writer. organizer. educator.
The Canadian Science Writers Association announced the winners of the annual Science in Society Journalism Awards on May 3, 2016. I am excited to be named as the Honourable Mention for the 2015 Herb Lampert Science in Society Emerging Journalist Award. The story which garnered the honour was published by Van Winkles in October of 2015.
My article for Briarpatch Magazine exploring the successes of the cross-national movement to increase the minimum wage (“What’s at Stake in the Fight for $15?” Briarpatch Magazine, November 2015) has been named a finalist by the Canadian Association of Journalists for the 2015 CAJ/CWA Canada Award for Labour Reporting.
(image: Jake Giddens)
Can you experience Boston as written by Dennis Lehane, if you use his books a tour-guide? I wrote an essay about Lehane’s Boston-based crime novels, told as a travelogue. The amazing folks at The Life Sentence published it this week and you can find it here.
“We would arrive after the framers, electricians, and plumbers had come and gone. We hung doors, installed baseboard, and built cabinets and floor-to-ceiling entertainment units. During our coffee breaks we sat in companionable silence, side by side against the dusty drywall, surveying the fruits of our labour: the building’s daily transformation.”
Read the rest of my personal essay about life and labour, carpentry and capitalism, in the March 2015 issue of Briarpatch Magazine.
Back in November I interviewed poet and songwriter John K. Samson (The Weakerthans) and author Candace Savage (A Geography of Blood) for Briarpatch Magazine. You can find the whole interview by visiting here.
I had the chance to interview Ben H Winters, New York Times best-selling author of the Last Policeman Trilogy. Check it out at KGB Bar Lit Magazine.
An article I wrote about the human right to adequate housing in Canada appears in the Summer Reading issue of THIS Magazine, which also includes great poetry and fiction by the likes of Sina Queyras, Carrie Snyder (check out my review of her latest book here) Tony Burgess and others.
You can find the new issue at your local independent bookstore.
The Sun Magazine recently reprinted several essays from Beautiful Trouble, including a short one I authored. You can check out the May 2014 issue, which also includes great fiction , non-fiction, interviews, and a transcript of Pete Seeger’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee by going here.
The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for nearly forty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human. The Sun celebrates life, but not in a way that ignores its complexity. The personal essays, short stories, interviews, poetry, and photographs that appear in its pages explore the challenges we face and the moments when we rise to meet those challenges.
A short memoir I wrote, longlisted this spring for the CBC Creative Non-Fiction Prize, can be found in the latest issue of Ricepaper Magazine, alongside exciting writing from the likes of Doretta Lau (shortlisted for the 2013 Journey Prize) and Madeleine Thien (author of Dogs At the Perimeter and Certainty).
“When I was young, we lived with my grandparents in Toronto. My parents slept in a windowless room in the basement, hidden behind the washer and dryer. My brother and I shared a bunk-bed, tucked into the bedroom on the second floor. There was a time, living there, when my dreams crept into the waking world.”
You can read the rest by finding a copy at your local independent bookstore, or by ordering one directly from Ricepaper: http://ricepapermagazine.ca/magazine-2/18-3-winter-2013/
I tried my hand at crime fiction and Shotgun Honey picked up this flash fiction story.
“Johnny wasn’t a deep thinker. But he burned hot; bright and reckless. He’d slam on the brakes going seventy, slide through a corner and scream my name so loud I could feel his voice ricochet around my ribs. The few nights he didn’t spend with me, he spent at the track, or in one of Callum’s card rooms. He was hooked on that moment before the clock started, or the cards were called.”
To read the rest: http://shotgunhoney.net/fiction/out-of-time-by-yutaka-dirks.html
yutaka dirks 