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December 9, 2025

December 10, 2025

victor enns smiling

Victor passed away this evening, at 4:48pm. As I’m sure many of you know, Victor has lived with various forms of pain most his life. This year he came to the end of medical solutions that would keep him alive with what he would describe as “fair control” of his pain. Given a diagnosis of dementia that was advancing faster than anyone would have expected and no control for his physical pain, he made the decision to use MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying, at the Central Okanagan Hospice today. 

He leaves behind a wonderful family – his sister Marg, his kids, Alden, Theo and Bronwyn, and all of their families – and of course, Leo and I, and my family.

This isn’t an obituary – that will come later in conjunction with Marg, Alden, Theo and Bronwyn. This is just a notice to let you know he’s gone. We all loved him dearly, and it’s going to take some time to come to terms with the hole in our lives that he doesn’t fill anymore.

Incredible as this may seem, once he knew he was going to die, Victor wrote another book – his second this year. Mein Todesbuch – My Deathbook – is finished, and is in the final stages of editing, to be published in the New Year. Victor even planned its launch – April 4th, 2026, the day after his birthday, in Winnipeg – more details closer to the date!

The hospice is half a block from our home, so we rolled there with Leo. We were early, of course, so we took some photos outside. It’s hard to believe that the man with that massive smile was going inside to die. Leo and I are wandering around the condo trying to work out what to do with ourselves without him. When we know what we are going to do, we will let you know.

Michelle

NOTHING FITS

November 28, 2025

INTRODUCTION

I’m too heavy
I’m too fat
Jumping
Josephat!
Anxiety shakes
me down!
Imagine me
in a dinosaur gown!
Spent days crying
still too fat. Nothing
fits! Keep moving
not just your lips!
with a hips one
and a hips two
free arm moves
together again

I’m too heavy
I’m too fat
Jumping
Josephat!

 

November 14, 2025

CAN’T FIND MY LOVE

Hands and knees bring me down
further than I thought I could
scream you look spacious specious

you lifted your head, just in time
to be run over by stampeding buffalo
trampled you will never use your left

elbow the junction Damit
who reads traffic signs
 riding a horse

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I listen to music, read, write poetry and prose, and make videocasts, usually in collaboration with visual and media artist Murray Toews. I am a writer with disabilities, or a disabled writer, or a neurodivergent crip writer. You choose the point of entry for your reading;  there are no border guards.  The welcome mat is out. Stomp your feet and leave your shoes on. 

But remember

Always Breathe, (n n 2025) 186 page of raw, candid, memoir from my face to face meeting with a brick wall when I was 6 months old, to my narrow escape from a badly bungled methadone transition that nearly killed me. A quick sample.

I am dizzy I am raw

Still to sign a DNR

My hallucinations

stand around my bed

they breathe too,

until I’m dead.

Order Always Breathe online.

Love & Surgery (Radiant 2019)  was my  collection of words about love and loss, including my below-the-left- knee amputation, my most visible disability. “Lousy cartilage genetics,”  the surgeon’s note. Lucky for me no phantom leg pain. Disappearing cartilage makes for severe osteoarthritis. Real pain is now an everyday companion, but usually held back enough with meds and meditation, to allow for making poems, stories, jokes, aphorisms all true enough, remembering narrators are unreliable and writers make shit up. 

Afghanistan Confessions, poems in the voice of Canadian soldiers, was published in 2014, boy in 2012. Lucky Man (2005) was nominated for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year award.