Keira McArthur

I look through my third floor windows at the same houses that were here 100 years ago, hear the train squeal over tracks laid well before that – the houses curve to flank the track as it winds its way through the east end of Hamilton. Trains to carry raw materials like cotton to the […]

The first few hours of the year 2020 are dressed with finely sifted snow. No hollering or screeching of tires, just the old trees rumbling peacefully in Gage Park. Some fireworks to the northwest begin at 11:55 and continue for fifteen minutes. I sense a breathing out in the world, like a photographer does, after […]

This surprising year. This morning’s write is populated by a surprising jumble of images – the giant blue Christmas bulbs on the giant tree at the Distillery District’s outdoor Christmas market. A market that featured a Christmas Angel who wandered through big fat snowflakes and the crowds, occasional a capella singers, a snow-covered booth selling […]

Each morning both colour and form return to the rooms I write in, despite the rain, the snow and the cloud cover. Leaves of my fig plant appear like green-stained glass in the window, my cello a rich chestnut brown. In all weathers, the sun rises and days begin. For me, each reliable day this […]

You look like a teacher, says the young waitress in the very loud bar the night the Tiger Cats lose the Grey Cup game. She looks like your neighbour’s odd tweenage daughter who dresses like her big brother, a closet spoken word somebody or maybe even closet hip hop but white and really short. I […]

The six hours I spent in the studio yesterday were a snarling, jangled mess of assertions piled on top of counter-assertions, each increasingly aggressive. At least I felt it so. Hilarious after the fact, maddening at the time. Howard Stern through the floor boards loud enough to be sitting beside me, interspersed with the high […]

Just a hint of snow. The occasional fat flake visible against the still leafy tree, in slow dance downward. I watch, mesmerized as if my back window has become a television, the floating white stuff a metaphor, a plot device in the opening credits that whisper a coming change.   There are things I am pleased […]

Why travel away from studio and project – to build career? To provoke and push my smaller self who would so prefer to work away quietly in my studio, in my cabin among the trees?  To push the known boundaries of my awareness. To become apparent to unknown others, somewhere outside my comfort zone. To […]

The taste of anxiety on my tongue over the Canadian election has been an undeniable distraction. How can there be so many voting humans in this immense and beautiful country who deny the urgency of climate change? I’ve been watching the polls, stuck in bafflement, for weeks now. EVERYONE I speak to on the street […]

My list of Canadian election complaints reads like the slow, bewildering spread of a very bad virus. I can’t and won’t publish it here, since I have the strongest feeling that vitriol just plays into the hands of the bully boys in blue and their henchmen. Instead, I will adult. Never have I been more […]

One of the life skills required of me as an artist & performer is good facility at writing my own bio, in 50 words, 100, 500. I’ve come to understand that this is important and useful to everyone concerned, since I’m the only one who knows everything about where I’ve been, how I got here, […]

…asks the Tree of my human self as I walk round and round in circles on the forest floor. Mother Mary in the sky full of all kinds of weather, what a time. I want eye contact, good humour, respect and trust, even in the absence of understanding, Willingness to move forward, together into the […]