eight: you can be good
and now that you don't have to be perfect
Case numbers in Toronto started to drop hard in early June--a wobble and then a cliff. Like, I'm guessing, many people, I've been watching the graphs every morning. The moment when suddenly outside was comfortable again came Last Unicorn-style: I woke up one warm morning and thought yes, but now, and we went to the market for cheese and laundry detergent.
Going grocery shopping in person again means reclaiming one of my sources of immense pleasure. It is, for me, what some people get out of being let loose in an art supply store: sights and smells and the delectable crackling of potential energy shifting. A tomato in your hand has little strings of possibility trailing from it. It can become.
Which meant we managed to get to our fishmonger just in time for the weekly vegetable box that's kept us going through lockdown to get beautiful--purple beets, tarragon, heritage potatoes, shallots, rhubarb, collard greens, as if the mandate had come down and it was French food all week. So we cracked the Julia Child and celebrated P.'s birthday with a first homemade Lobster Thermidor (definitely a special occasion dish, dirties every pot, terrifyingly heavenly, and enough of a butter bomb that I'm eating near-vegetarian and low-fat for the next six weeks because butter is just emotionally over for a while).
There were scallops in tarragon white wine sauce with caramelized onion rice pilaf, there has been asparagus and asparagus and more asparagus (this time of year, there is never enough asparagus), there were miso-marinated salmon tails cooked while attending public space committee meetings, gingered radish slaw, made-from-scratch sliders, and beets peeled for salad while notetaking a panel on pathways to defunding police.
There are things I truly appreciate about the sudden ubiquity of Zoom meetings. Being able to rough-chop tarragon and juice lemons while drafting an anti-oppression policy and vision/values statement is definitely one of them. It feels very much like the kind of community work I've always wanted--the kind that can live in the kitchen too, and bring those fundamentals of food/nourishment/making outside, into itself. It's working from the right centre of gravity; it's all my modes combined.
Attending activist meetings from the kitchen has been one of the greater sources of satisfaction in what is still self-isolation life right now--the numbers are better, but we are still careful, and will continue to be. Last issue, I mentioned the core concern outside working hours right now: impact, and methods/spaces of heightening same. About what feels like a thousand years ago (okay, it was really just ten or eleven) I realized I would never be happy as a person who writes about adventures and change-making but never does them. The principle is holding. Focusing on my impact has indeed brought in greater joy.
So: There is a talk on James Baldwin and a public meeting on redesigning Yonge Street later this week. Which is lucky, because our summer CSA has started--from a small, newer farm that usually sells at our local market--and I will have Harukei turnips to pickle while I'm dialed in, and a whole stack of chard to figure out so help me god, because it's as long as my arm.
(is that it?)
One of the other things that can be fetched now that lockdown is slowly easing: physical library books. Toronto Public Library has figured out a pick-up/dropoff system that minimizes contact absolutely, and so half the stack of hardcovers that sheltered in place with us this spring has been sent safely home and the first new books in a while have arrived: two more of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher novels, a novella research resource, and 2018's Best American Food Writing, because there is always room in this house for essays about food.
As good as getting the new books: the nice removal of psychic weight in sending the old library books home. It's a good feeling to see off what you're finished with, even in small ways, and take that bit of table space back.
However, a great deal of my reading this month has been other people's just-finished or not-quite-finished work. Book reviewing has picked up again as publishers are rescheduling releases for autumn, the Reckoning slushpile is humming (promptest slush in the West), and several teaching crits I owed--for my regular monthly gig at OWW or a few Visiting Professional Critiquer situations--came due these past few weeks. I have read a lot of fiction in the past few weeks that still has the bark on, or is review work and under NDA, so of course I can basically report on none of it. C'est la guerre.
The other thing I've read a great deal of these past few weeks is studies. I spent a few days mopping up research resources for the novella--mostly reading urbanism and infrastructure reports for the right details that particular future needs--and found, through them, the City of Toronto's Circular Economy working group. It's fundamentally just expanding what most of the economically precarious (hi), slightly crafty people I know already do with things, reuse-repair-renew, but on a municipal sourcing scale that has a chance for real impact.
It's mason jar economies but for cities and I love it, not because of the aesthetics, but for the recognition that these approaches aren't aesthetics: they're mindsets that are expandable out of the individual and into the systemic.
It all, of course, loops back into the writing work: urbanism and community-building and citizenship inflect science fiction, and science fiction inflects organizing. What it means when you expand a point of individual, personal growth into the realm of the systemic; how it builds and mirrors.
You apparently think about a city or a system in lateral terms when you're used to asking okay, but on the spaceship, how do they poop? It changes which issues you consider fundamental and actionable, and how you conceptualize that question of impact. (Activism is just worldbuilding done with your hands; same thing really.) You think about the worldbuilding laterally when you have spent time in public meetings and mission statements, and the guts of how your own neighbourhood runs.
It all loops back into the manuscript, which isslouching toward Bethlehem to be born striding smoothly and urbanely toward a finished first draft. I am really hoping to have news on that front inside the next two letters. Long time coming, well worth the wait.
Things to read
It's a space of quiet for new publications, but the physical edition of Reckoning 4 has arrived from the printers, including my city-like-the-rings-of-a-tree poem, "The Dream of the Wood", and a pile of gorgeous fiction, essays, and poetry. It's available to order now through the link.
(I guess so. maybe that's it.)
Case numbers in Toronto started to drop hard in early June--a wobble and then a cliff. Like, I'm guessing, many people, I've been watching the graphs every morning. The moment when suddenly outside was comfortable again came Last Unicorn-style: I woke up one warm morning and thought yes, but now, and we went to the market for cheese and laundry detergent.
Going grocery shopping in person again means reclaiming one of my sources of immense pleasure. It is, for me, what some people get out of being let loose in an art supply store: sights and smells and the delectable crackling of potential energy shifting. A tomato in your hand has little strings of possibility trailing from it. It can become.
Which meant we managed to get to our fishmonger just in time for the weekly vegetable box that's kept us going through lockdown to get beautiful--purple beets, tarragon, heritage potatoes, shallots, rhubarb, collard greens, as if the mandate had come down and it was French food all week. So we cracked the Julia Child and celebrated P.'s birthday with a first homemade Lobster Thermidor (definitely a special occasion dish, dirties every pot, terrifyingly heavenly, and enough of a butter bomb that I'm eating near-vegetarian and low-fat for the next six weeks because butter is just emotionally over for a while).
There were scallops in tarragon white wine sauce with caramelized onion rice pilaf, there has been asparagus and asparagus and more asparagus (this time of year, there is never enough asparagus), there were miso-marinated salmon tails cooked while attending public space committee meetings, gingered radish slaw, made-from-scratch sliders, and beets peeled for salad while notetaking a panel on pathways to defunding police.
There are things I truly appreciate about the sudden ubiquity of Zoom meetings. Being able to rough-chop tarragon and juice lemons while drafting an anti-oppression policy and vision/values statement is definitely one of them. It feels very much like the kind of community work I've always wanted--the kind that can live in the kitchen too, and bring those fundamentals of food/nourishment/making outside, into itself. It's working from the right centre of gravity; it's all my modes combined.
Attending activist meetings from the kitchen has been one of the greater sources of satisfaction in what is still self-isolation life right now--the numbers are better, but we are still careful, and will continue to be. Last issue, I mentioned the core concern outside working hours right now: impact, and methods/spaces of heightening same. About what feels like a thousand years ago (okay, it was really just ten or eleven) I realized I would never be happy as a person who writes about adventures and change-making but never does them. The principle is holding. Focusing on my impact has indeed brought in greater joy.
So: There is a talk on James Baldwin and a public meeting on redesigning Yonge Street later this week. Which is lucky, because our summer CSA has started--from a small, newer farm that usually sells at our local market--and I will have Harukei turnips to pickle while I'm dialed in, and a whole stack of chard to figure out so help me god, because it's as long as my arm.
(is that it?)
One of the other things that can be fetched now that lockdown is slowly easing: physical library books. Toronto Public Library has figured out a pick-up/dropoff system that minimizes contact absolutely, and so half the stack of hardcovers that sheltered in place with us this spring has been sent safely home and the first new books in a while have arrived: two more of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher novels, a novella research resource, and 2018's Best American Food Writing, because there is always room in this house for essays about food.
As good as getting the new books: the nice removal of psychic weight in sending the old library books home. It's a good feeling to see off what you're finished with, even in small ways, and take that bit of table space back.
However, a great deal of my reading this month has been other people's just-finished or not-quite-finished work. Book reviewing has picked up again as publishers are rescheduling releases for autumn, the Reckoning slushpile is humming (promptest slush in the West), and several teaching crits I owed--for my regular monthly gig at OWW or a few Visiting Professional Critiquer situations--came due these past few weeks. I have read a lot of fiction in the past few weeks that still has the bark on, or is review work and under NDA, so of course I can basically report on none of it. C'est la guerre.
The other thing I've read a great deal of these past few weeks is studies. I spent a few days mopping up research resources for the novella--mostly reading urbanism and infrastructure reports for the right details that particular future needs--and found, through them, the City of Toronto's Circular Economy working group. It's fundamentally just expanding what most of the economically precarious (hi), slightly crafty people I know already do with things, reuse-repair-renew, but on a municipal sourcing scale that has a chance for real impact.
It's mason jar economies but for cities and I love it, not because of the aesthetics, but for the recognition that these approaches aren't aesthetics: they're mindsets that are expandable out of the individual and into the systemic.
It all, of course, loops back into the writing work: urbanism and community-building and citizenship inflect science fiction, and science fiction inflects organizing. What it means when you expand a point of individual, personal growth into the realm of the systemic; how it builds and mirrors.
You apparently think about a city or a system in lateral terms when you're used to asking okay, but on the spaceship, how do they poop? It changes which issues you consider fundamental and actionable, and how you conceptualize that question of impact. (Activism is just worldbuilding done with your hands; same thing really.) You think about the worldbuilding laterally when you have spent time in public meetings and mission statements, and the guts of how your own neighbourhood runs.
It all loops back into the manuscript, which is
Things to read
It's a space of quiet for new publications, but the physical edition of Reckoning 4 has arrived from the printers, including my city-like-the-rings-of-a-tree poem, "The Dream of the Wood", and a pile of gorgeous fiction, essays, and poetry. It's available to order now through the link.
(I guess so. maybe that's it.)
Hope you are all safe and well, and finding ways to be--not perfect, but good.
See you in three weeks. :)
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