It’s one week away from the opening night of Guelph Little Theatre’s production of “The Laramie Project”, and I thought I’d take some time to reflect on the play and my time in rehearsals with this great cast and company of drama-files. But for those who don’t have time to read these reflections in their [...]

          In The Turning, Tim Wynton winds up a bunch of achingly self-honest characters and lets them go in a dying industrial fishing town in coastal Western Australia, wandering the corridors of conscience in a time and place where redemption is the hottest commodity when the principle sin is turning a blind eye. Winter is a [...]

          Owing to some madness I experienced years ago, my search for a sympathetic voice led me into the imagination of the late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, progenitor of Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report and Paycheck, in their more popular adaptations. After plowing through five volumes of short stories and a dozen novels, I [...]

          A couple years ago I was having a beer on an empty patio watching the sun drop behind the bar across the street when I pulled out my harmonica and started playing a little Delta style blues. Pleasing myself with the naked tone as it reverberated throughout the empty canyon of the downtown core; I [...]

          As promised, my review of Northern Suns. This time, in point form. As you will see, Hartwell and Grant have gone farther a-field—in fact, beyond the field—for contributions by Canadian writers who, while having made significant contributions to sf in general, are not restricted to the genre. Margaret Atwood is a prime example of a [...]

          There is a rare and fervent sub-class of recording collector that snaps up spoken word sides sight unseen and sound unheard. To those people, I have only to say that the work I am reviewing is available. Period. To the rest of us who are still in a state of denial about our personal fetishes, [...]

          Several years ago, I attended a presentation given by high school law students on worldwide child labour. I was impressed by the formal declaration made by these two students of condemnation before commencing their report. I don’t think it would have impacted us as it did if they had waited until the end. As such, [...]

          During the rise of the Internet and the proliferation of personal home computers in the Nineties, I had a friend with whom we would become…intoxicated…and discuss grand ideas while he tapped away at the keyboard and freaked me out with fractals that cycled through the colour spectrum. These psychedelic models were of course based on [...]

          “Autopathography” is a word I highlighted in the concluding chapter of my copy of Ryan Knighton’s Cockeyed, his memoir of going blind from progressive retinal degeneration in his early twenties. It’s an awkward word, as though whimsically concocted by another near blind writer, James Joyce. In pursuing his English degree, Knighton is eventually only able [...]

          It is amazing how one’s ideals, delicately embroidered in the optimism of youth, can make such utter fools of us in times of hardship and deprivation, roiling, mocking, “apish errors posed in fearful symmetry”, screaming out of the stinging winds of fate like the totemic tricksters of our earliest heritage on this continent. To be [...]