Walking through a parade for the blind — 1951 Imagine: a single moment waited 63 years for me, hidden in a blue shoebox. And when I say a moment, I mean it: a sixtieth of a second, maybe less. I wasn’t there for it back when it happened. I wasn’t even born. The moment I’m talking about — and…

My mother was tiny, her bones delicate, like a bird’s. When the young woman at the Mount Royal Crematorium handed me her remains, she said, “That’s the lightest box of ashes I’ve ever seen.” Sealed with tape and never opened, that plain white cardboard box sits on the fourth shelf…

There’s music in everything, even defeat. Charles Bukowski So, here’s a funny story. Or maybe it’s not funny at all. My mother told it to me when I was around 25, swearing it to be truth not mischief, though she sometimes couldn’t help mixing the two together. …

Becoming an artist meant learning to create for myself, not anyone else — Dear Frank, Your elder self is charging into winter. To be more exact, it’s the hours that charge forward; I follow, slower and less certain. When the time comes, you’ll find me less a comet and more like Riley, the chocolate Lab retriever who lives next door. …

Way back in 2013, I googled “self-esteem” and here’s what I got from a site called Psych Central: Have you wondered about what self-esteem is and how to get more of it? Do you think your self-esteem is low? Do you know how to tell? …

Written in conjunction with the exhibition Untitled Selves: New Work by Frank Rodick, Ryerson School of Image Arts, Toronto, 2018. It lasted years, not months; and during that long season of falling apart I watched those last waves of stardust sweep through my parents, breaking them into pieces. …