My essay, “The Boyfriend-Sweater Curse,” is out!

This post is a little late, but I am happy to declare on my blog that my story, “The Boyfriend-Sweater Curse,” appears in Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life, alongside writing from twenty-seven writers in Canada, the US, and beyond.

How cool it is to hold my story in my hands, but cooler still has been reading all the other stories in the anthology, about family, culture, heritage, migration, the environment, illness, identity, loss, healing, stillness, community, resistance, and the role making stuff plays in our lives.

The other day I received a delightful message from a friend’s mum in Toronto. She had opened a copy of this book and chanced upon my story as she rode the streetcar wearing a pair of mittens I made her a decade ago. What are the odds? That put a huge smile on my face!

In truth I have picked up neither needle nor pen for quite some time, but this anthology reminded me why I knit and write to begin with: it’s my way of making sense of the world, of filling it with richness, color, and meaning and feeling connected to other people.

Thank you to Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee for including me in this special project, taking such good care of my story, and helping me to become a better writer, and to Catharine Chen, Brian Lee, and the folks at Arsenal Pulp for putting out such a cool book.

With that, dear reader, I leave you with some photos of the ill-fated boyfriend-sweater-curse sweaters from 2010-2014.

“Boyfriend sweater” #1: Enormous pockets for hoarding those tiny hard candies you get when you leave a restaurant after dinner
“Boyfriend sweater” #1: Elbow patches
“Boyfriend sweater” #2: Knit using a “recipe” from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitting Without Tears (some tears were indeed shed because the saddle shoulder made no sense to me, but I trusted the process and it worked out like magic)
“Boyfriend sweater” #3: Wow, I must have been VERY in love to put up with such a tedious stitch pattern…
“Boyfriend sweater” #3: Even the elbow patches were tedious to make

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