“Do you swallow or spit?” I’m seven the first time I’m asked this by a boy around my age at a park where I would one day play soccer. My dad brings my twin sister and I to the park during the summer to play with the Supie since the friendships we make during the …
“‘You have no idea what it means to be a Southern woman…It means fixing messes that the men make. It means running the Underground Railroad right under a husband’s nose, and it means rebuilding the South after fathers and husbands and brothers started the war with their stubborn pride. The women were the ones that …
“So what kind of things did you see?” (Bervoets). Kayleigh is in debt, and her new job at Hexa as a content monitor for an unnamed social media platform has a nice paycheque that just might get her out of it. All she has to do is stare at a screen and remove offensive videos and …
“It’s hard…I’m forty-four and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up,” (Nugent 149). Sally Diamond doesn’t understand why everyone is acting like she did something wrong. Her father told her to put him out with the trash when he died, and that’s exactly what she’s did. But now the media …
“Memories are time travel, and so are regrets, hopes, and daydreams. When we die, the people we love carry us forward into it,” (Smale 295). Cassandra Penelope Dankworth knows what she likes (wearing colour-coordinated jumpsuits during the weekday, her boyfriend Will) and dislikes (her job, change). Cassandra enjoys her predictable life until one day everything goes …
I received this book from The Next Best Book Club in exchange for an honest review. “It began many years ago, in the first love of shadows. The first knowing of the body’s dark, the curve around its shape holding darkness,” (Jopp 240). Sonya Hudson’s life has been dominated by a severe phobia of cats since she was …
“Queer life experience is different; queer cultural experience is different. Why not reframe stories using existing tropes rather than cookie-cutter it instead? That’s also what ‘queering’ means: to disrupt, reframe, challenge and question how it’s always been done,” (Garside 21). I always find the popularity of Schitt’s Creek a source of pride and humour on my end. As …
“You can burn a book or a library, but to really destroy a story you have to destroy the language and its people. Or write another one,” (Barwin). After an unfortunate incident in his youth that left Motl ball-less, he has decided to go on a quest to find them and, hopefully, procreate. Except that …
“Love…is potent and powerful — it gives pleasure, meaning. But it also dominates, weakens, is a beast greedy and selfish, requiring constant sacrifice. To love is to cede our own power, an act of surrender we cannot guarantee will be returned,” (Keetch 203). Morgan of Cornwall lives a happy life with her mother, father, and …
I’m on a Wellness committee at work and last month I was tasked with writing a blog post on Toxic Positivity. We’d all been allowed to choose our own topics, and I wanted to talk about one that hides itself as a wellness/self help guide but can actually be pretty harmful when dealing with mental …
Sarah O'Connor 