forty-four: o I dream a highway back to you, love

This month's title from Thanksgiving dinner, which was eaten around midnight (due to working hours and sometimes just taking a long lazy time to cook something) sprawled gently on the couch, eyes half-shut, listening to the peace that holds together fourteen solid minutes of Gillian Welch. I am not a country/roots person, and I know this song is sort of a history of country/roots, but it's so gorgeously meditative I don't mind missing half of it. I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight / any second now I'm gonna turn myself on is one of the beautifullest lines I've heard anywhere.

It's also a good summary of mood for this month? (Yes, I am still doing the song lyrics emotive Livejournal titles as a grown-ass woman, I know what I am, and at this point I can have this.) Trying to force-run stable harvest ritual, work schedules, and future plans against a backdrop of lots of people just bluntly going out of their heads with an intensity I haven't seen since 2001, and the newsletter itself a week late (sorry!) because of a COVID scare in the house which turned out to be Some Lurgy Other Than COVID? I don't know what happens, I just work here. I dream the process. That's where we're at.

Johnny's kicking out the footlights

We hit a small heat wave in the first week of October, right when most buildings change over from AC to heat and you get weather full in the face. So I spent most of a week sweltering, an ice pack tucked against my belly at night, putting off the canning because it was too hot to cook. When it got cool again -- really abruptly cool, 30 C to 11 C overnight -- the feeling was sheer amazing.

As things cooled into a more normal-feeling autumn, I've wanted to just be outside with a vengeance, so there's been a lot of perching in coffeeshops and on patios with the laptop, getting in a couple hours' desk work at a time while the jazz soundtrack across the street plays and you eavesdrop on little conversations passing by. There's a piece of a functional life, P. has been saying, which is putting yourself in the way of the emotional nutrition: the dogwalkers and tourists and idle conversations and turning leaves and concrete generosities that should be what's making up a life. This is one of the ways I've been doing it this month (see: a lot of people trying hard to go out of their heads). I am going where the restorative action is.

This does occasionally come with hazards. Sometimes a bee will nosedive into your fresh cardamom latte and promptly drown, too fast for you to fish him out. (The nice people behind the counter sympathetically just made me a new one so I didn't have to drink the haunted coffee. It's amazing how little you want something once there's been death in it.)

But: everywhere you go, you hear all sorts of little conversations. I walked two blocks in front of a pair of twentysomething arts graduates who were (rather skillfully) anatomizing the growing class gap between them and their old classmates, people renting villas in Italy for their wedding and somesuch, saying their corporate jobs are just for a little while and guessing (I think quite correctly) that no, that's going to be forever. That this is a legitimate divergence point in their lives.

It's odd and reassuring, to hear people facing the choices you made and keep making, and coming to a similar read: that this is a life you have to choose and keep choosing, there is no Making It in any real sense, that it's worth choosing anyway. I mightily restrained myself from turning around and saying, in my Old way, that yes, they are right about everything. I went to the coffeeshop patio wrapped in the designer hoodie I bought myself as a treat with first novel advance money, fished a bee out of my coffee, opened the grant application scoring and the PEN mentorship emails and the unfinished poem that needs revising before deadline, and got to work.

Lord let me die with a hammer in my hand

(Speaking of which.)

As of the second week of October, I'm back in Poetry School -- an eight-week course with Catherine Graham -- which is halfway done now, and proving excellent: less talk about rules and strictures, more about tension, breath, and where the energy in the poem's generating. All craft and effects, very little didactic.

I hate and love poetry classes because they make me work in a way that's very little present my life anymore. I'm being asked to create honestly on topics I don't choose, in forms I didn't opt for, from prompts I wouldn't touch. It's emotionally difficult. It makes me dig deep for the least easy solutions. This is healthy.

I have a bad tendency to defeat and subvert every assignment -- and that itself is an urge I need to defeat and subvert sometimes. I bring the assignment to me, frequently, instead of walking out to meet it. Example: For the first week, I was supposed to write something springing from childhood. Promptly hating the idea, I started a poem about Athena, Jane Ellen Harrison, animacy, and refusing the assignment, realized I was coating this grit in intellectualism to cushion and deflect it, as is my wont, and at 4:30 am on the day before the draft was due, found the sharp minimalist, honest thing that I wouldn't have touched without that small, loud personal struggle. I'm still playing with the look on the page -- writing concrete poetry is still firmly at the fuck around stage, and not yet at find out -- but even from Draft One, ooh shit, it has power. It is clean and true and has layers flitting through its undercarriage.

So I'm realizing that -- while frequently, the actual poem is the way I'm refusing the assignment? That sometimes it's true that between what I was supposed to do and the etymology of the name of Athena -- that's the answer, that's the poem? It's also how I just bluntly dodge things flashily enough to get away with it, talk a good line, and miss something much keener, much better, living in the heart of that particular star. There are vital things to be had if I accept the assignment and struggle my way toward it instead of taking the shortcut.

And so the shadow goal of this poetry course has become that I will accept the assignment every single time. No fireworks, reinterpretations, or diversion: I'm going to play this straight. Even if that means the poem's late (which it has been). Even if it means I'm forced to write the poem of where I'm emotionally at, no matter how much I hate that, instead of where I wish I was, and find the ways that's bigger than it is instead of dismissing them.

It's making me work. I'm glad of it.

**

For confidentiality reasons there's obviously not much I'm saying about climate grant jurying, my other just-completed work duty this month, except that it was great and another thorough use for the skill of close reading. Not that I'm in the argument about the worth of the humanities, but close reading is really useful for sussing out whether someone knows what the hell they're doing.

But yes, Rebecca Solnit is right: If something looks daunting and hopeless, step closer. The official stats on public attitudes toward climate in the City of Toronto are now in my hands, and people, we are on the same side, and we're on the right side. It feels glorious to know that and work with it. I am nourished. :)

sickos.jpg

Within the swirl of everyone absolutely losing their heads: After three and a half years of (let me toot my own horn here) what we'll call expert, balletic avoidance, we finally had a legitimate COVID scare in the house the last week of October. P. spiked a fever late Thursday night, and the world subdivided into getting PCR tests, airflow, and the logistics of him self-isolating in a one-bedroom apartment that also only has one shower (conclusion: sucks to be me).

There's something vertiginous and yet oddly comforting to finally put into action contingency plans you've had boiling in your head for whole years. There's a psychic weight to preparation and contingency; it can build up in my head like static charge, and then it finally happens, and my options are limited and structured by time, resources, what's to hand. The decisions get made and come to earth. And: whoosh. Discharge.

There was a point on Day Three where I realized I was actually more relaxed than I'd been in a while, because the lineaments of this problem? I could absolutely handle, and I was handling it. All my systems (supply, airflow, PCR testing, bedroom-to-main room comms by voice and text!) were in place and working, and what couldn't be done just couldn't be done, so I didn't have to worry about it anymore. I wasn't in two timelines anymore; I was only here. It was so restful to be only now, and only here, and find that after all I could handle it. And then on Day Six, the PCR came back negative, and -- it was handled.

It made me understand what various people meant when they said their pandemic was over. And it made me think a lot about what it actually means to resource people against a problem, and what the job of public health and governments really was there -- and maybe should've been. Information, yeah, but helping people to a certain sense of you got this. Organizing! That's half the point of planning: yes, to have actions ready and in place, but to shortcut the emotional distance to you got this and improve those decisions and cooperation points.

I'm not being snitty here: I can't imagine what it was like to have to do public health comms on an unknown threat, with everyone panicking, surrounded by people who bad and stupid things when they panic and probably panicking yourself. But I'm tucking notes in my pocket, as usual, for the next time I'm nominally responsible for something. About what my job actually is in that situation, or maybe what it could be? About how that charge of multiple futures builds and crackles, and -- not just how to direct it, but how to find the point of discharge, and: whoosh.

things read

A very brisk library month in these parts: the supply started to bubble over again, and I spent a few days dedicatedly blowing through what I had checked out just to catch up.

Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond, which wrapped 1950s Cold War politics around the almost polite pettinesses of Church and family politics through a Turkish and Levantine travelogue that's only pretending to be breezy. I might not have caught on to her so fast if I hadn't already read Keeping Up Appearances last month, but I went into this alert for what wasn't quite on the page, and it was an approach that paid off.

On the surface, Trebizond is cheerful, cynical, prone to get wrapped up in details in a way that will probably put some readers off. Most of what's important in these relationships is unspoken, fitting perfectly into the nested ideas of Cold War spies, ritual, schism, adultery, and faith. (I love books that tell you how to read them.) Protagonist Laurie is very quietly shifty: they only leak their true intentions sidelong, and when those intentions come bursting out, it's still sidelong, through a digression about a fever dream, an ape, a period of trying to metaphorically rebuild "civilization". The logic here isn't explicitly dreamlike, but it's -- ritual logic, almost. I would be catching so much more if I knew anything about Church of England practice. If anyone knows stuff about the C of E, please do chime in?

The most abiding impression, though, is this great love for the natural spaces of the world -- all these purportedly fallen, despoiled countries which are nonetheless teeming with pines, with history, with good fishing spots, with sun -- and a decided feeling of ruin and falling empire; that something has already passed, and this trip is its funeral procession and the witnessing of a rebirth. It's an interesting stance for a 1950s title, and makes me want to dig deeper into that era. I get the feeling maybe it's gotten short shrift in terms of depth.

I also finally got Kate Beaton's Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands, which was vast and grim and eminently devourable. I hadn't been aware that while I was first reading Hark! A Vagrant its author was writing those cartoons from a camp in Fort Mac, and I think it's going to change the way I read that work: what its humour is pushing against adds a shadow, a dimension that made me want to go back and do that stuff again.

The people in Ducks are a complex mess of community and isolation, lateral violence and regrets. I have heard sidelong stuff about Alberta man camps; this is a depiction that's both workaday, banal, and occasionally horrifying. I appreciate Beaton a lot for -- not having her characters have dimensionality, but the ways it slowly shaded in, like hatching. Likewise, this, from a Guardian interview about the book, felt increasingly relevant:

It's the awful culture of institutions, and she's very clear how it leaks. The metaphor's obvious, complete, and -- exceedingly accurate.

The graphic novels kick continued with Tillie Walden's On a Sunbeam, which made me appreciate how clean Ducks's panels were (this is probably not Walden's fault; I think this edition really needed to be printed in a slightly larger format for the dialogue to hit cleanly) but also has the most comfortable, delightfully casual space worldbuilding I've seen in an age.

The structure, I don't think, holds up? It sets up so much, and pays it off so scantly, in a way that feels a bit like sketching and exhaustion. But it's the kind of world I wanted to play in, for people who like open worlds.

things read in the verbal sense

It was confirmed between newsletters and so never made it in, but I read a little more poetry at horror specialty shop Little Ghosts Books's Queer Poetry Seance on October 22, spearheaded by poet Kelly Rose Pflug-Back.

This turned into something that we wouldn't call small but intimate: About a dozen audience members and four readers, playing with lines, round-robining, bouncing replies off each other. It was a really fascinating time, and the first time in a while I've read and heard poetry out loud but also in a room. It's different in a physical room; it adds.

things to read

A nice surprise late September: "Ithaka" placed as an honourable mention in the League of Canadian Poets' Lesley Strutt Poetry Contest. I found this a week later when the Google Alert popped up. I am very pleased that this poem has accrued honour. (Honour!)

Another poem is just out: "Sisyphus, Mid-Flight" is live in this month's issue of The Deadlands. It's on one level about the peculiar tyranny of second chances, but there are other things going on oblique to the eye. It's available to purchasers and subscribers now, and will be live on the website itself November 13. I like that it's last in this issue. It's a good going-last poem.

Finally, local colleague (and excellent horror writer) David Nickle has an article on speculative Toronto in this month's Spacing Magazine, and I'm one of the authors he interviewed for it, alongside Gemma Files, Cory Doctorow, and Michael Rowe. It's a really great short piece if you're interested in city-rooted fiction and want some delicious al-dente quotes.

***

Since this is a bit late, I might be three weeks between this month, to get us back on schedule (yes, I understand this doesn't need a schedule, but I'd rather send a newsletter end of December than early January). So, short issue incoming next: More poetry, some knitting, rest TBA.