Things have been on hold here at the cafe for a couple of months. There has been activity I could have reported on, but I’ve been tied up with other matters, and took an unscheduled break while paddling the river of life and pondering the future of this forum. It’s been nearly nine years since I started, and many things have changed.
Back in 2006, I started the blog to muse on food and poetry which were my main interests du jour. There has been, sadly, much less poetry in my life over the past year or so, although writing of various kinds has been happening. But I can happily announce that a new poetry collection – Ex-ville – will be published by Oolichan, hopefully in late 2014.
I’ve been paying more attention to nonfiction over the past couple of years, while 
Digging the City came into being – and continues to gratify me with positive reviews both published and anecdotal (anyone out there want to review it on Amazon by the way?). The rest of my writing has been sparse posts here and more numerous but sparser posts in my Facebook pages (and please feel free to Like those pages – one for Digging and one for me the writer).
More of my time over the past year has continued to be spent on food, as eater, cook, writer and student. The food security concerns I documented in Digging the City have unfortunately not changed much. My experience at the University of Gastronomic Sciences continue to inform my interests, and my writing, but nutritional studies at the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition have led me into a different way of looking at food. I’m fascinated by the possibilities for healing by simply eating the right foods; but there seems to be little agreement on what those are. (Lots of consensus on what many of the wrong foods are, though!) My chief concerns are for foods that are healing, nutritious and able to be locally produced.
So.. watch for posts from the blog in the new year; maybe not so frequent, but trying to bridge food security, urban agriculture and nutrition with the usual odd sprinklings of poetry and travel.
Meanwhile: happy new year! Be sure to eat something nice and read something good. Here are my books of the year = enjoy!!
