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I’ve been thinking a lot about ekphrasis (the fancy word for a poem responding to a work of art), and it’s led to me wonder whether poetry is as fundamentally a product of input (what a poet sees, hears, reads, and absorbs from the world around them) as of output (the actual writing and revising).…
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The word “inertia” has a negative ring, but I like the idea of remaining at rest unless changed by a external force, which is how my dictionary defines it. The writing life is something like that — doing time at the desk until some mysterious, meaningful force finally shows up to make the work worthwhile.…
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Thanks to old friends and new friends who came out this weekend for performances of Piecework: When We Were French in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and Turners Falls, Massachusetts, and to my hosts in both towns. Thanks also to everyone who has sent messages in the wake of those performances with their responses to the show.…
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My solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, continues its life on the road this month with two new performances. If you’re near St. Johnsbury, Vermont, I hope you’ll come see the show at the St. Johnsbury School on Saturday, January 29 at 7:30pm. I used to live in St. Johnsbury, and I’m looking forward…
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Buying a 3-month membership to Ancestry.com might be the closest I’ve ever come to going on a bender. There is something about genealogy that I find positively addictive. Each ancestral coupling leads backwards to another and another, like cells dividing. Recovering the path between us and our ancestors is like reading a mystery novel, and…
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It was pleasure enough to share a poutine with artist and performer James Bewley during his recent visit to Montreal, but I also had the opportunity to chat with his alter-ego, Dale Seever, about Tim Horton’s, Celine Dion, and my own solo show, Piecework: When We Were French. Dale is a born entertainer, an unsinkable…
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Until now my solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, has been performed exclusively in the U.S., which is fitting: it is primarily a memory play, exploring how Franco-American culture has been both preserved and lost over the past century. I am a native New Englander, and the reception my show has received there has…
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Join me on November 17 at Arts Café in Mile End for Poetry Plus, one of Montreal’s finest and longest-running reading series. I’m looking forward to reading with a line-up of great local writers. Read on:
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This afternoon I was fortunate to be a guest at the IBM plant in Essex Junction, Vermont, where they were holding a diversity event focusing on Franco-American culture. I was invited to perform my solo show, Piecework: When We Were French, and it was great fun to be part of the day. When I first…
