Letters from Rona / Sort by titles

Just when I was getting used to the welcome but startling notion of a black president who invites his opponents and their kids to watch the Superbowl at the White House, Barack Obama surprised me again. He told NBC news, "I think I screwed up." [more]

When I read the grim news about a suspected domestic homicide in a picture-book Calgary family, I immediately thought of Mary Swan's arresting and devastatingly assured first novel, The Boys in the Trees. [more]

This morning I asked myself how many people in my circle had been touched by the suicide of someone dear to them. Without even trying, I counted 12 names. [more]

Every generation of women aspires to what mom didn't have. Now it's baby boomers' turn to be told that our frantic lives didn't cut it. [more]

Sometimes I look back on my son's teenage years and wonder how we ever got through. It's not that we had a hell-raiser on our hands, just that there are so many ways for a promising, likeable, headstrong kid to fall from the precipice of adolescence. A kid like Brandon Crisp, age 15. His funeral in Barrie, Ontario, is expected to draw 1,000 mourners who loved him, searched high and low for him or simply know in their hearts that what happened to Brandon could happen to their own child. [more]

The best part of being a journalist is interviewing people who have led extraordinary lives. I look back on some of them as mentors. For instance, the vital and exuberant woman who pursued her dream despite ovarian cancer---and whose victory gave me hope as I struggled with depression, the life-threatening cancer of the soul. [more]

From a botched Toni home permanent to the risks and rewards of going gray, the story of my hair has been the story of my life. Let's face it, to be female iis to struggle with your hair. [more]

What I learned from giving my cast-off fiction and poetry to Sanctuary, a charity that befriends the the scorned and forgotten. [more]

The world does not look kindly on a woman who swaggers from bed to bed as men have always done. But to my mind, the real inequality is that a naked woman can't display her cellulite in post-coital splendour the way a naked man displays his gut. [more]

A trip is like a breakfast buffet. I want to taste everything because it looks so tempting, and because at home I can´t start my day with scrambled eggs unless I´m going to scramble them myself. So of course I overdo it. The reality is, I´ll never taste it all. [more]

My brain goes into spasm at the thought of living in China's biggest, bursting-at-the-seams metropolis, with its omnipresent cranes and pollution haze. Still, I have to admire the city's heritage of openness and the scope of its current ambitions. Here, a few memories I'll be sharing with friends back home. Shanghailights, you might say. [more]

Some of these books changed my life. Others are just so irresistibly compelling, I find myself telling every reader I know, "You've got to read this." [more]