Molly Peacock

When Emily Urquhart’s firstborn dazzles the maternity ward with blindingly white hair, the child’s beauty triggers emotional, medical and family history consequences that Urquhart, with her unique credentials as folklorist and journalist, absorbs into the narrative DNA of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. Step by step she records her mystification and education as she and her husband discover what it means to have a child whose skin pigmentation and eyesight will be a challenge to live with from hour to hour for the child’s entire…

  “I’m coming with you!” V cried to Adam and Eve. “I’m taking your plunge!” And V leapt from the place she’d been born (in the crook of a branch of the Tree of Knowledge) onto the stunned couple. She planted her imprint in the animal skins they hugged around them, creating the first primitive…

When poet and painter P.K. Page (1916–2010) appeared in “full evening dress” at a diplomatic reception in Mexico City that she herself had partly engineered for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, she was 43—and had not written a poem in three years. Although poetry had been her ambition, her joy, her sustenance since she was a toddler whose mother made her drawings into little…

  When I see you slump, defeated in your chair, should I disturb you? Or should I leave you there in your cave, in your brain, your truck, lake, lair,   dive, booth, toilet seat, bar stool, bench, deep freeze- equivalent of slumping in your chair as if undressed, in your pajamas, unaware?   Though…