Welcome friends and new subscribers. 

Happy summer! This is my third newsletter, and since committing to publishing a seasonal missive, I am even more aware of how quickly the seasons pass (didn't I just send the spring newsletter?). 

If, like me, you've already had your sandals on, applied sunscreen, and thought summer is well underway, then you're living in the meteorological summer that begins June 1st and goes to the end of August.

Most people, however, still believe the official season begins with astronomical summer, the longest day of the year, marked by the solstice.

This year, astronomical summer in Edmonton officially starts June 20th at 8:42 pm (MST). It will last for 93 days, 15 hours, and 37 minutes (there is no magic anymore; everything is calculated). That's only thirteen weeks. When I was a kid, thirteen weeks sounded like a long time and summer lasted forever. Now, the seasons pass too fast. I still haven't cleaned up last fall's leaves.

What am I looking forward to this summer? The strawberries ripening in the garden. The raspberries that will soon follow. Because I was busy editing my novel and missed much of spring while away in Montreal, I neglected my garden and didn't jump to weeding. That might be a good thing. Last year, I'm pretty sure I pulled a beautiful bee balm by accident, thinking it was a creeping bellflower. This year, perhaps more plants I thought were weeds will flourish. 

I am also hoping for smoke-free skies (please please please) and look forward to the late summer smell of dill baking in the heat. 

The novel previously known as 

Dog Days of Planet Earth will likely be published under a new title. It kind of feels like renaming a child once it turns five. What name could possibly be better than the one I've been using all this time? It's an adjustment, to be sure, and since I haven't yet landed on anything that sounds right, I'll continue to call it Dog Days until further notice.

To recap: I signed the contract for Dog Days on Halloween, for an expected fall 2026 publication. I edited the accepted draft and sent a revised version to my editor at ECW Press on February 8th.

In the space between sending the new draft and waiting for it to come back with notes, I turned to another project on the go and managed to write 45,000 words in 3 weeks! I'm not sure I will ever be as productive.

On April 17th, I received notes back from my editor, and for the past eight weeks I have been doing another revision of Dog Days. 

For me, editing is an obsessive act. I walk around as if I am engaged in the world and pretend to be listening, but really I am thinking about plot, character development, transitions, and the like. Sprinkled into my obsessive thinking is a great hope that the book will be improved and an even greater dread that I will horribly embarrass myself. The fear of publication brings great clarity.

On June 10th, I sent the new and improved manuscript back to my editor. As of this writing, I am free.

The manuscript will be back in my inbox at the end of July. Until then, a pause. A beat. A moment to reconnect. The garden needs me, I have a pile of books to read that I've been looking forward to, and I will walk with friends. 

This is the sweet spot of summer. 

Since sending my spring newsletter, I was lucky

to spend almost a month in Montreal. An artist friend offered me her apartment while she was in Vancouver, so I had a beautiful place to stay. My eldest son Dash accompanied me for the first five days, and we visited with my youngest son Levi, who is a student at Concordia. 

It was Dash's first visit to Montreal, so I enjoyed showing him the McGill Campus, Old Montreal, Mount Royal, my old apartments, and many of my favourite establishments that remain in business. He wanted to see the Formula 1 track, and I'll admit it was more fun that I expected, listening to him explain the ins and outs of the Canadian Grand Prix.

The city that has my heart is also the city that  

celebrates Leonard Cohen.

As a young want-to-be-writer when I moved to Montreal at 23, language became alive in an exciting new way. My French was pretty well non-existent when I arrived. Everywhere I went, I saw words I didn't know. What is dépanneur? Boulangerie? Casse-croûte? I felt like a child again, acquiring language. A man at an ATM asked me for the time. He didn't say, "quelle heure est-il?" as my grade 10 French had instructed. Instead, he said, "c'est quoi l'heure?" I was baffled and mute. A deer in the headlights. He finally lifted his arm and tapped impatiently at his wrist.

Oh how I wanted to be able to communicate! To show I had a personality.  

After five years of living in the city and working in the service industry, I spoke enough French to get by but wouldn't call myself bilingual. On this trip, I imagined how good my French would be if I hadn't left the city. Do I still have time to become fluent?

I kept all my journals from that period and have a future project in mind that includes renting a place in Montreal for six months to a year, immersing myself in the language again, and writing about a young woman's coming of age. 

I lived on the top floor of the apartment 

pictured above, before the mural was painted, and at a time when rents in the city were still affordable (I almost wrote adorable).

It was a small two bedroom suite in the plateau, and a 20-minute walk to McGill, where I was a student. I bought my first computer while I lived there and put a desk in the study. I will never forget standing in the hallway and looking in at my OWN writing studio and thinking, "this is where it starts." 

I will also never forget working on an essay in that studio on a snowy evening in December, 1989, and hearing sirens cleave the air. So many sirens! I turned on the radio I kept tuned to a French channel, but the broadcasters were speaking too fast for me to translate. The tone was unmistakable. It was fear. Something terrible had happened. I called a friend. She told me women had been shot. Engineering students. 

I was majoring in English with a declared minor in Women's Studies. That semester, I had read Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 essay "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" and was exhilarated and depressed at the same time. Two hundred years earlier, the British philosopher and women's rights advocate had argued for gender equality and the need for women's education. Two hundred years ago!

I was young and naive. I honestly thought the struggle for gender equality was still somewhat new, for if people only understood there was a better way, they would change, wouldn't they?

It has always been dangerous to be a woman. Standing outside my apartment in April 2025, I felt an incredible fondness for my younger self, leaning towards the sun and learning so much because everything felt new.

Montreal changed my views of cities and how to live in them. I loved that I could walk out of my apartment and be immersed in activity. Clark is now a one-way street with traffic calming and a bike lane. In fact, Montreal has more bike lanes than any city in North America. When I lived there, a bike lane was a break in traffic. I approve of this change!

I am a nostalgic person. I enjoy travelling to meet myself, but it's my past self I look for, a long lost feeling or yearning that returns to me, poignant and sweet. 

Phones. Actual payphones that work!

There are roughly 2,000 payphones in Montreal. It's impossible not to notice them. It's like seeing an old mustang on the street and harkening back to a time when cars had better designs. What once was a normal sighting now stirs nostalgia.

The first working payphone was installed in Hartford, Connecticut in 1889. The story goes that William Gray, the son of Scottish immigrants, was inspired to create the payphone when his boss or neighbour (stories vary) refused to let him use their phone to call the doctor for his ailing wife. If only there was a public phone he could use!

The humble payphone became a necessity as cities grew and people began to travel. If you're of a certain age, you have made a collect call when travelling or stood in a line outside a phone booth, waiting for someone to finish their call. 

Why has Montreal retained its payphones when most other cities in Canada have not? Every metro station in the city has payphones, and there are still phone booths on the streets. It's as if, for the most part, a vandalism truce has been agreed upon. A call today costs .50 cents. Compared to the inflationary rise of costs of other things, that's not bad. 

I would like to believe the payphones continue to exist because the city administrators care about those who live with economic hardships. Not everyone carries a charged smartphone in their pocket. The infrastructure already exists, so there's no reason to get rid of them entirely. 

And in an emergency, the payphone may be the lifeline we all turn to, as its operation isn't dependent on electricity.  

I love the architecture in Montreal.

I was struck on this visit by how much the city's architecture calms my nervous system. It's a visual connection to time and history, and it's so solid. Limestone. Montreal Greystone. Rock. Marble. Brick. Cobblestones.

As a novelist who conjures structures out of letters and cuts and pastes them at whim, I wonder if I crave the solidity of a finished and well-built thing, resting on a firm foundation. 

There's such an elemental feel to buildings here and a connection to previous generations. There's also a lot of scaffolding on heritage buildings. Old things require skilled heritage restoration. Old trades are still practiced here. Stone masons. Bricklayers. There's an attention to detail and a reverence for fine craftsmanship. 

Edmonton, by contrast, is a young city. Here, it feels like there is more demolition than restoration. Here, the streetscapes change by the decade. 

The pope died when I was in Montreal. 

Montreal has a tradition of changing the colour of the lights on the cross from white to purple between the death of the sitting pope and the election of a new pope. On my final night in Montreal, I walked with Levi to the base of Jeanne-Mance Park to get this photo. The purple doesn't show well in this shot, but in person the change was evident. 

Across the Saint Lawrence River is Habitat 67,

or simply Habitat, "the utopian brutalist apartment complex." Designed by Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie, it started as his master's thesis project at McGill University in 1961, when he was twenty-four. 

Habitat was originally built as a pavilion for Expo 67, where housing was a sub-theme, and it garnered much acclaim. Safdie aimed to "reinvent the apartment building, and so created the 12-storey complex out of 354 grey-beige modules that are stacked one atop another in a pyramidal cluster to form 148 residences (there were originally 158 apartments 1967)." 

On the 50th Anniversary in 2017, Safdie told the CBC, "Every apartment is a house with a garden open to the sky, access by streets, open to the weather. It's like a house, living in the city."

Units rarely go on sale, as people are keen to live in "one of the most famous utopian manifesto buildings[s] of twentieth-century architecture." In January, 2023, a 1,368 square foot unit with two floors, a solarium, and a private terrace overlooking the river was listed for $1.3 million dollars. 

On my next trip, I plan to book one of the ninety-minute walking tours that run from May to November. They are popular for anyone interested in architecture and design and include a visit inside Safdie's four module penthouse. 

When I first saw Habitat, I knew nothing of Safdie's aim and didn't appreciate his aesthetic. Now, I'd love to see more examples of this kind of unique design in Canada's cities.

I'm new at this newsletter business. 

Thank you for reading. What would you like to see here? What questions do you have? Feel free to contact me. 

See you next season.

Until then, may great books find you.