fifty-eight: do you want to hear about the deal i'm making?
It’s funny; my usual process for these is to accrete them throughout the month, adding bits and items together until they’re ready to smooth out on mailing day and off we go: everything goes down bakery-fresh and it’s not a huge piece of work in the week of, so I’m less likely to shortchange you on quality-of-letter. It’s not usual that I get to the last week of the month and the entire approach feels just off. That the unifying theme I went in with isn’t just in need of adjustment, it has expired.
But this year’s holiday season has been an unconventional one: quiet, sober (tonally; she has not been sober, bar-hopping with friends has absolutely been on), and mostly grey and drenched in rain long past the time when rain ought to be in local season. The one truly cold day was Solstice, when it hit -14 C (which, this time of year, it’s awful but it’s lawful) and since then it’s been a gentle purgatorial affair. Hard to know what time it is; hard to know what season. At time of writing it’s been raining for I think 36 straight hours, and I have well and truly given up on it staying cold enough to do a garlic crop this winter. Which — eh, it’s fine. I was overmachining there anyways, I think. Let the seasonality be what it is.
But it seems in the face of that, the introduction I had for about a month was lodged a little too deeply in that epiphantic tone, the one that afflicts poetry and I have chosen my verb there with malice aforethought; the one where shit bluntly oversignifies and you’re overmaking meaning from guts and tendons. And since the combination of a Solstice interrupted by construction and cold (still good), a Christmas that I’ve realized I have no personal investment in, a Chanukah that’s come strangely late in the Gregorian calendar this year and thrown the rhythm of the month slightly askew, and all of them subordinated to the body-clock, because I got my COVID booster on the 23rd and all week, nothing’s mattered more than Wow, I hurt — I’ve been reevaluating signification. Not in an I’m taking my toys and going home way; as in it had me thinking lots about how things signify and how that changes when you’ve grabbed yourself some actual neurological rest, rather than the kind of sleep that’s just Ongoing Crisis Coffee Breaks Before You Reenter the Crisis. How other people sound in their prophesying mode, epiphantic, once you’ve spent a while doing mundane quiet things like eating takeout and playing video games and fixing your sink stopper and passport applications, things you can do under a grey sky while all your muscles give you post-vax shit, in end-of-year Purgatorio. It strips away a certain appetite for performance. And then things which were quite sincere three and a half weeks ago become a little too performative and self-involved to send out.
Which, I mean. Of all the weeks in the year to need to rewrite 2/3 of a newsletter, I guess this is the one when I have time.
a more accurate summation
It’s bluntly been a chaos month. We have seen two and a half months’ action here in the bowels of December: A combination of messy healthcare news (still undefined and I have no real facts, but having it dropped in my inbox 10:30pm on a Friday night during exam week necessitated some real hard boundaries); writing an essay exam in one afternoon and a term paper in two, back to back; about four different drawn-out fights with four different dysfunctional institutions, win rate presently 2:1 with the last one pending; a whole flurry of intensely excellent social holiday time; and the usual year-end couple of days where I feel like I’ve done absolutely nothing, which was a little harder to shake this year.
Intellectually (because I’m smart enough these days to keep a list for such moments) I know isn’t true. I seem to have pulled an entire research/academic/advocacy situation out of my hat inside six months of when “I’m going to do policy” first fell out of my mouth. I’ve resolved a lot of the long slow arc of healthcare for the better, which is no mean feat by itself; gave a climate paper; grew a stunning amount of my own produce; and brought about 100,000 words into the world across the general writing project buffet table, which is — really about an average wordcount year, amidst everything? Nothing to be unreasonably unhappy about when you break six figures? The only locus of control in the arts is you?
It’s partly, I think, that we are all running that much harder to stand still and this is deleterious to morale (as was confirmed by one of my dormant writers’ mailing lists doing a check-in, and yup, it’s fairly widespread). But more than that, that personally this year has felt like a long negotiation on every possible level: with systems, with others, with myself. What to part from, what to hold fast, where to engage and where to draw hard, hard lines. Which is enough, but comparatively the easy bit; then you get to how, right? How, where the action livest.
What on earth have I been doing with my year? Apparently repairing, replacing, and upgrading my infrastructure. And that’s why it’s been such non-stop work, and such an inobvious version of results: reconfiguration, audits, and state of good repair are all unmarked work when they’re working, and there’s a whole digression to be had here about the weighting we choose for public and private work and let’s just pretend we did it, this is already running long. The infrastructure work looks like so much nothing to everybody else, but I’m light-years from where I was 365 days ago, and the drains work a sight better now.
I’ve been thinking actively about how I want to tackle the business of 2025 for about six weeks. Obviously it’s never anything but curve balls in practice, and the catching and dancing and rolling is the choreography, and there’s something to be derived from all this mess about the perils of sticking a little too close to the story of a thing and performing it instead of getting in there and living what you didn’t expect. But I do like to have a few starting prompts in hand, at least, especially in an ambient global situation where no one knows what’s going to happen next.
I have an idea how it might be shaped thematically. When I’m an entirely different beast 365 days from now, I know in which direction I’d like that happening. So: it’s a beginning.
Publicly-accessible notes on same: I’m dropping a few more of the conversations I’d have with people in person into their inboxes at random, and seeing if they’re up for it, and how they’re doing. I keep thinking we were all a little happier when we benevolently chucked more stuff over the proverbial walls at 8am on a Thursday instead of living in peer-review and broadcast. When we presumed a little more welcome in each other’s lives, y’know?
And I am mulling a way to, without pressure, prioritize finishing at least one of the longer projects (with all previous context about the likely 700,000 words of fiction stuck on the same hard social problem still being true and an actual obstacle, not really an excuse; people don’t get much satisfaction if you end big social novels with “shruggles!” so I have to do better than that). The week between Christmas and New Year’s is also the week when I tend to do massive social-life catchup because for once, everyone’s largely available at the same time (cue long walks, coffee rambles, and that aforementioned unscheduled eight-hour bar-hopping, I didn’t even get as hung over as I expected). You abruptly realize how long and how intensely you’ve been circling some of the same conversational topics, that the realizations are wearing thinner, that the combination’s calcifying from insufficient movement. That you’re getting a little bored of your own questions. This is how a person becomes a crank; a paucity of mobility. So yeah, I’ve let these books take up residence in my head far too long, I think; I need to trepan it out so I can be a better conversationalist when we’re four cocktails in and solving the universe on a Friday night.
the art of repair / all things perfectly in place
On the upside (I’m sorry, that was grim, it wasn’t even close to all grim this month): A large part of what my brain said when it promptly gave up for the year was that it wanted fewer things broken, and more things fixed. This is a semi-regular cycle these days. I saw one round, late November/early December, and then late December again, binging friction reduction: deliberately stopping at every missing stair and fixing it now.
While this was a game played under handicap (Canada Post was on strike from mid-November to mid-December, so my few holiday cards are inevitably late and there is a tiny time warp in my mailbox as mid-November trickles in), I spent a lot of time doing little vital things: writing (finally) the thank-you letter for one of those academic awards (on local handmade-paper stationery; someone got to use her fancy envelope glue); finding the right lightbulbs to put a cute novelty lamp from undergrad back into service, and not have my desk be so dark; rehabilitating my vintage teacups to a space where I can actually enjoy them; getting passport photos done; admin admin admin; replacing some long-busted dishes (I’d planned to fix them, they aren’t going to fix, they’re literally older than me, I think we can call that a day); realizing I’d spent — actually, my entire adult life without a good pair of rainboots because it’s always for some reason been ten items down on the priority list, and just bought a pair of rainboots, so I can stop damaging my life with wet feet.
At best there’s a synergy to this: spending a chilly Saturday, first snow of the year, bopping from a library repair cafe afternoon (where I’d just planned on asking them to sew a notion back onto my lil’ owl-shaped purse, and they rebuilt the whole purse for me instead while we chatted about fruit trees and circular economy infrastructure for restaurants) to the hardware store to find the right pot lid handle replacement to put my 1970s pasta pot back into circulation, to a friend’s place to pick up the drum composter she was gifting me and wrestle it down to the streetcar stop together while making holiday plans for what we want to do once I’m done my coursework and she’s not catsitting.
I feel like everyone gets one day per annum to be the inconvenient person on the streetcar, and dragging this home across town through holiday traffic at rush hour used up mine, manners only on transit for the rest of the year. I forget what happens, though, when you bring your random stuff on transit: You end up running a floating Q&A on whatever unexpected object it is, and it’s kind of the best? People are so conspiratorially cheerful with you and ask you questions and help you shift your awkward large thing around, possibly because you look like you’re an interesting person having fun and we like nothing more in this city, when it comes down to it. People from outside Toronto think we’re all cold and remote, but we like nothing more than someone doing something slightly unexpected as long as it’s benign and fun.
I’ve cleaned it up and put it into service (early doors I think I need more browns in there; one of the last community garden conversations this year was 1) about leaf heists and 2) hilarious and is becoming 3) potentially practical) and it occurs to me that after a lot of setup costs this past spring for the oh-god-can-I-grow-food? experiment, this little guy is the last piece of infrastructure I need for the garden next year. If I have fertilizer inputs covered, now? That’s it. I have no costs next spring. I have a million zillion seeds here, trellises, bird netting, containers, soil. Everything I grow next year is free.
waiting! for the great leap forward!
Amidst that, I’ve also found the next pragmatic steps on that road — or maybe just set them up.
Item One: Last summer, friends from the community garden did a season-long weekly vegetable growing intensive up at Downsview Park (site of Tree Care School back in May!). It’s a small, hands-on, intensive version of Farm School (or at least Market Garden School) that gets fully into soil condition, companion and trap cropping, like actual ongoing kinetic focused knowledge.
I’ve been profiting secondhand off what they were learning at the community garden for a while, and at brunch the other week we decided: Yeah, okay, let’s all three of us pick the same session this year. Then we can work together on a garden plot there.
Which is how I dropped $500 first thing on a bleary Sunday morning to learn market gardening every Tuesday next March ‘til October. (And had a moment of mild sticker shock over that, as you can probably tell, until I reminded myself that this is instead of a lot of groceries, not on top of, and also it is infrastructure. Lateral resource movement! Lateral.)
I don’t know how I’m going to shift load to make this rhythm work — it’s obvious from how overworked/whelmed I got this summer that this can’t be an and; something will have to reduce or go to make room for it. But I can already feel this as a set part of a rhythm and structure for my days next year, and am thinking about how to figure a crop distribution that’ll make the most of the opportunity (crops I’m confident with on the balcony, newer things I want assists with at the farm, I think? Container-thriving stuff at home, stuff that needs some actual ground there? My garden plan is going to be a fucking tactical briefing next year.)
What are your goals for this? the registration asked. Last February, when I signed up for the first community garden course, I was pretty muddy about that situation; I just knew the body said yes so unarguably that I was doing it. Now, though? It’s definitely clarified. I want to grow for myself and my community. I want a better grasp of the concrete practice to take into urban ag policy advocacy, so I’m catching the nuances, designing for better systems, showing up right if I plan to open my mouth in the first place, and I do. I want to be literate in soil; I want to be literate in leaves. My relationship with a lot of things was “know enough to write a good story” for a lot of years, and while I still love the perspective that being a generalist gives you, getting to catch where systems and ideas change trains and create knock-on effects, thinking in the connections, for some things that’s no longer good enough for this exercise and arguably never was. I want praxis.
So turns out I’m going to hang out with my friends on a city farm that used to be an airbase when I was a kid and we’re gonna grow food all summer long. It’s going to be great and probably unexpectedly deeply stupid in bits. I’m very much looking forward.
Item Two: I don’t know who I got the School for Poetic Computation from — I mean, it has to be one of the tech-oriented people? But I’ve been quietly on their mailing list for a while, and when a January class on Solidarity Infrastructures (!) came up? Yeah, that is a relevant next step in this, the homebrew Ph.D. in building the long 21st century on better principles than what we’ve got.
I can code. I’m a musician first and a linguist at core, so I have the head for it. I’m not current on coding at all, but the rest of the work I’m doing on systems, real-world organizing, analysis, was apparently enough that the class and scholarship application went in and came back yes. Most of my community work is analog; having a server-oriented, technical toolset that’s thinking about the implicative goals of design is — yeah, I think that’s going to be important to the overall mouthful. There are doors I might be able to not necessarily open, having better digital skills; but I’ll be able to see doors, not walls.
So yeah, I’m going to potentially be really stressed and pissed at myself come March when this all converges into a point that’s bristling with deadlines. But it’s also very likely to be glorious. Watch this space. 😀
the art of noise
Advocacy season winds down for the holidays, but she is never over. I spent the better part of a grey, cloudy afternoon doing that Food Charter consultation I somehow talked myself into, at which I found myself surprisingly salty and yet in basic concord with a lot of people there, most of them from organizations more solidified than my lil’ wildcat projects. I wasn’t happy with how I showed up there at first; feeling a little too disorganized, a little too associative.
A lot of what we said: Take all this encourage, advise, downloading and hands-off language from the earlier version and update it to something that actually gets some shit done. Have some resources flow to grassroots and community people who are actually doing massive food security and sovereignty work for zero dollars and the price of free. Collaborate. Remove silos. Add concreteness and practicality.
A lot of what I said: I want the entire lens of this situation to decenter authority and requests made of it, and to center ground-up community structures. I want the City’s role in this to be building the social and economic infrastructure that lets people work problems and support each other. If you won’t pay us, build my runway. This isn’t as adversarial as it may sound. We had a mayoralty that worked this way, when I was in my twenties. I cannot tell you the quantity of lasting shit we got done this way. Capacity was built.
Some of this echoes the same old situation: How do I explain abundance strategies to people who are locked into rigid hierarchical zero-sum structures as a fact of life? How do you communicate this is a variable? It’s that poverty of language situation again; it’s one hundred words for the world and a starvation vocabulary. And I realized halfway through, glorying a little in the feeling of the work, with a soft song in my head: Oh wow, I’m so angry.
I got the edits on a book review partway through the meeting, and snuck a peek to see the editor basically thrilled with it: impressed at how complex the read was, and how much I’d put into it, and my head was singing an ache for the ones who've walked before me / and joy for the ones who walk beside me as I sat there listening to our group moderator reel off how we’re trying to fix the food system in this town and I was so angry, and — I am actually aware in flashes that I’m so good at things, guys, but sometimes I wish it counted in the right places. The problem is that I know, when it doesn’t count. So I sat there in the five-minute bathroom break midway through the consultation, folk song in my head, crying into my hand real quick in the dying grey snowlight of 3:45 in the afternoon. And then I dove back in and made some hot points about a city that worries less about who might do something wrong than what we might do right in front of some people who have organizations and might do something about it, and those were the words that this time, I slipped through the keyhole. Words I’ve been saying for years to people trying to find the ones who can hear them. They got heard this time.
Half the time this month I had no idea where I was or where I should be going, and that’s been general all year, but in increasing moments: I am right where I’m supposed to be.
things watched
Lots of visual media in the land of chores and messy limpy back pain, and a few of them — really good ones. Behold:
Wicked Little Letters (2023), which was simultaneously one of the most delightful, gleefully straight-faced, and awful in — not even the implications, it’s the text — movies I’ve seen in a while. It’s based on an actual poison pen letter-writing case in the 1920s, and I was left going wow, that was good and oh. my. god. iteratingly for the rest of the night.
It’s somehow managed to make everything it’s saying about women and stifled lives and the horrifically telling thing of where people turn their violence straight-up on the page, while never feeling the slightest bit heavyhanded. This is partly a matter of scoring, I think; it makes so much difference when the music isn’t committed to telling you how to feel but gives viewers a little air. The comedic beats in this script, verbal and physical, are just marvelous. How it walks the line between real aggression and play is marvelous. And it’s partly a matter of the acting, because the cast is stacked. But it’s the most amazingly incisive sharp-eyed thing while still being light enough to be quick and funny and fun, which is a bit like the art of a good souffle. It’s substantial; it floats. Highly recommended.
Likewise is Still Life (2013), which is the most elegant, precise, heartbreaking, and quietly fierce piece of art about aloneness — individual, social — I’ve seen in an age. It follows a London council worker who locates the next of kin when someone isolated dies, on his last case. There are shadows of a lot of things being said, considering the where and when of this. It’s very quiet, understated, and sharp as hell.
I don’t think it plays fair with the ending. I’m not necessarily interested in meeting the unjust with the unjust and insufficiency with insufficiency; I graduated out of Newsflash! A Thing is Bad! art when I was about 26 years old. I can see the art in it. I wouldn’t have done that thing. Still recommended: It’s beautiful and infuriating.
the art.
Things you forget and remember and remember: Writing is a pain in my whole ass and the better you get at it the larger and more persistent a pain it presents, and sometimes Being An Author is worse, and yet when I’m not doing it I’m not a whole person on some very important levels. I think this is designed to be forgot and remembered. It’s not a trap, it’s a circuit: necessary cyclical action, or else your life overfocuses and descends into cruft on one axis or another and you ask yourself, how did I get here?
I’ve been picking at two of the quieter long-term projects this month; definitely thinking about that poverty-of-speech situation from a few angles, one of which is a lens. I get the feeling I’m onto something actually important there and it’s worthwhile to spin it out a little, see where the thread takes me. Fold it in, fold it in, fold it in. There’s also a lot going on about poetic lineation, the precisions of it, and how it tangles with something Greer Gilman said at a Readercon years ago about the neurology of puns, but that is one of the bits I cut for being self-involved. Let me know if you do actually care; I can put it back next month. It’s a good craft point for me, but may not be relevant for anyone but me, y’know?
things to read
The embargoed sale I mentioned last month is off embargo: prose poem “Refeeding” is the third-place winner in the International Human Rights Art Movement’s Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry. It is biographical, brief, cranky, and in possession of sound ethics. The organizer in me is thrilled at this, in a small private childlike way: One step closer to being Garcia Lorca except with hopefully better taste in crushes (Dali? Really?) and also without getting shot.
And another poem, “Sparagmos (on Di Modica's Charging Bull),” has landed with Workman Arts’s newest literary anthology, themed around revolution. They’re a local arts collective that handles mental health and addictions work: a bit on the education side, a bit on the community and resources side, and this is their first literary anthology in a while. This one is, again, very much pandemic poetry of the very first blush, aka A Ration of Big Mad. I am glad it’s found home with a worthy cause, and also really looking forward to the day when all the pandemic poetry is off the books, and I never announce another one again.
**
with light in my head / and you in my arms
See what I mean about two and a half months’ worth of month? This week alone has fit at least a week and a half. I mean, it’s better than zero months in your month but sheesh, it makes it hard to pick up a thread, communicate it, live in it. Everything, everywhere, all at once.
And that’s probably the rhythm of gait I’m leaving this on. I had so much theming for this; so many pat answers structured in, all currently making time in the trash. The parable’s so pervasive in our social communications, and it’s frankly such a piss-poor form of story to base anything on. I think I shall leave it where we found it: a little looser. You can story yourself into corners. You can story yourself into UN-recognized stress positions. Best, right now, to keep a little more mobility in the exercise.
I’m not sure yet what I’m doing for New Year’s Eve tomorrow, because it may well be raining; because it’s all in transition around us, and there may be a better idea tomorrow or reasons to adjust. Because without making this the narrative, there’s value right now in being limber.
Happy New Year. See you in the next edition of the show.