I think it is time for a tiny refresh/reboot, glow-up….TwB 3.0. I’ve been writing and sharing in this space for quite some time now — since September of 2016 to be exact, with this post. And before that I wrote other blogs, which have long been archived, deleted, or made private.

Before and especially during the early part of the pandemic, writers all jumped on newsletter sites like Substack and Patreon etc. I even tried out a Patreon for a while! Some writers seem to make a fair bit of income from their newsletters, but I think Canadian writers in general just have a harder go of that. Though I think it’s just a hard go unless you have a massive readership. Which honestly, I do not. That’s fine! But lately I’ve been rethinking my entire presence on the internet, as one should and as one does every so often. Some people I admire have gone the podcast route — Kerry Clare’s Bookspo for example, is a delight.

I don’t like asking for money but I’m going to point out the tip jar just a little bit more often. This is not a get rich quick scheme, but if you’ve been reading this blog for even a year, you’ve probably read content equivalent to the length of a book. Whether you find it as edifying a a book, that’s up to you. (Heartfelt thanks to those who have tipped in the past — your generosity really bolsters me on multiple levels).

Okay, next on my agenda today:

Really, the reboot consists of adding four new categories. Most readers won’t notice these changes, but I think it will help me reshape the content and the direction of the posts. You might not have noticed that there are categories even! You need to be reading this in your browser to see them (in case you receive this as an email in your inbox, which you can do by subscribing way down at the bottom of this post). You can see the categories by hitting the menu button in the top left, or again, navigating to the verrrry bottom of this post. I’ve kept the previous categories for those who might like to peruse the older content.

And so, the new categories are:

Poetry Club

This category feels very on-brand so to speak for TwB. I’ve long been pushing poetry on ya’ll. Still, I’d like to be a bit more mindful about presenting it. I’m an advocate for deep reading and I think poetry is just a wonderful way to spend 20 minutes to kickstart your day. While I know I’m preaching to the converted here, I think poetry can be accessible to all but some readers might have built up barriers in their minds. Why read poetry? I often quote Nicole Brossard, saying, “You have to be insane to confide the essential to anyone anywhere except in a poem.” And so poems contain things — thoughts, feelings, philosophies, images, experiences — that you won’t necessarily find anywhere else. Poetry can be a site to explore friction, strife, generosity, emotions, disparities, contradictions…in ways that no other form can. Also, poetry is so nimble! It can speak to what is happening right now.

Our beloved On Being has just launched their latest series of Poetry Unbound podcasts, saying, “In a world filled with divisions, disagreements, and black-and-white thinking, what can we turn to in order to stay open, aware, and grounded? Poetry, believe it or not.”

Admittedly, I read this, and thought, well, what do I have to offer beyond that? But the thing is, there’s a lot of poetry out there that needs a light on it, and I don’t mind being a smaller voice sharing what I can share. That’s worth something, too, right? And while I will not limit myself, I hope to share a lot of Canadian poetry and poets here. In addition to poems, lines of poetry, I hope to share essays about poetry, poetic thinking, and themes that come up in poetry.

Repair Shop

The book I’m currently writing is titled Repair Manual for the Soul. The world is a lot right now, and maybe always has been. But our witnessing of wars, climate disasters, political travesties, health crises, and other myriad injustices, collapses, horrors, is at another level entirely because of the internet. I know for myself this affects my body, my brain patterns, and this, I acknowledge, is from about the most privileged stance going — a white woman living in the suburbs in a relatively safe country. I worked for a year in an inner city library, and still take shifts there and at other libraries, so I’m quite aware of many things. Before that it was 13 years at a library close to the inner city so I have some very small degree of lived experience (enough to know what I absolutely do not know). I know that I can’t change the world, but what I have learned is that we can have some influence in the 3 meters around us. It’s not nothing. If I could (privacy precludes this) tell you stories, I could tell you stories.

But okay. What if I looked at the small possible repairs in our everyday lives? What would those tell us about larger possibilities? My most prevalent interest right now is to talk about repair without erasing or diminishing the disrepair that came before. Honouring the disrepair. So while I’m writing my book, I’d like to share some of that learning as I come to it.

Mixtape

In a previous post, I talked about Goethe’s line, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” I also talked about the book Exhaustion by Anna Katharina Schaffner, and how she says we should apply mixed mental arts to help overcome it.

In these posts, I’ll be sharing a little bit of everything. The usual, really, right?

Live like an artist

So because I can’t write just one book, the other one I’m writing (mostly in my head at this point) is titled, Live Like an Artist. And maybe it’s a bit of a reaction to the line “Steal like an artist” which can be used for good or for evil, really. Austin Kleon’s book perhaps popularized the line which is inspired by T.S. Eliot:

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”

Kleon himself beat me to the punch, as I was going to look up Nick Cave’s recent words, in light of the potential and likely increasing rot and outright theft of AI. Cave said

“Theft is the engine of progress, and should be encouraged, even celebrated, provided the stolen idea has been advanced in some way. To advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes.

But a word of caution, if you steal an idea and demean or diminish it, you are committing a dire crime for which you will pay a terrible price — whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.”

If you’ve been following along, you might know that I quit my job (twice really) this year. Really just moving from one position to another, to find the right fit for now. So I moved into the call-in-pool at the library, after moving from one branch to another to another. And this feels right, at the moment, offering me more flexibility though less money. I’ve had a lot of people say, oh money isn’t everything. But in fact, money is uhhhh kinda necessary. Also, yes, it isn’t everything.

How to live like an artist, then? How to be cool, and honourable, and generous, and weird, and how to further ideas? How to just carve out time? How to scrape by? How to be dignified, live, and create with integrity, but also with a certain amount of ruthlessness? How to do all this with the presence of the internet and AI and who knows what comes next? How to cultivate the conditions for creativity and keep alive, and Alive? The artist is not a machine, we know that. And the process, the PROCESS, is what keeps moving us forward.

I’m not the only one asking these questions, but I need to pursue the answers, and learn to ask better questions myself…so that is what this category will be for.

Well, that’s enough preamble for sure. As usual, a blog can be a messy space, a place for trying things out. How will things actually go? I’m not sure! But if you’d like to follow along, you can subscribe to the newsletter (though it always looks prettier in the browser). If you’re like me, you’re tired of a filled up inbox, so there’s always the old school bookmark method. Or follow on FB or Insta. :)

May 15, 2024