by Michelle Tocher | Sep 9, 2022
September 8, 2022 — Queen Elizabeth II has died today, and I feel the urge to sit straight up at my writing desk and pen an entry in my journal that dignifies her. She was much more than a figurehead, and at the same time, that is the best description of the...
by Michelle Tocher | Aug 30, 2022
I’m sitting on a bench overlooking the sparkling sea off the western side of Cape Breton Island. It’s a deliciously quiet afternoon, a reprieve from the building project going on next door. The workmen have stopped. I hear the dull din of traffic from the highway and...
by Michelle Tocher | Mar 25, 2022
In his book, The Practice of Dream Healing, Edward Tick writes: …in our contemporary moral vacuum, public figures seem to see it as their duty to resist and deny the need for shriving. Shriving. It’s an old word, so unused and unpracticed that it has slipped out of...
by Michelle Tocher | Feb 10, 2022
In his book, Mirror rorriM, Mark Pendergrast takes us on a time-travelling tour of the looking glass, and he’s left me enthralled by the impact that mirrors have had on human societies. Pendergrast is mostly interested in the development of the mirror as a...
by Michelle Tocher | Sep 25, 2021
It’s amazing how long a picture from a fairy tale can stay with you. For years, I have had a picture in the back of my mind. A princess has been turned into a withering old woman with balding red hair and grey wrinkled skin. She’s stuck in a dusty garret in a castle...
