Happy Pride Month Unless You're in Vancouver

Did you know that Vancouver celebrates Pride in late July / early August? It's disorienting seeing the entire Internet declare it Pride Month when outside your front door your own city continues to be only its regular level of gay. Granted, I live in East Van, so the baseline queer vibes are pretty high. Nevertheless, with in-person Pride celebrations still months away, I had no choice but to mark this June by making a bunch of podcast episodes.

This month we made Material Girls episodes about Trad Wives and the Manichean Allegory and got to spend extra time hanging out with Gaby while she covered for Coach's mysterious leave!

We also marked Pride Month by launching a new watch-along pod for the new season of The Vampire Lestat, which has been extremely fun. I'm proud of the rigour and research we bring to Material Girls but hoo boy is it a good time to just watch a thing and then chat about it!

Finalement, I wrapped my delightful season with Hot & Bothered by recording an episode with Vanessa and incoming cohost Stephanie Paulsell. Stephanie and Vanessa are making a new season all about Jane Austen's Persuasion. (Spoiler alert: I'm joining them on the new season to talk about chapter two, which I enjoyed reading so much that I ended up rereading the entire novel.) The three of us talked about Casablanca, which I had never seen before and can officially declare to be one of those classics that deserves its status.

One last in-person plug: if you're reading this when it comes out and you're Vancouver-based, there's still time to see my choir perform on Saturday, July 4. It's a good time, I promise, and all proceeds this year go to Rise Women's Legal Centre.

As a child, I was obsessed with miniatures. There was a miniatures store in downtown Ottawa called Lilliput and I loved to go in and look at all of the tiny accessories: teensy baking trays with miniscule chocolate chip cookies, teacups the size of my pinkie nail, armchairs I could hold in the palm of my hand. Miniatures felt something like reading to me. They offered me a world that I could both co-create and immerse myself in, one with clear boundaries around it but unlimited potential for imagination within.

I can't remember how old I was when my parents gifted me my own dollhouse, a stately three-storey build with a fold-away front. It was really my mother's and my shared project. We lay a hardwood floor in the living room using tiny wood slats, glued down one at a time and then sealed and stained. We put wainscoting in the kitchen and baseboards in the bathroom. We painted the ceilings white and wallpapered the bedroom with a scaled down floral print. We got most of the way through gluing siding to the outside before we stopped. I can't recall with certainty why we paused, but I can guess: it was likely a cancer relapse. Perhaps by the time she was well again, I had outgrown the hobby. Perhaps she never had energy for it again and I wasn't old enough to continue on my own.

For whatever reason, the dollhouse went into the basement and stayed there until, years after my mother's death and my father's remarriage, we were clearing out the house to sell it. At that time, in my early twenties, I was remorseless in my desire to purge memories and keepsakes. I wanted to sever the past like a gangrenous limb. The dollhouse, a symbol of all my mother and I had shared and all we had lost, had to go. So I sold it at a garage sale, furniture and all.

Years later, I was visiting my father and my stepmother at their new home in the country, just over an hour outside of Ottawa, when I spotted a familiar shape up high on a shelf in the garage. Wait, I asked my father, is that my dollhouse? It was. Without saying a word to me, he had quietly bought it back, packed it away, and stored it in his new home. He thought I might regret selling it, that I would want it again one day. He was right.

It sat in storage for another fifteen years or so until, during a visit in summer 2024, fresh off my 40th birthday, I decided that I was ready to reclaim it. We pulled the house down from its high shelf and promptly discovered that, in the intermediate years, it had become a house for mice. (This sounds adorable, I know, very Beatrix-Potter-coded, but in reality it involved having to bleach every piece of gnawed-apart furniture and shop-vac out the interior while wearing respirators to avoid giving ourselves hantavirus.) After it had been thoroughly cleaned, my father packed it up and shipped it across the country. It arrived in a box almost as tall as me, swathed in a quantity of packing peanuts so enormous that I gave them away on my local Buy Nothing group to someone restuffing a bean bag chair.

The dollhouse sat on my sideboard for another two years. I knew I was going to do something with it, and I knew that, when the time was right, that something would become clear. And at last, it has. I've ordered enough sideboard in the right scale to finish off the outside. I've begun peeling away the old wallpaper and building a Pinterest Board to gather ideas and inspiration. I've rewatched all three seasons of Best in Miniature while putting together pieces of a greenhouse kit to start practicing my own miniature-making skills. Last week I went to Michael's and bought myself a cutting mat and a good sharp craft knife. It all feels as exciting as cracking the spine on a new fantasy series, knowing that I have a whole new world of co-creation and discovery ahead of me.

Your turn! What's a project that you've been sitting on but know in your heart you'll pick up when the time is right? What are your favourite miniature things? Did you know that it is incredibly easy to make a tiny pencil?