It’s now two weeks until my UBC classes begin, and, with them, a new phase of my life. I realise also that as this happens the nature of this blog will change. Over the past few months I’ve thought about questions of identity and the shape of my life, sometimes through incidents that have happened to me or situations I have encountered, more often through books I have read. As

This August, I thought I’d spend my leisure time before the coming storm of study reading more about the place I live in. I began with Charles Demers’s Vancouver Special – short, quirky essays about Vancouver, which also contain references to other works. This led me to one of the books I’ll write about here, Mark Leier’s Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British

The summer’s moving on. I’m back from Japan, and this month I’ve been trying to put my academic house in order by finishing revisions to two scholarly papers. My hope is to keep exercising these intellectual muscles as I move into a new disciplinary area, with the dream that work on counselling, the study of narrative, and other forms of writing will somehow begin to coalesce into something new, in

This blog was meant to be exploring transitions, but with only a couple of months to go before I start at UBC, I find myself drawn back to literature. I’ve been having dreams in the last month about my past: about teaching, about writing, chairing sessions, and publishing. And, as happens once in a while, I’ve discovered a stunningly good author: one of those authors who startle you, deeply move

One of the things I’ve been doing in the time before I start my Masters’ in September is taking a language class. We’re going to Japan for a walking holiday in less than a month, and we have time on our hands that we didn’t have when working. So each week we head over to the Community Centre. There are five of us in the class: the two of us, two Canadian men with

In the last month I’ve moved more into the world of counselling, both through preparations to study at UBC — and I’ll post more about some of the challenges I’ve faced later — and through my growing involvement in Peer Counselling at West End Senior’s Network. I’ve also had to make a choice about writing, and what forms of writing matter to me in my life. Come September, I won’t

Good news — I’ve now been accepted into my Master’s Programme starting September 2019, and I’ve also started working with my first client as a peer counsellor. For the last three weeks since I came back from Singapore, however, I’ve been reading a lot and, for the first time for many years, found myself completely immersed in novels. I’ve got Pat Barker to thank for that.  I’ve come across Barker’s writing

Something strange happened to me on my last full day in Singapore on this visit. I’d been back for two weeks, giving talks at the University and at schools as part of Words Go Round, acting as an external examiner for Singapore University of Social Sciences, attending events, and catching up with friends. Before I returned, I was concerned that I might feel disconnected: I’d as someone living a different

In January 2018, I took what I thought was a one month’s retreat from Facebook. I’d been through a lot of changes. My father had died in December 2017 after a difficult year in which I’d spent in total three months in England being with him, flying back and forth from Singapore six times; I’d still been teaching at the National University of Singapore, researching, struggling with my permanent resident

In the last few weeks I’ve read all of Nella Larsen’s fiction. This isn’t as impressive as it sounds – Charles Larson’s edited Complete Fiction collection of Larsen’s works contains only three short stories, none of which are her best work, and the two short novels Quicksand and Passing. It’s a slim volume, not much thicker in total than many literary novels. I came to Larsen by a circuitous route,