two: whole entire cities rising like soft cables from the ground

Let me explain--no, there is too much. Let me sum up.

The last three weeks have been absolutely stacked with projects moving, a bit like your classic iceberg, through and across my desk. The whole month of January hit like a parade: a pile of opportunities opening, and applications sending, and project calls, and I've spent it simultaneously hustling like mad and sitting in the falling confetti left by the aftermath of the hustle, waiting to see which of those calls and applications and opportunities are going to turn into more.

I kept track as it was going here, thinking oh, good, I'll have a newsletter issue ready when. Except it grew and grew, so if this is too much newsletter for you, let me know. Its bulk was unexpected.

Things made

I have been, for a long, slow time, decluttering: not so much because of the KonMari trend as it being convenient to getting serious about what two adults with two adult lives of possessions in one apartment means for the long haul. And at the end of last year, I finally decided that if I didn't actually use my yarn stash it was time to let it go. And yet: spun silk. Cashmere.

So I chose life and started knitting.

It still needs a toe. And a second sock. But.

As of this writing I am halfway through a pair of Twisted socks, and my hands are remembering how to love this; the kind of physical motion that makes, that's productive, but it's also inherently your brain and body at rest. I have never really caught the trick of meditating; this might not be far off the mark, though.

(This is where I sneak in a book recommendation: Katrina Onstad's The Weekend Effect. For those of you who like labour movement history, work-life balance in arts practices, and very real justification for hobbies and taking days off, this is your book.)

So with that in mind, this month I also -- since Boxing Week sales now last into late January -- took receipt of my Christmas present from P.: a big, blueberry-coloured Le Creuset stock pot. Behold my immortal beloved:

So pretty.

One of the slow goals for this year is to find all the things that are a little broken, that we're used to stepping around or hacking, and just fixing them -- and then we see where that gets us. Because making do doesn't always feel like that until it does, and I've been making do on the canning front with a too-shallow soup pot I've had for almost eighteen years, turning taller jars on their sides to get enough water on top to create vacuum.

Farewell to all that. I will be looking out for very tall things to pickle.

Things heard

A longtime local Twitter acquaintance posted in passing about her last album's release anniversary, and that is how I've fallen face-first into Entire Cities this past month.

Most of my easy venues for new bands have dried up, so imagine my surprise when I clicked on a Bandcamp link and was plunged with an extreme startle back home, into the texture of 2011 Toronto, before things in this city were quite resolutely going bad: red brick houses twined with old, old trees and midnight walks where I timed my sneakers to the beat through the headphones, indie theatre and choral cowpunk, and flickering silent movies projected on a sheet hung out the third-floor window of someone's rented Parkdale house, and paintings splashed across the back of alleys, and the old, beautiful house where I lived.

I listened to all four albums in one grey wintry afternoon while Stardew Valley's computerized birds called in the background, and -- it can make you cry and rejoice, realizing that someone else remembers it. I was not the only one there; other people were too, and so many of us are, even now, carrying around inside that little seed, waiting to replant it.

(Do you know you're living in something holy when you're there, necessarily? Or is that the kind of state that's conferred afterwards, when you realize how it filled your hands?)

So along those lines, later that week I did a very 2011-in-Toronto thing and attended the reboot meeting for the Toronto Public Space Committee, which -- for those who remember my old writer's biography line about planting gardens in back alleys -- I used to volunteer with on the Guerilla Gardeners' side of things, sneaking out quite literally in the dead of night to plant pretty flowers in places we were not legally supposed to. Because.

The TPSC's coming up from hibernation around a more sustainable approach to public space activism, and in that first meeting we heard about pop-up projects in strip mall parking lots, a park that's been lovingly revitalized by newcomer women and their multi-pronged approach to community-building, painting street murals, and working the regulatory process for good.

At drinks after, I figured out where all the goofy, slightly punk, chaotic good, crusty working artists have gone: everyone cleaned up a little, got smart about income streams, and are still doing the work. My people are still here. I may have started the ball rolling on some joyous, absolutely Situationist, prosocial space takeover business. We'll see if it lasts through next meeting; watch this space.

I am resolving to spend more time in rooms with activists. They are good rooms where people are leaned into the work of getting things done. They are cupped full of joy in motion.

Things (for you!) to write

All this to frame and contextualize and report this month's biggest work-news:

I am going to be editorially curating a little space this year as well, as the guest poetry editor for Reckoning's 2020 issue (see: goofy, slightly punk, chaotic good, cleaned-up crusty working artists still doing the work).

The call for submissions, built to resonate with fiction editor Cécile Cristofari's set theme, is about those little seeds we're carrying around, waiting to replant, and all this will be the feeling I'm looking for: the spaces cupped full of joy in motion; something holy in your pocket; a little-god reminder of why we do the work. That which is beautiful amidst. The things that make it a little easier to do our living.

Guidelines here, deadline September 22nd. Please drown me in incandescent poetry. I have like nine or ten slots; make it the fight of my life.

Things to read

It's February, and so "The Death of the Gods" is free to read now in the web issue of Uncanny Magazine for people who are not subscribers. Behold career size dysphoria!

I'm also delighted to announce that I'll have a poem in Climbing Lightly Through Forests, an Ursula K. Le Guin tribute poetry anthology edited by R.B. Lemberg and Lisa Bradley, which will be out through Aqueduct Press later this year, I think? I'll check on that. Everything in the anthology is inspired by Le Guin's work, and "A Headful of Hair" is from Le Guin's critical theory -- specifically, "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction". It is about how we knot things, people, memory together and they are gone but not gone after all.
 

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News pressure is already building for the next edition of this letter -- even as I was drafting the final touches, things happened and happened and happened, and there are books read I definitely want to talk about -- but here endeth the roundest newsletter in the land.

I hope the winter is treating everyone kindly so far: just enough snow, seeds, or birds as is relevant to you. See you in three weeks!