The Lily Pond - Talks

Here is the link to a combined talk and slide show on my memoir The Lily Pond: http://lilypond.adventmedia.net/

I first prepared this talk for the book's launch on October 9, 2008 at St. Joseph's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario. Various aspects of living with and recovering from mental illness are discussed during the 47-minute presentation, illustrated by readings from The Lily Pond. The paired slides have a story, or stories, of their own. The sequence of images on the left documents the attempt, which my wife Heather and I made over one summer, to grow a water lily on our apartment balcony in order to obtain a cover image; we took hundreds of pictures of the stages of growth, including some of wild water lilies for comparison. The right-hand images come from a 90-minute walk I took one spring day through the grounds of the old Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, a place to which I was nearly sent for long-term care.

I thank Heather for greatly improving the look of the pairs of images, and Andrew Macrae for making the entire presentation Web-ready.

A shorter, 23-minute talk (audio only) that I gave at St. Clement's Church, Toronto on November 2, 2008 is also posted. It is called "A Slice of Water" and is available here: http://lilypond.adventmedia.net/slice.html