scribblings

april 8

the writing

whistle in the dark 
to draw them close—say your name 
come back—different

~

They watched the dragons bank sharply, turning back towards the town; the creatures’ scaly throats warmed to a white-hot glow, visible even from a distance. 
Micah knocked an arrow; Siri hoisted a rifle.
“That’s cheating,” Micah snapped.
Siri laughed. “I’ll close both eyes.” 

~

sweet blood of the lamb 
spilling onto white linen 
as the maiden weeps—

the reading

Poem: “Ledge” by Kevin Young (from “Darkling, Part 2: Werewolf Hill” in Night Watch)

“Beauty is as beauty 
     does my mother says, 
who is beautiful & speaks 

loud so she can be understood 
     unlike poets who can’t 
talk to save their lives 

so they write.”

Essay: “Death of a Columnist” by Stephen Marche (from Best Canadian Essays 2026)

“I believe [Bob Fulford] may have written more columns than anyone else in history. He dropped out of Malvern Collegiate with his friend Glenn Gould—Glenn to play piano, Bob to write. He began professionally at sixteen, and continued, without significant interruption, to the age of eighty-eight. His first columns reported on high school sports, and the one thing that did not interest him in this world was sports—and yet he wrote fluently and enthusiastically. If they’d offered him the paint-drying beat, he would have taken it, and crushed it. For seven years, he wrote a five-days-a-week book column for the Toronto Star, with a column on art on Saturday. Almost the entire time I knew him, for nearly thirty years, he was writing three columns a week, plus occasional pieces. A fair estimate of his average output is three columns a week over the course of seventy-odd years. That’s eleven thousand columns. Eleven millions words. Twenty War and Peaces.”