Nudity is Only Skin-Deep

I realized I didn't have a URL list of where to read or purchase magazines/anthologies where I've been published. There. Fixed.

• 2025 Pony. Poem in ZO Magazine.
  
• 2025 "The Tupilaq." Fiction in Iridescence: Speculative Fiction and Poetry Featuring Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
  
• 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. (Nominated for the Pushcart Prize)
  
• 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 play “A Time For Dolls,” a coming-of-age story with wickedly funny Inuit tales, has been published in Native Voices: A Literary Collection of Emerging Indigenous Writers. I think it’s on sale until the 15th of June, and then prices go up. It’s available on all of the Amazons, I think. It may be coming to other booksellers later this summer.

People like my writing, and that brings gladness to my heart.

My play "A Time for Dolls" finished fourth over all in the Native Voices Award sponsored by Kinsman Quarterly. I was told there were over 400 entries. The play will be published in an upcoming issue of Kinsman Quarterly as well as in the Native Voices anthology.

My poem "This is the Time Just Before Spider Woman Meets Kiviuq" has been accepted for reprint in West Trestle Review. It should be out in January/February.

My personal essay "Saddles in the Kitchen" has been accepted by Redivider and will be published in the Spring 2024 issue.

I'm getting very close to completing the first draft of my novel The Everwhen. I'm around ~90,000 words in. This has been sponsored by the Waterloo Arts Fund.

I am contemplating getting a Masters degree in creative writing. I'm currently looking at the programme at Northeastern University.

I'm also applying for a writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

I figured out how to add a title and end credits. Turn on subtitles for the full experience.

If you're not familiar with Oscar Wilde's story of Salome, here's my quick and dirty spoiler:

Spoiled rotten princess becomes infatuated with a Christian prophet who spouts of bunch of yo momma jokes. Prophet spurns her and she has a conniption. Princess's stepfather, a powerful tetrarch, has the hots for the princess, and she takes advantage of this to get the prophet's head served to her on a silver platter. She makes out with the head.

I attended the Canadian Opera Company's performance of Strauss's opera last night. This performance was directed by Atom Egoyan. My opinions are mixed. Parts of the opera are brilliant. Parts of it are so lacking in subtlety that it was like being repetitively hammered with overt symbolism and visual puns. I get that at the climax, Salome gets Joachaan's head. But was it necessarily to neatly bookend the piece with the captain of the guard getting head at the beginning? Really? Especially considering his obsessive infatuation with Salome, why the heck was he having hanky panky with that other woman, anyhow? It just doesn't make any sense at all.

I understand that the director was trying to show the motivations of Salome, why she turned into a bloodthirsty necrophile. But I think that the depictions of her abuse were heavy-handed and out of place with the rest of the story. The dance of the seven veils scene was a weird montage of images of sylph-like innocence and ballerinas in a forest mixed with a nifty, disorienting shadow play of a gang rape. No, I get that the tetrarch wanted to bang Salome. But her consensuality is the major crux of the whole sordid tale. If the tetrarch didn't care about her consent in the first place, the story just wouldn't work. If he didn't require her consent, he'd never have made that deal with her. He just would've raped her whenever he pleased and Joachaan would've continued languishing in the dungeon.

Overall, blocking was solid, but there were a few times when it just didn't work for those of us sitting in the nosebleed section. Screen projections just weren't viewable, and when actors were at the back of the stage, I couldn't see their heads.

Inexplicably, the captain of the guard wore a suit which was way too big for him. I don't know what's up with that.

Other than these things, I think the show was brilliant. The orchestra was magnificent. I loved the simple colour symbolism of the show. White, black, and red clothing and props were used to excellent effect. I don't have the program, so I don't know who played which part, but the stand-out roles were of the Tetrarch (amazing stage presence and a wonderful voice) and Salome herself (some excellent physical theatre, and she can hit high notes and hold them even when she's doubled up or crumpled upon the stage). The climactic scene of Salome with the head of Joachaan was excellently presented, and the blood on the white dress worked well to tie in the problematic earlier scene of the sexual assault.

On Friday, I took part in my second Write or Flight event. I was taken to a theoretically creepy location to write a short play overnight. I ended up at a building which was once a gun shop. Years ago, guns were stolen and used in several murders. Some people believe the building is haunted.

I don't believe in ghosts, and wasn't at all creeped out, except once, shortly after waking up, when I saw a giant earwig/centipede-looking beast scramble past me.

For better or worse, this is what I came up with. It will be performed on Saturday. Wanna come see?

( Enjoy! )

Late Friday night, as part of the UnHinged Theatre Festival sponsored by Flush Ink Productions, I and seven other playwrights were taken to previously undisclosed locations around the city where we would be given 24 hours to write a play. Each of these places was calculated to be unsettling in some way or another. I was nervous, but not because I'm afraid of haunted houses or anything like that. It's just that it's been a long time since I last wrote for stage: about fifteen years. It's also been a long time since I've written under a hard deadline--maybe fifteen years since I last did that, too. What if I got writers' block? It's happened before. What if my play just sucked? That was a possibility. After all, I'm awfully rusty.

So off I went to the Rum Runner to meet up with all the other writers and the other people involved for the first time. It was confusing. I was trying to go over various story possibilities in my mind while dealing with questions about tech issues. They wanted to do a Blair Witch Project sort of idea, with streaming video of us during the writing process, but the video stream website was confusing. I felt like I was being bombarded with irrelevant material while all I wanted to do was start writing before I got too tired. It was already too late, though. I was tired--verging on exhausted. Although I'm typically a night owl, for the past few months, I've been sliding more and more into a diurnal state, and now I had to mix it around.

We finally received our locations. One writer, who had a fear of ghosts, was being sequestered in a theoretically haunted hotel room. I was a little envious. It sounded cushy. He'd have a warm place and a bed, when he was too tired. One was writing in a creepy, cold basement in an old building. I was being placed in a ramshackle warehouse with a theatre space. Another was in the emergency room of a hospital. I didn't envy her. In my opinion, that is the most stressful of all locations. I don't recall the other locales. My mind was too busy.


( This big, black room became my home for the next fifteen hours. )

My dance performance on Saturday night went over very well. I'm looking forward to seeing video footage so I can critique myself mercilessly. Now I'm working on familiarizing myself with the music for my next performance in November, and figuring out what the heck to do with it. It's extremely different from anything I've ever performed to before, and rhythm and melody don't really enter into the equation. Also, I only have 60 seconds. Tricky, tricky, tricky....



Tickets are available now. 60x60 will be a really unique show. Please come check it out.

I spent yesterday with knightky, and walked his damned legs right off him. Poor guy. But we did get to see the Terra Cotta warriors exhibit at the ROM, which was interesting, but, I have to admit, a little disappointing. The pieces they showed were remarkable, but I didn't get the sense of scope I was hoping for. There were only a half dozen or so of the soldiers, and a couple of the horses. I felt far more overwhelmed by the huge lineups to see the things than I did by the artifacts themselves. I will, however, admit to being taken aback by the collection of ancient Chinese dildos. These were ostensibly only used by women, because apparently, Chinese men had no use for such things back then. Pfft.

Later, we found a playground sized for adults on a back street behind the Toronto public library, and had lots of fun playing on the springy seesaw. I love those things! There should be more playgrounds like that everywhere. I know we're not the only grown-ups who like playing on such things.

In the evening, I went to see Gary Numan. Nash the Slash opened for him. I was under the impression I was the only one in the audience who didn't like him. He had his face wrapped all in bandages, just like thirty years ago. And he wore a white tuxedo with a white top hat. It is definitely a unique schtick, but I just cannot get into his music. I didn't really like him when I was a kid, either. Ah well. At least I could sing along with his closing song, "Teenage Wasteland." I overheard someone in the audience positing that he could very well be a member of The Residents. Yes, I suppose so.

It was a much older audience than I'm used to seeing at shows. I'd say 2/3 of the audience was my age and older. There was no mosh pit. Hehehehe....

Gary was awesome. His band was really good, too. The first half of his show was all early stuff. Although I'm fonder of his later music, I gained a fresh appreciation for his older compositions when I got to see/hear them live. The audience nearly lost their minds when he started playing "Cars" and "Down in the Park."

He did a three-song encore, ending with A Prayer for the Unborn, which is about the saddest song ever, and not the sort of thing I want to cheer all frenzied-like for.

I feel a pretty strong connection with a lot of his lyrics. I think he perhaps shares the darker part of my brains.

Link time.

Equus: This is playing in Toronto next month. It's one of my favourite plays, so I'd really like to see it. Wanna come with me?

Shopping for Zombies: This is not the store I would have figured would do this....

Bacon Lube Taste Test: It's bacony.

adieu canaille: NSFW because of roto-boobies. Surreal fembot-type stuff, with burlesque spinning action (thanks, balthcat).

Student Hides Rick Astley's Song In College Paper: I used to write secret messages like this all the time, but I have never attempted rickrolling like that.

Crocodile on plane kills 19 passengers: I feel bad for laughing. Really, I do. But motherfuckin' crocs on a plane!

Republicans Oppose Franken on Rape Legislation: When the reputation of big business is considered legally more valuable than egregious human rights violations. Disgusting.

Transcending the Material: Knitted skeleton (thanks, longpig and elanya)!