seven: setting up signals across vast distances
The title this time around is from Muriel Rukeyser's Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars), which was shared in one of the group chats that's keeping me anchored as we get into Week 12 of self-isolation, with an extra helping of personal mourning to deal with. I've been coming back to this piece since. We are more or less mad for similar reasons: It has been a hard four weeks, inside and out. The newspapers arrive with their careless stories, and I think we are all trying by any means--whatever our means are.
try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves
Here, the human emergencies--anti-Black racism colliding with pandemic and the things closer to home--induce an almost unlimited state of sobriety. It keeps pushing me to enumerate to myself all the things I'm not: a public health official, a community leader, a corporate brand, a doctor, a government, a therapist, a priest. I'm a person, and strongly believe that counts for a hell of a lot more than we give it credit for sometimes--two hands, one quite usable head on my shoulders, and a solid quantity of stubbornness oh wait I mean goal-oriented persistence.
It's not a good time for living within the general mythologies we paste up around what it means to be a writer and how that's constructed as authority. It's been a long time since I believed that if I posted do this, and give money here on social media, anyone would actually do those things; a writer's authority mostly exists in the places where we're telling someone what they already believed and wanted to hear; worst case, where they want the semblance of authority to hit someone else over the head with. It's an uncomfortable position at the best of times, and useless for tackling actual jobs of work now.
So I've been asking myself, once again--I feel like I've been asking it since at least 2005--what are my means? Where do my routes to best impact lie? Or, to gratefully borrow one from Bujold, where do I place my nail so it meets the horseshoe, pin so it meets the axle, feather to the pivot point, pebble on the mountain's peak, kiss so it finds that despair, or put myself in the position to speak a right word to the ears that need my right words?
It's not a question any of you should feel you have to answer. Like I said, I'm asking myself, and I've been working this one formally and informally for a long while. I've found a few right answers for myself in the past few weeks, and I find another pivot point, another axle every other day, mostly because when you go looking for places to apply yourself you'll usually find them.
Likewise, I'm not going to exhort you to do anything specific: we're all going to have different answers for the confluence of skills, situation, follow-through, and impact we're personally living in. I'm confident in other people's ability to work two hands, a head, and a will too.
There's a middle where those answers eventually meet, where all the angles we're each covering converge. Hard going to get there, I think, and shitty terrain, but it feels like a place worth reaching.
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values
Even with self-isolation still very much in the mix, I distance-attended my first volunteer training meeting for local urban forest stewardship organization LEAF--one of the last things I'd already set up before lockdown came down. They plant and maintain trees, and advocate for the urban canopy. It's slow-moving, long-view work: raising people's confidence about tree care and our collective sense of the value of green infrastructure.
They have six urban demonstration gardens scattered about the city: little pockets of native species outside subway stations, usually full of bees and birds. I'll be part of a small team this year taking care of one of them, just doing the little things--pruning, weeding, cleaning trash and cigarette butts away. It's fairly unglamourous stuff. But you can get a lot done with a handful of people doing the little things regularly.
Toronto Public Library is tentatively opening up for pickup and dropoff this week--yesterday I got the first email notification that a hold's arrived, like a sign of spring--but we're still working through the significant pile of library checkouts stranded here before the lockdown. Before the difficulty ramped up on everything, we watched Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the villages expropriated and relocated to accommodate the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.
It follows a family who's losing their riverside farm to water and trying to pivot to the entirely different life they're being pushed into--and most notably, their preteen daughter, who instead of getting to continue school is sent to do service work on river cruises catering almost exclusively to white tourists, presenting a very manicured image of China and its policies.
It's a quiet, deliberate documentary: building a very clear thesis in a way that doesn't hit you over the head but is nonetheless devastating. One gets the overwhelming impression that the filmmaker took that Yangtze river cruise the first time with his grandfather, who still lives there; realized the depth of the story present; and hustled back with a film crew like there was a fire under him. There is a dispassionate and yet visible outrage in the camera on behalf of the people he depicts: in the stark gap between the fake English names the child staff are assigned, their mandatory faked mannerisms, and the very real problems they are staring down.
It's a quite subtle opinion piece on how much mileage between the story of late 2000s China and the experience of it from the docks and fields, from inside the house, inside individual lives; how much effort goes into maintaining those stories, and for whose benefit, and what they cost.
Things to read
"The Instructions", an exoplanetary magical realist story about domestication, colonial exploitation, and wolves, aka the Susannah Moodie/Ursula Le Guin/Margaret Atwood Raise a Murderbaby Story, will be appearing in Neon Magazine in early 2021. It is strange and grim and still my favourite.
"The Bear Wife" has been gifted some lovely reviews, notably this one from A.C. Wise
More a thing to listen to, but this past October at CanCon I guested, alongside Toronto modern fantasy author E.L. Chen, on Brandon Crilly and Evan May's podcast Broadcasts From the Wasteland. It's strange listening back through editing and time at a conversation you half-remember, but: also fun. You can tell we were all a little convention-punchy, but in the nice way? Notable feature: a little sneak peek of the newest longform project, in summary, at least.
try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves
Here, the human emergencies--anti-Black racism colliding with pandemic and the things closer to home--induce an almost unlimited state of sobriety. It keeps pushing me to enumerate to myself all the things I'm not: a public health official, a community leader, a corporate brand, a doctor, a government, a therapist, a priest. I'm a person, and strongly believe that counts for a hell of a lot more than we give it credit for sometimes--two hands, one quite usable head on my shoulders, and a solid quantity of stubbornness oh wait I mean goal-oriented persistence.
It's not a good time for living within the general mythologies we paste up around what it means to be a writer and how that's constructed as authority. It's been a long time since I believed that if I posted do this, and give money here on social media, anyone would actually do those things; a writer's authority mostly exists in the places where we're telling someone what they already believed and wanted to hear; worst case, where they want the semblance of authority to hit someone else over the head with. It's an uncomfortable position at the best of times, and useless for tackling actual jobs of work now.
So I've been asking myself, once again--I feel like I've been asking it since at least 2005--what are my means? Where do my routes to best impact lie? Or, to gratefully borrow one from Bujold, where do I place my nail so it meets the horseshoe, pin so it meets the axle, feather to the pivot point, pebble on the mountain's peak, kiss so it finds that despair, or put myself in the position to speak a right word to the ears that need my right words?
It's not a question any of you should feel you have to answer. Like I said, I'm asking myself, and I've been working this one formally and informally for a long while. I've found a few right answers for myself in the past few weeks, and I find another pivot point, another axle every other day, mostly because when you go looking for places to apply yourself you'll usually find them.
Likewise, I'm not going to exhort you to do anything specific: we're all going to have different answers for the confluence of skills, situation, follow-through, and impact we're personally living in. I'm confident in other people's ability to work two hands, a head, and a will too.
There's a middle where those answers eventually meet, where all the angles we're each covering converge. Hard going to get there, I think, and shitty terrain, but it feels like a place worth reaching.
considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values
Even with self-isolation still very much in the mix, I distance-attended my first volunteer training meeting for local urban forest stewardship organization LEAF--one of the last things I'd already set up before lockdown came down. They plant and maintain trees, and advocate for the urban canopy. It's slow-moving, long-view work: raising people's confidence about tree care and our collective sense of the value of green infrastructure.
They have six urban demonstration gardens scattered about the city: little pockets of native species outside subway stations, usually full of bees and birds. I'll be part of a small team this year taking care of one of them, just doing the little things--pruning, weeding, cleaning trash and cigarette butts away. It's fairly unglamourous stuff. But you can get a lot done with a handful of people doing the little things regularly.
Toronto Public Library is tentatively opening up for pickup and dropoff this week--yesterday I got the first email notification that a hold's arrived, like a sign of spring--but we're still working through the significant pile of library checkouts stranded here before the lockdown. Before the difficulty ramped up on everything, we watched Up the Yangtze, a documentary about the villages expropriated and relocated to accommodate the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.
It follows a family who's losing their riverside farm to water and trying to pivot to the entirely different life they're being pushed into--and most notably, their preteen daughter, who instead of getting to continue school is sent to do service work on river cruises catering almost exclusively to white tourists, presenting a very manicured image of China and its policies.
It's a quiet, deliberate documentary: building a very clear thesis in a way that doesn't hit you over the head but is nonetheless devastating. One gets the overwhelming impression that the filmmaker took that Yangtze river cruise the first time with his grandfather, who still lives there; realized the depth of the story present; and hustled back with a film crew like there was a fire under him. There is a dispassionate and yet visible outrage in the camera on behalf of the people he depicts: in the stark gap between the fake English names the child staff are assigned, their mandatory faked mannerisms, and the very real problems they are staring down.
It's a quite subtle opinion piece on how much mileage between the story of late 2000s China and the experience of it from the docks and fields, from inside the house, inside individual lives; how much effort goes into maintaining those stories, and for whose benefit, and what they cost.
Things to read
"The Instructions", an exoplanetary magical realist story about domestication, colonial exploitation, and wolves, aka the Susannah Moodie/Ursula Le Guin/Margaret Atwood Raise a Murderbaby Story, will be appearing in Neon Magazine in early 2021. It is strange and grim and still my favourite.
"The Bear Wife" has been gifted some lovely reviews, notably this one from A.C. Wise
More a thing to listen to, but this past October at CanCon I guested, alongside Toronto modern fantasy author E.L. Chen, on Brandon Crilly and Evan May's podcast Broadcasts From the Wasteland. It's strange listening back through editing and time at a conversation you half-remember, but: also fun. You can tell we were all a little convention-punchy, but in the nice way? Notable feature: a little sneak peek of the newest longform project, in summary, at least.
*
Stay safe, everyone. Back in three weeks.
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