About Schmutzie
Elan Morgan arrived on the scene in the dead of winter in 1972 and now thrives physically in Regina, Canada and virtually as the founder, designer, administrator, and blogger at Schmutzie.com, the Canadian Weblog Awards, Five Star Friday, Schmoetry, and the Grace in Small Things social network, as well as being a contributing writer at MamaPop, with the help of three cats and a spouse that doesn't quit. Add to that the fact that she is also known to needlecraft, photograph, and web design the hell out of whatever else she sees fit and has survived cancer, mental illness, jerk lovers, and the torture of beige cubicles, and she is basically a superhero, at least as long as her laptop battery holds out.
You Aren’t Always What You Eat, Right?
An inadvertent misplacement of food turns a normally innocuous snack into a disgusting affair.
It Gets Better
If you are struggling with your identity, the very core of who you are, know that it does get better. You will find a life that allows for love and friendship and trust and belonging. It is out there waiting for you to find it and all the joy that it holds.
Sober Without God: Love, Honesty, and the Pursuit of a Good Life
I have spent the majority of my years on this earth castigating myself for my lack of restraint and poor decision-making, allowing my own weaknesses a drunken pass to design a lesser life. If I am to move forward into a future in which I can both believe and love, a future in which those I care about can also believe and love, sobriety is not an option, and I truly and honestly trust that I can be sober without surrendering myself as powerless before a deity in which I have no faith.
How I Became a Conflicted Omnivore
Meat became much more than just meat for me that day. It has become a real and living issue about love and humanity and a concern about how the way we extend ourselves into the world becomes, in turn, what we are. We become what we do, and what we do is terrible.
S/he: Stuck
As Schmutzie discovered, coming of age in the middle of a gender crisis is less fun than you’d think…
S/he: In the Beginning
A young child struggles with the early stages of self-realization and tries to make sense of the hand she’s been dealt.
Oh, To Be A Drunk Methuselah
As the sock was pulled along her leg and past her ankle, a fine cloud of dry skin, speckled with larger flakes, sprung into the air. Breathing solely through my mouth had solved the foot funk problem, but it backfired when it came to flying skin. I felt a large flake fly past my uvula and stick to the back of my throat. Death snuck in under cover of old lady skin.
My Dentist was a Sadist
Back in the day, when I was a naïve little kid who loved to pick out her very own jeweled rings from the receptionist’s desk after getting a filling, I had not yet plumbed the depths of pain and fear brought on by forcible tooth extraction…with no anesthetic!
In the Beginning: How the World is Born
I was raised within the confines of a religion that believed in the power of words. John 1:1 stuck in my brain with the ka-thunking rhythm of a train on tracks: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Freed: How I Lost God and Gained the World
It struck me hard and loud at the age of 17 when I finally understood that I did not really believe in the capital-G God that had been taught to me since someone could press my palms together in nightly prayer. I had no faith, because I had no belief.
