"Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude." - Paul Theroux

(By the way, I highly recommend his writing.)

I have a meeting next week with Yann Martel (winner of the Booker Prize and a prestigious German book prize for "Life of Pi") to get feedback about one of my stories. As you may already know, he's the writer in residence at the Saskatoon Public Library this year. I'm currently reading (and greatly enjoying) his novel. Below is an excerpt that I found particularly powerful. Martel is referring to various religions in it.


"There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise [small portion of an Indian rupee] , walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush."

"The main thing that separates happy people from other people [is] the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench." - Barbara Kingsolver

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I hope that I'm of use to at least a few people in the world! :-)

"Write about what you're afraid of." - Donald Barthelme

Here's an interesting, brief article that I found today on the Internet:


It was on this day in 1895 that Oscar Wilde was arrested on the charges of sodomy. For the past two years, he had been the lover of Alfred Douglas, a young poet and student at Oxford. In February of 1895 Douglas's father left a note at Wilde's club that accused Wilde of being a sodomite. Wilde sued Douglas's father for libel, but the judge ruled that he was justified in calling Wilde a sodomite. Wilde knew he would be arrested, and his friends urged him to leave the country, but instead he accepted his fate and went to prison.

At the time, he was at the height of his popularity as a playwright, but once he was arrested audiences turned against him. His plays An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were selling out every night in London, but they soon closed. A tour of A Woman of No Importance (1893) had been planned in the U.S., but it was cancelled. Newspapers wrote editorials denouncing Wilde's homosexuality; even close friends spoke out against him.

The first trial took place in late April. On the night before the final day of the trial, Wilde wrote a letter to Alfred Douglas that said, "Your love has broad wings and is strong, your love comes to me through my prison bars and comforts me, your love is the light of all my hours. . . . If I have been the butt of a terrible tragedy, it is because the nature of that love has not been understood."

The first trial ended in a hung jury, but Wilde was convicted in the second trial. He was sentenced to two years in jail, and while he was there he wrote his most famous poem, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and his autobiographical essay De Profundis (1905). He was released in 1897 and died three years later in a hotel in Paris, estranged from his family.

Wilde said, "It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inarticulate manner that they hurt one by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style."

To read my latest poem ("I Lost Three Things"), go to zed.cbc.ca and type 120202 (the poem's ID #) in the search box.
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Here's a great poem that I just discovered:



Poem: "When Death Comes," by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press).

When Death Comes


When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Last night David and went to see "Calendar Girls", starring Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. It's a wonderful movie, and I recommend it highly. Although it's mostly a comedy, there are some very poignant moments.