Nudity is Only Skin-Deep

I have a plethora of publications this year. Here's what came out so far!

• Things No One Ever Told Me About the Change of Life. Breath & Shadow. February 17, 2026
  
• Sibyl Has a Heart of Gold. Rat Bag. February 14, 2026
  
• "We, Medusa" and "Prayer to Dorn Ridge." The Malahat Review: INHALE/EXHALE: Contemporary Indigenous Storytelling. February 9, 2026.
  
• I Am Pretty Sure Those are the Same Cops I Saw Dragging a Disabled Woman Across the Pavement By Her Dislocated Arm A Few Years Ago. Wordflower Poetry. February 8, 2026
  
• "He'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain When He Comes." Cosmic Horror Monthly. Issue 68. February 2, 2026.
  
• The Ghosts of Forests Past. Ecological Design Collective: Litter Journal. February 2, 2026
  
• What Could Be. Lucky Jefferson. January 25, 2026.
  
• "Sirens Don't Sing Underwater." Aothen Magazine. January 25, 2026
  

Yesterday was my last day at the McCormack Writing Center's winter workshop. I workshopped excerpts from my memoir-in-progress: Leaving Armageddon. Feedback was encouraging. I shared a hybrid collection of personal essays and poetry, and the takeaway is that readers want more. More. MOAR. I used my fellow workshoppees' feedback as writing prompts. Looks like I need to write more specifically about Armageddon, and what it meant to me as a kid. Funny that, especially considering the working title I gave the project.

I am also working on a collection of short stories called Every Tear From Their Eyes. This is related to my memoir as it is based on the premise of Jehovah's Witness teachings/prophecies being literally true. I've already written a cosmic horror flash called "The Good News," a short story called "Rich-People Houses," and another called "No Happy Endings." The latter was commissioned for an upcoming anthology in The Asylum of Terror series. Feedback from my weekly horror group has been positive, and just today, I received notification that my collection has been awarded a creation grant from the Ontario Arts Council through the recommendation of House of Anansi Press. I am grateful for their support. It's good to know that people want to read my stories.

I've had two publications this week:

My poem "Stillborn" has been published by Nightmare Magazine as well as their podcast. You can read it or listen to it.

My poem "Angakkuq," which was an Aurora finalist, has been published in Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume Three.

If you patronize the A-Hole (my pet name for Amazon), you can follow my author page to find out what is being released there for sale.

One of my drabbles recently won a prize, but I can't officially announce which one or where. Yet.

I'm currently co-writing a science fiction story with several other authors. Can't say much other than it involves pigeons and astronaut ice cream. It's a fun project!

I have started keeping track of how many submissions/rejections/acceptances I get each month. It's the 17th of October, and my tally shows 54 submissions, 14 rejections, and 2 acceptances. I know most people are unable to spend that much time sending things out, and I am grateful and incredibly lucky to be in a position to do so.

It is wholly unfair that, unless you are Stephen King or the dread JK Rowling, it is pretty much impossible to live on your writing. Our capitalist society does not support arts and culture. I hate that even winners of multiple, top awards are unable to achieve a living wage from their writing, and that many authors are being forced to withdraw from their writing careers in order to eat and keep the lights on.

It doesn't help that their/our writing is being stolen wholesale by Large Language Models and repackaged via ChatGPT and the like. If you use ChatGPT, you are not only complicit in the theft of author's living wages, but also in the destruction of ecosystems. Data centres use more power and water than cities, and greenbelts, forests, and farmland are regularly being destroyed to erect even more.

Here is a human-written story I've read recently which resonates with me:

Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience by Rebecca Roanhorse. Written in the dreaded second-person (which I personally enjoy), this toothsome example of Indigenous Futurism shows what happens when new technology is used as a toe-hold for destructive cultural appropriation. It's a microcosm of what has happened and what continues to happen.

Kwe!

That's one of the few Mi'kmaq words I know. It means "hello." I just started taking language lessons this week. It's gonna be a long road, but any word I learn is a huge level-up, considering I only knew two or three words to begin with.

I had a couple of acceptances yesterday, but I'm not going to count them because their acceptance letters were shady AF. Most of the letter was promotional material, urging me to buy multiple copies of the anthology ahead of time, plus stuffed toys, and, if I am lucky, I might win a prize. While I believe someone will get the prize money, the way this is being run is straight-up scam. Publishers ought not to get all their money and all their product from authors/artists. That is low. So no, I will not be sending more work to Polar Expressions Publishing, and I suggest you avoid it, too. I can see how this would win over someone new to publishing, but your work is worth more than this.

The erotic eco-horror anthology Silk and Foxglove launched yesterday and is available in e-book or trade paperback format. My story "All That Came From Our Lips Were Lilies" is within.

I want to share some of the stories I've been reading with you:

The Cost of Living by Jen Cornick. Creepy tale about the horrors of the working poor. I got to be a beta-reader for this, and it's delicious.

Proof By Induction by José Pablo Iriarte. A thought-provoking story about mathematical proofs, uploaded memories, and grief. This was a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award finalist.

Love is the Plan the Plan is Death by James Tiptree Jr. This is a surreal story from a unique POV. Who is speaking? WHAT is speaking? And what does it have to say about the nature of love?

And then there's this wonderful Inuit tall tale about Sermerssuaq, the strongest, strangest Inuk woman, ever.

A while back, I applied for a residency in Costa Rica. The Casa Uno Residency is a highly competitive artist residency, and I made the short list. I had an interview with the host yesterday and learned I am under consideration for placement in January/February.

I officially withdrew from consideration for the residency today. I graduate from the Queer Novel Immersive program at GrubStreet in February. If the residency were just a few weeks later, I would have been able to swing it. Womp womp.

The weird thing is, when I applied for the residency, I had a completely illogical feeling that I would get it. I have no idea why I was so certain, but I really was. Maybe I'm psychic.

I applied for several other residencies, but didn't have the same feeling about any of those. I wonder if I'll make it to the final rounds for any of them. One is in Alaska, one in Switzerland, one in Banff, and the other is online. Another writer I know is also applying for the Banff one. It would be fantastic if we both got it. I've been working with her online for over a year, and I'd love to meet her.

In other news, I recently completed edits for my personal essay "Monsters." It will be published in a special issue of Ex-Puritan. When I received my acceptance letter, the editor called my essay "fucking phenomenal." It's the only time I've ever had an F-bomb in an acceptance letter. An early version of the essay was shortlisted for the Dreaming into Collective Futures contest by Textile Magazine but was not published. I first began work on the piece while working in MT Space's Arts Exchange. "Monsters" is a personal essay showing the deleterious effects of settler colonialism on my life and the life of friends and family. It's a heavy read.

Also, although I did not win The Forge Literary Magazine's flash fiction contest, my story "The Bird Husband" made it to the longlist. Time to send it elsewhere. It is inspired by the story of Nuliajuk/Sedna from Inuit folklore.

I am currently enrolled in a flash fiction course through Workman Arts. I think I'll read "The Bird Husband" to the class today. I hope I will generate even more good stories through the course.

Today I plan on writing the next chapter of my work-in-progress "The Development." It's my gothic tale of southwestern suburban sprawl.

In November, I will be getting caught up on my writing even more, taking a course on subgenres of horror through Alex Davis Events. There are still spaces available if you're interested. I recommend Alex's courses. They're very good, and reasonably priced.

I will also be helping develop a course on flash memoir with Rachel Thompson. I'll be "playtesting" the course to give feedback on it. I've enjoyed her classes, and recommend them. Her Lit Mag Love course is what got me organized and paved the way for my professional writing credits.

In case you're interested, here are my publications for the year, as well as my upcoming publications. The year isn't over yet. Maybe I'll get even more of my work published!

2025 “Half Blood Line” and “To Live a Life More Full.” Forthcoming poetry in Workman Arts Literary Anthology
2025 “If You Listen.” Forthcoming fiction in Terrain.org
2025 “The Qalupalik.” Forthcoming fiction in Flash Fiction Online.
2025 “The Ghosts of Forests Past.” Forthcoming CNF in ALOCASIA
2025 “The Tupilaq.” Forthcoming fiction in Iridescence anthology. January 2025
2025 “The Infective.” Forthcoming fiction in Asylum of Terror: Volume 2 anthology
2025 “The Stolen Language of My Ancestors.” Poetry in IHRAM Publishes: Indigenous Voices - Heart, Hope and Land
2024 “Wolf Mother.” Fiction in Inner Worlds.
2024 “Angakkuq.” Poetry in On Spec. December 2024.
2024 “The Yolk of the Moon.” Fiction in LSUA Flash Fiction Booklet and website.
2024 “The T-Bone.” CNF in The Masters Review
2024 “Daisy Chain.” Fiction in Against the Wall, Under the Armor anthology. December 2024.
2024 “Sirens Don’t Sing Underwater.” Fiction in Moonlit Getaway. December 2024.
2024 “Monsters.” CNF in Ex-Puritan. November 2024.
2024 “Scarred.” Fiction in Meetinghouse Magazine. October 2024.
2024 “The Snow Hath No Queen.” Fiction in MetaStellar. September 2024.
2024 Excerpt from “The Tupilaq.” Fiction in Kinsman Quarterly. September 2024
2024 “A Time For Dolls.” Play in Native Voices: A Literary Collection of Emerging Indigenous Writers.
2024 “The Last Trench.” Fiction in Bitter Become the Fields. Horns and Rattles Press. July 2024.
2024 “Exile of Nuliajuk.” Poetry in Heredity issue of NonBinary Review, June 2024
2024 “Keswick Valley Memorial, 1984,” “This is How to Not Give Up,” and “Salt Water Strider.” Poems in Event Poetry and Prose
2024 “Tom Thumb of the North'' & “Blubber Boy: A Traditional Inuit Tale Then and Now.” Fiction in Mihko Kiskisiwin/Blood Memory: An Anthology.
2024 “Saddles in the Kitchen.” Memoir in Redivider.
2024 “Hiding in Plain Sight: Life With and Without Masks.” Personal essay in Knee Brace Press.
2024 “Saved” and “Wrassling’s Object Lesson.” Poetry in Eavesdrop Magazine.
2024 “Thumbing to Sugar Daddy Oberon.” Short fiction in MetaStellar.
2024 “This is the Time Just Before Spider Woman Meets Kiviuq.” Poetry in West Trestle Review

My memoir essay, "Saddles in the Kitchen," has been published in Redivider.

Here's the opening paragraph:

In the 1970s, my family lived all over New Brunswick before settling down deep in the Appalachian hills of the Acadian forest. Every summer, we journeyed to Newfoundland to visit Dad’s family. I have snippets of memories from my infancy and early childhood. I recall being a baby on a plane with a smoking section, hoisted up to look over the rails of an icebreaker ferry called the William Carson. It sank by the time I turned six. We drove through a place called Blow Me Down where Dad told me the Tabletop Mountains were flat on account of the fierce wind. I camped in a frigid tent on the Avalon Peninsula and peeked through the tent flap to watch a bull moose swim across a moonlit lake ringed by dark conifers. I saw icebergs float like white mountains off the coast of St. John’s. I witnessed herds of Newfoundland ponies running free, the last of a vanishing breed marking the end of an era. I remember being held in my Inuk grandfather’s arms in the passenger seat of a car while he pointed out a waterfall to me. It’s my only memory of him. He died when I was two.

I'm still not finished my manuscript. It's hanging there like a loose tooth. So close to being finished, but not quite there. I've been stalled by my health (chronic health conditions are a serious pain in the arse), but I finally finished a chapter which has been stalling me for weeks. Forward momentum has once again been achieved. Onward! This manuscript is sponsored by the Waterloo Arts Fund.

My poem This is the Time Just Before Spider Woman Meets Kiviuq is live on West Trestle Review.

I wanted to apply for the Masters program at Northwestern University, but when I learned they only want a 2,500-word writing sample, that waved a big red flag right in my face. How can they get an idea of someone's breadth of writing in such a small sample? I'm not a one-trick-pony when it comes to writing. I'm a buffet table! I'm a playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, memoirist, and short story writer. I write book reviews, smut, literary fiction, speculative fiction, and uncategorized weirdities. I'm also a proof reader and have experience as a copy and line editor. Though I crave structured learning and mentorship, I will find it another way: possibly through the private sector.

Once a month, I run a co-writing group for Indigenous writers in conjunction with the Indigenous Poets Society. It's been running on the first Tuesday of the month since November. It's a small group, but one I'm grateful for. We get a lot of writing done, and have a fun time with it. If you are an Indigenous writer and would like to write along with us, contact me at shanmonster at gmail dot com. We vet people beforehand to avoid Zoom bombers.

Here are my publications for 2023. I hope I have even more this year!

• “Wolf Mother.” Fiction in Augur 6.2.
  
• “The Redcoats Are Coming.” Micro fiction in NUNUM’s Done in a Hundred Anthology.
  
• “How the Blubber Boy Came to Be.” Poetry in The Deadlands Magazine.
  
• "The Snow Hath No Queen." Winner of Seminal Edits' Dystopian Fiction Competition.
  
• "The Anxious Writer." CNF in Fall 2023 issue of Open Minds Quarterly
  
• “The Silent Madness of Whales.” CNF in About Place Journal.
  
• “Sibyl Has a Heart of Gold.” Short fiction in The Temz Review.
  
• “Original Sin.” Poetry in Arc Poetry Magazine: Disability Desirability.
  
• Featured book reviewer in month of August for CAROUSEL Magazine
  
• “The Ghosts of Forests Past.” CNF in Solarpunk Magazine Issue 10.
  
• “Anirniliit: Those Which Breathe,” “Nuliajuk’s Promise,” “Seasons of the Nattiq. Poems in Spring 2023 issue of Yellow Medicine Review
  
• “Monkey Business.” Short YA fiction in Spring 2023 issue of Yellow Medicine Review.
  
• “How to Make Boiled Potatoes.” Memoir in 2023 Festival of Literary Diversity Program
  
• “Lost and Found.” Memoir in Grande Dame Literary Journal
  
• Various book reviews for Cloud Lake Literary
  

(I just realized that I somehow didn't include a short critical essay I wrote years ago about Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Here it is now.)

The Others of Herland

Superficially, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland appears to be a study in contrast between a utopian matriarchy and a flawed patriarchy. The most apparent difference between Herland and the rest of the world is the lack of men in the former, but Herland is not the genial utopia Gilman envisions, but a dystopian colonial society relying upon racial purity to succeed. It is not just missing men: it is missing non-white, “savage” races. The perceived superiority is based upon “othering,” which is a major theme in colonial literature.

“Othering” may be defined as defining/securing positive identity through the omission or stigmatization of an “other” (1). The concept appears early on in the book. When Indigenous guides inform Jennings that many have gone to the hidden civilization, but only one has ever returned, Jennings laughs and says, “I knew the stuff that savage dreams are made of” (Gilman 2). Othering continues when the women's voices are described as “no savage sing-song, but clear musical fluent speech” (Gilman 13). Jennings' racism grows more explicit: “There is no doubt in my mind that these people were of Aryan stock, and were once in contact with the best civilization of the old world. They were 'white'” (Gilman 46). It is not accidental that the supreme virtue of Herland is described as “race-motherhood” (Gilman 119).

By the end of the book, the othering has intensified to a genocidal extent. Jennings says the men make plans of “civilizing—or exterminating—the dangerous savages. That is, we men talked of that last—not with the women. They had a definite aversion to killing things” (Gilman 122). This raises a huge question: what happened to the many who had journeyed to Herland in the past? Jennings and his companions never ask, the women never offer, and this elision cements the story as colonial literature.


1. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Other
2. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1998). Herland. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.

Yesterday while I was at the gym, I overheard a young soldier laughing about how his fellow soldiers took a course on Indigenous culture in Ontario. He thought it was funny how not a single one of the soldiers actually read any of the material. Not even one soldier bothered with it, but they all passed the course.

While he laughed, I recalled how a Canadian soldier felt justified in thrusting a bayonet into the chest of a 14-year-old Mohawk girl who was holding her baby sister at the time. I thought about how RCMP officers have been terrorizing and harassing Wet'suwet'en people on their own land multiple times per day for weeks now. I thought about how cops shot at women at 1492 Land Back Lane in 2019 just so they could videotape the aftermath: angry men charging toward the police cruiser afterwards. The footage was released to the media who shared it, no questions asked, without talking to any of the Anishinaabeg or Haudenosaunee people. I remembered how one of the terrified elders there had sent me a text message saying, "They're shooting at us!"

Canada is built on genocide, and government attempts at reconciliation are a joke. It's the worst sort of joke, because it isn't funny.

Over ten thousand graves of First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children have been found at the concentration/re-education camps still referred to by the government as residential "schools," and there are over a hundred more of these child prisons to search. And somehow, Canada still has a reputation as a polite country filled with nice people. And somehow, most Canadians refuse to acknowledge the genocide that is still going on.

There is an apartheid in this country. Indigenous people do not get the same legal protections as other people. Forced sterilization is still taking place, as are birth alerts where Indigenous babies are taken away from their families right after birth and placed in foster care where they are abused, molested, and removed from their culture. The "residential schools" may be closed, but children are still being kidnapped by the government.

There's a trope in movies and books where bad shit always happens on Indian burial grounds. This entire continent is an Indian burial ground. Our bodies are everywhere, and the Prime Minister is still fighting against Indigenous children receiving the same medical care as other children.

Indigenous people live in a post-apocalyptic world.

Some time ago, an artist was offering a free, online workshop about native plants. I signed up, of course. And when it came to actually attending it, I dearly wish I'd made a reaction video of the whole thing. My face surely went through the gamut of expressions.

Since the workshop was being sponsored by some formal institution or another, a representative opened with a land acknowledgment. The mangled pronunciation of the various First Nations peoples made me cringe. I thought to myself, "Well, at least they're making an effort," and suffered through it. I waited for the part of the land acknowledgment where they say what their organization is doing to honour the treaties and to reconcile with Indigenous peoples, but that part didn't come. It rarely does.

The artist then began their workshop, saying they were new to the area, and had read up a bit on the region's history. They discussed how the particular area was important to people here when the settlers arrived, and how it is important to people here now in a "post-colonial" period.

My brain made a screeching sound. Wait. What? We aren't in a post-colonial period. We are in a straight-up colonial period. The colonizers are still busy colonizing.

Nevertheless, they persisted, repeatedly referencing current times as post-colonial. They talked about how everything was basically just a wilderness before and how the Europeans brought agriculture. They then discussed why they had chosen native plants as a subject: the aesthetic appeal. They then announced with a weird sort of glee that not all the plants were just weeds, because some of them actually have uses as food or medicine. They said that no one really knows this sort of stuff. They said their idea was to make a community project where everyone can come in and do a drawing of one of these overlooked and potentially useful plants, and that maybe everyone could come to see that some are pretty and might deserve a place in nature and a bunch of cockamamie nonsense which takes no understanding of ecology into account and what the fuck my brain was just melting at this point. So I logged off.

This is what casual, everyday, inadvertent racism from nice white people looks like. There was absolutely no consideration of the people who lived here before European contact. There was no mention of how folks were already living in the region (aside from the land acknowledgment), or how those people were incredible gardeners with excellent knowledge of companion planting and permaculture. There was no mention of how those first Europeans were doing so poorly in the region that the First Nations people taught them what foods to eat and what medicines to take out of empathy. There was no mention of how there are still people with that traditional knowledge about native plants. There was no mention of how many of these "weeds" were and still are specifically cultivated for food and medicine. There was no mention of the First Nations people who still live in the region. There was no mention.

A land acknowledgment is not a set of magic words which automagically squares everything up with First Nations, Inuit, or Métis. To me, almost all land acknowledgments come across as "this stuff isn't ours, but thanks for letting us steal the lion's share."



And then there's one of the courses I'm in, now. There was a session held during the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The class wasn't postponed until the next week, but American Thanksgiving, a holiday steeped in genocide, is going to be a day off. I can't help but note this. I try not to feel bitter, but I am. At least I get more time to work on my project.

Since Ontario decided not to make the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation a statutory holiday, the bankers and the politicians got the day off, but Indigenous people did not. Although there was an excellent turn-out for the march and the speeches, I know a lot of people who could not afford to take the cut in pay to offer their respects to survivors of genocide and their families. Meanwhile, glorious leader Justin Trudeau went on a fancy resort holiday in Tofino, skipping out on all the tricksy reconciliation bits. I guess he figured he'd already done his bit by staging a photo-op on the graves of dead children earlier in the year.


One of the reasons I left FaceBook was because of the waves of toxicity drowning me. Not only was I seeing hate speech in the comments sections of CBC/CTV/etc. posts, but I was being attacked by people who I thought were my friends. Some frequently questioned my motives for speaking out against racism. One of them, a friend for almost fifteen years, would regularly imply I was being hyperbolic about racism in Canada, that it wasn't nearly as bad here as it is in the US. But it's all the same struggle. All the while, cops continue to assault or murder people in my community. Abuses are happening all over the world to Indigenous peoples. In Canada, racist nurses killed Joyce Echaquan on a livestream. An Elder contacted me in desperation last year because the OPP had opened fire on women in Six Nations. All this time, I was being gaslit by non-Indigenous people.

This guy unfriended me in a fit of pique, but in a last vicious dig, accused me of being gullible, "woker-than-thou", and maybe even a pretendian. He eased up a little on that last one by saying that he looked into me and I seem to be legit.

I don't think I have the words for how violated that made me feel. That some white dude, who I thought was my friend, decided to research whether or not I'm actually worthy of being anti-racist. That he implied I'm a fake. That I'm only pretending to be Inuk because it makes me one of the cool kids.

The only people who have a right to tell me if I'm Inuk or not are Inuit.

I know people who are out on the land, defending land and people and water from acts of war. I do not use the word "war" lightly. The cops being sent in to fix the "Indian problem" come with assault rifles and armoured vehicles and attack dogs. Resource depletion companies are pay-rolling the RCMP. While dead children are being exhumed from unmarked graves, pipelines are buried in their place. RCMP used to kidnap all the children to take them to concentration camps where they were starved and horrifically abused, and more likely to die than a WWI soldier. Now the RCMP are all soldiered-up and attacking Land Defenders. At Fairy Creek, they especially like targeting Indigenous women and trans folks, using sexual violence and pepper spray to make them comply. A couple of days ago, they ran down an Elder at a crosswalk, leaving him lying there and saying that since it wasn't caught on video, it never happened.

A couple of days ago in Wet'suwet'en, they grabbed Logan Staats by his braids, slammed him face-first into the ground, punched him in the ear, and kneed him in the spine. He was hugging a 70-year-old Matriarch at the time, an Elder who'd been denied her heart medication for days by heartless cops. The folks in that community were cut off from the outside world. The RCMP wouldn't even allow their medication to be brought in. Their power, radio, and internet were shut off. They were in their houses, and cops broke their way in with chainsaws and axes. It's right out of a goddamned slasher movie. How would you react to having your house broken into by an ax- or chainsaw-wielding cop?

Many of these stories aren't making it into the news, and this is by design. Journalists are being jailed. Indigenous peoples are under attack. Prepubescent girls are taken from their families, fitted with IUDs, and put into foster care where it is known they will be raped. This is happening. This is the reality in Canada. We are not safe here. We cannot be safe unless we protect one another. I am so grateful for the Land Defenders. They give me hope.

There's a solidarity march tomorrow in uptown Waterloo. I plan on being there. We need to let the people know that we are not going to quietly vanish beneath waves of greed and hate and racism. We are still here, and we're finding peaceable ways of fighting back.

In July, MT Space paired me up with multidisciplinary artist Salomé Perez. Together, we collaborated and exchanged skills/knowledge. Both of us are eclectic artists with a keen interest in the natural world, so it was a perfect match.

Over the summer, we met several times in person, in our respective gardens, and also walked through the Laurel Creek Conservation Area. I shared my herbalism knowledge as we walked, and we discussed different uses for various plants. We collected grasses, flowers, and pollen for pigmentation and cordage. Salomé is an accomplished crochet artist and embroiderer, and she crocheted and embroidered with natural fibres.

She showed me how to crochet, and I showed her how to do relief printing. Although I didn't end up using crochet in any of my work (so far), Salome used some birch bark for relief printing.

My own relief printing is based on linocuts. I cleaned up some designs I made last year and produced these:









Salome did many sketches of the plants we saw on our walks. I went on a camping trip to Algonquin Park and did some drawing from life.



I also experimented with mixed media and natural materials. I incorporated wasp paper, wasp nest cells, leather, seal skin, butterfly wings, birch bark, and rose petals in my work. I gathered about 12 cups of rose petals from a grocery store parking lot. I made rose water with some, and macerated/simmered the rest to create rose beads. I ended up being most interested with the liquid produced in the latter process, and I used it as ink for this drawing:



In August, I was in preparation for the Indigenous Art Market Kitchener, and I continued to incorporate natural elements for that. I designed a line of earrings made from leather, sealskin, and birch bark.















I also embroidered some miniature pendants.






I continued playing with textures and contrast.

Birch Rose 1


Birch Rose 2


Sting of Pearls 1


Sting of Pearls 2


I continue to play around with another composition. This remains a work in progress.





I have enjoyed working with Salomé, and I anticipate we will continue our collaboration. I have very much enjoyed learning and creating with her, and want to thank both her and the fine folks at MT Space for putting this all together.