Summer in the City
Deep Stories Halifax
Kelly Carrington
"I took my dry clothes off, put my wet underwear on, and my life jacket, and they tied a rope to me. They said, 'You’ve got five minutes.' So I dove back in the water."
Annie Valentina
“All these kids had Barbie dolls and I didn’t have one. And I dealt with this in the most obvious way: by lying about it."
Kyle Shaw
“Finally I found a job. It was advertised as adventurous international sales. So what this job was, was selling horrible crappy oil paintings door to door.”
Portia Karegeya
"It was supposed to be seminal. I was supposed to feel pride and joy. Instead I was on the phone to my dad, just weeping."
Nikki Martin
"I wish I remembered that summer, and what it was like now with a different way of knowing how life works. You can’t just live in the before and what’s next."
Bernie Langille
"In the deepest, darkest, most buried corner of the last room in the apartment, I found a big, red, hard suitcase. I opened it up and there were three photo albums inside."
Jayson Baxter
"I open up the old trunk, and I get that horrible smell that you get from old newspapers. Right on top was this newspaper called The Albertan, and it was from 1958, and the headline said, 'Jack Baxter Dead'."
"Love" Edition
Deep Stories Halifax
Nasha Nijhawan
"Is this ever going to end? Am I ever going to get past this part? Am I ever going to understand this tiny forceful being that I’ve brought into the world?"
Chloe Kennedy
“Rom-coms are an art form that very rarely imitate real life—that’s why it was particularly incredible to me a few years ago when my friends and I lived through a series of coincidences and fortunate events that a rom-com plot would kind of resemble."
Adam Fine
“Our daughter is placed on an incubator, and they put in a little plastic bag to keep her warm. She was born at just 630 grams, which is about the weight of a package of butter.”
Paul Vienneau
"I disappeared for an eternity: what I call the cosmic light switch. I came to on my back, and this was the amount of life I had left, and as I was pouring it out, I could see the bottom of the bottle."
Martha Paynter
"I thought nursing could be my practice, my work. It turns out it’s more of a basement on top of which I’m trying to build a meaningful life. But love is the work of the building."
Emily Baron Cadloff
"I look back at the ring, and then at Justin, and the ring, and I say, 'How could you do this to me?!' And then I jumped off the bed: 'I have to go get the pizza for dinner!' And I left the house."
"Risk" Edition
Deep Stories Halifax
Maggie Rahr
"Chris reminds me that Jeff was so poetic, that he could make poetry out of anything, whether it's a sunrise or a cigarette butt. And I want to tell you something that magical about my own brother."
Raja Salim
“Moving from As-Suwayda to Damascus was harder than moving to Canada. And the distance between As-Suwayda and Damascus, for sure, is longer than the distance between Istanbul and Nova Scotia.”
Vaughn Stafford Gray
“My mother said, ‘Because you’re a virgin, I think you’re afraid of having sex, and you should hire someone to teach you'. My mother was at the time a 72-year-old ex-headmistress, telling me to find a prostitute…so I said, 'We need to have a conversation.'”