Stories & Articles
Photo credit: Laura ChapnickBridgerton’s real scandal
Reading at Ochre Pit Cove in 2019
“In episode six, 'Bridgerton' drops the facade of fluffy rom-com and reveals itself as a horror.” - essay in Maclean’s, February 2021 print issue
Meet the slackers
“Half a century on, Gen X remains undefined, evading categorization, unwilling even to raise our hands during roll call. Children of the Silent Generation, perhaps it’s fitting that ours is invisible." - essay in Maclean’s, February 2020 print issue
Madonna in the linen closet
“My ancestors were temple builders. This was in Point Pedro, the northernmost tip of Sri Lanka, in the early twentieth century, before independence, when the British were still acting like they owned the place and Christian missionaries were dangling the carrot of education to convert the populace.” - essay in Body & Soul: stories for seekers and skeptics (Caitlin Press, Winter 2019) and previously published in The New Quarterly 140, Fall 2018
Happy Adventure
“Hilda had dozed on the plane from Montreal and wandered out of Arrivals at St. John’s in a disoriented haze.” - short story in Joyland, January 2019
When the end came
"Harry had the vacuum out and Margaret was kneeling at the tub, rubber gloves on, when there was a sound like a thunderclap and a long dulcet moan.” - short story in Riddle Fence 29, 2018
Mutton curry
“Amma died on a Saturday, the least convenient day of the week.” - short story in Maisonneuve, August 2018
Quickening
“My wife is not pregnant. Two pink lines have appeared on the wand.” - short story in Understorey Magazine's Blood issue, 2018
Good country
“On a rainy afternoon in September 2010, I stopped in at Halifax’s Pier 21. Once a bustling terminal, this seaport welcomed 1.5 million immigrants and refugees between 1928 and 1971, roughly one in every five new Canadians.” - essay in The Newfoundland Quarterly online, January 2018
Butter tea at Starbucks
“Karma’s room smells like blood and shit. There is a beeping machine and an impassive nurse in a hairnet and blue booties. Pema has never heard her sister make noises like this before. Urgent, animal sounds that roar out from some place deep inside.” - Winner of The Journey Prize 2017, published in The Journey Prize 29, Fall 2017 & in The New Quarterly 140, Fall 2016.
Obit: O’Shea, Eustace “Bunky”
“Eustace “Bunky” O’Shea left the earth on July 20 when the Devil called him home. He is predeceased by his tonsils (1962), his appendix (1964), his prostate (2010), and the middle toe on his left foot (2015).” - postcard fiction in The Newfoundland Quarterly online, June 2017
Doppel
“The homeless girl appeared on the same day Jenny Chau was evicted.” - short story in Hazlitt, Fall 2016
Lord of the manor
“Every family has its own creation myth. Other people’s parents met at university. Julian’s mom and dad were introduced at a peace rally.” - short story in The Dalhousie Review 95.3, 2016
Miloslav
“It did not start with Miloslav. First, there was the young couple who showed up with a vacuum cleaner in a backpack - a device they claimed to have invented.” - short story published in The New Quarterly 137, 2015, long-listed for a National Magazine Award
Reading week
“Joan is ten. Jeremy is sixteen. There is a note. Two sentences. I’ve gone. Don’t try to find me.” - long-listed for the Journey Prize 2017, published in The Journey Prize 29 & PRISM international 54.2, 2015
Love you, bye
“There is only one toothbrush in the bathroom: Crest, Oral B with blue and white bristles.” - short story published in Room Magazine 38.4, 2015
Gliding, Weightless
“The sun is setting by the time they realize they are lost.” - short story published in Riddle Fence 21, 2015
This fiction is fat free
“While no one’s paying attention, maybe because no one’s paying attention, writers, like mad scientists, are conducting experiments. Lights are flashing. Concoctions are exploding. And if you’re not a part of this, if you’re not watching over their shoulders, breath held to see what emerges from the cauldron, dear Reader, you are missing out.” - essay in Atlantic Books Today, issue 79, 2015
“A drawer full of Guggums”
“In Bloomsbury there were spiked iron fences around the parks and Georgian townhouse blocks, their windows stacked up in neat lines, a fan of glass above each glossy blue door. We are respectable and bourgeois, the houses said. We only drink single malt.” - short story published in Racket: New Writing made in Newfoundland (Breakwater Books, Fall 2015)
All that you left
“Your name is Allan Dowden and you are born to a fisherman called William and his wife Susannah during the middle years of Queen Victoria’s reign.” - flash fiction for This Great Society, 2012
West London, early evening
“A man in a striped toque wails mournfully on his saxophone outside the Shepherd's Bush Tube station.” - creative non-fiction for This Great Society, 2011
Synonyms of the verb covet
“The colourful stones sparkled. The lamplight glinted off their beveled surfaces, inviting curiosity.” - flash fiction for This Great Society, 2010
*this story was translated into French by Jean-Marcel Morlat and published in Le Crachoir de Flaubert, November 2019
I moved to England and became a housewife
“The choice that faced me on the bank forms seemed to foreshadow the next 12 months of my life. Under ‘employment details’ I had two options: unemployed or housewife/homemaker.” - personal essay for the Globe and Mail, 2009.