Tag: personal essay

September 1, 2026

A Canadian’s First Impression of 10 Scottish Foods

“9 years ago today,” Google Photos reminded me, showing a carousel of pictures from Scotland.

It’s been almost a decade since I arrived in the UK. What a roller coaster it’s been! I wrote about my experiences moving “across the pond” in my poetry book, The Heart Decided to Move. I wrote other pieces about the experience as well—some published, some not. Among them is this little essay sharing my delight and surprise at some of the Scottish foods I encountered. In the spirit of “9 years ago today,” I’m sharing it with you now.

A Canadian’s First Impression of 10 Scottish Foods

My paternal grandfather’s family came from Scotland. He died when I was seven, but my key memories of him pre-illness involved food, like the lox and scrambled eggs he enjoyed for breakfast before smoking a pipe. When I moved to Edinburgh on a UK ancestry visa, eager to connect with my heritage, I took it for granted that culinary matters would be involved. I was familiar with shortbread and scones from family recipes, but many Scottish foods were new to my North American palate. I dove in and tried them with gusto—and mixed results. Here’s what one Canadian thought about a few distinctive Scottish and UK foods upon first encounter.

Haggis: In the Scottish capital, haggis is sold in food trucks and even as a burger topping. I approached this dish, made by cooking sheep organs and oatmeal (traditionally inside a sheep’s stomach), with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, trying an appetizer of haggis balls at a nice restaurant. They tasted spicy and meaty, not a flavor I was used to. Over time, I became fonder of the dish, and even enjoyed it on top of the aforementioned burger. It serves a nice kick, but like Australia’s marmite, it’s not for everyone.
Scotch eggs: These boiled eggs covered in sausage meat and breadcrumbs, then deep fried, are Scottish classics available in supermarkets and weekend food markets alike. I enjoyed the savory mix of proteins and felt energized every time I ate one. Plus, they’re the perfect size to munch on. Yum!
Deep fried pizza: UK chip shops (or “chippies” as they are affectionately called) are fond of their fried foods. One in Edinburgh offered a cheese pizza that was entirely deep fried. I had a slice or two, but that was all I could handle. The pizza, doughy and sparse on the sauce, was only vaguely recognizable under the heavy grease. If you’re a fried foods fan, maybe you’d like it better than I did.
Rock cakes: While reading the Harry Potter books as a kid, I assumed that many of the foods enjoyed by Harry and his friends were invented, like Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans. I mean, how could “spotted dick” be a real thing? (Now those odd jellybeans exist in real life, and I’ve discovered that spotted dick does, too.) The “rock cakes” that Hagrid served Harry and his friends always made me laugh; I pictured burnt North American-style biscuits given a goofy name. Imagine my surprise when I went to a Scottish church function and discovered a plate of rock cakes, there for the tasting. They are, in fact, scone-like baked goods stuffed with raisins. They have a light texture and don’t taste like rocks at all. I recommend rock cakes, as long as Hagrid doesn’t bake them!
Pie (not the fruity kind): A proper British pie is a savory dish, unlike the sweet Canadian ones I made with fruit at home. The first one I tried was a steak pie at a fish and chips shop in a small Scottish town. I won’t mention where, because it wasn’t very good: the miniature pie boasted a dry crust and gummy texture. My second steak pie (from a different spot) was delicious, with an ale-soaked flavor and finely cooked meat, so mileage on this dish varies widely.
Fish and chips: You may be sensing a pattern here: many of these dishes come from a chippy. Putting fish and chips on here is cheating a bit, because my home province of Prince Edward Island, and many other North American destinations, offer some version of cod with fries and tartar sauce. It’s better in the UK, fried golden with thick wedge-like chips (the skinny American-style potato side being called “fries” here too). I came to expect white fish, topping options like vinegar and “brown sauce” (the sweet-and-savory specialty reminded me of vinegar in the best way), and a heartier helping than you can eat in one go.
Cullen skink: A traditional Scottish soup with smoked fish, a can or bowl of this creamy, potato-strewn recipe goes down like a dream. The smoky flavor permeates the entire bowl. I found this soup to vary in quality, but I have yet to meet a bad one. One of these days, during lockdown, I might try making it myself.
Jaffa Cakes and Tunnock’s Teacakes: Like rock cakes, these teatime treats stretched my understanding of what could be called a “cake”. Jaffa Cakes have a sponge base, orange jam, and a layer of chocolate on top. Tunnock’s Teacakes boast a chocolate-covered meringue atop a shortbread biscuit. Both of these, prior to coming to the UK, would have fit my definition of “delicious cookies”, while here they are not quite biscuits but layer cakes’ little cousins.
Mince pie: This sweet Christmastime pie (miniature, like many British savory pies) is made of mincemeat, which isn’t actually meat but minced fruit with suet. Raisins, currants, and orange peel feature in it. I had one at a coffee shop, dusted with powdered sugar. It seemed like a fruitcake in tart form. I wasn’t sure if I liked the heavy sweet or not. I found some supermarket versions of this pie a bit bitter; nonetheless, they all tasted, somehow, like Christmas.
Tablet: It sounds like an iPad and tastes like what it is—fudge. Light in color, it’s made with sweetened condensed milk and sold in gift shops across Edinburgh. I loved it, like most types of fudge, in small doses. This treat is buttery, a little dry, and exquisitely sweet. Not all that different from my grandma’s shortbread, albeit an ocean away.

For a more personal take on my first impressions of Scotland, you can read my essay “Land, Love, and My People” on School of Shine.

February 1, 2026

The Shadow of My Dead Sister

Personal essay previously published on xoJane

Sometimes I share work here that’s gone out of print (or, as in this case, offline). Losing a parent last year has made me reflect on my earliest experience with family grief, for a sister I never knew. Below is a personal essay I wrote about her for xoJane, originally published in 2015 in their “It Happened to Me” series: “It Happened to Me: I Grew Up in the Shadow of My Dead Sister.”

Growing up, my mother liked to tell me how much she’d wanted a daughter. How happy she was when I was born. However, there was more to this seemingly cheery statement than I first realized: I was my parents’ second daughter. Their first one had died.

I found out about her from a photo album kept on a dusty shelf. At first I thought the little blanket-swaddled bundle was me, but the cheeks were too small. As a baby, I’d earned the nickname “Ziggy” for my balloon-like facial features. This kid had to be someone else.

My mother explained the facts of Heather’s existence. Two years before my birth, my parents had another daughter who lived for six hours. There were complications with her brain. Everyone knew what was going to happen — not that it made things easier.

In the picture of my parents holding Heather, their faces are grave. A tuft of hair much darker than mine is stuck to the first page of Heather’s photo album, beside her pressed pink baby hat. There are ink prints of two tiny feet on her birth certificate.

Most of the album is taken up by cards commemorating her death and birth at once, full of purple flowers and sympathy wishes. A family friend wrote a beautiful poem for her memorial service, calling her a “laughing clog-dancer.” No one had ever called me a laughing clog-dancer. It seemed like a pretty fabulous title.

My family moved from New England to Canada when I was one, and Heather came along with them. A box in the cupboard held ashes from her cremation. My mother planned to bury them in the yard someday and plant a tree over them, but she never got around to doing it. The ashes stayed put.

I missed the older sibling I’d never had a chance to know. In the first grade family albums we had to draw, I filled the sister page with a drawing of a tree over ashes and wrote “My sister is dead.”

Every Christmas, I’d look through the Sears Wish Book for gift inspiration. My parents no doubt hoped for a list of toys and games. Instead, I pointed at every female catalog model in my age range. “I want a sister!”

My two younger brothers were great people to grow up with. I loved bossing them around in complex fantasy games, being the queen or the teacher. But I couldn’t trade clothes with my brothers, and they didn’t share my attention span. I imagined that somehow, a sister would understand me.

When I grow up, I’m going to build a ladder to Heaven and go get Heather and bring her down,” I vowed one day. Heather’s absence made her all the more appealing. She filled the void of my sister fantasies. My life would be full of flowers and magic and crime-solving motifs from my favorite books, if only I could get her back.

I’m sure she filled a similar void for my mother. She wrote children’s stories, ostensibly to publish someday, but partially to keep me entertained. The character based on me was a kid who read all the time. The character based on Heather was an angel who made a heavenly newcomer feel at home.

My mother said again and again that she was lucky to have a daughter. What type of daughter did I have to be to live up to that statement? I was uncoordinated and tantrum-prone and kept my room messy. How could I compare to a sibling who’d never made mistakes?

Death creates an ideal that’s impossible to live up to. I saw this in high school when two students were killed in car crashes. Suddenly everyone was talking about them, and students who didn’t know them well acted like they’d been best buddies. Deeds that would have been frowned upon in life were either glossed over or discussed with rapture.

Dead children take on a mythical quality. Their short lives become larger than life, their futures outrageously promising because they never had a chance to happen.

Dead children are uniformly wonderful. This can be hard on surviving siblings, whose grief is mixed with all the other feelings of a close relationship, such as anger or envy.

With someone like Heather, dead without having had much chance to live, the myth is different. Not only did Heather get the best name in the family (Heather Meadow), but she also got immunity from the blunders of living. No matter what I achieved, there was always a photo album on the shelf dedicated to a daughter who could have been anything.

I looked for people whose lives were shaped by similar loss and found many. My best friend at school had a dead sister, and like me, dreamed of finding her again. My aunt had a stillborn daughter.

People came out of the woodwork and revealed themselves as members of this secret club. Some grieved grandparents. Adoptees missed birth parents and rumored siblings. I kept a list diligently in my head and drew dark comfort from being one of many. It wasn’t so strange, after all, to grieve a family member you’ve never met.

I wanted to show Heather respect by grieving her properly. At around age 10, I kept a diary where I wrote about her a lot, scribbling poems and pictures. I even composed a mournful lullaby (which, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have shared with my mom).

Whenever I achieved something picture-in-the-paper worthy or did something interesting, I thought of Heather. “She should have been the one doing this. She could have done it better.” At the same time, I tried my best to live up to her blank-slate perfection, to fashion myself into a good prospective dead person.

As time went on, I got caught up in other things, but thoughts about Heather asserted themselves whenever I met some sort of goal. In high school, I took up the alto saxophone and loved it. The sound was resonant. It took up space. In the shower one morning, a Heather thought interrupted me. “She never got the chance to play the saxophone.”

Some part of me wondered if she would have made it to Carnegie Hall, while another part of me felt sad that she’d missed out.

The truth is that Heather couldn’t have done many of the things I took pride in, even if she’d lived. I still have Heather thoughts sometimes, but they’re tempered by gratitude at being the living daughter, the one with the good fortune to try a wide array of experiences.

July 1, 2020

A Little Thing That Went Big

Last month, I had a personal essay published on Huffington Post. I wrote about the challenges of being petite and mistaken for someone much younger on a regular basis. It was a small essay, about being small. I never expected it to go so big.

As a mostly literary writer, I had a decent track record of acceptances scattered among my big pile of rejections. My bylines had appeared in poetry journals and niche online magazines. I hadn’t published in many known venues, and I hadn’t tried to. I was intimidated, believing I lacked connections, know-how, and good ideas. One of my goals while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, after my freelance work went quiet, was to pitch bigger venues and land something beyond my comfort zone.

I picked up a book called The Byline Bible recommended in a Facebook group. The author, Susan Shapiro, has a great track record of publication and teaches courses on publishing non-fiction (I’m talking pragmatic nuts-and-bolts, not the “find your voice” stuff of my creative writing degree). I found her tips on pitching stories to be valuable. The HuffPost editor was interested in my personal essay topic right after I sent it, and accepted my article after substantial edits to draw out the themes. The editorial team smoothed over my literary stylings, adding click-ready quotes and a sensational title: “I’m An Adult Who Is Constantly Mistaken for a 12-Year-Old. This Is What My Life Is Like.”

They should have called it “A Woman Publishes An Essay. You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!” My social media outlets and inboxes were flooded with messages. I thought a few people would like the post on Facebook and then I’d make dinner, but the likes and comments kept pouring in. For the first few days, I tried to reply to everything. Then I discovered a further bunch of messages hidden in my Spam folder and gave up.

Most of the messages were from people who related to the article: petite women, shorter men, skinny and baby-faced folks who are mistaken for being younger, and various people who experience body shaming, judgment, or being physically “othered” in some form. Some sought advice (my recommendations are to cultivate and focus on skills and things that matter to you; this won’t make physical judgments go away but it will give you something to live for and be proud of).

A few people mentioned that my article had made them reflect on the impact of their words, a message I was honored to hear. Older readers shared “epilogues”: for some, strangers’ perceptions had improved as they got older; for others, they emphatically had not. Many thanked me and noted that this was the first time they had seen their experiences and struggles reflected in print. “I’m not alone,” many voices chorused.

On the day after my essay was published, I got a message starting “I saw your article in The Sun…” What?! I googled it and found that not one, but two British tabloids had printed stories based on my essay. Both had scoured my public social media for photographs to add to their paraphrases and quotes from my piece. Each had its own angle, focusing on the “outlandish” story without articulating the point I made at the end of my essay (that I hope the pandemic might lead people to focus more on resilience and less on judging each other’s physicality).

My first reaction was to laugh. How could anyone consider this news? My editor later confirmed that tabloids sometimes pick up stories from Huffington Post, but generally just the highly trafficked ones. It was truly bizarre to see my old, unflattering photos on the internet. However, I was grateful to have chosen my public presence carefully. Nothing in the tabloid articles went beyond “slightly awkward.” When you control your own angles and tell your own story, there is only so much that others can find on you.

Over the last month, things have simmered back to normal for my daily life following these 15 minutes of internet fame. A few more eyes are following my earnest little writing posts, and I hope that something in there speaks to them too. Regardless of the tabloid weirdness, internet trolls, and few unkind messages (another lesson from all of this is that my skin is thicker than I realized), I’m grateful that my words resonated with so many. If you’ve found my blog post through my “looking 12” essay, welcome. Welcome, and thank you, to everyone who’s seen themselves in my little-big story. You’re not alone. You are so much less alone than you might think.

June 4, 2018

How to Write a Personal Story That Connects with Readers

I recently finished doing a manuscript assessment for a memoir. The author was eager to tell their story to future generations of their family, having put much time and effort into researching their own family history and finding the stories sparse. A memoirist in my writers’ group is impelled by the same impulse. The lines I’ve participated in critiquing are well crafted, the stories engaging. These two books have me thinking a lot about memoir lately, and one of my client’s comments made me think: “I know this story isn’t commercial.”

“Commercial” is another thing I’ve been thinking about. It speaks to the market, but the market is born from reader interest. Readers buy a book because they connect with the content in some form. For those who write memoirs, personal essays, and other forms of writing about their own experiences, their art becomes commercial when it resonates with others. Reading someone else’s story is most interesting when it connects to something you’ve felt, thought, wanted, or lived.

Many of us hunger to tell our stories. There’s a difference, though, between what works for the writer and what works for the reader. How to use the ephemeral medium of words to build a bridge between your experience and others’?

From reading and editing work based on personal experience, I’ve noticed that certain elements help an individual’s story resonate on a broadly appealing level. If you’re working on a memoir or personal essay, the following writing techniques might help it connect with readers, too.

Bring scenes to life. Rather than listing events, show your experiences by creating scenes. Incorporate the senses: What did you see, hear, feel, smell, and taste? If you’re writing a longer piece, dialogue can be built into your scenes to break up the narration. Because we don’t always remember what everyone said in the past, dialogue in memoir is often more of an approximation. That said, if you recall any memorable lines, by all means include them!

Be a character. Readers want to get to know you. Let your individual voice come through in word choice and craft. Use your story to highlight your values and share your feelings. It might be tempting to think that writing something “universal” means leaving your personality out, but the opposite is true. Few readers relate to a bland everyman or everywoman, while many will relate to a narrator who feels alive, even if they are quite different from the reader themselves. Don’t be afraid to take a stand. Let your uniqueness shine.

Build in a narrative arc. Readers appreciate progress and stories that make sense. While life doesn’t necessarily have clear-cut beginnings, endings, or climaxes, it’s helpful to shape your story so that it does have these elements. Show who you were before your story began, how your experience changed you, and why it matters.

Emphasize a theme beyond the personal. It’s often immensely rewarding to write about your life experiences, but readers want stories that have something to offer them beyond experiencing someone else’s reality. Look for universal truths that your experience individualizes. Maybe it relates to a global issue or relatable emotion. Bring out your story’s implications that are bigger than the scope of your personal sphere.

When done well, personal writing is some of the most powerful writing out there. It allows readers to experience walks of life they might never otherwise have access to, and it describes deep human experiences in ways that help them feel less alone. With thoughtfulness around audience and storytelling, your personal writing will shine. For some readers, your voice might be the very one they need to hear.