David Macfarlane

The Bellone went straight for the Néréide, as though to run her aboard; but just before they touched the Bellone put her helm hard down and shot by. For a moment the two frigates were yardarm to yardarm, almost touching: both broadsides crashed out together, and when the smoke …

Here’s a true story about acting. When our kids were little, we spent a spring break with friends on Captiva, an island (recently walloped by Hurricanes Helene and Milton) on the southwest coast of Florida. Our friends had two children about the same ages as ours. Every four or five houses in the neighbourhood shared a swimming…

Speaking of the Iliad . . . I first heard Bob Dylan’s album Blood on the Tracks in 1975. I was living on Sackville Street in a three-storey, comfortably old apartment building that, like a lot of comfortably old things in Toronto, is no longer there. The summer was hot and…

When people come over, things get put away. After things get put away, things get put out. Chips, usually. The process is inexorable, though what is removed from an interior space before guests arrive varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. A rowing machine and the kitty litter present their specific challenges of temporary storage in a downtown one-bedroom on the thirty-second…

I hate Scrabble. It gives me a headache. My wife, who is an avid player, knows not to ask me to draw seven tiles — mostly because I’m so bad at figuring out what to do with them. “ ‘And’? That’s the best you can do?” But I’m a good sport, and so when invited to play by friends who are unaware of my inability to think beyond one-syllable…

I am not sure when my personal habit of Woke started, though I do know it comes from a time in my life when the bathroom was not entirely my own. I’m equally uncertain why I called it Woke in the first place, though claiming that I called it anything is a bit of an…

I was not yet two when my mother took me to Newfoundland. This must have been 1953 or ’54. I’d check the date, but there’s nobody I can ask anymore. I was the first of four children, the first grandchild on my mother’s side. I was born in Hamilton, Ontario, which is where my father lived all his life and my…

What we have been, or now are, we shall not be tomorrow. — Ovid As I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, I lay in bed wondering what to wear. This was not so luxurious a pastime as it may sound. This was not lounging. Think of it as more like lying in bed and wondering what to do about becoming a…

One reason to purchase and read Marcello Di Cintio’s Driven is to show support for a beleaguered sector of the non-fiction world: the pitchless, outline-free book. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea whether a pitch or outline was involved in the creation of Driven. It just doesn’t feel that…

Conclusions about books drawn from single sentences are reckless adventures, if you ask me. Words don’t operate fully as words except in the presence of other words. The same is true of sentences, which depend on context for their resonance. It is in the variations of their echoes that nuance is established. And nuance, as it turns…