outside Scott Meller

spiders

maggie britton

Weaver of dreams You make beautiful webs Constructed partially from fantasy And partially from the past You draw your prey into your artwork Where they taste the ecstasy Of freedom and communion with the divine

But when they wake The realization of where they are And why The façade It hits Arise: loneliness, excuses, misalignment Between thoughts, words, and actions

Coming down To the heaviness of truth And as the fog clears They see you unhealed Passing your pain and spreading it In an attempt at escape From yourself

outside

scott meller

I live among you not fitting into your mold you live without me

brief distraction

desirée samuelson

Monotonous. Ring of an alarm. Morning commute. Screen of a computer. Return home. Stale take-out. Bad TV. Sleep. Repeat.

Days go by unnoticed - a never ending loop. Watching reruns of once favourite TV shows. The words and punchlines falling flat.

Ring of an alarm. Morning commute – “What are you reading” Brown hair, green eyes, curious smile. - Screen of a computer. Illuminated phone – something funny; laugh. Dinner uptown. New shows. New bed. Dynamic.

Time passes – each new moment belonging to you. Ring of an alarm - smile. Meet at our favourite café. Embrace you before I leave. Morning commute. Screen of a computer. Counting down the minutes until brown hair, green eyes, moist lips. Return home. You await my arrival, perched outside my apartment door. Something’s wrong.

“I’m sorry” (Forgive me) Brown hair. Red eyes. Quivering lips. Alone.

Ring of an alarm. Morning commute. Screen of a computer. Return home. Stale take-out. Bad TV. Sleep. Repeat.

dinosaur bones

alisa caswell

At one time, horses grew in the big yellow field behind Orchard Hill Park. Big, muscular draft horses. Friendly horses that came running for apples we would pick from the old orchard trees in the overgrown wood. The air smelled of hay. It felt like we lived in the country, even though our suburban houses backed right onto the field.

There were large, overgrown birch trees in the hedgerows separating the east and west fields and we would climb up into their low limbs. We played King-of-theCastle and taunted the kids who remained below.

We built forts among the ferns and fallen logs. The girls would build forts from the natural walls in the clearings by sweeping the leaves away from the forest floor. The boys would build structures up in the trees with wood and nails.

One day, we were climbing in the great birch tree with the split trunk. From up high, I noticed something peculiar peeking out from beneath the leaf rubble. Something white, glinting in the sunshine. We rushed down to inspect.

Bones!

It was the pelvis bone of some large animal. It lay partially exposed under the tree. Why we hadn’t discovered it earlier I don’t know. It was partially buried. We left it there and mused about its origins. We had many discussions.

“A cow!” someone would say. That seemed the obvious answer.

“Maybe a mammoth?”

“Or a dinosaur!”

For days we dragged over new kids who hadn’t seen them yet.

I thought about them often that summer. What were they?

One day we dug them out and dragged them through the field. They were heavy and we had to drop them halfway between the hedgerow and home.

I asked my father what they could be. He said it was “probably a farm animal” when he came to look. I took his theory into consideration.

“Maybe.”

They remained a mystery. There was no way to confirm, after all, what type of dinosaur they had really belonged to.

marginalia

The Little Speck of Dust on the Photo

A column by douglas abel

Anomaly. A curious word. It is certainly in my “passive” vocabulary, and I have read it a number of times. I can and will tell you what it means. But I don’t recall ever deliberately writing it before now, or even using it in conversation. It seems that the word is almost “anomalous” in my linguistic experience.

I say “almost,” because an anomaly is more than just an unusual event, observation or fact. An anomaly is an ultimately significant irregularity or inconsistency, an abnormal deviation from an accepted pattern, order, form or rule. An anomaly definitely does not “fit” what we know, believe, or expect. It is not just inconsistent; it is incongruous. Because it challenges the rules, an anomaly can be unsatisfactory, even unacceptable. It must either be explained away, or explained. As an outlier, it can be judged as an outlaw, deliberately breaking the established order. Its Greek roots point to the effect that an anomalous event can have. An anomaly is “an—homalos,” “not even;” it is a dangerous bump or pothole in the smooth road of established belief, which can force us to go off course, change direction—or rebuild the road.

Yet the word itself has such a beautiful sound, gentle and peaceful. It’s all vowels, nasals and liquids, unbroken, flowing. There are no sudden stops, no explosions (plosives), no harsh friction sounds (fricatives). We wouldn’t expect, while speaking those sounds, that the phenomenon this lovely word denotes can explode established ideas, bring easy assumptions to an abrupt stop, and act as grit that causes damaging friction in the gears of existing thought systems.

An anomaly is more than just an extreme instance. It is not just a relatively “unlikely” point on a graph, one of the end points on the familiar bell curve, for example. An anomaly is off the curve, and frequently off the chart. Its existence can force you to go into uncharted intellectual territory, and to redraw the map of what you know, and how you know it.

Anomalies are dangerous. Anomalies are annoying.

Often the initial reaction is to dismiss the anomaly, to attribute it to some extraneous factor, or to simple human/experimental error. For one very significant astronomical discovery—that of the once-planet Pluto, as I remember—initial evidence of a very small object that “shouldn’t be there” was dismissed as a probable speck of dust or grit on the photographic plate. Similarly, the discoverers of cosmic background radiation in 1964 were looking for something else, and were perplexed by the odd buzzing sound that was interfering with their experiments. They were searching for microwaves, but didn’t expect to find them absolutely everywhere they looked. They initially dismissed that annoying anomalous “noise” as probably due

to pigeon droppings on the surface of their radio telescope. In both cases, the anomaly refused to go away, or to submit to easy explanations. In each case, it led to radical rethinking of established scientific thought.

If anomalies cannot simply be brushed aside, like specks of dust or pigeon leavings, an attempt is then often made to make them fit into the existing rule or theory by slightly modifying the theory. The Ptolemaic view of the universe, with the earth at the centre, worked very well at explaining the motion of the stars the sun and the moon. But the motion of the planets was anomalous. Increasingly complex models of “spherical” motion around the earth were manufactured, each one leading to more complexity, requiring more spheres with more erratic rotations, as well as retrograde (backwards) motion, until it became apparent that the geocentric concept did not and could not work. It was necessary to “start from scratch,” with the sun at the centre. And with that change, created by anomalies, an entire system of medieval thought had to be torn down and rebuilt. It was, to be replaced by the Copernican/Newtonian laws of motion, which worked extremely well, until anomalies in the 20th century—particularly the observed fact that the speed of light was an “impossible” constant— led to relativity and quantum mechanics—and a whole new set of anomalies and paradoxes.

Are anomalies simply “the exceptions that prove the rule?” To answer that question, we first need to understand what that odd phrase means. It is actually a legal concept, going back to Cicero (!), and referring to a case where a specific exception is made to a general rule or law. The need to make a specific exception, points to the existence, and to the force or validity, of the general rule; otherwise, there would be no need to make an exception! The crucial point is that the exception has been consciously made. More general, non-legal usage seems to imply that every rule has an exception, or that the existence of an exception proves that the “rule”—principle, precept—is right. The first assertion casts doubt on what the definition of a “rule” is; the second really makes no sense.

Anomalies, however, are not just “exceptions that prove the rule.” They are exceptions that “prove,” i.e., “test” a rule, and very often “disprove” it. If the rule is correct, the anomaly cannot be there. If the anomaly is there, then the rule cannot be correct. As a result, anomalies become crucial reminders of what “rules” or “laws” of science and nature are. They are not edicts, or pieces of enforceable universal legislation. Laws of nature are useful generalizations that describe how things usually seem to work: either generalizations derived inductively from a large body of observations, or generalizations deduced logically from other “laws” or principles. In either case, these laws are subject to further “verification” through observation and experiment, and are taken as valid only until an inexplicable anomaly appears. Hence, anomalies tell us that scientific laws are “best guesses” based on the evidence—logical or observational—that we have at any particular moment. They remind us of the limits of our understanding, and of our perceptions, and urge us to keep striving to understand more.

Anomalies are annoying, frustrating, exasperating, because they are humbling. They bump us off the smooth path, reminding us that we are never as clever as we think we are. Like Douglas Adams’ infamous number 42, they point out that the unsatisfactory answers we may get are the fault of the unsatisfactory questions we have asked.

Remember the sound of the word, anomaly. When you encounter one, its name lingers in the air and speaks to you, gently, saying, “I’m here. You can’t deny me. I won’t go away. And neither of us will be satisfied until you explain me.”

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contributors

douglas abel is an actor, director, writer, and voice and speech teacher. He has just completed a World War 1 video documentary, Yours, Lovingly. He finds none of these activities anomalous.

dawn booth is the Editor-in-Chief of YMM Parent Magazine and Associate Editor of Your McMurray Magazine. As a local freelance journalist and owner of the communication service, Media Booth. She has actively worked in the Wood Buffalo region's media industry since residing in Fort McMurray in 2007. Her passion is writing poetry and puts it at the forefront of the community through her volunteer work as the President of NorthWord Magazine. Most important, Booth puts her family of five first, which includes her husband Ryan and their three children, Landon, Dawson and Tessa.

chris bowers is a writer and actor who has lived in Fort McMurray for the last 7 years and is proud to call it home. You can read more of his work on his website cjbuzz.com. He is currently a Kennel Supervisor at the Fort McMurray SPCA and is passionate about helping rescues and finding them homes.

maggie britton is an outdoor enthusiast and human being.

alisa caswell has lived in Fort McMurray for twenty years. She is an engineer, a gardener, and mother to two teenagers and a bunny. She enjoys writing about energy and the environment on her blog, “Confessions of a Dandelion Anarchist”. She also enjoys writing science fiction and small-town mysteries.

allison dakin grew up in Fort McMurray, Alberta. She earned her Bachelor of Education from the University of Alberta in 2008. The next several years were spent expressing her creativity through nurturing the imaginations of children in her classroom. After taking a break from teaching to care for her two young children, Allison moved to Spruce Grove where she rediscovered her first passion— art. In February, 2017 she received her first international award in colored pencil for Colored Pencil Magazine’s Monthly challenge.

veronica ephgrave-wood has little of a social existence outside of

the confines of Keyano College, and would prefer to otherwise stay silent on this matter.

travis hoyles writes, “Born and raised in Newfoundland, Canada. Currently residing and working in Fort McMurray, with my lovely fiancée Desirée. In my spare time, I enjoy writing prose and poetry, as well as reading as much as possible. A couple of my favorite authors are Haruki Murakami and David Foster Wallace.” jennifer macmullin writes, “ I moved from Cape Breton to Fort McMurray over 9 years ago and am happy to call it home. I enjoy expressing creativity through writing, making cards, and painting.”

kiran malik-khan is the communications manager for the Fort McMurray Public School Division. She's a TEDx Fort McMurray speaker, a freelance journalist who loves sharing stories about Fort McMurray, and a social media specialist. The co-founder and Public Relations Director for NorthWord , she's also the co-founder and president of World Hijab Day Fort McMurray, a committee that has brought the conversation about the Islamic headscarf front and centre in our region. Kiran has been in Fort McMurray for 19 years. Happily married, she has two beautiful boys.

ryan mccann writes, “I am 38 years old living in Fort Mcmurray with my wife, two kids, and dog. I have a passion for writing, and I am currently working at putting together a novel about my life, living in Northern Alberta.”

Originally from Drumheller, Alberta, scott meller has now called Fort McMurray home for more than 20 years. A fixture at Campbell’s Music, Scott also supports all of the Arts with his colleagues at ACWB, and by working on a personal mission to positively impact the world through music. When not championing arts, Scott can be found spending time with his wife, Natasha, and daughters Emelia and Evelyn, exploring the world and pursuing happiness.

stacey northcotte is an artist living in Fort McMurray. Stacey draws inspiration for her poems and short stories from her observations of the wilderness and urban life around her.

alan reeve is a retired police officer from Ontario and has resided in Fort McMurray since 2005. Alan is an avid nature photographer and when he took this picture his first time poem came to him.

desirée samuelson is a 25-year-old born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland. She is currently living in Fort McMurray with her fiancée Travis and their wonderful family. Her passion for creativity extends into the world of poetry, story writing and reading.

kevin thornton has won one Buffy and been shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Crime Writers Awards seven times. He is a founding member of this magazine, the secretary of the Writers' Guild of Alberta, a director of the Crime Writers of Canada and a member of the Keys, the Crime Writers Association, the Mystery Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers. Oddly he also belongs to the Mesdames of Mayhem and Sisters-in-Crime. He attends a lot of meetings.