The Saskachewan Writers' Guild Festival is coming up. I'm looking forward to a Zoom historical fiction talk with Caroline Adderson and Marina Endicott on March 6th (sign up here). Escape the present with us for a while!

Here's a new short story I wrote, "Brother and Sister," in this month's Brooklyn Rail.  I'm so happy it's out.

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 I'm leading a free Zoom workshop with my writer friend Adam Lewis Schroeder very soon. We hope you can join us on Monday, June 29th, at noon EST (9 am PST). We're going to talk about journal-writing and refining your raw material, with a few exercises and tips. Everyone is welcome, near and far, and please feel free to share. Sign up through the link.
Thanks to CBC Arts, the Faculty of Communication and Design at Ryerson University, and Okanagan Regional Library for sponsoring this series.

 Confusion reigns at my house right now--schools are closed, jobs are shuttered--but we're adjusting. We're lucky to be healthy. I hope you are too.
I'm happy to be part of a virtual reading series that starts with Frances Greenslade (Shelter), Shelley Wood (The Quintland Sisters), and me, this Tuesday, March 31st, at 6:30 PM PST. $10 gets you into the whole series via Zoom, so you can ask us questions and chat. Proceeds go to Friends of the Library,  a cause dear to my heart.  Big thanks to ReadHead Studio and Read Local Okanagan for setting this up.. Really hope you can make it!

My grandmother, Gerarda Boerboom Bunyan, died last night. She was 94. She taunted Nazis in the occupied Netherlands, raised four children almost single-handedly, and sewed better than anyone. I wrote this short piece about her a few years ago. It's no longer available at the CBC site, so I'm posting it here as a small memorial. 


                                                                                                                              Pig (For Oma)

Carry the dead pig beneath your dress and sweater but above your undervest, so it doesn’t touch your skin. You knitted the sweater yourself from the poor remains of three old ones. It’s all lumps. Though you didn’t plan it to shroud an animal.
 
In the evening your mother stands in the dim doorway with her glasses glittering and has you write to tell your aunt about the litter of only two, one stillborn, one sick. You couch this in a page about your studies, your cleverness. Your aunt writes back: their sow has littered too. Eight, all living. It might as well be an official report, as everything must be reported now: livestock births, deaths. The letter goes on to complain carefully of the children, the clouds, the shift in the taste of the well water. As if your aunt’s pigs too are nothing. As if you weren’t paying attention.
 
Go to the north of the country with the dead pig. Don’t look back at your mother’s face. Get to the farm in the morning, eat porridge with your cousins, leave the small body next to the great hill of sow and swarming piglets in the shed. When you go, don’t look at your aunt with her hand over her hair, only sing Goodbye. The feel of the new pig, the trade, shifting under your sweater all the way back to the train station, insistently alive.
 
Two Nazi soldiers in your carriage. All Dutch pigs belong to them. All the pigs of the world, all pinkness, all squeals, all flesh. One of the young men has broken blood vessels in his cheeks, one picks at the dimple in his chin. Both have guns, easy hands, painful uniforms. Think of your neighbours who were taken; you went inside their empty house and stole a spoon from the kitchen drawer. It has an O stamped on the handle. The Germans’ eyes travel the carriage. You smile and hug your fat stomach, fiercely happy. You wish, almost, that they could see through your sweater to the pig, see exactly what you are doing. Perhaps Nazis have X-ray eyes; who knows what they have? They have everything. Your heart is beating in your stomach. The pig nestles into it, the beating.
 
The train sways, the Nazis set to talking. Ja, nein. You know German now, but you don’t think in it. Think in Dutch of what you will do, how you will train the pig to be silent, how you will keep it in the dark, in a pit dug in the yard with dirt flung over its wood cover. Never talk to it. Hit it with a stick if it makes noise. Feed it on grass and whatever scraps you can spare. In Amsterdam, everyone is starving. In the village, you can hide potatoes if you’re careful about it.
 
You hold yourself in. The pig is trying to suck at your vest buttons. Let it.

 Very happy to be among the judges of the CBC Short Story Prize this year, with Rawi Hage and David Bezmozgis. Send in your stuff! Short fiction is my first love.
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I'm writer in residence at the Woodbridge Farm on Lake Erie at the moment, gawping at the beautiful surroundings and working on my next novel. My host, Grant Munroe, asked me to write an essay for the Woodbridge Farm series, which he and his team have produced as a handmade chapbook. I talk about photography, the city dump, childhood, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK, and--no thanks to me--it's a gorgeously made thing. You can order it here. 

A great, packed festival on BC's Galiano Island, where I read with thriller writer extraordinaire Sheena Kamal, and interviewed the great Anna Porter. Also got to hear readings and talk from writers like recent GG-award winners Darrel McLeod and Kathy Page, Buffy Sainte-Marie biographer Andrea Warner, and short-story queen Erin Frances Fisher (check out my interview with her). And Meg Tilly, wonderful writer and actual movie star! Some pics courtesy of official photographer Kris Krug. Please note that they MADE OUR BOOKS OUT OF FONDANT AND MARSHMALLOW. 

Canadian writers age 14-17, there are four days left to enter the Amazon Youth Short Story Contest, of which I'm a judge this year. You could win $5000! Send us your stuff. All the details are here. 

 I'll be at the Galiano Island Literary Festival next month. They have sea lions! And a great lineup. There's a new interview with me at their site, in which I discuss my junior self and the difficulty of naming characters, etc.

I'll be doing a reading with Sheena Kamal, whose novel I can't wait to read. I'll also be interviewing the fantastically interesting Anna Porter onstage. Tickets are on sale now.