Patrick Warner

I opened my computer to find emails from two people I had not heard from in years. The first was from a retired co-worker, an expert in maps, now living in Australia. She wrote to offer her sympathies on the death of my mother. I thanked her before offering my condolences in return. Some months before my mother’s…

Raised Catholic, I was indoctrinated in school with the notion of soul. The nun, in her old-style black habit, tried to give us a compelling picture. The soul, she said, was like a white sheet, and each sin was a little black mark on that whiteness. Sitting at my tiny desk, my shirt tucked into my short…

Writers are those naïfs among us who believe that language can be used to take the measure of experience. Readers demonstrate faith in them when they commit to a book or short story. The reader-writer relationship is a contract of sorts. But because the terms are not written down, there is much room in that contract for…

Given that the pandemic has significantly altered our daily lives, it is necessary to gather information on its effects on mental health and coping skills.— Statistics Canada Sometime in the spring of 2023, I received a slim brown Government of Canada envelope in the mail. My first thought was that it was an adjustment to my tax…

Fear, in the Canadian literary world, is something few people want to talk about, at least openly. When writers gather in private, however, the topic of what they can and cannot say or write in the public sphere is always simmering just under the surface. These days, they are justifiably afraid of putting a foot wrong (for a sample of the reasons…