Photo: Stratford Long Table Dinner 2017

Sorting through the archival drifts of my office this morning, I unearthed the August 2007 inaugural issue of eatdrink magazine when it was a monthly. Tucked inside was the first iteration of my Buzz column, “New and Noteworthy,” a dispatch originally engineered to offer a sort of insider’s cartography of the culinary landscapes in London and Stratford. The mandate was pleasantly ambitious: to stoke the local gastronomic conversation, introduce the personalities and rising stars navigating the kitchen trenches, and, crucially, to coax readers out of their homes and into dining rooms. It was designed to be educational, entirely partisan, and beneath the glossy veneer of the trade, entirely my own voice. I also wrote a travel article titled The Heart of Italy, followed in the September issue by another travel article called Remembering Sark. My regular columns and restaurant articles are a compendium of London and Stratford’s culinary history over the last two decades.

The Long Table
On the enduring appetites of a Canadian theatre town.

There is a particular satisfaction in looking back at a piece of writing from long ago and realizing that its truths have not only aged well but have actively solidified. Seventeen years have passed since I first sketched out my impressions of the opening of the Stratford Festival, yet the scene remains strikingly unchanged. The festival continues to serve as an annual ritual that traditionally draws upwards of half a million tourists to this small Canadian hub of theatre and gastronomy. This seasonal influx puts a city of roughly thirty thousand in an enviable, if slightly surreal, demographic position, culminating in a period of intense, appreciative commerce that lures loyal theatregoers and culinary zealots back to the region year after year. There are plenty of structural reasons for Stratford’s peculiar density of exceptional restaurants, a phenomenon I have spent many previous columns championing. Chief among them is the venerable Stratford Chefs School, an institution whose talented alums routinely choose to stay in the area, lending the local food scene distinct cachet and a spirit of restless innovation.

From the archives: On the enduring appetites of a Canadian theatre town.

Just days before the curtain rises on the official season, I found myself at the Sputnik espresso bar, nursing a café au lait and re-reading M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. Nearby, a cluster of hip American tourists thumbed through the latest Stratford dining guide, trading reminiscences of past visits and debating their itinerary with that peculiar frisson of self-importance and competitive connoisseurship common to the travelling gourmand. Their conversation, loud enough to bypass any need for active eavesdropping, centred on the local pantheon: The Church, Rundles, Pazzo, Bijou, and The Old Prune. A crowd of serious epicures, obsessed with the regional terroir and the bravura performances of world-class actors, swapped memories of long-ago meals at the Sunroom, Keystone Alley, and Woolfy’s. I resisted the brief, democratic urge to intervene and lecture them on a recent meal at The Old Prune that had been a genuine gastronomical tour de force. Instead, I finished my coffee and meandered over to one of my regular writing haunts to sketch out a few thoughts on Fisher.

Fisher remains the wry, critically acclaimed architect of twentieth-century food literature, the author of several gastronomically minded books that have long since graduated into the ranks of literary classics. Her evocative prose, paired with a fierce and innate understanding of cuisine, was a singular achievement that helped rescue culinary writing from the realm of the domestic manual and elevate it to an intellectual art form. How to Cook a Wolf arrived in 1942, when the psychological scars of the Great Depression were still fresh, wartime rationing was at its peak, and rigorous material prudence had become the defining national psyche.

The book is an elegant collection of essays whose title invokes the old anxieties of keeping the proverbial wolf from the door. Throughout, Fisher dispenses practical counsel and sharp-edged philosophy that are primarily, though never exclusively, culinary. Her observations on daily life offer valuable, occasionally radical insights into how one might endure, or even flourish with a certain performative bravado, under the shadow of scarcity. The common-sense pragmatism of her narrative, alternately ironic and self-deprecating, serves as a psychological antidote to grim periods when capital is short, the pantry is depleted, and the spirit feels thin.

Fisher’s enduring thesis is that poverty is neither a crime nor a moral failing, a point she drives home in chapters titled “How to be Sage Without Hemlock,” “How to Boil Water,” and “How Not to Boil an Egg.” Even in “How to Keep Alive,” where she outlines a devastatingly unappetizing recipe for a dish she frankly calls “sludge,” the true objective is preserving human dignity in the face of austerity. It is a treatise that feels remarkably urgent in our own precarious economic moment, reminding us that providing true sustenance is always a matter of culture, not just sustenance. BL

Beneath the soaring vaulted heritage of St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown London, Ontario, 125 plates will soon tell a story far deeper than simple provenance. On Thursday, October 22nd, this historic sanctuary, usually a space for spiritual reflection and community outreach, will transform into an expansive dining room for a farm-to-table Harvest Dinner supporting Paul’s Place (formerly St. Paul’s Social Services). Organizing and collaborating on a menu of this scale requires navigating a delicate and uncomfortable paradox. Gathering guests for a high-end, curated culinary experience to raise funds for those who go without is challenging. It is an inherent paradox: an exquisite meal can easily feel like an indulgence, a temporary luxury sitting uncomfortably close to the systemic realities of hunger and homelessness we seek to alleviate. Yet, in moments like these, I find myself reflecting on Big Night and Babette’s Feast, those classic cinematic masterclasses of culinary idealism and brotherly collaboration, and an essay I wrote years ago on film and the culinary arts. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder once again with Chef Brian Sua-an of Reverie and Saisha’s Patisserie, widely regarded as one of the city’s premier culinary talents, alongside a collective of top-notch local chefs selflessly volunteering their time and craft. As I help craft the menu, this endeavour feels less like a detached gala and more like stepping directly into our own version of those fateful, beautiful experiences.

Translating the poetic romanticism of celluloid into the rhythmic hum of the cathedral’s on-site commercial kitchen reveals a different kind of magic. Professional infrastructure on-site anchors our ambition, letting the team trade chaotic improvisation for the focused, synchronized choreography of a true brigade. Yet the deeper challenge remains untouched by stainless steel and industrial ranges: turning the mechanics of luxury into an authentic offering. Every plate must justify its own presence, transforming high-end culinary artistry from a potential contradiction into a vessel for radical hospitality. By placing thoughtful craftsmanship in the direct service of our neighbours, this October 22nd benefit seeks to resolve that initial tension. When abundance is shared, the high table is no longer an indulgence, but a profound act of dignity, memory, and grace.

The Big Night: Our Regard for Food has Flourished into an Interesting Film Genre

Our regard for food has flourished into an interesting film genre. Big Night, Julie and Julia and Babette’s Feast are examples that fill me with appreciation for films where the culinary arts are the true stars. Small wonder Julie and Julia, which depicts chef Julia Child’s early career, lets the audience savour the remarkable nature of her achievement. The film contrasts Child’s life with that of food blogger Julie Powell, who aspires to recreate all 524 recipes from Child’s collaborative cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The film has been warmly embraced.

Adapted from Isak Dinesen’s (pen name Karen Blixen) short story, and originally published in 1958 in her collection Anecdotes of Destiny, the Oscar-winning 1987 film Babette’s Feast follows a French political refugee who finds shelter in a strict, austere Protestant village in 19th-century Denmark. Taken in by two pious sisters, Babette works quietly as their cook for years serving up austere fare. When she wins 10,000 francs in a lottery, she spends every penny to prepare a legendary, seven-course, gourmet French meal. During the meal, a visiting military officer recognizes the peerless quality of the food and wine, realizing that their humble cook was once a supreme culinary genius of Paris. Through her culinary art, Babette transforms the single night into an act of grace and generosity, melting the rigid hearts of the wary congregation.

Big Night comes closest to capturing many of my own experiences in the restaurant business. It tells the story of two brothers who run an Italian restaurant and face the trials and tribulations of serving authentic, regional fare in the 1950s, when “Americanized” spaghetti and meatballs defined Italian cuisine.

The plot centers on planning and preparing an elaborate, eight-course feast. But the story also explores how to balance culinary art with paying the bills. At the heart of the movie lurks the unquestionable truth that genuine gastronomic pursuits are always labours of love.

I have been inspired to recreate this meal on several occasions, most notably as a fundraiser for our local Slow Food convivium twenty-five years ago, for my colleague Jane Antoniak’s fiftieth birthday, and, more recently, the timpano at her husband Bruce Fyfe’s retirement party. For that Slow Food dinner, I collaborated closely with my chef friends Barbara Bandeen Toomer, Sandro Malnati and Fernanda Cerone, sharing the stove in a true collective choreography. These meals are always the collective effort of collaborative chefs.

Happily, after taking a long hiatus from such madness, I found myself drawn back to the ritual of making the timpano again this year, dusting off the heavy pans to construct the centrepieces all over again.

For our Slow Food fundraiser, the evening began as guests arrived in vintage 1950s evening dress, setting the stage for camaraderie, great food, music and exceptional wine. A long table laden with antipasti was presented, and pre-dinner aperitifs were served. The chefs mingled with the patrons and showed little indication that the pressure was on.

Guests were seated on the terrace. The kitchen became a hub of activity and conviviality. In a flash, we dispelled the assumption that too many chefs spoil the broth. We served steaming hot vessels of delicate consommé, enhanced with freshly dug carrots, Italian parsley, and homemade tubular and cylindrical ziti.

Following a spectacular juggling act of pans that paid homage to prop-based Fellini-circus skills, we produced a trio of delicate, creamy risottos in unison. One was flavoured with spinach and Genovese basil; another with Roma tomatoes and shrimp, scallops, and calamari; and the third with local goat cheese, two fresh sheep’s milk cheeses, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. We ladled these onto large platters to simulate the three equal vertical bands of the Italian flag. In the film, they prepared only a seafood risotto. Like the film, we poured our souls into each course, lavishing care, patience and attention on the cooking.

The next course was timpano, the film’s penultimate dish. Meticulously assembled in advance, it required additional baking. Timing was paramount, given the constraints of two ovens. When carefully unmoulded intact, the Timpano was visually stunning. Kindred to the lasagna, but far more dramatic in scale, Timpano is a signature special-occasion dish from Calabria. In our version, the Timpano’s sturdy, drum-shaped pasta dough is filled with multiple layers of regional specialties, including spicy penne Arrabbiata, homemade sausage, provolone, ricotta, meatballs, marinated artichokes, olives, roasted red peppers, pesto, and hard-boiled eggs.

In the film, you only catch a glimpse of the next course, so improvisation and the constant refocusing of one’s attention were required. Two baked and stuffed whole Atlantic salmon infused with fennel, skewered with black tiger shrimp and sauced with lemon aioli were presented. This was followed by oven-roasted capons stuffed with apple, pear, and quince, glazed with a pomegranate butter sauce.

After a brief interlude, twin, boned, whole roasted, crispy pigs emerged from the ovens, and once dressed, they were paraded around the dining room to great fanfare. The evening’s decadence was topped off by platters of baked fresh fig and raspberry crostata, cantucci (a type of biscotti), seasonal fruit, nuts and traditional amaretti cookies. Well past midnight, the reverent guests settled into cups of espresso and glasses of grappa and limoncello.

Our interpretations of the Big Night meal were such epicurean triumphs that I have often discussed creating the entire meal from Babette’s Feast. However, to achieve such gastronomic accuracy in the film’s portrayal of food, one would have to win the lottery and be as self-sacrificing as the protagonist. BL

To stay abreast of the culinary scene, I talk and meet with restaurateurs, chefs, farmers, and food artisans. Lately, I have redoubled my efforts to shop Canadian and in-season, remaining firmly opposed to political discussions that would allow American wine and liquor back on our shelves. At the same time, the Trump administration continues to impose heavy tariffs on trade. I write on a variety of subjects, but food has been my professional métier. When I tell people that I am a food writer, they imagine a frivolous existence of dining out night after night. I do eat out a lot, and in diverse spots, but I tend not to dwell on pedestrian dining experiences or unfortunate cuisine. The reality is that I am subjected to more than my share of mediocre food, disappointing culinary experiences, and wearisome individuals, and I rarely feel the compunction to write about it. No reader wants food writers to pile unrestrained acclaim on every restaurateur, chef, farmer, or entrepreneur. It’s disingenuous, and it gets obnoxious.

I am an adventurous diner and a dedicated proponent of Slow Food and farm-to-table principles. I like to discover new restaurants at random, while taking suggestions from my readers and a large network of contacts. In my quest to eat well, I have been sent on many a wild goose chase. In these situations, the crucial caveat remains: I can forgive unpleasant surroundings or underwhelming service if the food is exceptional. We are living through another gastronomic renaissance, and more than ever my work puts me in front of the orthodoxy of local food sourcing, business incubators, and food entrepreneurs advancing innovation and regionalism in our food culture. I can’t help but be enthralled by chefs and food producers who support farmers and food artisans and pay close attention to the provenance, seasonality, and authenticity of their ingredients.

Friends and colleagues ask why I do not approach restaurants with a more critical pen. There are many restaurants and chefs whose virtues deserve recognition without undue hyperbole or derision. I have never been in league with my publishers, editors, colleagues, destination marketing organizations, or the hospitality industry to hype undeserving entrepreneurs, chefs, restaurateurs, and their establishments. I do not feel I need to manufacture controversy to attract readers. Along the way, I have had to put up some pretty strong fights to avoid undermining my credibility and voice.

My mission has been to encourage people to dine out and support culinary innovation, independents, and small businesses. I am a local food movement advocate and a proponent of culinary tourism and agritourism. My columns and articles are not platforms for taking potshots at restaurants or over-inflated personalities; other individuals feel this is their job. Of course, who among us couldn’t benefit from a figurative kick in the bum every once in a while? However, this writer attempts to provide fair and unbiased reporting on the local food scene while keeping his penchant for sarcasm mostly in check. As I have said before, the food media are necessary members of the culinary community.

I bring appreciation and sensibility to the table. But the food media’s mission goes beyond that. We must convey our unbiased impressions to readers while alerting the dining public to the diversity of choices on the culinary scene. Good reporting furnishes you with enough information and insight to make informed decisions, while helping to set the standards for dining out. If you don’t have good, strong food media, whether you love them or despise them, you don’t have the same degree of interest, enthusiasm, and accountability.

It has always been clear to me that there is no way to have one meal in a restaurant and offer a fair and credible critique if you approach food reviewing with integrity. Three visits ordering multiple items are the minimum requirement. Food, identity, and culture are closely tied together for many people, and inadvertently insulting customs and cuisine you don’t understand is offensive. Even a hobbyist should meet certain journalistic standards when reviewing a restaurant. People who have strong opinions in a given discipline or make sweeping statements, and many of us do, but don’t have the broader knowledge or context that gives an opinion merit and weight, are not proper critics. It’s for this reason that online restaurant reviewing by vituperative diners can’t be taken too seriously. The credible restaurant reviewer can’t simply be a euphoric advocate either, someone whose adulation for a restaurant or chef is reduced to innocuous showboating. The thoughtful negative review has its own merits. It pays homage to serious chefs and restaurateurs who want to be critiqued fairly and intelligently, rather than showered with meaningless praise.

One of the greatest things about reviewing and writing about restaurants is unearthing the unforeseen jewel or the diamond in the rough. In my opinion, among the foibles are discovering restaurants that don’t live up to their reputations or encountering the disengaged owner who has lost interest in the business and whose writing is on the wall. Even worse is the server who echoes those bitter grievances. Even more obnoxious are the staff who ride on the chef’s laurels and the restaurant’s former accolades, thinking that a lingering reputation gives them carte blanche to bully or dispense apathetic or poor service to their customers.

Writing about restaurants brings unique challenges. Often, I am offered invitations with the implied expectation that, in return, the invitee will receive an exaggerated endorsement from me. Fabricated enthusiasm and lazy hyperbole do businesses no favours. A glowing article about a restaurant, even when it is deserved, can set expectations so high they’re difficult to maintain daily. Sometimes the food may be tremendous, with the perfect calibration of flavours, but the service wanting. Other times, the service is top-notch, but the food is anemic and undistinguished, rendering the experience an endurance exercise. Ultimately, whether navigating a flawed service or celebrating a culinary triumph, the goal remains unchanged: to chronicle our evolving food culture with the honesty it demands and the respect it deserves. BL

Immediately after meeting him, I spent that same summer and early fall drifting through the cobblestones of Belgium, Holland, and England with Bonnie. We read Graham Greene and Sylvia Plath, and Bonnie remains another stalwart lifelong friend. Bonnie is the inspiration for the main character in my short story, What Time is the Bus to Sulmona.

We had set out just a year after my formative summer living in Vancouver’s West End. Gary and I were supposed to reunite in Paris that December, but he injured his knee, rendering him unable to walk and altering our plans. Looking back, that one breathless season of ambition, travel, and unexpected detours became the hinge upon which the rest of my life swung.

The crucible of my early twenties was defined by a specific kind of self-indulgent, romantic melancholy. Borzoi Hill, where we lived, possessed the kind of tragic rural decay that Tennessee Williams might conjure out of the humid deterioration of an antebellum mansion. It was a landscape of heavy air, fading grandeur, and rooms that surrendered to time by elegant degrees.

Williams was one of my early literary heroes. At twenty, though, I failed to realize a crucial truth: living inside a Southern Gothic melodrama is significantly more charming on the page than in the flesh. The romance fades when you find yourself sitting in an elegant sunken marble bathtub, trying to coax discoloured water out of a rusty faucet while Esther Phillips sings the blues.

This summer, Gary, who has long served as my indispensable sounding board and unremunerated copy editor, has been struggling with his eyes. A few weeks ago, he surrendered his car keys, a concession that promptly curtailed our summer plans. This week, he undergoes cataract surgery. Finding myself with a sudden surplus of quiet hours, I decided to return to the story of my friend Esther Reep, a narrative obligation I contracted in my youth. She always wanted her story to be told, and I have now written four chapters, finally giving shape to a history I have attempted to capture in several different versions over the decades. Here is the first installment.

Blood Memory and the Afterlife

Consciousness does not cease when a heart flatlines. It simply shifts into a closed, high-velocity loop, and your heart’s electrical activity appears as a flatline on an electrocardiogram. On July 2, 2003, at exactly 4:12 PM, my ravaged body finally succumbed to a malignant slow-moving leukemia after being in and out of remission for many years. It was a stiflingly humid summer afternoon, though I only knew that from the condensation fogging the double-paned glass of my isolation room at St Joseph’s Health Care. The medical reality of mid-2003 was defined by clinical paranoia. The global SARS outbreak had technically just been declared contained by the World Health Organization that morning, leaving the oncology ward smelling violently of germicidal detergents and industrial bleach and the triage doctors masked with “space age” protective gear. My 63-year-old bone marrow was entirely kaput, overrun by mutated white blood cells that chemotherapy had failed to kill. There were no targeted miracle drugs available for my specific subtype yet. They were on the horizon but months away. Instead, there were only the blunt-force side effects of daunorubicin, pumped through a central line, leaving a permanent taste of rusted pennies in the back of my throat.

When my damaged heart muscle finally surrendered, the boxy, beige CRT cardiac monitor beside my bed registered a flatline. The alarms screamed out into the isolated hallways, triggering a sudden, frantic rush of soft-soled nursing clogs against the linoleum. But inside my skull, the engine did not cease. It accelerated. As ischemia cut off oxygen to my thalamus, my brain’s internal perception of time dilated exponentially. The neural networks responsible for processing time ran out of sensory anchors, expanding a single remaining millisecond into a subjective eternity.

The most profoundly logical aspect of my death was the sudden, mathematical removal of physical suffering. For years, my life had been dictated by a deep, throbbing pressure grinding inside my pelvic bones and ribs, which was the literal crowding of malignant cells inside my marrow. At exactly 4:12 PM, the ascending spinothalamic tracts, the neural cables responsible for carrying debilitating pain signals from my bones up to my cerebral cortex, suffered total oxygen deprivation and failed.

Without the relentless background noise of those distress signals, my parietal lobe instantly lost its GPS (a new concept to me) of my physical coordinates. I could no longer compute where my swollen legs ended, and the coarse hospital sheets began. This sudden, disorienting absence of somatic boundaries is what the religious describe as floating. In truth, it was simply a dying brain losing the data it needed to construct a body.

Because I am trapped entirely within the final electrical firing of my own neural network, my afterlife looks identical to the world I left behind, yet completely scrubbed of physical friction. I am currently walking down the cracked concrete sidewalk in front of the Dutch Laundry where I worked during my fledgling years. The rendering is flawless, built entirely from the deep data storage of my temporal lobes. I pass people I have not spoken to in decades. They wear the wardrobes my memory assigned to them. They speak using the exact, finite vocabulary my brain recorded from them when we were alive. There is no anxiety here. Without a functioning adrenal gland, my prefrontal cortex has no software left to run a panicked fight-or-flight response.

Outside the bone-dry walls of my skull, decades have marched onward. My physical remains are long gone, and my medical records are archived and can only be accessed by a formal privacy or release-of-information request. The world has completely reinvented itself. But inside this looping, oxygen-starved synaptic spark, the clock remains frozen on that humid July afternoon in 2003. The severe bone pain has been permanently muted. The final millisecond of my life is broad enough to live in forever. Now here we are. This is my untold story.

I. The Dutch Laundry

I arrived on earth in 1939, a year suspended between Judy Garland’s first steps along the Yellow Brick Road and the opening salvos of the Second World War. As the youngest of four children, I entered a house already crowded by the anxieties of impending conflict. Our father, Harry Ethelbert King, was deployed overseas, leaving our mother to maintain a precarious home front.

For decades, the true topography of our family remained hidden. In that pre-digital world, secrets solidified without a trace. Around 1942, while stationed in London, my father met an Englishwoman named Annie. They had a daughter, my half-sister Jeanette, born amid the air raids of 1943. Safely tucked away in Canada, we knew nothing of the infant who slept through the Blitz in the underground shelters of East London.

The echoes of that fractured family line never truly stopped reaching for me, even long after I was gone. Some twenty years after I passed away, a message arrived from England. It was Jeanette, tracing the edges of a family tree scattered across oceans, trying to locate me and the half-sisters and brother she had never met, whose lives had once been defined by jealousy and malice. My former roommate, The Boy who had grown into the man I always knew he would be, sat down at his desk and picked up a pen. He wrote back to England on my behalf. The trail eventually went cold, and the silence stretched out across the Atlantic, unanswered, but he did not let my name or memory fade.

Back in 1952, however, I drew my own battle lines in a classroom corner. My schoolteacher, Miss Alton, leaned close to my mother, their heads huddled away from the other pupils.

“She doesn’t have the head for books, Mrs. King.”

My mother accepted the verdict with a casual, calculated smoothness. “Esther may be educable,” Miss Alton added flatly, “but she is unsuited to academics. She would do much better contributing to the household.”

For a woman descended from the proud, unyielding stock of Lucknow’s pioneering farm families, this pronouncement was less a disappointment than a convenient release. In my mother’s eyes, as in the eyes of the generations before her, muscle and duty built survival, not the luxury of literature. One needed just enough literacy to navigate the Bible, and no more. By instantly agreeing that I lacked intellect, she validated her own coldness, neatly mapping out my future as an unpaid labourer bound to the domestic grind. I was already the outcast of the family. With a simple nod, my mother used the teacher’s words to seal the borders of my small, cold universe. My childhood, like my brother before me, dissolved into a quiet, rampant neglect.

The Dutch Laundry became my guardian and I its unwilling hostage. My mother needed the extra wage, though she was quick to frame the arrangement as an act of maternal self-sacrifice. To ease the transition, she adopted the convenient fiction that I was simply dim-witted, creating an official alibi to strike my name from the school roll call and transfer me to the industrial workforce. She could not look me in the eye when she handed me my small paper parcel of lunch that first morning. Instead, she spoke to the kitchen wall, reciting a cipher intended for my sisters: “It’s a blessing Esther can find good, honest work down there at the laundry.” It was a seamlessly tailored lie, designed to keep her conscience clean while my hands blistered. She required the armour of false pride more than she required the duty of protecting me. And so, I became the family’s official dunce, traded for a few extra dollars a week, while my sisters casually adopted the day’s pejorative slurs to describe me.

Just like that, the classroom door slammed shut. One morning my world was framed by the soft scrape of pastel chalk on slate and the orderly rows of wooden desks. By the lunch bell, I was out in the gravel yard, dispatched straight into the humid, industrial underbelly of the Dutch Laundry down by the Fork of the Thames. The transition was absolute. The laundry was a fortress of damp brick and iron, a wet furnace that swallowed oxygen and rendered the crisp cotton dresses and white-collared shirts of London’s elite into a heavy steam that coated my throat like grease. The roar of coal-fired boilers and the choking stench of lye replaced the quiet geography of the schoolhouse. The endless hum of the washing wheels became a daily ball and chain, monitored by floor managers who paced the aisles like turnkeys, watching for any sign of slackness. In their eyes, and eventually in my own, I was no longer a schoolgirl with a future. I was merely an uneducated cog in a steam-driven engine, bound to the tub and the press by a baptismal certificate my mother had forged.

In those days, the commercial laundry was a standard rite of passage for London youth in search of pocket money, a place where teenagers were routinely brought on to haul sodden, leaden bags of linen. At fourteen, however, I was the outlier, working under a special dispensation. A severe, grinding regime governed the factory floor, driven by a cruel management style belonging to an older, harsher tradition of piecework. This was no gentle, school-sponsored introduction to the workforce; it was a raw, unforgiving private operation designed to consume cheap adolescent labour and spit out the chaff.

I can still taste the thick, chemical fog of chlorine bleach and alkaline soap. I stood on concrete that vibrated constantly beneath the weight of the machinery, my arms aching as I lifted heavy steam irons and sorted mountains of damp sheets. The air was a toxic bouillon of fumes and blistering heat that seeped deep into my lungs, weaving a web of permanent damage long before I was grown. I learned early in that dank, roaring space that if I did not advocate for myself, no one else would. But finding my actual voice would take decades of learning to speak truth to power for my own health and sanity. I was trapped in a Dickensian novel.

Then came the freezing night I stood on the riverbank, watching the Dutch Laundry building erupt into a spectacular, terrifying blaze. The flames lit up the London night sky, reflecting off the dark water of the Thames and burning away the physical walls that had imprisoned me. Wrapped in a borrowed coat, I was captured on film, fleetingly, for the evening news, as the massive fire served as the brand-new CFPL television station’s very first major breaking-news broadcast on its historic opening night. Forty firefighters were called in to fight the blaze, thought to have started in two piles of rags soaked in cleaning fluid.

II. Whistles and White Linen

When the smoke finally cleared over the Thames, my world shifted a few blocks away to the pristine soda fountain counter of the Whistle Stop Diner. The narrow, train-car diner sat huddled at the southeast corner of Stanley Street and Wortley Road, backing directly onto the Canadian National Railway line near the underpass. It drew its name from a bygone era of local transit. Before traffic signals were installed at the intersection, passing steam trains were legally required to stop and blow their iron whistles right above our roof, rattling the coffee cups along the counter. We ran on a relentless sixteen-hour rhythm, divided into exhausting shifts that left my feet burning, but it was heaven compared to the damp captivity of the laundry.

Inside, a neat row of metal stools bolted to the floor was always filled with regulars calling out for hamburgers, clubhouse sandwiches, or westerns. Outside, the gravel lot hummed with a different kind of choreography. Drivers pulled up beneath the railway line and blinked their headlights, the universal signal to let the staff know they were ready to order. Carhops, sharp in their crisp white vests, darted out to the idling cars to take orders for the diner’s famous whistle dogs; wieners split down the middle on the grill and loaded with melted cheese, bacon, and house-made relish. In the back, short-order cooks in white paper hats moved like ghosts through the greasy smoke, struggling to keep pace with the flashing high beams.

I worked those long shifts in the open kitchen behind the grill alongside the owner, Wilford Reep. He was a towering man from a completely different generation, thirty years my senior, whose heart was still heavy from the recent loss of his first wife. Behind that counter, however, our worlds slowed down. Wilford was a constant, stabilizing presence, accompanied by a large, friendly German Shepherd who became as much a fixture of the diner as the train whistles. While my mother and my two older sisters had treated me as fundamentally backward, Wilford saw someone worthy of tenderness. He spoke to me with a soft, steady compassion and an unrelenting patience I had never experienced.

Our courtship was not one of grand gestures, but of quiet, accumulated observations. Wilford took me under his wing with a gentle authority that felt entirely protective rather than restrictive. In the slow hours between the breakfast rush and the dinner headlights, he began to teach me the choreography of the business. He taught me how to balance the books, cut the inventory with precision, and command a kitchen that once seemed completely overwhelming. He shielded me from the sharper edges of the short-order cooks and the demanding regulars, positioning himself as a reliable buffer between my fragile confidence and the world outside. For the first time in my life, someone was investing in my competence. He treated my thoughts not as the dim murmurings of the family outcast. But as informed opinions worth hearing. We shared quiet pots of coffee at the end of the counter while the German Shepherd slept at our feet, finding a rare, unspoken sanctuary in each other’s presence.

“Esther,” he said one evening as the diner lights went down, “marry me.”

The proposal fell like a blade between my sisters and me. The meanest could not stomach my sudden, accidental elevation; she had intended to marry Wilford herself. When she cornered me in the hallway, her face twisted out of its familiar symmetry. She drew a small, flat revolver from her purse, aimed it squarely at my breastbone, and squeezed the trigger. The hammer clicked and the black powder burned, but the bullet tore through the plaster behind me. I survived that firing line because the terror failed to do its intended work. Under Wilford’s patient, meticulous care, the pliable, dutiful girl my sister tried to break vanished. In her place, I stepped forward and bloomed.

Our marriage brought a hard-won respectability, a quiet, immovable self-assurance that left my family disarmed. It stunned Miss Alton, too, who was forced to watch the girl she had comfortably written off step into a life of undisputed dignity. On my wedding day, struck by a sudden, sharp conscience, Alma reached into her wardrobe and draped her mink stole across my shoulders. It was a surreal, hushed surrender, a temporary acknowledgment of the person I had become, and the weight of her own culpability.

When Wilford died suddenly in his early sixties, I was left a widow in my early thirties. The marriage was brief, and the grief was sharp, but the autonomy he helped me find remained intact. He left me a final, enduring gift. Behind the wheel of a sun-baked, safari-yellow car, Wilford had patiently taught me to drive. For a girl who had been told she was slow, mastering the road was a monumental accomplishment, a tangible victory over everyone who had ever underestimated me. He left me with a late-model, four-door Volvo, and that vehicle quickly came to mean everything to me. I kept it in pristine condition, polishing its paint and keeping its engine tuned. That car gave me an independence I had never known.

Paradoxically, I stayed devoted to Miss Alton. Our relationship was an emotional tangle of unsaid words, a continuous performance observed primarily through the rearview mirror. For some reason, after labelling me and sending me to work, she had felt guilty enough to tutor me in secret. I lived for those rare scraps of praise through the haze of my exhaustion, becoming completely co-dependent, chasing an approval she was fundamentally incapable of giving. Eventually, we settled for a complex logistical pact: Miss Alton paid for the gasoline and tune-ups, and I became her personal chauffeur and sometime maid. Navigating my pristine Volvo through the London streets while she commanded the passenger seat, I inhaled her heavy, unyielding scent. Sitting so close yet miles apart, I was still trapped in the intoxicating, suffocating cloud of her absolute authority. Even as my own body secretly began to fail me, I held the steering wheel tight, resolving never to betray a trace of weakness. It was only when Alma reached old age, fragile and now dependent on my hands to move her through the world, that her hard exterior finally cracked into a quiet acceptance. I chauffeured her until the day she died.

When Miss Alton passed, she left me a small inheritance, a final gesture that her family immediately complicated. Her niece refused to release the funds, withholding what was rightfully mine. It felt like a final slap from the grave, a lingering echo of the way that family had always tried to ration my worth. But I soldiered on, and in a strange twist of fate, that same niece eventually looked out for me as the years pressed on, ultimately arranging my funeral and celebration of life… To be continued. BL

On Monday morning, waking at six-thirty gave me time to listen to the birds outside my bedroom window and the latest episode of From the Heart of the City (found here on Substack), featuring a dialogue between host The Very Reverend Kevin George and Carepoint Manager Christine Moss. The broadcast offered the clearest framework yet for my understanding of what is happening in London, Ontario today regarding homelessness. Their conversation grounded provincial policy decisions in the daily realities of the sidewalk, where the municipal By-Name List has surged to 2,294 individuals. In municipal housing strategy, a By-Name List is a real-time roster of people experiencing homelessness, updated to track individuals by name and map their health, medical, and housing needs. Because this metric relies on individuals consenting to register with local frontline agencies, community workers emphasize that the number reflects only those visible to the system, leaving the true scope of the crisis even larger.

Later that day, the conversation continued in a different register at a dinner gathering in a beautiful century home in Blackfriars near the Thames River. The evening was hosted by local artist Kevin Bice and his wife Daphne, a respected former educator whose dedication touched the lives of countless local students. For context, Kevin Bice is a well-known London painter, printmaker, and art educator who has spent decades capturing the region’s landscapes and cityscapes while fostering a vibrant local arts community. Kevin and Daphne are both precise in their methods, and they kindly invited my partner, Gary, and me over for an evening of warm hospitality and Kevin’s legendary risotto. Kevin’s artistic talent and legacy run deep. His father was Clare Bice, the celebrated Canadian painter, author, and long-time curator of the London Public Library and Art Museum. I had been a devoted fan of Clare’s work long before I ever met Daphne and Kevin at Blackfriars restaurant, where they were loyal supporters and customers for many years and gave the restaurant a stunning print of the Blackfriars Bridge that now hangs in my house. The Bices are deeply involved in preserving the heritage of the Blackfriars area, and the Blackfriars Bridge is one of Kevin’s muses.

We began the evening with an antipasto board of prosciutto, artichokes, and cheese, paired with flutes of dry prosecco, an opening salvo that reliably smoothed the path for good conversation. The artichokes were a quiet nod to my Substack, Heart of an Artichoke. Our hosts, Kevin and Daphne, are perennial pilgrims to Italy, possessed of an endless cache of interesting Venetian lore; Kevin’s artistic eye has even committed the vivid facades of Venice and Burano to canvas. As they recounted tales of Burano and their preferred Michelin-starred trattoria, Al Gatto Nero, they served an intermezzo inspired by the establishment: a sgroppino. This classic Venetian specialty, traditionally a frothy, refreshing blend of lemon sorbet, vodka, and a splash of prosecco, was given a midsummer twist by the Bices, who substituted lime for a sharp, seasonal finish.

The dialogue drifted naturally toward the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This shared Italophilia struck an intimate chord; Gary and I have haunted Venice independently on numerous occasions, an obsession that once led me to operate a Venetian and Slow Food-inspired restaurant called Murano for a decade, and which still compels me to collect vintage Murano glass.

Kevin’s risotto was an absolute triumph, served all’onda, with a pristine, toothsome bite that ranks among the finest I have encountered. I watched him minister to the pot with the patient, steady devotion of a monk, coaxing the grains to life with ladles of steaming vegetable stock, seasonal yellow zucchini, buffalo mozzarella, and butter. While he summoned the rice into being, Daphne and I tended to the canestrelli, those tiny scallops for which the Venetians maintain a private lexicon. We seared them to quick perfection in a stunning Italian copper pan, using a slip of oil and butter before flaming them with a splash of triple sec. Later, following the salad, Daphne produced a luscious carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, pulled from the pages of a vintage London Art Gallery cookbook. Gary, acting the resident connoisseur, predictably demanded a second slice.

Yet, even amidst the warmth of Italian travel stories, exceptional cooking, and great company, the realities of downtown London, Ontario, remained close at hand. Joining us as fellow guests were Bishop Terry Dance and his wife Diane, an accomplished former teacher who spent her career shaping minds and mentoring generations within the community. Terry and Diane had just returned from a trip to Croatia, and they shared several amusing stories from their travels, including the Croatians’ references to the Venetians. Over the antipasto, Terry, Diane, and I fell into an animated conversation about the current London restaurant scene. The bishop has been a longtime supporter of Blackfriars restaurant, and our shared love for excellent local dining led me to promise that I would pull together and send over some restaurant recommendations for them to explore. While we were talking inside, Gary and Daphne were outside with their neighbour, picking bags full of fresh pears for us to take home. The skin colour of the pears is subtly transitioning from a dark, matte leaf-green to red. We will store them in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks; this cooling period triggers uniform ripening. Then we will poach half of them in red wine. This generous act reminded me of a few years back when Daphane gave me several bushels of quince, which I preserved and served as a beautiful seasonal dish in the restaurant. The evening ended with a smooth pour of grappa, rounding out an atmosphere of profound comfort. Now to find some additional pear recipes.

On the way home from Bice’s house, we encountered rabbits and raccoons moving quietly through the neighbourhood shadows. Earlier in the day in Blackfriars, deer had also been spotted a few blocks from where we live. Speaking with Terry earlier in the evening about his time as the rector of St Paul’s Cathedral in the early 2000s, he noted that homelessness and addiction were already emerging as structural challenges in the core of the city more than twenty years ago. This history shows that the modern emergency is not sudden, but a slow-burning crisis left unaddressed for more than two decades.

Reflecting on the timeline, it is not lost on me that I sit in a warm home and describe this dinner against the bleak background of the homelessness emergency right outside the door. While the urban wildlife we witnessed on our journey exists in harmony with the neighbourhood, human beings are left unsheltered on these same streets. The stark contrast between a multi-course meal and individuals struggling to survive on downtown sidewalks is a jarring reminder of societal inequality. By examining these frontline and historical perspectives alongside Ontario’s wider systemic shortcomings, the complex dynamic between inadequate provincial safety nets and the localized burden of care becomes clear. Homelessness is not an isolated individual failure, but rather the visible symptom of a deeply broken housing and social support framework.

A central element of the dialogue between Reverend Kevin and Moss focuses on public safety in this downtown core. They challenge the political and commercial narrative that views safety strictly through policing, private security, or property protection. Instead, they define safety as a shared human necessity that cannot be achieved through exclusion or banishment. Reverend Kevin addresses the tension felt by business owners and residents who report feeling unsafe because of visible poverty, open substance use, and encampments. He argues that the mainstream response misidentifies the true threat. To Reverend Kevin, the primary danger downtown is the vulnerability of the unhoused population itself, left exposed to a toxic drug supply, severe winter weather, and street-level violence. He asserts that true safety is an inclusive right and that a community cannot call itself safe when its solutions push vulnerable people out of sight to protect economic interests.

Moss brings frontline operational context to this philosophy, explaining how punitive measures meant to clean up downtown actually worsen public safety for everyone. She points out that increased security enforcement in municipal parking lots and downtown streets does not resolve the crisis; it merely disperses high acuity individuals into surrounding neighbourhoods and church properties. Moss highlights that when city council debates policies like good neighbour clauses, which penalize social service agencies based on neighbourhood complaints or perimeter visibility, they threaten the infrastructure keeping the streets stable. Together, Reverend Kevin and Moss advocate for a collaborative approach. They argue that safety for merchants, visitors, and the unhoused population depends on expanding low-barrier stabilization hubs, permanent supportive housing, and lifesaving healthcare infrastructure like the York Street Carepoint consumption and treatment service site, rather than hiring more security guards or clearing sidewalks.

Through his public platform, Reverend Kevin uses conversations with leaders like Moss to expose the volatile, exhausting nature of modern crisis intervention. A primary example analyzed on the show is London’s House of Hope, a twenty-four-hour supportive housing facility built to stabilize forty-five high-acuity residents dealing with complex medical and psychological trauma. While the facility proved that comprehensive, wraparound care works, it faced immediate closure when its provincial funding dried up. While a one-point-three-million-dollar emergency lifeline from private donors via the London Community Foundation temporarily saved the site, Reverend Kevin emphasizes the failure of forcing vital healthcare infrastructure to rely on short-term charitable donations rather than permanent, systemic provincial backing.

Furthermore, these dialogues show that homelessness cannot be separated from a collapsing public health system. Moss utilized her time on the podcast to share insights regarding an increasingly toxic illicit drug supply in downtown London, which triggers high rates of street overdoses. Reverend Kevin argues that treating this purely as a housing supply problem ignores the deep psychological trauma that frontline workers must manage on the sidewalk. Because the province lacks low-barrier institutional mental health and addiction care, outreach staff are forced to act as emergency trauma responders, dealing with acute psychiatric and medical crises directly on the pavement.

This frontline friction in the mid-sized city of London offers a clear look at how a broader provincial breakdown impacts local municipalities. According to the City of London’s Housing Stability Action Plan, local housing infrastructure is under immense strain. The average market rent for a one-bedroom unit reached $1,529, while the vacancy rate for low-income residents plummeted to an impossible 1.2 percent. Over seven thousand Londoners remain stuck on municipal supportive housing waitlists, completely stalled by a lack of available units. The human cost of this crisis in London is staggering, as the city recorded one hundred and seventy-four preventable deaths among its unhoused population over a recent two-year period. Local service data reveals that approximately six hundred individuals are considered high acuity, suffering from overlapping, severe medical and psychological trauma that emergency shelter beds alone cannot address.

At the provincial level, homelessness is driven by a profound mismatch between the supply of affordable housing and the growing population that needs it. Data from the Association of Municipalities of Ontario indicates that nearly eighty-five thousand Ontarians are unhoused, marking a severe fifty percent spike since 2021. Decades of underinvestment in deeply affordable community housing have left over three hundred thousand households stranded on municipal waitlists, where average wait times routinely stretch past five years. Consequently, low-income individuals are forced into an unforgiving private rental market characterized by historic low vacancy rates and soaring costs.

A failure in provincial safety nets compounds this housing deficit. Financial benefits provided by Ontario Works and the Ontario Disability Support Program have remained largely stagnant, failing to keep pace with inflation or skyrocketing rent. Unable to afford basic shelter, thousands fall through the cracks. Crucially, Ontario remains the only province in Canada where the fiscal and administrative responsibility for social housing is downloaded onto municipal governments. Local property tax bases are forced to fund emergency services, sheltering networks, and encampment management, which is an unsustainable burden that has prompted municipal groups to call for a massive eleven billion dollar provincial housing investment. Furthermore, severe gaps in community-based mental health and addiction treatments mean that vulnerable individuals frequently cycle through emergency rooms, shelters, and the correctional system without receiving stable, supportive care. This lack of provincial intervention led to the proliferation of nearly two thousand public encampments province-wide, changing the visible landscape of Ontario’s communities.

In response to the emergency, London has become a pioneer in localized crisis intervention through its Whole-of-Community System Response. Rather than relying on traditional, high-barrier shelters, the city collaborated with frontline organizations to establish twenty-four-hour low-barrier hubs, such as Atlohsa Family Healing Services Wiigiwaaminaan Lodge and the Youth Opportunities Unlimited Community Youth Hub. These purpose-built hubs provide immediate basic needs alongside integrated access to primary healthcare, caseworkers, and transitional housing beds. Early evaluations indicate that highly supportive housing works. Residents in dedicated spaces like the House of Hope have achieved long-term stability and significantly reduced their reliance on emergency hospital services. Remarkably, despite a growing unhoused population, London’s targeted interventions helped secure a twenty percent reduction in preventable street deaths over two years. However, local agencies warn of severe frontline worker burnout and emphasize that these municipal strategies are merely temporary life support measures. Without long-term provincial funding to build permanent, supportive community housing, local efforts will remain stretched beyond their limits.

The homelessness crisis in Ontario is a structural failure requiring a structural solution. The macro-level issues, including stagnant income supports, a vast affordable housing deficit, and downloaded municipal burdens, manifest directly in communities like London, resulting in crowded shelter systems, public encampments, and preventable loss of life. While London’s innovative community-led responses prove that integrated, highly supportive care can save lives, municipalities cannot solve a systemic provincial crisis on their own. Resolving homelessness in Ontario ultimately depends on senior levels of government matching the resilience of local communities with permanent funding, comprehensive mental health support, and a commitment to housing as a fundamental human right.

The urgency of this commitment becomes even more critical when looking at the wider economic threats on the horizon. The delicate local safety nets managed by Canadian municipalities face severe pressure following Trump’s recent announcement of sweeping 50% tariffs on billions of dollars worth of Canadian exports. These newly targeted duties under Section 338 of the Tariff Act represent a dramatic escalation, specifically built as retaliatory measures against Canada’s domestic trade rules. Washington officials explicitly cited long-running disputes over Canadian restrictions on American alcoholic beverages, alongside Canada’s protectionist dairy supply management system, as key drivers behind the trade penalty. With import taxes now set to hit cross-border sales of everything from Canadian wine and whisky to cheese and milk products, economists warn of immediate ripples across local agriculture and manufacturing sectors. If these trade barriers go into effect next month, the resulting price shocks risk introducing a precarious wave of economic anxiety, threatening jobs and heightening housing stability pressures across the province. With the cross-border climate growing increasingly volatile, the need to build robust, permanent community infrastructure within our borders is no longer just a social obligation, but a matter of local economic survival. BL

The names we are given at birth are so often inadequate for the lives we are actually meant to inhabit. We spend our years quietly editing ourselves, casting off old skins in a bid to align our external worlds with the hidden truths and talents inside. Sometimes this revision happens across decades of careful concealment; sometimes it takes root over a three-hour lunch in Old East Village, over a plate of chicken parmigiana and a massive panzerotti. I am a chef/restaurateur by trade, which means I understand the meticulous, deliberate structure required to create balance, but I am also a writer, which means I am constantly at the mercy of unexpected currents that threaten to rewrite my structural layout entirely. Since entering semi-retirement, I have felt completely compelled to journal, finding a creative space and a rhythm that I was simply unable to cultivate well while stewarding the daily, exhausting demands of the restaurant. Over a decade ago, I took the step of adding Parker, my family’s maternal name, to my own moniker, establishing a distinct line to separate my essay writing from my professional culinary life and food writing. When I first did it decades back, a few armchair critics told me the change was pretentious, but it was a necessary act of differentiation, especially since there are several other writers with a similar name, a reality I have noted in my Substack before.

I woke up yesterday morning with a singular, fierce determination that today would be my ultimate, uninterrupted reading day. My night table is a carefully curated moment of anticipation. Stacked there is Rachel Aviv’s essay collection, You Won’t Get Free of It, its title a haunting theft from an Alice Munro story. Beside it sits Ann Patchett’s novel, Whistler, and Suddenly Light by Nina Dunic, a handpicked recommendation from Jenny Berkel, the owner of Little Wren Books. I also have four back issues of The New Yorker to read and return to Penn Kemp, and an anthology of verse and short prose by the London Writers Society. My literary trajectory felt entirely secure, buoyed by the lingering creative hum of Saturday, when Gary, Penn and I held an indoor picnic and Penn and I mapped out the preliminary plans for a collaborative writing project.

Jenny Berkel, the owner of Little Wren Books

The books on my table are artifacts of a deeper lineage. It was only a few days ago, returning from that long lunch at Tony’s Famous Italian on Dundas Street, that I detoured into Woodfield to visit my parents. Tony’s is a neighbourhood staple entirely unchanged by time, offering old-school comfort through its classic booths and vintage charm, though stepping inside that day felt like entering a different era of austerity. Gone are the familiar red tablecloths and the classic logo imprinted placemats. The Chianti bottles adorning the brick walls remain. There was a steady, rhythmic stream of traffic flowing through the dimly lit dining room, but it took a long while for my eyes to fully adjust from the blinding summer sun outside and the heavy, sepia-toned smoke drifting from the distant wildfires.

My lunch companion was Julian, a former librarian, music teacher, Assistant Professor, and writing counsellor at Western University, who has been a formidable, comforting presence for decades. Revered by generations of students, he is celebrated for his approachable style, his impeccably structured essay guidelines, and his rare clarity when unpacking complex rhetorical concepts.

He is a meticulous soul who loves nothing more than to sniff out editing mistakes. Most writers deeply appreciate a second set of eyes, and Julian is always right on top of things. He recently corrected me after I mixed up St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s cathedrals, later texting: “I wouldn’t worry about it too much… I don’t think it’s a mortal sin or anything.”

Though long interludes pass between our visits, he remains a champion of my life’s dual landscapes. He offers unstinting validation for both my culinary career and my journey with the pen. However, as a true purist, he recently questioned my use of sun-dried tomatoes in my Chicken Marbella. Julian’s skepticism is historically accurate. The famous dish, originally popularized by the Silver Palate Cookbook in 1981, relies on a specific balance of briny, sweet, and savoury elements. Sun-dried tomatoes are a modern twist.

We shared a Caesar salad that afternoon, intentionally devoid of bacon and tossed with commercial croutons, while the lingering anxiety of the latest widespread lettuce scare drifted quietly through my mind. Over our meal, our conversation drifted from the childhood pages of Enid Blyton into the heavier, unpredictable currents of memory. Three years ago, Julian had told me that his life was coming to an end, a stark reality of bone cancer that now lends a quiet, profound weight to his every word. He has outlived his expected expiration date and then some, but he soldiers forward. We spoke of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where he was once a parishioner, visualizing the brilliant light streaming through its historic Tiffany windows. Then, he spoke of a more personal architecture: how, when his mother died, he changed his name from Chris to Julian.

He is a natural-born raconteur, a man who still amuses me with a brilliant, unexpected Sandy Dennis impression, recalling an afternoon I spent with the actress and her assistant some thirty years ago, channelling her frantic, breathless intensity from the film Another Woman. “I’m not being theatrical! I don’t know what you’re talking about. We didn’t just drift apart, Mary! I withdrew.” With a sharp flourish, he would lean in to deliver her scathing accusation: “Your conversations were full of subtle flirtations. Full of meaningful little looks and little gambits designed to seduce!” He would capture that exact, trembling defiance, then pivot seamlessly to describe his youth in France, working as a live-in cook and male au pair for a family called the Fourquaux. He would recall his exceptionally tenuous command of the language, with only Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child’s classic cookbook for survival, and the endless, hilarious travails of trying to purchase fish that was deemed good enough for the family cat but strictly forbidden for human consumption. I could listen to those stories of his French tribulations forever.

Speaking of France, I am a great fan of the baker and cookbook author David Lebovitz, and I had been thinking about a recent video of his where he visits G. Detou, a famous, historic chocolate and food shop in Paris. He steps out of his own kitchen to examine the craft of other masters, driven by the same restless curiosity that compels any maker. Leaving that heartbreaking lunch with Julian, I stopped at Little Wren Books to buy four titles, driven by the acute reminder that we must support our independent booksellers before their spaces vanish entirely.

Yet, despite the beauty of the stack waiting at home, my momentum shifted early this morning. The weather had finally turned, breaking from the stifling heat and heavy humidity of earlier in the week, leaving the afternoon air clear and inviting. Perhaps that was why Margaret Atwood’s On Writers and Writing caught my eye from the pile. I am currently working on a piece about Atwood, and I found myself drifting through twenty pages of her text.

My project on Atwood explores the intersecting yet divergent paths of two foundational pillars of contemporary Canadian poetry: Margaret Atwood and Penn Kemp. While both authors utilize feminist reclamations of mythology and ground their work deeply within the Canadian landscape, their stylistic and philosophical differences are profoundly shaped by their paternal heritages. Atwood’s literary lens reflects the clinical, scientific detachment of her entomologist father, resulting in a preoccupation with existential dread and ecological collapse, and a view of nature as a high-stakes arena of survival. Conversely, Penn’s poetic sensibility mirrors the fluid, metamorphic world of her abstract-painting father, a pioneering regionalist force who mentored iconic visual artists such as Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers. This artistic legacy leads to an auditory, community-driven practice that views nature as a cyclical sanctuary. By synthesizing their respective recent memoirs, Book of Lives and Colour Fielding, my essay demonstrates how reading Atwood and Penn in tandem provides a comprehensive dialectic of the Canadian poetic psyche, balancing sharp, analytical critique with rhythmic, communal healing.

Mulling over these dual landscapes of critique and healing, Atwood’s thoughts on the writer’s craft acted as a strange, migratory catalyst. Rather than anchoring me to my writing room, a space I have recently resolved to no longer refer to as my office, the words nudged me outside. I had a small obligation to fulfill, a friend’s cat to feed, a task that came with its own minor trials, but the pull of the weather was too strong to ignore. Drawn by the collective joy drifting from the core of the city, I detoured into the Pride celebrations at Victoria Park.

The park was alive with infectious energy. I found a spot under an umbrella directly in front of the bandshell before the parade arrived, letting the sharp beats of the DJ wash over me. In a beautiful irony, my reading day transformed into a writing day. I sat there listening to the music, scribbling into my notebook, entirely immersed in the festival’s atmosphere.

It was during this vibrant detour that I met the author Monica Miatello, who was there to speak about her newly released memoir, Erasing the Five O’Clock Shadow. Intrigued by our brief conversation, I purchased a copy right then and there. I opened to the first page and was instantly, completely enamoured by her narrative voice. Her opening chapter pulled me into a world of striking contrasts: a Roman Catholic Italian upbringing, varsity hockey, and an internal knowledge from the age of five that she was living a life mismatched with her true self. Reading about her navigating gender dysphoria in the isolation of the 1970s, and later running a small-town Ontario pharmacy as a parent before transitioning in the 1990s, was utterly mesmerizing.

The parallel between Julian’s renaming and Monica’s mid-life transition struck me with immense clarity. Both had looked at the structured identities handed down to them by circumstance, family, and history, and both had chosen the radical, terrifying act of revision. They understood that to live authentically, one must occasionally rewrite the very title of their life. It felt ironically fitting for Pride. More than that, it felt deeply essential to my own creative headspaces.

I am currently expanding a narrative essay, a project exploring the parallel traumas of surveillance, institutional exile, and repressed identity through a reunion between two estranged brothers in Southwestern Ontario. Set against a vibrant Stratford diner backdrop, my story contrasts Silas, a deeply repressed minister trapped in a hyper-controlling, anti-adornment religious sect, with his brother Gideon, who is traumatized by a recent exile. Meanwhile, a sudden framing shift reveals Gideon’s acute paranoia following a forced retirement from a thirty-five-year career, a ruinous downfall engineered by a clinical, bureaucratic whisper network.

To read Monica’s real-world triumph over fundamentalism, institutional surveillance, and the mandatory cruelty that weaponizes suspicion was profound. It was a direct mirror to the thematic structures I am writing about, a reminder of the high stakes involved when an institution or a culture tries to police who we are allowed to be.

Eventually, I left the park and began my trek home. I found myself following a gaggle of geese down Albert Street, their slow, deliberate march guiding me onward until I reached the Blackfriars Bridge. I wandered across with a completely rewritten day. The water flowed beneath me, reflecting an afternoon that had moved in entirely unpredictable currents. The meticulously planned reading stack waiting for me had temporarily ceased to exist, replaced by a triumph of authenticity that directly fed my own manuscript.

I stepped back across the threshold of my newly changed writing room, knowing I had volunteered to make dinner. There is a familiar, comforting rhythm waiting for me in the kitchen now: preparing an artichoke polenta with Spanish olives, thick pork chops paired with sweet Ontario peaches, and a rich cauliflower and goat cheese mash. The chef in me will look for structure, but the writer in me knows that recipes are only guidelines, and that the best days, like the best stories, are the ones that refuse to follow the strict rules. For now, with the weight of Monica’s book in my hands and a fresh creative clarity in my mind, everything else could wait. BL

This essay addresses the frequently asked question of why Blackfriars Bistro decided to cease operations after thirty years of culinary service in London, Ontario, framing the end of its brick-and-mortar operations not as a defeat, but as a deliberate act of preservation and a transition into an agile, digital-and-event-driven brand. The narrative contrasts a successful, community-driven final chapter with the clinical realities of divesting physical assets, dismantling careers' worth of accumulation, and facing severe external challenges. These challenges included a post-COVID economic landscape, a landlord's refusal to maintain crumbling historic infrastructure, and volatile disruptions from neighboring tenants. Despite these systemic headwinds facing independent dining, the essay honours the restaurant's deep roots in Southwestern Ontario’s culinary identity, its commitment to a Slow Food philosophy, and the multi-generational legacy of its stewards and patrons. Ultimately, I outline a transition away from the day-to-day grind of a fixed footprint toward a versatile legacy rooted in culinary archives, ongoing catering, pop-ups, and a forthcoming memoir and cookbook.

The decision to close our doors after thirty years was not an admission of defeat; rather, it was a deliberate act of preservation designed to transition Blackfriars from a fixed footprint into a dynamic, agile culinary force. Every creative venture has a natural lifecycle, and recognizing the right moment to conclude a physical chapter after three decades of service was a mark of stewardship. By choosing to step back then, we protected the integrity of everything Blackfriars had come to represent, ensuring that its mission remained a standard of quality rather than a diluted version of its former self. While our daily operations have ended, the intellectual property and creative pulse of Blackfriars will continue to beat through our digital archives, curated pop-ups, local farmers’ markets, catering, and eventually a cookbook.

After thirty years of Blackfriars, the end itself was not a fade-out but an exhausting crescendo, a final Saturday night service that refused to end. We finished far more successfully than anyone could have predicted, fueled by a community determined to savour every last drop of an atmosphere we had spent the last six years distilling and stewarding. Beneath the farewell lay the clinical work of divestment. We spent those last two weeks dismantling several careers’ worth of accumulation, specifically the mosaic tables that held up thirty years of hospitality and confidences. Alongside them, the vast array of Mac Caloren pottery and artwork, pieces that defined our visual language, found new homes. Most were claimed by the stalwarts: the regulars who supported us through the lean stretches of COVID and the last six years of rebirth. For them, a tangible piece of our aesthetic was a fair trade for a generation of loyalty, both before and during our stewardship.

Blackfriars Emporio was born of a Slow Food-inspired, farm-to-table ethos, a dream realized as something truly innovative and unique for London. In its final years, Blackfriars evolved into something far greater than a traditional bistro; it became a masterclass in regional sustainability and a pillar of Southwestern Ontario’s culinary identity. This era was defined by a shift toward stewardship, in which the restaurant served as a hub of gastronomic wisdom and a standard-bearer of a slow-food philosophy. Through the introduction of the Blackfriars Emporio, Forest City Culinary Experiences, and our Ark of Taste explorations, we moved beyond the dining room to celebrate the unique terroir of our land, from the discovery of rare indigenous pawpaws to the daily rhythm of farm-to-table staples. It was more than a storefront; it was a curated world of sensory detail, with shelves stocked with hard-to-find provisions, artisanal finds, and the lingering scent of quality gourmet to-go meals that signalled a new kind of sophisticated retail-and-hospitality. Our patrons weren’t just customers; they were friends. I knew I would miss those daily interactions.

We did not slink away. We fought a post-COVID landscape and a landlord’s refusal to maintain the crumbling infrastructure of our historic home. Since our co-chef, Jacqui, left the kitchen in January, I cooked every meal that crossed the pass. It was a solitary marathon, but there was a deep satisfaction in knowing the final chapters were written by my hands, just as the first ones were with Barbara Bandeen Toomer, thirty years ago, with the steadfast support of Gary, Liliana, and Kirk. We pulled out all the stops until our final service.

The final physical task was striking the patio. It remained a point of quiet grief that we were unable to use it during our last year, sidelined by the toxic and volatile behaviour of the upstairs tenants. It did not help our business that on several occasions, the police arrived in tactical gear to visit those tenants. For over a year, they flew a Confederate flag directly above the entrance to our restaurant, a deeply distressing situation we had to operate under, and one that, by bizarre coincidence, still hangs in the window over the front door today, long after we have gone. The wider community seemed to offer only notoriety and outrage over the flag after our departure, yet they had previously been forced to intervene directly in the tenants’ garbage problem, which had begun attracting vermin to the back of the building. Yet, in that immense struggle, we found grace in our Blackfriars neighbours and our staff, Jamie and Yamuna, who offered the sustenance and support that the building and its landlord could not.

Then there were the ghosts. People who hadn’t been seen in years reappeared with a proprietary disappointment, acting as if they held a right of first refusal over the restaurant’s carcass. It was a masterclass in entitlement from those who were nowhere to be found during the fight.

Eventually, the final appliances were hauled out. Our loyal crew moved through the rooms one last time, ensuring the building was clean, even as it failed. Our staff all successfully transitioned to new roles elsewhere, and everything else, every remaining plate and tool, was donated to good causes. There was a deep satisfaction in knowing that our Blackfriars family landed on their feet, and the remnants of our work would continue to be of use. To our patrons: thank you for your support and the tremendous outpouring of love and generosity that carried us through those final years and months.

We waited in the limbo of the final hours, waiting for the “spoken for” to finally become the “gone.” Emanuela had returned to Italy. There was a sharp irony in standing in an emptying room, waiting for people who had no concept of the clock ticking.

The building’s subsequent reality only underscored the fight we had endured. For nearly three months, a For Rent sign has hung uselessly in the window while prospective tenants fell away, discouraged by the staggering financial mountain required to bring the crumbling infrastructure back to life. It is hard to know if an independent restaurant like Blackfriars can even exist in the current economic climate, where independent dining faces such unprecedented headwinds. The structural reality of hospitality has shifted, defined now by a crushing financial squeeze, the immense cost of sourcing with true local integrity, and the weight of maintaining heritage infrastructure that landlords refuse to support.

Yet, the outside world still remembered our milestone. Today, we received an official citation from our Member of Parliament for London Centre, congratulating all the stewards of Blackfriars on the occasion of our 30th anniversary in February, and wishing us continued growth and success in our ongoing catering business. It was a bittersweet honour, and one that, in truth, belonged in great part to Betty Heydon. She was the one who had passionately operated the business for over two decades, laying the very bricks of the legacy Ottawa was now acknowledging.

I announced my retirement from Blackfriars, but in reality, it was only a retirement from the exhausting day-to-day grind of stewarding a brick-and-mortar restaurant. In this new phase, I remain deeply committed to the causes that have long sustained me, while actively making room for new projects. This evolution is the blueprint for how our core philosophy survives. We are trading a fixed footprint for a versatile legacy, no longer defined by a single address, but by the quality of our craft and the strength of our connections and communications.

The work stored in our archives is not static; it is a repository of wisdom that remains as relevant today as the day it was created. Our recipes were never mere instructions; they were records of a season. By highlighting the seasonality of our ingredients and our deep roots in the community, these archives continued to advocate for a more thoughtful way of eating. They served as a guide for those who still valued the patience required to wait for the first spring harvest or the deep, roasted comfort of winter roots.

We looked back at our archives to stay grounded and honour the local producers and customers who built this story alongside us. After a rest, we will move on to farmers’ markets and pop-ups to ensure that the Blackfriars spirit stayed alive, active, and delicious. We look back not out of nostalgia, but to ensure that the wisdom we had gathered over time continues to fuel the inspiration for whatever comes next.

For fifty years, I had been the proud steward of many culinary milestones. As the last piece of equipment was carried out, we were finally allowed to claim our own. Blackfriars will eventually continue in a new form, but at the time, the restaurant is a shell. That part of my career, however, finished exactly as it should have: exhausted, proud, and completely grateful to those who have supported our vision.

For now, I have returned to writing a culinary memoir. In the meantime, you can read my regular column in Lifestyle Magazine or follow my latest essays and short stories on my Substack page bryanparkerlaveryvery.substack.com

Roughly one kilometer northwest of where the Regional HIV/AIDS Connection scrambles to maintain its basic needle exchange program, providing supplies but legally barred from allowing supervised consumption, stands St. Paul’s Cathedral. Its rector, the Very Reverend Dr. Kevin George, has become a prominent voice detailing a profound civic abandonment. For St. Paul’s, a provincial funding pivot has transformed the church steps into an immediate frontline. The cathedral operates Paul’s Place, a social program offering community meals and radical hospitality, which has recently been forced to serve as an emergency triage centre. During extreme winter weather, George opened the historic cathedral doors overnight, welcoming unhoused Londoners to sleep in the pews because the formal shelter system was entirely full. George rejects the sanitized language of provincial policy, pointing out the hypocrisy of a culture that calls wildlife rescue for an injured animal but expects citizens to step over a human being experiencing a medical emergency on a downtown sidewalk. He treats a reality bureaucrats ignore: you cannot legislate away suffering without forcing someone else to clean up the pieces.

On London’s downtown sidewalks, the crisis is no longer a policy debate; it is a daily obstacle. Pedestrians, store owners, and workers find themselves forced to navigate around unhoused citizens asleep or in distress on the pavement. This friction captures the breakdown of the city’s public core, a visible reality where economic anxiety and human abandonment collide head-on. On June 13, 2026, the structural safety net beneath these sidewalks vanished. When the midnight deadline passed, Carepoint on York Street permanently stopped monitoring drug use, the casualty of an Ontario mandate terminating funding for safe consumption rooms. The clinical sanctuary that managed over 15,000 visits, reversed 218 overdoses, and kept injection-related HIV transmissions to zero in 2025 is gone. Defunding Carepoint did not eliminate consumption; it re-allocated it directly to storefront alcoves, alleys, public transit, and public restrooms, turning ordinary citizens into unwitting first responders.

This pavement crisis catches City Hall in a profound institutional bind. Just days after Carepoint’s closure notice, London City Council endorsed a forty-eight-million-dollar Downtown Master Plan. The blueprint aims to transform a ravaged commercial core into a residential neighbourhood, boasting a new River District along the Thames. To protect this investment, the plan prioritizes “clean and activated realms,” relying on municipal law enforcement and clean-up crews to physically push the crisis away from retail doorsteps.

For core property and business owners, this policy shift represents a deeply conflicted milestone. Many merchants feel caught in an impossible vice between human empathy and economic survival. Business owners in the core have spent years watching vacant storefronts multiply while dealing with property damage, vandalism, and the heavy emotional toll of witnessing overdoses outside their display windows. For some operating near the core, the provincial decision brings a sense of relief and hope that removing a localized crisis hub will finally allow main streets to breathe, attract foot traffic, and reverse years of economic stagnation. Yet, even among the most fatigued merchants, there is a pervasive skepticism. Business association leaders warn that simply closing a facility without immediate, local treatment capacity in place will trigger a rapid deterioration in conditions, scattering the emergency across an even wider perimeter of commercial doorways.

The result is a municipality bracing for impact, with one hand constructing an urban oasis while the other prepares for an emergency. Local councillors warn the closure will trigger an unbudgeted surge in paramedic deployments, emergency room overcrowding, and police costs as consumption spills further into the public square. Even the London Public Library Board fears that its Central Library branch downtown will, by default, become an ad hoc, unmonitored injection site.

Paul’s Place is left to anchor a fractured core, attempting to uphold dignity with hot meals while the medical infrastructure required to keep those same people alive is systematically dismantled. What remains is a healthcare system forced to absorb the shock of political decisions. The burden removed from York Street will simply transfer to municipal ambulances, church pews, and the buckling triage rooms of London’s hospitals. Paramedics and volunteers alike will play a grim game of catch-up, reversing overdoses in alleys that were once managed calmly indoors.

There is a cold irony in the government’s insistence on abstinence as the sole path forward. It ignores three decades of clinical consensus, treating harm reduction and recovery as warring factions rather than points on the same continuum. As London chases a polished downtown dream while cutting the safety net beneath its most vulnerable, the city stands as a costly experiment in political nostalgia. The Province and the City may clear their consciences, but at the expense of their streets. BL

Downtown London, Ontario, is caught in the grip of a relentless and toxic fentanyl crisis. While public health officials battle a volatile street supply marked by frequent overdose spikes and criminal trafficking networks, the local business community faces an economic and existential threat. For long-standing downtown merchants, the epidemic is an everyday reality playing out directly on their doorsteps, forcing prominent cultural institutions and venerable restaurants to the brink of collapse. As a culinary experience facilitator, I actively reroute out-of-town guests away from traditional corridors like Dundas Street and toward the Covent Garden Market and River District to ensure a comfortable visitor experience.

The sheer lethality of this crisis stems from a massive structural shift in the global illicit drug market, wherein synthetic opioids have largely displaced traditional, poppy-derived narcotics on the street. Because fentanyl is entirely synthetic and does not rely on agricultural crop cycles, it is significantly cheaper and easier for criminal organizations to mass-produce in covert laboratories than heroin. It is also roughly fifty times more potent than heroin. Highly addictive and cheap to manufacture, the substance is frequently used by dealers to stretch their profits, leading to rampant cross-contamination.

Today, fentanyl can be present in virtually any substance purchased on the street, from cocaine and methamphetamine to counterfeit prescription pills pressed to mimic Xanax or Percocet. Compounded by what experts call the chocolate chip cookie effect, an uneven blending process that leaves lethal, concentrated clumps of fentanyl in otherwise standard batches, street-level drug use has become unprecedentedly fatal.

No business exemplifies the local fallout of this volatility more clearly than the Jonathon Bancroft-Snell Gallery. Located at 258 Dundas Street, Canada’s largest contemporary ceramic art gallery has been pushed to the edge of permanent closure. As open-air drug use, discarded paraphernalia, and visible homelessness became fixtures of the immediate neighbourhood, local foot traffic evaporated. Long-time patrons and casual shoppers stopped visiting the core, leaving a forty-five-hundred-square-foot cultural landmark surviving almost exclusively on a dedicated network of out-of-town collectors. This desperate reality drove gallery manager Brian Cooke to stage a profound visual protest. By completely covering the gallery’s front windows in brown paper, the business simulated its own bankruptcy to sound a public alarm. The display served as a stark warning to the community that if Londoners abandon the core, boarded-up windows will become the district’s permanent future. Cooke noted that while major hubs like Toronto face similar crises, their citizens still utilize their downtown spaces, a civic habit that London urgently needs to replicate to save its retail base.

This sentiment of widespread suffering is deeply echoed by neighbouring retail and hospitality businesses along the Dundas Street corridor. The crisis has hit the restaurant industry with equal force, eroding the traditional evening economy. Iconic restaurants like Grace have closed, and others, including Massey’s Indian Cuisine, have chosen to abandon the downtown core entirely. Massey’s relocated to the suburban Hyde Park area after decades downtown, citing an increasingly hostile street atmosphere that drove away regular dinner crowds. Restaurant staff are frequently left to deal with the hazards of clearing out individuals sleeping in doorways and cleaning up discarded needles, biohazards, and human waste on storefront steps before opening for lunch service. Furthermore, a major point of contention has erupted over the proliferation of private, for-profit pharmacies dispensing safe-supply medications in the core. Restaurateurs and certain city councillors argue these clinics operate like high-volume variety stores for medication, drawing hundreds of vulnerable individuals into the shopping core daily without providing the robust mental health aftercare or housing infrastructure needed to stabilize the neighbourhood and restore public comfort in outdoor dining. In response, municipal authorities have deployed a multi-layered strategy under London’s updated Downtown Master Plan, including the launch of a specialized Downtown Response Team. Operating under the Coordinated Informed Response program, these specially trained municipal enforcement officers are dedicated to a stretch of Dundas Street to audit storefront security, promote the Trespass Agreement Program, and engage with unhoused Londoners. While merchants praise the team’s compassionate intent, shopkeepers like Bancroft-Snell have raised concerns that their highly visible tactical gear could inadvertently alienate and scare away the vulnerable populations they intend to help.

Simultaneously, the London Police Service has sustained street-level outreach patrols. While the initiative has processed over five thousand calls and executed more than eighteen hundred drug and paraphernalia seizures, with fentanyl being the most frequently seized substance, it has received mixed reviews. Bancroft-Snell pointed out that when broken down mathematically, the number of daily seizures feels remarkably low compared to the constant open drug use visible on his specific block, suggesting a spread-out beat system would be more effective.

Some business owners note that proximity to the police foot patrol’s home office offers a modest bubble of safety, but others emphasize that the core issue remains a structural lack of places for people to go. This critical resource bottleneck is further evidenced by police data. Despite officers making thousands of referrals to local shelters and healthcare settings, only eighteen per cent are accepted, while the vast majority are declined. This disconnect underscores a systemic lack of long-term supportive housing and medical infrastructure.

The crisis has also prompted aggressive provincial escalation. The Ontario government enacted the Safer Municipalities Act, also known as Bill 6, which explicitly bans the public consumption of illegal substances in shared spaces, including unauthorized dwellings such as tents in parks. Bill 6 equips law enforcement with the authority to issue steep fines of up to ten thousand dollars, sentence violators to six months in prison, and execute arrests without a warrant to clear encampments. While designed to restore order to business districts, human rights organizations criticize the law, arguing it criminalizes people with nowhere else to go and pushes vulnerable populations into deeper isolation without addressing the underlying toxic drug supply.

Ultimately, the ongoing struggle in downtown London highlights a fragile intersection. It is a space where a severe humanitarian tragedy directly threatens the economic survival and cultural heritage of the city’s independent merchants, restaurateurs, and tourism operators. BL

We awoke to a sky the colour of a yellow highlighter, a phrase coined by my summer companion and host, Anne, to describe the eerie, chemical glow drifting down from the forest fires in northwestern Ontario this morning. Below this bruised canopy, however, the Mennonite counters were awash with a clean, chemical-free abundance: red, ripe cherries from Niagara, early garlic, soft-ball size, sweet candy onions, and freshly dug fingerling potatoes still dusted with earth. There were sunflower-yellow and forest-green saturated zucchini and giant, stark-white heads of cauliflower (my first of the season) grown without sprays or shortcuts and freshly picked.

Most arresting, though, are the field tomatoes. Unlike their milder, greenhouse-grown counterparts, these had been allowed to ripen on the vine in the peak summer sun, yielding a dense, meaty flesh and a complex, umami-rich undertone. They taste exactly as a tomato is supposed to taste: robust, earthy, and vibrating with a distinct balance of natural sweetness and sharp acidity.

The drive south from this oasis was a study in haze. Whenever I rolled down the windows, the air bit back, stinging my eyes with particulate grief. For two weeks, I had been playing the role of the “low-maintenance” guest at a cottage I have frequented for twenty-five years; a quarter-century of summer rituals now punctuated by smoke. A roadside visit with our Mennonite friends anchored us back to earth, though the conversation stayed in the air, tracking the plume as it travelled down from the Bruce Peninsula. We bought the season’s first ripe peaches and yellow plums, heavy and sour, while nearby crates signalled the arrival of raspberries and black currants, a brief, tart reassurance that the earth was still yielding.

Earlier

I sit at a writing table beneath a wooden-roofed gazebo draped in white linen, in the company of two Margarets, Atwood and Laurence. There is a specific kind of peace in returning to books whose endings are already written, much like the ritualistic way I return to old films at the cottage every summer. To read and watch the familiar over and over again is not merely a pastime; it is an act of seeking solace, a deliberate retreat into structures that remain unchanged while the world outside shifts. This year, my standard shelf has given way to a more intentional pairing. I am rereading Atwood’s recent memoir alongside Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, a deliberate choice as Laurence’s centenary quickly approaches. There is something deeply grounding about spending these hot, heavy weeks tracing Morag Gunn’s path along a fictional Ontario river while navigating my own slow river of memory. When I am not turning their pages, I am working through a tall, accumulating stack of back issues of The New Yorker, letting the world’s distant dispatches pile up beside me in the shade.

Beyond the boundary of our shifting sand dunes, the modern world announces itself in a low, collective hum. I can hear the weekend beachgoers, those big-city interlopers who arrive with the heat to claim their temporary stakes on the shore. This year, the beach is unusually expansive, a wide ribbon of sand that looks vastly different from how it did earlier in the season, when the shoreline was choked and heavy with winter’s leftover driftwood. Guarding the property from this public tide are the shifting sand dunes and a dense perimeter of indigenous cedars. Inward from this native border stand other coniferous trees, each one planted intentionally over the last decade in the twenty-five summers I have witnessed here, serving as a living monument to family and friends who have passed away. They stand as a quiet congregation of the gone, absorbing the summer heat and the noise of the living.

In the cottage gardens beneath these memorial boughs, nature is handled with a deliberate sort of neglect. The beds are purposefully overgrown, a calculated tangle of wildflowers and weeds designed to welcome the wild rather than shut it out. Milkweed, heavy hydrangeas, and stalks of tall grass sway in the breeze, serving as a sanctuary for a buzzing population of pollinators. At night, this untamed landscape is illuminated by the faint, cold glow of solar-powered lights, some of which are multi-coloured replicas of butterflies floating artificially among the weeds. Meanwhile, warm strings of Edison lights trace the wooden slats of the gazebo and weave through the trees at the back of the property, capturing a strange intersection of the natural world and human intervention.

Lately, the weather has been unyielding, bringing thirty-degree days under a blank, cloudless sky. Yet, I find myself refusing the sun except for afternoon swims in the lake. I stay in the shade of the timber and linen, hiding from the light because my skin has begun to bear what an older generation politely referred to as age spots. One has bloomed prominently just below my cheek. It is an elegant euphemism for the slow accumulation of time, and the bill comes due for years of youth spent sun worshipping on these very shores. Looking at its quiet silhouette in the mirror, I find myself wondering about something more clinical and ominous, specifically, whether this small mark on my face is actually the early, silent blooming of skin cancer. Fortunately, it is not.

There is a strange friction in sitting here, safely shaded in a manicured paradise, while my mind dwells elsewhere. On the table before me, my pages are consumed by a different kind of blight, which is the fentanyl and homelessness crises currently ravaging downtown London. It feels indecent, sometimes, to parse such profound human suffering from the cool comfort of a gazebo.

Yet the weight of this research demands a deliberate reprieve, a sensory counterweight that arrives in the ready stream of visits from longtime friends. When the solitary focus becomes too heavy, I take my turn in the kitchen, finding a grounding, tactile rhythm in preparing hors d’oeuvres, chopping crisp Mennonite vegetables, tending to barbecued steaks, and preparing local freshwater fish fetched from Howell’s in Wiarton.

This transition from solitary cerebral work to shared domesticity unfolds upon the very surface where the pages sit. As evening approaches, the white-pebbled writing table easily sheds its research role to assume a different purpose, becoming a host for alfresco meals that seat eight under the wooden roof. Gathered around it, the talk inevitably turns back to the world beyond the dunes. There is always too much discussion of Trump, an inescapable friction of differing world views that matches the sweltering heat. Eventually, the dinner dishes clear away to make room for competitive rounds of Scrabble and competitive hands of Euchre, the cottage game of choice, where the rules are fixed, and the banter is wittier.

Still, the pages wait for me. As the city interlopers play havoc on the other side of the dunes, and the faux-butterflies glow alongside the insects in the weeds, I am left to bridge the distance between these fragmented worlds, the sanctuary of the living, the memory of the deceased, and the human and environmental crises we cannot afford to forget. BL

Introduction

Every essay starts as a chaotic first draft, just a raw impulse until editing brings it into focus. This project began as a deeply personal reflection, sparked by the upcoming centenary of Margaret Laurence in July 2026. But what started as a tribute to Laurence’s prose quickly grew into something much bigger. I initially tried using the diary-like tribute to Mavis Gallant written by Bill Richardson, the beloved former CBC radio host and author, as a warm, intimate framework. That intimacy collapsed, however, under a far more pressing obligation: my compulsion to reckon with Alice Munro.

I have just returned from visiting the Alice Munro Literary Garden and the Alice Munro Library in Wingham, as well as the Clinton Public Library. I spent time photographing the literary garden, the homage to Alice at the entrance of the Wingham library, and the Alice Munro bench dedicated to her Nobel Prize in Literature in Clinton. While inside those libraries, I went through the local newspapers to see what local residents were saying about the controversial municipal plans to relocate her Literary Garden. I also quietly combed the stacks to see exactly how many of her titles were still available on the shelves. Standing in the physical spaces dedicated to her memory, looking at the literal presence or absence of her books, made it impossible to ignore how the painful complications of Munro’s legacy hang heavily over Canadian literature.

This essay looks beyond simple nostalgia to ask how we decide which authors we celebrate and which ones we quiet. Ultimately, examining the Canadian literary canon means confronting a system built by university reading lists, government-funded publishers, and book awards, all working together to manufacture a neat, unified national identity.

As I explored the mid-twentieth-century Canadian fiction backlist, specifically the core body of work written by some of the country’s most celebrated mid-century women, the clear lines of a milestone faded. Instead of a nationwide celebration, Laurence has been quietly kept in print in English Canada with little fanfare, while Munro’s major legacy had been completely shadowed by real-world revelations of complicity and silence. Seeking to understand how we interpret these acts of structural refusal on the page, my curiosity led me backward and outward. I revisited Joan Barfoot’s Abra, marked by its solitary flight into the wilderness, and Marian Engel’s Bear, once at the edge of avant-garde shock. These, alongside Margaret Atwood’s prophetic The Edible Woman, seemed less like historical artifacts and more like survival handbooks. I was drawn to Carol Shields for her unique ability to find the miraculous in ordinary domestic life. Yet even an author like Mavis Gallant complicates any neat, geography-bound definition of a national literature. By choosing Paris over Montreal, Gallant resisted the pastoral, survivalist mythologies that mid-twentieth-century critics used to fence in the domestic canon. Her displacement was a deliberate aesthetic strategy, an early act of structural refusal that proved a writer could map the precise psychological architecture of modern isolation without waving a flag. To read Richardson’s tribute is to witness an engagement with an author who bypassed the national framework entirely, leaving behind a legacy that refuses to be neatly packaged by the very institutions she chose to leave behind.

This literary interrogation took a decisive turn when it collided with a crisis close to home. Recent developments at H.B. Beal Secondary School in London, Ontario, revealed a hyperbureaucratic library purge in which over 10,000 books, including irreplaceable local histories and literary classics, were sent to recycling or offloaded to thrift stores. The casual disposal of our literary history clarified the direct connection between today’s institutional pulping of books and the rigid corporate impulses these mid-century authors originally critiqued. When a nation’s literature shifts from a repository of shared cultural memory into a portfolio of corporate commodities, the metrics of preservation inevitably change. In this hyper-bureaucratic ecosystem, books are no longer treated as vital historical testaments or dangerous, avant-garde provocations, but as inventory. The logic that dictates whether a classic like Laurence’s prose remains visible is the same clinical efficiency that authorizes the pulping of thousands of library books. Under the corporate impulse, cultural erasure does not require a dramatic, ideological bonfire; it requires only a quiet spreadsheet, a recycling bin, and the passive assumption that old words are non-performing assets. This essay results from that exact collision: an investigation into the mechanisms of what we remember, what we commercially repackage, and what we choose to discard.

Backlist Realities: Atwood, Barfoot, Engel, Laurence, Munro, Shields, and the Curation of the Shelf

In the winter of 1964, a twenty-four-year-old Margaret Atwood sat in a Vancouver apartment. She was writing a novel about a woman slowly being eaten alive by her own life. The women’s movement of the sixties hadn’t yet become a massive cultural force. When The Edible Woman was finally published in 1969, it arrived less like a literary debut and was considered “weird” because it discarded the polite, romantic conventions of 1960s women’s fiction in favour of biological horror, surrealism, and psychological breakdown. The novel was scathingly funny and deeply uncomfortable, an example of what we would later label proto-feminist fiction.

Now, well over half a century later, following these historic developments, the book is being served to us once again. McClelland and Stewart and other major imprints have launched a uniform republication of Atwood’s foundational backlist. Seeing The Edible Woman with new cover art in bookstores is not mere nostalgia; it signals an industry-wide trend to excavate select mid-century and late-seventies feminist fiction and present them as modern survival guides.

This corporate logic appears in curated placements: Marian Engel’s Bear, once avant-garde, returns, as does Faber and Faber’s summer reissue of Gaining Ground (originally Abra) by Joan Barfoot.

Like The Edible Woman, Bear and Abra explore the claustrophobic boundaries of female compliance. Whether it’s Marian McAlpin’s body rebelling before her wedding, Engel’s protagonist escaping to the wild, or Barfoot’s heroine retreating to the woods, each stages a wild defection from imposed structures.

Publishers intentionally return these texts to us. Once considered radical, now their revival seems selective. Scanning shelves for other mid-century matriarchs exposes a strange quiet. Margaret Laurence’s centenary passes without major commemoration; her Manawaka series remains in print but receives no grand new editions, left to the quiet dignity of respected classics.

Instead, commercial focus has shifted to reshaping the canon. Leading this change is the Kanata Classics series by McClelland and Stewart, launched to mark the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s tenth anniversary, serving as ongoing literary reconciliation.

For two years, the series has followed its strict mandate: every year, six titles, three Indigenous-authored, three non-Indigenous, invite excluded or miscategorized narratives into dialogue. The books, with culturally resonant covers and new introductions by contemporary figures like Saeed Teebi, Audra Simpson, and Atwood, seek balance and context.

Through this methodical program, older titles are remade. Last year, Engel’s Bear was aligned with Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed. This year, Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute connects with Kim Thúy’s Ru, while Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk finds resonance with Omar El Akkad’s American War.

If this revival of twentieth-century literature is cultural archaeology, it is also defined by erasure. Among new editions of Atwood, Barfoot, and Engel, there is a void where Munro once stood. No new covers for Alice Munro appear.

For decades, Munro was the leading Canadian short story writer—her mastery earned a Nobel Prize and permanent status. Her focus on the violence and constraints of domestic life and women’s survival echoed the qualities that now make The Edible Woman or Abra appear modern.

The silence comes from a devastating rupture. After Munro’s death, her daughter revealed abuse by Munro’s husband and, more disturbing, Munro’s decision to remain with her husband. The revelation not only damaged Munro’s reputation but cast a harsh light over her body of work, long invested in exposing hidden truths.

This has left the publishing apparatus paralyzed. The vanguard of the current revival, the Kanata Classics series, is built on a strict mandate of reconciliation and moral realignment. To place Munro’s work into that delicate dialogue is currently impossible. The industry has discovered that while the public has an immense appetite for the fictional rebellions of Marian McAlpin, Barfoot’s Abra or Engel’s nameless librarian, it has no stomach for a real-world legacy compromised by complicity.

By utilizing these highly curated placements for Atwood and Barfoot at the front of the shelf while allowing Munro to recede and Laurence to simply coast, the literary world is playing out its own complicated drama of consumption, neglect, and disposal. We are learning that a literary resurrection is never just about what we choose to remember. It is also about what we choose to package, and what we decide we can no longer bear to look at.

Yet, if you look closely at the center of the shelf, you will find a legacy that has quietly bypassed the corporate trend machine altogether. The catalogue of Carol Shields, the late, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Stone Diaries, resists the neat cycles of the anniversary reprint. Shields has not been given a uniform graphic makeover, nor has her estate left her to simply coast on nostalgia. Instead, her legacy is being sustained through a patient, continuous process of archival excavation.

The University of Manitoba Press quietly released The Canadian Shields, a collection compiled by scholar Nora Foster Stovel that unearthed more than two dozen completely unpublished short stories and essays from her personal papers. To read these new pieces alongside her permanent backlist is to see a writer who never required a contemporary marketing campaign to remain relevant. Her sharp, micro-focused style, illuminating the grand, sudden miracles buried inside ordinary, quiet domestic lives, holds its shape perfectly.

Instead of a publisher’s seasonal promotional campaign, Shields’s name has been anchored to the future through institutional permanence. The annual presentation of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction has turned her namesake award into the largest purse in the world dedicated to women and non-binary writers. It establishes her name as a living, radical baseline for contemporary literary excellence.

Nowhere is this anxiety over what we can bear to look at more literal than in the school libraries of Ontario. Over the past few school terms, a quiet, hyper-bureaucratized panic has played out across the province under the banner of equity-based book weeding and diversity audits. In regions like Peel and London, Board of Education administrators attempting to clean the shelves of outdated or harmful material ended up accidentally executing wholesale purges. Thousands of books, including celebrated classics and historical literature, were pulled from shelves and sent straight to recycling plants based on arbitrary publication cut-offs. The public backlash became so severe that the provincial government was forced to issue an official freeze, stepping in to pause the culls before any more history could be shredded.

It is a striking, real-world mirror to the very anxieties these mid-century authors spent their careers diagnosing. The administrative desire to quietly recycle old, uncomfortable paperbacks stems from the same corporate impulse that modern publishers use when they put flashy new wrappers on old Atwood stock: a desperate obsession with optimization, curation, and the management of public consumption. We are terrified of the raw, uncurated past, preferring either to dress it up in a vibrant new cover or to grind it down into pulp.

Ultimately, the great literary excavation of our past is revealing a shifting, complicated landscape. We are losing some stories to the dark, letting others fade into background institutional noise, and pulling a select few into the sunlight with a renewed, urgent hunger. We are still sitting at the same tables, still turning the same pages, and still discovering that the voices who first taught us how to look at ourselves have not lost an ounce of their power. We are looking at the cake, staring into the woods, and trying to figure out exactly how much it costs to live a life that is entirely our own. BL

For decades, my grandmother Mabel was a closed chapter in our family home. My father, William, whom everyone called Bill or Lav, never spoke a word about his mother. My childhood questions about her were met with a heavy, unyielding silence, and my adult inquiries with a practiced, seamless evasion. This left Mabel to me as a historical abstraction, a blank face from an untold past.

Fifteen years ago, I began navigating the city directories and microfilms at the Toronto Reference Library, working in the quiet of the stacks to piece together my paternal lineage, map their forgotten addresses, and visit their gravesites. Yet, because of my grandfather’s historical isolation and my father’s total silence, Mabel’s final resting place remained entirely hidden from my research.

The veil only lifted a few years ago when my cousin Sue, my aunt Joan’s daughter, came to visit. She brought along her family photo albums, and for the first time in my life, I looked at a photograph of my paternal grandmother. Seeing her face changed everything for me. It forced me to redouble my efforts to reconstruct the mechanics of a journey that began in the heart of Scotland and ended in Toronto’s West End.

It was only recently that the final piece of the puzzle fell into place, revealing that Mabel was interred at Prospect Cemetery on St. Clair Avenue West, north of Rogers Road, just blocks from where her children were raised. The rest of the family is interred south of Rogers Road.

In a striking convergence of family lines, both the maternal and paternal sides of my family are interred within those same grounds. My mother’s side of the family immigrated mostly from Lancashire, settling first in Montreal before moving to Toronto to establish roots. They arrived in Canada nearly fifty years before my father’s maternal family crossed the Atlantic, establishing deep Canadian roots long before the Monteith sisters stepped off the train. Coincidentally, my maternal grandmother, Annie Isabel Tomkins Parker, was also born in 1909, the very same year Mabel was born an ocean away in Scotland.

The story I unearthed of my paternal side was born of pure grit. Mabel Monteith was born in 1909 at 20 Melville Street, an urban corridor in the centre of Falkirk. Her older sister, Janet, born in 1908, felt the immediate pressures of the local economy at an early age. I remember hearing family accounts recalling that upon turning fifteen, Janet was brought to the town centre and told she must secure employment before nightfall. By the late 1920s, central Scotland faced severe post-war industrial stagnation and a grinding regional economic depression.

In the decade following the Great War, the Canadian government found itself preoccupied by what the press termed the “Servant Problem.” Eager to restock the kitchens of its growing middle class with what Ottawa deemed culturally frictionless labour, the Dominion turned its gaze toward the British Isles. Through the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, the state effectively weaponized the anxieties of post-war Britain, where a stark demographic imbalance left a generation of young women facing meagre economic horizons, by offering heavily subsidized ocean passages. The bureaucracy envisioned an orderly pipeline of solitary, compliant hands. What they received from my family instead was the quiet, calculated architecture of familial ambition.

For three Scottish sisters, the transatlantic shipping lanes were negotiated not as isolated labourers, but through a precise, sequential choreography of chain migration. Their sister Mary Malcolm was the first to arrive from Scotland, stepping into the booming, self-consciously pious landscape of “Toronto the Good” to establish our family’s initial foothold. Once the geography was proved hospitable, Janet followed, anchoring their presence abroad. The final, definitive link was forged on November 10, 1927, when eighteen-year-old Mabel boarded the Anchor-Donaldson liner SS Letitia at the Port of Glasgow.

Mabel’s crossing caught a brief, transitional moment in maritime history. The 13,475-ton twin-screw steam turbine vessel had undergone a substantial refit earlier that year under Captain David Taylor, its passenger quarters reconfigured to accommodate the shifting demographics of a new, industrialized class of travellers. It was also a race against the Canadian calendar; the Letitia steamed down the St. Lawrence River during one of the final seasonal runs before winter ice choked the shipping route, forcing subsequent vessels to divert to maritime ports. Upon disembarking at Quebec, Mabel immediately boarded a westbound train, tracking the rail lines directly to Toronto to rejoin her sisters.

To establish a baseline of financial independence, Mary, Janet, and Mabel initially took employment as domestic maids on Lauder Avenue, a residential stretch running through the Eglinton and Oakwood area. In the late 1920s, the neighbourhood was a microcosm of Toronto’s upwardly mobile anxieties, where households sought to project an air of established gentility. For the sisters, I see this arrangement as a pragmatic compromise. The positions required gruelling, fourteen-hour days of cooking, heavy laundry, and child-minding, yet they provided shelter and an opportunity to accumulate savings. On Lauder Avenue, insulated from the immediate surveillance of the downtown “Welcome Hostels,” the sisters adjusted to Toronto’s rigid social structures, all while quietly eyeing the factories, department stores, and telephone exchanges that promised a more permanent brand of Canadian independence.

Eventually, Janet settled with her husband, William Anderson Ritchie, at 254 McRoberts Avenue, a narrow, deep urban lot located north of St. Clair Avenue West. Born in 1905, William was a native of Dumbarton, a shipbuilding town on the River Clyde. He had traded the industrial landscape of the Clyde for the expanding grid of Toronto, arriving with the practical skills required to navigate the labour market of the Great Depression. The surrounding Earlscourt and Fairbank districts had a high concentration of British and Irish working-class immigrants, earning them the nickname Little Britain. William Ritchie found steady employment within this community, beginning his career as a delivery driver for a local dairy before qualifying as a professional operating engineer in the City of Toronto’s expanding mid-century manufacturing sector.

Mabel established her own household within the same neighbourhood. In the 1930s, she married William Lavery, an Irish immigrant born in Belfast, a common name in Northern Ireland. This union typified the intermingling of Scottish and Irish families in working-class Toronto. The couple managed the economic difficulties of the decade, which included the devastating loss of an infant child in 1938. Mabel and William went on to have three surviving children who spent their early years around McRoberts Avenue: Bob, my aunt Joan, and my father, William.

The family structure faced a sudden, tragic realignment a few years later. In 1941, at just thirty-two years old, Mabel passed away. Following her death, my family’s immediate future fractured in secret. Distanced by grief and the pressures of the era, my grandfather, William Sr., secretly placed Bob, Bill, and Joan into the care of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, hiding the decision from the rest of the family before departing to serve as a merchant marine.

Upon discovering what he had done, William Sr.’s sister-in-law, Janet, whom we knew as Jennie Ritchie, refused to let the children remain in the system. Determined to preserve our family, Auntie Jennie went directly to the agency, retrieved the three young siblings, and brought them home. Because she and her husband William Anderson Ritchie did not have children of their own, they immediately reshaped their lives to accommodate the grieving siblings.

While William Sr. permanently distanced himself from his old life, eventually remarrying and moving across the city to live on Maclean Avenue in the Beaches, Janet and William Anderson Ritchie assumed the full responsibility of raising Mabel’s three young children. They officially moved Bob, Bill, and Joan into 254 McRoberts Avenue to ensure my father and his siblings grew up together under a single roof.

To my father and his siblings, Janet and William acted entirely as parents. By the time I came into the picture, they functioned more like grandparents to me. She was my great-aunt Jennie, but we always just called them Auntie and Uncle because they were the central anchors of our extended family. Auntie was famously, fiercely frugal, a trait likely sharpened by the sudden responsibility of raising three children during wartime. It was a running joke in our family that she still held onto the Victory war bonds she purchased during the 1940s right up until the 1980s.

Yet despite her frugal personal habits, Auntie hosted lavish family meals. She never scrimped when it came to gathering the people she loved, and the big meal of the year was always the grand New Year’s Day soirée, a beautiful nod to her Scottish roots. When I was a child, she poured that same generous spirit into Christmas gift-giving and our summer months. Her family picnics remain legendary to me, stretching out into unforgettable days at High Park, Centre Island, Heart Lake, and Wasaga Beach.

The dynamics shifted when my parents separated. We no longer attended those grand New Year’s Day soirees on McRoberts Avenue, breaking a long-standing family rhythm. Even so, Auntie and Uncle made the effort to keep in touch with us.

In 1992, my world underwent a major transition. My maternal grandmother, Annie Isabel Tomkins Parker, passed away. Shortly after her death, I made the massive decision to sell my restaurant, La Cucina, sell my house, and embark on a trip to England, where I planned to stay for at least a year.

Before leaving the country, I knew I had to say goodbye to Auntie Jennie, who lived in a retirement home somewhere in the western stretches of the city, either Etobicoke or Mississauga. I took the train to Toronto, then the GO train, and finally a local bus to reach her. The entire journey took me roughly 3.5 hours. I cannot quite recall if she was expecting me, but I arrived at Jennie’s retirement home carrying flowers and chocolates. Our visit was warm but brief. After about half an hour, Auntie Jennie excused herself because she did not want to miss her favourite soap opera.

Once I arrived in England, I wrote letters to her to maintain our connection, but over time the distance took its toll, and the correspondence dwindled. Auntie Jennie lived a long, full life, passing away in 2002 at the age of 94. At her funeral, my Aunt Irene scolded me, telling me bluntly that I should have kept in touch better.

Auntie’s lifelong financial discipline served her well over the decades, ensuring she could provide both a good life for her charges and security for herself. She lived comfortably in her final years in a nursing home in suburban Toronto. While William’s sister, Cathy Wells, stayed behind in Scotland, the family network in Toronto remained tightly knit around the McRoberts Avenue home Auntie and Uncle anchored for so long.

Many branches of my maternal family rest right there at Prospect Cemetery beneath prominent tombstones and within dedicated family plots. The contrast in the very same cemetery is quiet and stark. While Mabel rests alongside the infant child she lost in 1938, Bill and Auntie Jennie lie nearby. True to Auntie’s enduring, practical frugality, there are no soaring monuments or grand displays over their resting place. The woman who saved her war bonds and carefully counted pennies, yet freely gave away legendary picnics and lavish New Year’s feasts, chose an understated end.

Small, modest ground markers bear their names, and no prominent upright tombstones rise above the grass to mark their presence. Their names remain uncarved in traditional cemetery granite, yet their legacy lives on in the family they bound together. Located within walking distance of the old neighbourhood, the green expanses of Prospect Cemetery serve as the final, singular anchor where both sides of my heritage, the Lancashire pioneers and the mid-century Scottish arrivals, rest together in Canadian soil.

The express rattled across the bridge spanning the lagoon, its rhythmic clack-clack echoing against the accordion doors of our compartmentalized carriage. Inside the crowded, utilitarian space, I was having a lively conversation with the American soldier seated beside me on the worn, olive-green leatherette. He spoke with a bright, restless energy about home and the road ahead, telling me how excited he was to be engaged to be married. Our voices rose over the clatter of the wheels, his words occasionally punctuated by the vibration of the fold-down table between us. The air in the six-seat compartment was thick with the haze of permitted smoking, drifting lazily toward the windows. As the industrial mainland faded, the Grand Canal finally came into focus through the grime-streaked glass. Despite the dusty, worn-in comfort of the long journey from Rome, my eyes were increasingly fixed on the choppy water outside, which seemed to signal the expiration of the familiar and mark the point where the solid world dissolved into the floating, ethereal nature of Venice.

The train hissed to a final, shuddering halt, the metallic screech of brakes echoing under the soot-stained arches of Venezia Santa Lucia. I adjusted the strap of my black leather knapsack, a gift my stepfather had specially made for me. Later, when it was stolen on a train trip from Vancouver to Toronto, he would have it replaced by the very same craftsperson, but for now, it was the sturdy companion of my first real journey in Italy. In my pocket, the weight of my brown diary was a comfort, its gold embossing catching the overhead station lights. An archivist by nature, I have ensured that the diary survived all these years, its pages still holding the static charge of that day. I followed the flow of passengers, pushing through the heavy station doors, and then it happened. The jump-cut.

I stopped dead at the top of the wide stone stairs. My breath caught. One moment, I had been enclosed in the grey world of textured rubber floors and compartment seats; now, the world had exploded into a Canaletto panoramic. There was no transition, no suburbs to prepare me, just the sudden, impossible sprawl of the Grand Canal. Across the churning green water, the great copper dome of San Simeone Piccolo rose like a mint-green sentinel against a hazy, early-1980s Venetian sky.

The air didn’t just hit me; it enveloped me. The humidity carried a thick, savoury weight. I opened my diary to a fresh page, the gold on the cover glinting as I prepared to capture the immediate sensory wall. It wasn’t just the salt of the lagoon; it was the heavy, golden scent of seafood frying in oil from a nearby fritolin. But cutting through that richness was a sharper, electric note: the unmistakable sting of vinegar. It was the scent of sarde in saor wafting from a kitchen window, onions and vinegar marinating in the heat, mixing with the sour, fermented tang of red wine spilling from a canal-side bàcaro. It was acidic, bright, and ancient. Underneath it all lay the scent of damp wood and the earthy, cold mud smell of the prized castraure, which were the fresh, purple baby artichokes grown on the island of Sant’Erasmo, piled high on a passing delivery barge.

Then, my eyes shifted from the water to a small vitrine in a shopfront tucked just to the side of the station steps. Resting there was a Seguso sommerso vase. I froze. It was a masterpiece of green and gold, layers of deep colour trapped perfectly within a thick, clear crystal casing. Today, that same vase sits in the foyer window of my parents’ house, a permanent anchor for the memory, but standing on those steps in 1983, it was simply the spark of a lifelong obsession. I pulled my pen from my pocket and, leaning against the cold stone, scribbled a single, frantic line in my diary about that glow. Thus began a lifelong interest in Murano glass, transforming me from a passing witness on the station stairs into a dedicated collector.

I took a vaporetto across the canal, the boat’s engine throbbing beneath my feet as it cut through the dark water. From the deck, the city felt even more tactile, the spray of the lagoon mixing with the lingering scent of fried fish and vinegar. Later that afternoon, the narrow, winding veins of the city finally spilled me out into the vast opening of St. Mark’s Square. I found a spot away from the main flow of tourists and eased the leather knapsack off my shoulders. I pulled out the brown diary and began to write again.

On my way to the square, I had passed a small, weathered notice in the window of a pensione. They were looking for an English-speaking person to help with the guests. I stared at the page of my diary, thinking of the possibility of staying, of living amongst the glass and the salt. But I was far too unsure of myself, and I spoke no Italian but for a few clumsy words I had picked up from classmates growing up in North York, where I had gone to school with many Italians. That wall of language and my own deep shyness held me back. I was too hesitant to apply for the job, so instead, I chose to remain a witness, recording the missed opportunity in the fading light… BL

The upcoming documentary, The Cost, produced as a sponsored project through Women Make Movies and directed by Catherine Rix, marks a definitive end to a decades-long literary myth, a project deeply supported by Andrea Skinner’s stepbrother, Andrew Sabiston. The film follows Skinner as she returns to her childhood home in Huron County, Ontario, to pack up her family’s remaining belongings, navigating the physical spaces where a suffocating domestic silence was enforced. By widening its lens to the surrounding town of Clinton, the documentary explores the precise pathology of the open secret, showing how an entire community, a literary establishment, and a mother used polite silence to protect a monumental legacy at the expense of a child. Skinner’s real-world journey and her creative reclamation through her advocacy song, Ophelia, provide a structural answer to the cold detachment of her mother’s bibliography. Where Alice Munro disguised her real-world compliance as complex artistic nuance. The Cost strips away the passive voice to demand radical public transparency.

The reading world world had long treated Alice Munro with a reverence bordering on international literary sainthood. Critics routinely celebrated her unmatched ability to excavate the quiet undercurrents of domestic life, praising her signature unsentimental distance and psychological realism as hallmarks of a rare, illuminating moral neutrality. However, the revelation by Skinner, who disclosed that she had been systematically sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, and that Munro had knowingly chosen to protect the abuser rather than her child, shattered this spotless legacy. In the wake of this modern reckoning, contemporary critics have forced a harrowing, retrospective re-evaluation of Munro’s craft. Her fiction is no longer viewed as a detached observation of human flaws, but as a highly sophisticated, deeply unsettling defence mechanism. When read in the shadow of Munro’s domestic reality, her texts cease to be abstract exercises in psychological ambiguity and reveal themselves instead as an encoded, real-time blueprint of moral passivity, complicity, and the chilling mechanisms used to rationalize real-world horrors. It is highly probable that Munro herself anticipated the ultimate exposure of her family secret, constructing her narratives not merely as passive reflections, but as an intentional, preemptive archive designed to explain her choices to a future world.

For over forty-five years, I read and admired Alice Munro as an unparalleled chronicler of southwestern Ontario. Her stories felt tethered to the very landscape I knew, and just before the shattering revelations from her daughter came to light, I spent two years diligently curating and designing an experiential Alice Munro Literary Trail. I wanted to celebrate her legacy and trace the physical geometry of the small-town rural communities she mapped so masterfully on the page. Like so many long-time readers, the sudden exposure of her domestic choices felt like a physical blow, permanently altering the literary terroir I had spent years studying. Reconciling forty-five years of deep literary admiration with this sudden ethical collapse requires going back to the text, where the clues to her real-world choices were hidden in plain sight all along.

The chronology of Munro’s bibliography reveals that her stories directly tracked and arguably metabolized the escalating crises of her daughter’s disclosures. The timing of Vandals is devastatingly precise, published in 1993, a mere year after Andrea Skinner first confronted her mother with the truth about Fremlin’s abuse in a 1992 letter. Knowing this biographical context radically transforms the story’s layout, elevating it from rural Gothic fiction to an active response to domestic horror. The narrative centers on a remote property owned by Ladner, a cold, enigmatic taxidermist who preserves dead animals. On the surface, Ladner represents an eccentric but harmless fixture of the community, but beneath this facade lies a predator who systematically and brutally sexually abuses a young neighbouring girl named Liza and her brother. Living alongside Ladner is Bea Doud, a charming, flighty woman whose entire identity is anchored in her desire to please her partner. Bea deliberately overlooks the open secret on her own doorstep, prioritizing her domestic comfort and romantic relationship over the children’s safety, thereby positioning her as a devastating literary proxy for Munro herself. Munro does not paint Bea as a monster; instead, she renders her with a gentle, complex psychological realism that makes her willful blindness feel profoundly human, even tragic. Munro eagerly reaped the rewards of personal liberation and artistic fulfillment, but abandoned the foundational moral responsibility to protect the vulnerable. By creating a character like Bea, a woman who simply looks the other way to keep the peace, Munro was writing a real-time justification for her own passivity, providing an intricate, psychological rationale for the future readers who would one day uncover her real-world compromise.

As the underlying family tension escalated toward a permanent rupture, Munro’s narratives became increasingly preoccupied with the structural preservation and weaponization of domestic cover-ups. This thematic shift is evident in the 1998 story Before the Change, published during a period when Skinner was attempting to navigate adulthood under the weight of her family’s enforced silence. The story follows an unmarried daughter who returns to her childhood home and uncovers layer upon layer of hidden truths, most notably that her religious, respectable physician father has been performing clandestine, illegal abortions in their house for decades. Rather than exposing the truth or seeking justice, the characters treat these violations as a currency of mutual survival, illustrating how secrets are handled as specialized tactical choices within small-town life. The narrative design of Before the Change mirrors the structural hypocrisy of the Munro-Fremlin household, in which horrific or illegal activities within the domestic sphere were neutralized by being routinized and unacknowledged as background noise. Munro uses the story’s historical setting to normalize a climate of secrecy, implying that survival requires an alliance with the patriarch’s sins. This aligns with the realization Skinner faced in 2002, when her attempt to bar Fremlin from her own children led Munro to cut ties entirely, choosing her husband’s convenience over her family’s safety.

The final legal escalation of the crisis triggered Munro’s most direct and terrifying literary exploration of marital codependency and structural violence. In 2004, a public profile depicted Munro and Fremlin as an idyllic, loving couple, an erasure that prompted Skinner to finally turn Fremlin’s written confessions over to the Ontario Provincial Police. Fremlin was subsequently arrested and pleaded guilty to indecent assault on March 11, 2005, an event that Munro met with intense rage, denouncing her daughter as a liar. Just months later, in early 2006, Munro published Dimension in The New Yorker, a story that reads like a direct, chilling distillation of the psychological aftermath of a family destroyed by a partner’s monstrous actions. Dimension follows a woman named Doree whose husband has murdered their three children. Instead of severing ties with the killer, Doree continues to visit him in a psychiatric facility, seeking an intimate, shared understanding that only the perpetrator of the horror can provide. Through the prism of the 2005 conviction, Dimension ceases to be a detached study of grief and transforms into a raw defence of a woman who remains tethered to a calculated abuser. The internal fictions motivating Munro’s characters are deeply tied to darkness, exclusion, and domination, operating as a form of pathological co-dependency where participants willingly sacrifice the innocent to preserve their internal status quo. Intimate human bonds are forged not through mutual goodness, but through a terrifying, clinical detachment from flesh and blood trauma.

This dark psychology reaches its apex in the 2008 story Child’s Play, published as the legal and familial silence solidified into permanent estrangement. The narrative follows Marlene, who reminisces about an intense childhood friendship with Charlene and their mutual, visceral repulsion toward Verna, a mentally disabled girl at their summer camp. Seeking to permanently eliminate what they perceive as an unwanted disruption to their lives, Marlene and Charlene wordlessly coordinate to hold Verna underwater, drowning her in the lake, and keeping the murder an open secret for the rest of their lives. Historically, the hallmark of Munro’s genius was her weaponized narrative distance, a flat, unblinking prose style that critics lauded as a sign of unmatched artistic maturity. While Alice Munro is universally praised for her precise, detached style, modern scholarship debates whether that detachment exposes trauma or normalizes it.

By exposing the heavy emotional and societal toll of breaking a decades-long silence, Sabiston’s film connects these texts directly back to the physical decay of Munro’s legacy. The local community of Clinton has entered a period of protective entrenchment, resisting the dismantling of civic monuments honouring a Nobel laureate, even as the regional Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story has collapsed entirely. The Cost forces the viewer to look past the cozy myth of the beloved grandmother of Canadian letters and confront the institutional machinery, the publishers, the biographers, and the local councils that explicitly chose to look away. Ultimately, the documentary demonstrates that historical truth carries a heavy, isolating price for the survivor who chooses to speak it. But as Skinner’s journey proves, it is a price far lighter than the soul-crushing burden of a community’s collective silence. BL

An official release date for the documentary film The Cost about Andrea Skinner has not yet been announced.

To be a zealous David Sedaris disciple is to participate in a collective, public exercise in shifting malaise. For those of us who have followed his oeuvre since “The Santaland Diaries” first aired, the misanthropic recounting of his time as a Macy’s elf named Crumpet remains a capriciously dark, sardonic antidote to forced holiday merriment. To watch his evolution from that initial foray into the cultural zeitgeist is to witness a masterclass in narrative restraint. To the uninitiated, Sedaris might appear to be a mere satirist, a regular contributor to The New Yorker and BBC Radio 4 who trades on shock value, or a provocateur aiming for the easy gasp. But for the audiences who fill theatre seats and buy his books year after year, the reality is far more convoluted. Sedaris does not blindside to repel; instead, he does so to connect, transforming our private humiliations and public traumas into a shared, liberating guffaw.

The mechanics of a Sedaris essay rely heavily on an active, engaged audience, a fact made entirely clear during his legendary live book tours. At a reading at Centennial Hall, in London, Ontario, I witnessed a microcosm of this exact tension. The venue itself, a rigid piece of 1967 Centennial architecture, seemed designed to test an audience’s endurance. We sat packed into the main floor’s notoriously flat orchestra level, trapped in tight, unyielding, cushioned auditorium chairs that offered virtually no legroom and forced everyone into an aggressively upright, uptight posture. When a heavily intoxicated audience member began openly mocking Sedaris from the crowd, trying to derail the performance with drunken heckles, the night could have dissolved into awkward hostility. Instead, Sedaris handled the disruption with the precise, unflappable composure of a seasoned comic. He did not just survive the moment; he absorbed it, allowing the crowd’s collective discomfort to shift into a sharper, more unified focus.

This live-wire environment is precisely where Sedaris refines his literary clockwork. He uses his massive tours to live-test his diaries, actively editing his essays from the podium based on where an audience stifles a yawn, a laugh, a groan, or a gasp. However, the performance begins long before he takes the stage. It starts at the signing table, where the boundary between the author and the audience blurs into something entirely unpredictable.

Years after that chaotic night at Centennial Hall, my friend Bonnie bought us tickets to see Sedaris at Massey Hall, in Toronto, for my birthday. The signing table was situated beneath an open stairwell. This particular evening predated his ultimate upgrade to the Gammarelli liturgical cassock. We stood in a sprawling line that snaked through the lobby, anchored by a prominent, authoritative sign strictly forbidding photography, an instruction virtually everyone ignored, their smartphones held aloft like small, glowing tributes. By this point in his career, Sedaris’s visual presentation had fundamentally shifted. He had traded his traditional, safe literary suits for avant-garde, flouncy Japanese culottes and skorts paired with a shirt and tie, choices that confused the masses but made him look like an elegantly eccentric, semi-formal ringmaster.

And yet, his true genius lay in his knack for sudden, arresting intimacy. When it was my turn at the signing table, he looked up and asked what I was planning to do to celebrate my birthday.

“See you read tonight,” I replied.

Sedaris stopped. He looked at me in the most peculiar, unreadable way.

It was a classic Sedaris beat, a brief, glitching pause in reality. In that singular look, the irony of his entire career was perfectly captured. Here was a man who spent his life cataloguing human absurdity, staring at a fan who chose to spend their most personal day of the year watching a stranger read diaries about grief, economic instability, and family dysfunction. For a writer who weaponizes the bizarre, a moment of pure, earnest adulation from a reader is perhaps the most shocking thing of all.

His is an apt persona for a writer whose later career has become an extended meditation on the theatre of aging and the quiet compromises of lifelong devotion. That signing-table evening may have predated his ultimate stylistic transition to Vatican tailoring, but that sartorial evolution mirrors the thematic shifts of his latest collection, The Land and Its People. Critics have hailed the book as a return to his finest, most heartfelt form, particularly as it zeroes in on his three-decade partnership with Hugh Hamrick. Where his previous work occasionally curdled into a harsher misanthropy, these new essays find Sedaris balancing his trademark bite with a profound, domestic tenderness. He chronicles the messy, real-world trials of stepping into a caretaker role for Hugh following hip-replacement surgery, anchoring his humour in the terrifying vulnerabilities of growing old together.

This deepening intimacy underpins his recent admission that he and Hugh have actually been married since a secret courthouse ceremony in 2016. Characteristically, it was not romance that drove them to the altar, but the pragmatic advice of a banker, and Sedaris famously hid the union from friends and family for a decade simply because he shuddered at the creepy theatricality of the phrase “my husband.” The collection is at its best when capturing the mounting, petty friction of their shared senior years, mapping out the comedic territory of a long-term relationship where affection is expressed through bickering. From navigating competitive health ailments like hearing aids and surgeries to the domestic irritation of a puffy, foot-tall medical toilet seat that Sedaris decries as a chilling spectre of death, he handles the quiet warfare of aging with unmatched wit. Whether navigating the bureaucratic absurdity of a clandestine marriage or the minor indignities of elder care, he proves that his modern wardrobe is no mere gimmick. The cassock is the perfect ecclesiastical drag for a man who has become the high priest of our collective, late-stage anxieties, translating the terrifying inevitability of dotage and the enduring bonds that survive it into a shared, liberating laugh.

This tension between the disturbing and the deeply human is exactly what links Sedaris to the literary masters he worships. Behind the comedic persona lies a hyper-disciplined technician obsessed with the short story form. His idolatry of Alice Munro’s writing, the legendary master of short fiction, is something we easily share. He famously noted that a good short story should take a reader out of themselves and then stuff them back in, outsized now, and slightly uneasy with the fit. What Sedaris mimics from Munro is a surgical economy of language, understanding that in short-form writing, every sentence must carry the weight of an entire life.

Decades after his debut, his sharp, misanthropic edge has not dulled with age; it has simply focused its lens on the breakdown of modern civility. We see this vividly in The Land and Its People, where Sedaris gleefully fantasizes about the literal execution of train passengers who dare to rest their shoes directly on the upholstery. To the casual reader, proposing a death sentence for a minor public transit infraction sounds like shock value for its own sake. But to anyone who has actually navigated the crumbling infrastructure of a modern city, the homicidal impulse feels less like hyperbole and more like a documentary.

My own introduction to this brand of transit-induced madness occurred on a recent afternoon while travelling into Toronto. Miles outside the city, my train gave a sudden, definitive shudder and died. We were forced onto the concrete platform at Appleby station, a bleak expanse outside Oakville never designed to hold an entire population. Abandoned without announcements or instructions, a few hundred of us formed a dense, radiating gridlock of human body heat on the stairs. When a local GO train finally arrived to rescue us, it crept toward the city at a pace that suggested the driver was actively trying to avoid reaching our destination.

Union Station offered no reprieve, merely funneling us into a second, more immediate trap. Shortly after boarding the northbound subway, someone in our packed carriage shattered a glass bottle, triggering a minor panic and an evacuation into the humid, late-afternoon congestion of the TMU station near Dundas. Pinned against the crowd, the yellow safety strip beneath my shoes felt less like a warning and more like a suggestion. When the next car groaned open, I allowed the swell of the crowd to carry me inside.

The relief lasted perhaps three seconds before the crowd surged again. A passenger piloting a remarkably heavy, motorized mobility scooter had decided to clear a path. The driver was entirely oblivious to the surrounding chaos, wearing a serene, unblinking expression while single-mindedly navigating the platform. Without warning, the machine threw itself into reverse, rolling directly over my foot and crushing my toes into the grey composite floor. I gasped, pinned too tightly by surrounding bodies to even lean away from the pain. Before I could inhale enough air to scream, the driver slammed the vehicle back into gear, pulled forward to resume his quiet mission, and ran over my foot a second time. It was a moment of agonizing, absurd cruelty so pure it felt as though it had been pulled directly from a Sedaris diary.

It is precisely within these pressure cookers of urban exhaustion that Sedaris’s writing transitions from comedy to radical validation. We are taught by polite society to internalize these moments, specifically to swallow the bubbling, feral rage of being crushed, ignored, and literally run over by the modern world. Sedaris simply has the audacity to take our unspoken, homicidal commuter thoughts and elevate them into an absolute authoritarian extreme on the page.

Ultimately, this calculated use of shock serves a purpose far deeper than mere entertainment, for it provides the comfort of shared shame. When Sedaris exposes his own petty grievances, cruelest impulses, and the quiet warfare of his domestic life, he gives us permission to accept our own hidden flaws. He pairs these outbursts with profound personal tragedies, using comedic shock as a vital psychological pressure valve. By refusing to sanitize the world, his wardrobe, or the absolute misery of a broken transit system, Sedaris achieves a rare emotional honesty. Whether he is performing in the rigid, unyielding seats of Centennial Hall or presiding over his readers in a Vatican cassock, he proves that the things that shock us are often the very things keeping us sane. BL

During a recent, aimless excursion to Indigo, initially undertaken to secure David Sedaris’s latest volume of public neuroses and a refresher on Greek mythology, I found myself drifting toward the understocked shelves of the back catalogue of local authors, looking for the novels of Joan Barfoot and Bonnie Burnard. They were, predictably, not in stock. But although they weren’t on the shelves, I managed to give three clerks a tutorial on these local writers before leaving empty-handed. The immediate, algorithmic absence of their names collapsed twenty-seven years of distance, returning me to the late autumn of 1999, when my life was metered out in six-minute increments. That is the precise interval a chef is granted to hold a pan over a blue gas flame before nuance scorches into ash.

At the time, this frantic tempo dictated not just my service but the rhythm of my weekly writing. As a chef/restaurateur filing a food column rather disturbingly titled “Flash in the Pan,” my critical apparatus was fueled entirely by the immediate, loud demands of sensory critique. When I sat down to review Burnard’s debut novel, A Good House, which had recently captured the Giller Prize, I approached the text as I would a plate arriving at the pass. I was hunting for sharp geometry and sudden bursts of flavour. Even my appreciation of the book’s jacket was purely aesthetic, focusing on a soft-focus photograph of mismatched vintage teacups stacked precariously in faded mints and buttery, melancholic yellows. The porcelain looked fragile, domestic, and entirely uncomplicated.

Because my waking hours were spent managing the daily choreography of hospitality, my initial reading of Burnard’s work was stubbornly literal, preoccupied with her spatial arrangement. If memory serves, I evaluated her narrative framework by the physical movement of bodies through hallways and the practical logistics of a holiday gathering, demanding that the prose replicate the velocity of a Saturday-night dinner rush. To review a sprawling, multi-generational opus through the narrow confines of a culinary deadline meant, inevitably, that I was looking for the wrong things entirely. I had arrived expecting a stir-fry; she had presented a masterfully executed, decades-long braise. I was, it turned out, an embarrassing dilettante.

This critical misjudgment became starkly apparent when I later met Burnard at a Central Library reading. My colleague, Joan Brennan, introduced us, gleefully announcing me to the author as her “biggest fan,” a moment that felt uncomfortably plucked from the Kathy Bates and James Caan film Misery. Standing there in that quiet, civic space, I felt the sheer friction between my hectic kitchen world and the deliberate, emotional geography of Burnard’s work, which Bonnie seemed to inhabit by birthright. Burnard, of course, was magnanimous.

Nearly three decades later, now immersed in a centenary study of Margaret Laurence, I find myself repeatedly pulled off course by Burnard, Alice Munro, and Joan Barfoot. What I once dismissed as regional background noise has revealed itself as a formidable literary lineage. These writers are, of course, among the premier cartographers of the Canadian small town, but more crucially, they are masters of domestic space. Through Laurence’s Manawaka, Munro’s Jubilee, and Burnard’s Stonebrook, they establish the home not as a backdrop, but as a metaphorical architecture of human survival, a protective crucible where private griefs and daily meals are safely contained.

Barfoot, by contrast, shifts from the metaphorical to the literal, contracting her lens to the suffocating physics of confinement: a single house over three days in Luck, a notebook-filled hospital room in Dancing in the Dark, or the fateful small-town ice cream parlour in Critical Injuries, where a stray bullet shatters two lives. For Barfoot, these tight, interior structures are not sanctuaries, but sites of total alienation and sudden, violent intersection.

To read A Good House properly is to understand that the most profound human truths do not arrive via a dramatic flourish. They accumulate gradually, like the thin patina of steam and grease that settles onto a kitchen wall over time. The novel traces three generations of the Chambers family in a small Ontario town, beginning in 1949 with a man returning from the war missing a few fingers, and ending near the turn of the millennium. There are no theatrical plot twists or explosive betrayals. Instead, Burnard asks her readers to sit quietly in the corner of a domestic kitchen and watch the slow, heavy evolution of ordinary time.

Burnard approached fiction with a deep, practical patience. Having previously read her short stories, I should have recognized her unique rhythm. Burnard once described the short story as forked lightning, fast, jagged, and direct, while the novel was sheet lightning, illuminating a broad space where you cannot see everything at once. This slow illumination is precisely what Alice Munro celebrated in her own assessment of A Good House, noting that readers would find increasing satisfaction in the unshowy craft of a writer who could “tell you hard truths, hopefully.”

If I had been more patient back then, I would have focused my analysis on the unspoken vocabulary of the kitchen table. In a restaurant, a table is transient real estate, wiped clean every two hours with a damp cloth to make room for a fresh set of customers. In Burnard’s world, the kitchen table is an unyielding anchor. Over fifty years, its surface records the changing topography of a family: the chaotic spill of baby food, the quiet scraping of forks during post-war grief, and the eventual, sparse tidiness of an empty nest.

I likely missed the quiet genius of how food operates as a substitute for emotional vulnerability in the post-war Canadian home. The characters in A Good House do not easily voice their love, terror, or sorrow. Instead, care is bartered through ingredients: the precise assembly of a Sunday roast, the pouring of hot tea, or the simple preservation of seasonal fruit. These quiet, domestic rituals serve as the primary language for navigating tragedy.

This protective domesticity contrasts sharply with the Manawaka of Margaret Laurence. Where Burnard’s houses offer shelter, Laurence’s domestic interiors are battlegrounds of rigid judgment, pride, and Scots Presbyterian guilt. In The Stone Angel, the domestic space is a cage; Hagar Shipley’s relationship with her home is defined by ownership and ultimate entrapment. Yet, like Burnard’s characters, Laurence’s women use the domestic sphere to endure. The preparation of food, the polishing of mahogany, and the maintenance of appearances are not trivial routines. They are the daily, desperate scaffolding that keeps chaos at bay.

Alice Munro’s southwestern Ontario occupies the complicated territory between Burnard’s warmth and Laurence’s severity. Munro’s domestic spaces are places of intense, claustrophobic scrutiny, where the ordinary is always on the verge of slipping into the salacious. Kitchens and back porches are where women trade local gossip and uncover hidden desires. While Burnard uses domesticity to unite a family, Munro uses it to expose the friction pulsing beneath respectable facades.

Looking back from the vantage point of a quieter life, I see that my early critical failure was a failure of tempo. I had expected literature to perform with the loud, sweaty urgency of the line. It took years to realize that the most enduring stories aren’t flashed in a pan; they are the ones left to simmer in the dark, much like the quiet, architectural traps that Joan Barfoot builds so carefully out of ordinary wood and brick. BL

“Colour Fielding”

A daughter’s poetic dive into her father’s studio.

By Bryan Parker Lavery

To enter the London, Ontario home of Penn Kemp is to step directly into a living, mid-century canvas. Surrounded by the massive, vibrating abstract works of her late father, Jim Kemp, the poet laureate does not merely remember local art history; she lives inside its aesthetic world. In her latest collection, Colour Fielding, published by Silver Bow Publishing, Kemp undertakes the perilous poetic errand of translating this massive, wordless spatiality into the narrow confines of the printed page. The result is a striking series of quantum-linguistic experiments that prove abstraction is never a retreat from reality, but a headlong dive into it.

Emerging from New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, Colour Field painting sought to rescue abstract art from the frantic, gestural angst of Abstract Expressionism. Deeply inspired by European modernism, many of its notable early proponents were actually among the pioneering abstract expressionists themselves before they chose a different path. Instead of jagged brushstrokes, artists like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Helen Frankenthaler offered weighty, unmodulated planes of pure hue. They treated colour not as a vehicle for a subject, but as the subject itself, creating what Rothko called “a religious experience through sheer visual scale.”

This project arrives at a historic moment for the author, who was recently honoured by the League of Canadian Poets with their Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award—a testament to her six decades of rewriting the rules of Canadian literary experimentalism. For Kemp, the collection operates less as art criticism and more as a deeply personal, intensely familial archive.

Jim Kemp was a foundational pillar of London’s burgeoning mid-century art scene, a beloved mentor and tireless organizer who built the institutions that defined the local creative landscape. He was instrumental in establishing the Western Art League, organizing the Art Mart, initiating Western University’s Artist-in-Residence programme, and reopening Western’s McIntosh Gallery. A graceful mediator within a legendary regional community, he worked alongside brilliant 1960s contemporaries like Herb Ariss, Jack Chambers, Greg Curnoe, Clare Bice, Bernice Vincent, and Tony Urquhart. This immediate, lifelong environment lends Penn’s collection its unique avant-garde urgency.

Five of Jim Kemp’s paintings begin a section in Colour Fielding that ties the art to the word. Penn operates on a quiet, radical frequency, asking where, precisely, paintings and poems originate. In bridging the gap between the eye and the spirit, she confronts these works even when encountered within the over-conditioned enfilades of Museum London. Standing in that sterile gallery space, she stares at her father’s painting Marsh. While she may have never stood in this exact spot during the creation of Becoming, her poetry makes these encounters feel inevitable.

Penn’s verses bridge the gap between memory and imagination, transforming the mid-century oil canvas from a static historical artifact into a living question. The stark abstraction ceases to be paint on fabric; it becomes an active portal, pulling the reader past the physical surface and straight into the heavy, vibrating space of the unseen. Penn is no outsider strolling through a chilly public gallery, detachedly documenting what she sees; she has stepped directly inside the literal and emotional architecture of her father’s vision.

To live with Jim Kemp’s abstracts, two of which hang in my own living room, is to witness this relentless, joyful exploration of light and texture firsthand. Orange is a dominant colour in both paintings, a radiant, burning hue that pulses with an interior luminosity. Though his early work was anchored in representation, his travels through Europe evolved into a highly personal modernism that boldly pushed into abstraction. Strikingly, despite being red-green colour blind, he possessed an almost mystical command of underwater and autumnal tones: lustrous deep blues, vibrant greens, and these arresting, incandescent oranges.

His impressionistic dabs of oil and acrylic do not just sit on the canvas. In many of his paintings, his colour fields merge in a subtle sfumato border where transitions become almost imperceptible, shifting softly like light moving through water. By fusing these boundaries, he removes all hard, rigid outlines. Instead, the tones evaporate into one another, creating a dreamy, atmospheric effect that gives the composition a quiet, breathing depth.

The aesthetic lineage of this collection extends beyond her father’s studio to the book jacket, which features the iconic work of rebel regionalist Greg Curnoe. On the front cover, Curnoe’s vibrant colour wheel introduces the book with a jolt of local history and theory. Curnoe was a master colourist who, in a fascinating parallel to Jim Kemp, also defied his own partial red-green colour blindness. His painterly brushstrokes fill the wheel’s segments with independent fields of pure energy, turning a technical diagram into a playful declaration of identity. By wrapping her book in Curnoe’s wheel, Penn signals that this collection is a deliberate defence of our specific regional landscape. It sets a beautifully ironic stage: a bold, circular map of strict visual boundaries acts as the gateway to a collection where those very borders immediately dissolve.

Indeed, Penn looks beyond local borders to weave legendary historical painters such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, the Group of Seven, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pieter Bruegel, and Emily Carr into her narrative, expanding her exploration beyond regional constraints. Her ekphrastic tribute uses these figures to build an interconnected dialogue about how landscape, identity, and the artistic spirit merge. Yet, whether traversing international art history or defending local regionalism, the collection always returns to the literal space where art is born.

In her poem, “Translation,” Penn takes us directly into that sacred, physical labour behind the canvas. She recalls the rhythmic intimacy of priming her father’s raw surfaces with white gesso, preparing each substrate for his layered acrylics. In this memory, the act of translation begins long before words ever hit a page; it starts with the baseline of white, the literal ground from which her father’s vibrant oranges and deeper blues would eventually erupt. By grounding the book in this foundational act of physical preparation, Penn ultimately positions her poetry not just as a reaction to finished art, but as a direct continuation of a collaborative family dynamic.

As I continue to observe Penn’s work, I am constantly struck by how it thrives in these exact spaces—like a story within a story—where various art forms meet. She treats canvas not as a stationary object to be described, but as a vibrant, living field. Drawing on her six decades at the forefront of Canadian literary experimentalism, she possesses an innate ability to bridge the visual and the oral. Penn articulates that colour and sound are merely different frequencies of the same cosmic energy. To her, sound is generative, containing the primal potential for the dazzle and mystery of colours, forms, and images.

Several of Penn’s poems in this collection scumble across the page, completely discarding the tyranny of the rigid left-aligned margin. Words are scattered like loose pigment or arranged in sweeping, open-field compositions that mimic the expansive, edge-to-edge washing of a canvas. The white space of the paper ceases to be a void; it becomes a crucial ground of silence, a primal space where language dissolves back into pure color. - BL

Untitled, 1963. Oil on canvas. Collection of Museum London.

When Alice Munro went to battle against her neighbours in Huron County, Ontario, in the late summer of 1978, she did so as the high priestess of exposure. The battleground was a high school syllabus; the target was a challenge to contemporary Canadian fiction. In raucous town halls and on national television, Munro skewered the local censors with a cool, clinical irony, famously mocking their collective delusion that if we do not write about sex, it will disappear. For decades, these were the foundational tenets of her legacy: Munro as the unblinking anthropologist, the woman who dragged the hidden, suffocating secrets of small-town domesticity into the unforgiving light of art.

In her public life, she frequently resisted the idea that her fiction was a form of personal confession. “I don’t set out to do self-exposure,” she once reflected, turning instead to the flawed giants of the Western canon for justification. “I have been reading Dostoevsky again. He was not a particularly admirable person. He didn’t have a very good life. He had a lot of problems. But to have got so far into the human experience seems a marvelous use of time on earth.” For Munro, the work excused the life, and she genuinely seemed insulated from the weight of her own revelations. “It never occurs to me that I am being candid,” she noted. Critics agreed, marveling at how she could peer into the darkest, most agonizing corners of the human soul without flinching.

Yet beneath that artistic confidence lay a deep aversion to the public gaze. She openly admitted that she feared interviews would humiliate her, though she claimed that, as she aged, “the world’s opinion matters less.” It sounded, at the time, like the hard-won peace of an elder stateswoman of letters, a liberation from public judgment.

That curated peace vanished in July 2024, mere weeks after Munro’s death, when her public legacy collided with profound revelations of a devastating private horror. An essay by her youngest daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, revealed that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, starting at age nine. When Skinner finally exposed the trauma to her mother as an adult, Munro chose to protect her husband, defend her domestic respectability, and remain in the marriage. The irony is devastating: the writer who built a career dismantling the hypocrisies of polite society had used those very same structures to enforce a conspiracy of silence in her own home.

Because Munro was her husband’s primary defender, even accusing her daughter of lying during Fremlin’s 2004 arrest, the post-scandal consensus is that her actions are indefensible. In the immediate wake of Skinner’s essay, the shock was academic and institutional. However, for her readers, the impact cut much deeper, transforming a professional debate into a profoundly personal crisis of confidence. Universities re-evaluated syllabi, readers grappled with how to separate the art from the artist, and local civic bodies like the Township of North Huron quickly clarified that her name on municipal sites would be maintained strictly for historical and literary context, rather than as an endorsement of her character.

But time has deepened the critique, shifting the focus from Munro’s personal morality to the nuts and bolts of her writing. To read Munro now, two years into this collective re-examination, is to witness a chilling convergence between her life and her aesthetic. Her fiction was long celebrated for its distinctive passive voice, a detached, ironic observation of human foibles where characters absorb terrible knowledge about the people around them and simply continue on regardless. Her peerless artistic grace lay in her ability to dissect the quiet, suffocating social architectures of small-town Ontario, holding a mirror to subtle cruelties and quiet betrayals. Critics awed at her restraint, how she could capture intense domestic trauma without ever raising her literary voice.

When Skinner confronted her mother, Munro reportedly claimed the trauma was an isolated matter that had nothing to do with her, adopting the precise, compartmentalizing logic of her own fictional universe. Her detachment was not just a style; it was an operational doctrine.

Nowhere has this reckoning been more visceral than in the geography that gave birth to her stories. In her hometown of Wingham and her long-time residence of Clinton, the news triggered a defensive closing of the ranks that felt lifted straight from her pages. Local politicians initially panicked, with some dismissively calling the child abuse a private family matter, while old acquaintances publicly lamented that journalists were digging all the dirt on a local hero. Yet, the town’s geography could not remain frozen. Because the township is moving to sell off the municipal property where the tribute was originally placed, they are now debating where to shift her physical legacy. While the council initially proposed quietly tucking the monument away inside a neighbourhood green space, a local pushback from the horticultural society has forced a different conversation. Municipal organizers are instead talking about moving the Alice Munro Literary Garden directly to the grounds of the local Alice Munro Library. It is an agonizing administrative shuffle, a quiet municipal admission that, while the monument must be moved to keep her name within strict historical context, her memory has become a physical burden the town no longer knows how to display gracefully.

The true aftermath, however, belongs to the survival that outlived the silence. In May 2026, Skinner released a song titled “Ophelia” at a trauma survivors’ festival in Toronto. This was an act of public reclamation dedicated explicitly to ending the silence around childhood sexual abuse. This is where the narrative permanently shifts. The 1978 censorship battles were about who had the right to dictate public morality. The modern reckoning over Munro’s legacy is about who has the right to tell the truth. Munro spent her life proving that the small town’s greatest fear was exposure. In a twist of fate as devastating as any of her short stories, her own mythology was dismantled by the one truth she refused to write, leaving her daughter to break the silence decades later.

This summer, UK publisher Faber and Faber is officially re-releasing Abra globally under its European title, Gaining Ground. This international revival comes at a vital moment. For years, Joan Barfoot’s work has been both common knowledge and a cherished secret among a dedicated generation of readers, but literary landscapes are shifting. A new generation of readers, currently navigating an era defined by burnout, isolation, and deep questions about the cost of traditional social structures, is uniquely primed to rediscover her. Barfoot’s prose does not offer easy comfort. Instead, it offers something far better: absolute honesty.

Recently, this generational shift was visible in real-time at Toronto’s Union Station bookstore. Operating as a temporary pop-up space for only a short period of time, the shop serves as a fleeting, urgent crossroads for modern literary culture. Inside, clerks witness a daily rush of commuters looking for exactly what Barfoot mastered: stories of intense internal friction and the desire to escape.

While transit readers currently fuel the massive, viral success of high-stakes, enemies-to-lovers queer fiction like Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry, the core emotional hunger remains the same. Before this brief retail experiment vanishes from the station, today’s readers are devouring books about characters who reject the status quo, endure isolation, and demand authentic connection. Whether through the fast-paced, modern romance flying off the station’s temporary shelves or Barfoot’s raw, re-emerging literary classic, a new generation is actively seeking out uncompromising honesty on their daily journey.

Decades before these modern cultural conversations, there was Abra. Published in 1978, Barfoot’s stunning debut novel won the Books in Canada First Novel Award and established her as a radical new voice. The book follows a woman who walks away from her husband, her children, and the crushing claustrophobia of suburban motherhood to live in absolute isolation in an abandoned rural cabin. Long before modern internet subcultures began debating the trap of traditional domesticity, Barfoot was investigating the terrifying, liberating reality of radical self-reliance.

My own early introduction to Barfoot’s cinematic power came as a 30-year-old man, watching the legendary Martha Henry embody the psychological ruin of Edna Cormick in Dancing in the Dark, the award-winning 1986 film adaptation of Barfoot’s second novel. Henry’s performance as a housewife, looking back from a psychiatric facility after murdering her husband, perfectly captured Barfoot’s signature terrain, which is the dangerous fiction of the perfect domestic life.

Lately, I have found myself drawn back to her mid-career opuses, Getting over Edgar (1999) and Critical Injuries (2001). Re-reading them today is a striking reminder of her mastery of chance. In Critical Injuries, a random, violent encounter in a ice cream parlour instantly tethers two strangers together, proving Barfoot’s central thesis that a life can turn entirely on a dime. In Getting over Edgar, she examines the aftermath of a different kind of fracture, specifically the slow, suffocating weight of domestic expectations and the messy, dark comedy of surviving grief.

This thematic obsession with agency and the finality of human choices finds its ultimate culmination in her eleventh novel, Exit Lines (2008). Set within the pastel-hued, plastic-planted confines of a senior care facility euphemistically named the Idyll Inn, the book brings together a brilliant, defiant quartet of aging protagonists. Among them is Ruth, a retired social worker whose deep grief drives her to enlist her fellow residents in a secret, late-night pact to control their final departures on their own terms. Like Barfoot’s earlier works, Exit Lines balances a biting, sardonically witty perspective with a profound meditation on personal autonomy. It insists that old age is not a fading away, but a fierce continuation of a life’s choosing.

Joan Barfoot lives quietly in London, Ontario, watching the world with the same razor-sharp perspective that has guided her eleven novels. It is here, that her enduring influence feels most intimate.

Every few weeks, a quiet literary ritual unfolds. My partner, Gary, and I travel to the home of celebrated poet Penn Kemp for an afternoon of conversation. Depending on the season, we gather either indoors by the warmth of the fireplace or outside beside the still waters of her fishpond. This routine, while deeply personal, serves as the conduit for a unique literary inheritance. Though I hold my own long-standing subscription to The New Yorker, I prefer the physical presence and tactile experience of holding a printed magazine in my hands. Before we depart, I collect a carefully preserved stack of these issues from Penn.

These magazines are not mere discarded print. They represent a deliberate chain of custody among local literary enthusiasts. The copies arrive at Penn’s home having been passed down by their original subscribers, Jennifer Wenn, a talented trans-identified poet and writer, and Barfoot herself. This baton-passing of contemporary literature among friends imbues the physical objects with a distinct communal reverence.

Flipping through these second-hand pages, rich with sharp satirical cartoons and expansive long-form journalism, directly mirrors the mechanics of Barfoot’s own celebrated fiction. Her novels operate with a similar clinical precision and elegant detachment. Like the magazine’s finest storytelling, her work executes a completely unsentimental dissection of the quiet domestic catastrophes that underpin modern life. As her debut book finally finds its way back onto global bookshelves, the rest of the world is about to catch up to what those of us passing magazines across the city have known all along. BL

The screen doors at Murano and Blackfriars Bistro used to slam with a familiar, metallic bang, a metronomic punctuation mark in London, Ontario’s culinary awakening. For three decades, that sound meant I was inside, likely parsing the erratic geometry of a local sunchoke or coaxing the surprising, tropical custard of a native pawpaw into a glass. Looking back on my years in the kitchen, I realize I have spent several decades waging a quiet, gastronomic campaign against the homogenization of the Ontario palate from a corner of Southwestern Ontario.

My culinary conversion did not happen in a vacuum, but rather on the sun-bleached roads of northern Italy. The air in Emilia-Romagna smells of damp stone, turned earth, and the sharp, dizzying funk of Parmigiano-Reggiano aging in the dark. It was there, amidst a contingent of Canadian chefs, that I first felt the true gravity of what we were losing. We were sitting at a long wooden table, drinking wine that tasted of the hillside outside the window, listening to people speak of balsamico, and heritage pigs not as commodities, but as history. As identity.

Three decades ago, my friend Fernanda Cerone and I were chosen to join a select contingent of Canadian chefs, handpicked by the Italian Trade Commission, for an intensive gastronomic tour of the Emilia-Romagna region. Crisscrossing that landscape alongside some of the founding chefs and early adopters of Slow Food, we were immersed in a food culture that revered geography above all else.

It was there that the shadow of Carlo Petrini first lengthened over my life.

With Petrini’s recent passing at his home in Bra, Italy, this weekend, a massive void has opened in the global culinary landscape. To the rest of the world, he was the intellectual who stood on the Spanish Steps in 1986, passing out bowls of penne to protest the opening of a McDonald’s, the man who turned an aversion to fast food into a worldwide movement. But to those of us who lived our lives in the frantic heat of commercial kitchens, he was an apostle of common sense. He taught us that pleasure and responsibility belong together. He famously said, “Those who sow utopia reap reality,” a phrase that became the underlying rhythm of many a culinary career.

Back home in Southwestern Ontario, the culinary landscape of the late twentieth century was largely an industrial monoculture. We were asleep at the wheel, blinded by the convenience of a globalized supply chain that flattened flavour and erased the farmer from the plate. But sitting in that Italian twilight, Petrini’s manifesto struck me not as political theory, but as an awakening. Food security, biodiversity, and dignity for the worker were the ultimate antidote to the corporate machine.

When I returned from Italy, I wasn’t just inspired; I was impatient. The epiphany I’d had in Italy felt entirely incompatible with the culinary isolation we were experiencing back home. It wasn’t enough to simply change the menu at my own restaurants. We needed a framework, a collective, a way to anchor these radical Italian ideas directly into our own glacial soil.

That urgency is what drove a group of like-minded co-founders to launch London’s first official Slow Food Convivium.

In the language Petrini gifted us, a “convivium” is much more than a chapter or a committee; it is a local table where farmers, chefs, and eaters gather to protect the foodways of their specific region. In the early 2000s, London was ripe for it, but the genuine infrastructure of “local” didn’t exist yet. We had to help build it from scratch. Organizing and collaborating that early convivium meant gathering a small, fierce contingent of local growers, food artisans, and conscious citizens into the Market Kitchen at Covent Garden Market.

Our mission was simple but daunting: we wanted to dismantle the anonymity of the industrial food chain right here in Middlesex County. We spent our evenings mapping out the regional terroir of Southwestern Ontario, tracking down heritage crops on the verge of disappearing, and creating direct, non-transactional pipelines between independent family farms and urban kitchens. We wanted a carrot to taste like the dirt it was pulled from, and we wanted the person buying it to know the name of the farmer who sweated over it.

I encountered the friction of this ideal firsthand during my time at the Western Fair Farmers’ and Artisans’ Market. Serving as a platform to lead and support community initiatives during a transformational era, it was a testing ground for true food security. My attempts to push the operation into a strict, producers-only market—intended to provide the uncompromised transparency that consumers crave. were met with deep-seated resistance to abandoning the convenience of wholesale, resold goods. Yet, innovation always blooms from friction. The market proved that a transformational ecosystem doesn’t appear overnight; it emerges organically over years of patient, dedicated friction between old habits and new ideas.

Nowhere did this alliance manifest more vividly than in my friendship with Paul Spence and Sara Caiche, stewards of The Culinary Farm near Thamesville in Chatham-Kent. When I first profiled Paul, I recognized a rare, kindred spirit, a “culinary farmer” whose hands were stained by the resurrection of heritage grains like Red Fife. On that seven-acre property, I found the perfect lab for our Slow Food evangelism. It was a place where agriculture was treated not as a mere commodity, but as a living piece of cultural theatre, eventually bridging South American traditions and Southwestern Ontario soil through specialized workshops and experiential farm dinners.

As the years progressed, I transitioned from the gruelling theatre of daily restaurant lines to the more contemplative desk of the culinary journalist. Writing became my primary weapon. In the pages of Edible Toronto, my Food Writer at Large and “The Buzz” column for Lifestyle Magazine, and Eatdrink, my prose took on a subversive, delightfully granular edge. I didn’t just review meals; I interrogated the very possibility of what could grow in Canadian soil.

In a piece for Edible Toronto about banana farming, I sought to capture the surreal alchemy of Ontario’s shifting agricultural boundaries. I chronicled the audacious experiment of growing tropical fruits, papayas, guavas, and, yes, bananas inside plastic-wrapped, wood-heated hoophouses through brutal Canadian winters. To me, a local banana crop wasn’t just a horticultural curiosity; it was a profound, provocative thesis statement on food security and the shifting definition of local terroir.

My menus at my restaurants had always been living archives of this region’s overlooked capabilities. We elevated wild, forgotten, and hyper-seasonal ingredients that the modern supermarket chain had flattened out of existence or deemed too troublesome to standardize. Diners came to expect the unexpected: the sharp, garlic-onion punch of wild ramps gathered from damp forest floors; the earthy elegance of ostrich fern fiddleheads; and the vibrant, green sting of stinging nettle transformed into delicate soups and sauces. We celebrated the sour, aromatic bite of wild quince, the historical ghost of the ancient Jesuit pear, and the prized, tropical perfume of the native pawpaw. Through cooking and writing, I wasn’t just feeding people; I was trying to help the urban population learn how to taste the geography of their own backyard.

When the screen door at Blackfriars Bistro closed for the final time in April 2026, marking my retirement from active kitchen work, it felt like the end of a culinary epoch. I walked away with the Southwest Ontario Luminary of the Year Award, a fitting crown for years of Slow Food-inspired diplomacy and advocacy.

Yet, true to the Slow Food ethos, retirement has merely been a transition from the stove to the street. Stripped of my chef’s whites, I now operate as a cultural geographer. Through our Forest City Culinary Experiences, I lead modern eaters through the same regional landscapes I have spent a lifetime sourcing, while my Substack, Heart of an Artichoke (read Clapping Back at the Ultracrepidarians), offers a biting, literate defence of culinary history.

Over the last few decades, through the frantic heat of the line, the pages of the press, and the culinary trails of the Forest City, I have chased that initial Italian epiphany. Petrini’s passing marks the end of an era, but his memory is not a relic to be preserved in amber. It is an active spark.

Today, we stand on the precipice of a renaissance. Through the launch of the proposed Forest City Culinary Guild, we are actively reviving that unyielding Slow Food ethos in London. This guild will be our new table. It is the vehicle through which a new generation of culinary enthusiasts, chefs, growers, and advocates will carry the torch. Beyond building this network, our ambitions are tangible: we are working to revive a dedicated, Slow Food-inspired festival right here in the Forest City, a true celebration where the community can once again gather, taste, and honour the hands that feed us. Petrini’s legacy lives on in every local seed saved, every shared regional meal, and every young cook who refuses to let convenience conquer culture. In an era of instant gratification, the mission simply shifts. The table Petrini built is getting busier, and through the Guild, it is up to us to keep it open,proving that the most radical thing we can all do is slow down, look toward the farmer, and taste the terroir. BL