"Wall of Shame" goes digital

The digital version of the current Geist magazine is now up and running. My story about the Saharawi refugee camps, titled "Wall of Shame," begins on page 53. The good people at Geist did a fantastic job with the layout. My work has never looked so pretty.

This story has turned out to be rather important one for me. It represents the first chapter of my 'Walls' project and it is the piece I worked on during my literary journalism residency at the Banff Centre in 2008. In addition, this 'Geist version' - edited for both brevity and clarity - won the 2009 Dave Greber Freelance Writer's Award.

Here is the link.

While you are electronically flipping through the magazine, look for Billeh Nickerson's McPoems. Fast food can be beautiful after all.

Hills, here and elsewhere

My office window faces north and from here I can see the edge of Calgary's Nose Hill Park. The park is a vast stretch of grassland that has avoided the encroachment of subdivisions and suburbs. A miracle in Calgary. I used to run along the trails on Nose Hill Park when I was a teenager. It is the first place I ran out of my own volition. (Before that I'd only endured the forced marches of Phys-ed class). My hill run began on the pathway behind my house and stretched up through the brown and tan suburbs, underneath busy 14th Street, and up onto the Hill. The pathway ended at a picnic table made ragged by pocket-knife graffiti. Initials added to initials framed in lopsided valentines. The mathematics of teenage lust.

Sometimes, when I was lucky, I saw a young deer at the end of the pathway. I don't know how many times this happened - in retrospect, it couldn't have been often - but I remember it very well. The morning moments with a young deer was the reward for my panting and sweat.

Other things happened on Nose Hill, of course. A parking lot on one edge of the hill, just out of sight from my office window, was called, charmingly, 'Pecker Point'. An archaeology of beer cans and condoms lays beneath the gravel bearing witness to what happened here. There were fires, too, started by careless smoking or illegal fireworks, that often blackened the hill to its edges. Sometimes we could smell the ash in the air from the St. Helena Junior High down the road.

My times on Nose Hill were decidedly more chaste. Just the morning runs and the hope of spotting deer at the picnic table.

I am writing about other hills right now: the Khasi Hills in northeastern India along the border with Bangladesh. The Khasi Hills, of course, have little in common with the dry Calgary park I can see from my window. On the Khasi Hills, moisture from the Bay of Bengal collides into the cliffs and pours down in a rage. These hills endure the world's highest annual rainfall, and Indians come in the dry season to stare over the cliffs and imagine the storms. The rains turn the Khasi Hills into jungle, but Nose Hill is only green in the weeks after a grass fire - a brief transition between the black and brown.

Instead of the white flowers that hang along the Khasi roadside, Nose Hill enjoys a brief blessing of crocus. I remember my kindergarten teacher bringing us onto the hill to see the tiny purple flowers. Mrs. Bloy told us to find a blossom and lay on the grass beside it while she told us the myth behind the Chinook wind. I cannot remember the story, but I remember my puffy winter coat and the feel of the dry grass on my face and the velvet petals of my flower. That day on the Hill remains one of my fondest childhood memories.

I mention it here because I became a father three weeks ago and I'm feeling nostalgic.

Writer-and-Wrestler-in-Residence

I've been the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary since mid-August and I've had a fabulous and productive month. From my 11th floor office I managed to complete a handful of freelance pieces for magazines and, more importantly, another chapter in my Walls project. A first draft of my Ceuta and Melilla chapter is now in the proverbial can.

I am both thrilled and startled at my productivity here. It makes me wonder why I couldn't get so much done at my office at home. (That office is now a nursery - my next 'project' is a collaboration with my wife and will be released in the next few weeks.) Perhaps I've gotten so much work done here at the University because the writing has never felt so much like a job. I get up in the morning, tuck a sandwich into a Ziplock, and head to the office. I have business cards and an office phone number. I have regular hours in which I do manuscript consultations, an online calender, and - miracles of miracles - a salary.

I already worry what will happen when this delicious gig ends in June. I hope I can keep up my momentum.

I am an alumnus of the University of Calgary and a former member with the varsity wrestling team. I stopped being a competitive wrestler when I graduated in 1996 - though some of my teammates, and certainly some opponents, might say I stopped being competitive long before that. I returned to the wrestling room for a few months in 2003 and 2004 as part of my the preparation for my book Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran. The book chronicled my travels through Iran in search of Persian poetry and traditional wrestlers. I planned on wrestling in Iran and wanted some mat-time back home to get my body fit enough that I wouldn't end up hospitalized.

Now I am back on the mat again. Since I spend most of my day on campus, and since I really miss the sport, I am taking advantage of my proximity to the old wrestling room. Last night was my first practice. It hurt.

There was something intensely satisfying about the rituals of a wrestling practice. The give of the mat beneath my boots. The warm-up stretches. Bending knees and bumping foreheads. Then, on the ground, pressing your body into to the mat to fight the strain that turns to pain before the turn. The familiar feel of ribs against wrist, of fingers on forearms. The slow soak of sweat and knee-pad stink. The brief camaraderie strangers share in combat. I was the oldest wrestler on the mat by at least 15 years, easily the slowest and most likely the weakest. Still, it felt good. Really good.

I am curious to see what effect these tri-weekly battles will have on my writing. In Poets and Pahlevans, I traveled through Iran looking for the connections between combat and creativity. Now I will do the same here on more familiar ground. I just hope I survive.

Great Home Chefs

My freelance writing career has been typically feast or famine. This September I am feasting.

In addition to the Maisonneuve piece I mentioned in my last post, and a story about Tangier in this month's Westworld Magazine, I wrote the cover story in today's Swerve Magazine. In it, I profile five great amateur chefs of Calgary and attempt to understand what motivates them to make magic in their home kitchens. The photos, by Marc Rimmer, are marvelous.

Since any discussion of great home chefs has to include someone's grandmother, I thought I might as well include my own. That's her holding the giant meatball.

The story is titled "From their kitchens with love."

A Biography of a Café

Earlier this year I had the great honour to read at a Jerusalem café-bookstore called Tmol Shilshom. (I mentioned this in a previous post.) I'd been wanting to read at the café for years, and it was a fabulous night.

Tmol Shilshom has a fascinating history. The café's opening night event in 1994 featured the beloved Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and granted the café a literary cachet. Since then, the café has become a place for authors to both read and write. Some of the world's most celebrated writers have graced the lecturn at Tmol Shilshom: Amos Oz, Yann Martel, Frank McCourt, as well as lesser scribblers such as myself. The café is a centre for Jerusalem's contemporary culture, and one of my favourite places in the world.

I wrote a 'biography' of Tmol Shilshom two years ago, and the story has finally has seen the light of print. The piece is called "Book not Bombs" and it appears in a fine Montreal magazine called Maisonneuve. You can find it on better magazine racks in Canada.

Reading about the Saharawi

Last week I 'headlined' the monthly Flywheel Reading series event at Pages Bookstore in Calgary. It was a chance for me to read from the book-in-progress and I am grateful to the Flywheel crew for inviting me to read. The reading was recorded by a local spoken-word blogger - thank you, Dale - and I've posted the audio below. My reading begins after a couple of minutes of preamble by the event host, Stephanie Davis.

The three excerpts are from my chapter about my visit to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria in February 2008. Those of you who have been following my blog for a while might remember my posts and photos from that trip. If not, you can find them here, here , and here .

By way of context, and to make a long and complicated history extremely short, the Saharawi are long-time inhabitants of the Western Sahara who fought a war of independence against the Moroccans for the territory in the 1970s and 1980s. During the course of the war, Morocco built a series of defensive walls, or berms, in the desert to repel the advance of the Saharawi forces. On the east side of these walls, on land granted by Algeria, are the Saharawi refugee camps where upwards of one hundred thousand Saharawi live. More than half of them were born in the camps and have never known the land their parent's generation continue to fight for.

I hope you enjoy the reading. Click the little green arrow below to play.

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Mightily, the Overflood

I was going through some of my old travel journals and came across this little gem. These are tasting notes for Vinium Karalahna, a wine my wife and I drank plenty of during our honeymoon on the Turkish Island of Bozcaada:

"Profound ruby red with violet tints allures to stare at it into depth and strong scents of cherry and plum flood out, mightily. At a first stir, it is a powerful overflood of mellow fruits like cherry, dewberry. wild strawberry. Thorough harmony of scents and savours. Highlight of pleasure which seduces to sip it over and over again."