Source: Make Magazine

It is not that this site is new. It has been around now for a while. But my finding it via Spark makes it now less important to me or have any less impact. One of the bloggers to first looked this was Chris Higgins of Mental Floss blog, he provide some of the first details of why this site existed.

“Every Day For 18 Years” looks like a normal life, full of friends and family and baseball. As did many I rushed to the end to see why he stopped. I was saddened to see that the taker of these pictures succumbed to cancer. But it was a life lived, a more or less normal life. Through these pictures you see as I and think many of us already know, but might to say. That even normal every day lives are beautiful, even special. This is demonstrated as truth by the constant circle of friends and family. Photographies of the various moments, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings… the milestones that mark and dot all our lives. There are some 6500 pictures more or less and you really get the impact of this mans life. I don’t know how many of the 6500+ photo’s got to me… it was enough that it’ll be a long time before I can forget.

I cheated after the 2 year I jumped to the end. Having seen the end I needed to see all the photos. There was something about seeing a mans death that made me need to see what his live was. It was like pay a debt for that cheating. This man died young, only by see how he lived could I justify looking in on his death.

It is hard to keep track of just how many books rob has published this is just a short list of some of his most recent titles.

Ottawa: The Unknown City
White
The Ottawa City Project
Name, an Errant
stone, book one
What’s Left
red earth: Poetry
Paper Hotel
harvest: a book of signifiers
bagne, or, criteria for heaven
Manitoba highway map
Bury Me Deep in the Green Wood
The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh
Notes On Drowning
Poems From The Blue Horizon

Hanging out with rob is a blast, though it is hard to get a word in edgewise. Like with his obsession to write all there is to write, just in case his curtain should fall to early. rob also talks the same way. I’ve known rob since 1993ish give or take a year or so. I’ve got lots of great memories of Ottawa many of them include rob, some are really funny and some are really annoying. But that is rob and they are indivisible two halves of a coin.

On the other hand, I’ve sown my oats and I live a quite suburbian life. So the things that happen to me are small so it nice just to sit back and listen to someone else doing his best to make a mark on the world. To get the chance to relish the successes, and to be there for the rough patches that inevitability come and go.

I was very happy to hear how well thing at the Writer-in-Residence stint went. I knew that rob would be a good choice for this sort of thing. Since the day I meet him he has been a ball of energy. Contributing to the Ottawa literary life unlike any Ottawa writer/poet in past memory. I defy anyone to find someone in Canada that knows as much about Canadian literature as rob. Yet year after year I see these talking heads on tv or radio trotted out to discuss this or that literary event, but rob is all but ignored. But if you need to know something about contemporary Canadian literature he is in my mind the go to guy. Hopefully soon another university will come knocking at his door and he will once again demonstrate why he is worth every penny of the grant money that will fund his presence.

Our ivory towers are chalk-a-block full of people that make there living writing articles about dead people which is fine. But for my money if you want to know what is happen amongst the living writing community of this country, rob is the guy you should talk to.