Cold Hard Cash
Finding a birthday present for my mother is never easy. After all, she can make anything she wants. My sister always comes up with something inventive. She’s like that. For…
fiction
The Ruins — a new flash fiction at the Caesura Letters
I have a new flash fiction up this week at the Caesura Letters called The Ruins. It’s a different kind of piece — a meditation on the nature of Stoicism…
Apocalypse Cow
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were going all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin’ program. And me?…
Leonides and the papier-mâché spatula
Gregorina awoke that morning feeling stranger than usual. She’d had vivid dreams of ravaging Leonides, their local butcher, with his own meat tenderizer. In the dream – or perhaps it…
Canada’s New Parliamentary Budget Officer Doesn’t Disappoint – Stephen Harper
After former Parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page locked horns with the Conservatives over their voodoo math, he was replaced by someone whose inexperience would be much easier to manipulate. Not…
National Anthem: A poem; “Year of reconciliation? Prove it.”
A poem on our state of denial.
Once upon a time, there was a Vancouver Mayor who promised he’d end homelessness…
Once upon a time… There was a handsome young prince named Gregor Angus Bethune Robertson. He was a much envied prince. He represented his fiefdom, Vancouver-Fairview, for years before he,
The long course of civilization
“With the collapse of totalitarian empires, we believed that living together, peace, pluralism, and human rights would gain the ascendancy and the world would leave behind holocausts, genocides, invasions, and…
Blake meets Zathir [excerpt from The Fridgularity]
Author’s note: here’s another quick hit from The Fridgularity, which is still available for 99¢ in May. Not much needed to introduce this one, except to say that the…
Another day on the job in Paradise… chapter one
Mayor Ralph “Bosco” Hearne, whistling softly “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City” under his breath, gazed at the wood-and-polished-brass, 19th-century front doors of town hall and nodded slightly in…
1984 is blacked out in a graphic tribute to George Orwell
Penguin Books is releasing new editions of George Orwell’s best known books on January 21 to commemorate the inaugural “Orwell Day” — an annual event to celebrate the author and…
Teaser from The Fridgularity: How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The Fridgularity is a satire of Internet culture, so that means it’s rife with pop-culture references, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas is one of them. I can’t tell you…
How Landon, Ontario got its name
Here’s a little snippet that didn’t make it into The Fridgularity. I cut the description of Landon, Ontario’s founding because it doesn’t really add much to the story, though it’s…
Fonts of The Fridgularity
TYPOGRAPHY One of the ideas that I play with in The Fridgularity is that the entity Zathir — you know, the one that takes over the Internet and promptly locks…
Excerpt from The Fridgularity: a ski in the storm
Given the arrival of Winter here in Souwesto, I thought I’d put up an excerpt from the second half of The Fridgularity (A Cold Reboot), in which the lead character…
Femininity, fantasy, and fever dreams – Book review: The Lava in My Bones by Barry Webster
In a delirious, hallucinogenic voice, author Barry Webster turns directly toward the place and experience of femininity in a queer life dominated by masculine desires.
Finding (Queer) Time – Book review: First Spring Grass Fire by Rae Spoon
Rae Spoon (Photo: JJ Levine) In his remarkable 2009 text, Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz fixates on the ways in which queer bodies exist outside of and subvert what he…
I Have Not Lingered In European Monasteries
by Leonard Cohen I Have Not Lingered In European Monasteries and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell; I have not…
Chthonic Monsters — Theseus Becomes King
This is the final part of Chthonic Monsters. Part one, Theseus Goes to Crete, is here, and part two, Theseus Meets the Minotaur, is here. This is from a novel-in-progress,…