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My dad told me that his step-father, Robert Matsyk, was a news editor at the Winnipeg Free Press decades ago. He's proud of me for getting into this line of work—for sinking my teeth into literary journalism. For the fact I'm writing good work that people read.
To be honest, I'm not someone who cares for traditional publishing. Maybe it's a fear of rejection, maybe it's my anti-authoritarian streak. Regardless, I'm not somebody proudly within the CanLit landscape or on any CBCReads list.
Let's be honest. You're probably reading this for free right now, and that's the problem. 'Free' trained us to scroll past everything that matters. The attention economy has taught you that, outside of streaming services, nothing is worth paying for.
History freezes in strange places. Not in decorated marble halls, or on blood-spilled battlefields mapped by generals. History is truly only created in bunkers that smell of sweat and fear, in submarines where the air runs thick as soup.
There's a particular species of internet creature which fascinates me. Not the obvious grifters, those are boring, predictable, easy to spot. No, I'm talking about the shapeshifters. The ones who appear at the crest of each wave positioned tactfully and tactically, speaking the language fluently, building the infrastructure.
One of my earliest memories is riding the Winnipeg Transit bus with my Mom, before I'd even started pre-school. We'd go on what I understood only as 'adventures.' Though looking back, we were probably just running errands, maybe visiting the Munro Public Library.
In my quiet wooden study, I've been staring at my chipped black-painted nails, trying to process the latest news. The cloudy blue-green lava lamp I resurrected from a thrift store two years ago bubbles beside me. Hermanos, a vivid ceramic red skull, watches.
Soft humming of the radiator is all I hear as the fire glow of sunrise bleeds through the window. I'm awake too early to write this. Eating Mediterranean crackers between paragraphs. Lighting the vanilla incense from the Tibetan shop in Inglewood.
What is a poet allowed to be? For much of the modern era, the answer has been dictated by a familiar archetype. The solitary genius, often obscure and always allusive, their poetry a fortress guarded by the gatekeepers of academia.
Windows at Element Cafe fog with steam and breath. There's the ambient noise of me and twenty other people who should be at work. 2:47pm on a Tuesday afternoon in Calgary. Everyone locked into a staring contest with laptop screens, performing the theatre of productivity.
Most Indigenous folks know and will tell you plainly that our world already ended. Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) stated in a 2019 Dissent Magazine interview: 'Indigenous people are post-apocalyptic. In some cases, we have undergone several apocalypses.'
There's a moment in every reader's life when they stumble upon a connection and it feels like uncovering a secret message. Mine came while researching Banana Yoshimoto, the contemporary Japanese novelist whose dreamy prose has captivated readers worldwide since her debut with Kitchen in 1988.
The laptop is warm against my chest. October in Calgary, and I've got the window cracked because my anxiety needs air, even cooling into evening. My wooden desk—rough grain, two hundred small scratches from pens and coffee cups and the pressure of years—holds everything I need right now.
In 2017, I wrote about blogging with the wide-eyed idealism of someone who still believed in the democracy of the Internet. I was twenty-two, convinced that 'the way Gutenberg gave everybody the power to read, the Internet gave everybody the power to write.'
In the quiet weeks since leaving campus behind, I've found myself in that strange liminal space familiar to anyone who's completed a significant chapter of their life. The graduation gown remains unworn, commencement still weeks away, my apartment half-packed with cardboard boxes bearing cryptic labels.
When Finn and Jake first bounded across my television screen in 2010 I was fourteen-years-old. Their world of post-apocalyptic whimsy unfolding in eleven-minute bursts of colour and sound. The Land of Ooo was a place where candy could talk, where dogs stretched like taffy.
On Valentine's Day in 2014, I watched Her in theatres with my then-girlfriend Danielle and then-best friend Samana on a double date. I was seventeen years-old. The sharp, ringing drone of the start of the track 'Milk & Honey #1' when the scrawled title card appeared is engrained in my head.
Do you remember Doge? Not the new United States government department currently operating a coup, or even the cryptocurrency. I mean the original meme, the Shiba Inu with the Comic Sans text.
In 1982, a mother's hands found the underside of a Chevrolet Impala. The metal was still warm from her son's work beneath it, the jack having given way like so many other false supports. Angela Cavallo didn't think—thinking would have meant hesitation, would have meant loss.
The easiest way to count 'stunt' fliers is to count their tombstones. This is, of course, a radical statement, but it is almost literally true. The cleverest flier who ever lived was not clever enough to last long at the acrobatic game, as a survey of the death roll of aviation proves.
The women of America were today formally enfranchised. Secretary of State Colby at 8 o'clock this morning signed the proclamation which makes the suffrage amendment a part of the United States Constitution.