fifteen: the life you want
December rituals are persistent. Not necessarily the widespread holiday ones, but the act of closing things down for a while: the last invoice this year for a client, the unwrapping of next year's daytimer, the shift from working at the desk to working in the papasan chair wrapped in a blanket. Building the fresh blank spreadsheets and organizers and schedules for a whole new year. Looking through them at what got done, and goals.
This month was the first time I really saw--or maybe let myself see--the impact of COVID-19 sweeping down upon my year in work. It's heartbreaking, if I let it be, what I got done professionally in the first two months of the year and then what I got done after. And yet: so much of what I got done after is structural, not tangible. It's changes in the water level of the world, and I'm not going to see what they meant for probably two or three years down the line.
tl;dr: What a long, strange, messed-up year, hm?
walking through walls
Because I can go places in my pajamas now, like a spirit, I actually accepted my annual alumnus invitation and did U of T's Alexander Lecture this year: a talk from Folger Shakespeare Library director Michael Witmore.
It was billed as being about the future of research libraries and was not exactly that thing (all convention regulars now holler from the back get back to the topic) but there was a delightfully valuable thought embedded: asking how institutions grapple with why people love certain writers--using the example of the Folger's first director's unabashed championing of the resource as a way to further white supremacy.
This month was the first time I really saw--or maybe let myself see--the impact of COVID-19 sweeping down upon my year in work. It's heartbreaking, if I let it be, what I got done professionally in the first two months of the year and then what I got done after. And yet: so much of what I got done after is structural, not tangible. It's changes in the water level of the world, and I'm not going to see what they meant for probably two or three years down the line.
tl;dr: What a long, strange, messed-up year, hm?
walking through walls
Because I can go places in my pajamas now, like a spirit, I actually accepted my annual alumnus invitation and did U of T's Alexander Lecture this year: a talk from Folger Shakespeare Library director Michael Witmore.
It was billed as being about the future of research libraries and was not exactly that thing (all convention regulars now holler from the back get back to the topic) but there was a delightfully valuable thought embedded: asking how institutions grapple with why people love certain writers--using the example of the Folger's first director's unabashed championing of the resource as a way to further white supremacy.
The best Zoom slide.
There's a thing Hanne Blank said once, about recognizing that just because you share an identity or a view with someone, it doesn't mean you have anything else in common; it doesn't make you Tribe or Group, it just means you have one overlapping interest and are whole and entire people beyond that, and that internalizing that understanding is valuable.
On the other other hand: I also got to Progress Toronto's annual fundraiser (they do good work, and sometimes I do their data entry so they can do good work) and got to hear Parkdale-High Park MPP Bhutila Karpoche talking about translating desire into action, and using her own participation in the Tibetan freedom movement as an example: that one was, even stateless, raised to build and build and work in anticipation of the opening, the moment.
On the other other hand: I also got to Progress Toronto's annual fundraiser (they do good work, and sometimes I do their data entry so they can do good work) and got to hear Parkdale-High Park MPP Bhutila Karpoche talking about translating desire into action, and using her own participation in the Tibetan freedom movement as an example: that one was, even stateless, raised to build and build and work in anticipation of the opening, the moment.
"Organizing begins with knowing that we can do better and there is always a pathway to that better world, and all we have to do is walk it. There is strength in walking that path together."
I love being around--being part of--organizing, even if we're not all there for the same reasons and being there doesn't make us Group. It's like falling through a glorious portal into the World of Forms, where we know we can be brave enough, where we work the problem. Where we handle the real. Sometimes just a shared agreement on what agency is worth can be enough.
Things read
In early December, because I care if fifteen books are overdue even if Toronto Public Library doesn't right now (thank you, TPL, full of at least situational grace) I caught up on recent releases from a few people I know personally. Occasionally I think that perhaps I shouldn't read the books of people I've known for years. I know too much about their actual lives; I can see those lives, those incidents through the cracks between the lines. The idea of fiction is shattered. It all gets a little too personal.
On the other end of the spectrum, I finished Lesley M. M. Blume's Everyone Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises and hoo boy, if there was ever a late-breaking investigation into publishing scene politics this is the place, pass the margaritas because we're going to be here a while.
Blume treats her subjects with an interesting mixture of professional respect and personal--we'll call it a critical eye? She doesn't hesitate to mention the way people's little arrogances and quirks and affections slip the mold of the images they were working so hard to create, and how deliberate some people were in the creation of those images (and Hemingway as a guy who was absolutely self-creating branding is something I've spotted before, in reading his collected letters; you have never seen a guy shift from persona to persona like this before).
I'm not sure if writers tend to read a lot of literary history, but: whoa, it's good for the heart. It's fascinating, what you recognize and what you don't.
a small racing note
On that theme:
At the end of November, one of the Formula 1 drivers we're fairly fond of, Romain Grosjean--not particularly because of his racing, but because he seems like a really genuine, grounded person who has a whole life off-track: small children, a cooking hobby, putting together little models and posting them on Instagram, and he is a whole-ass grownup--had a very, very bad crash in the first lap of a race. The kind where the entire viewership, drivers, engineers, everyone paused and went oh god, did he just die? The car was in two pieces. There was fire in the sky.
And he walked away from it with a few burns and that's it.
I'm glad we didn't see it in person. Even in replays, knowing he was all right going in from the headline, it was straight-up terrifying. But it was very emotional, this year in particular, to see the kind of fireball crash that two years ago meant a driver was dead--should by rights have been dead--and that awful fire and silence, and then the silhouette of him, pulling himself up out of the cockpit and over the side. All the safety features and procedures worked. He didn't even break anything. The systems saved him and then he put his hands down into the flames and saved himself. It was like watching the kind of grace that no one person gets twice.
I keep thinking about it, the way every member of every team dropped everything in those twenty seconds he was in that burning car. Every other driver had nothing to say to their race engineer except who is it and are they okay?, and then afterward all they cared about was the safety investigation. That he was okay. The whole sport got off its bullshit in milliseconds and stayed off.
Maybe people are a little kinder when their high-performance, public-facing profession contains the memory of dying. I can never tell if in publishing the stakes aren't high enough, or if they're too far removed, or if they're just the wrong variety: self-image and self-deception instead of body and bones. I wonder if writers actually, even while doing all these desperate little warlike things across the invisible cables and lines, actually believe in the importance and permanence of their own battles. I'd think it would make a person infinitely sober: health first, and then safety improvements, and really, fuck the race. Fuck the rivalries most of all.
Things to write
Regardless of where the rest of my schedule's at, December's been a research month for a specific project--I was the happy recipient of a Marion Hebb grant to do the extensive footwork for my next YA novel, and that was a good thing, because it deserves a dedicated two months of research--and so I've been head down in journals, articles, first-person writing, videos, documentaries, analysis of prisons, rehabilitation, and abolition. Not the Scared Straight kind of material; the kind that speaks to incarceration as a system, an experience, a personal point in time, and an un-necessity.
I don't know if you can spend time with the ways prisons function and malfunction--and it's both, really; the awful abuses of power and the patient, clear, trauma-informed structures people build to walk the walk on rehabilitation--and still believe in a Manichean universe. There's a nuance to people who are in abolition movements, how they talk about the complexity of systems and societies and human relationships, how they talk about worldmaking that is deeply soul-nourishing. Sometimes you can live in complexity and swim.
A lot of it keeps coming down to healing and accountability, working the trauma and working on seeing what you did truly and with responsibility instead of shame. And a lot of it is applicable to what you do inside, when you can't get outside.
So on that note, your pandemic moment of empowerment from Stephen Reid of the Stopwatch Gang, who knows a few things about incarceration:
(The documentary is Jason Young's Inside Time. It had absolutely nothing to do with the research I was actually doing, and is thoroughly worth watching.)
Things to read
I did in fact get off my usual ambivalence and make an eligibility post for my 2020 publications (yes, I get ambivalent about it even after all these years; it feels like participation in something I don't quite like the shape of). So if there's anything there you missed out on and which sounds good to you, voila.
(Please only nominate it if you truly feel it's award-worthy. This is not self-sabotage. This is a stubborn opinion that awards should mean something.)
And there is a lot coming up. The first pieces in Reckoning 5 are going to go live in January, and the issue will be posted piece by piece up through July, when the print edition releases. It was a long, piecemeal work that--when we snapped it together--became absolute brilliance, and I hope you love what the contributors created.
Things read
In early December, because I care if fifteen books are overdue even if Toronto Public Library doesn't right now (thank you, TPL, full of at least situational grace) I caught up on recent releases from a few people I know personally. Occasionally I think that perhaps I shouldn't read the books of people I've known for years. I know too much about their actual lives; I can see those lives, those incidents through the cracks between the lines. The idea of fiction is shattered. It all gets a little too personal.
On the other end of the spectrum, I finished Lesley M. M. Blume's Everyone Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises and hoo boy, if there was ever a late-breaking investigation into publishing scene politics this is the place, pass the margaritas because we're going to be here a while.
Blume treats her subjects with an interesting mixture of professional respect and personal--we'll call it a critical eye? She doesn't hesitate to mention the way people's little arrogances and quirks and affections slip the mold of the images they were working so hard to create, and how deliberate some people were in the creation of those images (and Hemingway as a guy who was absolutely self-creating branding is something I've spotted before, in reading his collected letters; you have never seen a guy shift from persona to persona like this before).
I'm not sure if writers tend to read a lot of literary history, but: whoa, it's good for the heart. It's fascinating, what you recognize and what you don't.
a small racing note
On that theme:
At the end of November, one of the Formula 1 drivers we're fairly fond of, Romain Grosjean--not particularly because of his racing, but because he seems like a really genuine, grounded person who has a whole life off-track: small children, a cooking hobby, putting together little models and posting them on Instagram, and he is a whole-ass grownup--had a very, very bad crash in the first lap of a race. The kind where the entire viewership, drivers, engineers, everyone paused and went oh god, did he just die? The car was in two pieces. There was fire in the sky.
And he walked away from it with a few burns and that's it.
I'm glad we didn't see it in person. Even in replays, knowing he was all right going in from the headline, it was straight-up terrifying. But it was very emotional, this year in particular, to see the kind of fireball crash that two years ago meant a driver was dead--should by rights have been dead--and that awful fire and silence, and then the silhouette of him, pulling himself up out of the cockpit and over the side. All the safety features and procedures worked. He didn't even break anything. The systems saved him and then he put his hands down into the flames and saved himself. It was like watching the kind of grace that no one person gets twice.
I keep thinking about it, the way every member of every team dropped everything in those twenty seconds he was in that burning car. Every other driver had nothing to say to their race engineer except who is it and are they okay?, and then afterward all they cared about was the safety investigation. That he was okay. The whole sport got off its bullshit in milliseconds and stayed off.
Maybe people are a little kinder when their high-performance, public-facing profession contains the memory of dying. I can never tell if in publishing the stakes aren't high enough, or if they're too far removed, or if they're just the wrong variety: self-image and self-deception instead of body and bones. I wonder if writers actually, even while doing all these desperate little warlike things across the invisible cables and lines, actually believe in the importance and permanence of their own battles. I'd think it would make a person infinitely sober: health first, and then safety improvements, and really, fuck the race. Fuck the rivalries most of all.
Things to write
Regardless of where the rest of my schedule's at, December's been a research month for a specific project--I was the happy recipient of a Marion Hebb grant to do the extensive footwork for my next YA novel, and that was a good thing, because it deserves a dedicated two months of research--and so I've been head down in journals, articles, first-person writing, videos, documentaries, analysis of prisons, rehabilitation, and abolition. Not the Scared Straight kind of material; the kind that speaks to incarceration as a system, an experience, a personal point in time, and an un-necessity.
I don't know if you can spend time with the ways prisons function and malfunction--and it's both, really; the awful abuses of power and the patient, clear, trauma-informed structures people build to walk the walk on rehabilitation--and still believe in a Manichean universe. There's a nuance to people who are in abolition movements, how they talk about the complexity of systems and societies and human relationships, how they talk about worldmaking that is deeply soul-nourishing. Sometimes you can live in complexity and swim.
A lot of it keeps coming down to healing and accountability, working the trauma and working on seeing what you did truly and with responsibility instead of shame. And a lot of it is applicable to what you do inside, when you can't get outside.
So on that note, your pandemic moment of empowerment from Stephen Reid of the Stopwatch Gang, who knows a few things about incarceration:
(The documentary is Jason Young's Inside Time. It had absolutely nothing to do with the research I was actually doing, and is thoroughly worth watching.)
Things to read
I did in fact get off my usual ambivalence and make an eligibility post for my 2020 publications (yes, I get ambivalent about it even after all these years; it feels like participation in something I don't quite like the shape of). So if there's anything there you missed out on and which sounds good to you, voila.
(Please only nominate it if you truly feel it's award-worthy. This is not self-sabotage. This is a stubborn opinion that awards should mean something.)
And there is a lot coming up. The first pieces in Reckoning 5 are going to go live in January, and the issue will be posted piece by piece up through July, when the print edition releases. It was a long, piecemeal work that--when we snapped it together--became absolute brilliance, and I hope you love what the contributors created.
*
I may send a small New Year's booster newsletter once we're into January: when there's not much doing, four weeks is too short; when there's so much doing, it's far too long, and there are two publications scheduled to drop with the new year.
Until then: I hope you are all safe and well, that there's active chances for things to get brighter, that you're getting a restful holiday and to refill the well. I hope you have comfort and love.
Happy New Year, and that's 2020 out.
Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to a letter from the northern provinces: