Keira McArthur

I know people who choose to live in forests – with forests, that is, rather than with humans. I am one of these whenever I am able, though I recognize a balancing urge also, to interact in the world of people, thoughts and ideas. So, internet connection, car, art studio, city streets cloth face masks […]

It was a complex spring last year, coloured by the peaceful death of a beloved man. Dad passed in the middle of the night on the 29th, the day before I presented my Masters capstone. I heard a train whistle, Mom texted ten minutes later. The leaves must have been budding, but I wasn’t watching […]

As it turns out that if one is not well trained in endurance sewing, a good recipe for burnout is making 100 cloth face masks and driving twelve hours to deliver them in one week. My Le Mans effort was 42 masks in 24 hours, when I’d become efficient enough to make one every twenty […]

I had such a great plan, before CoVid-19 changed us. A working car-trip across Canada to Banff residency in the summer or fall (Banff is of course now closed, all programs cancelled into early fall), an artist residency in the Shetland Islands for a month, where the shore meets the land and the land calls […]

March 31, Hamilton, Ontario As I drive through the rain from there to here I see rainbow auras over everything – trees, fields, barns, mailboxes, road. It’s good to be out, to be in that odd state of stillness and movement that is distance driving. The trip north does its work – gets me out […]

Solitude is my natural state as writer and artist; I’m in this 3-year residency to do my work, so I’ve had plenty of it. Monday’s call from Trudeau made complete sense to me: Stay home. We can do this together by staying apart. Let’s help one another with the practicalities of our self isolation, and […]

The beautiful winds. They picked me up out of sleep, made my first coffee then tucked me in for the morning write in front of the eastern window. A quick scan of the news has filled me with wonder – we all are navigating this new call for quarantine, for self-care, in isolation. Museums close, […]

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 […]

There were floating blue spheres in my dream, a room with a happy baby, Sam Orr playing with a string group on a balcony outside – she saw me and waved. We’d met in the reading room first – he was looking for an artist to step into his project, to amplify it. Lovely soft […]

Somewhere after the second sip time folded in on itself. It was 7am only a moment ago when I put my second coffee down to cool.  I’ve done many things but 6.5 hours has felt like a moment. It has only become clock time again because my feet are cold. As is my second coffee. I’m […]

I feel something soft about the morning. I can see it in the pastel sky, hear it in the slow wash of tires on the wet street below. Sunday. Two crows barking. A wave of consumer propulsion towards all things pink, red and heart-shaped began last week and crested on Thursday and Friday when even the […]

This sixteen-year-old cat I foster spends her first week here under a blanket. She drinks water and sleeps. Processing, it feels like. The loss of her former foster dad, who had to move into long-term care. The four days she spent at a shelter full of a full spectrum of other cats, all negotiating and […]