Category: Writing

How to have your period in the woods

The Narwhal, 2025

 

How to have your period in the woods

 

Imagine this: you’re on the first day of an 80-kilometre, multi-day hiking adventure — and you’ve unexpectedly gotten your period. You haven’t packed any supplies. No, bears won’t attack you. But you are going to have to sacrifice your socks.

 

This scenario might induce anxiety in outdoor novices, but personal hygiene is simply another layer of logistics, alongside meal-planning, first aid or navigation. It’s just one that’s less talked about.

 

Read the full story.

An Ode To The Cheeseburger Dumpling

Chatelaine, 2023

 

An Ode To The Cheeseburger Dumpling

 

This recipe is a nostalgic-but-novel homage to my childhood McDonald’s treats, and to memories of watching my mom’s nimble fingers as they deftly stuffed dumplings at the kitchen table.

 

I considered the universality of the potsticker and what made it comforting: meaty, fatty and enrobed in pan-fried carbs. Though the taste and execution may differ, it had plenty in common with a Happy Meal. Why limit myself to tradition? So again, I came up with another version of my own.

 

Thus was born the cheeseburger dumpling, stuffed with ground beef, chopped onion, the high-and-low marriage of aged cheddar and Kraft Singles slices, dijon, mayo and splashes of soy sauce and rice cooking wine in a nod to its origins.

 

Read the full essay and the accompanying recipe.

Team Sets New Mississippi Speed Record

Paddling Magazine, 2023

 

Team Sets New Mississippi Speed Record

 

A team of four paddlers has unofficially set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest time to “row the length” of the Mississippi River, voyaging some 2,350 miles from source to sea in 16 days, 20 hours and 16 minutes.

 

“We’re going down the river, and it was like some demonic influence took over, and my teammates were pumping so hard to get to the end,” Miller recounted on Saturday after a few hours sleep at a hotel in Louisiana. “Of course, I’m worried we’re going to slam into the mile marker zero buoy and ruin everything because they were going too fast.”

 

Read the full story.

Read about their preparations for the record-setting effort.

Q&A: Photographing survivors of sexual assault

The Toronto Star, 2013

 

Photographing survivors of sexual assault: a Q&A with Grace Brown of Project Unbreakable

 

Grace Brown was a 19-year-old photography student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan when she began photographing survivors of sexual assault on her blog Project Unbreakable. She now travels around, photographing survivors and giving talks about the project and sexual assault awareness. Recently she was invited to photograph in London, Ont., and Calgary. Though she admits Canadians are “so nice,” the experiences she documented were anything but. “It doesn’t matter where it is — in a small town, big city, on an entirely different continent — it still happens.” This is an edited interview with Brown, who spoke to photo editor Canice Leung by phone from New York.

 

Read the full Q&A.

Investigating Harvey

Ryerson Review of Journalism, 2008

 

The fact that Harvey Cashore, senior editor for CBC’s investigative program the fifth estate, has stayed on Airbus for 13 years is unusual in a profession always eager to move onto the next story. It’s also a testament to his reputation as one of the finest investigative journalists in the country.

 

This feature has received:

  • National Magazine Award, Honourable Mention, Best Student Writer
  • Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Awards, Third Place, Consumer Magazine Article (Investigation & Analysis)

 

Excerpt available online.

My Secret Toronto: Picking berries

The Toronto Star, 2012

 

Throughout Toronto, serviceberries and mulberries are available free to those who know where to pick them.


I first ate them when a friend returned from Alberta with a sandwich bag full of the frozen gems. She called them Saskatoon berries. I’d never heard of them.


Out east, they’re known as serviceberries. They look like wild blueberries, plumper, more purple, and have woodsy seeds with an almond-like flavour. A second friend sampled some recently, between bites declaring that they tasted like “blueberries on steroids.”


After that first taste years ago, I went several summers painfully without. Then, a friend tipped me off to a whole patch next to the train tracks, probably planted by some beautiful soul who favoured the native Ontario bushes not for its fruit but for its hardiness. It’s the perfect disguise — no one would think to find them in the middle of a weedy gravel lot.


Inevitably someone will stop to inquire while I’m rooting through the leaves: “You can eat those?”

 
Read the full piece.