Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer to [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, I'm moving out of my family's home this week. I'm moving to the twin city of my hometown for the summer before starting college across the country in the fall. I have always been an "independent" person; I grew up in a single-parent household with few monetary or …

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer to [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, My unhappiness and depression have accumulated so much that they have blown up my life. I go out for long walks at night when I can't sleep to think about all my passive self-hatred has taken from me, and try not to let it lead me into the nearest …

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, I come from a small place where people grow big ambitions and leave, or furtively guard what they’re passionate about while getting on with the everyday business of work and family. I have ties that keep me here, and I don’t mind it so much. I make art on…

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, I had hoped that university would be my golden ticket to a golden world far away from the endless kitchen sink drama of my home-life. So really I was always bound for disappointment. Rather than dancing my way through a golden haze of new friends and old books, I …

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line.

Dear Spinster,

I recently ended a relationship I didn’t want to be in anymore. I feel like I should either be jubilant or devastated, but really I’m just floundering.

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Previous installments can be found here. A while ago I walked home from work and was not sure if I would kill myself when I got there. As I rounded the last block to my front door, my cellphone rang; a cousin I didn't know well wanted to go out to dinner. We met …

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. I am a woman in my mid-30s who has never had any romantic life to speak of, though not for lack of trying.  It seems that I am intrinsically unattractive to the opposite sex, though my (same-sex) friends assure me I am "cute." …

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Dear Spinster, Every day this summer I have gotten up to read the news with a sense of powerless dread. Bombs in Gaza, the lack of regard toward Ferguson and all the other communities where people of colour are executed by American cops, more missing Aboriginal women in Canada, tanks on …

Do you have advice on falling in and out (and in again) of love with my husband of three years?

I come to you, dear reader, less with straightforward advice, and more with a series of meditations for you to consider. The Spinster’s Almanac takes its name from a song by Canadian folk musician Christine Fellows, which in turn is inspired by a found newspaper obituary and the life of poet

…

after Florence Wyle

Flo was the artist. I managed the blood

and bones, babies slick with afterbirth,

sicknesses like ciphers in the gridwork

hallways of the teaching hospital. She gave birth

on paper and in wood, bronze

when she could get it. I saw her sketching

skeletons the first day of Anatomy—

we were the only girls

in the lecture hall.