November 11, 2026

What I Wouldn’t Do for a Free Book

I don’t know what I wouldn’t do for book in the mail, which is something that occurred to me the other day as I signed on to receive a newsletter from the media outlet Be Giant in exchange for a book they’d created. And did I need that book? Probably not. Do I already have a professional life that involves books arriving in my mailbox on a regular basis, many of them unsolicited? Absolutely. And yet there I was, happily relinquishing my personal information, consenting to yet another corporate email appearing my inbox, because I’d been promised a book, and I was fine with that.

Not even 24 hours later, I’d done it again, purchasing two boxes of Mini-Wheats as part of Kellogg’s Feeding Reading campaign. With the purchase receipt for these two boxes I was eligible to receive a selection from a list of children’s books in the mail, and naturally I was all in, never mind that my children have aged out of the books on the list, and no one in our household eats cereal for breakfast under ordinary circumstances anyway. But free books in the mail are hardly ordinary circumstances, even if you’re sending away for them all the time, and when called upon our family will rise to the occasion.

I’m actually well practised at books for breakfast—we partook in Feeding Reading last winter, ate a ton of Mini Wheats, and ended up with three books for my kids. (Feeding Reading had more YA titles then.) Almost 25 years ago, when I lived in the UK, book tokens in cereal boxes earned me Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit and Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, and the fact that I could earn books by ingesting whole grains still fills me with abject delight.

Reader, this is who I’ve always been. When I was a kid, there used to be television advertisements in the daytime for an actual sequel to the Bible that you could get if you called the phone number across the bottom of the screen, and I wanted that book so bad—I went to Sunday school, but they’d never once mentioned the Bible Part Deux, so I was curious. And while I’m really sure I called that number in quest of the book, that it never arrived makes it more likely that I didn’t call at all for fear of the kind of telephone charges you might incur for calling the Psychic Network—I was ten, so who was I to discern?

And that is the story of how I never managed to get my grubby mitts on a complimentary copy of The Book of Mormon, an injustice I’ve been making up for in the years since by trying to acquire all the other books in the universe.

November 4, 2026

“To love this world is not a simple thing.”

“It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with.” —Ali Smith, Autumn, 2017

Last night many remarkable things happened, but chief among them—from my perspective—is that I went to bed entirely relaxed and not even that engaged with the results of the election in a country that I don’t live in. Not because the election wasn’t consequential, but instead because I had a pretty good feeling (based on facts) that the results of the election were going to be fine, that democracy would do the thing it was supposed to do; I didn’t have to manage it. And I can’t remember the last time I felt like that about a US election, about any election really. To think that there might have been a time that I did, but then I would have been young then, and really didn’t know anything.

It’s been an incredible season for democracy lately—not just the US, but Brazil, and Serbia. My own city decidedly reelected our progressive mayor last week in a victory that defied pollsters’ predictions. Voters in Alberta stood up for Canada the week before that. I’m still thinking about Hungary, the tremendous odds of Magyar’s victory, how hard and persistently Hungarians fought to make it happen. And what is most heartening about all of this is that it’s not about winning, us versus them, but instead an understanding that these are electoral results that are ultimately going to serve everybody—even the people who might not be celebrating them yet.

At a different time in my life, I would have wondered if these victories were indicative of a broader shift, a realignment. And in some ways, they are—we have seen what authoritarianism looks like and we do not like it. But I have also grown wary of reading too much into such patterns, of supposing a few data points can tell us anything definitive about how the future might go. Which I say not to put a damper on the joy of all this, but instead to suggest that the recent election of a far right party in a German state (for example) also might not be indicative of something sweeping to come, and the reality is more likely that there will always be this and that to contend with, that the future is gong to go all of the ways, that the tension is inherent, and while it means we cannot be complacent, it also means there might be something that all of us could stand to learn from each other. That the world might be more complex and interesting than left versus right, or just that we might require a different kind of framework by which to properly understand who we really are.

There are some days when it feels especially easy to love the world for what it is, which was what I was thinking about yesterday before I even knew how the election would turn out. The light was so incredibly golden, and it was shining through whatever autumn leaves had not yet fallen into a carpet across the street and sidewalks, and the sky was so blue, and the beauty of it all was just absolutely breathtaking. And I was thinking of how it’s easy to love the world, even when it breaks my heart, the fragility of life itself only underlining how precious and miraculous it is to be here at all, to be able to hold what we hold. And to hold it all so close, while we can, as the seasons and cycles swirl around us, nothing ever finished, nothing ever still.

“To love this world is not a simple thing. But no matter what you do, life happens. That’s the funny, forgivable thing about the earth, It is not only loss that is imminent: it’s creation.” —Alessandra Naccarato, Imminent Domains, 2023

September 21, 2026

Takes and Gifts

“And it feels so good these days to keep yourself for yourself. What a great trend,” writes my friend Shawna Lemay in her latest Transactions with Beauty post, to which I reply (to myself!), And how! Like Shawna, I’ve been asking what the point is with these sorts of spaces, who is even listening relishing the straightforward humanness of real life encounters. I think I’m still a bit burnt out from my very busy season last spring, and am having trouble finding the motivation to write my monthly Substack essays or resurrect my podcast. For the former, I am pressing on anyway, because I’m grateful to have paid subscribers, but on Substack itself and on the internet in general, I am getting very tired of screaming out into a void. On Instagram, I’m altogether tired of scrolling to find post after post of clickbait by people I don’t even follow, weird and warped content that actually bears no relationship to the world that I live in.

My blog feels different though—it was always fairly certain here that not many people were reading anyway, that relative obscurity was a feature, not a bug. What has always differentiated blog audiences from those of social media is that the former is highly specific, while the latter is terrifyingly general. I know who I’m talking to here. I’m fairly sure that those readers will understand me. And anybody who doesn’t will have the context clues of 20+ years of archives with which to make sense of the matter.

In a piece today, Emily Wilson (recent and well known translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad) complains about the one-noteness of internet discourse (which maybe is part of the reason I’m not very inspired to post on online essay about anything right now). She writes about the “poisonous trend in media coverage, to be constantly reacting to lowest-common-denominator “takes” on the internet, rather than taking up the responsibility to reframe, investigate, listen, and educate.” Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there’s an alternative to this way of being online.

I am so done with “takes,” and am thinking now about about what takes actually take—from their writers, their readers, from the culture at large. And I’m thinking about how the opposite of a take is a give/gift. What Shawna writes:

Artists and writers and makers very often think about the gifts they receive, and understand the give and take of it all. The more you give, the more you get back. It’s a mysterious and wonderful economy all its own.

September 6, 2026

A Great Day

Yesterday, I got to see Pitbull in the company of 15,000 other fans. It was wonderful.

On March 14, 2025, we were driving home from a visit to the the Royal Botanical Gardens, and a song played on our Spotify playlist that I’d somehow never heard before, performed by an artist I knew nothing about, including his area code (unbelievably). A new release, I’d assumed, because it had come on after Charli XCX, but it turned out the song was 12 years old and everybody in my family—in the world, even?—knew it, except for me.

“Why did nobody tell me about this?” is what I kept thinking in the days to follow when I wouldn’t stop playing it over and over.

That song was “Timber.” (Full credit to Kesha, without whom….)

Now, an essential detail of this story and of my whole “Come to Pitbull” moment was that by March 14, 2025, I was six weeks into a difficult bout of anxiety, my first experience of such a thing since the major episode on 2022 that almost broke me and made me realize that I had an dysfunctional relationship with anxiety in the first place. Watching the US government wreak havoc on the post-WW2 world order had once again sent me down a road of terror and existential dread that made ordinary functioning difficult and left me sad and scared all the time in a way whose disproportions I did not comprehend. It was awful.

But “Timber” made me happy, it really did, and everybody in my family was pleased about this development because during my previous bout with anxiety, I’d listened to Phil Collins over and over, and they all determined that Pitbull was a vast improvement.

And then Leon Musk put on a cheese hat and a Democrat won the Wisconsin senate race, I realized that the forces of evil were not necessarily omnipotent, and my anxiety lifted.

But Pitbull remained.

And I’ve loved Pitbull ever since, Mr. 305, Mr. Worldwide, a product of Dade County always. Not in such a way that I’m sure you’ll love him too, if you don’t already. My love for Pitbull makes no sense, and doesn’t map neatly onto anything, weird and incongruous. But Pitbull himself is weird and incongruous, and I think that’s part of the appeal for me. After having my mind broken by its insistence on absolutes, Pitbull showed me how to relax a bit, to hold multitudes. He has taught me that some things are simpler than they seem, and that there’s power in rejecting cynicism. That I *could* consider myself too smart and worldly for a platitude like “Every day above ground is a great day,” and yet there is truth in it, so why would I?

He’s author of the line, “This biggity boy’s a diggity dog.” He does not take himself too seriously, and yet he also comically takes himself way too seriously. His lyrics are super-sexualized, his dancers practically naked, and his female fans show up at his concerts in drag, dressed like him in bald caps. He’s spoken of spending his childhood driving around with his mother listening to Tony Robbins’ cassette tapes and used his private jet to fly cancer patients from Puerto Rico to the US for treatment after Hurricane Maria. He’s a caricature, but there’s something more there that’s oddly compelling. You should read Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND, which tried to skewer the Pitbull persona, but could not bring itself to do so entirely at the end.

I love him so much, and I love the world better because he’s in it.

June 10, 2026

On Suffering Sheila

Selections from one-star Goodreads reviews of Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great:

• The kids really wanted another Fudge book, so I picked this one up because it was listed as the next book in the Fudge “series.” Waste of time – Fudge is not in this book at all, and Sheila is not a main character I could root for.
• One thing I normally like about books is that the main character has an arc…they grow and change throughout the book. Sheila is as rude and annoying at the end as she is at the beginning.
• Listen, I understand kids come in all shapes and sizes, and some are a little messier and more complicated than others, that doesn’t necessarily make them bad protagonists. But when they’re so utterly unlikeable, and there’s no redemption at the end of the book? No thanks.
• Everything about this book annoyed me. I could not find one character that was redeeming–except for maybe the dog, Jennifer.
• The main character is an insufferable liar, know-it-all and lacks self-awareness…
• What a horribly selfish girl. At no stage did I find her redeemable or even likeable.
• I was really hoping she would have some kind of character arc by the end of the book, but she didn’t… Don’t let your kids read this one.
• I was hoping her behavior would be confronted as the story went along, but was disappointed. My children did not like the book either.
• Her attitude was terrible throughout the book and no repentance for the rudeness she portrayed her family. Not a good example of how I want my children to be reacting to the world around them.
• This was hard to get through. Sheila was a spoiled brat.
• We didn’t finish this one. Sheila is insufferable.
• stupid

As creator of a fleet of supposedly unlikeable female characters, I found these reviews clarifying, thinking about what readers demand of protagonists (main characters we can root for), and they also made me realize that this is Judy Blume’s bravest novel, even more than Forever, about a character who is undeniably flawed (we are all Sheila Tubman) and who never changes, and also can you IMAGINE the audacity of being somebody who’d give ACTUAL JUDY BLUME a one-star review?

May 11, 2026

Last week the internet went crazy

Last week, the internet went crazy. And I was so interested in the way that the internet went crazy, because instead of being in the crazy fray (where I use to hang out all the time!), I was looking on from the sidelines, in more than one sense. The most obvious sense being that this was a fracas among the children’s lit internet, of which I am not a part, so I had no skin in the game, the game being a comment by children’s writer Mac Barnett (from his recently released book on writing for children) in which he reports that “maybe more like 94.7 percent of kids’ books are crud.”

The thing I found most fascinating about this comment was how 94.7% of children’s authors in my feed seemed to believe without hesitation that their books were the books that he was talking about. I mean, the odds are high that they were, 94.7% being a sizable piece of the pie, but still. No doubt there is a gendered element to this. I’m not a children’s writer, BUT I was once a student in a university department of English, and I think the dynamics are the same, which is that 94.7% of the students are women and it’s the 5.3% of students who are not who are lauded as geniuses, dominate in-class conversations, and receive post-doctoral fellowships. So I suspect I understand why the community finds itself with a chip on its collective shoulder.

But still. I find myself thinking, “Can you get a little bit of male entitlement, people?” We could all do well sometimes (but not all the time) to channel the spirit of that guy who’s released an obscure book with a small press nobody has ever heard of that sells six copies and who is wide awake the morning of the announcement of the Giller Prize longlist waiting for his moment, and who’s indignant when they fail to call. As a writer of commercial fiction, I understand parts of what it must be like to be a kidlit writer (not being taken seriously, your poetry colleagues from your MFA have never published anything but still think they’re better than you, male writer colleagues with literally no interest in ever reading anything you’ve written), but we’ve got to hoist our spirits high above these petty grievances and/or get our heads out of our asses.

I know all this because of the years of my life that I wasted being triggered by things Jennifer Weiner was saying on the internet. It was my PRIME, people, and I spent it in the comments of Blogspots, either being really mad at Jennifer Weiner, or defending Weiner from her naysayers, and I don’t really remember why my views on Weiner were so all over the place, but also she was a lightning rod so it almost didn’t matter, and now I think about all the things I could have been spending my energy on instead.

The greatest revelation I’ve had in recent years is that so much of the frustration across the entire political spectrum (and also in my nervous system) is the result of fury that we cannot, in fact, control the things that other people think or the ways they behave. And this revelation lives alongside another fact that is just as true, that is we must keep working for a better, fairer world, not merely accepting the status quo. That we must change the world, but also there are parts of the world that are not ours for changing. That other people are going to think things, and say things, and I’m not going to like the things they think or say, and this is—in fact—part of the schema.

And yes, I’m talking about cancel culture, but I’m also talking about the people who were so opposed to cancel culture that they became their own cancel culture (which was a thousand times worse than campaigns removing men from positions of power for being sexual predators, no?).

It’s a mess, it’s a muddle, and I don’t really know a way out of it, except to shut down your browser when those synapses are flying and you find yourself in an internet pile-on, and go for a walk outside.

December 17, 2025

December Enthusiasms

My final “Enthusiasms” newsletter of the year is out! It includes some VERY DRAMATIC NEWS about the whereabouts of my Books of the Year list, and also a link to my recent spot on CBC’s “The Next Chapter” talking about whether literary awards are a scam (spoiler: UH HUH). Read it all here!

December 2, 2025

You are a sophisticated person if you think things are bad.

“We get accustomed to something improving, and we stop recognizing that actually matters. I think as well, there’s an element where for audience, it feels weirdly not smart to consume this kind of coverage. Like, you are a sophisticated person if you think things are bad.

Because you’re smart enough to see it, which actually is not hard to see. I think with solutions there’s no one to blame, which I think is a big part of news coverage and news consumption. Especially, again, in a more social media era, like we’re usually trying to identify very quickly what went wrong.

And in some ways, that’s a great step forward. Like, we’ve experienced these terrible floods in West Texas. The worst and the deadliest floods we’ve had in decades in the US.

And these things used to happen more often. And I believe when they did, the reaction was less, well, what went wrong? Because we didn’t presuppose we had the power to control things like that.

Now, almost instantly you’re going to who failed, right? Like, this shouldn’t happen, who failed? And that is true to a certain extent.

Like, things like that, incident in particular, shouldn’t have happened to this degree. But what that means is that there’s a constant feeling that there’s failure everywhere. Government’s failing, or people are failing, or businesses or institutions definitely are failing.

And I think trying to consume solutions, journalism, means you have to go back against that to a certain extent. If your attitude is that things are wrong, this is challenging that. There might be a bit of a cognitive disconnect, I think, that sort of pushes people away.”

Bryan Walsh – “Solving the Narrative Deficit” on the Hope is a Verb podcast

November 26, 2025

Keep that Candle Burning Bright

I’d heard legends about such practices, but until this summer I’d never witnessed it myself, the meticulously maintained collections of used books up for grabs at rural waste transfer stations. When we arrived at the dump in late August at the end of cottage holiday, it just rained in Haliburton, mercifully, for the first time in weeks (there’d been a fire ban on all summer). And the station attendant was carefully unwrapping the book tables from the layers of plastic tarp that had protected them from the deluge and other weather—there were all kinds of books, hundreds of books, absolutely bizarrely and serendipitously (un)catalogued, the most curious collection of thrillers, bestsellers, ancient paperbacks. There was so much good stuff. There was also so much that stuff that probably no one would ever want to read (weird old children’s books that were missing their covers, or a microwave cookbook for cocktail party appetizers made from Triscuits that smelled like a haunted basement).

And along with the good stuff, and the poor unwanted stuff, there was also the odd semi-obscure volume that had been placed at the dump by fate, just so that one day I could find it, the person it had always been meant for so that it could live forevermore on my shelf. There, alongside Ricky Martin’s autobiography (sadly devoid of its dustjacket) and a 20-year-old human resources manual, I found Keep That Candle Burning Bright, by Bronwen Wallace, a posthumous collection of her poetry I hadn’t encountered before, published by Coach House Press in 1991.

As someone who loves Wallace best for her fiction (her story collection People You’d Trust Your Life To is one of my favourite books) this book is a special treat, a collection of prose poems inspired by tue songs of Emmy Lou Harris:

“Well, what/ do you think we’re doing anyway, spinning out here,/ stuck with each other and no more able to get over/ that than we can get over our need for oxygen? Why/ not sing for what we can’t do, instead of all this/ booming and bragging, most of us stuck in the back/ row anyway, squawking, gimped-up. What if some/ tuneless wonder’s all we’ve got to say for ourselves?/ Off-key, our failings held out, at last, to each other./ What else have we got to offer, really? What else do/ we think they’re for?” —from “This is the Closest I Come to a Song”

October 17, 2025

Learning

Brunswick Avenue, north of Bloor, has just been resurfaced, which makes flying down the bike lane there there smoothest and most exhilarating experience, and I was doing so not long ago on the most beautiful day (we’ve had a lot of those lately), speeding past the small group gathered at the Little Free Library, perusing the titles available, and there are always people there, a fact which, along with the blue blue sky, underlined me to how just how much the world was beneficent and people were good. And I felt a familiar compulsion to climb up on an online soapbox to declare this fact, because I’m still not entirely over the instinct that a feeling isn’t truly felt until it’s been broadcast on the internet. And thinking about this made me realize how much of my anxiety over the last ten years or more stemmed from me feeling responsible for the world in this way, in proving that hope was reasonable and that we were worth fighting for.

Which is weird, in a way, because doesn’t me feeling like I had to work so hard to make it true suggest I didn’t wholly believe it myself? The other evolution in my thinking since then, in addition to that I’m not responsible for proving the goodness of the world, is that that world actually isn’t good. Or isn’t just good. The way I’d wanted it to be, like managing to get a snapshot, A HA! There, you see, demonstrable evidence! I read a book earlier this year where the author reflected on how she used to think that we were all *this close* to getting on the right track politically, and then everything would be fine after that, and I could so relate to that naivete. And what I understand now is that the world is brutal, terrible, wondrous, perfect, violent, loving, balanced, unfair, beautiful, ugly, predictable, explosive, safe, dangerous, and miraculous all at the same time. The world (and its human inhabitants) are so many things, but “perfectable” isn’t one of them, and maybe I’m learning to accept this? That the world will always be good and bad in equal measure, and we can still love it all the same.