The first half of this month’s title from Chris Wilcha’s documentary Flipside, which I watched in late October and holds more inside it, more nimbly, than you’d suss out from the description. It’s a film about making art, nostalgia, frustration, letting go and when and where and how, which means it’s a film about everything. But: quiet-like.

This line in particular, though, is from Deadwood creator David Milch — one of the people floating around Wilcha’s pile of shelved documentary projects, which get enumerated and sampled through this film, repaired into this rather lovely quilt of time and ideas and ephemerality. At the time, he’s oscillating between good and bad Alzheimer’s days. In that headspace, it’s how he defines regrets. I paused it and was like: Oh. That’s correct. It’s at the root of every problem I run into, which implies something of a solution, sometimes.

The second half from a post of Cory Doctorow’s on David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which sums up three key freedoms people have had in some combination through most of history:

I. The freedom to go somewhere else and expect to be welcomed thanks to duties of hospitality;

II. The freedom to disobey orders;

III. The freedom to imagine a different social arrangement.

He goes on to say they’ve been, in the modern world, pretty ruthlessly expunged and decry the attack on imagination most of all, which is exactly the thing a speculative fiction writer would say!^*, so I always take it with a grain of salt. I mean, whispering ~the normies do not imagine~ is a known speculative fiction thought-terminating cliche (see: failures of generosity), and since none of us have ever been to the private recesses of others’ heads where the wild things are unless we’re real intimate with each other, I’m more interested in the first.

_{*”Are you the cult of Vecna?” “Nope.” “That’s exactly what the cult of Vecna would say.”}

I mean, whew, it’s full of potential: To go somewhere else, and be welcomed because hospitality is a sacred principle. It’s the only one of these three that are actually relational. I mean, I can disobey and imagine all day long on my own time and that’s Tuesday. On a certain level, what you imagine only counts if it’s actionable, or it’s just sparkling dissociation, and disobedience is — a bit of a null state. It functions for making things not happen sometimes, but it’s a lot harder to make things yes happen from that starting point: reactivity has hard limits, because making things yes happen requires logistics, and reactions don’t usually have a five-year plan. But the knowledge that the world is made of shelter, food, and drink — inarguably so, as a social contract that applies everywhere — that can’t be replaced. You inherently can’t coerce it, and I don’t think it’s possible to render it inert, either. If you have that thing happening, it’s always alive and active and producing strange outcomes. I like that sort of thing. :)

So I’m futsing around a lot with the — almost socio-chemical reactivity of generosity this past month, and how that works, and where that little bit of fizzy knowledge might be more applicable — and this set against piles and piles of having quite practical things to do, both to deadline and in terms of finally getting a whole lot of stuck or marooned repairs/processes unstuck (the subtitle/refrain of November was: “okay, but it isn’t this hard and doesn’t need to be”).

This involves a lot of being up my head in ways that aren’t quite legible to people who don’t live in here, so this month will be rather quotidian/internal by turns, but hey.

an effort toward nice things (inbound)

Considering the months-long shitty mood, some effort was made to go do some Nice Things: A few small-scale gallery exhibit outings, making some calls into meetings that happened to be in bars, and a trip with friends to the fancy fountain pen show, which delivered the most former bookselling regulars and people-who-recognized-me-from-authoring per square foot in some time. The Venn of stationery nerds and indie bookstore regulars is very close to a circle. I caught up with some people I haven’t seen in ages and was actually recognized by a few of my own novel readers inside ten minutes of being there (the books did sell decently, so such persons are inevitably skulking about). It was nice: made the whole thing feel very collegial and cozy.

The weekend after included a small sortie to the Toronto International Festival of Authors, explicitly to trawl their small press fair/local publishers’ dealers room for new, reviewable small presses. My fiction-reviewing horizons have gotten a little narrower than I liked; it felt like a good chance to broaden them while picking up a few things that looked intriguing just on a civilian basis.

And mid-month, the League of Canadian Poets’ Fall Intensive Weekend (hey, if you’ve got the membership, show up and use it). I was into about half the sessions: on design principles in poetry, on writing desire, on ekphrasis.

Considering how absolutely hamfisted I feel with poetry sometimes, perhaps it’s a solid measurement of craft to be handed an image, a prompt, and five minutes, and see how what I can just plop right out onto the page has changed since five or six years ago, when I decided to take poetrycraft seriously. It has specificity, line ending choices, internal rhyme, some play with white space on the page, refrains which pay off and develop, jokes. For some reason that’s the bit that surprised me: I can’t be utterly stagnating at this (see: bad mood), because now I can speed-write a first draft that actually involves wit.

It’s a lovely thing to think: this is my baseline skill improving. I can write a draft in ten lines and ten minutes that cracks jokes. Cohesive ones! Hangs a thematic turn on them! That’s a move from can you do it? to can you do something with it?, and — if ever there was a shift in question that tells you you’ve actually learned something after all.

improv is listening / an emergent digression on honesty (outbound)

(Paraphrase from: Sanjeev Bhaskar, a smart man.)

Despite how heavy the weather’s been in terms of my patience, it’s also heavy municipal politics season, so the schedule hasn’t permitted much sulking. Or, let's be real, as much. This was good in many respects. Some of it reminded me I actually like doing this shit, in an autumn when that’s been real hard to remember.

It was a month of sort of working my way up through webinars on how Ezra Klein’s Abundance book is making its way through the climate policy landscape on several levels of government (actually interesting fact that, keep an eye out for it), a whole lot on grassroots orchard maintenance, and the CityTalk Canada podcast, which is quite good stuff if you’re interested in the question of infrastructure — and I know some of you are. It’s good experiments, good learning, and also a nice litmus test for where you sit on certain things because you can go from interesting, say more! to oh, FFS, grow up inside five minutes of an interview, and that is a useful mapping exercise as to what you consider new options or already-solved problems.

Notably, it casually dropped the concept of a Schelling Point into my lap (oh no she’s applying some game theory!) which is proving a little fun to play with on an epistemic level. Not going to go too deep into that, because something might well come of it, so no spoilers.

***

On the more active end, I also took the annual trip to municipal pre-budget consultations. This year, the flag has been food security and budgeting intersectionally in a world that isn’t silos and enemies, because clearly the other thing isn’t working. This came to the fore somewhat, because I really felt the questions they framed for us were slightly dirty pool. I did not yell at anybody — and it’s telling that I so deeply wanted to — but the words I resent the cynicism of showing up here and being asked to play let’s-you-and-him-fight with the province instead of solving problems did exit my mouth. That was either very dumb of me, or very smart. I’ll find out somewhere down the line, I’m sure.

Group webinars are a bit of messy territory at the moment. Yes, I have spent a few months foundationally in a bad mood (truly, it’s getting better; September was bleak), but it is terrifying how competent I can look just by speaking in the moment instead of in talking points, referencing what other people have said, by just — visibly demonstrating that yes, I’m here, I’m responsive and thinking, I’ve been listening. I am listening. Like, wow, the bar isn’t just low here, it’s down to the Earth’s mantle.

And yet also reassuring, in that — it’s taking a little less to repair or advance some things right now? I can call a project’s lead organizer when I get a real weird outreach call from them and go dude, knowing as you know that I’m not an asshole, what’s happening there? Or just ask people from a meeting if they want to grab a drink and compare notes, and walk out of that bar with a few more interesting directions and a possible project ally. (It might have just plugged one of my big logistical gaps; we’ll see.)

Or to show up to your student union’s newish food security committee with a list of the projects you’ve been wanting to do for a year now, and guess what, at least two of them will be happening — and soon — because they’re just sensible low-effort interventions whose long-tail impact costs nothing. There’s going to be a seed library at TMU in a few weeks, and the beginnings of a student grocery discount program that privileges local-owned stores over overpriced chains and thus reinforces keeping our food money in the community, and I am officially leaving behind some legitimate no-bullshit infrastructure after my eighteen months in this program. Ha ha ha take that, systems decay. :)

I think the point right now might be: Please never think that you can’t do activism or advocacy. It’s yet one more of those life activities that fall under the Slushkiller rubric. Show up with basic demonstrable social skills and legitimate respect for others — like, show up honest — and you’re through 50% of the situation.

***

Along those lines, it has also been Climate Grant Slushpile Season — something I didn’t get to spend as much time with as I wanted because my overarching schedule overran so badly (and which was part of this running late: I had to read the climate grants). But now that it’s the third year of this, I’ve internalized the skills enough to pick up the pace considerably: I veritably flew through this year, and I think without skimping on analysis. I really shouldn’t talk about it as much as I inherently want to (it’s a rich site for so much, seriously; slushpiles are full of learning and slushpile NDAs are understandable but sad) but a few prime takeaways:

1. Never send an LLM or a grantwriter using very repetitive boilerplate language to do a man’s job. Seriously: if you’re writing a grant, please use your own words. Other people’s words taste peculiarly thin and unfinished and emit through that a vast insincerity, and that’s the last thing you really want in a grant? The honesty matters. I mean, at least if you’re not getting funded, do it with the dignity of being yourself.

2. Our activism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. If your theory of change is pontificating at someone you’ve decided is stupider than you because they’re different than you, and if they were more like you we’d solve [PROBLEM]? You have not asked enough questions yet to apply for funding or to hang out with me. Dignity is structural. Without it, the house falls down.

This covers most of the applications I got angry at quite efficiently. The jury meeting is still pending, but there are a good bunch of thoughtful projects here I look forward to funding: elegant little perfect interventions, really big ambitious shots at community infrastructure, known models being executed in really clever ways, just dedicated excellent work as usual. Increase capacity and increase dignity? Thou shalt always kill.

***

And along those lines: One of the smaller prosocial things I finally got around to was putting some money into my local Community Land Trust. (I have never resided in Kensington Market, but I certainly live there. It is, to hit the cliche, where people know my name and when I’m absent a while, actually ask where I’ve been and if I’m all right.) Did I practically speaking have the money to do this? Nope! Is it the right decision anyways? Yup. If we’re inevitably financing somebody’s version of the future every single day, the one I want to live in is an easy purchasing decision.

If you have something like this floating around your locale and need something to do, they’re a really great direct way to act on all the trouble we’re facing around land and place and who it’s for. Obviously things can be well or poorly run etc. etc. but as a model they’re enticing stuff. I will be broke in January over this, but, yanno. I regret nothing.

things to read

“Biologists say it will take at least a generation for the river to recover (Klamath River hymn)” — aka The Fishies Poem 🐟 🐠 — has made tiny history as my first poetry reprint. It’s scheduled to appear in editor Sina Queyras’s On Occasion: Poems for the People, out from Coach House Books in May or June.

Coach House is one of my longtime favourite presses: they’re oddly enough one of the closest fits to my readerly taste out there — one of three places where I regularly scan the whole catalogue and regularly handsell/review books. So this is a nice little private benchmark. More on this one in the spring.

***

On another arm of the proverbial octopus, I seem to have achieved some tipping point where, while I’m still pitching reviews and have half a fall list in need of placing (more than that, post-TIFA), I’m starting to get reviews reliably commissioned. This is nice. It sort of happened without me noticing because I was so busy with other trouble. So there will be a little heap of new reviews from new-to-me authors coming out in Spring 2026; watch this space.

***

On a third arm (we have eight to work with! we’re good here): Mike and Anita at Mythic Delirium Books have a small regrouping action going for 2026, and have put together a bundle of some of their original collections as a pre-show/pre-order. It’s a really strong set of books on deep discount, and generally speaking they do great work that should be supported, so I am doing the rare Newsletter Signal Boost.

and just imagine a profound heading here

—as I don’t have one right now and am giving up on fetching one: today was a full-day Sunday meeting on four hours’ sleep, and this is not said in the spirit of a flex. I apparently can produce wit on the first draft now but today I’m exercising the freedom to not perform it.

I may send an omake! review next month, depending on whether a thought shakes out (guess who’s been watching so much Taskmaster, team) but otherwise, next issue around the holidays? Stay safe, stay cool, stay thirsty my friends.