Fiction
Zero Hour
"A transfer student from another Catholic high school, Rose McCraig liked to talk about the sickly saints, the holy anorexics who starved themselves for God."
Published in Joyland
Face
"Pam pulls out her phone and creates new profiles for us, with fresh names. In the description, she writes: Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield are ready to play."
Published in Cosmonaut's Avenue
Awakenings
“She looks me over on my third night visit to the infirmary. Her white outfit is still half on. The cigarette in her mouth is an orange hole in her perfect face."
Published in Pithead Chapel
Good Little Animals
"Our mother called us two sides of the same coin, the moon and the sun, the rabbit and the rat."
Published in The Rumpus
Image credit: Peter Witte
Heal My Life
"Before taping, I assure the producers I have a sharp mind and excellent eyesight, strong enough to see an audience member and connect, to know who to sway."
Published in Juked
Letter to a new sun
"Remember that day cousin Steve, a sushi chef in San Francisco, accidentally chopped off the top of his thumb and they had to graft skin from his ass to cover it up, and we spent the entire summer calling him ass thumb?"
Published in Permanent Collection, The Esker Gallery
Image: Detail of Michelle Bui's Naked Excess (2022)
Essays, Interviews & Reviews
"Learning about cassava’s toxic side, I grew to appreciate its dual power—a means of survival for the Taíno people, even if that meant not living."
Published in The Walrus
"How do the things we throw away return to us in different forms? How then does art respond to what is disposable, ignored or forgotten?"
Published in Canadian Art
"The gap between cooks of colour and the mainstream is stubbornly large, but social media is ushering in a new era for Asian creators."
Published in The Walrus
"Some nights a police officer follows him silently for twenty minutes, only pulling away once my father makes the cautious signal to turn into the alleyway to his home."
Published in Maisonneuve
Community is never neutral: Placemaking in Chinatowns Across Canada
"Chinatowns have persisted not by the grace of tourists or city officials, but through a network of family associations and grassroots organizations operating in hidden spaces..."
Published in C-Magazine
Imperfect Archives: Lilian Leung and Linda Zhang
"For Leung and Zhang, creating intentionally imperfect VRs of Chinatown speaks to their larger project of moving past superficial representations, and framing the built space not for its real-estate value but for its time-worn aesthetics and fading presence.”
Published in Momus
The Line Between "Invasive" and "Native" Blurs
"Not all invasive plant species are damaging to Toronto’s ecosystems. Treating them like they are could do more harm than good."
Published in The Local
Respectability will not save you
"Fragments of Epic Memory feels hyper aware of the trap of performing for white tourist consumption, rejecting the romanticism of “mysterious islands” for a more nuanced, layered presentation. "
Published in Blackflash Expanded
Trash Medicine: The Narrators of Reality TV
"Welcome to Trash Medicine, a column where two friends and reality TV fans celebrate guilty pleasure viewing and love/hate-watching."
Published at In the Mood Magazine
Proximity and Transmutability of Disaporic Archives: An Interview with Kandis Friesen
"Working with stories of exile in my family, I think of my own work as compositions that I build from their inhabitations of exile."
Published in Public Parking
Uncertain Frontiers: Female Identity and Rural Spaces
"Can the open landscape be something beyond a source of repression and isolation for female characters in film?"
Published in LUMA Quarterly
How to Write About Your Ancestral Village
"...you tell your cousin, over steamed duck and rice, you are ready to visit the ancestors, any ancestors."
Published in Catapult