless. It has been this way for more than a year, and its brokenness has caused me multiple complications. Fixing the problem has eluded…
There’s a round-about a block away from my house, and on one side of it, a large parking lot and a small independent grocery story called, “The Super A.” I like the name because it reminds me of Super-8 video technology, so it implies to me something from a by-gone era, a still standing relic.…
The other day I saw a humpback. It arched its back slowly over the surface of the water, rotating like the slowest saw blade in the world. I held my breath and didn’t move, hoping for a resurfacing. Its fluke appeared and stood straight up before slowly sinking and disappearing from sight. Afterwards, I…
I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach. — Upton Sinclair Years ago, I picked up a copy of Upton Sinclair’s famous 1906 novel, The Jungle. I think I was looking for a book on slaughterhouses, but what I got was a book on servitude and capitalism. I’ve since…
Joseph Sagaj is Anishinaabe, a residential school survivor, and an artist. A few years ago, he took up gardening as well and joined a group of Indigenous tradespeople and Elders known as the Earth Helpers who made it their mission to bring biodiversity and native species back to Paul Martel Park in Toronto. As Sagaj…
When you drive north on Vancouver Island’s Highway 19, keep your eye out for a sign marking Ginger Goodwin Way as you approach the town of Cumberland. That road sign has been there since 2019, although the name was originally given to that stretch of road when the highway opened in 1996. The local MLA…
Five, seven, five. Three lines of writing, with a precise number of syllables in each; this is haiku. In sixteenth century Japan, the beginnings of Renga poems, which were hundreds of stanzas long, broke off into their own form. A wandering daydreamer named Basho, would go on to make haiku a widely accepted form of…
Diana Beresford-Kroeger could have written a dramatic memoir about childhood neglect and the journey to overcome it. However, she admits to being a reluctant memoirist and sees the telling of her life’s story in To Speak for the Trees: My Life’s Journey from Ancient Celtic Wisdom to a Healing Vision of the Forest as part of the…
In the spring of 2019, SwimBowen received registrations from two sons and a father. Event organizers were intrigued: there must be a story there, they thought. Sure enough, there was. A Bowen Island resident, Daxton Curry (the older brother) brought up the idea of participating in SwimBowen – an open-water swim event that raises funds…
It was more than a year ago now that grocery stores started struggling to keep toilet paper on shelves. Not long after the words “global pandemic” started being thrown around, the whole world stopped. Stuck at home we found ourselves thinking hard about resilience and self-reliance. Deep in our lizard brains, a great many of…
