All of my officially published pieces of journalism
There is room in this world for the serious poetry built out of timber and stone. And there is also room in this world for poetry that gathers in clouds and flutters, that is fun and fresh. Pearl Pirie’s first trade collection of poetry, Been Shed Bore, is most definitely the latter. READ MORE
Taking up the burden of a classic with the stature of Romeo and Juliet is a huge task. It’s even ballsier to try to reformulate it to say something new. There’s an enormous inertia to Shakespeare plays: Like a rolling rock, they simply resist a push in any other direction. This production is classical in nature – a spectacle on a thrust stage full of light, shadow, merriment, festival, death and duels. In entertaining, little is restrained. READ MORE
Sandra Beck, the first novel from local writer John Lavery, is a stunning, engrossing experience. It’s good. It’s really good. Really fucking good. I get antsy when I hear John Lavery’s prose described as “surreal” in reviews because that is the element I find missing from so much contemporary Canadian literature. Writing in the hands of someone as talented as Lavery, who grapples intelligently with its potential, can create whole new kinds of emotion out of the raw material of juxtaposed words or striking images. READ MORE
Wild Horses is rob mclennan’s 21st book of poetry, written while the incredibly prolific Ottawa author spent 2007 as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta. Mclennan is a poet of place, always finding his voice out of the material of his surroundings, the continuity of its existence through history. “It’s an Edmonton book,” he says. READ MORE
To call David Harrower’s Blackbird a bare bones play is nearly an understatement. It’s stripped down in almost every way that comprises a work of drama: two actors, a man (Ray) and a woman (Una), interact in sentences that more resembles a hail of verbal bullets than human thoughts – they stop and start, they fragment and halt. When you read it on a page, it’s almost ambiguous; it could be either be genius or drivel. What makes it sing is that it doesn’t merely stay on the page. READ MORE
Watching the movement of the different poles of the Ottawa theatre community is an interesting thing. On the one side there are the National Arts Centre theatre programs, newly remastered to take up a place of national importance. On the other there are those local theatre companies trying to fill their seats and pay their bills in a city that is often criminally neglectful of theatre. READ MORE