March 26, 2025
Gleanings
- “The battle for American decency happened to be here this year,” Sherman Burgoyne wrote to a distant sympathizer. “We fought it and won. Next year it may be in your part of America, and I’m counting on you to stand true.”
- She seems allergic to earnestness, this woman, but also addicted to shock, or attempts at shocking. We get it: you’re cool, you swear, you don’t conform.
- The older I get, the more I fall out of love with efficiency. I’ve struggled enough mentally to know that many of the experiences that are most edifying and healing for me are slow and full of friction
- Little by little, as the frequency of my syncopes has decreased, I’ve begun to feel my innate rebellious sovereignty return which is, of course silly in anybody as old as I am. But what is the use of being a willful and cantankerous old hag if I can’t be silly on a whim? I’m now happily anticipating hiking and photography in the solitude that has always been so dear to my heart.
- Most things I create are an amalgam of stealing and dreaming. I like to think of our brains as containing one of those moving carousels filled with images captured over time; one never knows what images will show themselves when and how we will distill them into the things we create.
- Where are you right now? What is possible? Because the goal of life, not just art, really is rapture — dropping into that eternal now.
- And so living well, and living in community, and living with others, and taking care of your people, and even not your people, is not just self-care in order to keep fighting. That was the 2016 idea. It is actually inseparable from resisting their big project.
- There used to be a little book shop in Toronto, near the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. This was back in the early 80’s. I lived near enough to ride my bike over on a Saturday morning. The shop was above a bakery and I may or may not be imagining that you were allowed to take your goodies upstairs and sit on one of the couches or at little tables (my imagination also recalls a fireplace) and browse the bookshelves.
- In the end, Picnic at Hanging Rock is more than just a tale of a mysterious disappearance. It’s a colonial artifact, shaped by Lindsay’s own privileged background and the broader societal structures of the time.
- Watching Oscar sprinkle some cochineal bugs on my palm, crushing them to a carmine paste, adding a little lemon juice, which turned the paste orangey-red, then adding some soda, which turned the paste royal purple, I thought, I can do this. Not well, perhaps, and maybe I’ll make a mess. But I am drawn to the work and will spend the nicer weather making my workshop and then seeing what happens.
- Dear smut writers: I do not want to police your language, but just know that I’m always going to hate “intimate folds.” The vulva is not origami.
- It’s easy to send an observation, a compliment, a thank you out into the ether. It might make just the difference to someone, and might also collectively help to redeem our online commons at a time when we especially need to share beauty, kindness and respect for each other.
- We make connections, we lose connections. We make gains, we lose pieces of ourselves. We create ripples that go out, and we never know if they reach someone. And they never know if their ripples touched us.
- My ghosts are all over this place—that’s one of the cool things about living in the same city for such a long time—and one of them lives in the Central Branch of the Regina Public Library. She went to see the Writer in Residence there about a decade ago, clutching a half-baked manuscript that needed two more years of edits before an agent would take it seriously, basically to ask if she was any good at this writing thing or if she should quit.
- What is true for both of these men—my sweet, fading father and the monster in the White House—is that they can do nothing to avoid dependency. It came for us in the beginning and it comes for us in the end. And if you stop fighting it, if you surrender to it, it can become a final exquisite experience of just how much you are loved—flesh and bone, the laughter and lightness of giving up the ghost, deserved, not earned, just because you are a human living inextricably with other humans.
- So take a news break. Spend time with people who fill your cup and see how long you can go without talking about the latest headline. Better yet, link arms with people working to make things better, whatever form that might take for you. Find the helpers—they’re there if you pay attention.
- Oh how our individual lives and living isn’t as much about us as we’re led to believe, sandwiched as we are between a past and future unknown.
