Keira McArthur

For Fran, 1936-2022.

Stories that want to be told come in through the eastern window in the morning, or sometimes down onto the roof with the rain. There’s a beautiful one that follows me everywhere I go now, about the water that washes the eastern shore on Georgian Bay and how that is like, and also not like […]

The tarps work well. Easy to pull out and put away, which is required since sometimes rain comes unexpectedly at 3am. I am quietly and ridiculously proud of this. It occurs to me that I haven’t been myself for some years now. That the strong, creative me, fully open to possibles and wonder is only […]

Let’s say in a fit of wild enthusiasm you’ve made a generous statement about the people you play music with: “Anyone can play in this band!  Come on over and jam with us!”   Word gets out because your music is fun so five new people show up to the next band rehearsal, in this […]

There’s no other way to heal, I think. I’ve read this many times.  It is lodged in my blood now, where it often sings me awake at night, sometimes until dawn.  It is in my belly too, still mostly undigestible. The difficulty lies in the difference between what my heart reads and what my head […]

In the corner of my well-collected room there is a gilded chair, with cushions of soft cedar green. I observe both chair and my pleasure in it, thinking how odd it is to have something right there in my room so finely made that the gilding is not ostentatious, but appropriate. I do not sit in […]

It’s been such a long long time since I’ve allowed myself to feel the wonder of my own buoyancy. Sing a B-flat major chord to the sun as it dips below the western horizon.  Play and snap and thunder through two sets of Charlie Glasspool’s excellent music with four excellent and complex human beings. Floating propelled on a […]

I have a little time to say some things that are important to say about my dad, now 81. There are some people who are reliable in their ‘rightness’, who – if asked a genuinely perplexing question about human complexity and what to do next – will listen, consider and then dig deeply for an […]

It is re-focus time in the studio.  I have all weekend for this – just one little gig for an hour today, then back at it. I think of studio as a map both for and of my mind.  It’s a container for schedule; a flexible structure that can be altered according to the needs […]

I stare at the handle of a red screwdriver and use my ears to see the space around me.  There are tires scribing the wet street three floors down; the clock ticks each second in counterpoint to the keys on my laptop.  Furnace just kicked in like a huge breathing thing acres wide and deep; […]

in the approach to Christmas 2014…

Snow is both light and heavy, slow and fast, visible and not. It’s a season of contrast. I live in a Canadian province that stretches from Windsor/Detroit (on a latitudinal par with Northern California) to Hudson’s Bay – a stretch between 42 and 57N; from carolinian forest to tundra – “Ontario is Canada’s second largest […]