Love lettering on CBC Radio’s DNTO

Sunday, March 25th, 2012
CBC Radio, Sook-Yin Lee, Lindsay Zier-Vogel, love letters, love lettering project, Toronto

CBC Radio One host Sook-Yin Lee and I chat love letters / Photo by Tori Allen

My love letter lovin’ is back in full swing! And CBC Radio One’s DNTO featured The Love Lettering Project this Saturday on their show about letters. It’s a wonderful clip (though man alive, I talk fast!!) with an interview with a woman who found one of last year’s love letters.

You can listen to it here (it’s about a third of the way in)…

I wrote a bunch more love poems to Toronto and host Sook-Yin Lee and I hid them around a Toronto parkette.

And now I’m dreaming up this year’s incarnation…I’ve got great hopes. Time to start making epic to-do lists (with hearts at the top of each page!)

~

A love note to Toronto streetcars:

You are always late
and I will always wait for you.

And another love note to this wonderful city I love so dearly:

Toronto, you are not the prettiest
girl at the dance, but you
sparkle from the dark corner
near the punch bowl
and I fall in love
with you
and your wide open doors.

Brunch mapping + bacon: A Q&A with the Drake General Store

Monday, March 19th, 2012
toronto brunch maps, drake general store

Les brunch maps / photo courtesy of the Drake General Store

I’m positively blushing…brunch maps as a best seller? Swooooon!

From the Drake General Store blog:
When she’s not busy writing love letters, dancing or teaching, Toronto artist Lindsay Zier-Vogel creates beautifully-printed brunch maps. Complete with a checklist and button, you can guess what we spend our weekends doing! We sat down with Lindsay for a brief chat about her work + what she’d order for her perfect brunch.

Read “Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Brunch Maps: Helping Us Eat Our Way Through Toronto” here!

Addendum: More Brunch Map lovin’ from the charming Reb Stevenson!

Brunch map + Scout, Chopin + cake

Friday, March 9th, 2012
Thrilling news! The magnificent new(ish) shop, Scout, up on Roncesvalles, is now carrying the Toronto Brunch Map! Yay neighbours!

In other fun news, I finally celebrated Pancake Tuesday (on a Thursday a few weeks late…) and moved my childhood piano from my mom’s place. I’ve been tinkling the ivories (and butchering Chopin) and loving every minute of it.

There’s something so wonderful about not having to be *good* at it…and to not have to do crazy amounts of scales and theory, though my fingers could use a good arpeggio or two, I’m sure.

It’s also incredible to me how much muscle memory my fingers have. I can muddle my way through pieces of music I haven’t really played in 14 years. Pretty amazing…!

I also gluten-free-ified the most wonderful cake recipe from Jeanette Ordas + poppytalk. I started adding apples, replaced the vanilla extract for almond extract and used half the amount of oil (and changed the flour to ¾ C sorghum, ¼ potato starch, ¼ C almond meal and a tsp of xantham gum) and it’s my new fav thing to bake. It also makes the house smell divine.

And while I was already peeling apples, I threw together an apple-onion chutney inspired by the gluten-free friendly folks at Grindhouse Burger Bar.

A pretty great start to March indeed (though I’m not sure I’m ready to be waking up in the dark again starting Monday…)

2012 is officially the year of collaboration

Monday, March 5th, 2012
Rhya Tamasauskas

A sketch of "Fort" by Rhya Tamasauskas for a creature collaboration.

I love the solitary nature of writing. I love that I can do it anywhere at any time and only have to count on myself to show up, but late last year, I was chatting a theatre director, and realized how much I miss that collective creative “aha” moments. It’s really not the same giving myself a high-five at the coffee shop at 7 in the morning…

And somehow, after this revelation, I started sending and receiving emails from all sorts of inspiring folks. And all of a sudden, collaborations started happening left right and centre!

I headed to Saskatchewan to work on the script and source text for Shannon Litzenberger’s dance piece, HOMEbody (premiering in Toronto in September) and came back to Toronto and started working on Sylvie Bouchard’s incredible piece, Histoire d’Amour  (that goes up in May). Man, I love the writing-dance process!!

I’m going to be turning Christa Couture’s lyrics into limited edition books for her Indigogo supporters and Rhya Tamasauskas and I started playing with her whimsical creatures and some wee poems for a submission to a brilliant online mag (The sketch at the top is from this creature-collaboration).  Mark Freeman and I have started a wonderfully inspiring brainstorm for a project. We have no idea what’s happening with it and where it’s going, but something grand is afoot!

And there’re even more projects on the go – an arts education one, some book making workshops…and some grand Love Lettering Projects dream-ups…!

High FIVE! I hereby deem 2012 the year of collaboration.

~

A glimpse of the collaboration between Rhya and me:

Another gem by Rhya Tamasauskas.

If I stand still enough,
I can hear the leaves pushing their way to green,
the branches tangling even more
against the impatient sky.