Things I do

In early 2013, I approached a friend (Dr. Larry Librach) who had been a palliative-care pioneer in Canada, to seek his help. I wanted to write a long-form piece based on a day in the life of a palliative-care physician. I planned to shine a light on the vital work that palliative-care physicians do. I’d seen the difference palliative-care can make, when my eldest brother died of cancer without access to proper care three years previously. That was the plan at least. It never came to fruition.

Three weeks after our first meeting Larry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He was terminal. Together we worked together to craft a narrative about his cancer journey. The result is a book I never expected to write: Conversations On Dying.

A couple of years ago a short non-fiction piece I wrote about euthanizing a pet guinea pig made it to the longlist of the CBC’s Non-Fiction Contest. A year before that an experimental non-fiction piece about an abusive relationship (written in the form of a Cosmopolitan quiz) made it to the longlist of the Carte Blanche/Creative Nonfiction Collective contest.

What else have I written? About a million years ago, when I first moved to Canada I was working with Anthony Williams and Don Tapscott (Wikinomics) on a project that became the book The Naked Corporation. Working on that project got me thinking about fresh water, and how much we take that for granted, especially in Canada, where we have so much of it. I wrote a story about a future in which that would no longer be the case. A decade and a half later Exile Publications was looking for stories inspired by climate change, and it finally found a home.

Stories can be found almost everywhere. I found the one that sparked the story that won this short story contest in C’Est What?, my local. Jeff, the barkeep/rock star was chucking to himself as he made his way back around the bar, having just served a table. I asked him what was so funny. He handed me what looked like a business card. It was obviously well-thumbed and was speckled with stains. At the top it read ‘Allergies Stephanie’. It was a list of foods that Stephanie (I presume) could not tolerate. I asked if I could keep the card, thinking it might spark a story idea. It sat on my desk for two years or more. Every now and then I’d pick it up and look at it but the story never came. Then, in the middle of a rather sleepless night, I had a half-dream about a date between an OCD man, and an allergy plagued woman. The story pretty much wrote itself in (weirdly) second person.

A friend of mine had a new publishing project he was launching with a few other authors. The idea was to create themed anthologies. The twist was they wanted the stories to be written by writers who don’t normally write in the genre. The theme of this particular collection was romance. I thought of a story I’d written several years previously: essentially the origin story of a female serial-killer, told on the very evening that she chose her first victim in her vendetta against sexual predators. He didn’t think the story was right for his romance collection (and who can blame him?) but decided it would be a perfect fit for the next book in the series: Nefariam—The Element of Crime.

Sunglasses are a relatively modern phenomenon. They were popularized by movie stars in the 1920s. But protecting our eyes from the harmful effects of the sun is something humans have been doing for thousands of years. Oddly (or, perhaps, predictably) it wasn’t in the sun-kissed regions of the Earth where the practice first arose, but in the Arctic. The Inuit developed flattened Walrus ivory goggles with narrow slits to block reflected sunlight.

The top hat was not always the go-to headgear for the elite. It replaced the tricorn and bicorn hat in the late eighteen century. Shortly after its introduction, it became popular with all social classes. Even the common labourer could be seen sporting one.

Strictly speaking the term Suffragette should only be applied to the more militant members of the women’s suffrage movement, especially the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The name was penned as a term of derision by Daily Mail writer Charles E. Hands, but Christabel Pankhurst embraced it. She pronounced the word suffra-GETs because, she said, women were determined to GET the vote.

Ever wondered why it took us so long to invent the bicycle? On the face of it, it’s not a very complicated machine: a couple of wheels mounted on a frame. But a number of technologies and developments had to come together before the bicycle became a feasible, comfortable alternative to walking. The invention of vulcanization made the bicycle’s tyres possible, while the advent of tarmac as a road surface made for a smoother ride. But arguably the key component was the smallest, most invisible part in the bike: the humble ball bearing. Until we had a way to reliably manufacture ball-bearings of regular size and roundness the bike was simply an eccentric novelty.

The Victorian railway magnate Sir Edward Watkin planned and started to build a tunnel under the English Channel in 1880. To promote his venture (and raise funds) he held lavish parties underground, in the tunnel workings. Champagne was served. Guests were transported down a 163ft shaft to the tunnel bottom in metal skips. Watkin built over of mile of tunnel before the government of the day shut the venture down on fears that invaders from Europe’s mainland could use the tunnel to storm England.