December 3, 2012
Talented Friends
This busy weekend featured a couple of my talented friends, and not for having written books even! On Saturday night, we attended the very exciting Toronto premiere of the short film “How to Keep Your Day Job”, based on the short story of the same name by Rebecca Rosenblum. It was so wonderful to be there in a room full of people, all of us collectively laughing at the humour and gasping at the otherwise. The film was so well done, underlining the goodness of its foundation. The film has already been shown in Calgary, and if you hear of it coming about somewhere near you, definitely go and see it.
And then last night I went to the theatre! I saw Strolling Player at the Red Sandcastle Theatre in Leslieville, written by Heidi Reimer and her husband Richard Willis, and starring Richard, a 90 minute one-man show about his life in theatre that begins with his birth (on purpose) at Stratford-Upon-Avon. A life in 90 minutes that takes up from a summer theatre in Guernsey, to stages in London’s West End, marriages wrought to ruin by tabloid journalism, exhausting tours across America, and a most unlikely true love discovered in the wilds of West Virginia. It was by turns funny, sad, and always excellent. I was so thrilled to be there, and very excited to learn that the show will be staged this summer as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. Do not miss this one…
August 12, 2012
Long Weekend
No post tonight as Pickle Me This is extending the weekend. We had just a little too much fun at the wedding of Rebecca Rosenblum and Mark Sampson, and three cups of tea and a late afternoon nap have done nothing to ease the post-party burden. So we will take to the bath with a copy of Emily Schultz’ The Blondes, which is so wonderful. And in the meantime, check out the wedding cake– with books on top! A most fitting cake for this literary duo, and my goodness, did they ever throw a party. It was a fantastic event, and only the beginning of a really delightful, inspiring, happy tale they’ll make together. So happy to be a supporting character. So happy for them both. xo
April 25, 2012
Mad Hope is launched
My friends-writing-extraordinary-books streak continues with Heather Birrell‘s story collection Mad Hope, which is so rich and wonderful. We’re currently working together on an interview that I’m looking forward to sharing with you soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to share photos from Heather’s launch last night at the Dakota Tavern. Her reading was brilliant, followed by an excellent interview with Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer. The room was packed with Heather fans, and it was really a most enjoyable evening. PS You can still get a copy of her story Frogs for free. 
April 22, 2012
The Famous 5
So many things I love are a part of this photo. Also, we had a really wonderful trip to Ottawa this weekend. Lots of reading on the train, hotel fun, good food, friends, and, speaking of friends, we were the beneficiaries of some amazing hospitality. Long live the Mini-Break!
March 22, 2012
A splendid day
“Albert collected good days the way other people collected coins, or sets of postcards.”– Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Oh, we’ve had a good day. Sunshine , popsicles and a brilliant morning in the park with wonderful friends, after which Harriet went straight to nap without lunch (at her own request) and slept for 3 hours. And then we headed down to Queen Street West to Type Books where Kyo Maclear was launching Virginia Wolf and her novel Stray Love, which made it the perfect mother/daughter occasion. The event was great, with snacks (pocky!), music (Waterloo Sunset!), and company (my best friend, Jennie!, who took our picture). It was also nice to meet Kyo Maclear, whose work I’ve admired for a long time. And then Harriet and I took the streetcar home, which was fabulous because transit is Harriet’s favourite part of being alive, and the driver on the Bathurst Streetcar rang his bell for us! Also exciting, I thought, was that the entire Queen St. W. area smelled like farm, which was curious, yes, but mostly importantly, which Harriet recognized before I did, and how wonderful that my streetcar-riding city girl knows what just what a farm smells like.
November 14, 2011
This is where we used to live.
2001/2002 was my final year at university, the year I had a back page column in the school newspaper and therefore had a platform from which to address the question of what it meant to live on a “grimy, yet potentially hip strip of Dundas St. West”, as my block had been described by the Toronto Star in a restaurant review of Musa. To live on such a strip meant kisses in doorways, I wrote, because no boy would ever let you walk home alone, it meant watching from your bedroom window as a dog devoured a skunk, and having to call the police when people started smashing car windows with implements from the community garden. I can’t remember what else I wrote in that piece, and Musa burned down two summers ago, but neither point means that year is lost. I have never gotten over it.
Everything felt monumental that year, not because of anything specific, although it was our final year of school, and 9/11 occurred days into it, serving to make us think a lot about things we’d always before taken for granted. “That was a year,” wrote my friend Kate in a recent email, “we all made enormous leaps into adulthood even if many days it felt like we were just playing.” And of course, everybody has had those years, monumental if only for how they delivered us to here. A threshold to something finally real, but we were aware of it happening all the time, and so amazed to watch the world opening up before our eyes.
And so it felt entirely appropriate when I discovered last week that they’d turned our entire apartment into an art exhibition. (It all feels a bit Tracey Emin.) “They” being the people at Made Toronto, which now lives downstairs from where we used to live, though that storefront was a Chinese herb shop when it was ours. (It was a different time. We’d never heard of hipsters, and Musa was the only place to get brunch for blocks and blocks. David Miller wasn’t even the mayor then, and Spacing Magazine had yet to be invented.) The exhibition took place last year, designer furniture and housewares on display in a “typical Toronto apartment,” which is funny because there was nothing typical about it– for about nine months that I know of, that apartment was the centre of the universe. It’s also funny because it’s the ugliest apartment I have ever, ever seen. Aesthetically speaking (although “aesthetic” was not, in fact, a word I was aware of when I lived there), that apartment’s sole redeeming feature was the patio where I used to go to pretend to smoke cigarettes, and watch the city skyline.
Part of the reason I love my husband is because I brought him home for a visit from England in 2003 when the apartment was still inhabited by friends of mine. And they had a party to welcome me back, and so for two days, he got to know almost exactly what I was talking about when I talked about that place, about that time. I love that he was there, that brief intersection between my new life and my old one. I love that my roommates are still such dear friends, no matter that we live so far apart now. And I love that the hideous pink linoleum floors are just the same, and that we’ve come so far, they’re considered art now.
September 19, 2011
I'll be there when Rebecca Rosenblum launches The Big Dream tomorrow. Will you?
Tomorrow night, Rebecca Rosenblum launches The Big Dream at the Dora Keogh Pub on the Danforth. Rebecca has been my friend since I met her in Goldberry Long’s backyard in September 2005, though at that time I knew her as “the girl who worked at Harlequin” (this was before I discovered that everybody, in fact, has worked at Harlequin). Other important things about Rebecca are that one day I realized that “Becky” was written on her shoe, which is how I discovered that everybody calls her Becky, except for everybody she met after 2005 (perhaps she wasn’t wearing those shoes often enough?), and also that both of us had the same photocopied picture of Bob Geldof on our bedroom walls during high school.
Three years ago, when her first book came out, Rebecca was the subject of one of my first interviews, which makes it all the more poignant that I’ll be interviewing her as part of her launch tomorrow, all up in front of the crowd and everything. I’m honoured to be a part of the event, so excited to celebrate this wonderful book with her, and also, I’ve made cupcakes. We’ve even got a babysitter! This is a big deal.
If you can’t make it, do c heck out the book. Yesterday morning, Margaret Atwood tweeted that she was looking forward to it, and as someone who just finished reading it, I can promise that Margaret Atwood will not be disappointed. Neither will you.
July 18, 2011
More Camilla than Kate
Many of you will no doubt recognize this dress as the dress I wore to *your* wedding!
With my usual knack for doing it wrong, I am more Camilla than Kate, but I like my hat anyway. It’s how I represent my English-ness (via marriage) at weddings. And this wedding was particularly extraordinary as we left Harriet at home and went away overnight (and then Stuart spent the wedding being barfed on by someone else’s baby, and I kept hiding in bushes in order to stalk another wedding guest who was exactly Harriet’s age, save for one week). We had criminal amounts of fun, the wedding was fantastic (with no actual wedding component, but with lobster, chicken wings, cupcakes, a live band and swimming), and Harriet had a time just as splendid with her grandmother. And in the twenty-four since we returned home, Harriet has appropriated my hat, clutch purse and high heels, and I don’t think she’ll be returning any of these items anytime soon. (And congratulations to our friends Erica and Alex who sure know how to throw a party!)
July 3, 2011
Best morning ever
Our friends Jennie and Deep have a new house within the vicinity of Trinity Bellwoods Park, so that was where we met them this morning for a splendid picnic brunch. It was a brilliant walk in the sunshine, from our house all the way down to Clafouti for the best croissants in Toronto. We had teas and coffees, and sat on a blanket under a tree, and marvelled at the goodness of life in general, in particular on a day like today. And then Harriet went to the playground and the wading pool, while Jennie and I dashed across the street for a browse in Type Books. I bought Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems and It Must Be Tall As A Lighthouse by Tabatha Southey. Jennie bought the Jack Dylan Trinity Bellwoods poster (at right). Then back to the park where we splashed around with Harriet in the pool. She was eventually bribed out of the pool with the promise of ice cream, which dripped until she was covered in it, and by then we were home. And then Harriet slept for three hours, which made this probably the very best day on record. Not a bad way to cap off a weekend of patio sitting, bbqs, and reading a big fat summer book. More about that book later…
April 1, 2011
A teapot for Harriet
Our friend Genevieve Côté sent us this picture today, to satisfy Harriet’s love of teapots. (Harriet is a teapot tyrant. She will hand you a crayon and say, “Teapot, happy” and you have no choice but to comply, to draw that teapot, and don’t even try to forget the happy smile.)
We were excited to see Genevieve’s new book yesterday at Book City. Without You is the sequel to her acclaimed 2009 book Me and You, and I will be buying it for Harriet for her birthday. Genevieve has a thing for teapots too, and Harriet loves finding them in her gorgeous illustrations.
