Hi.
So.
I’m back.
I mean, I was never gone. But I haven’t written a Creating Through the Crisis post since May of last year. This month, though, my work life is entering a new phase and I think one element of that will be using this sort of blog-ish writing as a tool — though probably in a bit of a different way than I was using it last year.
Creating Through the Crisis started in November 2024. The idea was to use it as a way to produce regular, short, public-facing pieces of writing, mostly pretty informal, and with a broad and open focus. It was intended to be of benefit to me — to be writer-centric, rather than reader-centric. And it was, for awhile, successful. I wrote things I otherwise would not have. It helped crystallize ideas out of more fleeting interests, and strengthen the muscles necessary for turning those sorts of ideas and interests into writing in a fairly fluid and organic way. Those muscles had atrophied during the long years of my work on Talking Radical Radio, and it felt positive and useful to start working with them again.
Over the not-quite-half-a-year I engaged in this blogging practice, its character shifted. I have an on-again, off-again relationship with TikTok, and at some point, Creating Through the Crisis became mostly a repository for the scripts I used for TikTok videos. I ended up feeling like I had less space to use blogging as a tool, and it had become more of an obligation. And finally, I set it aside. I had a book — Listen! Knowing the World and Fighting to Change It — due to come out later last year, and it was when some element of the work related to getting that book ready for publication came back onto my plate that I decided I just didn’t have time for blogging any more.
This month, I am, as I said, entering something of a new phase in my work life. Which isn’t necessarily saying much — I’ve had a lot of moments in the last few years that felt like that. The first, and perhaps biggest, was when I ended the ten-year weekly run of Talking Radical Radio at the end of February 2023. The other main contender for “biggest” would be when Listen! came out in late October last year. And there have been plenty of smaller ones as well.
This one — the one that started a couple of weeks ago — is one of the smaller ones. But even though it’s small, I think it is also fairly consequential, at least in a symbolic way. After Listen! was launched into the world, I had a few lingering commitments that I had to complete. One was a piece of writing that I’d started earlier in the year that I finished at the end of December. Another involved making various changes and upgrades to my work infrastructure, which is always ongoing but for awhile consumed rather more energy and attention than its usual baseline. Yet another was a practice that I’d only begun in a sporadic way in the fall: Over the previous couple of years, I’d produced a fairly large body of not-for-publication writing to work myself towards a new book project, and I realized that I needed to go back over all of that and extract some of the key ideas I’d explored so I could lay them out in more accessible and useful ways for future writing. It’s that work that I finished a couple of weeks ago, and the time that I was using for it is now available for me to use in other ways.
Of course, it’s not like I don’t have other commitments, even though the last of the lingering backward-looking tasks is now off my plate. Some of those commitments, I’m just not going to talk about here. Probably the largest that I will talk about, at least in an indirect and roundabout way, is that possible future book project. I am committed to continuing to write my way towards it and, perhaps more significantly, to doing a lot of reading related to it over the course of the year, and that’s going to take a lot of my time. I doubt I’ll start work on a manuscript in 2026, but I will say that going back over my exploratory writing from the last couple of years has resulted in me realizing that I’m farther ahead on that project than I thought.
As well, there are smaller things. I am committed to doing an occasional series of interviews where I talk to activists and organizers from across so-called Canada about learning in, from, and for social movements. I’m part of the core team for a grassroots media outlet, and that involves a fair bit of editing and administrative labour on an ongoing basis, plus playing a major role in a website upgrade later in the year that I’m kind of dreading. I’m on the editorial committee of an independent left publisher, and along with reading book proposals and participating in meetings, I also seem to be in the process of taking on a role in preparing for that organization’s 50th birthday in 2027 — exactly what that will look like is uncertain, but it could end up being a fairly substantial piece of work.
Of the newly freed-up time, some will go towards the book project, but there are a few other strands of work — some intersecting with the book project, some not — that I also want to explore. And I have this idea that an ongoing blogging practice will help me do all of that.
Just like back in November 2024, I don’t know if I’m actually going to keep this up. I also don’t know exactly what I’m going to write. But my guess is that it’s going to be a bit different than before. Last time, the point was just to have a practice of writing things that would be published — the content was mostly irrelevant, and I put zero energy into trying to get any of it in front of eyeballs. I just wanted to identify things I was sufficiently interested in to write about, and then to do it.
This time, I’m more focused on making sure that this blogging is connected to my other strands of work. I’m still feeling out what that might mean, though. There will probably still be times where I latch onto some random thing that interests me and then I write about it. But I suspect that more of what I do is going to be grounded in my other work practices. So this will, I think, be a place where I work out problems, a place where I explore ideas not in a way that is random and arbitrary but connected to that other work, and a place that is deliberately generative. I’m not saying that’s always going to be visible to anyone but me from the writing itself, but I think that’s what I’m going to try for.
Last time, I had a fairly rigid weekly posting schedule. I don’t remember if I always stuck to that, but I think I usually did. This time, my initial intent is for it to be approximately weekly but also quite a bit looser — if I post three times in a week, great, and if it’s once in a month, also fine.
I’m still not concerned about getting these posts in front of eyeballs. I have no intention, for the moment, of posting them to social media or anything like that. I’m going to start out by posting them to scottneigh.ca and doing absolutely nothing else with them. But this time, I’m also hoping that this practice gels in a way that, at some point down the road, will allow me to start thinking about other possibilities — maybe other platforms, maybe just circulating what I write here on social media, I’m not sure.
And as before, if doing this feels useful, I’ll keep doing it. If it doesn’t, I’ll set it aside.
