by Michelle Tocher | Dec 2, 2022
I can’t believe that I’ve lived this long without discovering the books of Kathleen Raine. Kathleen, where have you been all my life? Kathleen Raine was a poet and essayist who revered the visionary imagination and felt the heartache of its loss in a materialist age....
by Michelle Tocher | Oct 28, 2022
I was taking pictures of Hallowe’en skeletons and ghosts in our neighborhood when I came upon this one specter reaching for her little ghostly child. The moment I put my camera on her, the wind picked her up, and she and her baby turned in my direction. Then a light...
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...
