Category: Brick 100

From The Linden Tree

The earliest memory I have of my father is of him riding the bicycle he used for getting all around town, even to its farthest limits, carrying a very long ladder on his shoulder. I don’t think this scene would . . .

Mortar

Nursing the coffee, cold as slush, Jimmy doubles back on the previous sentence. He slows at its end, at the question mark he just penned, at the blank space announcing what is not flowing from what he has just written. . . .

Novelistic Love

Just over a decade ago, in my late twenties, I decided to drop out of a Ph.D. program in literature at Harvard and start a job as a high-school teacher. To my family, this was more than merely another episode . . .

Cultivating Wildness

Thirty years ago, fresh out of college and working as a bookseller in charge of the store’s poetry section, I received a package from Knopf containing a handful of publicity materials highlighting its newly revivified poetry list. In that box . . .

An Interview with Ai Weiwei

A version of this conversation was broadcast on “Wachtel on the Arts” on Ideas on CBC Radio One in November 2016, produced by Sascha Hastings. Ai Weiwei has been called the most powerful artist in the world, the most . . .

Halfon, Boy

Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean You were a grape. In the beginning, Leo, during my wakeful nights, you were a grape. That’s how I imagined you because that’s how the first doctor described you at the first . . .

1-866-MRTR

Four very thin trees stand above their own reflections and hesitate, as cold girls do. She thinks of rhymes for girls do. Whirls through. Pearls anew. Use it in a sonnet? Eddy’s mother lives by a lake. It is . . .

Grave, Prince Albert

Enter off Marquis Road. Your father will tell you to slow down, even though you weren’t going that fast, even as you were already slowing down for a sign that stipulates a 10 km/h speed limit. You find him irritating—he’s . . .

Mortar

Mortar, the stuff that binds the aggregate, is itself a composite substance, and similarly composite is my foundation as a writer. I find that final phrase discomfiting for reasons I’m not altogether clear on, but in part because I suspect . . .

Brick’s Early Days

The germ of Brick was the review section of a short-lived literary magazine from London, Ontario, called Applegarth’s Folly. Joshua Applegarth was the first European settler in the London area, then the first to leave. For the magazine’s southwestern-Ontario . . .

Mortar: A Conversation

Kamila Shamsie: When did you first think you wanted to write? Gillian Slovo: I never thought I wanted to write, and I never intended to become a writer. I decided to have a go in my early twenties. . . .