Jack Kerouac would be ninety-two today (March 12th), a birthday the New Republic has celebrated with a Reconsideration originally published in December of 1972. Noting a recent change in fashion that “left Kerouac’s work inert and his legend inactive,” William Crawford Woods set out to devour the scope of the author’s “one vast book” of […]
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“Every man moves on,” says my father quietly, and I think he speaks of Santa Claus, “but there is no need to grieve. He leaves good things behind.” From Alistair Macleod’s “To Everything There is a Season“ At certain times in life, there is too much to rightly say – too much felt, experienced, too […]
Read more "On other new beginnings and other new beginnings’ ends…"
This post is part of a serialized collection of chapters composing my recently completed Master’s of Education degree at the University of Victoria. You can access the other chapters on this site here, and access a pdf of the completed paper on the University of Victoria library space here. As it is with running, so it is […]
Read more "Running, Writing & Living: to Make the Means the Ends"
I first read Narcissus and Goldmund ten years ago this February – finishing it at 11:33pm on February 16th, 2004 (the inscription in the back cover tells me). It’s likely that I was at my house on Barbara Circle, in Little Rock, an idyllic three bedroom where I spent my senior year of college. It’s possible that […]
Read more "Summer Book Project: Narcissus & Goldmund"
Part of my summer plans to reread a few formative books of my university years. It’s been ten years almost since I consciously “outgrew” Jack Kerouac’s singular influence on my young mind. Having long exhausted myself of his optimistic early work, I petered out through Desolation Angels and Big Sur as Jack faded into alcoholism […]
Read more "On dipping a toe…"
For a formative period in my youth, I was made of books and words. Half a continent from home at the end of my adolescence, I filled the blank slate of my life in Arkansas with the stories and poetry of the literary zeitgeist of people like Jack Kerouac, Jim Morrison or Douglas Coupland. Such […]
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Even as I was shifting the course of my studies to emphasize creative writing and the pursuit of a literary life, I was being propelled headlong into the likes of Jack Kerouac and Ernest Hemingway by an unwavering admiration for the stories unfolding in my favourite rock music. For me, even as I was only […]
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With a handful of our grade tens offering thoughtful reflective posts on the turning of a new year, I have been thinking the last few days about the dawn of 2010. It seems as though I have been headed here in my mind for some time. I can remember standing on the pool deck at […]
Read more "A New Year (…and my love of teaching grammar)"
ds106 Introduction from Bryan Jackson on Vimeo. It’s the end of another semester of TALONS and guitar teaching,ending – as they do – in the flourish of report cards, reference letters, applications for next year’s program, a school trip to Sun Peaks, and the recording phase of the finalists in the Write Gleneagle’s Anthem contest. […]
Read more "Something for myself, this week: Digital Storytelling 106"