I took this picture of my father and my stepmother, Sarah Doughty, in September of 2016, on my last visit with my father in Victoria, B.C....

Without undue judgement, I admit that I'm baffled by folks who walk their dogs while wearing earbuds or headphones. When Beckett and I w...

  TBT: My first national publication was this poem in ' TEEN magazine, in December 1977, when I was fifteen. I'd written it the pr...

I remember so vividly when John Kennedy, Jr.'s George magazine launched in the fall of 1995. There was still a sense of optimism in pol...

Today is World AIDS Day. In the summer of 1992, when I was doing a summer writing workshop in Cambridge, MA, I met John Preston, an acclaime...

  One of the happiest American Thanksgivings I ever spent was in 1981. The exquisite American Church in Paris has an annual Thanksgiving din...

This Transgender Day of Remembrance, I'm struck by two cruel realities—not only that this has been the deadliest year on record for murd...

  Dad and Princey, 1971. I saw a Norwegian Elkhound in the park today, and I was unaccountably moved. They're rare in the city, and Prin...

  On this day in 1960, six-year old Ruby Bridges desegregated her school in the company of armed federal marshals, and faced a ravening mob ...

I'm thrilled to share the news of the forthcoming December publication of Insurrection by the brilliant young Seattle-based photojourna...

A cherished memory from 10 years ago tonight—signing Enter, Night , my just-published first novel, at McNally-Robinson in Winnipeg on the ni...

  On this day in 1946, beautician and entrepreneur Viola Desmond was arrested for refusing to leave the whites-only section of the Roseland ...

In advance of Remembrance Day, which is Thursday, today is Indigenous Veterans Day. Naturally, on social media, the question "Why do we...

"One evening when he’d been living with us for six weeks or so, we went to the hill brow above the park. It was a perfect late-summer p...

In the spirit of November's cold, I recently took a deep dive back into Jonathan Aycliffe's 1996 novel, The Lost . I read it when it...