Above: A fall splash of colour on the Alberta Legislature grounds – seemingly firmly rooted, but, like many cultural truths, unsupportable when you look at them in a different context. In this post you’ll find: Opening an aged white whine. Chirps from the racist nest. Shouting At…Who? Awareness Tips Opening an Aged White Whine When…
Read more
In this post you’ll find: A short discussion about snippets. A sad snippet. A snippet suggesting the value of sadness. A hopeful snippet. Sometimes ideas come to you as feelings or impressions. Sometimes they come with force, as words already formed. Sometimes they aren’t enough to furnish the structure or content for a complete poem,…
Read more
All photos courtesy of Jordon Hon – https://www.joho-photos.com/ In this post you’ll find: A brief threaded trail of how tangled up my work has been in the last twenty years. How housing in Edmonton is tangled up as well. An introduction to the Housing Complex. Lessons in entanglement. Important links: The Housing Complex site at…
Read more
What you’ll find in this post: A brief description of two street newspapers that were created and published in Edmonton between 1994 and 2024. A reflection on alternative journalism and what that might mean in this context. A reflection on how digital media changes our interaction with the world in this context. Disclaimer and Positionality:…
Read more
Why It’s Important to Think About Theatre Positionality and Disclaimer: I’m an aging, white, cisgender male. Living in Alberta for the greatest part of my life, I’ve been socialized into a colonizing, white supremist system. Through close personal relationships I’ve been introduced to the impacts of marginalization and exclusion on others, but I haven’t experienced…
Read more
DISCLAIMER and RECOGNITION I’ve been involved in projects and organizations dealing with housing, homelessness, and poverty for fifteen years, but that is very little compared to the many people in Edmonton who spend every day providing shelter, food, counseling, housing, and support for those suffering from poverty and lack of adequate housing. Those needing the…
Read more
Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0: Imagining Inclusive Performing Arts Edmonton, Alberta, Canada May 21-24, 2024 In this post you’ll discover: What Postmarginal Edmonton 2.0 (PME 2.0) was and where it came from A variety of my perspectives on relationality, working styles, and self-awareness DISCLAIMER This text is from my perspective, about me. I understand the limited value…
Read more
This Is Where We Live is a video project that aired at the Garneau Theatre on Nov. 22, 2022 and is available for viewing at the link below This Is Where We Live began as a theatre pilot project, with the intent of piloting a process for interviewing people experiencing homelessness, creating monologues from those…
Read more
This post relates to a number of projects – specifically a video project called This Is Where We Live that aired at the Garneau Theatre on Nov. 22, 2022 and is available for viewing at the link below, and a playscript also called This Is Where We Live (just to confuse people) that is in…
Read more
In September of 2021 40-50 theatre artists and culture workers gathered to investigate what it takes to honour difference in the creation process. This was part of a process begun with Walterdale Theatre in Edmonton, at the initiative of my wife and myself. However, it branched out much further than Walterdale, created relationships that span…
Read more
Photo of Walterdale courtesy of Henderson Images – https://www.hendersonimages.ca This is one chapter of a novel in progress about the resident ghost of Walterdale Theatre in Edmonton. To all the friends and people I’ve met at Walterdale – none of these characters are meant to be you!
After Ralph’s World I was chided by a former artistic director about the character of Ralph, and questioned about my knowledge of homelessness and homeless people. So I volunteered for three years with a street newspaper, Alberta Street News, interviewing and writing profiles on the vendors, who were marginalized and sometimes homeless. Starless was the…
Read more
Photo credit: C.W. Hill Photography Ltd. and Walterdale Theatre After Thicker Than Blood life got busy. School, kid, work, more school, another kid, more school, always writing in my spare time about the freeing quality of art. Go figure. It took a long time, but it finally came together with Premier Ralph Klein’s drunken night…
Read more
With this cross we stake our claim Raise our stone god on the now broken land The river which poured us hungry, fierce across the prairies Now lolls at our feet One arm of this cross Thrusts west Peaks impregnable now train-tracked traced in children’s colouring books The other arm aims east, shoots the nodding…
Read more
I acknowledge that I and many other non-Indigenous people have benefited from this land and I want to show it with more than words. This is my land acknowledgement. Like many non-Indigenous people in Alberta, I’ve benefited greatly from the land and from the resources under the land. Many Indigenous people have not benefited,…
Read more
Creative nonfiction is a murky genre. On one hand, revealing the events which have happened to us is a liberating experience. On the other hand, how much can we trust ourselves when we report on the events which happen to us? This biopsy did happen. The beetle did crawl. I did feel like a bug.
The Poet’s Pig was co-winner of the one-act comedy category of the 1988 Alberta Playwriting Competition. It was first produced at Walterdale Theatre, Edmonton, Alberta, in May of 1988, as part of the one-act festival, with a second production in the 1988 Edmonton Fringe Festival, and a third production in the 1989 Vancouver Fringe…
Read more
Photo credit Peter Law https://unsplash.com/@retepwal When I was a child I thought he was a giant With his arms he moved whole trees And animals tenfold his weight He lorded over – they went where he willed He worked from dawn to dusk And at his command Horizons changed from gold to black A humongous…
Read more
