seventeen: dressed to suppress all kinds of sorrow
dirtbag shawarma cat
The stay-at-home order continues apace here in downtown Toronto; it's been just over 100 days since we went under it, and though it was slightly lightened yesterday, the gist is still stay indoors. We have a lot of people around here to vaccinate. It's speeding up, but it'll be a while.
Despite that restriction, spring still works, because as the light gets longer I am feeling tiny flashes of desire. Midmorning between an invoice and an email: when this is over I will put my headphones on and walk the breadth of this city east to west on a sunny day listening to Metric with the steady beat of the sidewalk under my sneaker feet. When this is over I am spending a full day breathing the flower greenhouse in Allan Gardens with yarn tangled in my hands. Little ambushes of nearly synesthesiac desires: I am going to meet every single dog in this city. I will construct a life list of Toronto dogs.
I'm like this every year: comes a point where instead of raising the black flag, I look outside and want to slink through parks like a dirtbag alleycat in a hoodie and Chucks, eating all the shawarma and daring it to still be too cold outside, planting my grownup ass on the kids' playground equipment. You can kick me outside my routine for a full year and it doesn't matter. Nothing is stronger than a suburbs kid with her instincts firing off.
The last month has involved facing some bitterly difficult problems which may ultimately have no resolution, but spring is coming, and everything keeps whispering listen I love you joy is coming and even if I don't feel that right now, there's nothing but to believe it's true. Because what else is there, and what's the percentage otherwise? Joy is coming. Be there to meet it. Going to put on my headphones and move my feet.
mutual aid about mutual aid
As part of the novel research programme (it's serious business so it's UK spelling-programme, not the more generic North American kind; I don't make the rules) I ran through Jacks McNamara and Sascha DuBrul's Transformative Aid Mutual Practices kit this month. Mutual aid practices factor heavily into this book; I wanted more understanding of some of them from the inside.
Being asked to remember and describe what you're like when you are happy and well is a serious panacea: that feeling of snap! and suddenly, you're awake. So if anyone's feeling a little lost at sea during pandemic, I'm passing you this across the table. It was good research, and it's a very good anchor.
me, an intellectual
At the end of February, I watched a panel on the dystopic, speculative fiction, and time through the University of Toronto with Carrianne Leung, Canisia Lubrin, Cherie Dimaline, Thea Lim, and Catherine Hernandez -- all very much literary-stream writers who are working very interestingly with speculative material. In terms of Canadian literary work it's an absolute powerhouse lineup.
The discussion was absolutely fascinating, because it was handling very similar material as in-genre discussions but through an absolutely different lens: not invention or innovation but restorying, and a whole discussion about being called dystopia where the authors didn't have the words for what they were working towards genre-wise, but--being a product of SFF, I did. A lot of our faffing around in the early 2000s with literary movements thirty people large that never left the basement felt a touch self-involved, but I'm realizing it was (also?) conceptual work. We were doing some mapping there that's served us well later. As a professional evader of categories, it's really interesting to see different people discover each other's conceptual work, find the overlaps, find the gaps, and then what we do with that.
Listening to writers doing the work I love but from the literary stream of things always makes me want to take my own more seriously as a practice: step away from marketing, commercialism, pragmatics and think of the long game, work my work as meditation. First position, second position, third. At heart, I'm a weird poet theoritician. The desire to lean into that is sometimes overwhelming. Sometimes I really do want to just shed shoes and follow it into the woods. It might be a goal this year that I do.
things read
My major for-me read this month was Catherine Bush's Blaze Island, a climate change-oriented retelling of The Tempest set off the coast of Newfoundland. Bush is one of my all-time favourite writers; her Minus Time was absolutely formative for me, as a writer as a person as an activist, and she has a hand with place and space that's so invisible and yet palpable and loving. Comes a point a certain project sees print, you will see her fingerprints all over it and my soul.
The newest one was beautiful to be in, but I find I'm struggling a little with retellings as of late: there's something that falls out the bottom, for me, when I know where the beats land and can read a book with a complete eye to the callbacks and references. When they hang a little too close it feels overwhelmingly like a third person in the room, watching, and I can't but flick my eyes over to see what they're doing all the time.
This is spurring some complicated thinking, because: this isn't exactly a false model of how we render the world. We absolutely, as human beings, frame new situations in the terms and shapes of our older stories. Putting climate change in the hands of The Tempest says a thing about climate change and it says a thing about Shakespeare, just the choice of proximities. We see in reflected light. And yet. I might have more/better to say about this in a while, once I've chewed it.
things to read
This one feels like a milestone too: two poems, "Better Attitudes to Pleasure" and "Vestige", will be appearing in a future issue of Canadian literary journal Prairie Fire. The first is about a jar of grapefruit marmalade hand-imported from Connecticut which I treated very wrong; the second the conjunction of whales, medical trouble, the women's shelter movement and the question of doing the work. More when I get a publication date.
The stay-at-home order continues apace here in downtown Toronto; it's been just over 100 days since we went under it, and though it was slightly lightened yesterday, the gist is still stay indoors. We have a lot of people around here to vaccinate. It's speeding up, but it'll be a while.
Despite that restriction, spring still works, because as the light gets longer I am feeling tiny flashes of desire. Midmorning between an invoice and an email: when this is over I will put my headphones on and walk the breadth of this city east to west on a sunny day listening to Metric with the steady beat of the sidewalk under my sneaker feet. When this is over I am spending a full day breathing the flower greenhouse in Allan Gardens with yarn tangled in my hands. Little ambushes of nearly synesthesiac desires: I am going to meet every single dog in this city. I will construct a life list of Toronto dogs.
I'm like this every year: comes a point where instead of raising the black flag, I look outside and want to slink through parks like a dirtbag alleycat in a hoodie and Chucks, eating all the shawarma and daring it to still be too cold outside, planting my grownup ass on the kids' playground equipment. You can kick me outside my routine for a full year and it doesn't matter. Nothing is stronger than a suburbs kid with her instincts firing off.
The last month has involved facing some bitterly difficult problems which may ultimately have no resolution, but spring is coming, and everything keeps whispering listen I love you joy is coming and even if I don't feel that right now, there's nothing but to believe it's true. Because what else is there, and what's the percentage otherwise? Joy is coming. Be there to meet it. Going to put on my headphones and move my feet.
mutual aid about mutual aid
As part of the novel research programme (it's serious business so it's UK spelling-programme, not the more generic North American kind; I don't make the rules) I ran through Jacks McNamara and Sascha DuBrul's Transformative Aid Mutual Practices kit this month. Mutual aid practices factor heavily into this book; I wanted more understanding of some of them from the inside.
Being asked to remember and describe what you're like when you are happy and well is a serious panacea: that feeling of snap! and suddenly, you're awake. So if anyone's feeling a little lost at sea during pandemic, I'm passing you this across the table. It was good research, and it's a very good anchor.
me, an intellectual
At the end of February, I watched a panel on the dystopic, speculative fiction, and time through the University of Toronto with Carrianne Leung, Canisia Lubrin, Cherie Dimaline, Thea Lim, and Catherine Hernandez -- all very much literary-stream writers who are working very interestingly with speculative material. In terms of Canadian literary work it's an absolute powerhouse lineup.
The discussion was absolutely fascinating, because it was handling very similar material as in-genre discussions but through an absolutely different lens: not invention or innovation but restorying, and a whole discussion about being called dystopia where the authors didn't have the words for what they were working towards genre-wise, but--being a product of SFF, I did. A lot of our faffing around in the early 2000s with literary movements thirty people large that never left the basement felt a touch self-involved, but I'm realizing it was (also?) conceptual work. We were doing some mapping there that's served us well later. As a professional evader of categories, it's really interesting to see different people discover each other's conceptual work, find the overlaps, find the gaps, and then what we do with that.
Listening to writers doing the work I love but from the literary stream of things always makes me want to take my own more seriously as a practice: step away from marketing, commercialism, pragmatics and think of the long game, work my work as meditation. First position, second position, third. At heart, I'm a weird poet theoritician. The desire to lean into that is sometimes overwhelming. Sometimes I really do want to just shed shoes and follow it into the woods. It might be a goal this year that I do.
things read
My major for-me read this month was Catherine Bush's Blaze Island, a climate change-oriented retelling of The Tempest set off the coast of Newfoundland. Bush is one of my all-time favourite writers; her Minus Time was absolutely formative for me, as a writer as a person as an activist, and she has a hand with place and space that's so invisible and yet palpable and loving. Comes a point a certain project sees print, you will see her fingerprints all over it and my soul.
The newest one was beautiful to be in, but I find I'm struggling a little with retellings as of late: there's something that falls out the bottom, for me, when I know where the beats land and can read a book with a complete eye to the callbacks and references. When they hang a little too close it feels overwhelmingly like a third person in the room, watching, and I can't but flick my eyes over to see what they're doing all the time.
This is spurring some complicated thinking, because: this isn't exactly a false model of how we render the world. We absolutely, as human beings, frame new situations in the terms and shapes of our older stories. Putting climate change in the hands of The Tempest says a thing about climate change and it says a thing about Shakespeare, just the choice of proximities. We see in reflected light. And yet. I might have more/better to say about this in a while, once I've chewed it.
things to read
This one feels like a milestone too: two poems, "Better Attitudes to Pleasure" and "Vestige", will be appearing in a future issue of Canadian literary journal Prairie Fire. The first is about a jar of grapefruit marmalade hand-imported from Connecticut which I treated very wrong; the second the conjunction of whales, medical trouble, the women's shelter movement and the question of doing the work. More when I get a publication date.
*
The next month is going to be a flurry of work: some of that joy is coming comes packaged with overtime is coming. Some of it's the same thing. I'm hoping it'll spit out a good quantity of news.
Until four weeks from now: stay safe.
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