This is my first essay.
I was five…
. . . and an unreliable narrator. The claim that “ Is CAN PLA THE PEANO” holds only a shade of truth. It should have read, more modestly, “ Is CAN PLA ‘CDE MaDE A Boat’ oN THE PEANO.”
I’ve written a few more essays since then.
My personal essays lean toward memoir. They’ve won the CBC Literary Award and the Prairie Fire Creative Nonfiction Award, appeared in Best Canadian Essays and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award in personal journalism. My manuscript, Any Myth Will Do, won a John V Hicks award under an earlier title. It’s still a work in progress, but I hope soon to have it ready to submit to publishers. ‘CDE made a boat’ is still my entire repertoire for ‘the peano’.
Curriculum of a Western Landscape (shortlisted for the CBC Literary Award) appeared in Brick Magazine.
Sturnella Neglecta (Overlooked Little Starling) was a finalist for the CBC Literary Award.
In the Cypress Hills near Eastend, Saskatchewan, the setting for Curriculum of a Western Landscape.
Several other essays don’t appear online, but are part of a book-length work-in-progress, Shelter: A Personal History. Here’s a list of a few of them:
“The Occupations of Muriel Thompson” won the CBC Literary Award and appeared in En Route Magazine.
“Pathologies of the Heart” earned an honourable mention in the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest and appeared in The New Quarterly.
“Varieties of Accident” (nominated for a Pushcart Prize) appeared in Grain Magazine.
“Six Ways She Might Have Died before She Reached Nineteen” appeared in Prairie Fire, where it won the Creative Nonfiction Contest; appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2016; shortlisted for a National Magazine Award.
“The Hours, Emma Lake” (unpublished) was longlisted for the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest at The New Quarterly.
“From the opening line of ‘Six Ways She Might Have Died before She Reached Nineteen,’ we know we are in the hands of a writer who is writing about serious matters but with a sly, sardonic gleam in her eye .... Part memoir, part personal essay, structured around six near misses, the tension builds to the horror of the fifth and the denouement in the sixth. The essay as symphony.”