As this website was launched in December 2020, everything was new at that time!
NEW May 2024
There are 7 new stories and one new poem uploaded.
Among the stories are 3 travel tales, the recent 2024 trip to Portugal, the 2023 trip to Puerto Rico, and a trip to Toronto during the semi-lockdown of 2021. They join my other travel notes from Foix (France), Collingwood / Bruce Peninsula, Cuba, and driving (poorly) in foreign countries.
There is a new addition to the Mini-stories of Lesser Known Hockey Personalities. Look for Karl-Petr Magnersson, hockey card photographer and his unfortunate piece of parsley. His story follows all of the other folks that make up that collection.
The other three are fiction. I can really let myself go in fiction, can be someone else, say outrageous things and ignore the urge to edit my thoughts. Not sure if the result is what everyone wants to read but I'm often happy with it.
So of the new fiction, the words of Robbie Robertson are what link 6 separate tales in Robbie, Fanny and Chester. Another is Bumpy Rides an observation of what may be behind a conversation between two new lovers on an overseas flight. And Conversations With the Dead and Dying is about trying (unsuccessfully) to hold onto the fading memories of a lost love.
The new poem is called Fingers and when I wrote it the same day that my mother died, I thought it was a weird, gory little thing about body parts getting ripped off and wasn't aware of it having anything to do with my Mom or anyone else. I left it as-is and went to sleep. When I re-read it the following morning and tried through tears to read it aloud to my sister, I realized what it actually was, something I was totally unaware of when I wrote this thing down on a pad of paper at my bedside. It's a protest against death and a recognition of how much of us it takes each time.
If someone is on this site for the first time and is trying to decide what to read, here are some of the ones I personally like the best:
The Covid stories, especially Bravery and Explaining It Backwards
I also love older ones like The Crowd In All Of Us or Claire, the Bear and Me or The Family Name
The travel stories cover some recent fun and exploring places and my tolerance for what can happen.
Also in non-fiction: Mini-Stories of Lesser Known Hockey Personalities
The recent poems are ones I'm more happy with, some of the early ones can be goofy, or my thoughts on life have changed alot (I was a teenager when some were written after all), but my all-time favourites of what I've written are In The Night and My Father and Yours