I make things.
It’s what I do.
Mostly, I make things with written words. Sometimes those things involve audio, and occasionally photos or video. But always words.
This piece of writing is intended as the first in a new, ongoing practice. Well, I say “ongoing,” but I don’t actually know that. I may decide that it’s not useful, I may decide that it doesn’t fit, I may decide that I’d be better off pointing my energies in some other direction. At least as of today, though, my goal is to write and publish some sort of short something, once a week. In the year and a half since I stepped back from Talking Radical Radio – the weekly interview-based radio show that I hosted and produced for ten years – I’ve developed, in fits and starts, a suite of new practices related to my work. But a lot of that involves building towards a couple of different larger projects without actually publishing anything in the short-term, whereas this new practice is responding to a desire to integrate some more regular, small, public-facing work into all of that.
Over the three decades I’ve been making things with words, most of what I have made has been related in one way or another to social movements and social justice – not all of it, but most of it. That’s probably going to be true of the things that I make as part of this new practice as well. Sometimes, that connection will be explicit, but at other times it will be more of a political grounding and a sensibility as I talk about things that are a bit farther removed.
I say that in a vague and uncertain way because I don’t actually know what I’m going to write here. This is not a reader-centric project in which I strategically choose a narrow area to write high-octane, click-inducing pieces that I aggressively promote in order to build an audience. I might be better off, professionally speaking, if I did something like that, but I think I’d kind of hate it. Rather, the idea is that this will be writer-centric (it’s me, I’m the writer); that it will be slow and thoughtful; that it will meander; and that it won’t really care much if anyone reads. I will no doubt sometimes write about current events, but I’m often not a fan of hot-take pontificating, so I really hope I don’t do too much of that. More often, I suspect, I will reflect on ideas and the world through a lens of justice and liberation in ways that are farther from the cutting edge of the news cycle. At least sometimes, it will be me talking about interesting things that I’ve run across in the course of reading for and writing towards those larger pieces of work that I mentioned. And given that I spend rather an inordinate amount of time thinking about my own work processes, I’ll probably sometimes write about writing, too. All of which means that this series of short pieces could include anything from rageful polemics, to memoir, to scattered thoughts on the book I’m reading or some article I ran across, to personal essays, to painfully in-the-weeds dissections of the work of being a writer, to who knows what else. So consider yourself warned.
At least to begin with, I am going to publish what I write as part of this practice on my author site (scottneigh.ca) and I am not going to do anything to circulate or promote any of it. Lord knows that if there is anything that this world has in excess, it’s writing shared online by white, middle-class men in the Anglosphere, and I’m under no illusions that this practice is going to lead to me producing anything that distinguishes itself from that vast and mostly mediocre field. But, still, I’m a writer, and if indeed I do end up developing a sustained attachment to this new practice, there’s a good chance I’ll eventually start circulating what I produce in gentle ways.
And I think that’s about it, for this week. Will I be back again next Thursday? Who knows! Even if I manage that, will this practice endure once the closer-to-done of those larger projects I alluded to lands back on my plate in a big way in the new year? No idea!
But I hope so.
Oh…and I think I might call this series “Creating Through the Crisis.” Because that’s part of what’s inspired me to do this as well – a recognition of the multiple profound, interlocking crises we face, and of the fact that while making things with words and sharing them publically can feel trivial or downright irrelevant in that context, we must all nonetheless navigate these crises starting from who we are, where we are, and what we do. And…I make things with words. It’s what I do.