“Smith's long-abiding belief in safeguarding rights, it appears, is complemented by a belief that politicians' interpretation of rights should trump the courts'.” Gross. #sendhelp

An important dive into the serious problems with Canada’s temporary foreign worker system, from my talented friend @marcellodicintio.bsky.social

"How strange a world... that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality... that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree." -from JAMES, Percival Everett #SundaySentence

The thing about being first-generation college was that no one we knew had any idea what the hell we were supposed to be doing there other than taking some classes and hoping they added up to a grand theory of our lives. #SundaySentence from the brilliant The Payback by Kashana Cauley.

Parallels between Trump and AI are endless. Both overpromise, underdeliver. They put people out of jobs. They lie and steal constantly. They think they know way more than they do. Both backed by techbro billionaires. Neither are any fucking good at their job. And everywhere you turn, there they are.

Druid’s Temple, Yorkshire, a folly built in 1820 under the orders of scholar William Danby. Local lore says those who try to spend the night at the temple will be driven out before daybreak. #StandingStoneSunday

Callanish this morning #StandingStoneSunday

“You can never just climb down from something,” Isla had once told her, “you like to treasure up a grudge like something you’ve birthed and fed and sent to an expensive school.” #SundaySentence from the unforgettable Private Rites by Julia Armfield. Sisters. Agh.

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. My #SundaySentence today is from The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

#SundaySentence Every day, somebody's born who's never seen The Flintstones. v @hotdogsladies https://mastodon.social/@hotdogsladies/115036672146872450

"We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening." #SundaySentence from Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust tinyurl.com/2ep46rxp

At night, I can sometimes hear a single high note, a tremble in the air like the audible hum of electricity, the braking of city buses making a noise like whale song. #SundaySentence from Defenestrate by Renee Branum. A haunting, poetic novel.

“Dessa said it amazed her to think how self-assured she had been at that point in her life—how confident she was that if she just planned a future, that that would be the future she would have.” ― Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True #sundaysentence

“Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.” ~Roberto Bolaño, ‘The Savage Detectives’ #SundaySentence

"I wanted to practice my falling, feel the earth bend beneath my arrival, convinced I would not break." #TodaysPoem #poetry From the Trees Full of Birdsong Comes Unripe Fruit by Albert Abonado (2020 @lunchticket.bsky.social) tinyurl.com/ejfm9avy

The past ten or so years’ worth of work was quietly turning its back on him. It wasn’t his anymore. It belonged to a person he used to know, or thought he’d known—once upon a time. #SundaySentence cluster from The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith. #Booksky📚💙

Author Jojo Moyes on AI.

TELL EM

"More books were stacked on the floor, like African anthills or a literary Stonehenge, as if the light through the wood slat blinds would eventually align with the volumes to reveal a fundamental truth or at least the correct time." #SundaySentence The Reluctant Poet by Blaine Newton

The scent took her back to the hot afternoons of her childhood, to the smell of fresh cane stalks being sliced open and stripped, to the sweet juices that slipped into her mouth as she chewed on the cane fiber, to the orange-blossomed shade of a ponciana tree. #SundaySentence 1/2

The bees are happy and that helps tremendously. Also featuring garden art by @paulboultbee.bsky.social affectionately known as Burnt Severed Deer Legs (it’s vegan art, calm down). #yeggarden #urbanentropy #randomphototherapy especially for my darling @stephy-gee.bsky.social

A super smart friend recently taught me that you can add this to any Google search to avoid those excessive, erroneous, unasked for AI results: -ai It works!

You know you can just not use AI, right? You can make a choice not to be part of this. Even if your job uses it, YOU don’t have to in your normal life. You don’t have to let your kids use it. You didn’t have it three years ago. You can just…be on Team Human. You can choose.

This #SundaySentence candidate has me looking at sentences differently now: "Did you know that the first five syllables of any sentence are the beginning of a Haiku?" Conversations with Cows by Blaine Newton from Rag Pickers (2025 @ucalgarypress.bsky.social) press.ucalgary.ca/books/978177...

Because family and opioids really aren’t so different. Both can make you feel great until suddenly they don’t. #sundaysentence @atriabooks.bsky.social #thefrequencyoflivingthings #nickfullergoogins

My #sundaysentence for this week is from Model Home by @riverssolomon.bsky.social "Maybe my mother is God, and that's why nothing I do pleases her." (That was the opening sentence, too; well played.)

""Have you ever wondered," she said, "what we two might have accomplished had we been rowing in the same direction all these years?"" #SundaySentence by Michael Crummey from The Adversary (2025 Knopf Canada) tinyurl.com/5d99nh4y

#SundaySentence “It is possible that if we spent more time alone in Nature our intuitive abilities - another way of gathering information about the world - would strengthen.” - Sharon Butala, The Perfection of the Morning, 1994/2004

It was on a Tuesday when the rain finally came after a long drought — the same Tuesday when he began to suspect that critical events in his life always happened in years when his age was a prime number. #SundaySentence 1/3

"I'm constantly discovering, or finally getting around to reading, books that were published years ago. Books have a much longer shelf life than publicity machines and social media would imply." @lesliegreentree.bsky.social on how we often *really* read: preview.mailerlite.io/emails/webvi...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I will take my emdash and spear it through the glowing eye of any robot who tries to claim it.

The poppies in my front yard are fabulous but honestly it’s the wee fuzzy green pod-hats littering the ground around them that truly delight me. Like Mary Tyler Moore tossing her beret on the street, just full of silly joy.

shoutout to Alex for encouraging me to do this chat with him, and helping me to lay out a lot of thoughts I hadn't yet expressed. bonus: he naturally comes up with the perfect academic metaphor

I’m excited to teach my favourite writing workshop this Saturday at the Writers Guild of Alberta conference. Registration is still open! When They Won’t Die the Way You Want Them To: Using Dark Humour to Write About Difficult Topics. writersguild.ca/wga-2025-con...

“There was an immense amount of public hunger in 2022 to forget all the lessons of the #MeToo movement, and instead fall back into the comfortable belief that sexism is a myth, women just make up stories for attention, and it's accused men who are the real victims.” So, so gross.

He hath ribbons of all the colors i’ th’ rainbow

And now for the female gaze. Through these portraits, published in her book "Emergence" in 1977, Cynthia MacAdams sought to depict women with a powerful, revolutionary spirit. A “F-you attitude,” she explained in an interview for Getty Magazine.

My husband and I celebrated one year of retirement this weekend by holding a Year in Review meeting, seeing Jackie Chan’s hilarious classic Rumble in the Bronx, and feasting on bubbly and sushi. I am 73% happier and have an overall retirement rating of 81%. Blaine is still crunching his numbers.

“So what is noticing?… It’s catching your sleeve on the thorn of the thing you notice And paying attention as you free yourself.” —Verlyn Klinkenborg, SEVERAL SHORT SENTENCES ABOUT WRITING #SundaySentence #writingcommunity

Everywhere plants Flourish among graves, Sinking their roots In all the dynasties Of the dead. - Seamus Heaney, Human Chain #SundaySentence

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be…otherwise they…come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them.” Joan Didion for my #SundaySentence & featured in this book as well. #Booksky

"They were fabulously well-to-do, and descendend from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot's Delight--obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and then money back into power again." Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut #SundaySentence

In this #SundaySentence, Douglas Adams' So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish goes philosophical: “Life... is like a grapefruit. Well, it's sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It's got pips inside, too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.”

If we listen to their poems as birds might, relieved of our preoccupation with message, we may hear the beloved music of our language on display, intensified, toyed with, subverted, stretched taut to its quivering point. #SundaySentence Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love @juliesedivy.bsky.social

A warning popped up on my phone about extreme weather just as I was filling out this #abgov survey trying to push censorship and book banning — specifically aimed at harming LGBTQ+ students. Storm answered with my response to this UCP crap. Take the survey here: your.alberta.ca/school-libra...

It simply was, had always been there, waiting for him, and he had never noticed, had walked past it all his life. #SundaySentence from The Unmothers by Leslie J. Anderson.

Fuck this, absolutely fuck this, everyone who loves audiobooks loves their favourite narrators because they are great at their jobs and interpreting the author's words and they make the experience what it is www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

This is one of the most low-stakes, utterly delightful deep dives I’ve read in ages. “The bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong.”