I’ll be reading selections from my memoir All These Imperfect Emotions: That Time I Totally Paddled the Peel River Watershed at my new home base, Galiano Island Books, on Sunday September 6th at 2pm. Hop on a ferry and join us!

*Poster design by Donna Moreau.

Dunno how I missed posting this. Here’s some audio of me reading at the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series 5th anniversary in February. Sean Cranbury and Dina Del Bucchia host a wild night of poetry, prose, and sometimes music, and it was a real pleasure to be involved. Thanks to everyone at RVWS.

Listen to me read at RVW5 on Soundcloud.

Listen to the whole Books on the Radio show featuring RVW5.

Very happy to report that Dinner with the Vittrekwas, a CNF essay about the my trip through the Peel River Watershed, will be in Prism International this fall/winter. Pick yourself up a copy when if comes out! You can also read it online on Going Down Swinging, a sweet online publication that swaps stories with PRISM on occasion.

Thanks to Christopher Evans, editor extraordinaire and ardent local bookstore supporter, and to the folks at Going Down Swinging. Also, many thanks to Gary Ross, for his editorial expertise and support.

Call me a liar and I say fuck yourself— too often our history is remembered by victims, and victims are the bitches of time.

Check out my Globe and Mail review of Jon Chan Simpson’s Chinkstar, a fresh and totally badass exploration of history, language and cultural truthiness – straight outta Red Deer.

Me and the T. Aberdeen Canyon, Sept 2014. Calder Cheverie Photo.

Musician/ composer and fellow Peel paddler Anthony Wallace and I are working on Confluence at Aberdeen Canyon, a sound installation at the Calgary Centre for the Performing Arts (aka Arts Commons). The piece will be a mashup of poetry, music, and ambient sound collected on the Peel. Tony and I have been toiling away on different sides of the country, Skyping when necessary, writing, recording and sharing. No portaging though. Screw portaging. Confluence at Aberdeen Canyon runs from December 16^th– April 29^th 2016. Hope you can make it.

Thank you to Arts Commons for their generous support of this project. Many thanks to Daniel J Kirk.

To learn more about what’s going on in the Peel River Watershed, visit protectpeel.ca

I contributed an essay to an anthology about reconciliation that will be coming out with Brindle & Glass in 2016. Here’s the press release. Congrats and many thanks to editor Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail.

Brindle & Glass Publishing will publish In This Together: Fifteen Stories of Truth and Reconciliation, a collection of reflective magazine-style essays edited by Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail.

Metcalfe-Chenail commissioned non-fiction pieces written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals from across Canada. The contributors are journalists, writers, academics, visual artists, filmmakers, a city planner, and a lawyer; they carefully consider their own experiences and assumptions about Canadian Indigenous peoples and histories in hopes of sparking further conversation and increased understanding of Canada’s colonial legacy. In an afterword that is essentially a candid converstaion between Chief Justice Murray Sinclair and renowned CBC radio host Shelagh Rogers, Sinclair shares his thoughts just as he wraps up the executive summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He says one of the most common statements the commission heard was: “I didn’t know any of this, and I acknowledge that things are not where they should be, and that we can do better. But what can we do? What should we do?” This collection is a response to what we can do.

The project was inspired in part by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission but also by Edmonton’s Year of Reconciliation and the Idle No More Movement. Metcalfe-Chenail is convinced that Canadians want an open dialogue that encourages everyone to begin the important work of reconciliation in Canada, and maintain the conversation long after the buzz of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report has faded. Metcalfe-Chenail is Edmonton’s Historian Laureate, author of Polar Winds and For the Love of Flying, and a columnist for CBC Radio Active.

Taryn Boyd, associate publisher of Brindle & Glass, acquired the project. It is slated for release in 2016.

Here’s a little Métis flash-fiction for ya. Happy Tuesday.

A mother, a friend, an aesthetician. A woman in stilettos and a ruffled pink blouse raves about Angelique’s skill with hot wax. Acrylic nails airbrushed with cherry blossoms. A cousin (and there are many) tells us how Angelique used to snare gophers when she was fifteen. Made earrings from their tails for her friends in the city; that sort of Daniel Boone aesthetic was popular in the late seventies. The earrings were a big hit until the smell set in—Angelique was no taxidermist. Laugh a little, she’d want us to. Remember her from the PowerPoint projected on the clubhouse wall: Salsa dancing at a three star resort on the Mayan, hiking the Andes, kayaking on Stave Lake with her boyfriend, Ed. He put together the PowerPoint. She was loved, Ed reassures us. So deeply loved, and when he’d tried to be unbiased and think of something less than ideal to tell us about her, all he could come up with was her terrible spelling. An affliction—she never recovered from learning French as her first language. A woman in a blue rinse and a polyester suit nods vigorously. Oui, c’est vrai. Laugh a little, our people have always made light in the dark. Even when it’s inappropriate. We’ll keep laughing.