Posts Tagged ‘literacy’

the ketchup sandwich

Posted: September 29, 2026 in sarah ellis
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Originally published on this site in 2017, and well due an airing.

Resilient Child as Fictional Character takes Embarrassing Ketchup Sandwich to park where it can be eaten away from bullying classmates but Editor gets involved and screws up the Story so that only Litter remains.

Bon appetit!

 

So.  The very best thing about being a fictional character is that everything you do has significance.  I see all of you non-fictional beings, busying yourselves with walking here and there and nursing your ailments and swiping your screens but none of it means anything. It doesn’t further the plot, it doesn’t make the setting crisper, it doesn’t add to the tension, it doesn’t help to build a metaphor cluster.  It’s just . . .  making a random sandwich.

For us, by contrast, all actions, all details, are intentional and important.

Let me give you an example.  See that sandwich on the bench?  It’s a ketchup sandwich.  And that ketchup sandwich is more than pulling its weight.

Let me introduce myself.   I’m the Neglected But Resilient Child.  You’ve met me before, in many guises. I may have brought you to tears.  In this particular story my hapless, overwhelmed single father has nothing to put in my school lunch sandwich but ketchup.  The ketchup sandwich is a potential source of bullying at school and, more importantly, if some adult sees it they might find out about my family situation and alert the authorities and that would be a disaster.  So, being a Resilient Child I take my lunch out to the park rather than brave the school cafeteria.

But where am I in this picture?  How come I haven’t eaten my sandwich?

So.  The worst thing about being a fictional character is the existence of editors.  Writers are fine.  We love writers.  We worship writers.  But editors?  In this case the editor thought that the Neglected But Resilient Child was a redundant character.  So out I went, doomed to hang around for another story that needs a NBRC.   However, the editor forgot to excise the sandwich!  So there it sits, an untethered detail, a sandwich that could have risen to the level of an endowed object or even the giddy heights of an objective correlative.  But no, it’s just a sandwich.  It’s not literature.  It’s just litter.

 

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Sarah Ellis  is the award-winning author of over twenty books for children and young adults, winner of the B.C. Lieutenant Governor’s Award For Literary Excellence and one of Canada’s nominees for the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Having retired as a children’s librarian and then retired from college teaching she is now writing and reading fulltime in the rain in Vancouver. Her latest children’s book is As Glenn as Can Be, illustrated by Nancy Vo and published by Groundwood Books. Her memoir, My Year in Fairyland, was published in 2026 by Stonehewer Books.  All her writing features a resilient child because, really, what else is there to write about?

www.sarahellis.ca 

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BIGGEST LITTER-ary PEEVE:

My current litter-ary pet peeve is the use of “calculus” to mean “calculation.” “Calculus”  should only be used to denote an advanced branch of mathematics OR something you would discuss with your dental hygienist, not a plan or a scheme or a strategy.

_________________________________________________ Sarah Ellis

 

no frills

Posted: July 24, 2026 in kirsten madsen
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Everyone has to go to the Metro. That’s first: get the meat. Hamburg, 1.99. Write it down, keep within. Budget. Budget.
 
You can count every penny. You can make your plans. You can have: No Frills.
 
You can make your plans and write your lists and pay your charities and find good use of a free note pad and create a future without breast cancer TM, and still
 
plums 1.29
mini wheats 2.10
milk, I mean you still need milk
 
and still
 
it’s distracting
 
the charity could sue,
on the basis of copyright infringement,
someone who proclaimed a cancer-free future
 
they own that (a boundary)
 
2.79
2.49
3.99 you’re getting wild
 
Stop counting.
cherries, watermelons, Ocean Spray!
 
lose steam. buy lemonade.


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Kirsten Madsen’s fiction has been published in The Walrus, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was runner-up for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2015, and long-listed for the CBC Non-Fiction Prize in 2020. Kirsten’s story collection, People Who Like This, will be published by Freehand Books in 2027. She lives in the Yukon on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dun First Nation and the Ta’an Kwach’an Council.

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wreckage

Posted: May 27, 2026 in lillian necakov
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From the vaults: first published on this site, July 6, 2021.

necakov

It has been weeks since the storm
river-mouth agape
what it has seen
and cannot un-see
shipwrecked sunstones
squabbling through the wreckage
light bending past the margin
naked and glorious
bone-sliver reeds
whoosh whooshing
shallow now
a small shoe
wound in the shore’s
belly a glass
eye
communion
ancient rune
shallow now
under the cloudless veil
of skin.

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Lillian Nećakov is the author many chapbooks, including, Mària (siderOxylon Press), All My Romeos (Turret House Press), The World is Beautiful (above/ground press), ¢3 Pulp (above/ground press), The Lake Contains and Emergency Room (Apt. 9 Press; shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award), as well as the full-length collections il virus (Anvil Press; shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books) and The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn). Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag (Meat for Tea Press) and Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin (Guernica Editions). She has also published in many print and online journals in Canada and the U.S. Lillian lives in Toronto.

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BIGGEST LITTER PEEVE?

My biggest litter peeve is dog poop bags. It's bad enough that there are people who do not pick up after their dogs, but, what drives me doubly crazy are those people who just leave full dog poop bags lying around or throw them in random places rather than into trash bins. 

Editor’s Note: hear hear! (And why are these bags all so gaily coloured? Is it so they look merry hanging on shrubbery?) https://blog.ontarioparks.ca/dog-poop-is-litter/

Don't leave it hanging

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rooted or rotted, depending

Posted: April 23, 2026 in judy gaudet
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From the marvellously be-littered vaults, originally published September 18, 2020.

“such a tangle of what is wrong and what is right…”

what it was: toilet paper collected against shortages
then released into the wind as an act of anti-hoarding,
plastic bags from a big grocery store shopping sent up
to roam free to protect overloaded landfills

what it will be: an unpalatable lunch for larger and then
smaller and smaller and then larger and larger animals,
or if it’s toilet paper maybe a family gathering, a joyful
return to the site of former happy days in the woods

what it is: rubbish of course, but lit and rather lovely,
kite tails caught out of the hands of inexperienced fliers,
doves only temporarily snagged and about to take flight,
their tail feathers spread in the light as they ready for takeoff

the power of it: those lovely dark intricacies and the fans
of white light, lit and fluttering among them, the oddity:
such a tangle of what is wrong and what is right commented on
by camera and sun, their take on one moment of our destruction

 

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Judy Gaudet is a poet living in Belfast PEI. Her latest collection is Another Landscape (Island Studies Press, 2026). Others are Conversation with Crows (Oberon, 2014) and Her Teeth Are Stones (Acorn, 2005). She has edited a collection of poems, 150+ Canada’s History in Poetry (Acorn 2018).

[Editor’s Note: the new collection, Another Landscape, has one of the most beautiful covers ever.]

 

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(Judy’s) Biggest Litter Peeve?

Why do people throw empty cans and bottles out of their car windows? At home they’d put them in the garbage or recycling…

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[Editor’s Note: hear hear! I’d love to see the backyards of litterers… are they chock a block with debris flung out the kitchen window?]

The Women’s Institute does amazing work, not the least is the annual island-wide, community roadside cleanup.

https://www.peiwi.ca/events-1/wi-annual-roadside-cleanup-2

 

 

 

from the butt of my heart, i adored you

Posted: March 13, 2026 in laurie d. graham
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From the litter vaults; this beauty first appeared on these pages in August, 2016.

Please re-enjoy.

graham

 

And now there’s this aftermath. Finished with
reservation. Intentions crystalline and finite.
Flattened in the feelings department.
Wet like the ground of the beer tent.
Jumped on like balloons with quarters in them.
Wet like it’s much, much too late for that angle
to dry it. Dyed the fresh ventricle red.
Proximal as if proximity’s meaningless.
Shoulders brushing, descending stairs
actually, actually done, inhabiting done,
buzzing the hope strings of done. Crumbled
once the sun rises on it. In the rhythm of heels
coming down on it. In the crunch of what’s left
in the corners of it. Staining the tongue
to the nodes of it. Waiting to light the next
smoke of it. Wet like the bus shelter floor
of it. In the grit and the groan of the wake
of it. Shoulders now riding the pine of it.
The breath, sugar, smoke, and the no of it.
Two buses pull up to dispose of it.

 

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Laurie D. Graham’s latest book of poetry is Calling It Back to Me, which will be out in spring 2026 with McClelland & Stewart. She lives in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough.

 

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LITTER PEEVE:

Litter in a lake, a creek, any body of water fills me with something deeper with sadness.

Our Story – Planet Patrol

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the future

Posted: January 20, 2026 in ronna bloom
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I remember seeing this piece of litter on a street I often used to walk. Likely escaped from a bin on garbage day and yet there it sat and how many people had walked past and what was to become of it? Thoughts that go through my mind whenever I see litter, same thoughts that initially prompted this project. The thing that will never ever, EVER stop blowing my mind is that when I send a picture, in this case of a detergent escapee, to a writer, ‘The Future’ happens.

Thanks to Ronna Bloom, who, I’m delighted to say, has included ‘The Future’ in revised form in her most recent book, In a Riptide, in which the future, as a subject, plays a beautiful role, not least in the closing poem ‘A Full Glass’ — “A few days short of New Year’s Eve, a man stands/ on the sidewalk, bundled against the dry cold./ He holds a martini glass full of brownish liquid you hope/ is hot cider made from September’s Macintosh apples/ with a bit of ginger or lemon for brightness, though the drink/ looks a lot like the slush you’re walking on./ To the future! he says to you as you pass./ To the future! you say, holding nothing.”

Enjoy this most wonderful re-post, first published here on February 7, 2020.

And oh how I would love for whoever once owned that Sunlight to see what became of it.

I saw the icons of my generation trashed, pounded, run over.

Sunlight, Madge, we were soaking in it. That box that held our kisses

was flat. Lifestyle came undone so that life was hanging on by the grate

and style underfoot. What happened and is it everywhere?

“The future is in plastics,” said the man in The Graduate and it is.

One night in the last century, I dreamt I sat on a high wall an open book

on the ground and the sea rose. Be careful the book! I called.

The water came anyway. What is precious and who cares and how much?

To each her own footwear in the apocalypse. It’s not just the litter it’s the latter.

But some people notice. Someone took these pictures.

In Australia, fire eats the houses and the vines in California.

In Venice, someone’s couch was swept into the water, someone’s tombstone.

Tourists looted the Vuitton store and swam away with the goods.

Tom Waits is not dead yet so I ask him what am I seeing?

Misery’s the river of the soul, he says. Everybody row.

The young are out mopping because there’s no school

when there’s no school. And the old, well, it doesn’t matter how tired and dazed you are

when you’re up to your knees. All you can do is wait. The tide will turn.

Sunlight. The real thing. Until the next siren. Fire and water and so on.

Sisyphus that old trooper. Sisyphus is us.

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Ronna Bloom is the author of eight books of poetry. Her work has been broadcast on CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and translated into Bangla and Chinese. Her poems also appear several times in Best Canadian Poetry and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ronna has brought poetry into health care, specifically developing the Poet-in-Residence program at Sinai Health. She has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers, musicians, and architects. Her poem, “The Future,” originally published in the litter I see project, appears in her new book In a Riptide (Brick Books 2025.) ronnabloom.com

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BIGGEST LITTER PEEVE?

RB — Junk in the water. Seeing a tide with plastic bottles, tin cans, tires and other bits of debris coming ashore just deflates me. The endlessness of the fight… I always cut the strings off masks too as I worry for the strangling of birds. 

https://ocean.org/pollution-plastics/shoreline-cleanup/

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bad rubbish [good riddance]

Posted: December 23, 2025 in christine higdon
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First published on this site November 30, 2018, I’m happy to kick off this year’s year-end/new year Redux Series with Christine Higdon’s ‘bad rubbish [good riddance]‘, in which the difficulty of breaking up, breaking a habit, or simply moving on is explored through the lens of a littered tube of mascara.

It’s this kind of magic that never fails to delight when I send out a litter pic and the response I receive is the alchemy of random photo and imagination having created beauty from something discarded, something that would otherwise be, and almost always is, overlooked.

For my own interest and as a way of sharing info, I include at the end of each Redux post, two questions I’ve asked each writer: what’s their biggest litter peeve, and to share any drop of good news they might be aware of, sites, or groups that are making a difference in cleaning up the land. Christine doesn’t disappoint… for which, many thanks.

Keep talking trash!

& happy Redux holidays to all.

It’s complicated. We’ve been in a love/hate relationship since I was sixteen. We try it on. It works for a while. Then. Well. You know. It feels like it’s over. A few months later, we’re back at it again. Two or three weeks pass. We’re doing it every morning and I’m starting to feel obligated. I find myself staring at my reflection in the mirror, questioning my sanity.

Hay fever season comes along. I can tell we’re heading for another breakup. I’m rubbing my eyes all the time and Maybelline tells me I look like a raccoon. I say, I’d like a little time to think. I go home by myself. It might be permanent this time.

But I dream weird dreams of Maybelline: Experts say: replace every two months. Two months! Aren’t these the sexiest eight dollars you’ve ever spent? I don’t think so. Are You Dreaming of Bold! Sensational! The False-Lashes Effect? Um. No. Do you understand the latest technique: sweep from the root to tip with a rotational or zig-zag motion? WTF. Rotational?

That’s the tipping point. Like it never happened, I know it’s over. Forever.

Only it’s not. Maybelline is omnipresent. I see that pink and green outfit everywhere. At the beach. In the café. Rolling down Yonge Street at two in the morning. That Maybelline is going to be around for another thousand years.

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Christine Higdon is the award-winning author of The Very Marrow of Our Bones and Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue. Another novel is in the works. She has been shortlisted and long-listed for CBC fiction and nonfiction prizes, and her short stories have been published in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, untethered, and Plenitude: Your Queer Literary Magazine. She sometimes lives in a cabin near Lunenburg, NS, and sometimes in Mimico, Ontario, where she alternately marvels at the beauty of the world or gnashes her teeth over it.

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What is your BIGGEST LITTER PEEVE?

My biggest litter peeve is cigarette butts—those seemingly small bits tossed out car windows, ground out at bus stops, swept down city storm drains, or left to litter the sidewalk outside bars and restaurants. They aren’t biodegradable! They break down into microplastics and chemicals that leach into the ground and water.

And do you have any GOOD NEWS to share ON THE LITTER FRONT?

Regarding good news on the litter front… My lovely niece, Haley, an ardent environmentalist, has recently joined the board of Mind Your Plastic. https://mindyourplastic.ca/ Among other things, the organization runs a “Circular Economy Ambassador Program” in schools nationwide. They aim to create real solutions to stop plastic pollution at the source by educating students about it and engaging them in community cleanups. Interestingly, the most collected litter item is cigarette butts! Check out their Instagram page!

https://www.instagram.com/p/DSKkVnyEb7N/?img_index=1

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croc

Posted: October 31, 2025 in sharon mccartney
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It was scary at first, and hurtful, to be
abandoned. Unmoored, unhinged,
no mate. A fear that all I have left
is entropy, microscopic decline, exhaling
my polyethylene breath, my toxins,
on the napes of my verdant companions,
but I am buoyed by the lilypads’ sibilant
there, there, our rhizomatic exchange.
Look how they embrace the cosmos!
Mired in the ebon deep of the pond, yet
they aspire to the firmament, baring
tender green palms. I trust that, with time,
I can learn from them how to be whole –
how to be not just another empty sole.

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Sharon McCartney is the author of eight books of poetry, including, most recently, Hey Trouble and Other Poems (Baseline Press, 2024), Villa Negativa (Biblioasis, 2021) and Metanoia (Biblioasis, 2016). She lives in Victoria, BC.

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BONUS… B A C K S T O R Y

I love when a writer is willing to share a glimpse into how a piece of writing came to be. When I sent this photo to Sharon as her ‘prompt’ I expected either poetry or prose in response… she chose poetry then added not only backstory, but a fabulous visual into her process.

“My first thought was poor Croc – where is your mate?! Croc looked so alone out there, floating on the lily pads but, as a loner myself, I know how fruitful solitude can be. So I decided to paint the scene, as a way to explore that. I had recently begun working with a Jungian psychoanalyst, who encouraged me to paint. (Jung was very big on all forms of creativity.) I have never painted in my life... and I have no visual art skills, clearly, but painting is interesting. It’s about letting the unconscious have a hand. What I found with this piece was that the lily pads took over. They’re the focus – the way they straddle darkness and light, feeding on both. As I painted, I found that Croc was the voice I wanted but Croc didn’t need to be in the picture. The lily pads are the way. My analysis is ongoing — I continue to paint and write and unearth..”

~ Sharon McCartney

sighted

Posted: September 27, 2025 in carolyn smart
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The plastic petal, a perfect drop of blood upon the ground.
One lens snapped, the other whole. The frame in tatters.
Is it light that blinds us? Or the knowledge of that light?
You were with me for so long, then disease stole you away.
The sight of you enough to make me wish for blindness.
Day after day of that. Enough, I said, and threw my sight
away. Like hope. Like all I’d ever wanted, lost.
The unforgiving ground.

It was on a softer ground we poured your ashes,
grey and white upon the soil. The rain dissolved them.
For months I’d watched you, nothing more than bones and fear,
I took my glasses off to wipe my face.
Perfect sparkling tears upon my cheeks.

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Carolyn Smart is the author of an award-winning memoir and seven collections of poetry, including Hooked and Careen. She is a freelance editor, founder of the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and lives in South Frontenac, Ontario. For more than three decades she was Director of Creative Writing at Queen’s University.

Her website is www.carolynsmartediting.ca

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Photo courtesy of Christine Higdon.

this is where

Posted: July 25, 2025 in christine fischer guy
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This is where we escape the bleaching whine of fluorescent lights in language class.

This is where we learn the best places to get warm coats and international money orders.

This is where we learn who’s hiring.

This is where we teach each other how to tell a knock-knock joke.

This is where we share an orange.

This is where we hatch plans for a laundromat business.

This is where we name our restaurant.

This is where we luxuriate in the tongue of our mothers.

This is where we were standing when we learned that father died in the bombing.

This is where we take a deep breath before trying to shape English sounds.

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Christine Fischer Guy is a Toronto writer and journalist. She was a 2024 VCCA fellow and is the author of The Umbrella Mender and The Instrument Must Not Matter (coming in 2026). Her short fiction has appeared in Canadian, American and British journals. She was awarded a National Magazine Award and contributes criticism and interviews to literary journals. More: https://christinefischerguy.com/

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