thirty-seven: the falling leaf can't forget the tree
stationery robbery
(Not my joke, see reference.)
March has been a lot of little picky deadlines all in a row with very little gratification just yet, so I've been offsetting it with little treats; adding little bits of ornamentation to the state of affairs: a tiny bottle of currant-coloured J. Herbin ink, an iced blueberry scone, a packet of heritage-varietal sunflower seeds. The new thing is egg cups: I think I would like to eat my eggs like a gentleman detective. I'm sure that energy's available from a vintage shop for under ten bucks.
In that spirit, I picked up my first Rhodia notepad, and man, that's nice paper at a price point the people can use. I was starting to feel a little weird about sending my sumptuous, rather expensive G. Lalo Verge de France to certain destinations. It's gorgeous paper, but we consider the recipient's needs too, and sometimes it's not the right channel to be broadcasting on? These are the problems you have when you're a lapsed sociolinguist. Everything is communication! Guy was right: it takes fountain pen ink beautifully. So now I have something more neutral, and we can save the Lalo for the other stationery lovers, who will have the desired reaction of ooh, nice thing.
after this / i will be / something else instead of me
Mid-March, I took a deep breath, strapped on an N95, and went to see July Talk at Massey Hall. Three years and four days passed between my last live music and this; three years and four days before I was shoulder-to-shoulder in the back of the Horseshoe Tavern, dancing to Limblifter, and felt breath and sweat and noise and thought is this a good idea? but: I was there. It was too late. So I kept dancing. They closed down the world four days later. I was glad I'd stayed at the show.
This is the longest I have ever gone without music physically pressed against my chest. It was something like starving. I'm not a stereotypical writer type, in that I could probably live without books. I can make books! I have a head on me. But I can't live without the bodily experience of live music. The act of sitting in a dark room and letting a bass line hit your stomach is the act of being outside yourself, unguarded. I never had to think about this before. I could just plop down and let my ribcage open so the atoms streamed through. I could expand myself so wide I caught everything. And -- I've lost the trick of it. There was no trick. The trick was I was that person, and I had no reason not to. It's not that simple now.
Two days later, we went to The Burn, an interactive exhibit outside City Hall timed to coincide with the three-year anniversary of the COVID shutdown. It was less an art exhibit than a ritual, and when someone offers you a communal grief ritual, Egon, you say yes. Given the state of the world right now, we're in a vast supply shortage of funerals.
The core of it was three shapes, with three tended fires inside, and a lot of very small cedar balls in which you could put your griefs. You could handle them beforehand, but also on-site, and on-site was where the connection clicked into focus for me, at least: I put it in my hand and thought, and what came out was half-poetry, and maybe also prayer. We spent a little time in the quiet, and then wandered down for brunch with the friends we'd taken it in with, and I just -- enjoyed that rare bit of calm in my body. There was cedar in my hair for days.
(Going to the library, the Friday after, I found one of those little cedar balls on the ground, damp and abandoned. We picked it up, hopped the fence around the City Hall Peace Garden, and fed it to the Eternal Flame there, because you don't leave people's griefs untended on the ground. I hope it found a good home after, and someone inexplicably, on Friday afternoon, felt freer.)
(The next week I dreamed someone brought me a handful of all those little balls, excited to do it again, and I told them: No, that was just the one day. It's over now. We're done.)
All this to say there is a situation that I'm starting to viscerally understand, this month: There will be no passive moment when anything ever feels okay ever again. There is only what I reach out and take back.
always be planting
Which is a good thought to be thinking during seed starting season.
I have a lot of seeds stored up. I inventoried them ahead of this year's Seedy Saturday, which was cancelled due to snowstorm near my place, but still running three weeks later in Parkdale, where it was noisy and cheerful and diverse and smelled like pakoras and felt like an actual community. I picked up yet more seeds to fill the gaps -- tomatoes, arugula, nasturtiums -- and a little bit of shiso from The Artist Formerly Known as Dr. My Roommate Lindsey, and once it's stably above freezing at night, we're just about ready to rumble. I'm very happy to have shiso, assuming I sprout and don't kill it.
There's also been no shortage of volunteers. Last month, I found a few sprouted seeds inside a grapefruit I'd let sit too long, and decided that instead of a spoiled grapefruit, I had two new volunteer plants. Or at least that the project was worth trying. Here they are, five weeks after being put in the window, in some soil:
I've had this long, enduring fantasy of an indoor citrus tree. In my dreams, they're lemons; I met a guy at a board game afternoon years ago, in my twenties, who talked casually about growing lemons in his dorm room at Waterloo, and I latched onto the thought and never let go. So: These are tiny grapefruit trees. I get a lot of eastern sun here, in the morning. It's a bit like a greenhouse. We'll see how we do.
things read
I've been writing the reviews for my CAROUSEL residency, so a lot of this month's reading will be referred to that office. But I did get through a few more Miss Fisher novels this month (news: Kerry Greenwood is still writing Miss Fisher novels, or at least started doing that again) and they absolutely fulfill the main thing I want from mysteries: reliably doing the thing.
I've also started (not yet finished) M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and so far: good god, it's wonderful to be in the hands of someone who knows absolutely what they're doing. It's soft and odd and absolutely in control of its craft, insightful without didacticism, and I kind of immediately declared it a new goalpost for what I'm trying to do with prose. Obviously we have to see how it all lands, but provisionally: recommended.
things to read
To promote the release of the anthology, I did a short interview ahead of the Reckoning: Our Beautiful Reward launch. There's one for every day of the week preceding, with different contributors, and they're a good read if you want to hear how smart, aware people are tackling hard and far-too-personal problems while simultaneously letting themselves be sad about it. (I especially appreciated what M.C. Benner-Dixon had to say about precision.) They're an angle on our tiny playbooks for living, and worth reading.
mandatory award foolishness
Debated about it as usual, but yeah, the Prix Aurora Awards are open for nominations until April 22. I'll admit: I feel less and less about this every passing year; I feel more and more about the craft side of things instead. But yeah, if the spirit moves you: 2022 publications here. Only if you really mean it, please. This office tries to keep its friendships non-transactional.
(Not my joke, see reference.)
March has been a lot of little picky deadlines all in a row with very little gratification just yet, so I've been offsetting it with little treats; adding little bits of ornamentation to the state of affairs: a tiny bottle of currant-coloured J. Herbin ink, an iced blueberry scone, a packet of heritage-varietal sunflower seeds. The new thing is egg cups: I think I would like to eat my eggs like a gentleman detective. I'm sure that energy's available from a vintage shop for under ten bucks.
In that spirit, I picked up my first Rhodia notepad, and man, that's nice paper at a price point the people can use. I was starting to feel a little weird about sending my sumptuous, rather expensive G. Lalo Verge de France to certain destinations. It's gorgeous paper, but we consider the recipient's needs too, and sometimes it's not the right channel to be broadcasting on? These are the problems you have when you're a lapsed sociolinguist. Everything is communication! Guy was right: it takes fountain pen ink beautifully. So now I have something more neutral, and we can save the Lalo for the other stationery lovers, who will have the desired reaction of ooh, nice thing.
after this / i will be / something else instead of me
Mid-March, I took a deep breath, strapped on an N95, and went to see July Talk at Massey Hall. Three years and four days passed between my last live music and this; three years and four days before I was shoulder-to-shoulder in the back of the Horseshoe Tavern, dancing to Limblifter, and felt breath and sweat and noise and thought is this a good idea? but: I was there. It was too late. So I kept dancing. They closed down the world four days later. I was glad I'd stayed at the show.
This is the longest I have ever gone without music physically pressed against my chest. It was something like starving. I'm not a stereotypical writer type, in that I could probably live without books. I can make books! I have a head on me. But I can't live without the bodily experience of live music. The act of sitting in a dark room and letting a bass line hit your stomach is the act of being outside yourself, unguarded. I never had to think about this before. I could just plop down and let my ribcage open so the atoms streamed through. I could expand myself so wide I caught everything. And -- I've lost the trick of it. There was no trick. The trick was I was that person, and I had no reason not to. It's not that simple now.
Two days later, we went to The Burn, an interactive exhibit outside City Hall timed to coincide with the three-year anniversary of the COVID shutdown. It was less an art exhibit than a ritual, and when someone offers you a communal grief ritual, Egon, you say yes. Given the state of the world right now, we're in a vast supply shortage of funerals.
The core of it was three shapes, with three tended fires inside, and a lot of very small cedar balls in which you could put your griefs. You could handle them beforehand, but also on-site, and on-site was where the connection clicked into focus for me, at least: I put it in my hand and thought, and what came out was half-poetry, and maybe also prayer. We spent a little time in the quiet, and then wandered down for brunch with the friends we'd taken it in with, and I just -- enjoyed that rare bit of calm in my body. There was cedar in my hair for days.
(Going to the library, the Friday after, I found one of those little cedar balls on the ground, damp and abandoned. We picked it up, hopped the fence around the City Hall Peace Garden, and fed it to the Eternal Flame there, because you don't leave people's griefs untended on the ground. I hope it found a good home after, and someone inexplicably, on Friday afternoon, felt freer.)
(The next week I dreamed someone brought me a handful of all those little balls, excited to do it again, and I told them: No, that was just the one day. It's over now. We're done.)
All this to say there is a situation that I'm starting to viscerally understand, this month: There will be no passive moment when anything ever feels okay ever again. There is only what I reach out and take back.
always be planting
Which is a good thought to be thinking during seed starting season.
I have a lot of seeds stored up. I inventoried them ahead of this year's Seedy Saturday, which was cancelled due to snowstorm near my place, but still running three weeks later in Parkdale, where it was noisy and cheerful and diverse and smelled like pakoras and felt like an actual community. I picked up yet more seeds to fill the gaps -- tomatoes, arugula, nasturtiums -- and a little bit of shiso from The Artist Formerly Known as Dr. My Roommate Lindsey, and once it's stably above freezing at night, we're just about ready to rumble. I'm very happy to have shiso, assuming I sprout and don't kill it.
There's also been no shortage of volunteers. Last month, I found a few sprouted seeds inside a grapefruit I'd let sit too long, and decided that instead of a spoiled grapefruit, I had two new volunteer plants. Or at least that the project was worth trying. Here they are, five weeks after being put in the window, in some soil:
I've had this long, enduring fantasy of an indoor citrus tree. In my dreams, they're lemons; I met a guy at a board game afternoon years ago, in my twenties, who talked casually about growing lemons in his dorm room at Waterloo, and I latched onto the thought and never let go. So: These are tiny grapefruit trees. I get a lot of eastern sun here, in the morning. It's a bit like a greenhouse. We'll see how we do.
things read
I've been writing the reviews for my CAROUSEL residency, so a lot of this month's reading will be referred to that office. But I did get through a few more Miss Fisher novels this month (news: Kerry Greenwood is still writing Miss Fisher novels, or at least started doing that again) and they absolutely fulfill the main thing I want from mysteries: reliably doing the thing.
I've also started (not yet finished) M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and so far: good god, it's wonderful to be in the hands of someone who knows absolutely what they're doing. It's soft and odd and absolutely in control of its craft, insightful without didacticism, and I kind of immediately declared it a new goalpost for what I'm trying to do with prose. Obviously we have to see how it all lands, but provisionally: recommended.
things to read
To promote the release of the anthology, I did a short interview ahead of the Reckoning: Our Beautiful Reward launch. There's one for every day of the week preceding, with different contributors, and they're a good read if you want to hear how smart, aware people are tackling hard and far-too-personal problems while simultaneously letting themselves be sad about it. (I especially appreciated what M.C. Benner-Dixon had to say about precision.) They're an angle on our tiny playbooks for living, and worth reading.
mandatory award foolishness
Debated about it as usual, but yeah, the Prix Aurora Awards are open for nominations until April 22. I'll admit: I feel less and less about this every passing year; I feel more and more about the craft side of things instead. But yeah, if the spirit moves you: 2022 publications here. Only if you really mean it, please. This office tries to keep its friendships non-transactional.
***
Next month: the exigencies of cable knitting, some climate/activism non-fiction reviews, and possibly nature pictures. I hop on a train Wednesday for a way-too-long-delayed visit with friends/voluntary beseigement by cats, and they have good trees. I will try to capture you some tree action as I go.
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