Black Dot Diary

One of the best things about hav­ing a blog is that I get to rave about the peo­ple I think are remark­able. One of these peo­ple is jew­elry artist Anne M. Kelly who will debut two excit­ing new lines at the upcom­ing Out of Hand Craft Fair on Novem­ber 20 — 22 at The Crys­tal Gar­den in Vic­to­ria BC.

Anne, who truly is one of the West Coast’s best kept secrets, cre­ates high-​demand orig­i­nal pieces of jew­elry, each with its own unique story. Because Anne is a pub­lished poet, the sto­ries that come with the jew­elry are works of art in them­selves. Her two newest col­lec­tions include a Native Species line fea­tur­ing Shibuichi Rough­skin Newts, and a Tim­o­r­phic line cre­ated from pure repur­posed aero­space titanium.

What’s it like to be on stage with U2? I never dreamed I’d ever find out. But life is full of twists, turns and gifts as I dis­cov­ered at U2’s Van­cou­ver show on Octo­ber 28, 2009.

U2’s music has been with me through a lot of my life — births, cel­e­bra­tions, deaths, dances, epipha­nies. Their music takes me to the same place I go when I’m writ­ing poetry — the almost-​undefinable, mag­i­cal place where the poetry gets lift off and seems to write itself.

Hello every­one, I am so new to Word­press that I acci­den­tally “cut” a blog post that was gen­er­at­ing some inter­est: “Canada & BC Arts Cuts: Deep Insult, Shal­low Think­ing,” first posted on Octo­ber 10^th, 2009. I have to say there’s a strange les­son in cut­ting this blog — when you cut some­thing that is a unique cre­ation of an indi­vid­ual, you often can never get it back. You can’t unring a bell. Les­son learned for me. If only the Harper and Camp­bell gov­ern­ments would learn the same thing about cut­ting the arts. Their cuts have far more dire con­se­quences than the mere dele­tion of a blog. Below is my attempt to recre­ate what I had written:

Photo by Ash­ley Rose, Cre­ative Commons

Today the rain started. It could have been worse. They pre­dicted hail for Vic­to­ria. I woke up this morn­ing in an amaz­ing mood to a sunny fall day: head clear, full of energy, ready for any­thing. By 3 p.m., my mood greyed with the sky and by 4 p.m. I was down­right despon­dent when the rain came.

Since mov­ing to the West Coast of British Colum­bia 22 years ago, I’ve con­sid­ered myself a weather vic­tim. A few years ago I had to admit it — I suf­fered from SAD (Sea­sonal Effec­tive Dis­or­der). If I could move to the desert I would, but love has a way of mak­ing us do crazy things. For love, I live in a rain forest.