three: mountains beyond mountains built from the ground up

These keep getting longer; I swear I didn't mean this installment's title to be a nice and accurate description of the size of the contents. But seven weeks in, and this year has been a little non-stop: it's reshaped at least three times since New Year's Day, and while that's finally coming stable in a lot of exciting respects, there's no reason to believe it won't keep chucking things at me -- and therefore, dear correspondents, at you.

Deep breath, let's go!

Things read

Thanks to a sick day (sick weekend?) in early February I blew through a good stack of library books this month -- something that's gotten harder to do with book reviewing being a regular gig now and a workday sometimes involving go and read -- and found some absolute gems.

I burned my way through Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet in an afternoon; I heard a short reading from it at Scintillation last year and found the whole thing deliciously funny at the time. It lived up to that and more in final form. There is a gift to writing about difficult or objectively scary things in a way that doesn't take swipes at the reader themself -- real danger viewed from a place of calm -- and this book has it; a little education wrapped in a lot of fun wrapped in something quite seriously kind.

Along those same lines, I spent a good week with some unread backlist from Martha Baillie. I have this terrible suspicion that very few people outside of certain spaces in CanLit know Martha Baillie exists, and yet she writes some of the most fine-grained, shimmering, complicated books on care relationships and mental illness and wineglass-clear, fallible humanity and the flavour of a word in your mouth that I have ever read. She is experimental; I love every single experiment she does. She is the kind of author you simultaneously want to slide toward other people and yet also never whisper a word about, because the books and your relationship to them is just absolutely that intimate.

Her sister, Christina, is a writer and visual artist who lives with schizophrenia, and their Sister Language -- written as a back-and-forth epistolary joint essay on language and writing, how it works, how words feel inside Christina's head and what the flex of grammar can do when one of your symptoms is how words disintegrate -- was, well. Mountains beyond mountains. This is probably exquisitely designed to hit my linguist buttons, but I know some of you have linguist buttons (hey, Tamara?) and as a formalism, as one of those weirdings of what language is and how it's made and how it breaks and comes back together, it's fascinating.

The other kind of things read

I've started well into the Reckoning 2020 slush pile, and can we just take a moment to raise a glass to the absolute pleasure of editorial reading? I've really missed that feeling of opening up a file, knowing what's inside could be glorious -- or almost-glorious, and then there's room to put your heads together and find the missing piece.

Editing is good. Please to send poems.

The other other kind of things read

The whole thing was set up between this issue and the last, so it didn't get a mention here, but on Sunday I read at Toronto's Draft Reading Series as one of its four-minute backup-singer readers, there to support the main event: D.A. Lockhart, Derek Mascarenhas and Aparna Kaji Shah.

Draft is a reading series entirely devoted to reading work in progress, so it's an interesting afternoon: writing that's coming sometime, read in raw form -- all about potential. I picked up a few projects I'll be looking forward to in final form -- one downright intriguing-sounding memoir from Gloria Blizzard, and a novel-in-progress from Michelle Alfano -- and here's a rather nice shot of my own four-minute bit, courtesy my barstool neighbour.

 

I got that shirt for ten bucks and it's great.

Things not yet planted but soon

We had a lil' excursion to Seedy Saturday mid-February -- I don't know if other cities have this, but it's a series of late-winter seed swaps, where you can bring your old or saved seeds and get different ones, and gardening advice besides. I have Intent (tm) on the question of the garden this year, so we came away with a whole entire stack of plantstuff: bok choy, cilantro, dwarf curled kale, borage, dill, eggplant, baby carrots, heirloom tomatoes, romaine, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans.

The idea, this year, is to put a little pollinator garden along the balcony: basically as marketing for bees. I didn't actually predict myself growing milkweed on purpose, but the thought of it is oddly peaceful: milkweed from seed, fifteen-plus stories up in the sky.

Things watched-and-learned

In keeping with what you should put in a circle to summon me (sustainable food documentaries, coffee, an interesting question) at the end of January I watched The Biggest Little Farm on Netflix: a feature-length documentary about a couple's eight-year work to revitalize the dead soil of a 160-acre California farm through biodynamic farming techniques.

I do not want to spoil, but what they end up building isn't a product, it's an ecosystem -- conditions that feed a pest species that feed a predator that generate a universe -- and it resonated so strongly with my entire understanding of building and tending social systems that I took eleventy screenshots and notes to try to catch the fireworks going off in my head.

 

(This is important.)

As P. and I frequently repeat to each other, everything is everything. The routes to making good art are no different from the ones that make a good bakery, or non-profit organization, or apparently, a biodynamic farm. All happy families, when it comes to learning and skills and crafts, apparently are alike in some fashion.

Things epiphantic

Which ties in with an interesting experience I've been having with the question of signal.

For the past few months, I've been muting arguments on Twitter: finding the keywords that people pivot around for those dragged-out, iterative, whole-industry fights and muting those one by one. It's something I started largely for peace of mind: After fifteen years in the discourse, one's seen every argument repeat in every iteration, and I hate watching people fight past each other.

But there's an interesting side effect emerging from that, which is that I am actually finding, again, that which i wanted out of the thing in the first place.

I've been running a what-if this month: What if authority, and the idea that we have to maintain it to others, is the death of learning? You can't learn what you don't admit you don't know, and when we put ourselves in positions where we're always the mentor, the authority, it--limits the size of the universe of what's to be known. The size of the world gets defined by the knowledge of The Expert. And yes, sometimes I think people position themselves as such to keep the worlds around them small, but more often it just happens, out of time scarcity or an unclear path on what's next or because it signifies a certain kind of relationship with themselves. I know a few people, all academics, who started by going to therapy and very quickly ended up training to be therapists themselves because that's what their epistemic relationship with knowledge was: you win at knowledge and then become an authority. People get to authority and they...stop. People think authority is city limits.

But...it's not.

That's wrong, I'm thinking this winter, where I'm stepping off the roads of my own authority into Courage Wolf territory, wherein we bite off more than we can chew and then chew it (thanks, Danny). You get knowledge, and then you sight farther, up the hill to where something larger is, something steep and beyond your reach, a mountain--and then you go get some more. And then when you're on top of that, you look from higher vantage, and what you see will be a mountain.

Over the past few years, I've found myself leaving some smaller worlds, either by choice or not: places where I was an expert and held some measure of authority. And that's put me into all sorts of learning positions: applying and trying for kinds of work and opportunities where I am most definitely not an expert, where I am learning on the way down, where I am unready but alert for the tools, because I took myself off the ladder of those smaller places and now I have to try differently.

I've been realizing, startlingly, now that they're in the rearview, just how small those worlds were. Because you can preoccupy yourself endlessly with all the things that happen in a small universe (the same argument to no purpose, reiterated annually for fifteen years); you can have a thousand things to do there that don't involve looking up and realizing how much you don't know yet, and how much there is to know.

And I am particularly unsatisfied with all the things I already know how to do, where authority lives, but all the things I don't know turn my brain to stars.

So through that biting off more than I can chew, I've forced myself into a position this spring where I'm face to face with what I don't know yet, and the people around me do have knowledge I don't and I owe it to them to collaborate on their level. Once again I'm in, as Tamara Faith Berger puts it in Maidenhead in what is, yes, a really problematic example, a learning position. And--there are mountains beyond mountains.

It's terrifying. It feels great. I'm deep into the effort of getting me some better proverbial hiking boots. More as their soles and laces develop.

Things (that are going to be) writing

Some of which is:

One of the better pieces of news this past month was that I've been awarded a pair of recommender grants from the Ontario Arts Council for a YA novel manuscript I've had quietly in development, back behind all the other bubbling metaphorical soup pots (it occurs to me this metaphor is like, the least efficient kitchen design and Gordon Ramsay would loudly wave his hands in dismay) and so I've officially slotted in a particular novel project for this autumn. It's going to require some serious research, which is also part-planned, and extends this year to a three-project year.

I might be looking, at some point, for writing retreat locations so I can lock myself happily in with a manuscript. If there's anywhere that's ideal for a girl and her laptop, let me know?

Things to read

Finally, I'll have a short poem, "Every Boat", in a chapbook curated by games writer, academic, and journalist Cameron Kunzleman specifically for this year's ICFA. It'll contain some short fiction, a game from him, and two poems.

This was my first official-like poetry commission, so it feels like a big freaking deal, in the professional parlance. If you're at ICFA, keep an eye out for a copy there; he's let me know it'll likely be a numbered, very limited edition, and a web edition is still a firm maybe.

*

I'm going to call it here, because this thing is already overfull and spilling. But: a promissory note for knitting pictures next time, some garden, some food, and if there's anything particular you've been missing, let me know.

Hope you have a wonderful few weeks. Until mid-March, then.