Creating Through the Crisis #29 Generally speaking, I’m uncomfortable telling other people what to do. I know and respect people who make use of their platforms in that way — at their best, they offer guidance to movements, advice to individual organizers, suggestions about the positions that people should take with respect to the news …
Creating Through the Crisis #27 I’ve blogged since blogging was young. And I’ve decided I’m going to do it again in a concerted, ongoing way…though perhaps oriented a bit differently than I have in the past. From 2004 to 2023, I did it at A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land. My posting was always irregular, …
I talked in “Creating Through the Crisis #25” about a number of the things that I’m working on, these days. Or, at least, I alluded to them. Among other things, there’s a major strand of work that I hope will become a book project, and there are several smaller strands, some of which intertwine with …
I’ve been thinking, this week, about the politics of communication and about an older radical that I used to do activist stuff with. The starting point for this reflection is an article that I read. The topic of the article doesn’t matter, but it was smart and I mostly agreed with it. But I was …
One very obvious component of the writing practice that I’ve taken up in these “Creating Through the Crisis” posts is the need to come up with something to write about each week. My basic approach to doing that is to think about what has been on my mind lately, and then choose one of those …
I don’t generally pay a lot of attention to transitions dictated by the calendar. I don’t do much to mark my birthday, for instance, and I’ve never been given to making resolutions just because the count of years clicks up by one. I’m not claiming that this is any better than any other way of …
I like fanfiction. That’s perhaps something that someone who wants to be taken seriously as a reader, as a writer, and as a sayer-of-things about the state of the world shouldn’t admit, but it’s true. I’m not going to say what fandoms I enjoy, but I read a fair bit of it, and I’ve (pseudonymously) …
It’s pretty clear that a lot of people don’t understand the way that more extreme elements on the right try to build support for their agenda of harm and violence and a base to pursue it by organizing things like the anti-queer/anti-trans actions across the country last week and the convoy occupation last year. Not …
I alluded in a few places last week to the fact that a substantial piece of writing was rather rapidly coming together, and today I officially set Chapter 7 of my current book project aside as “done enough” for the time being – so, more polished than a raw first draft, but probably pretty different …
Working on a book in 2020 has been quite a ride. I mean, I can’t complain too much – the horrors of the world have at points made it hard to generate the focus that writing requires, but I’ve managed. And I have, long after I had hoped, a draft of what is provisionally Chapter …