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In an effort to fend off the blahs of short days and bipolar weather patterns we recently organized an event at Gallery Connexion in Fredericton that saw the telling of stories brought to the stage. Inspired by the Moth storytelling series and podcast, the performers would simply present their tales, loosely following the theme “Lost and Found,” in a very off-the-cuff conversational manner, without notes or props of any kind.

I am just a reporter, author and storyteller in a small province in Canada, a journalist devoted to covering seemingly prosaic concerns distant from the epic struggles, or literary hot spots, that marked the careers of Whitman, Hitchens and Havel. But lazy thinking and equivocation are universal, as is the need for clear thinking and clear writing.

Reporting on any and all activity, even your bodily functions, or while engaged in bodily functions, seems mandatory. I stood at a urinal in the Vancouver airport while the man in the next spot talked loudly on his cell phone. He even had a cigarette in his mouth. I asked him, “Is that what they call voice-over-I-pee.” He sneered and jutted his chin at me over the divider, causing the ash to drop, hopefully not anywhere delicate. He growled while I fled.

I think the first time I thought clearly that I wanted to be a writer was when I was in elementary school and I read a poem I’d written about war aloud at the Remembrance Day assembly and it made the school librarian cry.

2:00 pm New Brunswick College of Craft & Design, 457 Queen Street (Author talk & Book Signing)

5:00 pm at East Side, 520 Queen Street (Book Signing & Art Demo)

7:00 pm at Picaroons Brewtique, 422 Queen Street (Books. Beer. Music)

Poets include Amanda Jernigan, Jeffery Donaldson, James Langer, Warren Heiti, Leigh Kotsilidis, Linda Besner, Asa Boxer, Mark Callanan, Shoshanna Wingate, Nick Thran, Anne Compton, Karen Schindler, Rhonda Douglas, Ross Leckie, the ghost of Richard Outram and many more.

The idea for my book is to explore the fiction as simulation of social worlds, and to treat a small number of works of literature by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Anton Chekhov, James Baldwin from both a literary and a psychological point of view.

In our own time, few writers depict the ambiguities of sexual connection better than Alice Munro. Her stories tend to focus on the relational and the way in which actions of the unconscious, or barely conscious, mind affect others.

It was awful to turn on the computer to the news yesterday that Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch had died in a car accident on Tuesday night, returning home to Leduc from a reading, mere days before his 84th birthday.

You know how sometimes a fifteen minute break from writing can turn into a three hour Facebook / RSS Feed / blog reading sinkhole of procrastination? Well that was May for your humble editor.