thirty-six: your commitment is yours to make

Greetings from a never-ending month of hard weather: We've had almost a winter storm a week here in Toronto, with a few days between that felt (and smelled) like actual spring in between so the snow itself doesn't build up. It's been a month of abruptly prepping up, shutting down, and opening up again, little cycles running all within about 72 hours. If you've ever wanted your residual lockdown trauma delicately pointed out, and some prime opportunities to work on that, this February has been for you.

For the biggest one, I spent a few days in heavy survival prep for the weather to hit -18 C and stay there: doing all the errands to make sure I didn't actually have to go outside until it let up. The plus side was, due to a little necessity, rediscovering the tiny pleasures of the Asian market cheap shelf. (My old Asian market was sold and made boring; I had to go find a new good one.)

It can be hell cold outside and many things are beyond my reach, but I am going to eat figs, I'm going to eat mangoes; I'm going to rescue this little bundle of dollar asparagus with buttery hollandaise and it will be beautiful and not wilted again. This will all cost no more than fifteen bucks. All one has to have for this is timing.

None of these things last more than the weekend, but it can be one hell of a weekend?

A voyage to Notre Dame

Early in the month, I took my first US trip in seven years (!) to give a reading and talk on climate fiction with the Reckoning crew at the University of Notre Dame.

Aside from the chance to, well, give a reading and talk on climate fiction, this was a laboratory for a few things: travelling with celiac (new!), but also testing the supposition that the world seen through social media is the most fearful version. Sometimes what's being said is emotionally true, sometimes it's deliberate propaganda, sometimes just people speaking aloud the thing they're scared of to ward it off, but: a fear and not a mirror. The world through a keyhole, and one that shakes.

Actual reaction footage to me doing my first US event in seven years on like thismuch sleep

And on at least a surface inspection, that seemed to hold? The customs officers at the border were more bored than anything else. The train was stuffed with university students coming in for midweek classes, and on the way home, stuffed with university students leaving for the weekend. South Bend, IN has a wide, stretched brown architectural style that made it feel open and empty to me, more than enough gluten-free food options (item: one lamb, goat cheese, and spinach burger with red onion marmalade, delicious; item: a pumpkin creme brulee topped with cranberry-orange-pistachio compote at the campus fancy restaurant that made me see stars) and people perfectly willing to help travelers with stuff. No one fussed about our N95 masks. People just got to be people and do our business, and this was fine. There was a lot of art about the Virgin Mary and Jesus. It got a little frustrating and yet a little funny for the punchline of everything we saw to always be Jesus.

It was three days -- travel taking one each, and then one day touring the campus and doing the event -- and we spent a good chunk of that afternoon touring a university art gallery that is surprisingly French (apparently one of their core collections was built out of culled Academie works). Between that and the 1/7th-size replica of a grotto in Lourdes, the whole thing's had me thinking about small Midwest cities and how they construct culture, what the experience of people moving there was or might be. How it's a little fragmentary; a little yearning. There's something in them of what you think moving to exoplanets would be; what you scrape together as a home, and why.

I came home COVID-free (woot), untouched by the spectre of gluten (double woot), well-fed, and ravenously sociable. Good lord, I need to talk shit about art basically forever. Conventions are still probably by and large not in the cards right now: too many risk factors involved that I can't meet with consensual agreements. But man. When you refute the most fearful version, that never meant just going wild with it anyways. It means you get to make decisions that come from and serve you.

she promised sock pictures

Tangibly slowed down by all the out-and-about this month, but yes, folks, she delivers.

These babies took me within three yards of running out of yarn, which is like turning on the very edge of the cliff instead of going over. They are confirmed by this reporter as cozy.

baseball

We are four days into spring training and oh god I missed baseball. I'm listening to the baseball right now!

I have nothing else relevant to say about this than oh god I missed baseball so much you silly weird little game.

things read

Maude Barlow's Still Hopeful: Lessons From a Lifetime of Activism is billed as something like a handbook for climate action hope -- a seasoned, veteran activist offering what she knows about facing seemingly insurmountable odds to younger colleagues. I am enjoying it very much: it's practical, action-oriented, and a good guide for climate communication besides. Some ways of talking about problems help people! Others do not.

It's been serving me as a great gut-check, bringing a simultaneous understanding that oh, I am actually very good at this and also and this is the extremely crucial bit where my instincts always fail me. The quest for journeyman learning -- in writing and in activism -- is still my biggest thing, but stuff written toward people newer to the situation can really help me sometimes, just by showing if I've been going the right way: where the paths I've been wandering hold other bootprints, and sometimes, where the bootprints go that I just kept not going, and maybe I should check out that direction already.

There's also a ton of useful little nuggets like this:

This all led to the interesting experience of reading the first two chapters in the tub, floating with the nice bath salts, as a combined salve for one of the (slowly deescalating) flares of pandemic trauma, and then catching someone's post about necessary texts for mutual aid, abolition, and justice: all ones full of urgency, confrontation, and fight. It brought on the interesting realization that I need the people I work with, I root with, I support and am supported by -- for them to be people who can find a way to live in and express the work from foundations other than anger. To think in any structure that isn't a war.

Some of my occasional conversations about doing the work with people who think of activists as That Other Guy mire in this. They're caught up in the aesthetics of what activism would be: an outer skin of righteous rage continually projected. Thing, though: The violence is not mandatory. I don't need to know who my enemy is to go somewhere, just where I want to be next. We can just do the work.

This isn't a tangent; I think this book spoke to me not just because it anatomized some of Barlow's process so succinctly, but because it references having been angry, having felt anger -- but never roots the work in the violence. The work is the work. Because it's ceaseless, it has to be livable, sustainable. That is a way I can live.

things to read

"Notable Escapes," a poem about Harry Houdini/good Rabbi's son Erich Weisz and not being small for anyone, found itself a good home: it'll appear in Strange Horizons sometime in the next few months. I have a particular fierce fondness for this one, so I'm pretty glad.

One whole day after I sent the last letter, "Sunday in the Park with Hank" showed up on the 2022 Locus Recommended Reading List. Not a first, but definitely a first-in-a-while, so: that was cool. It also made A.C. Wise's Favourite Short Stories of 2022, which is just about an equal compliment, so it's a nice few weeks for words about ghosts.

opportunities to be read at

There's going to be an online launch for Reckoning: Our Beautiful Reward, the special issue around bodily autonomy, on March 19th from 8pm - 9pm EST.

This is getting done proper: draws, readings, book giveaways, and a few chances to not just talk about bodily autonomy, but organize around it. I'll be reading "fertile week" (aka biggest bad idea poem I ever writ), and several Friends of This Household are among the other seven readers.

Straight-up: This is not going to be an emotionally easy evening (we'll see how well I make it through). But I think it's going to be a fiercely rewarding one.
 

***

That's most of it for this month: I think we hit every milestone except for the at least three protests, which didn't need to happen as much because our terrible mayor abruptly resigned and took the pressure off. Which was good, because it's cold. I'd rather start planning for the byelection.

March is bringing in seed starting, a lot of book reviewing, deadlines deadlines deadlines, wordcount, and (maybe!) some live music for real. I'll hope to see familiar faces at the Reckoning event, and: until then.