Category Archives: ~Other

Wanderlust Ireland Travel Blog

Write with Lightning is on a semi-hiatus while I am backpacking around Ireland with my friend Brice. We will be keeping a travel blog of our adventures and the local stories we learn along the way. We’ll also be leaving treasure and old-school (non-GPS) clues for other travellers (or even locals, I suppose) to find. The trip begins on May 14th in Cork and ends on June 29 in Amsterdam (Scotland and the Netherlands occupy a small corner of our spontaneous itinerary). Please follow along at:

http://wanderlustireland.wordpress.com

Any poems I write on the trip will still be posted on Write with Lightning, so sign up for the RSS feed to know when that happens.


The Average Joe

There were a lot of things he wasn’t allowed to like: musicals, dancing, wine, unicorns, cocktails, the colour pink, museums, sunsets, reading. And only a few things he was: beer, sports, sex, danger, gambling, smoking, machines. Because of this, he was the type of person no one writes a story about. No artistic hobbies. No secret hopes or desires. No existential crisis. Just one of those guys whom the main character irrationally desires or envies. The Stiffler figure. The party animal with great stories to tell. Great vapid stories. For a person like this to become the centre of attention to a literary audience, something outside of his normal routine had to happen to him. Continue reading


First Love’s Theme Song

It was the summer after Grade 11—or the summer of Final Fantasy X, Smirnoff Ice, Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated”, and Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. I had won a five day trip to scout out the university that ended up becoming my stomping grounds for the five years after high school. My sylvan elf rogue is a great scout—as am I.

I arrived at the retreat in what I deemed to be perfect university student attire. I must have rolled a natural-20 in Disguise, or at least a 17 in Self-Deception, to warrant my success. As I walked around campus, old computer speakers lashed to the sides of my backpack scratchily, and between skips, played The Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” as the theme song of my group: Team DC (Discovery Channel). I also brought badminton racquets to show off what I liked to think of as my cool, athletic side. The tunes and sports equipment apparently worked, because I met a girl Continue reading


Sunday Morning Stranger in Your Bed: Tony Harrison

I saw a call for writers recently asking for “Twitter-sized” poems. I suppose crunching a thought into a 140 character poem is not so bad—after all, a haiku would have great difficulty reaching that length and most of my Word of the Day epigrams fit within this restriction—but it’s the premise that bothers me. Poetry requires form: something to separate it from prose. I’m not denouncing all free-verse and slam poems—I have seen both well-done…on occasion—but I see them as different art “forms” from the intellectual process of crafting chaos with the ordered form of poetry. One man keeping the formal fight alive with humourous couplets is British poet Tony Harrison.

Harrison was recommended to me by a Classical Literature professor at UBC not for any of Harrison’s translations of Greek plays (most notably Hecuba and the Oresteia), but for a poem about the Gulf War. The poem, “A Cold Coming”, is an imagined interview between Harrison and the charred remains of an Iraqi truck driver killed in a missile attack Continue reading


Purgatory

Congratulations! You’re dead and you’re not in Hell, but that probably means you’re in Purgatory where your wounds of sin will be cleansed. With punishment.

Dante’s Mt. Purgatory is arranged in an awesomely symbolic way, especially once through St. Peter’s Gate. Continue reading