life rattle show no. 1310

Presented on THURSDAY, august 14, 2014

hosted by laurie kallis

featuring

"Women's Rites"
and
"Fishbowl"
by Claire Holland

tonight's Show

Life Rattle No. 1310 features two stories by new Life Rattle writer Claire Holland.

Claire Holland was born in Dorchester, England, in 1973, and raised in leafy London, Ontario, where she spent hours in her unfinished basement playing school and plunking out tunes on a dual octave organ in her roller skates. In high school, she exchanged tree-lined streets for swaths of pre-Cambrian rock in a move to Sudbury, Ontario. There she earned pocket money pumping gas and, later, demonstrating the effects of chlorofluorocarbons in the Discovery theatre at Science North. Claire put her vocal talents to use accompanying a local folk hero and fronted an all-girl rock band. Her studies took her to Toronto where she pursued psychology and English at Glendon College.

Claire currently makes her living as a teacher, writer, sometimes singer, and enjoys her role as auntie.

Claire Holland fuels her prose with rhythm and lyricism. She seduces the reader with the cadence of her voice, and once she has you under her spell, she delivers insights and truths that may leave you with a bit of a chill.

"Women's Rites" opens full of sensuality and flesh in a Toronto nightclub. On the way to a stark ending of dissatisfaction and aloneness, a story that many women will recognize unfolds.

"Fishbowl" plunks us down in the centre of a college residence, a human aquarium where it seems that walls might as well not exist, and the illusion of life on residence as one of unbridled fun and freedom is exposed as a myth.

Please Note: Tonight's stories contain strong language and adult situations. Listener discretion is advised.