The Remembrance Day holiday has brought me a welcome break from the increasing pressure of the end of a semester. But I’ve always had mixed feelings about the act of commemoration it involves. As a child, I can remember standing during a minute of silence in school each year at the exact time of the Armistice that ended the First World War, and also my mother encouraging us to buy

It’s been an unusual Fall. Last year, when we moved into our apartment in the West End, it was dry and sunny. Vancouver in general doesn’t have the spectacular red leaves of the East Coast: most of the big trees are conifers, and stay green all year. But the West End is an exception, laid out in the nineteenth century as a residential area, each roadway a chain wide, and

What were my first two weeks in the programme like? I thought of an image for my feelings at the end of my second class, on Wednesday afternoon. We’d finished a little early, with a visit to the PRTC, the Psychoeducational Research and Training Centre that’s temporarily housed in one of the older buildings on the UBC Campus. And for the first time, we did some role playing. Two of

It’s now two weeks until my UBC classes begin, and, with them, a new phase of my life. I realise also that as this happens the nature of this blog will change. Over the past few months I’ve thought about questions of identity and the shape of my life, sometimes through incidents that have happened to me or situations I have encountered, more often through books I have read. As

This August, I thought I’d spend my leisure time before the coming storm of study reading more about the place I live in. I began with Charles Demers’s Vancouver Special – short, quirky essays about Vancouver, which also contain references to other works. This led me to one of the books I’ll write about here, Mark Leier’s Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British

The summer’s moving on. I’m back from Japan, and this month I’ve been trying to put my academic house in order by finishing revisions to two scholarly papers. My hope is to keep exercising these intellectual muscles as I move into a new disciplinary area, with the dream that work on counselling, the study of narrative, and other forms of writing will somehow begin to coalesce into something new, in

This blog was meant to be exploring transitions, but with only a couple of months to go before I start at UBC, I find myself drawn back to literature. I’ve been having dreams in the last month about my past: about teaching, about writing, chairing sessions, and publishing. And, as happens once in a while, I’ve discovered a stunningly good author: one of those authors who startle you, deeply move

One of the things I’ve been doing in the time before I start my Masters’ in September is taking a language class. We’re going to Japan for a walking holiday in less than a month, and we have time on our hands that we didn’t have when working. So each week we head over to the Community Centre. There are five of us in the class: the two of us, two Canadian men with

In the last month I’ve moved more into the world of counselling, both through preparations to study at UBC — and I’ll post more about some of the challenges I’ve faced later — and through my growing involvement in Peer Counselling at West End Senior’s Network. I’ve also had to make a choice about writing, and what forms of writing matter to me in my life. Come September, I won’t

Good news — I’ve now been accepted into my Master’s Programme starting September 2019, and I’ve also started working with my first client as a peer counsellor. For the last three weeks since I came back from Singapore, however, I’ve been reading a lot and, for the first time for many years, found myself completely immersed in novels. I’ve got Pat Barker to thank for that.  I’ve come across Barker’s writing