Tag: Post

Fed up with my own fear
Fear also reaches some kind of threshold
After which something new begins

from She Speaks by Anastasia Afanasieva

In these lines, part of a collection of creative responses to the Russo-Ukrainian war, the poet expresses a deep frustration with her sense of dread. Rather than dwelling on it, she rejects it, stepping into the liminal space at the edge of fear, where she finds the promise of renaissance. Rebirth. The beginning of something new.

Through these lines, Afanasieva assures me that there is a place beyond fear that isn’t beyond hope.

Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, I have grappled with a sense of helplessness, leading me to seek out ways to celebrate Ukrainian culture and support advocacy efforts.

I have also turned to art that explores the effects of this war on the land and her human and other-than-human inhabitants. I ache for the Ukrainian people as well as for the innocent civilians of Russia and neighbouring Belarus whose lives have also been brutally and senselessly disrupted.

Countless wars since the turn of the twentieth century alone have resulted in the deaths of somewhere in the range of 200 million people, depending on what source you look at, but of course the number is probably much higher and likely doesn’t include the deaths related to PTSD and other mental health issues triggered by the trauma of war. And it most certainly does not consider the deaths of ecosystems and all our beleaguered planet's inhabitants.

Until recently, I have been personally unaffected by war. At least, I have never lived in a conflict zone, and neither has my immediate biological family. No one close to me has died in active combat. But today, war feels a little closer. The Globe & Mail reported last month that, improbable though experts say it is, an American-led invasion of Canada is not impossible, and the Canadian Armed Forces are preparing accordingly (Fife & Gavin, 2026, para. 1).

The Guardian also recently featured US–Canada relations in the wake of America’s attempts at ‘regional dominance’, reporting that the United States devised a plan to invade Canada in 1930, and that recent actions by the current US administration are ‘reviving old fears’ (Cecco, 2026).

Still, war on Canadian soil is hypothetical. And although I share the sense of insecurity many living in Canada feel, my reasons for steeping myself in art about war are unrelated. Instead, these works of art help me grapple with a violence that beggars all belief and understand what I can do in the face of it.

With that in mind, I turn to a focused reflection on art and war. But where to start? So much art is about war. To shape this post, I found it a compelling exercise to start with the works of art that sprung to mind unbidden, allowing them to shape my reflection. Here are just a few.

In Flanders Fields is a poem about sacrifice in the First World War by Canadian physician and soldier John McCrae. At least once upon a time, almost every school-aged child in Canada committed it to memory. I can never get past the short poem’s second stanza without my voice cracking with emotion:

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
        Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
                In Flanders fields.

Being aligned with pacifist movements, I cannot, as the poem urges, take up the torch they throw from failing hands in any literal sense. I come by this anti-war stance honestly. My maternal grandfather was a conscientious objector during the Second World War and served by working in the Victory Gardens in Ottawa, which provided food for the war effort.

The poem also asks us to take up the soldiers’ quarrel with the foe. I am too old and probably too disabled to join the Armed Forces, and in any case I’m a pacifist, as I’ve already said.

So, what can I do? Well, I can remember—and to remember is to strive for peace.

I don’t know how to strive for peace. I don’t even know if peace is possible. But I must never give up trying to figure it out. And in the meantime, I can support, for example, persons displaced by war and others in need of humanitarian assistance.

My own tiny province has seen the recent arrival of over 2,200 Ukrainians and nearly 800 Afghans as well as hundreds of asylum seekers from around the world. I stand beside them as best I can as they face new foes, including xenophobia, cultural ignorance, and apathy. I also try to learn smatterings of languages so I can at least stammer out greetings in Ukrainian (pryveet), Russian (preevyet), Afghan Persian (salam alaikum), Arabic (marhaba), and so on.

Side note: having hit middle-age, I also promptly forget the words I learn, but Google Translate, along with its pronunciation option (flawed as it may be), is a gift from the tech gods at whose altar I worship from time to time.

***

The award-winning 20 Days in Mariupol is a not-for-the-faint-of-heart documentary film directed by Mstyslav Chernov and released in 2023. Drawing on personal footage, Chernov reveals in heart-breaking detail the atrocities recorded by Associated Press journalists trapped in Mariupol in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The film captures scenes that have come to define the war, including the bombing of a maternity hospital.

I am serious when I say I was sobbing—sobbing—as the film rolled. I had to press 'pause' on multiple occasions to compose myself as the resolutely sorrowful scenes unfolded. I couldn’t see the screen through my tears and in any case I was crying too hard to take it all in.

Why make this film? Why watch it? Why weep like this at this moment, in this film, when everywhere we are assaulted with images from this and other wars? Why am I not too desensitized to react?

The answer lies in the power of story. Chernov relates with raw honesty a dozen or more micro-stories of a city under siege. The human capacity to respond emotionally to the story of another human or other living thing is greater than our ability to react viscerally to the more abstract.

If you’re not so sure, consider this uplifting example: the 1993 hit film Free Willy, about a child who bonds with a captive killer whale in danger. Free Willy ignited a major animal rights movement focused on liberating marine mammals. As the story goes, Keiko—the whale playing Willy—became the first captive orca ever released into the open ocean. Keiko traveled over 1,500 kilometres across the Atlantic, feeding himself and splashing about rather merrily after twenty-some years of confinement.

This is an abstract concept (animal abuse) related in human, humane terms (Keiko the Killer Whale). It is a vague thing given flesh and a heartbeat. And it works miracles. Similarly, 20 Days in Mariupol is the abstract concept of war portrayed in deeply human terms. This is story.

And story is medicine. And sometimes medicine tastes awful. It might even make us feel worse before it makes us better. I came out of that story refined as if by fire. Scorched. Burned even. But still alive. And more determined than ever to love and to teach love. To resist hate.

When Chernov accepted the Academy Award for Best Documentary feature (the first Oscar for a Ukrainian film), he said:

I cannot change history. I cannot change the past. But we all together, you—some of the most talented people in the world—can make sure the history record is set straight and the truth will prevail and the people of Mariupol and those who have lost their lives will never be forgotten.

***

One more. The 1956 stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, based on the book of the same name by the teenager who died at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp in 1945. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s play dramatizes her time in hiding.

In the final scene, Anne’s father, who has been reading her now-famous diary aloud throughout the play, finds he can read no further. Not because the pain is too great, though it is. His eye falls on a sentence: In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart, and he speaks aloud as he closes the diary: 'She puts me to shame'. Mr. Frank is ashamed of his bitterness and pessimism in the face of her courage. Her optimism. Her belief in the goodness of humankind.

Of course, we understand why he feels as he does. We, too, are outraged for him. The man lived through the horrors of the Second World War only to lose his entire immediate family to the Holocaust. We wouldn’t even ask him to try to see things differently.

I saw this play two or three times in the late 1990s, and it has never left me. Why? Because it gently reminded me then, and persists in reminding me now, about how bitter I can be. How skeptical. How enraged—and I have lived through nothing even remotely close to the Holocaust.

Sure, people have hurt me. Badly. We don’t need to live in Nazi Germany to have had our faith in humanity eroded. Who hasn’t faced bullying, endured racist or queer/transphobic taunts, been fat-shamed, suffered assault, been mocked, or been made to feel small, invisible, or otherwise unworthy?

But, if Anne Frank can believe people are really good at heart, then surely I can strive to do the same. And do. En masse, we seem to be a terrible animal—but spend enough time with any of us individually and you almost always find something to like. To be inspired by. To believe in.

***

To close, I return to She Speaks, with which I began: ‘something new begins’, she says. The poet takes up this point again in the poem’s final lines:

Life beyond fear
Fearlessness on the verge of death.

After fear, something new begins. How do artists in the thick of war feel hope? How do they feel the beginning of something new? I don’t know the answer. I hope I never have to experience a war to find out. But, like Anne Frank, Anastasia Afanasieva is optimistic and determined. She hasn’t given up. She awaits life after fear.

In the middle of fear—and this I know intimately—we often feel there is no escape. The burning building we are in, figuratively speaking, has no obvious exits. The curtain of smoke is too thick. The wall of heat is too dense. But wait! There is one small window, and emergency responders are below, dousing the flames. One firefighter is ascending a ladder. We are not alone. All we have to do is summon the courage to lean out the window and begin our descent.

Life waits for us on the other side of the threshold.

Bibliography

Afanasieva, A. (2015). She Speaks (Transl. O. Livshin & A. Janco). Words for War. Retrieved Feb. 10, 2026, from https://www.wordsforwar.com/she-speaks

Cecco, L. (2026, Jan. 27). The US drew up a plan to invade Canada in 1930. Now Trump is reviving old fears. The Guardian (Online). Retrieved Feb. 10, 2026, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/trump-canada-us-war-plan

Fife, R., & Gavin, J. (2026, Jan. 20). Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion. The Globe and Mail (Online). Retrieved Feb. 10, 2026, from http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.mta.ca/blogs-podcasts-websites/military-models-canadian-response-hypothetical/docview/3294922317/se-2

Goodrich, F., & Hackett, A. (1956). The Diary of Anne Frank. Dramatists Play Service Inc.

McRae, J. In Flanders Fields. The Poetry Foundation. Retrieved Feb. 11, 2026, from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

This post began as an attempt to consider ‘what sexes read whom and why’, a curiosity piqued by a finding published in The Guardian:

women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women.
(Nielsen Book Research 2021).

In my surroundings, this is categorically untrue. I rarely see my father, for example, without a book by a female author in hand, and I will associate the names of those revered writers of detective fiction, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, with my dad until my last breath.

But my plan to ponder the question of sexes and reading soon crystallized, like frost on glass, wending its way upward and outward in shimmering threads and metamorphosing into something unexpectedly personal: a reflection on the women writers who helped raise me, who challenged my assumptions, and who transformed the way I think and act.

These women hover at the edges of my vision as constant guides. Although they include a predictable cast—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Shelley—the ones I write about in this brief chronicle are luminaries who seem more magical by virtue of being somewhat less known. There are prose writers, yes, but there are also playwrights and, above all, poets.

Jeanette Winterson writes that poetry is ‘a finding place’, and so it was, and is, for me. The first poet I recall reading, or hearing read, is Rachel Field, a woman who marvels in the mystery of not knowing. ‘Something Told the Wild Geese’ awoke my five-year-old senses to the wonder of seasonal change. Field offered me a conception of the world as a place of magical transformation, and she achieved this with a single word, pregnant with possibility: something.

Something told the wild geese it was time to fly.
Summer sun was in their wings, winter in their cry.

Every year when those magnificent V-formations of Canada Geese wing their way toward warmer climes across a boundless sky, I recall the words of this poem.

As I grew a little older and experienced my first sucker punches of betrayal, I learned about forgiveness—including self-forgiveness—from Patricia St. John’s Treasures of the Snow, the story of two Alpine children, Annette and Lucien, whose lives are altered by a tragic accident. Guilt and rage tear apart their already fractured relationship before a harrowing adventure ultimately leads to forgiveness and redemption. The lessons from Annette’s wise grandmother, who tries to foster forgiveness in an embittered Annette, stay with me the most:

When love comes in, hatred and selfishness and unkindness will give way to it, just as the darkness gives way when you let in the sunshine.

I was struck by Annette’s capacity for both goodness and vindictiveness because even at a young age I was aware of a confusing feeling of two selves inhabiting my small body—one generous and one vengeful. Much later, Denise Levertov helped me understand and accept this duality. From her, I realized that I can be both a ‘woman of innocence’ who is ‘kind and very clean without / ostentation’ and ‘turbulent moon-ridden girl’ who is not. Ridding myself of one is not possible, for trying to fly from myself is futile. When we are in a fight against ourselves, peace can only come from the laying down of arms.

My love for poetry endures, but during my teens I began devouring plays, from which I learned life-shaping imperatives. Lilian Hellman’s Southern Gothic drama, The Little Foxes is a portrayal of greed and treachery in early-1900s Alabama. Regina’s drive for wealth pits her against her avaricious brothers and leads her to betray her dying husband. I view greed as the root of all evil. It destroys families, communities, nations, and the environment. It affects all living things, even the top brass (though they seem to deny its repercussions). In The Little Foxes, Addie, the family’s housemaid and the play’s moral centre observes,

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then, there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly.) Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.

I can’t change all the world’s evils, but I can choke greed in my small circle of influence by modelling generosity. Doing nothing simply ain’t right.

The plays also evolved my understanding of racism, and especially anti-Black racism. My hometown had deep racial divisions, but the violent words and deeds were mostly directed at newcomers from India and Pakistan. My community had very few Black people and so the heinous form of White Supremacy connected with Black bodies was revealed to me in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, about the Youngers, a Black family in 1950s Chicago whose dreams of upward social mobility are thwarted at every turn.

As a teenager reading A Raisin in the Sun, I would have said I wasn't racist, and I would have argued passionately that the best way to end racism was simple: don't be racist. I didn't know that we are all racist to varying degrees and that ‘not being racist’ isn’t good enough: we are complicit in racism if we are not actively striving to change it. To be anti-racist is to step so far out of our comfort zones we don’t know how we’ll ever return, and we won’t even be sure that we’ll want to.

As much as A Raisin in the Sun taught me about anti-Black racism, the play's centring of forgiveness is just as powerful. As I also learned from Treasures of the Snow, love is the highest law, even when others have hurt us—though in the play this is not in the context of racism. The twenty-year-old Beneatha Younger is livid with a family member who has badly hurt her and the family. Her mother—Mama—calls on her to love. Beneatha can’t fathom why or how. Mama says,

Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When he’s done good and made things easy for everybody? That ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest … and he can’t believe in hisself because the world’s whipped him so!

These plays and others like them didn’t only influence the way I move through the world. They also fostered in me a deep love for theatre as a craft and led to my doctoral studies in drama and my work in professional theatre.

Anyone who has set their mind to a seemingly impossible task knows the feeling of overwhelm I experienced as I pursued my doctorate degree. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird inspired me whenever a deluge of reading threatened to drown me. The title comes from a piece of parental wisdom: when Lamott’s brother felt overwhelmed by a gigantic school report on birds, his father told him, ‘Bird by bird, buddy’. I held this maxim close and worked through my research book by book.

Another, more horrific form of overwhelm is one we experience with grief. My adult life has been strangely punctuated by the sudden and violent deaths of friends, and consequently I have often sought out literature that helps me work through spasms of shock and grief.

The Nobel Prize winning novelist Han Kang helps me by articulating truths too agonizing for me to put words to. The White Book, Kang’s lyrical meditation on colour but also on grief, perfectly encapsulates how we move through the pain of loss:

Each moment is a leap forwards from the brink of an invisible cliff, where time’s keen edges are constantly renewed. We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way.

Jackie Kay's achingly poignant poem, ‘Darling’, is a constant solace: ‘The dead don’t go till you do, loved ones.’ Why are we loved ones? Who are we to the poet? Is it because we are bound together as a community reckoning with grief? In the same poem, as well as in her novel, Trumpet, she cites the lyrics of a Scottish choral piece, The Mingulay Boat Song: ‘Heel y’ho boys. Let her go boys’. The first sentence might be read as ‘Heave ho, boys’, and the idea of working together through adversity resonates with me—and ‘let her go boys’ even more. Sometimes the dead needed to die. But as long as they live in our memory, they are also ‘still here holding our hands' (‘Darling’).

Grief is an ever-present companion, but so too is love—of people, of the natural world, of cityscapes and adventure and coffee and dark red wine. And words. Always words. In An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich inspires me to love all language even when its sense eludes us:

I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

I used to interpret these lines figuratively, understanding them to extend to reading in languages we don't understand or appreciating stunning imagery in an otherwise confounding work. As I reread them literally now, I am struck by how much more poignant they have become as my parents and partner all confront eye conditions and I myself have moved into a world of advanced myopia and double vision.

It feels impossible to stop. I haven’t yet argued for songwriters as poets and articulated how their lyrics changed and change me (Alanis Morisette—'you took me out to wine dine sixty-nine me / but didn't hear a damn word I said'—and Sarah McLachlan—'you are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie'). I haven’t referenced Marjane Satrapi whose portrayal of perseverance and self-acceptance sustains me (Persepolis) or the ways in which Louise Erdrich inspires me to yield to the moment (The Plague of Doves) and Aemilia Bassano (Lanyer) charges me to be proud of the knowledge that I seek (Salve Deus).

But stop I must, so I end with a great assertion of agency from the poet, Adrienne Rich (‘XXI’):

I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here.

Bibliography

Erdrich, L. The Plague of Doves. HarperCollins, 2008.

Field, R. Something Told the Wild Geese. Macmillan, 1942.

Hansberry, L. A Raisin in the Sun. Random House, 1959.

Hellman, L. The Little Foxes. Random House, 1939.

Kang, H. The White Book. Translated by Deborah Smith, Hogarth, 2018.

Kay, J. “Darling.” Darling: New and Selected Poems. Boodaxe Book, 2007.

———. Trumpet. Picador, 1998.

Lanyer, A. Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. First published 1611. Edited by S. M. Woods, Penguin Classics, 1993.

Levertov, D. “In Mind.” Poetry, vol. 102, no. 1–2, p. 68, Oct.–Nov. 1963.

McLachlan, S. “Angel.” Surfacing, Nettwerk/Arista Records, 1997.

Morissette, A. “You See Right Through Me.” Jagged Little Pill, Maverick, 1995.

Rich, A. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–91. W. W. Norton, 1991.

———. Twenty-One Love Poems. Effie’s Press, 1976.

Sieghart, M. A. “Why Do So Few Men Read Books by Women?” The Guardian, 9 July 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women

St. John, P. M. Treasures of the Snow. CSSM, 1950.

Winterson, J. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Press, 2011.

It is that time of year when giant inflatable Grinches assume control of front lawns. They billow incongruously over diminutive lambs, kneeling in a dusting of snow and the promise of a White Christmas. The sheep gaze adoringly at a White baby in a plastic manger, his arms raised towards White parents, who many social conservatives note look just like them. Mary's robe is so pristine. There is no hint in her placid face of the refugee she is soon to become, fleeing the violent whims of a jealous king.

But I digress, because it is December, and my starting point was supposed to be Charles Dickens, though not, as one might have thought, that wonderful tale about miserliness and redemption, A Christmas Carol, but rather a more devastating tale of two cities.

In a climactic scene near the end of the book, a loyal governess called Miss Pross ferociously protects her charge, Lucie Manette, against a life-threatening intruder named Madame Defarge. Dickens describes it thus in his moving novel of sacrifice and second chances, A Tale of Two Cities (1859):

Miss Pross, with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate, clasped her tight and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle that they had.

I am inspired by Miss Pross's courage, fuelled by the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate. Today, hate seems to be winning, and all too often it is unleashed by the very groups who claim to worship that beatific baby in a manger.

Even Canada, a nation with a global reputation for politesse, has seen a calamitous rise in hate crimes, with police-reported incidents more than doubling since 2019. Many acts of hate are fuelled by religious intolerance, especially antisemitism and Islamophobia, but Canada has also experienced a surge in hate crimes targeting Two Spirit, queer, and trans individuals. Anti-Asian hate crimes have also risen sharply since the onset of COVID-19. 

And then there is the hatred directed at those experiencing homelessness. It isn't always violent in a physical sense, though the unhoused population in Canada faces many vicious attacks. Feelings of resentment or animosity and prejudiced thinking are also hate. So is discrimination embedded in policies and laws. 

Where is our vigorous tenacity of love? The roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-angry love? I call this muscular love. It's the love that refuses to judge on the basis of difference, that speaks out against racism, religious intolerance, sexism, queer- and trans-phobia, ageism, and so on. Love doesn't turn away when it is afraid. Love runs towards in spite of personal risk. 

If personal risk feels too big, remember this: not all muscular love is dangerous love. Hiring the kid with the single mom to shovel your driveway or visiting a lonely senior citizen are also acts of love. These, too, are running towards.

Reflecting on these loving actions calls to mind an appeal I heard innumerable times as a child, in a story about a man sometimes called the Good Shepherd: Feed my sheep, he said to his friend, Peter. If you love me, feed my lambs. In an age of profound hunger, sharing our food is a radical act.

The Good Shepherd stands among good company. I like the kindred spirits he might find in the shepherds and cowherds of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim stories who also embody loving care. The Prophet Muhammed is said to have remarked that every prophet has tended sheep. I see this kind of prophet as a figure to whom we might all aspire: one who perceives hidden truths and possesses the courage to utter them.

Stories of brave and loving caretakers abound across cultures, religions, geographies, languages, and peoples. When I feel the weight of the world's hate on my shoulders, I hang onto these stories and am heartened by the vigorous tenacity of love.

So here's to us doing our best to love in an age of hate. Love is stronger. We are stronger. Happy Holidays to you, and may Miss Pross's lion-hearted love guide us through the season.

It is October and the air is cool. Here in Atlantic Canada, we are — I deeply hope — nearing the end of a season of drought and wildfires. Crops were decimated as heat and flame ripped across the province at distressing rates. The lives of countless animals, including humans, were imperilled and the food security of those already made most vulnerable was severely compromised. I write in the past tense, as July and August are behind us, but summer's devastation has nevertheless grabbed autumn by the throat.

The fire and famine of which I write are regional disasters, rendered miniscule when held up against the catastrophes happening globally. Jumping quickly to mind are the violent conflicts being enacted on various parts of this beloved planet, directed by dangerous and self-serving 'leaders' — a title they neither embody nor deserve. The scale of Eastern Canada's devastation is likewise diminished when I consider other heart-shattering tragedies playing out elsewhere: mass shootings, for example, or the terrifying erosion of democracy.

Though we may have secure professions and sit well-fed; though we may live thousands of kilometres from war and other violent clashes, we are not exempt from grief, from a gnawing sense of loss. How do we cope in such difficult times?

To help me, I often turn to a passage in T.H. White's 1958 novel, The Once and Future King. In the excerpt below, Merlin — the beloved magician who teaches a young Arthur all he holds dear — offers an inspiring lesson to the boy who will one day rule Britain:

"The best thing for being sad,' replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, 'is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

Accordingly, I have begun choosing activities from a list I created in the Notes app on my phone called Things to Learn. This month, I have picked up French study again after a hiatus. I am also beginning to look for First Aid courses, as my certification is woefully out of date. This was inspired by a recent incident in a local park, where I encountered a person lying motionless, face down, in an ornamental fountain. I ran over to help, knowing I was ignorant of the best course of action. (Good news! The person was OK.)

Not on my list, but things I'm also doing to offset the sadness include: practising new forms in haidong gumdo (Korean sword fighting), and reading a gorgeously contemplative novel — Greek Lessons — by the celebrated Korean writer, Han Kang. She reminds me in her finely-wrought prose of the lifegiving forces of language and human connection. 

Merlin was right! I'm feeling better already.

For information about a poetry workshop Julie Sutherland is facilitating on collective, private, and ecological grief, click here. Hosted by the London Literary Salon.