Large Ess Small Press is a creator-run Toronto publishing house dedicated to bringing you works of compassion, fun, curiosity, wisdom and humour. Along with our already available launch volumes of poetry, short stories from life and whimsical writings about humans and happiness,
Toffel digs inIllustrations by Andrew Rewfoe Foerster, from the upcoming book – “Stymie and Toffel” This is a weird and difficult time to be a kid. Childhood has actually been increasingly weird and difficult for several generations now, but the truly shocking
March of the Weavers (top image) I am continually amazed by the valuable clues we uncover when we dig into art history. These clues are never confined to the artist themselves or their work, but enrich our understanding of the places and
Hi Folks Just working on making Large Ess Small Press more fun to browse and more enjoyable to read. Might take me a few days to get all of the appropriate switches flipped appropriately. Do please bear with me in the meantime.
Hello my friends – time for a new song! I wrote this one a couple of years ago, and I’ve been playing with the arrangement in my head (mentally multi-tracking it) ever since, but it wasn’t until Catherine ordered me not to
I did a show awhile ago called, “You can’t guilt a fascist” and I don’t think this point can be made enough. Appeals to the powerful to amend their ways and show more grace to their serfs are structurally doomed, because there
Captain Bananas – Millennium Gorilla There is an old idea in Buddhism – attachment is suffering – which has always bothered me in a very stimulating way – because it is at once obviously true, right from the very first time we
Hello my friends! I am sorry to have been silent so long since my last episode. I have been trying (as I explain within) but like everyone else, I am finding many things more of a struggle than usual lately. This one
Dragon at Croydon – For a story from youth, a picture by the youth at the time I’m working on putting together two books at once right now, and this feels like a very cheering and natural publisher growth process. I have
I keep working over and over again on the one great essay which can make everything important clear at last. Of course, with every pass the goal recedes for a very obvious reason – as simple as my desire to be helpful
Eternal proof – one person’s mind can change the world Here’s one for my pal David Spencer – a fellow fan of longstanding. It also serves as a funny sidebar to my lovely Vale of Avoca walk a few days ago. For
The Quarry and the Years of Growth (as always, click top pic for high-res gallery) Yellow Creek may be mediated by stone – but nature works with what it finds Like many of my photographically inclined friends around the world, I’ve been
So, funny thing, my back is twisted into a pretzel, my time-tapping foot was twitching in my sleep last night (and may be in spasm by tonight), every one of my fingertips is raw, and the associated muscles along my forearms ache
Note: these images were photographed at the Ryerson Image Centre (which does expressly allow non-flash photography) as part of their excellent 2017 show: Attica USA 1971: Images and sounds of a rebellion. Click on the top image to see all of them
This is a moment of high passion and righteous calls for justice. Good time also to think about the history of advances in rights, and the outcomes of previous movements – so we can incorporate lessons about strategy – and make sure
Apologies for my absence – not ’cause I don’t love ya, I promise! More essays, podcasts, photography, poetry and my usual general craziness are definitely on their way. Managed to get some creative energy going – weirdly difficult nowadays – especially since
I got this lovely picture and quote from my brilliant cartoonist and illustrator friend Joseph Salina a few years ago, and I’ve kept it on my desktop ever since. Doris Lessing has been one of my greatest heroes since I was a
Hello my friends – here’s a podcast which brings together our shared strange experience of pausing normalcy, and several themes I’ve talked about before, and makes something of them. You don’t have to have listened to anything else I’ve posted for it
Somebody still has to shift these boxes (top photo) Hello, my friends – podcast time once again. Today I’m looking at a bunch of things which are popularly misunderstood on purpose, to support myths that we rather like. I don’t challenge these
Today’s podcast is about some of the reasons that sincere people have fought for progress for many years, and yet have somehow lost ground. It is also about the sort of opposition which really scares the forces which conspire to deny our
Hi folks! Time for another hard truth and a big hug. Today: “You can’t guilt a fascist.” But so what – what harm is there in any catharsis – ultimately paradoxical or not? The harm is that it throws off our aim,
