Appreciation: Jeanette Winterson

The following is an assignment I wrote for JRN 500: Journalism and the Arts. My instructor seemed to like it, and I enjoyed writing it.

During the fall of 2007, I borrowed “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit” by Jeanette Winterson from a friend who had never read it before. At the time, I had never heard of Winterson, nor had I read any of her other works. The moment I peeled open the pages of “Oranges,” I couldn't put it down. I discovered that each word in Winterson's novel is a delicious, juicy, succulent piece of a larger story.

Up until the age of 17, I thought that poetry and p
rose were completely different forms of writing. One was straightforward and used sensible language to weave a plot. The other was often chaotic, using flowery language to express abstract ideas.
Upon reading Winterson's autobiographically inspired novel, I found that prose and poetry could be one in the same. The phrases Winterson uses are prose in the sense that they build towards a larger plot, while the way she writes, weaves, and creates her story is more poetic than any poetic verses I've ever read.

In “Oranges,” Winterson explores her own upbringing, the realization of her love for literature, and her blossoming sexuality in a household that kept only the bible on its bookshelves. With flowing language she describes stuttering teenage times, and with comedic verses she delves into the sadness and confusion of her youth.
Shortly after reading “Oranges,” I began the lengthy and enjoyable process of devouring every book Winterson has ever written. “The Passion” and “Written on the Body” have climbed to the top of my own recommended reading list.

Each novel Winterson writes is just as poetic as the last. She has a way of using short, sort of surprising phrases next to long, rambling sentences full of commas, parentheses, and dashes. This fashion of forming her sentences is something I have longed- and tried- to replicate, but I will never achieve the poetic level of prose that Winterson has reached.

Furthermore, within all this poetic-like prose, Winterson is never too explicit. Even when writing about sex, death, and blood, she manages to create a soft image, a sideways reference, and a gentle reference with no rough explanations. While much of the poetry and prose created over the centuries has been about love, sex, and death, Winterson is able to describe a huge range of emotions and extremely subtle physical experience with a few well-placed words and simple adjectives.

For months after I read “Oranges,” I urged the friend from whom I borrowed the book to read its intriguing mixture of prose and poetry. I would repeat lines from that novel- and many of Winterson's other stories- to friends and family in order to bate them into reading my favourite novel. I even chose an “Oranges” quote as my high school graduation message: “If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches.”
I am still repeating those same lines today.

Yellow Tomatoes

Oh my gosh, I haven't posted anything in a very long time.
I have no excuse. I simply forgot.

Recently, I tried many different kinds of tomatoes: green zebra tomatoes, oxford tomatoes, and, my favourite so far, yellow cherry tomatoes.
Yellow cherry tomatoes are sweet and delicious. They don't have a very acidic taste (at least not the ones I had) and they are a nice bite-sized snack.


I made a salad with them: some herbs, garlic, and mini-bocchini cheese. It was so good, I could have eaten four bowls of it.

"Why is the phone ringing?!"

On Saturday, my mum installed a phone in the playroom/TV room/basement so she didn't have to sprint up the stairs every time the phone rang.

I called the house Saturday afternoon. My dad picks up, says hello, and then I hear Jo, my six-year-old sister, on the phone. "Why is the phone ringing?" Jo yells, directly into the receiver.

Okay, I think, it's a learning curve, she'll get over it.

I called the house again the next day. After about half a ring, someone picks up the phone, drops the receiver, picks it up again, and screams, "I got it! I got it!"

It's Jo.

I complain about my eardrums, and Jo finally gives my mum the phone, who assures me she will tell Jo to say 'hello' when answering the phone.

Apparently it worked. My other sister Adelaide phoned about three minutes later. Jo picked up the phone and sweetly said "Hello? Who might this be?" So, Jo did get over that learning curve. Though, it was three minutes too late if you ask me.

What's the difference?

So I'm a little confused.

My post about The Cyclepath on Danforth wasn't accepted by BlogTO because it "reads too much like an ad for the place."

Though, their recent review of Sweet Pete's on Bloor reads almost the exact same way, from what I can tell.

How does mine differ? If anyone can give me specific pointers, I would really appreciate it, because right now I don't understand.

Children's Pencil Obsession

My mom wrote me this email today. It's about my six year old sister, Jo. I have made some edits concerning grammar, typos, punctuation, etc.

Todays' Strange Story:

I was doing some spring cleaning on the front porch "after school" today. Jo was hanging out, enjoying the warm sun, stomping in last bits of snow and talking to passing cats.

She seizes upon an object she sees on Allen's (Allen is the house directly next to ours) lawn and brings it to me asking "Do you know who this belongs to?"

It's a pencil.

I admitted I had no clue and semi ignore her as she babbles on about various ways the pencil might have been lost and by whom. "You know what we should do?" she asks me. Because I am concentrating on some glamorous cleaning task, I didn't think before I spoke and said "No, what?"

"We should draw a picture of the pencil. or maybe take a picture. And put it on a poster and......" Fill in about three minutes of goofy drivel in which Jo describes an elaborate scheme to return the pencil to its, no doubt distraught, owner.

I assured her that wasn't necessary and not to worry, just put the pencil back if she was worried and maybe its owner would pass by and notice it.

I finish the clean up. We go in. I start whipping up some supper and Jo watches TV.

About 45 minutes pass. Then the doorbell rings.

An embarrassed looking Olivia (our neighbour, who sometimes babysits the following two children) is with Ivor and Miranda. Now Miranda (age 5) has the pencil and is waving it at me: "Is this yours? Do you know whose pencil this is?"

I resisted the urge to say "I have no f*%$ing clue and I don't care." Ivor (age 1) comes in to visit the dog and Miranda just keeps going on about this orphaned pencil.

As Olivia was dragging them both back down the steps I told her about Jo's earlier pencil issues. We agreed that it could never be said of the children of today failed to really care about pencils.

Bespoke tailoring in Toronto

I wrote this for my fashion journalism class at Ryerson. Couldn't think of anywhere to pitch it, but it will do nicely on here.

Men's suits have never gone out of style. Just like any other form of fashion, they have trickled down, been influenced by world politics and the economy. They have changed shape, length, width, colour, material, and texture.

These changes and fluctuation come and go in waves, often returning to a style that was popular a few decades earlier. Each subsequent age wants to have their own look. “There's always been a shift between generations,” says Mayan Rajendran, a first-year graduate student at The School of Fashion at Ryerson specializing in street fashion. “Silhouettes are constantly shifting. With each category of age there's always a contrast. You always want to be doing what your dad wasn't.”


Bespoke- a style of extremely specific custom tailoring- was the only thing available 100 years ago. A suit included a jacket, vest, and two pairs of pants. A bespoke suit was created for an individual, for one single person and it would never fit another person the way that it is made to fit the original wearer. But mass-produced clothing became popular during the industrial revolution, and bespoke tailoring became much too expensive for most people.

But now, bespoke tailoring is popular among young New York and London businessmen, and it's slowly effecting Toronto's high-end fashion. Today, lot of young professional lawyers, judges, and news anchors in Toronto have been getting their suits custom made. Bespoke, along with a sort of British Dandyism style (skinny suits, coloured socks, and tapered pants) is becoming much more popular among young Torontonian businessmen.


Terry Beauchamp is the current owner of Walter Beauchamp Tailors, the oldest tailoring company in Toronto. The company started out as a tailor for military suits. Now they do formal wear and the occasional RCMP or police uniform. Most customers are financial workers, TV personalities, musicians, and government officials, but practically all of the suits they sell are bespoke.

Terry Beauchamp, who has owned the store since 1985, has noticed younger men coming in. “It's sort of a nostalgia renaissance,” he says. Bespoke tailoring requires many different measurements, not just the inseam, waist size and shoulder size. “They love shopping here. They're not used to getting looked after,” Beauchamp says of younger men. Mostly, men in their 20s and 30s want to get a suit resized or updated, but occasionally a young man will come in to get a brand new bespoke suit.

One of Beauchamp's recent customers Mike Koncan, 24, is a fourth year RTA student at Ryerson. He has been on RUtv as well as well as Rogers TV in Mississauga. Koncan's parents bought him a custom suit at Beauchamp for his birthday. “I love it. It feels like day and night compared to other jackets,” he says. “I would much rather wear the custom suit and jacket than any of my others.”

But Koncan says he doesn't know a whole lot of people his age ho would wear a custom made suit, most likely because they don't require one for their profession or they simply can't afford it.

Though Glenn Vernie does require suits for his job. He is the network administrator for MicroAge, a Toronto technology company. He is 41 (he said he wouldn't call himself young, but compared to a lot of men who wear or wore tailored suits, he is quite young) and started going to Beauchamp Tailoring about three months ago.

“The issue was I couldn't really find anything that fit properly,” Vernie says. He used to shop at stores like Hugo Boss and Harry Rosen. “I was paying $2,500 for a suit and it still wasn't fitting properly. It was frustrating.”

Vernie had a double-breasted suit made for him at Beauchamp. It was custom tailored to fit him exactly. He also brought in a number of suits that didn't fit him and he had Alfonso Prezioso, the head tailor at Beauchamp, re-do them. “He's a magician,” Vernie says of Prezioso. “He basically tore them apart and remade them. I was just going to throw them out.”

Prezioso was trained in Italy and has been with Walter Beauchamp Tailors for over 40 years. Finding a tailor who has skills as good as his is rare in recent years. Today, suits are usually mass-produced and they don't have the same care and proper fittings put into them. Yet, thousands of people still buy mass-produced suits don't actually fit their body type.

Bespoke suits are completely unlike mass-produced cloths. They are measured and tailored numerous times so they fit the wearer exactly. “We don't think the way the modern world does. We make things too good and they last,” says Beauchamp. “But people appreciate that.” Bespoke suits have an “artisanal quality,” Rajendran says. A suit can be extraordinarily comfortable, but only if it is made to fit the wearer perfectly.

The whole effect is like a morale booster. “You feel like you look better, so you just feel better about yourself in general,” Koncan says. “If your first suit is one of those, it's hard harder to go back,” he adds.

“The dilemma is to convince people that we're not just stodgy old farts,” Beauchamp jokes. He knows that people who value quality and art in fashion will always value custom tailoring. “Knowledgeable fashion people always respect the bespoke tailoring.”


Photo Credit: All photos are courtesy of Beauchamp Tailors.

The Cyclepath Danforth

I originally wrote this post as sample for BlogTO. They didn't like it. But I do. So I'm posting it here, since I didn't do the work for nothing.
When I walked into The Cyclepath on Danforth, I was slightly in awe.

The store is lined from wall-to-wall and from floor-to-ceiling. They stock about 10 different styles of bikes, plus a whole lot of sub-genres that I won't even go into.

They have unicycles, 29-inch wheelers, kids' bikes, stylish and trendy cruisers, fixies, and flashy racing bikes. They also stock fold-up bikes for those who live in tiny apartments, adult trikes for the elderly and disabled, and trailers for pulling kids, supplies, or groceries. They're selection of women's bikes is much bigger than any other cycling store I've seen, and they also have an extensive BMX collection.

The bikes are priced anywhere from $200 for a basic bike on sale, to $3,000 for a nice speed rider.

In the spring, The Cyclepath stocks about 800 bikes, but in the summer months they can stock as many as 950 bikes. They receive weekly shipments, and if you can't find what you're looking for, they will order it for you.

But it's quite rare that they won't have what you need in stock.

They carry hundreds of accessories and parts, priced from $5 to $250, some displayed in an open walk-in safe left over from when the building was a bank.

I got some great ideas on how to pimp up my old clunker. They even have clothing to pimp up yourself.

The Cyclepath also has full time mechanics to help turn your creaky old bike into a smooth glider. They staff four mechanics in the summer and two in the winter. They do break and gear tune-ups for $30, or full tune-up of breaks, gears, lubing gears and chain, plus tightening up head set and bottom bracket for $60. They even offer a whole bike overhaul for $120, which basically makes your bike new again.

The mechanics try to get everything done as quickly as they can, especially for those who need their bikes to get to work or school.

They're currently working on a bike bath station, but an opening date and prices haven't been decided on.

But the main thing that sets The Cyclepath apart from other bike stores is its total accessibility. This goes hand-in-hand with wide variety of stock and its many services. Staff members are open and friendly, and with 20 staff members during peak season, you're almost sure to get all your questions answered. Any type of cyclist can walk into The Cyclepath and feel welcome.

*Photo Credit: All photos taken from thecyclepath.com.