I remember going to Gathie Falk’s first retrospective, in 1985, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and falling in love with her sense of humour and her quirky sensibility: pyramids of ceramic apples glazed a vivid red, and ceramic grapefruit glazed in sunny yellow; wooden cabinets filled with handmade ceramic reproductions of men’s shoes: hightop lace-up sneakers, black ankle boots with zippers, two-tone brogues. In one corner, a herd of plywood horses, modelled after merry-go-round horses in mid-gallop, hung by thin cords from the ceiling, swaying gently as people walked past. There were paintings in series: the “Night Skies” series, and “Pieces of Water,” for which Falk described her method: “I took a long sharp knife and cut down into the ocean to lift out a piece, almost a square, of about 3 by 25 feet and I painted the top surface of this piece of water.” Now, at age ninety, Falk has written an “artist’s memoir” (with Robin Laurence, the visual arts critic for the Georgia Straight) which is just as delightful to read as Falk’s artwork is to look at. In Apples, Etc.: An Artist's Memoir (Figure 1), Falk writes about her impoverished childhood in Winnipeg during the 193s; she writes about her father and mother, her brother Jack, and her friends. She writes about her early performance art pieces from the 196s, like the one titled “Some Are Egger Than I,” in which she “chose an egg from [a] white bowl, ate it from a gold-rimmed egg cup, got up, picked up a long ruler, surveyed the scene on the floor, chose a ceramic egg and batted it with the ruler towards a real egg, smashing it.” Awarded the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 213, Falk resists those who tell her that it might be time to “Hang up your runners and rest.” “But no, I told them, there’s still too much to do: too many more things popping into my head, demanding to be seen.”