Katie Munnik

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Articles

Natural light

Jan 22, 2025 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

January days are short, and evenings draw in quickly. After the bright sparkle of the Christmas season and the New Year’s fireworks, quiet winter settles around us with its early shadows and dark nights as we shift back to routine and daily life. This feels fitting. After the vibrant storytelling of the nativity, Love Incarnate, too, steps out of the limelight and into the shelter of family life. Isn’t limelight a funny, lovely word?
‘He has filled the hungry with good things . . .’

Dec 18, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

Sunday morning, up before dawn, and the smell of the oven preheating, a machine hum in the empty café. Outside the street was empty, and I could see the kitchen lights reflecting in the dark shop windows across the way. I was a university student then, working part-time in a downtown coffee shop around the corner from my small apartment. On the weekends, I had the early shift.
Short days ago

Nov 11, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

November takes us on a strange journey from All Soul’s Day to Advent, with Remembrance Day in between. I’ve been thinking about the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Like everyone else my age, I remember memorizing it in school and reeling it off with my class, all standing chock-a-block in assembly together with solemn looks pasted on our faces and hidden pride at remembering the words, or maybe fear we might forget. A complicated set of emotions for Grade Three.
In hood and headphones

Oct 28, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

Last spring, I had the chance to participate in a Writers at Work program at the Hay Festival, a large book festival in Wales. It was an amazing experience: for ten days, I was one of ten early-career writers treated to a full schedule of private masterclasses and events with some of the biggest names in literature. In addition, we had our own private workshop tent in the middle of the festival site, where we could sit and work on our own writing. But this was tricky.
Start again as we mean to go on

Sep 11, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

I’m washing smoke from my kids’ summer clothes after our holiday travels. I sink raincoats into a soapy bucket and watch the water swirl and turn grey with the charcoal smoke of family barbeques and campfires. It makes me smile at the memories, but of course there has been worse smoke in the air, too, this summer. It’s been another bad year for forest fires. Ottawa poet Jean Van Loon describes the sweet-bitter stink of charred wood. I pour away the ashen water, and her words catch in my throat.
Under the play of heaven

Aug 7, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

August brings the Perseids: the nights of shooting stars. We lie on our backs and look up, point and count, drinking in the warm summer light to remember later when the skies get colder and the nights are long. Of course, shooting stars aren’t stars at all but meteor showers made of space dust and rocks left behind in the wake of comets.
A garden lesson

Aug 5, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

A friend’s son recently wanted to know if a watermelon was alive, so he took out a stethoscope and listened for a heartbeat. You can see the logic. The melon grew on a vine, and the vine was alive. It put down reaching roots, its leaves responded to the sun, and it needed water to grow. And, once cut, brought into the kitchen and set down on the counter, the melon didn’t look like a dead thing. It was a vivid green and strong with an almost pregnant heaviness. A sweet summer egg. But no heartbeat.
Tell what the poets are doing

Jun 14, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

June is a month for poets, a sun-soaked month of roses and easy rhymes. Soon, moon, croon and all that jazz. It is easy to look at the lush growth and beauty all around and turn to nature poems. I read an article recently about the differences between nature poetry and eco poetry. Eco poetry seems to be a new trend, speaking directly into anxieties about climate change and changing landscapes and pushing past traditional nature poetry’s simpler observations of beauty.
April rains

Apr 19, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

Spring rains and there are wide puddles in the park. I head towards the primary school to collect my youngest, glad for the fenders on my bicycle, directing the splashes away from me, and glad for my raincoat, too. It’s a wet month but that doesn’t change family routines. The school bell rings at 3:15 p.m. and the school is five kilometres away. I can’t wait for a break in the weather. I won’t be doing this much longer.
Christmas lights in March

Mar 20, 2024 | christiancourier.ca | Katie Munnik

They’ve been dangling for weeks. If it was up to me, I’d have been on them in January, but the boss says it is better to keep ladder jobs until the end of winter. No point in slipping when you don’t have to. Still, all those forgotten strings of lights in the park are looking a mess. The winds at the beginning of the month did a number on them, and now it’s me up a ladder, cutting them loose. Then I need to untangle them and wind them properly if they’re to be any good next year.