Painted these new gender neutral bathroom signs for the Edmonton eatery, Sugarbowl:
The true, amazing story of two runaway circus slaves in 1926 in the mountains of BC -- Bonnie & Clyde before Bonnie & Clyde existed
Parts 1 and 2 of my award-winning documentary about masculinity, family, and prison.
Album design for babyjey.bandcamp.com
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Below is a poster I made for my improv troupe's weekly show.
Some illustrations and layouts for Vancouver's Voices of the Streets magazine.
I worked on this beautiful short film: https://www.reelhouse.org/nord-stewart/beat-around-the-bush/
And designed for this food rights magazine.
A chapbook of poems and drawings. Contact if you'd like a copy.
Album design for Robyne Walters (my mom).
A magazine I designed with Vicky Wiercinski
I assistant directed this little gem:
Alternatives
(written back when Peter Mansbridge was still a thing)
With one hand on the wheel
some future version of you or me
will turn on the CBC just in time
to hear Peter Mansbridge say
"we've run out of alternatives."
Says the tipping point was some time yesterday,
pegged that the place from which
there was officially no going back
and the gap between despair and indifference
is a difference even Mansbridge can't bridge tonight
because tonight he trips on the words
no going back.
It's a phrase that starts soft
but ends with a crack,
sounds sorry, at first. but in the end lacks
the kind of shame that lays wreaths
on the graves of those we fail to save
Consider that when we're buried
our grandchildren won't be the only ones
we could have considered.
Reality cross-check:
mentality is plunder now
before you're six feet underground
and we wonder how it got to this.
And another part of us doesn't.
Another part of us knows
that it was our foot on the gas too,
that this is not an "issue,"
it's a promise within a threat
hanging by a tissue paper thread
tread light cause it is bound to tear.
No strength can bear the same stress forever.
We were born to endeavour
we were born to expire.
And it doesn't require some Giant Leap
for mankind to remind ourselves
that we walked on the fucking moon
to win a race.
Our pace has passed its terminal velocity
and, honestly, I wonder how bad it'll have to get,
how much atrocity we'll gently commit
before we can't omit our foul tendencies
anymore.
Admit that we, too,
have a hand in the score
with the other on the wheel
steering straight toward that brink
while we pretend to think
of alternatives.
(written back when Peter Mansbridge was still a thing)
With one hand on the wheel
some future version of you or me
will turn on the CBC just in time
to hear Peter Mansbridge say
"we've run out of alternatives."
Says the tipping point was some time yesterday,
pegged that the place from which
there was officially no going back
and the gap between despair and indifference
is a difference even Mansbridge can't bridge tonight
because tonight he trips on the words
no going back.
It's a phrase that starts soft
but ends with a crack,
sounds sorry, at first. but in the end lacks
the kind of shame that lays wreaths
on the graves of those we fail to save
Consider that when we're buried
our grandchildren won't be the only ones
we could have considered.
Reality cross-check:
mentality is plunder now
before you're six feet underground
and we wonder how it got to this.
And another part of us doesn't.
Another part of us knows
that it was our foot on the gas too,
that this is not an "issue,"
it's a promise within a threat
hanging by a tissue paper thread
tread light cause it is bound to tear.
No strength can bear the same stress forever.
We were born to endeavour
we were born to expire.
And it doesn't require some Giant Leap
for mankind to remind ourselves
that we walked on the fucking moon
to win a race.
Our pace has passed its terminal velocity
and, honestly, I wonder how bad it'll have to get,
how much atrocity we'll gently commit
before we can't omit our foul tendencies
anymore.
Admit that we, too,
have a hand in the score
with the other on the wheel
steering straight toward that brink
while we pretend to think
of alternatives.
Cover design for The Gateway Student Newspaper at the University of Alberta, commemorating our 103rd birthday. The heart one won "Best Layout" at that year's Canada University Press awards.
(Crossword in The Gateway, March 19th, 2014, made to accompany the crossword cover, above)
Saint David
I don’t write poems about you
because I'm afraid of doing some injustice to the memory.
Like each time I fail to see your face in my reflection.
fearing every sounding of your name
lets you go a little bit more.
I know that in some part of my brain or my bones
there is no good memory that can't be undone
like the knots of a back, relaxed
from having passed away.
The marks of every sacred year
revealed upon each vertebrae.
Our bodies are collection plates
emptied at the altar,
our spines sunbleached totem poles
bent like willow boughs,
ever reaching for that water.
Sometimes I just imagine your face
and for as I long as I can
I just hold it there,
this immaterial memory
of a memory of a picture of you
smiling
in a turtleneck
at Oma and Opa’s
Christmas '96
each follicle
each misremembered gesture
re-etched into my grey matter
and through the distorting lens of memory
I study the surface of it
like a topographical map
of all the ways it foreshadowed mine.
Time is a lock confining the gone
to photographs and journals and memory,
whole galaxies of eyes reduced to dots
on a laser-printed page
soaked in sepia
drying
reminders
of the years in between us.
My eyes write your memoir each time
the mirror asks my DNA what it remembers.
I'm still tethered to this hope that
despite my best efforts at faith
maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe heaven's been there all along,
and maybe no one remembered is ever really gone
but it all ends up sounding like a Sarah McLaughlin song
to say I'm finally learning to let go
because I don’t know
what that means.
One of the only things I think I do know
is that as far as living goes
none of us really knows what we’re doing.
We are the descendants of ghosts
locked in a past so close and so remote
that most of our memories don't go
back beyond a couple generations ago.
Patience may be a virtue
but I need it now
now when it’s pointless to wait.
Now, when the patchwork
of your half-remembered face
whispers life will always be too short.
And there's a good chance that yours or mine will be cut shorter
than either one of us would have liked or expected
so through the limits of your short-lived words and minutes
spend it connected.
Descendants of ghosts,
it may be that the only heaven we're destined for
is the one we can carve out for ourselves
from each bright blessed day and dark sacred night
as I think to myself how lucky a life
and how a wonderful a world it was already been
where I can smile at myself
just to see you again.
I don’t write poems about you
because I'm afraid of doing some injustice to the memory.
Like each time I fail to see your face in my reflection.
fearing every sounding of your name
lets you go a little bit more.
I know that in some part of my brain or my bones
there is no good memory that can't be undone
like the knots of a back, relaxed
from having passed away.
The marks of every sacred year
revealed upon each vertebrae.
Our bodies are collection plates
emptied at the altar,
our spines sunbleached totem poles
bent like willow boughs,
ever reaching for that water.
Sometimes I just imagine your face
and for as I long as I can
I just hold it there,
this immaterial memory
of a memory of a picture of you
smiling
in a turtleneck
at Oma and Opa’s
Christmas '96
each follicle
each misremembered gesture
re-etched into my grey matter
and through the distorting lens of memory
I study the surface of it
like a topographical map
of all the ways it foreshadowed mine.
Time is a lock confining the gone
to photographs and journals and memory,
whole galaxies of eyes reduced to dots
on a laser-printed page
soaked in sepia
drying
reminders
of the years in between us.
My eyes write your memoir each time
the mirror asks my DNA what it remembers.
I'm still tethered to this hope that
despite my best efforts at faith
maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe heaven's been there all along,
and maybe no one remembered is ever really gone
but it all ends up sounding like a Sarah McLaughlin song
to say I'm finally learning to let go
because I don’t know
what that means.
One of the only things I think I do know
is that as far as living goes
none of us really knows what we’re doing.
We are the descendants of ghosts
locked in a past so close and so remote
that most of our memories don't go
back beyond a couple generations ago.
Patience may be a virtue
but I need it now
now when it’s pointless to wait.
Now, when the patchwork
of your half-remembered face
whispers life will always be too short.
And there's a good chance that yours or mine will be cut shorter
than either one of us would have liked or expected
so through the limits of your short-lived words and minutes
spend it connected.
Descendants of ghosts,
it may be that the only heaven we're destined for
is the one we can carve out for ourselves
from each bright blessed day and dark sacred night
as I think to myself how lucky a life
and how a wonderful a world it was already been
where I can smile at myself
just to see you again.
Campaign posters from my failed bid for the Student's Union Presidency.
Me as BituMan, a satirical cowboy oil spill turned supervillain, at the protest against Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Pipeline.
A Call to Arms
To any of you who own (or can get your hands on) a pen,
this is a call to arms.
To take those weapons in your closing hands
and set them to the page
like the needle of a record player.
To write the songs they’ll sing in the
soft stadiums of our ears
when those saints come marching in.
This is a call to arms
to pen a wake-up alarm
that will sound just before the point where we’ve slept
so long it’s too late to wake us.
Trust the opinions you put to the page but
write them in pencil
and say them with grace.
Try losing the computer.
Knowing that in a four-second depression
of the backspace key
you can remove accountability
on account of some doubted truth
is proof of the danger of doubting
our right to write our own stories.
Or write new ones.
I am a straight white male,
a member of the most
notoriously overrepresented group of people
in the history of the world.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve ever felt truly represented,
That my life’s been fit into a celluloid rectangle.
We can’t be squeezed into two hour time frames.
The name on your passport
is only an index of you,
something to show up on call display,
some name to mail your paycheques to.
It’s not something that needs to be known at all
by those of us so close to knowing it
we could write poems about how much it suits you.
This is a call to arms.
This is not for the little people,
for the overworked, the underpaid,
the dog-tired or the bogged-down.
Because the truth is
I am underqualified to begin sentences with “the truth is.”
But I’ve got ideas,
and a few loose sheets of loose leaf left.
So this is a call for the universal right
to bear a pen.
But to write it in pencil.
To say it all
a little more gentle,
to wrap it in ribbons of lead.
To save it for whatever rainy day or waking night
finds you lit up enough
to take up arms
and write.
To any of you who own (or can get your hands on) a pen,
this is a call to arms.
To take those weapons in your closing hands
and set them to the page
like the needle of a record player.
To write the songs they’ll sing in the
soft stadiums of our ears
when those saints come marching in.
This is a call to arms
to pen a wake-up alarm
that will sound just before the point where we’ve slept
so long it’s too late to wake us.
Trust the opinions you put to the page but
write them in pencil
and say them with grace.
Try losing the computer.
Knowing that in a four-second depression
of the backspace key
you can remove accountability
on account of some doubted truth
is proof of the danger of doubting
our right to write our own stories.
Or write new ones.
I am a straight white male,
a member of the most
notoriously overrepresented group of people
in the history of the world.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve ever felt truly represented,
That my life’s been fit into a celluloid rectangle.
We can’t be squeezed into two hour time frames.
The name on your passport
is only an index of you,
something to show up on call display,
some name to mail your paycheques to.
It’s not something that needs to be known at all
by those of us so close to knowing it
we could write poems about how much it suits you.
This is a call to arms.
This is not for the little people,
for the overworked, the underpaid,
the dog-tired or the bogged-down.
Because the truth is
I am underqualified to begin sentences with “the truth is.”
But I’ve got ideas,
and a few loose sheets of loose leaf left.
So this is a call for the universal right
to bear a pen.
But to write it in pencil.
To say it all
a little more gentle,
to wrap it in ribbons of lead.
To save it for whatever rainy day or waking night
finds you lit up enough
to take up arms
and write.
Ode to a Cardboard Box
O canvas-walled vessel,
gentle bearer of fragilities,
ensheathing what wonders
and what others
could have been.
What sleeps beneath your crucifix
of packing tape
strapping ungaped mouth,
framing the shape of you,
a simplicity.
Then, at middle-age,
your corners fray
lips curl with the hairlets
ripped from sleep,
depositing soft traces
of topsoil on any that wish to cling.
Wrinkled with riverbeds,
skin reveals the wearing waged
by decades of hands,
the soft violence they play
on your drying paper membrane.
O canvas-walled vessel,
gentle bearer of fragilities,
ensheathing what wonders
and what others
could have been.
What sleeps beneath your crucifix
of packing tape
strapping ungaped mouth,
framing the shape of you,
a simplicity.
Then, at middle-age,
your corners fray
lips curl with the hairlets
ripped from sleep,
depositing soft traces
of topsoil on any that wish to cling.
Wrinkled with riverbeds,
skin reveals the wearing waged
by decades of hands,
the soft violence they play
on your drying paper membrane.
