I'm working on a feature story on the zero-waste lifestyle for the Sunday Province.

I'm talking to Shia Su, aka. Wasteland Rebel; Anita Chan, who has an IG account sharing zero-waste tips and practices; Brianne Miller of Nada, which will open later this spring with what's being billed as Vancouver's first zero-waste grocery store; Lisa Papania of ( Read more... )

I went to Nieman's Notable Narratives looking for inspiration. Instead, I found this heartbreaking account of illness, grief and death, published in New York Magazine, told by a doctor whose wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. It's beautiful and sad and, I thought, captures the hope, denial and despair those with cancer and those who love them ( Read more... )

In my last post, I mentioned this recent Atlantic article I read on the benefits of learning a foreign language, which gave a few examples of foreign words and phrases absent in the English language.

There's gigil, for one, which I've always thought was super handy and had often wondered why English didn't have an equivalent for it. Same with the ( Read more... )

A couples weeks ago, I posted about writing a Sunday feature on the demolitions of original homes in Vancouver's westside.

Well, that story ran last Sunday (read here). It got more than 500 Facebook shares and plenty of reaction, via email and phone messages. Despite wanting to tear my hair out during the writing and editing process, I'm really ( Read more... )

Like most people in the western world, I've heard about Angelina Jolie's decision to get a preventative double mastectomy because she has the BRCA1 gene mutation which sharply increases her odds of getting breast cancer and ovarian cancer in the future. I learned about it mostly via Twitter headlines, which were almost universally positive and ( Read more... )

Funny how the oddest things can become your inspiration ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Last, last Friday the NNA awards were handed out in Toronto (see previous post hereAnd... Phoenix won in the special project category! I am now an award-winning journalist ( Read more... )

I wrote this entry in January, but neglected to post it.

-------

I'm a huge fan of Eat, Pray, Love. Part of it is timing. I came across Elizabeth Gilbert's book at a time when I needed it. Within the first few pages, I was already bawling my eyes out, relating to her even though our circumstances were not altogether similar ( Read more... )

Writing Good English by William Zinsser, a talk he gave incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism last August ( Read more... )