I write essays and poems about friendship, memory, and the stories that shape our cultural imagination.

Poems

A lone figure walking across cracked desert clay

Salt Dream

April 2024

hot sun, earthenware ground tired and unyielding soles of my feet grate and sting on hard sandals hard clay the horizon frowns and I can taste copper from here.

scripture · memory · desire

Essays

Film photograph by Joel Faber (alt TBC)

The Grain of Memory

Imprint Magazine, 2023

Inheriting my family’s film camera is a tangible reminder that the past stays with us, and has led me to reflect on how memories are made.

Read at Imprint →

memory · time · art

Poems

Remember That One Time

The firefighters pointed and laughed standing on the crowded landing of our student apartment. The odour of burnt rice hung in the air despite my best efforts . . .

friendship · memory · play

“La fin du monde, c’est moi”

They told me the end of the world was coming, that it’d be here any day now. If I asked, ChatGPT could tell me—

machines · the ordinary

A Little Lower Than the Angels

“let’s go and see!”—as if there was anything else to say or do but their voices and choices are right there on the page next to the angels

scripture · the ordinary

I’m Glad We Had This Talk

Let’s stroll down to the corner I said heft a jug of milk from the convenience store and meander along the sidewalk cracks.

friendship · time · the ordinary

The Universe Had a Blue Period Too

In the time of creation, at first, everything was blue. The sky – well, the bit of Something that was going to be the sky – was blue.

art · play

The Triumphal Entry: Or, Piercings

from dust to dust we seek a little death a touch, a cross, a thrill

scripture · desire

Essays

Illustration by Karlo Ong for the Mike Janzen interview (alt TBC)

Sing a New Song: An Interview with Mike Janzen

Imprint Magazine, 2024

My first memory of Mike Janzen’s music comes from years ago, in a charming theatre tucked away on a Kitchener, Ontario side street. Lounging cheerfully at the grand piano, a lanky man jabbed ham-fistedly at the chords of a catchy Broadway song, his hands stuffed into a pair of oven mitts . . .

Read at Imprint →

faith · community · art

Illustration of a church window, by Wladimir Figueiredo (alt TBC)

A Mirror of Sainthood in The Curse of Chalion

Imprint Magazine, 2022

This fantasy novel delves into the nuanced relationship between faith and works, worship and will, from the perspective of a human being who must find a way to live through paradoxes.

Read at Imprint →

faith · fiction

A watercolour image of a group of people sitting together on a small picnic blanket

You Can Be Our Brother

Imprint Magazine, 2021

The model of family for Christian community has lost its saltiness, especially as we reckon with the real and hurtful divides of race and gender in our society. Built on a robust theology of sexuality, Beyond Awkward Side Hugs offers a renewing vision of strong, gendered relationships inside the church.

Read at Imprint →

friendship · community · faith

An advertising poster for The Expanse, portraying a woman in overalls being launched into space

Stories for Isolation from “The Expanse”

Imprint Magazine, 2020

“The Expanse” shows how in the cold vacuum of space, fear and selfishness drive people to hoard life-giving commodities like air and water in bare attempts to survive. However, the show insists that we have an ethical responsibility not to retreat from each other, because survival only has meaning if it’s shared.

Read at Imprint →

fiction · community

Illustration for A Friendship in Letters (alt TBC)

A Friendship in Letters

Imprint Magazine, 2019

We centre ourselves by how we choose to inhabit time. Letters form the pulse of a friendship by keeping these beats, all the more so since in a deliberate letter-writing practice, what’s written is designed to be kept.

Read at Imprint →

friendship · memory · time

Salt Dream

hot sun, earthenware ground tired and unyielding
soles of my feet grate and sting on hard sandalshard clay
the horizon frowns and I can taste copper from here.
I can’t stop running my tongue against the backs of my teeth
but they’ve been dry since the rains of creation fell
on this plain
I’ve been walking to meet her from before
she was a distant speck,
an irritant grain between sky
and
earth
and I can tell the clouds are waiting.
her hesitating feet are bare, her chin angled searing arc of her
cheekbone defiant out of her burnous.
I let my traveling breath out in a sigh
but nothing changes.
whitestaring eyesunblinkingcry
the cost of her look; matching salt tears start on my cheek
surprising me
I taste that longing for the only home we’ve ever known, she and I
and it sits in my throat like
the groan behind us means the clay has finally failed
cracked earth feet staved through the ankles, and falling
falling.
as the colossal wreck of empire must be hurtling towards us,
I step forward
and brush her salt lips with mine
– no more holy I, yet
the Gardener calls.
she deserved this. didn’t she? the command was so clear
don’t
look
back.
April 2024

Remember That One Time

The firefighters pointed and laughed standing on the crowded landing of our student apartment. The odour of burnt rice hung in the air despite my best efforts, but it was six months’ worth of silly quotes scrawled on bristol board in the hall that held their attention. I’d exhausted my shame-faced apologies to our laptop-clutching neighbours as we’d shivered on the sidewalk in the spring chill, driven out of the rundown building by unselfconscious yells from the industrial-strength fire alarm —the one thing our landlord hadn’t saved money on, apparently. After quiet descended I retrieved the pot I’d abandoned on the back porch individual grains of rice charred into ink-black inversions of food. I climbed the three flights of stairs with a scowl for the zealous alarm in the stairwell, the one that sat between our smoke-filled kitchen and the sea-fresh open air and which had decided that smoke in two places meant the apocalypse. I was glad that they’d laughed, though, even though I hadn’t heard it.
April 2026

“La fin du monde, c’est moi”

They told me the end of the world was coming, that it’d be here any day now. If I asked, ChatGPT could tell me— trajectory, telemetry, and all. Which was good, because otherwise I wouldn’t know where to look. The servers vaporized a small lake in Utah, and as the steam rose to the face of heaven, my prayers were answered. Obediently I pointed my telescope into the sky, but try as I might I couldn’t find so much as a wink or shiver in the stars to suggest a million onrushing tonnes of exotic space rock. So I binned the thing, and went upstairs to brush my teeth. As I met my eyes in the mirror, the realization hit me like a summer hailstone. What do you even say, when you meet the end of the world. “Goodnight”?
August 2025 Gemini 2.5 Pro discusses this poem (PDF) →

A Little Lower Than the Angels

“let’s go and see!”–as if there was anything else to say or do
but their voices and choices are right there on the page
next to the angels
after the sky turned from silent night to glory
their voices must have rung wrong in their ears
flattened out and plain, words spilling unthought
“let’s go and see!” like a child at the zoo
–“Mommy, the lions are out today!”–
how inane the King’s chosen audience would sound
except the Word pours himself into their poverty,
and how profound, to be moved when God moves;
not to will or to work but to witness.
their flat voices lie still on the page
“let’s go and see.” the dreams and gifts
and prophetic epiphanies are for others
I read on to see what they saw:baby in the manger
God in human form
word incarnate
their choice has to be mine too, to stop
and see this thing the Lord has made known to us
these shepherds and me.
December 2024

I’m Glad We Had This Talk

Let’s stroll down to the corner I said heft a jug of milk from the convenience store and meander along the sidewalk cracks. After, you put your feet on the dash while we bickered good-naturedly over the map and got lost en route to the beach. These days we’re working my Aeroplan card hard big kids big problems, they say, and we’re the big kids now so we pack for the talks that keep us up redeye flights to family reunions with vacant chairs, and the stewardess shrugs apologetically because the bits & bites are gone. All this time we’re spinning together in the silent dark each word another noiseless moment further around the sun the long exchange we’ll be having all our lives in the vast distance it takes to say I love you.
November 2024

The Universe Had a Blue Period Too

In the time of creation, at first, everything was blue. The sky – well, the bit of Something that was going to be the sky – was blue. The water was experimenting with being different than the sky, and hid a piece of itself a little farther from the light. This is how midnight blue was born. Part of the light that loved the idea of midnight shifted, and the sky thought, “that’s still me, but over there now.” Then there were drops of blood, too, and Nothing knew where they came from, but they would be important later. While sky-and-water hues ebbed curiously around crimson, the life in the blood was thinking about what interesting shapes the blue could become once this business of distinctions got sorted: Wings, maybe, or a heartbeat in a hand, and hope.
April 2024

The Triumphal Entry: Or, Piercings

A poem on the occasion of February 14, 2024 being both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday.

from dust to dust we seek a little death a touch, a cross, a thrill there was an arrow shot before time, arched ecstatically into the heart of things. in the middle moment, that shaft into flesh spouted a bouquet of blood and water from his side: incarnation in carnations. a sword shall pierce your heart too, grief that turns stone to flesh. unthinkable to be touched like that, by that Spirit drink deep, greedy lips and eyes blind with soot and sweat and your glimpse of Passion naked glory not obscene, no – too grand for this our wooden O fired to ash, and dust at his quickening death.
March 2024