Sunday, December 15, 2013

Edmonton Journal: An Estate Home

 

Photo Credit: Bruce Edwards, The Edmonton Journal
I visited Alison Rayner after one of the first major Edmonton snow storms of the season. As I drove slowly out to her 8.4 acre property, I found my tense "I-hate-winter-driving-muscles" relax despite the icy highway. There was no way NOT to marvel. I was surrounded by a fantasy winterscape- ice dripping off trees, fields full of glinting diamonds.

The Rayner home was just finished, after a 3 year building process. As we drank our tea, you could tell Alison was both relieved and giddy that the project was over. She was a generous host and thoughtful homeowner.

To see pictures of their 6000-square foot estate home, and read more about the building process, click here.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Edmonton Arts Council Grant- Hurrah

Last month I received a letter from Edmonton Arts Council with news that made me hoot, shriek, and generally scare the children. My mouth gaped like it does to those artists on the award shows, and - in my basement, surrounded by my concerned family- I rambled thanks to God, my city, my colleagues, my editors. Right, and to my family.  The feeling of euphoria has continued to buoy my days (I fear that it has also revealed to me just how starved for affirmation I have become working from home in my little freelancing bubble.)

Along with the hysterical energy has come a stabilizing feeling I can only describe as dread. I have to write a book. The Council has agreed to fund a significant portion of my salary for the next few months so I can focus on writing the first couple drafts of a manuscript about my neighborhood Alberta Avenue, Edmonton.  It will be a book of essays, rants, profiles and obituaries. It will be a book without any easy answers, and hopefully, very few glib pronouncements on the glorious, wondrous, fantabulous privilege of living where I do. It is not to be a book of urban boosterisms. It is meant to be a book about the complexities and hylarities inherent when you live in a changing community.

I will be writing a lot less articles over the next few months.  I hope to emerge from this process in May with my clothes tattered, and my soul refreshed. Wish me luck!

And, thank you Edmonton Arts Council.