All of this is information I share in my book, to be published in June 2026 (June is Brain Injury Awareness Month in Canada; it’s March in the US): No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery.
PS: Thanks for everyone for pledging to my Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for publication. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lynne-melcombe-book/no-such-thing?ref=user_menu If you weren’t able to pledge while the main campaign was ongoing, it’s not too late. I still need funds to promote the book once it’s published, and “late pledges” are possible until April 1.
On May 29, 2016, I tried to end my life. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried, but it was the closest I came to succeeding. My reasons are not the point here. The point is that, during my long, slow climb back to mental health, I learned that I needed to stop living my life in the past and the future. If I was going to stay alive, I needed to live my life one moment at a time.
The therapist I found to help me through that period of my life is trained in a well-researched and fully secular practice of meditation called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). One of the techniques she taught me for pulling myself out of depression and anxiety, though not meditation, is a simple practice, of going through the five senses, one at a time, and noticing five things I see, five things I feel, five things I hear, taste, and smell. It’s meant to break the cycle of rumination over past experiences one finds depressing and anxiety over future experiences.
It’s meant to bring the person back to the physical world around them in each moment.
This is what I thought about as I read Grant’s book, as she explained her process of minding her senses, learning to wander, learning to let go, loving what you do, and learning to appreciate and to connect. Here’s how Grant describes her experience of getting reacquainted with her five senses:
I entered the reading room. Morning light streamed through tall windows. The walls were filled from floor to ceiling with books, and a dozen or more freestanding shelves took up the remaining space. To the left of the entrance door were counters with computer stations. Above, a bulletin board was covered in notices, local advertisements and sign-up sheets for local classes and lectures. A couple of round wooden tables filled the rest of the space. People sat here and there, reading books and newspapers. I went to an empty table, quietly unpacked my things, sat down and closed my eyes.
I could hear the occasional rustling of a newspaper and the soft hum of the heating system.
I took a deep breath through my nose. I detected a faint floral hint from the hand lotion I’d applied before leaving my room. Lately, I’d switched my allegiance from lavender to rose. Maybe it was the influence of England. After all, what was more English than a rose?
I settled into place, connected my laptop, opened the internet and started my search. My first question was simple: why, when I immersed myself in the present, did I feel so much better? By pulling my attention to the five senses, I gave myself no choice but to focus on what was happening in the moment. I was not stuck in the past or worried about the future. Yesterday, I had learned first-hand that the senses held the key that opened the gate to my present experience. They admitted me to the garden of earthly delights—sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical feelings—right here, right now. By being in the body, I could calm the mind and soothe the spirit. It felt neither self-indulgent nor hedonistic. It felt beautifully, blissfully ordinary.
When I was recovering after my suicide attempt, I read Full Catastrophe Living, a 650-page volume by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a world-renowned mindfulness researcher and originator/teacher of MBSR. I took the MBSR course twice, and underwent a one-year program called Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.
If I ever encounter someone going through a rough time, I might tell them, instead, to buy Grant’s 200-page A Cure for Heartache and read it slowly, mindfully, savouring each syllable, and then maybe go back and read it again. Because everything I learned in that difficult time is what I learned all over again from this meaningful little book.
Years ago, I attended a one-day workshop on racism. At one point, the workshop leader asked one person in the group to sit on the hotseat to learn about the experience of racism from a first-person perspective by talking about a time they’d experienced an “ism.” I volunteered.
I sat in the chair, closed my eyes, and—guided by his questions—recounted my experience with a long-ago boyfriend and his abiding misogyny. As the workshop leader led me slowly through a specific memory, I dove deeper and deeper into an incident that I needed thirty-five years to understand was rape.
Before I opened my eyes, after I had dissolved into heaving sobs, the leader brought me gently back to the present and translated my pain into a new level of awareness of the parallels—NOT the sameness, but the similarities—between all kinds of “isms” and “phobias,” in this case racism and sexism.
Not a day has gone by in the thirty-some years since then that I haven’t reflected on what I learned that day. I can’t ever know the pain of the constant “othering” that must constantly wear down the resolve of the strongest of individuals. I can only try to learn more, to understand more about racism when life presents me with an opportunity.
Gloria Blizzard’s (class of 2021) book of lyric essays, Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2024) presents such an opportunity. I’d like to say that once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down, but that’s not true. Rather, after I’d read almost every essay, I needed to put the book down and take some time to process and integrate what I’d just read. Like this passage, from an essay called “The Mathematics of Rage.”
Sitting at Northwood on Bloor Street West over a mocktail and beer, Gillian asks, “Did you notice suddenly becoming invisible to men around age forty?”
Me: “Nope.”
“Yeah, but you are beautiful.”
“So are you.”
“But I noted it and it was sudden.” Gillian is smart, gorgeous, accomplished, white, a writer, and one of my mentors during my MFA.
Good for her, I thought, as mostly I found myself far too visible. Still. A constant imposition or a weight lay upon me. Except, that is, when I wanted medical or legal care or psychological or academic care for me or my child—then I became eminently less visible, categorically unseen, a giant perplexity for someone who looked at me blankly, or with sexually laced assumptions or suspicion.
This is not unlike my trip to a walk-in medical clinic for extreme rib pain that had me hobbled. After an hour wait, I was sent to an examining room. The doctor entered. I sat twisted in pain and pointing at my chest. His face turned to scorn, the absence of concern. “Get out,” he said. “Just, just go,” he said, waving me and my pain away.
It happens to women of all ages and races, this shifting state of value and visibility. Gillian noted herself as suddenly unseen at a certain age. My Blackness, however, ensures that eyes remain on me. This disappears, however, when I am due for a promotion or in need of care. Then I am fucking invisible.
I did not respond in real time at the clinic. My thoughts were blunted by pain, shock, and confusion. This medical assault surprised and shocked me, and yet it did not surprise me at all. The doctor assumed I was there for opiates. …
The doctor got paid by our state for that visit. For my pain-infused walk to and presence in that clinic, I got nothing. The next day, after another pain-filled night, I took more time off from my job and visited a naturopath who was also a chiropractor. I paid for this visit myself. Upon a physical examination that took approximately two minutes, he determined I had a dislocated rib. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “This is a body response. Have you been under extreme stress?”
“You have no idea,” I responded.
That was exactly the lesson I learned at that workshop all those years ago: I can try my best to understand every day. And I do try. Every day. It’s literally the least I can do. But no matter what I do or how hard I try, I will never really have any idea.
That’s the reality that all of us need to integrate into our lives and reflect on every day for the rest of our lives. Adding this excellent book to the library of books and movies I continue to accumulate—not just in the years since that workshop, not just in the months after George Floyd’s murder, not just during Black History Month, but every month of every year I continue to be alive—is one small way to continue trying.
It’s not enough, of course. I doubt anything will be enough in my lifetime. But to paraphrase a very wise woman I once knew: How do you start fighting racism? You just start.
I’ve been mostly absent for a couple of months, first because I was on a much-needed vacation, and since then because I’ve been devoting my time to a book project of my own.
I undertook the MFA program so I could learn to write, not just any book, but this book.
This book recounts my experience of and research related to a “mild” TBI (concussion) that I had over 20 years ago and from which I’ve never fully recovered.
My experience taught me that there is “no such thing” as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. That’s why I’ve called my book No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery.
Most people recover from concussions in a few days—weeks at most.
But up to 30% of people don’t. Some go on having symptoms for months, even years.
I’ve never fully recovered from my injury. I felt a need to write a book about it for a few reasons.
Brain injury is very isolating. The injury itself—pain, brain fog, memory loss—can make it hard to communicate.
Many people—doctors, lawyers, co-workers, friends, family—don’t believe you. That makes the pain and isolation worse.
The stigma against people who pursue legal measures based on ongoing misperceptions about brain injury add stress and emotional trauma that complicate a person’s ability to recover.
There wasn’t much to support people going through this experience twenty years ago. Anyone going through it now deserves better.
At the time of my injury, I often felt like I was going crazy.
Doctors kept telling me I should be better. Lawyers put my life under a microscope. Family, friends, and coworkers acted—and sometimes said—I was just looking for attention and I needed to get over it.
But as years went by and social media exploded, I began hearing other people’s stories of not-so-mild traumatic brain injury. I began keeping abreast of current research that supported what they were going through.
Gradually, I stopped questioning my own perceptions.
When I wrote my book, I was writing the book I needed at the time.
I wrote it for the people who need it now, for those who love them, and for those who want to better understand this underestimated injury.
I finished my book a couple of years ago and, full of hope, I started looking for a publisher.
Every one of them responded the same way: timely topic, great story, well written, but I lacked enough of an audience to justify their investment in publishing it.
One of the things I learned in the MFA program was the necessity of building an audience while writing my book.
But while I was writing, I was coping with a divorce, navigating health issues, and rebuilding a freelance writing and editing business.
I was also managing the symptoms of my injury every day.
I lacked the ability to do it all.
At first, when I realized that no “real” publishers wanted my book, I felt like I’d failed.
But I also realized that if I gave up and left my book sitting in a virtual drawer, that would feel like failure too.
A hybrid publisher retains the quality controls conventional publishers rely on but with a requirement that authors cover production costs, as they would in self-publishing.
Iguana takes hybrid publishing a step further by asking their authors to crowdfund production costs. This ensures costs are covered and allows authors to test the market and build an audience for their book.
Iguana recommended Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform designed specifically for creators.
As I started building my Kickstarter campaign, an interesting thing happened.
I stopped feeling like I’d failed.
I realized that no matter how I publish my book, it will succeed based on same things as any other book—my research, my writing, and my promotional efforts.
That realization has renewed my confidence in my abilities, injected my efforts with energy, and restored my faith in the book I’ve written.
That’s where you come in.
I need your support to raise the $9,000 required to fund the production process—copy editing, layout, distribution. And I’m asking you to pledge whatever you can to help me get there.
Please go to my Kickstarter campaign page and learn more about why I feel my book is timely, important, and necessary.
Then consider backing my project with a pledge in any amount you can manage.
What’s in it for you?
If you pledge $10 or more, you’ll receive a reward tailored to the size of your contribution—an e-book, a signed paperback with No Such Thing bookmarks, or a book club special for buying in bulk.
If you pledge less than $10—even only $1—I’ll give you a shout-out on social media and add your name to the acknowledgements in my book.
If I don’t reach my $9,000 goal by March 15, my campaign will end and Kickstarter won’t collect any pledges.
You have nothing to lose.
What should you do next?
Well, you can click away to another page, if you want.
Or you can go to my campaign page, read more about my book, and consider making a pledge.
If you think my project is worth backing, click the button for a reminder when my campaign goes live on February 16. Then, if you still feel so inclined, pledge whatever you feel is right.
If you change your mind before my campaign ends, you can change or withdraw your pledge. No questions, no obligations.
Having had three children of my own, I cannot imagine deciding that that only way to give at least one of them a chance to survive would be to abandon her at the side of a road and hope someone would save her. But that was exactly what Esther Silber did with her eight-month-old daughter, Rivka, right before she, her husband, and her older children were herded into train cars to join the ranks of the six million Jews whose lives and memories the Nazis attempted to erase from history in World War II.
Miraculously, Esther’s baby girl survived. A Polish couple happened to be walking along the road where the baby had been abandoned. Following the sound of her cries, they found her, tightly swaddled, a note pinned to her blanket: Maria, November 25, 1941 (Esther had changed her name to something less Jewish-sounding). Approaching their forties, they’d always wanted but never conceived a child. So, despite the deadly risks to themselves for rescuing for what they knew was a Jewish infant, they took her home to raise as their own.
From there, the story of Rivka’s/Maria’s life and her search, as an adult, to find clues to her origins or biological family only becomes more incredible. Yet it’s not only a true story; it’s also not entirely unique. Even seventy-five years after the war, Holocaust survivors continue to search for family members they believe to have been murdered but hope, on the slimmest of chances, might have lived. It’s amazing how many of them continue to find each other.
Amy Fish’s (class of 2023) book, One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity (Goose Lane Editions, 2025) boasts a large cast of characters but just one real hero; a multitude of surprising plot twists and reversals of fortune; and tantalizing leads that compel the reader to keep turning pages but end up going nowhere. In her telling of a tale that could easily have been bogged down by extensive details, Fish endows this remarkable true story with all the hallmarks of a great British mystery.
It had been three years and two months since Maria first posted her question on JewishGen. It had been a year and eight months since Sarah told Stanley about the case. And it had been one year, eighteen weeks, and five days since Rabbi Kirchevsky packed Maria’s DNA packed Maria’s DNA in his suitcase and flew with it to New York. And finally, finally, after thousands of names of spreadsheets, hundreds of phone calls to complete strangers, and dozens of potential matches that turned out to be dead ends, they knew where to look.
Well, sort of. Sarah knew she could look at the Freund family in Krosno. But Sarah also logged onto Geni, a worldwide genealogical database, and ran a search for Freunds. She found a gaggle of them in Jaslo, a neighbouring town less than thirty kilometres from Krasno. Sarah promptly emailed Stanley, and Stanley immediately got to work. “With the kindness and cooperation of the Jaslo Urzad Stanu Cywilnego (Civil Registry Offices),” Stanley explained, “in combination with Ora’s input, it was possible to flesh out the entire family.”
Fish gives the bulk of the credit for the incredible research on this story to Stanley Diamond. A successful businessman, Diamond started a genealogical database when he retired twenty-some years earlier. His goal, at the time, was to warn Jewish relatives, close and distant, that the recessive gene for a serious genetic illness called beta thalassemia runs in the families of many Ashkenazi Jews, including theirs; they should have themselves tested before conceiving a child. But over the years, the work that became Stanley’s second career evolved. When Maria’s nearly impossible search came to his attention, he dug into it with fervour.
But not all the credit goes to Diamond. As amazing as Maria’s story is, the details of a years-long genealogical investigation could become tedious in the wrong hands. (This is a challenge of creative nonfiction writing that the UKing’s MFA program in CNF teaches students to manage.) Fish seamlessly weaves in personal background of the key players in the search, the history of the Jewish people from millennia past to horrific details of the Holocaust, and facts about her own faith and culture as a Jew.
An oft-related quote from the Talmud tells the faithful that: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” In an act of courage and faith that I cannot fathom, Esther Zilber saved Maria’s life by leaving her on a roadside. Vasili and Antonina Markovitch saved Maria’s life by picking up the abandoned infant and, at no small risk to themselves, raising her as their own. Stanley Diamond and the anonymous “Sarah” may not save lives, per se, but they enrich them by reuniting severed families in ways that make them feel whole again.
Finally, we can never know how many lives Amy Fish might be enriching, or even saving, by showing them that, even in a world apparently gone mad, there is still light. There is still hope.
Several years ago, I coached a client through a few drafts of a memoir. About twenty years earlier, he and his wife, always up for travel and adventure, had tried long-distance hiking. It had been disastrous: they’d done no training, they were wearing new ill-fitting boots, and their six-year-old son was with them. They abandoned their hike about halfway through.
A few years later, both approaching milestone birthdays, they were mulling over how to celebrate and decided to give hiking another try, this time doing lots of research and physical training, and leaving their children with family. It went so well and was so fulfilling that they made it an annual tradition.
At first, they did a few hikes in England, a hiking-friendly country. Then they decided to tackle something bigger: El Camino de Santiago, a trail for religious pilgrims that starts in the French Pyrenees and makes its way across northern Spain and Portugal to its terminus in Galicia, on the Atlantic Coast. Around 800 kilometres long, it takes thirty to forty days to complete; they broke it into three segments, which they completed over three years.
I’ve been intrigued with the idea of hiking the Camino ever since. So, Maryanna Gabriel’s (class of 2022) book, Walking the Camino: On Earth as It Is (Pottersfield Press, 2023) immediately leapt out at me. A bit adrift after the unexpected death of her mother, Gabriel was seeking a way to deal with her grief and reconnect with her inner self. She attended a talk about walking the Camino, where a stranger with whom she exchanged a few brief words leaned in and said, “Walk the Camino. You’ll know why.”
Her travel memoir, Walking the Camino, is exactly what the title promises: a chronicle of Gabriel’s experience, from that moment at the talk, through months of preparation, and from the beginning of the famed spiritual route in the Pyrenees Mountains to its end at the Atlantic Ocean. Just a few days into the hike, she writes about a moment when she’s resting with some fellow travellers, talking about the ineffable quality of the Camino.
I lifted my head at a pause. Something unusual was happening. I was trying to understand a rushing sensation from a great depth. I examined Bjørn intently.
“May I have your permission to pray,” he asked. His blue eyes twinkled.
It was getting late, customers had departed, and the owner had disappeared. We were alone. Kris and I glanced at each other and nodded.
Intonations of sound emerged. Rumbles that seemed ancient and long forgotten. Vowels tumbled, then halted, and gathered momentum. Bjørn tossed back his head and boomed in a crescendo of resounding benediction, a cascading river that encircled us then rolled upwards into the starlight. The sound was unlike any language I had ever heard, Latin but not Latin, Hebrew but not Hebrew, Spanish but not Spanish, but seemed to contain elements of these languages. The effect was musical and the intent benevolent. It uplifted the heart and I was filled with the wonder of it. Of babies, and cinnamon toast, dragonflies on mountain lakes, of angels blowing their horns, of kisses and custard and roses, a flower dappled in sunlight and pollen and dewdrops, the laughter of children, a first candy cane, of cookies and fire crackle, the crunch of snow, the crinkle of presents, of soft knitted socks, and the snuggle of Sunday mornings. A profound peace coursed through me, as though I had been enormously blessed. Was it from this world or beyond?
The reverberations slowly died away. Had Bjørn been speaking in tongues? I roused myself. I had to ask.
“Does this happen often?”
He mumbled and looked at me shyly from beneath shaggy brows. “Sometimes.”
Beautiful, visual, lyrical writing.
Anyone I’ve spoken to who’s done the Camino comes back with similar stories of wonder and awe and peace. The writer I spoke of earlier was at a complete loss to express his feelings as he and his wife drew close to and finally reached the end point, the finish line they’d been striving toward for three years.
I don’t know if I’ll ever walk the Camino. It seems huge, daunting. But if the kind of experience Gabriel and my writing client describe awaits along the route or at the end, maybe, just maybe, I should do it.
Like many Baby Boomers, I grew up in the shadow of World War II. My father was a bomber pilot whose plane was shot down days after D-Day; he was MIA (missing in action) and a POW (prisoner of war) in a hospital in German-occupied France for three months, where the doctors did such a terrible job of setting his leg that they left him with a permanent disability. My mother was a nurse who, despite numerous traumatizing experiences, survived The Great Depression, graduated from nursing school, and worked in Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Hospital when it was a veterans’ hospital. That’s where they met, he in a hospital bed after surgeons rebroke and reset his leg, she a nurse on his ward over the months while his leg healed. I know this because my mother occasionally spoke of it; my father never did.
Silence was the case for Marsha Faubert’s mother- and father-in-law, Wanda and Casey. It was as if their lives only began when they set foot in Canada—and maybe, in a way, they did. After they’d both died, while clearing out their house to sell it, Faubert (class of 2018) came across a tin of old photos and bits of memorabilia. She’d always been curious but never felt she should push them to talk, but now she began using those bits and pieces as starting points to explore and understand what happened to them.
The result is Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal(Goose Lane Editions, 2023). This well-researched and compassionately written story describes aspects of World War II that I never learned about in school, including the cruelties inflicted by the Nazis against Polish people—and presumably other Slavs, a large ethnic and linguistic group that encompasses much of Eastern Europe, whom the Nazis considered subhuman. (Although their primary target was Jews, the Nazis persecuted and imprisoned millions more people: Roma, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people—anyone who didn’t fit their idea of a “master race.”) Like many other Poles, Wanda was taken from her home and deported to Germany, where she was forced into slave labour in factories. Others, like Casey, who lived in a part of Poland that was under Soviet control, were shipped off to gulags in Siberia, from which they were “liberated” two years later, only to be conscripted by the Soviets to fight the Nazis.
Adding insult to injury, their introduction to Canada involved recruitment into two years of indentured servitude, living in restrictive conditions and working for minimum wage in factories (Wanda) and on farms (Casey). No doubt, conditions in Canada were better than under the Nazis or the Soviets, but as one Canadian official said (to deaf ears), these people, who had somehow survived six years of hell, went “From slave labour to slave labour” on government-sanctioned programs, as a condition of immigrating to Canada. By comparison, British men and women arriving in Canada at the same time with the intent of citizenship were not subjected to any such requirements.
In a book this well researched and written, it’s nearly impossible to pick out a single passage to quote, and certainly not a short one. The paragraphs below describe a time long after the war when Wanda’s son George, the author’s husband, learned about a compensation fund for people who had been forced labourers in Nazi Germany:
George called Wanda to tell her about her right to make a claim for compensation. She was unenthusiastic. “What’s the point?” she said. “It was so long ago.” George prodded her. … To him, a busy arbitrator, accustomed to hearing labour grievances, it was simple: fill out the form, send it in, wait for the decision. It seems insensitive, in retrospect, that we didn’t consider that it might not have been simple to Wanda, digging up a memory that she preferred to leave undisturbed. …
The form asked for a description of what happened during her period of forced labour, including the conditions in which she was held. For the first and last time, she told George what had happened to her in Germany. He wrote it down for her:
We lived in a barracks behind barbed wire. Every morning the guards took us to work. We worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., I think. There were armed guards in the factory watching us while we worked. In the morning before we worked, they gave us one slice of bread and black coffee. For lunch we had kohlrabi soup and a slice of bread. For dinner, we had a slice of bread and black coffee. There was one Italian, two Russian, and four Polish barracks. There were 21 of us in a 25-foot by 12-foot room in three-high bunks. We were not ever allowed to go outside for any reason except to go to work. There were armed guards outside the barracks. We worked seven days a week. The guards would beat at us [sic] for no reason. The barracks were filthy and full of lice and bedbugs. When the Allies were bombing the area we were not allowed to leave the barracks and go to a bunker.
Wanda gave as little detail as possible. She didn’t tell George about the day she was taken and deported to Germany. They didn’t have a conversation about life during the Russian and German occupations or during her time in the camp. She didn’t talk about being hungry or afraid or how she felt about losing her home. She didn’t offer any of the details we later heard from Joe [George’s uncle]. The form didn’t require this information and she didn’t volunteer it.
I’ve wondered sometimes about my father’s silence about the war. I know he, like other military men, were told to forget their experiences and just live happy lives. I also know he suffered from PTSD, not clearly defined at the time, and went to therapy. But I wonder too, if, as Faubert concludes, “Silence was Wanda’s answer to the past and her protection in the present. Silence was her right. Who is to say that the burial of her memories, the simple life in a safe space, wasn’t justice for her?”
I’d never thought about it that way, but who indeed?
Reviews of MFA alumni books on war and subsequent immigration:
As a teenager, I believed in psychic phenomena. My father, not a frivolous man, greatly admired the clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. My best friend had tarot cards. We all talked with wonder and awe about the amazing “coincidences” we or someone we knew had experienced at some point.
As I grew older and became increasingly skeptical, I still loved movies like Ghost and Practical Magic (although I actually liked the book by Alice Hoffman better.)I still watch reruns of the TV series Medium, based on the real life of Allison DuBois, a self-described medium and profiler. DuBois claims to have provided crime-solving tips to law enforcement agencies—tips those agencies have described as “unhelpful,” if they didn’t simply deny ever working with her.
So, when it came time to read Christian Smith’s (class of 2017) The Scientist and the Psychic: A Son’s Exploration of His Mother’s Gift (Random House, 2020), I was intrigued. What would a PhD-level scientist have to say about his mother, who once spoke to audiences of thousands about her abilities? And how would the fractured relationship they had for twenty years, in no small part because of her work as a psychic, play into his scientific exploration of her gift?
Here’s a taste of insight from the book’s introduction:
Up until now, scientific studies on the paranormal have been challenged by inconclusive data and imperfect methods, making it tough to convince critics on both sides of the argument. In truth, many of the studies used flawed experimental methods that lacked proper controls. However, the same could be said of early genetic research done before the completion of the genome project, which revolutionized modern-day biology. The tools to study psychic abilities are still in their infancy.
Does this mean we should disregard all data lacking rigorous methodology and controls? I would argue that anecdotal evidence does have an important role to play. If it didn’t, the famous scientist Alexander Fleming would have thrown out the mould contamination that stopped bacteria from growing in his petri dish, undoubtedly delaying the discovery of penicillin. Personal experiences are fuel for scientific discovery. A starting point.
I remember once saying to someone I know, a pre-med student at the time, that science has become the god of the twenty-first century. He immediately became very offended, assuming I was saying science is no more provable than any belief in a god. He was so annoyed that there was no point in trying to explain that I was speaking metaphorically, not literally. Many years ago, people turned to religion for answers to everything; if they questioned anything, they risked accusations of blasphemy and even heresy. Now they turn to science for all the answers and if they question science—well, they won’t be burned at the stake, but they’ll often be looked upon as uneducated idiots.
I don’t hold with that. Science is an ongoing quest for discovery, so it’s inevitable that as it moves forward, some things “proven” to be true yesterday will be proven untrue tomorrow. Unquestioning trust quickly becomes dogma. And as Smith points out in the above-quoted passage, anecdotal evidence is often the unacknowledged starting place for scientific discovery. A neurologist I saw regularly for twenty years once said to me that dismissing all anecdotal evidence simply because it’s anecdotal is, itself, unscientific.
In the epigraph, Smith quotes a very famous scientist: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” The scientist was Albert Einstein.
The Scientist and the Psychic is an intriguing balance of scientific evidence and psychic phenomena, interwoven with a poignant account of personal healing between a man and his mother. It’s as well researched as one would expect from a deeply educated scientist, and as compassionate as one would hope from a human being who, at a certain age, realized that familial love and forgiveness are profoundly important too.
This was a thoroughly enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.
On Remembrance Day, November 11, 2025, reposting this ode to my father.
The Space Between
A picture hangs in my living room, a sort of collage, but more organized, befitting its contents. It includes my father’s Royal Canadian Air Force wings and stripes from World War II, a green-and-gold RCAF emblem he embroidered while in traction for months in a veterans’ hospital, and two black-and-white photos, rimmed in gold. The pieces are carefully arranged against dark-blue cloth, framed in gun-metal grey with dignified flecks of gold. The photo on the left, taken before my father shipped out to England in 1942, depicts a handsome, athletic, optimistic, young man in his NCO uniform. To the right are his wings and stripes, a few threads out of place. From the photo on the right, the face I remember smiles out at me in his Pilot Officer uniform at the time of his medical discharge in 1945, still a handsome man.
In the first, he’s twenty-one. In the second, he looks much more than three years older. … (Read more here.)
Books on war and peace by UKing’s MFA in CNF alumni:
For several years in my twenties, I worked with what were then called “emotionally disturbed” children. I worked in group homes with young children and teens, did one-to-one contracts, and eventually worked in a receiving home for street kids.
I dealt with kids whose behaviours were off the charts, like the girl who told me she was going to slice my guts open and leave me bleeding beside my five-month fetus on the street. I heard stories that made my neck hair stand on end, like the girl whose father pimped out her older half-sister to support himself and the two younger children.
But mostly I worked with kids who were struggling to deal with the realities of life with parents who, often because of their own childhood experiences, weren’t anywhere close to knowing what good parenting looked like.
In The View from Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed (The Ginger Press, 2024), author Gwen Lamont describes the latter kind of abuse, the gnawing daily neglect that characterized her childhood.
There was the poverty because Dad always thought the next big scam would solve their financial problems; the money that disappeared in a fog of gambling and alcohol and second-hand smoke; the frequent moves that kept the children from establishing friendships with other children or relationships with adults who might have helped.
There was the non-stop bickering between a mother and father who’d long since stopped liking each other but couldn’t imagine anything different; the children’s teeth, rotting from a total lack of dental hygiene; and a decision her father made to get her teeth fixed when she was in grade 9, which ultimately led to her not finishing grade 9 or any more of high school.
As traumatizing as all of this must have been, Lamont says, she never really thought of it as child abuse and still feels taken aback by references to her “trauma.” This was just her family, her life; she didn’t know anything else.
Here’s an excerpt of what Lamont’s family life was like:
I had seen teacups, spatulas, and a can or two fly through the air but this day it was a kitchen chair I watched hit the wall with such a force it left a hole. As if the chair throwing hadn’t made her point, Mom followed it with one of her tirades.
“I’m not moving again, John Godfrey Morrison. I don’t give a shit what you do. I’m not going. You’ll have to go without me and the girls.” He wouldn’t go without us, would he? “I’m sick to death of your schemes that never amount to a hill of beans. I’m not going and that’s final.”
Dad sat silent, grinding his jaw with such violence I could hear it clear across the room. Red blotches crept up his face. The whistling started soft and slow, then grew faster and louder.
“I don’t care if you never speak to me again and you can whistle forever, you goddamn son-of-a-bitch. I AM NOT MOVING! Just when I find a job I love, and just when the girls are settled, you want to move to the goddamn middle of nowhere? And your mother, Jack, what about her money?”
Dad whistled.
“And just remember it was you who had to have this house, Jack Morrison. You! Not me! You talked me into this house and now you have the nerve to want to move us again.” She crossed her arms across her heart. “You jerk. What the hell are you running from this time?”
Dad whistled louder. My stomach knotted.
It’s hard to pick just one passage to quote because the tension in the book rises relentlessly. There’s never a break. And that, it would seem, is what Lamont’s childhood was like. A relentless struggle, no winners, no losers, no end in sight.
It did finally end. For years, she buried her past beyond memory while she went on to earn a BA, BSW, and MSW, work as a social worker in child protection and intimate partner violence. It was really only in writing this book and eventually earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College that Lamont began to face the impacts her childhood had on her.
The contents of The View from Coffin Ridge make it a difficult read, but the story is told with such skill that it was hard to put down. I find I’m writing those words about many of the books I’m reviewing, but that doesn’t make it less true. These stories embody what it means to be human and are of singularly high quality. And I’m reminded how grateful I am to have been part of this program.
