Category — Published

My second piece, a profile on my hometown neighbourhood, appears on the Sweetmama site today. You can find it here. Yum, yum.

Have a wonderful weekend, Everyone! I’ll be spending it celebrating the arrival of my new nephew (Judah, born yesterday) and enjoying one of our last weekends in Vancouver.

My most recent article appeared in the New York-based Curator last Friday. You can give it a read here.

An excerpt:

“There’s no question that technology has overrun our lives. Over the past century, the world has welcomed technological ‘progress’ with arms wide open and we’re living with the clicking, dinging, anxiety-inducing deluge of it.

But a creative backlash is underway, helping human beings cope with the avalanche of data that passes in front of most of us every day through the use of computers and cell phones.

Slow food, the back-to-the-land movement, and groups like letter writing clubs are being formed by a new subculture: the 21st century luddite, wielding fountain pen and notebook, and some checking e-mail from the public library a mere hour per week. Dolen and Fedoruk think this movement is more than a blip on the technological continuum…”

This may be my favourite article to date. I hope you enjoy it!

A few of my words appeared in ‘print’ this past week.

A poem: A Prayer in catapult’s Arms are for Hugging issue

An interview: Wax Poetic in Comment

And my first profile in Sweetmama: Overhaul the Coveralls

Also, I entered a full-length poetry manuscript into a 1st book competition on Monday. Fingers and toes crossed. 

Have a happy weekend, Everyone!

Paris, 2009

Cardus, my favourite Canadian think tank and publisher of Comment magazine, where I frequently contribute, has a new online venture called After Hours. It’s a daily blog interested in ‘issues that affect the architecture of North American public life, including economics, literature, religion, politics, social and scientific innovation (and sundry other things.)’

“Slow for Good,” my first post as a Contributing Editor, went live last Thursday. It’s a bit ‘manifesto-y,’ according to my husband. I get that way sometimes. 

Anyone is welcome to contribute to After Hours. Please, fire off an e-mail if you are interested.

My latest column exploring fashion and theology is up in Comment Magazine. Madeleine was my inspiration as I considered ‘The advent of personal style.’ Enjoy!

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Also, speaking of fashion, the following invite arrived in the ‘ol inbox this morning. Paul Hardy presents at Vancouver Fashion Week tomorrow. I can’t wait! Paul’s shows never disappoint. 

I hope to bring you back pictures…

“It began on a long wooden pew.

I grew up on The Banner, Calvinettes (now GEMS), rolls of King peppermints, and the steadfast traditions of my Christian Reformed church in suburban British Columbia.

I used to believe that at some point all Christian Reformed kids had to spread their wings, fly the CRC coop, and explore the wider world of Christianity. We’d travel like vagabonds to charismatic revivals and Pentecostal worship services—finally, finally, experiencing the omnipotent God we’d learned so much about.

The moment my last high school bell rang, I hopped a plane to New Zealand. Eventually I settled in a prominent Baptist congregation in the heart of Queenstown, where my brother and I lived.

My memories of the church are sparse. I remember my brother, in a testosterone-induced flurry, scaling the church’s roof with his bare hands. I remember the calico church cat who’d comb through the pews looking for bored churchgoers’ attention. But the memory that stands out clearest is the particularly bright Sunday morning the minister read aloud the following passage:

Now listen, you say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. . . . Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:13-15).

Those words helped me, at the age of 18, first understand God’s bigger story. I could make my own plans, but ultimately God was guiding my path…”

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An excerpt of my piece in the October issue of The Banner. Read the full article here.

I remember the day I first encountered dawn, willingly. The slow turning of midnight to charcoal, lavender then cherry red, blood orange and, finally, the blaze of morning’s first light: pineapple gold.

God made dawn, with its flurry of colour, to welcome us. I feel the same way about summer.

Right now, from urban mainstay Anthropologie to the handmade clothing of Adhesif, the radish reds and saltwater turquoise of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s are spilling onto sunny boardwalks and into the streets once again.

Spring/Summer 2009 at Anthropologie

Old is in. This summer, the used and discarded are making a comeback. Call it recession-proofing, call it what you like, but the second-hand clothing scene is booming.

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Read the entire article here. Published today in Comment.

Daily, my body twists and bends, my new form growing in directions I did not have in mind these past few months as I acquired lovely frocks in Paris, London and New York. Portobello, Spitafields and Williamsburg will have to wait—my baby is coming.

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“NY fashions will have to wait—my baby is coming”

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Being six months pregnant makes me feel like the antithesis to aesthetically pleasing. These days the better part of my morning is spent combing through long-loved blouses, hand-sewn dresses and vintage skirts for the sole piece that won’t make me feel fat today.

I have often heard fashion gurus (What Not to Wear’s Stacy London, anyone?) say “dress your body now” (not the one you hope for), and I am doing my best.

In recent months I have mastered the art of the cinched belt: disguising my widening hips (or trying, at least) and accentuating my burgeoning belly. I’m donning oversized dresses, leggings and flats, shopping in my closet for creative ways to smile in the mirror. (An impending birth is not the time to splurge on personal style; the extra pennies are already being tidily tucked away in the mattress.) This, I am told, is a time to celebrate the female form! So, why would I be hiding?

Pregnancy, like any season of life, requires attention. With such rapid and obvious changes afoot, it’s been easy for me to notice the details. But, more than an outward metamorphosis, this experience has been a lesson in living. I need to approach my wardrobe and my life with the same intentionality, every day.

Over the years our frames change, both literally and figuratively. Just as a woman’s body one day makes room for a visitor, so our bodies shift and change as we age. We take desk jobs and, sadly, one day our metabolisms stop burning Peanut Buster® Parfaits like they’re fresh spinach. Our frames change, and they require daily adornment, so why not relish in the simple creative opportunity this affords us?

Creative dressing comes in many forms. The more ambitious types, like Alex Martin of the “Little Brown Dress” Project, don the same homemade dress for 365 days. More than practicality, it’s an anti-consumerist statement, and a beautiful one at that. Others, like Ryan Marshall of Pacing the Panic Room, take a more mainstream approach. Working from the racks of American Apparel, this photographer/writer provides a weekly chronicle of his wife’s growing baby belly and her creative means to cover it.

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“Chronicling pregnancy from the dressing room”

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There is a season for everything (even tight pocket books and broadening mid-sections), Ecclesiastes reminds us. Perhaps pregnancy is a time when we mothers—writers, professors, teachers, painters, carpenters, dancers, students, baristas—embrace our inward and outward selves in new and inspired ways.

And, as Mark Twain coyly aphorizes: “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

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Published today in Comment

I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on marriage on the Listen Up blog today.

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A few weeks ago I read author Brennan Manning on needing proof of God.  He sure doesn’t let us off the hook and I found his directness particularly refreshing:

“Trust that is at the mercy of the response it receives is a bogus trust. All is uncertainty and anxiety. All is precarious.

In trembling insecurity the believer pleads for and even demands tangible reassurances from the Lord that his affection be returned. If he does not receive them, he is disheartened, frustrated, maybe even convinced that it’s all over or that it never really existed…

What the sincere Christian has not learned is that tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or provide any certainty of its presence.”

Particularly, in light of marriage, I welcome Manning’s view.

Himself, a retired Catholic priest now married, Manning has lived in fidelity to God, first, and his wife, second.

I think this is the perfect example for marriage.

I often reflect on how without my understanding of fidelity to the unseen - to God - I would be at a loss pursuing emotional and physical fidelity to my spouse. Only a year-and-a-half into marriage and I experience our commitment to each other as a daily choice to love, a choice, not an emotion, and ultimately love rests in trust.

Trust is only true if it lacks circumstance. From Manning’s view, if I require endless reassurances of God’s love for me, I will be the same with my husband, and it is not a true love but rather an affection lacking trust. This kind of insecurity on either of our parts will wrestle our relationship to the ground. And it does, with frequency.

The Bible says “Perfect love casts out fear.”

To live in love, to nurture our marriages, we must trust each other with abandon. We can’t hold back. I must look into my lover’s eyes and confess: “I am yours, body and soul, in sickness and health, in hardship and good times.” I must grab him in my most miserable moments and declare my love.

It’s counter to one part of our nature and life-giving to another, nourishing the spirit and annihilating selfishness. It feels backward in the moment but slowly, over time, it will become a new habit, a new way of being.

It’s the way I want to live.