fifty: soon enough, work and love will make a man out of you
This month’s title from the constant, drifting soundtrack of April: a Constantines cover from July Talk's Leah Fay and Eamon McGrath, done as a birthday gift for another of their band members because apparently it's his favourite. It's quickly becoming one of mine too.
Good things about this cover! It finds all the delicious pools of quiet in that original orchestration. It's quite capable of sounding like infinite, unbending grief. It's also quite capable of sounding like infinite, unbending hope. Which, lately — well, it seems appropriate?
work (the learning kind)
Increasingly, the operant theme of April! I’ve hit a juncture where I’m tripping along through four separate courses: three on urban agriculture, one the community-centred trauma response situation I signed up for back in January. I’m in a webinar about something more days than not this month. This newsletter is going out past midnight because, well. I had Tree School across town tonight (more on Tree School anon, Nurse).
The trauma and social work course is an interesting counterpoint to the plant stuff — both in subject matter/worldview lens and how the space itself operates. I'm having to treat that space, sometimes, under the rules of group therapy rather than professional development: to assume that when faced with new sources of authority (Indigenous or other cultural knowledges) a certain percentage of the people there are going to do a fawn response. That there are a certain amount of people who are going to treat concepts like inclusion or cross-cultural respect with the same methods that -- like being a writer is sitting in plastic-framed glasses with your laptop at the coffeeshop, because that's the level of things they know for whatever reason how to parse. That there are going to be a percentage of people for whom safe space means a space where I control the violence, which is not what that means for me: a safe space, in my parlance, is a space where we have actively agreed to exclude fists as a solution. It's a description of consensual and active treaty.
When it works, though, it's beautiful.
And it was good this month, because it was about trauma, neurobiology, and land connection from the perspective of movement and diet and seeds -- so, the garden stuff. And coffee in hand, with my IDHA seminar on, I listened to the garden stuff and finally did this year's garden plan.
I'd been putting it off because of exhaustion and weather and because it's a slightly complex cognitive task -- plant Tetris on a multidimensional level, sun soil companion pairings -- and I just didn't have it for a few weeks there. Once I got started it proved immensely satisfying, in the way a puzzle is, and the beautiful mental momentum just rolled the task open wide. I'm growing for serious this year; I'm growing to eat. I bought myself a whole soil pH monitor to bolster my commitment here (this takes me up from someone who tinkers in their back shed to someone who tinkers in their back shed to go on Robot Wars). It was an afternoon of thinking deeply what I want to grow, what I want to eat, and why.
Going through my seed stash right during and after a seminar about working trauma really drove another thing home: You can't hoard seeds.
It's very obvious, probably, how deep this does go, but it's also working on a practical level: I have seeds here from 2019, which -- man, these are unlikely at this point to germinate at all. They're living things. They, at a certain point, die. It very much came home how much this was part and parcel of my tendency toward hoarding potential energy, which is a bad habit so pervasive and infinite that I wrote a poem about it almost ten years ago and then kept doing it.
The thing I had found myself saying in that seminar, half an hour before I confronted the evidence of my own habits, was that the garden can be a pretty safe space for failure. Sometimes you do everything wrong and the plant meets you more than halfway, and thrives; sometimes you do everything right, and nope. There is a space here to reinforce tiny, accreting, better relationships with uncertainty and trying again next year. Hoard seeds and you never step into the ring.
So I am putting my hands where my big mouth went and the 2019 seeds are going in. And so are the 2023 and 2024 ones. I don't live in The Road just yet, let's burn plot, I can get more later, I know how to save seeds now, scarcity mindset please pull over to let the vehicles through. I'm a bit of a fool sometimes, but at least resolved to be less of a fool tomorrow, y'know?
Anyways: The peas, radishes, spinaches, nasturtiums, and lettuces are in; there are a bunch more things thinking about their life in the seedling starter. Big transplanting this coming weekend, and whatever dies, I learn from. And I will still have that space and that soil for the next try. And a fuckton of seeds.
The second major class coming onstream is a new weekly program from The Organization Formerly Known as Plant School, who (possibly sensing need) are doing an eight-week food-growing workshop. What I didn’t realize when I signed up for this fairly immediately, with an idea of using it as some hands-on support and backstopping for my own garden, is that we get land. We get land. Actual ground is the scarcest commodity in this city, and there are 130 sq ft of space that, between the seven of us, we can go to town on. Picture my eyes going catnip-wide when I heard that one. :)
No pictures yet of our lil’ space — right now, we’ve broken ground, pulled out a ton of yarrow/some iffy spearmint with no flavour/sad kales/sad parsley/other sad things, kept the tulips/sage/good kales/big honk of yarrow in front because it inspired respect and reverence, and gently put all the earthworms back. You never feel so much like the Iron Giant as when you’re easing a tight-curled, cold-shocked earthworm off the roots of the sad yarrow you just pulled, back into its home soil, whispering sorry, lil’ dude, and I am not a gun.
It’s going to be a communal garden, so next month: updates on both the Secret Plot (at home) and the Socialist Plot. (Yes, I’m way too amused by that.)
The third growing situation started just tonight: Citizen Arborist training. I am learning how to identify, understand the body language of, and care for trees but in an unofficial capacity. This is sort of the moral opposite of a citizen’s arrest, so imagine how much I’m loving this.
It’s situated up at Downsview Park: an old decommissioned military base and airfield in the north of the city that was redeveloped into sports fields, urban park, concert venues, a film studio, and a lot of urban agriculture projects. They regenerated fifty years’ worth of compacted soil to start it out, and some of the intensives my Plant School classmates are doing are up there, and a few excellent CSAs, and the Toronto Wildlife Centre. I haven’t personally been that way for years, and the change in it since then was breathtaking: I emerged from the subway into the smell of damp soil and dandelions and so much grass, and wandered around past a ton of migrating geese to the old administrative factory building where we were bunched between those very 1940s Brutalist textured concrete walls, passing slices of emerald ash borer-struck tree trunks and resined buds hand to hand to learn about how a tree runs its growth cycles, and what marks it leaves on its skin for you to read, about what happened, when it started, when it stopped.
Our next session is Thursday, and outdoors. We are going to be learning the signs of tree stress and how to ease it. This is an orthography I want to read.
love
This month's also involved a certain quantity of tying up loose ends: older deadlines, home repairs that never quite completed for one reason or another, and divesting from a few projects that were pouring more stress than progress into my single precious existence. It’s a side helping of structural edits on my life that’s been more than a little due. It’s officially hit the point where I can’t just pause obligations and make room for what I’m newly pursuing; there has to be a wholesale restructuring of how everything relates to each other, takes space, takes time, fits into a life.
Not gonna lie, this is and has been daunting, and not easy in the slightest. Half the time, I feel like I’m skating the edge of a cliff and have no idea what I’m doing, just a lot of instinct and a lot of trust.
Increasingly, the red thread through that labyrinth — the one that tells me perhaps I'm going the right way — is the infinite well of projects that just fall out of my mouth whenever I contact the things I need to keep. I find myself planning alternating schedules for free/affordable yoga classes from three different sources, in order to properly rehab my lower back/core injury (it’s alternating your rest and intensity, tl;dr), or riffing on ways to resource getting plastics out of container gardening, or refining my tortilla technique (finally grew up and bought a press, no you can’t fake it with plates, give up, it doesn’t work) or casually signing up for Pride Month tree planting this summer, two great tastes that taste great together. I started digging into phytoremediation the other week because someone needed to tell a friend no please do not plant edibles near railroad tracks, that is how you start a particularly clever Agatha Christie murder, and now I’m making a list of people to ask who’s doing that and sketching a plan to leach heavy metals out of some soil that isn’t strictly mine. I have an unending amount of yes for some of the current elements of my life.
It’s the same rare feeling as with wordcount: even when I have no I have an acres-deep, infinite quantity of yes. I have told people in interviews/blog posts over the years that I quit writing all the time, the point is that I also come back, and I wonder if they think I'm being quirky or something, but it's just that factually, the amount of surface and intermittent no is real, but never a counterweight against the sheer geological force of yes.
Everything, right now, is going in the direction of the yes. We’ve just stopped trying to steer the boat according to external definitions of sensible here, and I’m letting the yes carry me. Where I want to be, it will go.
words (work + love)
Between these runs of outdoor activity and, let’s be plain, rethinking my entire life and choices, wordcount has been somewhat cautious. I’d worry if I wasn’t at 65k, which is one of the cognitive turns in every single one of my drafts. I just have to refit my concept of the manuscript into a slightly different machine before I can go forward again. This is what experience is good for, I guess: knowing when it’s not wrong or broken, but my brain needs a little time to find the updated angle of approach.
Nutritional requirements for the wordcount this month have included a precious bar of Raaka rose & cardamom chocolate, pieced out (it's an import and hard to find lately); epic amounts of Vietnamese coffee both at home and abroad; some swimming pool time (I got contacts again for the first time in 13 years for this express purpose); a few seasons of The Saint, which is as fun and snappy as I remembered it; and some of those aforementioned seminars, which I was in more for the organizing side of things. Some of them are doing the delightful and necessary work of feeding two needs or more at once.
A few other projects are taking form, sometimes in deeply irritating ways -- a whisper-quiet and much-beloved thing burst gorgeously in my head for about two days, giving me all kinds of relevant facts to pull over to the proverbial highway shoulder and handle; a planned chapbook (achievable!) decided it would be much more fun to be a four-part collection. And the trouble with ambition, really, is it's fine until you have a head full of gleaming cities and not enough body or time to build them. I spent a solid evening calling this elegant, beautiful idea base filth, muttering the chorus to Armagideon Time, and wishing I had seventeen bodies, with which to scoop all this stuff out of my head already and make its beauty communicable. And then buckled down and made the notes. The love isn't worth much without the work, is the thing, despite my lifelong protests. :p
(I do try not to be coy about these projects and what they are, but the trouble is that the closer to the skin the work runs, the more the answer to "How did the work go today?" is a sensation in the chest, a colour, and "I finally understood what it was saying about the egg." Incommunicable, irreducible, epiphantic. There's a reason everyone thinks writers are flakes. It's just too big to bite anything but the edges of at these early stages; I mean, the thing about the egg alone is huge but it'll be ages before you find out about that. That's why it needs a whole novel: to think it all the way down, and make it communicable. It doesn’t fit into fewer words. Not yet legible orthography.)
The book I'm actually writing right now has been, by turns, very difficult and very tender; we are in the space where what is left to render are very high highs and some terrible lows. I admit I have to muster my courage to inhabit those lows. I have given two round, worthwhile people the run of my head. I hate to hurt them. They leave their grief in my mouth.
They’re also very smart, and still constantly surprising me. The list of Things To Fix On Second Draft is getting longer. I think I see daylight from here. :)
things read
Between all this, I’ve been trying to worm my way back into a reading headspace that's not actually for work. I’ve only read six books in all of 2024 so far, and that is a worrying social determinant of health around here.
Katherine May's Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which is titled like a self-help book and reads more like if a very bounded memoir was also a tone poem. The best description I can think of is it's a personal biography of a concept, which is a very cool thing to make.
Tonal is also the right word: she's among other things an essayist, and its chapters -- structured like the progression of the season -- little essaylets. There are some lovely lines and observations in here about allowing brokenness as a place in a cycle, not an endpoint -- made lovelier because they're not explicit or didactic, they're emergent. It's one of those books where you're not sure as you go that much is happening, but at the end it quite decidedly did.
Also worth a shoutout is Suzette Mayr’s Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, which basically quietly invented Dark Academia before anyone else processed/satirized the university-as-labyrinth and then blithely moved on to other things, like she does. (Longtime readers will remember I think Mayr’s basically brilliant at melding literary and genre stuff into unified smart funny wholes.)
For craft lagniappe: An interview, via elseInternet, by Trent Reznor and with actor David Dastmalchian about art-making, collaboration, cross-media, and sobriety. I tend to find most everything Reznor says about art Good (tm), because he has walked so far beyond the shadow of all kinds of insecurity and bullshit by now that there's a clarity in how he speaks about process. I admire and desire it and respect that he made it there, because that road is strewn with land mines, especially in music. This especially hit:
To me, it comes down to, can I adapt the thing that I think I can do, which is, I feel things too deeply, I feel too affected by things—being a parent has amplified that exponentially—and I can translate some of that feeling into music that can frame the feeling, and perhaps enhance it or set the tone. I don’t know how to score that scene of 13 seconds of walking out of a room, but I can relate to Fincher’s character of Zuckerberg as someone who believes so strongly in an idea that maybe it’s worth fucking my friends over for, and then feeling like, was that worth it because I still feel hollow? It didn’t fix the fucking hole inside me. I know what that feels like. I can make music that can support that feeling.
I'm less familiar with Dastmalchian, but this observation -- "I realized early on, this is not a commercial film, and with art films, you have the incredible luxury of being able to ask a really difficult question and not answer it." -- makes me want to be. Yes, that is the work I want to make, thank you sir, you understand about art and I shall be looking shortly for your full oeuvre.
Needless to say: There is a lot of great stuff in here. It's a great way to bathe in utter correctness for ten minutes.
a note about that last one
So, like most people in the world right now (or at least from what I’m hearing) money’s definitely tight in these parts. One of the things I’ve done to make inroads on that is finally set up a Bookshop Affiliate storefront.
Just to clarify how I’m thinking about this: I’ll be feeling it out a bit, putting the reads I mention here as well as the print reviews in the storefront in case anyone’s moved to try them. I still think monetization sucks and puts pressure on all kinds of relationships that shouldn’t be there, and I frequently resist it even when it’s practical, because I like my relationships low-pressure or pressure-free.
So: This is not backhanded social pressure. This is me attempting to respect the fact that grocery prices are scary in this town, I am walking the cliff-edge of chasing something I know not what with at least half my professional life, and — I should probably leave the door open for voluntary hat-tips to happen? If that’s a difference that can be split? I’ll probably link it with the things read section for a while. I do not plan to push.
things to read
The review of Caitlin McKenzie's Wifehood in ROOM Magazine is confirmed as on for the June issue, and I have a preorder link here if you want it for 30% off in Canada, as a small apology for that station interruption.
The review of Jade Wallace’s Love is a Place But You Cannot Live There will be, any minute now, in the new issue of Spacing Magazine (not the anniversary one; the next should be on their site within the week). Likewise we have an order link here for when it’s up.
***
So, rather talky month, and next issue is going to be full. Stay posted for the conclusion of Tree School, likely some actual book reviews again, some Crime Planting™ (you heard nothing), and whatever happens to happen on the way. Who knows; I may find out more about the egg.