As a six-year-old, I spent some evenings learning from my mother to write in Chinese. She began by deftly forming several Chinese characters at the head of a large copybook and explaining what they meant....
My palms burned as I held the tuning peg on my cello in a death grip, tightening it millimetre by stubborn millimetre. Would it stay put? Cautiously picking at the string, I heard a perfectly...
“I’m too fat; I’m too tall. I sing off-key and I don’t fit at all.” So runs a rhyme I made up as a seven-year-old with a crippling case of self-doubt. For several years, I...
A couple of years ago, I spent a summer tour guiding at the Parliament of Canada. Visitors young and old from across the world flocked to marvel at one of our nation’s most prized monuments,...
Quick—grab a pen and jot down five of your favourite songs to sing at church on Sunday. Now take a look at what you wrote. Do all of or most of your songs lean toward...
March 2015. I’m sitting at the back of my English 101 tutorial classroom. Alarmed brain signals careen along the labyrinths of my mind as the course instructor announces: “According to this theory, marriage is an...