Congratulations to Heather

Congratulations to my lovely niece Heather, from Ontario.

She graduated last week from Concordia University in Montreal, with a 

Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with distinction.

OVERTURES

You matured young. Spent too much time

in a basement room with sombre pulled shades, 

where your parents hid the piano like some 

old persistent wound. The world was fascinating 

even as it ignored you, dusty sunlight across 

your fingers in stroking tones. Yellow sachets 

on the windowsill in baskets, the electric orange

tabby, yawning cavernous and often. 

You knew the truth, sometimes, when it slipped 

out and lay like a fish on the top of the keys. 

Because it was always already three o’clock 

in the afternoon, you were supposed to have been

doing something else with your day. Not playing 

a sonata for the people on the street,

if only they could hear it. You knew it wasn’t

enough, it was never going to be enough.  

The look about you of someone who cares 

too much, hunched into the bars and notations

that streaked the pages. Realizing even then 

what you were doing, quietly saluting

the years as they passed.

Heather Davidson has a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University, where she won the 

2011 Irving Layton Award for Fiction. Her poetry has been accepted by  The Antigonish Review, 

Descant, and carte blanche. A short story appears this winter in The New Quarterly.

http://www.puritan-magazine.com/currentIssue.php

http://carte-blanche.org/june-dimming/

While we are waiting for Heather to write her first novel, any offers of employment can be sent to me:)

And it was interesting to note that the hostas were blooming in Montreal as of last week.  Not here,  and not this week either.