“Don’t Rattle Granny’s Bones” in Porridge
August 31 | 2026
I’m delighted to announce the publication of my essay “Don’t Rattle Granny’s …
“Don’t Rattle Granny’s Bones” in Porridge
August 31 | 2026
I’m delighted to announce the publication of my essay “Don’t Rattle Granny’s Bones” in the UK magazine Porridge. As suggested by the above image, the essay centres on driving and locomotion while also more broadly addressing themes of gender, history, and family. Alternating between earlier decades and the present day, “Don’t Rattle” evokes an era when traffic was lighter and the open road beckoned, with, among other pleasures, the lure of an ice cream smorgasbord.
“It’s Almost Valentine’s Day” in Panorama
December 4 | 2025
I take great pleasure in sharing the link to my essay “It’s Almost Valentine’s Day,” just published in the UK journal Panorama. The emphasis of the journal is on “travel, place and nature,” all of which feature prominently in my story about a vivid encounter with a snow bunting.
From the Archives of Ontario, the illustration shown here is a wash on paper by Elizabeth Simcoe (1762-1850), author, artist, and wife of the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. Elizabeth travelled extensively in “the Canadas,” including to Quebec, where she produced this image in December 1791, titling it “A Snow Bird.” She’s one among several authors whose historical writings about the snow bunting appear in “It’s Almost Valentine’s Day.” Nonetheless, the encounter central to the essay—and its lasting impression—are my own.
https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-16-encounters/encounters-its-almost-valentines-day
“Myself”—The Story of a Summer Vacation
August 21 | 2024
Summer and water, they’re inseparable—essentials of the July or August beach holiday. The allure of a motorboat promising adventure on a lake resonates today, but here the year is 1951, the woman in the passenger seat, my mother to be. She’s nineteen, in love (though not yet with my father), and on the threshold of adult life. The photographer, her brawny beau, an equestrian and a smooth talker, is about to assume the wheel.
As told in my memoir, The Smallest Objective, my mother wasn’t from an affluent family. Nonetheless, by the twentieth century, the beach holiday, once the preserve of the wealthy, had become a feature of summer for many families of modest means. That’s why Kodak, as early as 1907, was advertising its camera in Woman’s Home Companion as a must-have to recount “The Story of a Summer Vacation.” As the female audience was instructed, “It’s all simple. Press the button—do the rest—or leave it to another—Just as you please.”
From the array of pictures in my mother’s album The Story of My Life, it’s evident that she took abundant photos, quite likely with a Kodak camera, as well as posing for them. She demonstrated, too, another habit—and not one prescribed in Woman’s Home Companion. Curiously, my mother captioned photos in which she was the subject, labelling them “Myself.” She had become not merely the focal point, but her own audience.
“Flourish and Decay” in The Ekphrastic Review
April 4 | 2024
As many of you will be aware, ekphrasis refers to literary writing inspired by visual art. I’m delighted to share the link to “Flourish and Decay,” my photograph and related poem now available in The Ekphrastic Review, a journal dedicated to word and image.
Shell and Feather—songbirds in the line of fire
January 24 | 2024
Walking on eggshells … We all know the idiom—and how an egg, near synonymous with fragility, isn’t made to endure. For me, then, this wooden box of unhatched birds’ eggs, gathered more than a century ago on the battleground of Flanders Fields, brings to mind the pugnacity of sallies and wingbeats and the feathering of nests among the fallen dead.
Information about the birds’ eggs is scant, their story largely unknown. They were collected in Ploegsteert, Belgium—nicknamed by the British troops “Plugstreet”—in May 1915, near to the firing line with its trenches and parapets. Now the box is conserved in a small museum in southwestern England: 31 eggs in total, 15 pairs nestled in protective moss, plus, in a lone compartment, a solitary egg. Although I’m no expert in oology, the study of birds’ eggs, I can venture an educated guess about some of the field and woodland species represented here: blackbird and robin, chaffinch and tree sparrow, all of the European or Eurasian variety. Perhaps even yellowhammer or skylark.
More intriguing to me, though, is the why of the eggs’ rescue from the battlefield. Was their removal an act of collecting for an amateur naturalist? An effort to secure a keepsake for a child or a sweetheart back home? An attempt to salvage the unborn chicks, to oversee their hatching in a shelter removed from combat? Or a memory prompt for the future, recalling a moment of serenity in wartime? And did the person who collected them, in all probability a boy or man, himself survive?
Anyone who’s taken part in an egg and spoon race has deferred to the fragility of an egg. Whoever removed these birds’ eggs from the line of fire thus demonstrated care and agility in the face of horror and destruction. He, or she, recognized their worth.
Only rarely do we hear about the impacts of war on species other than our own. Recent research from the Conflict and Environment Observatory suggests how about 16 million animals played a role in the First World War, with approximately 484,143 horses, mules, camels, and bullocks having lost their lives serving alongside the British troops. Birds and other wildlife in war zones experience habitat destruction and pollution, food shortages, random cruelty, and heightened risk of both disease and death. In Ypres, just 15 kilometres north of Ploegsteert, the remembrance of World War One persists in the soil some hundred years after battle—in elevated levels of copper and lead, both toxic to birds.
A recent diary entry from a writer in Gaza notes that “in hard times, being kind is one of the most difficult things to do.” Rescuing the eggs more than a century ago was such a gesture—an act of caring in a time of brutality. The fact that they never hatched, however troubling, has allowed them to serve as messengers, reminding us of the breadth and tenacity of life and the will to perpetuate it, even in the line of fire.
The Smallest Objective—a 2nd edition
October 11 | 2023
For the e-readers among you, I’m excited to announce that my award-winning memoir and family history is now available in a 2nd edition. This new e-book version of The Smallest Objective introduces family photos, along with expanded material about Jockey Fleming, my great-uncle and a notorious rogue and raconteur of mid-century Montreal. The journalist Al Palmer, author of Montreal Confidential, wrote of Jockey: “Visiting celebrities vie for the honour of inviting him to dinner. He knows—and this is important—and keeps more secrets of the underworld than any ten men.”
The 2nd edition is available here. I’m hoping you enjoy it.
A new short story in The Razor!
May 1 | 2023
May Day, a celebration of spring, marks the appearance in The Razor of my short story “How a Tall Man Sat on a Small Chair.” As the literary magazine of Gotham Writers’ Workshop, the largest adult-education writing school in the United States, The Razor is endowed with many wonderful resources. In particular, the editors commission an audio version of each story, as well as an accompanying illustration, both by professional artists. I’m especially grateful to audio narrator and actor Meliora Dockery and artist Gerard Pefung for their inventive and playful interpretations of “How a Tall Man Sat on a Small Chair.”
In the forests of Lithuania—my grandfather’s formative years
April 10 | 2023
I’m delighted to announce today’s publication in Terrain magazine of my illustrated essay “Its Petrified Imprint”: <https://www.terrain.org/2023/nonfiction/its-petrified-imprint/>
The essay details my efforts to glimpse my paternal grandfather, Dr. Simon Kirsch (above), by means of the Lithuanian landscapes characterizing his early childhood. As some of you will know from my memoir and family history, The Smallest Objective, Simon immigrated to Montreal at the age of six, having spent his early years in the Jewish settlement of Vilkomir, Lithuania. His profession of botany originated, perhaps, in the country of his birth—a country abounding in pristine forests and the last nation in Europe to abandon pagan rites.
The lantern slide shown here was one that Simon used when teaching at McGill University in Montreal. It consists of a cross-section of a beech tree magnified by 25 times and would have been viewed through a magic lantern, the earliest form of a slide projector. Like Simon himself, the beech is a species to be found both in Europe and North America.
Artists in situ—Russell Hoban, Francis Bacon
March 17 | 2023
I was lucky enough recently to visit Dublin, including the reconstructed studio of maverick painter Francis Bacon. When Bacon died in 1992, his heir arranged for the artist’s London studio and its contents to be dismantled and reassembled in Dublin, where Bacon was born. Inevitably, the word that comes to mind upon first glimpse of the artist’s space is mess—or, more charitably, unchecked exuberance.
Bacon’s studio is strewn with newspaper clippings, paint brushes and tins, canvases, magazines, a tarnished mirror, books stacked precariously, walls splattered with paint, naked light bulbs, even a pair of corduroy trousers. Although the arrangement evolved organically over the years according to the artist’s creative impulses and material needs, the team dismantling and reassembling the studio treated it as a fixed piece, numbering each item and documenting its precise position in the whole.
I began to wonder whether any writer of renown could rival Francis Bacon in the density and accretion of debris and objects in a work space. After much searching—many authors who’ve volunteered glimpses of their work rooms appear to be scrupulously tidy or have cleared up in advance—I happened upon Russell Hoban.
Like Bacon, Hoban was born in one place, Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and concluded his life and career elsewhere, in London, England. (As I set their names side by side, I notice, too, that the pair’s surnames are near anagrams, with a matching four letters out of five.) Hoban said of his writer’s room in a Guardian interview dated November 9, 2007:
This room is composed of tottering stacks and shaky heaps of DVDs and videos, bulging shelves of books, slithery carpets of undiscarded draft pages, and delicately balanced objects of various weight and fragility poised to fall on my head. I have often been buried under DVD slides and video-topplings and once the TV fell on me while I was trying to squeeze between it and a precarious stack.
Are the surrounds of an artist’s space random and superfluous? Inspiring and essential? Russell Hoban supplied a ready answer. The author of the children’s book The Mouse and His Child, along with the science fiction classic Riddley Walker, described the clutter in his writer’s room as no less than his “exobrain.”
The above image suggests the kinds of items found in both artists’ spaces.
The Language of Flowers
February 1 | 2023
February in the Northern Hemisphere is a chill month, brittle and unripe. Yet it’s also by way of Valentine’s Day a celebration of flowers—bouquets as eloquent as they are lovely.
The language of flowers—illustrated catalogues of their meanings and sentimental associations—became popular in book form during the Victorian era in England, France, the US, and Canada. The first literary mention in English, however, was some 100 years earlier by Christopher Smart in his exuberant and sprawling poem “Jubilate Agno”:
For flowers are good both for the living and the dead.
For there is a language of flowers.
For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.
For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers.
—Fragment 3, Part B, c. 1759–63
The array of blossoms shown here were plucked from the gardens of 17th-century Ham House on the River Thames in Richmond, England. As transitory as an elegant phrase, each bloom has acquired meanings and associations harking back not merely to the Victorian era but to antiquity and traditions of thought in ancient China, Japan, Turkey, Greece, and Rome.
If these flowers could speak, here’s a whisper of what they might tell us of themselves:
Borage (blue, lower left): Courage, romantic longing, and purging of melancholy, especially when consumed with wine
Cornflower aka Bachelor Button (blue, centre left): patience, hope for love, once worn by young men to indicate they were eligible
Heartsease aka Johnny Jump Up (purple, yellow, and white, upper left): peace of mind, love, three colours interpreted as the Holy Trinity
Marigold (shades of orange, lower left): power, passion, optimism, renewal, vitality, occasionally grief
Nasturtium (shades of orange, upper right): victory, patriotism, loyalty, strength
Nonetheless it’s the rose (pink, centre right) that’s most closely associated with Valentine’s Day. Roses are inseparable, it seems, from love, romance, and beauty. In one telling, red roses originated when Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, ran to Adonis, her mortal lover who’d been fatally wounded by a wild boar. In her haste to save Adonis, Aphrodite pricked her foot on the thorn of a white rose, staining the blossom with her blood.
