today is my fifty-fourth birthday,

although, between working on curating next week’s VERSeFest, working copy edits on my upcoming short story collection, On Beauty (scheduled to release in August) and a few other factors (Rose broke her right pinky recently, which meant multiple attempts to find a working x-ray machine across Ottawa’s east end), I’ve barely had any attention span for any actual birthday anythings [where was I last year?]. Enough that I couldn’t even have my usual birthday gathering at the Carleton Tavern this time around (I took too long to get around to booking, and by then, it was too late). But VERSeFest next weekend is going to be amazing. Have you seen the interviews appearing online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics to help promote such?

And you know the above poem from Robert Kroetsch, don’t you? Strange for me to consider that I am now at the age where he was then, part of his Letters to Salonika (Toronto ON: Grand Union Press, 1983) (an edition gifted by dear half-sister a couple of years back), the poem-sequence he wrote about his then-wife, Smaro Kamboureli, being away, while Smaro was away and working on her in the second person (Edmonton ON: longspoon press, 1985). Not a solo birthday, but they leave soon enough: Christine and our young ladies head to hang out with father-in-law and his wife in Boca Raton, Florida for four days, starting Sunday. I remain here, working on festival publicity and other such details. We hadn’t been to father-in-law’s condo there since 2015, attempting an annual February/March trip that we haven’t managed since Aoife was born [see my report on that 2015 trip]. Had a different timing been possible, perhaps. I shall be home.

And, regarding Kroetsch: I’m still amused at the book he wrote about Smaro being away, as Smaro wrote a book about Smaro being away. While Christine was attending her two weeks at Banff Writing Studio in January of last year, I played my version of same, writing a poem sequence via Kroetsch’s own structure of dailyness about Christine being away, which I produced last summer as a chapbook, edgeless : letters, (2023). Be aware that the book she was working to finish during that period (the same project she turned from mound of paper to manuscript during her time at Sage Hill in 2019), Toxemia (Book*hug Press), is out this fall, and already up for pre-order.

Naturally, I’ve been wearing my birthday pin for the week, picking it up off a bookshelf for daily wear this past Sunday. I take the week, after all. I think it’s that March Break holdover, unable to find the birthday acknowledgement my school-peers might have, everyone home when mine would finally come around.

Distracted enough these days, that I’ve so far been unable to even consider a potential birthday poem this year. Might this be the first year I skip? We shall see what next week brings, hoping to get a couple of afternoons in a tavern somewhere, with notebook and pen and mound of books, attempting to catch my breath a bit. Perhaps the option remains. But let’s get through the weekend. Although, really, there have been little to no poems for quite some time, focusing the past eighteen months on larger prose (fiction and non-fiction) projects; still, there were pages upon pages upon sketched-out notebook pages from our Florida jaunt last fall [see my report on such here], but none of which I’ve been (as yet) able to return to. One project prompted by the work of Laynie Browne, another prompted by the work of Barry McKinnon. I keep hoping: soon.

The young ladies this past March Break week in another Forest School day-camp [just like last year, except sans snow], although the finger Rose injured last week apparently a minor break, so Wednesday morning was a second x-ray and a splint, which she must wear for four weeks, followed by a further two weeks of tape. It means the end of those Saturday morning gymnastics classes, unfortunately (those things aren’t cheap, you know).

I work to further dismantle my home office, what I’ve been a month already working on, moving myself into the finished basements. Our young ladies have become too big to share a bedroom anymore. I’ve already moved multiple bookcases and at least fifty to sixty boxes of books out of my office either downstairs or into storage. The fact that neither child has even noticed what I’m doing yet might say something of them, but just as much the state of my office, I suppose. It would be nice to have completed this task by the time they land home. I’m not sure such might be possible, but we shall see. I only started this process on February 6^th.

Birthday, a check-in: in my note last year I mentioned an extended period of breathlessness, currently feeling I’ve been in a version of same since, what, last July? Pushing edits on my short stories, working on my genealogical creative non-fiction project, “the genealogy book” [posting excerpts to substack, naturally], the household taking turns across two weeks with flu at Christmas (every day a new cancellation of social gatherings, and a Christmas dinner at least four days late) and now my copy edits, which are actually due today. On my birthday? Come on.

Hoping once the non-fiction a bit further along or even completed I can return to the novel I began during the onset of Covid; a handful of short stories-in-progress, as well as further essays on fiction writers. At least three poetry projects begun but on hold (as I said), including one that I’ve excerpted for the tenth anniversary issue of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], which lands in another month. And don’t I have a chapbook soon with Montreal poet James Hawes’ Turret Press? And another full-length poetry title en route as well, recently accepted for most likely 2026 publication (but we aren’t talking about that yet).