forty-one: Harry says: when faced with straitjackets / get bigger.
It's probably intensely recursive to quote from a poem you wrote; borders on wanky, honestly. But this line has been circling my head this month, like something I reached back for years ago and flung forward to tell myself when I'd need it. Far too much of my first week back from workshop was taken up with the return of some very old, very complex problems that never got adequately solved the first time, and it turns out this is absolutely the way to deal with it: When people try to make the world smaller to not face what's happening around them, or because of them? Open the windows and doors. I am glad I actually learned something after reading three years' of abolitionist theory. It's a sign of something, at least, to be able to take your own advice.
revision week on Discovery Channel
Along those lines, but on a different trajectory: It turned out I was right about it taking a while for Sycamore Hill to filter through my head and leave the landscape altered. When it finished percolating, it turns out that workshop was like plumbing: it flooded the parts of my brain that are intensely engaged with writing process, cleared out the gunk and disuse, and left them flowing. This is not nothing at all. It's equivalent to mental and professional State of Good Repair work. And suddenly I looked at my desktop and went okay, this will not do.
So in early July, instead of jumping back into the longform projects eating my head, I decided to spend a week opening up all the short pieces (poems, essays, short fiction) that are one inch from being finished and haven't been -- and, well, start finishing them. They're taking up valuable processing power in there, and I want it back.
I figured out rather quickly this was a laudable instinct, but easier said than done: the reasons they were all one inch from being finished weren't cosmetic, they were structural; they all required serious doses of concentrated thinking, the kind where you say "I spent all afternoon trying to find one right verb" and it isn't cute, it's just a lot of work compressed into small spaces. So I did a lot of thinking, and haven't get as far with it as I'd hoped (although project does continue!), but did get somewhere, with a lot of notes about emotional honesty in poetry, about the technical necessity for that right verb (a lot of what I seem to be working is better verbs), about what constitutes a middle. Middles are the unacknowledged hard bit of art and life.
And: Said concentrated thinking went down some seriously interesting rabbit holes. We spent the better part of a morning in the household batting around whether working stiffs of fascism (punchclock fascism, stormtroopers as a day job) is a legible trope to American readers. It shows up a lot in British and French media: lightly frustrated middle managers or stormtroopers or repressive military recruits who aren't into it, aren't going to be, and are mostly counting down the hours until their tea break so please don't rock the boat until then, for the love of God, let's just get through this together. American portraits of repressive violence are frequently assumed to be motivated; they rarely come with that tone of massive exhaustion. That yes, we're all tired.
And this whole thing (which was, let's remember, to solve a story) rapidly bloomed into a massive multi-person, multinational conversation about empires, different societies' etiquettes of violence, the little historical ghost-roles we're still casting for today, and that I probably need to send that story to UK markets and not US ones because the context is just too different, and I can't launch a survey course on sociology just to have a story read the way I want to write it. That is not effective arting.
The interesting thing, though: Those of us who got it are the people who are a little omnivorous in our reading and TV. The Americans immediately referenced Red Dwarf and Blake's 7; the Canadians threw in buckets of Japanese anime as reference. It said something about the value of watching international media: widely, young, and lots. You get exposed to not just the surface trappings of a culture, but all these different structural assumptions about power and how people interact with it. You acquire range in how you think about the world. Because of my upbringing (one British parent!) it's fairly invisible to me, but: oh. It's valuable.
But on the whole: Revision Week just kind of reaffirmed that my whole deal process-wise is take increasingly bigger unchewable bites of things and then try to grow my brain and craft fast enough to catch up with them. I'm literally not smart enough sometimes to figure out what I just did there, and then I have to go get smarter so I can find out, and frequently finding out is frustrating and circular and fun even when (and even though!) it takes years.
It's weird to think, though: I still have no idea what I am even doing as a poet half the time, except for the part of me that absolutely does, and I am constantly swimming out to her just at the horizon. That's the job, I've come to realize. Just sight yourself, and keep swimming.
gardentown
It's been wet and humid and bad for anyone who doesn't want to run three showers a day (and occasionally for anyone who likes breathing, last Friday was a rough situation in these parts), but the garden absolutely loves this weather. The garden, she is thriving. Behold:
And this is not just my hyperlocal plants. I took a long, winding night walk home last week after a volunteer thank-you party (note: always go to the volunteer thank-you party, especially when you win big; celebrating is part of the job). The dusk was falling over the city, people were on patios, the night was hot and soft, and all the parks and trees I passed through on my way home smelled like vibrant, living green. It's a good antidote (companion? balance?) to the climate news and occasional state of the sky: a lot of things around here alive and thriving.
things watched
A separate category just to shout out Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths (2008): a one-hour documentary about the segregated Mardi Gras crewes of Mobile, AL, which claims the continent's oldest Mardi Gras festivals. Brown interviews both elder and younger members of the major parading organizations in the weeks leading up to the parades, and--I am including this to follow on from that big thought last month. Nothing in your life will ever drive home harder that the United States of America is a colony, and has the reactions and politics of a colony. It's not explicit in the documentary itself, but--look for it and you can't but see it everywhere.
It's on Netflix at the moment, only about an hour, and it will make you think if watched at a certain slant of light.
things read
I started the month with a bit of carceral research mop-up: several memoirs that are very cogent in and of themselves but told me nothing new about the experience, and that's not their fault; I've just been those places before and heard those stories already.
More novel was Melody Beattie's Codependent No More -- part of the side research on helping professions for the book, but also for good hot interpersonal tips a girl can use in times of grief and trouble. This book lives up to its online-forum reputation: There is a lot in here that's extremely sensible, cogently said, direct, supportive, and immensely alarming if you are a person who has lived or worked in proximity to any fandom in the world.
So many of these assumptions and behaviours were familiar. There's probably nothing surprising about that: If you submerge a certain part of your identity into things other people do and make -- if you put yourself in the passive position for fun and profit -- some dynamics are going to play out. You are channeling your own agency through strangers, and that has consequences. So, shit got real in my heart for a few days as I worked through this one. It may have never meant to, but it provided a lot of context to some of the ways friendships and professional dynamics change when people sell a book, and change seemingly overnight.
I saw a few things I do; a few I never thought to do; a few I thankfully, and sometimes with effort, stopped doing in my twenties; a few strategies I'd figured out on my own time; a few that I'll keep in my pocket. Even if you are not worried about this particular dynamic or situation, it's a valuable piece of social and self-navigation and well worth reading. 200 A5-sized pages, verra short.
On the fiction end, I finally got myself to Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter, which quite deservedly won itself a whole entire Giller Prize last year (the literary prize that is eleven years of rent, although probably more like eight now with inflation). Mayr is one of the writers I want to be when I grow up (insert infinite post-home run dugout videos of baseball players slapping each other on the back and going make me like yoooou): she's brilliant, nuanced, absolutely in control of her craft, experimental, and does high-wire genre origami in ways that give me joy. Her Monoceros is still one of my best all-time books. So I went into this Expecting, and Expectations were not disappointed in the least. God, this book is beautiful. It's handling all these complex things very deftly, and it's very, very soft.
Mayr writes absolutely literary books, but they're always engaged with the weird: Monoceros had unicorns at its centre, and The Sleeping Car Porter holds orbit around a Weird Tales-style pulp novel called The Scarab From Jupiter, which Baxter keeps trying to get a few more pages of as he descends farther and farther into sleeplessness, unrepression, and ghostly visions which may or may not be real. The end as writ is a little too tidy for me -- things that are maybe news to other people, as above, and just aren't news in these parts -- but it was a kinetic, jolting, hallucinatory delight of a book without any of the affectedness that usually comes along when someone uses those words.
Finally, another to shout out: Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages, a meditative 1921 British novel which I think Marissa mentioned a few years ago, and which languished on my TBR list until I realized oh, what I would really like right now is another 1920s British novel where people aren't mean about each other but treat each other as whole. It's lovely, guys, even on the scale of 1920s humanist novels where people treat each other as whole: a thoughtful, compassionate, rather incisive little dwell on what it's like to grow up, grow old, try to square yourself with your own age as a woman from your twenties to your eighties. It watches people closely, intelligently, kindly. It's also one of those texts that will remind you that yes, the 1920s were very much the modern era; the concerns, struggles, solutions are very familiar. It's a great book for that moment when you're trying to reconcile yourself and the idea of yourself (always, yet again).
things to read
Another poem placed and forthcoming: "Sisyphus, Mid-Flight" will be in a future issue of The Deadlands -- probably September, although that's not yet final. It's about the peculiar oppressions of one last chance. I was visibly in a mood when I wrote it, though a more complex mood than one might think.
Likewise, "Sunday in the Park With Hank", the story where you try to go on a date and your boyfriend's personal haunting third-wheels it, is going to be reprinted in The Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1 after having originally appeared in The Deadlands last July. This was nice! It's a weird little story; I'm persistently glad it keeps getting love. The current publication timeline has the book dropping around October in print and ebook both.
I got proofs last week for Fire From the Heart 2023, which is the Muriel's Journey Prize chapbook, which is where poem "what Mama says" will be at. There's a launch event online Saturday, September 9th at 2:30 PST / 5:30 EST. I will link the link when I get the link. :)
I hope you're all keeping relatively cool/dry/whatever you need to be under these weird, chaotic summer circumstances, and: until next month.
revision week on Discovery Channel
Along those lines, but on a different trajectory: It turned out I was right about it taking a while for Sycamore Hill to filter through my head and leave the landscape altered. When it finished percolating, it turns out that workshop was like plumbing: it flooded the parts of my brain that are intensely engaged with writing process, cleared out the gunk and disuse, and left them flowing. This is not nothing at all. It's equivalent to mental and professional State of Good Repair work. And suddenly I looked at my desktop and went okay, this will not do.
So in early July, instead of jumping back into the longform projects eating my head, I decided to spend a week opening up all the short pieces (poems, essays, short fiction) that are one inch from being finished and haven't been -- and, well, start finishing them. They're taking up valuable processing power in there, and I want it back.
I figured out rather quickly this was a laudable instinct, but easier said than done: the reasons they were all one inch from being finished weren't cosmetic, they were structural; they all required serious doses of concentrated thinking, the kind where you say "I spent all afternoon trying to find one right verb" and it isn't cute, it's just a lot of work compressed into small spaces. So I did a lot of thinking, and haven't get as far with it as I'd hoped (although project does continue!), but did get somewhere, with a lot of notes about emotional honesty in poetry, about the technical necessity for that right verb (a lot of what I seem to be working is better verbs), about what constitutes a middle. Middles are the unacknowledged hard bit of art and life.
And: Said concentrated thinking went down some seriously interesting rabbit holes. We spent the better part of a morning in the household batting around whether working stiffs of fascism (punchclock fascism, stormtroopers as a day job) is a legible trope to American readers. It shows up a lot in British and French media: lightly frustrated middle managers or stormtroopers or repressive military recruits who aren't into it, aren't going to be, and are mostly counting down the hours until their tea break so please don't rock the boat until then, for the love of God, let's just get through this together. American portraits of repressive violence are frequently assumed to be motivated; they rarely come with that tone of massive exhaustion. That yes, we're all tired.
And this whole thing (which was, let's remember, to solve a story) rapidly bloomed into a massive multi-person, multinational conversation about empires, different societies' etiquettes of violence, the little historical ghost-roles we're still casting for today, and that I probably need to send that story to UK markets and not US ones because the context is just too different, and I can't launch a survey course on sociology just to have a story read the way I want to write it. That is not effective arting.
The interesting thing, though: Those of us who got it are the people who are a little omnivorous in our reading and TV. The Americans immediately referenced Red Dwarf and Blake's 7; the Canadians threw in buckets of Japanese anime as reference. It said something about the value of watching international media: widely, young, and lots. You get exposed to not just the surface trappings of a culture, but all these different structural assumptions about power and how people interact with it. You acquire range in how you think about the world. Because of my upbringing (one British parent!) it's fairly invisible to me, but: oh. It's valuable.
But on the whole: Revision Week just kind of reaffirmed that my whole deal process-wise is take increasingly bigger unchewable bites of things and then try to grow my brain and craft fast enough to catch up with them. I'm literally not smart enough sometimes to figure out what I just did there, and then I have to go get smarter so I can find out, and frequently finding out is frustrating and circular and fun even when (and even though!) it takes years.
It's weird to think, though: I still have no idea what I am even doing as a poet half the time, except for the part of me that absolutely does, and I am constantly swimming out to her just at the horizon. That's the job, I've come to realize. Just sight yourself, and keep swimming.
gardentown
It's been wet and humid and bad for anyone who doesn't want to run three showers a day (and occasionally for anyone who likes breathing, last Friday was a rough situation in these parts), but the garden absolutely loves this weather. The garden, she is thriving. Behold:
And this is not just my hyperlocal plants. I took a long, winding night walk home last week after a volunteer thank-you party (note: always go to the volunteer thank-you party, especially when you win big; celebrating is part of the job). The dusk was falling over the city, people were on patios, the night was hot and soft, and all the parks and trees I passed through on my way home smelled like vibrant, living green. It's a good antidote (companion? balance?) to the climate news and occasional state of the sky: a lot of things around here alive and thriving.
things watched
A separate category just to shout out Margaret Brown's The Order of Myths (2008): a one-hour documentary about the segregated Mardi Gras crewes of Mobile, AL, which claims the continent's oldest Mardi Gras festivals. Brown interviews both elder and younger members of the major parading organizations in the weeks leading up to the parades, and--I am including this to follow on from that big thought last month. Nothing in your life will ever drive home harder that the United States of America is a colony, and has the reactions and politics of a colony. It's not explicit in the documentary itself, but--look for it and you can't but see it everywhere.
It's on Netflix at the moment, only about an hour, and it will make you think if watched at a certain slant of light.
things read
I started the month with a bit of carceral research mop-up: several memoirs that are very cogent in and of themselves but told me nothing new about the experience, and that's not their fault; I've just been those places before and heard those stories already.
More novel was Melody Beattie's Codependent No More -- part of the side research on helping professions for the book, but also for good hot interpersonal tips a girl can use in times of grief and trouble. This book lives up to its online-forum reputation: There is a lot in here that's extremely sensible, cogently said, direct, supportive, and immensely alarming if you are a person who has lived or worked in proximity to any fandom in the world.
So many of these assumptions and behaviours were familiar. There's probably nothing surprising about that: If you submerge a certain part of your identity into things other people do and make -- if you put yourself in the passive position for fun and profit -- some dynamics are going to play out. You are channeling your own agency through strangers, and that has consequences. So, shit got real in my heart for a few days as I worked through this one. It may have never meant to, but it provided a lot of context to some of the ways friendships and professional dynamics change when people sell a book, and change seemingly overnight.
I saw a few things I do; a few I never thought to do; a few I thankfully, and sometimes with effort, stopped doing in my twenties; a few strategies I'd figured out on my own time; a few that I'll keep in my pocket. Even if you are not worried about this particular dynamic or situation, it's a valuable piece of social and self-navigation and well worth reading. 200 A5-sized pages, verra short.
On the fiction end, I finally got myself to Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter, which quite deservedly won itself a whole entire Giller Prize last year (the literary prize that is eleven years of rent, although probably more like eight now with inflation). Mayr is one of the writers I want to be when I grow up (insert infinite post-home run dugout videos of baseball players slapping each other on the back and going make me like yoooou): she's brilliant, nuanced, absolutely in control of her craft, experimental, and does high-wire genre origami in ways that give me joy. Her Monoceros is still one of my best all-time books. So I went into this Expecting, and Expectations were not disappointed in the least. God, this book is beautiful. It's handling all these complex things very deftly, and it's very, very soft.
Mayr writes absolutely literary books, but they're always engaged with the weird: Monoceros had unicorns at its centre, and The Sleeping Car Porter holds orbit around a Weird Tales-style pulp novel called The Scarab From Jupiter, which Baxter keeps trying to get a few more pages of as he descends farther and farther into sleeplessness, unrepression, and ghostly visions which may or may not be real. The end as writ is a little too tidy for me -- things that are maybe news to other people, as above, and just aren't news in these parts -- but it was a kinetic, jolting, hallucinatory delight of a book without any of the affectedness that usually comes along when someone uses those words.
Finally, another to shout out: Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages, a meditative 1921 British novel which I think Marissa mentioned a few years ago, and which languished on my TBR list until I realized oh, what I would really like right now is another 1920s British novel where people aren't mean about each other but treat each other as whole. It's lovely, guys, even on the scale of 1920s humanist novels where people treat each other as whole: a thoughtful, compassionate, rather incisive little dwell on what it's like to grow up, grow old, try to square yourself with your own age as a woman from your twenties to your eighties. It watches people closely, intelligently, kindly. It's also one of those texts that will remind you that yes, the 1920s were very much the modern era; the concerns, struggles, solutions are very familiar. It's a great book for that moment when you're trying to reconcile yourself and the idea of yourself (always, yet again).
things to read
Another poem placed and forthcoming: "Sisyphus, Mid-Flight" will be in a future issue of The Deadlands -- probably September, although that's not yet final. It's about the peculiar oppressions of one last chance. I was visibly in a mood when I wrote it, though a more complex mood than one might think.
Likewise, "Sunday in the Park With Hank", the story where you try to go on a date and your boyfriend's personal haunting third-wheels it, is going to be reprinted in The Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume 1 after having originally appeared in The Deadlands last July. This was nice! It's a weird little story; I'm persistently glad it keeps getting love. The current publication timeline has the book dropping around October in print and ebook both.
I got proofs last week for Fire From the Heart 2023, which is the Muriel's Journey Prize chapbook, which is where poem "what Mama says" will be at. There's a launch event online Saturday, September 9th at 2:30 PST / 5:30 EST. I will link the link when I get the link. :)
***
I hope you're all keeping relatively cool/dry/whatever you need to be under these weird, chaotic summer circumstances, and: until next month.
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