Keira McArthur

The heat of this summer is thick like soup laced with sweat.  I’m grumpy about it.  I’m not grumpy about the work that’s happening here like a series of intense mini-explosions, each triggering the next.  I’d just rather not sweat while I’m working (fan is off when recording).  My fuse is short. Happily I have this nearby… […]

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 […]

There are four new paintings living in my studio as of last week.  The experience of watching them come to be was shared by good friends – an artist, a poet, a songwriter, a filmmaker, a composer throughout the day and evening a week ago. Here’s where they came from – a photo of my painting wall […]

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 […]

Last year I found I needed a new-to-me Macbook Pro when I poured coffee on the spacebar of my current one.  In a year of cash that trickled rather than flowed, this took some doing, but I did it, and voila – its Faster Better, Quiet, sleek and wonderful.  In January 2015 the crashing began […]

It’s easy to forget that lists are just the paper they’re written on. Sometimes they need to be gathered in a big pile, taken to a place far away from schedule, and burned. What a relief. It’s a feeling akin to sorting through boxes and boxes of things you’ve been storing in case you need […]

Unbelievably, I am reunited with my oldest love, after fourteen years. I was fifteen and vague with deep introversion when we came together.  I had no real tools other than my ears and a fierce invisible longing that Named Me, so I struggled as if blindfolded.  I didn’t know how to properly approach the impossible,  let […]

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 went subterranean twelve weeks ago, maybe more.  Came up again two days ago, I think.  I know this because I found myself gardening yesterday. This was a tunnel of a place I’ve been in, a way into and through the deep, long list entitled Impossible-but-Necessary.  In twelve weeks strong and beautiful people died, shockingly, […]

I stayed over because of the cat. He’s not mine, but I care for him over the winter while his owner’s away.  Six toes on each foot. Patti says that makes him magic. He’d been locked in the basement for four days until yesterday when I got the store owner to let me go down […]

The morning raising of the bedroom window blind reveals a bright blue pipeline stretching east-west across the backyards of our neighborhood block, turning north at my forsythia bush. I look out the front of the house onto our street and it’s filled with orange trudging men. It’s raining water and corn snow as I ask […]

“..last year the pipe to the barn froze in February and didn’t thaw again until May 15. Nothin’ I could do about it, so we hauled water…”, said the farmer beside me in the feed store. Of course then I added my story of hauling 30-60 litres per day depending on house activity, “…well over […]