Selected Writings

Poetry, Short Stories, and Articles

You are my Sunshine

originally published in new ohio review

Let me start by offering my condolences, I said,

holding out my hand.

She shook out her umbrella and placed it open, just

beside the altar.

They thought it was an ulcer, she said. They

gave him some tablets.

Waiting

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED THE NEW QUARTERLY ISSUE 173

After, there’s no sign of you.

Gone: your shoes, your white dresses and

silk scarves, the tiny hats you perched

on your head.

Your childhood pony drawings, your

comic books, novels and piano music.

Your mother’s beaded purse,

the emerald bracelet made

(your father claimed)

by prisoners on Death Row.

And a clutter of silver medals:

Jesus on his cross, Joan before she burnt,

and, with one hand on her heart,

The Queen of Heaven.

Oldest Female Debut Novelist Tells All

Originally published March 2023 on Bloom

I was twelve when I wrote my first novel. It was four pages long, and in it Martha, the butt of bullying by her eighth grade classmates, graduates top of her class. Not much else happens, but with the novel’s completion I had accomplished a major life goal.

Nearly sixty years later I started another novel. For two years I basically lived in the quiet room of the Ottawa Library, and then another year in the Princeton Library, ignoring cracks from my sons about posthumous publication. That novel was published a year ago.

Writing it, I discovered, was actually the easy part of the publishing process. The next step was finding an agent.

Dear Margaret Atwood, I’d Like my Lucky Hat Back

originally published in the Globe & mail

Dear Margaret Atwood, I think it's time you gave me back my hat. You know the one, it's black, with a wide brim. Don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about. Poet Patrick Lane gave you that hat when you asked for it.

You were frequently photographed wearing it in the 1970s and later, in newspapers and magazines. I even recall seeing it on your head on one of your novel's dust jackets.

Writer Mark Abley published an article about you in The Guardian back in 1996, just after Robertson Davies died. One of the first sentences was:

Madonna Lilies

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED THE NEW QUARTERLY ISSUE 173

Wading through the tide in

Bar Harbor bay, Georgia spots

the perfect rock—smooth, flat,

made for sitting.

Just as she always found the

perfect shell or chestnut or autumn

leaf when we tripped out on acid

when we were young.

We clamber onto the jetty,

our sandals sliding over

lichen and foam,

and spread our towels.

We are fifty, and trying to cover

a thousand miles and twenty-five years

in a single afternoon.

Learning Swedish in Secret as a Joke

Originally published in New Ohio Review

All this passing on going on, almost
as if it were contagious. Words you’ve recently learned
spill easily from your lips:
Wenckebach, biliary, Cetuximab, granuloma,
the new bright colors of life. Just when
you were getting bored with the
pinks, purples, and greens on offer
for almost seven decades,

you’d happily now trade blasts and plasma cells for
brown or black or tan. But as surely
and hard as you know how many platelets it takes

Chasing Likes and Loving It

originally published in the globe & mail

Yesterday, driving back from a doctor’s appointment, I found myself craving a hot dog. When I got home I checked my freezer. Packages of frozen vegetables, English muffins, some assorted sausages—both Italian and bangers—but no hot dogs. Everyone knows that a sausage, even one smothered in mustard and sauerkraut and inserted into an appropriate roll, will do nothing to quell a hot dog craving.

So I made myself tuna salad and, in a silly mood, posted on Facebook: Sometimes a girl just wants a hot dog. When I checked back later, there were several “likes”—always good—and, from my writer friend Lauren, a link to a salacious blues song, full of double entendres, called “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll,” performed in the 1920’s by the Vaudeville husband-and-wife comedy duo Butterbeans and Susie.

What is Bobbie Jean Huff Reading?

From The New Quarterly

I find it risky to read when I’m writing intensely. When I do read, I sometimes find that my writing sounds like Molly McClosky for a few pages, then Sally Rooney for another few before, maybe, Ian McEwan takes over until the end of the chapter. You get the picture.

But often books just sneak their way into my life and demand to be read. This was the case with the novel I just finished reading, Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, It’s about a struggling novelist who steals the plot of her smashingly successful novelist friend, who has died suddenly. The novel takes a satirical look at current notions of race and cultural appropriation, and provides a scathing—yet, I fear, accurate— critique on the modern day publishing industry.