This blog started as an account of my travels in 2011 when I was living in China teaching English for a year. Since I had acquired a certificate in Toronto to teach English to adults, it seemed like a brilliant idea to teach English to 5-12 year olds in the Far East. That, in a nutshell, is the thought process behind most of my major life decisions. Which explains why, 19 years after coming to the land of abundant opportunity that is Canada (via Ethiopia & Austria & Switzerland), I am still pawing at the dream of a writing life like a one-track-mind feline at wisps of incense smoke.

After I tired of roaming Southeast Asia and Ethiopia and the U.S Northeast and returned to Toronto circa 2013, the focus of the blog shifted to a general account of the diaspora/settler Canadian/Ethiopian/human experience (I never know which is which at any given moment), both my own and that of those whom I have the privilege of witnessing at close range. [1]

Little by little, however, this blog has become about the thing which represents the most potent reduction of my lived experience: my writing. Aside from what is on my publications page, I’ve recently surprised myself by completing a novel manuscript. I talk about it on these posts, and if I manage to get it published you will find it one day in that big bookstore in the sky.

To offset the agonizing wait (mine, that is) in the meantime, I’m working on the second novel inspired by this. And of course there shall be more short stories and articles…

I hope you enjoy navigating the blog through the drop-down Category menu, which I’ve specifically designed to maximize your pleasure, because I care about you, visiting-reader, who I hope will drop a comment to let me know you stopped by or maybe even go all the way and write me something or sign up to get an email notification when I write a new post.

Off we go to just another day in paradise.

[1] (Yeah I put in a footnote, so what?) Or, as it said in my previous ‘About’ page, where I was really trying for ‘clever’: “diaspora! is a record of 1.5er life based on the reflections and experiences of one such specimen living in Toronto, Canada. Think of it as a modern-day version of the journals that the explorers of old kept as they discovered new continents, peoples and ways of being, but with a lot less conquering and a lot more navel-gazing, in the interest of creating some kind of record of just how fascinating my belly button is considering how far removed it is from the place where my umbilical cord is buried, in Ethiopia.”

I am represented by Marilyn Biderman of the Transatlantic Agency.

I wish to acknowledge the support I’ve received for my writing over the years from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.