Single totalizing narratives aren’t doing it for me these days, so: yeah, let’s not do ‘em. The swingometer between these two extremes has been wild and frequent. Between it lies some very complicated answers to: so how are you? Which is now at minimum an essay question.

One of the other infinite drawbacks of black-and-white thinking is that it doesn’t permit intermediate states, being in any kind of transit, so it’s not like you can get anywhere being like that, can you? On the road it’s always a few things simultaneously true. And I do believe that this is transit.

all of these question marks what could’ve been

That’s been increasingly complicated on the days and weeks when I have so much work to do, and need my focus dearly, but the gap between me and the world as it is, every morning, feels far too long a commute — and I don’t think me moving closer to many of the available versions^* of it is especially a good idea right now. It is not healthy to inhabit the logic of starving systems seizing and coming apart at the tendons. The emotional downstream effluent that I have to deal with — another round of everybody flaky and fight-picky and late as they trauma-logic their way into everything — I swear, I’m starting to be able to time the space between large violent geopolitical events and when my life is about to get bad — is already more than enough stress, work, and struggle.

_{*Let’s not be totalizing about it.}

Now that I’m starting to be asked from a few quarters okay, what’s next?, and surveying the conditions for same, I’ve been thinking if it’s viable to recommit to being what Dom Joly calls here “a shit polymath.” Which is great. I’m sure I’d be a better poet/critic/researcher/organizer/friend/human if I focused on any single one of these directions—

—except halfway through that sentence I completely lose confidence in it, and the gut and shoulders and spine say no, it’s actually the opposite. When it’s working right, all these things feed and shade each other in a semi-opaque inner ecology^*. Define it too much and it’s monocropping; the soil inevitably fails. I enjoy being a slightly shit polymath; it works. The only trouble comes in when you’re trying to translate that to people and institutions who, well. We’ve been down this road before.

^{*Inland Empiiiiiiire.}

I did really appreciate what Joly says about the legitimate friction and occasional urge to tableflip re: how much work it is to need to do a lot of different things. It actually — rarely does a girl feel that seen. Anyways, it’s a good interview for those of us with busy minds and a bit too much of a systemic bent to stay in any given lane, ever. Or who understand the sheer glee of hopping lanes until there are no more lines, just highway and horizon. I know there are several of you in here. Prost.

what you’ve done is not yours alone

The opening bars of April were spent compiling the first draft of the fruit tree research in a fit of nightwork, fueled by Toblerones and takeout and zero budgetary restraint because fuck it, I was getting things done, and if you’re not just filling a hole, but fueling the work, it’s worth it. I’ll fix it later.

I’m well aware of why this had to be done nocturnally: the world’s been too erratic to trust that I wouldn’t be interrupted if I did it in business hours. It wasn’t a fully conscious countermeasure, but a countermeasure all the same.^* The one peek I took at the news that week, I deeply regretted in a that’ll learn me kind of way.

^{*It did mean I was awake at sunrise, Easter Monday, to watch a dozen Canada Geese actively buzz my balcony at high speed, honking. I could have reached out and touched them if I’d been at the rail. Absolute drive-by.}

This was so hard to wrap my head around writing. It’s been living in my head in various forms for nearly two years, and once I managed to write it, it was so beautifully electric. I have been holding this stuff so long. It felt like birthing a novella out of my forehead — in the difficulty, in the compulsivity, in the postgame depression and sudden drop in anxiety as you realize how much of it was the work knocking at the insides of your head, trying to find the way out. Yup, that’s finishing a big project.

Likewise, very little exposes one’s own politics like going through academic literature on how cities and cultures do/don’t sanction urban gleaning. Like, there’s no sense in doing things just because they’re unsanctioned or officially disapproved of — that’s bratty — but if the thing’s prosocial and worth doing, well. Blast the Sex Pistols and let’s get this shit handled.^*

^{*I don’t think of myself as punk. But, c’mon. Like you ask.}

When you’re fathoms deep and swimming in the loveliness that is connecting the rise of certain land management regimes (integrated urban forestry management: a 1960s North American thing, did you know? before that people did the shit they want and I think we’re still carrying the sense-memory of that and that’s part of what creates problems around tree law if you think about the gap between stewardship and control) with the flinch away from common fruit and common responsibility and sharing, with the workarounds active projects have developed, with the idea that this literature is stuck on certain concepts because it’s ruminating, thematic patterns emerging from it all like the backs of whales, just tasting the whole thing—

—and you start to feel like, in the quiet lamplight, the entire 20th century drive toward the machine, toward sterile modernity, spaces set out by specific rule-bound purpose, surface readings, passive consumption is just one strange wavering act of projection: that it’s the fever dream of 18-year-old boys sent off to the trenches and WWII army camps and parented by matching uniforms and military regulations instead of humans in organic adult relationship, nostalgically remembering What It Was Like Back Home in the same way toddlers draw crayon houses — just the outlines, no adult grasp of the process, compromises, or reality — and then coming home, wounded, and demanding epistemic payment for their service. That none of the rigidity I’ve spent my entire life navigating was ever permanent, necessary, the actual truth of the matter of operating a functional world, or any good really: just a socio-nuclear blast of compensatory LARP emerging, pinpoint, from the collective terror of boys in army fatigues wanting desperately to go back where they used to be. Why else would someone have to compile a whole book about how it’s not threatening that life is sometimes messy? Who else thinks the universe of complication is a personal act of attempted murder, except people who are stuck at one age and in one experience, being scared all out of context?

And I think that leaked into the headspace a little — that all this land use scholarship and attempted intervention and policy is an act of hauntology in the end; that it is more legible when you think about it as choosing your ghosts and how you wish to contain or evoke them. So I wrote half of it listening to/singing with my love is bigger than your love on repeat through the cool night, and the other half listening to ghost stories. I like Uncanny. It gets a little silly with repetition, like most ghost investigation stuff does — it’s murder to a ghost story, repetition and taxonomy — but twined around the matter of orchards, it pairs excellently.^*

^{*Getting footnote-heavy but I do want to note that when you’re mainlining Uncanny or Battersea Poltergeist or suchsame, you realize how effective Borley Rectory’s 1920s-era branding campaign was because apparently all haunted houses are now “is this the most haunted house in Britain?” (Spoiler: I think it’s Pontrefract, that’s got the energy of a YouTube streamer gunning for sponsorships, all out there every single night like hElLo gHoSt hUnTeRs liKe aNd sUbScrIbE.) How ‘bout this one? More haunted or hauntedest? How about now? After about your twentieth poltergeist story this is actually terrifically funny. My ghosts are bigger than your ghosts, sing it!}

So: I made it. I submitted my Tiny Desk Ph.D^*, and triumphantly went to pack seeds with the student union folks for our brand new seed library (we also ate lunch). It’s met with a great reception from my supervisor, which feels doubly great, because I would have hated to have to run defence on this. I joke so much about Ph.Ds I Will Never Write, y’know? This is miiiine.

^{*A persistent criticism of my academic work in undergrad was that I kept trying to turn term papers into Ph.Ds and had to think about scale. It is a blessing to get old enough to just inhabit your own desire for that. Yes, I turn term papers into Ph.Ds. Isn’t it glorious? My DIY doctorate. My big love.}

This is why it’s worth being a shit polymath. The thing rigidity excludes is that dreamlike, ambient trance state of flow. And very little else does this much to make life worth living.

***

Finishing that off ties into one of those positives-in-progress I mentioned last month: the fruit tree research has been accepted to its first conference. Being a poster session at the Common Ground Food Forum in June, where a whole bunch of people are getting together to strategize and connect a whole bunch of things about Canadian food security.

And then I got a tax refund nutritious enough that yes, I could just go. This was in one of those weeks were everyone was breaking things enough that I didn’t get to enjoy the victories properly (I resent that) but there is something to getting good news, and even if you can’t get a full happy breath, repairing quietly to your bathtub with a glass of wine and bowl of surprise veggie-box kumquats and just be there for a long moment, letting the peel sit tart and satisfying in your mouth.

So I will be heading to Orillia to talk about making grassroots urban orchards an easier project, how policy and community get under each other’s feet, and how we can cooperate and riff and improvise off each other’s work in ways that function a little better and save everybody a lot of bullshit. I have never done an academic poster before. I guess I’ll learn. Someone I know through physio, who is also an active Ph.D/researcher, has already put me on to a place that prints them on fabric so you can just roll ‘em up in your suitcase, and that’s the best lifehack I’ve heard in ages. The Bayeux Fucking Tapestry of fruit tree policy models. 😘

So: Turns out this work is real after all! I wasn’t just bullshitting everybody and myself. Amazing when that works out. 🙂

I’m scheduling some time in May to put presentation material together and flesh out my models — I need to scoop up Calgary, Winnipeg, and a few other spots — but this’ll be work used at least twice. I already know where I want to submit this for its second airing, in a venue that approaches from a whole different angle, because that is the joy of being a shit polymath. And then, I think, stuff starts to get done around here. Where it stops, and what it becomes in the process, no one knows.

things to read

New poetry sale officially announceable: “don’t think other people’s thoughts” is going to be in a climate-themed issue of Prism International. The tiny fun thing about this one is that it sprung from this interview with Pamela Anderson about the best piece of advice she’s ever been given; about the work of internally being yourself. So it comes from an exercise in trying to take down thoughts I’m pretty certain were only ever mine, no one else’s; trying to find what the original language was. I think it’s out in autumn.

And that poetry reprint is just about out. On Occasion: Poems for the People drops May 12th, and I got contributor’s copies mid-April. They are very pretty, and hats off to the book designer for the patience with which we worked through the spacing on this one. The TOC here is both wide and deep — lots of stuff in this book — so it’s worth checking out.

Also live next week will be the review of Garry Thomas Morse’s Retcon at Prairie Fire. This was an author new to me, and this book is fuuuuun: neck-deep in film references, unreliable narration, structural high-wiring, and a hefty amount of jokes. I’m assured it goes live midweek. I could have just waited to send this until it was, but I have an eye exam Monday, and will be pupils dilated all day long, so y’know, let’s not mess with that.

circumstance is a bastard dance with me

So yeah, hey! I’m terrified. I can’t even whistle past it right now; it’s near-impossible to sleep. Every minute I can spend in the work makes life worthwhile. Every minute I spend with people actually doing stuff that goes forward makes life worthwhile. I refuse to be reduced to coping mechanisms and a perpetual emergency. Fuck deciding your actual personality is a luxury and a frill.

This is already going to be my dance hit of the summer. Trust Emily Haines to come through when I need her.