A Few Recent Stories

So I’m trying to finish this book about neverending life / the fountain of youth and it’s seriously becoming a neverending quest but in the meantime I’ve done a couple of short pieces to remind myself of what it feels like to actually complete something.

The CBC asked me to write a piece about Why I Write

I also did a story for their new radio show Stranger Than Fiction

My report on the volcanic island of Ischia is in the latest issue of San Francisco’s Caviar Affair

It’s not online yet, but look out for my piece on Hawaii and cacao in next month’s issue of Reader’s Digest (wha?)

And I also contributed my first ever piece of prose to a recent art show. My studio is part of Montreal’s Long Haul
and the theme of our last group show was “Hiatus”… I won’t be doing many new blog entries for a while as I’m trying to finish this book but in that spirit I will end this entry with my entry for that Hiatus show:

Hi Ate Us,
One day last fall when I was walking down our long corridor, a random sentence popped into my mind: “this work inhabits the hiatus.” Perhaps I’d seen it written on an artist statement; maybe I imagined it; possibly it was a case of cryptomnesia? Either way, it had a kind of artspeak vibe that made me happy. So somehow I wasn’t surprised to learn that the theme of this show was hiatuses. (Or is it hiatii? Like lacuna/lacunae? Hakuna Matada.) The word must’ve been in the air. Subliminal liminality. I later asked a friend if she knew anything about artworks inhabiting the hiatus. “Don’t you mean ‘inhabiting the habitus?’” she said. No. Hiatus. Somewhere between a kiss and the falls. In France, she told me, the word “hiatus” can be used to describe the velvety fold of an apricot. And according to the Dictionnaire Litteraire Et Erotique Des Fruits Et Legumes, an apricot’s hiatus is a divine opening. It is also a parenthesis, a barn, a purse, a hutch, an angel’s smiling ass, a pudendum muliebre, a fanny-pack, and “paradise or the whatever.” Hiatus. A velvety fold. Anyways, here you are, at a hiatus party, and here I am, working on a new book, taking a short hiatus in order to write a short note about inhabiting the hiatus in order to arrest time and be part of the hiatus art show before continuing the next paragraph in the next chapter. There we are, neither here nor paradise or the whatever.