Happy to announce I’ve been asked to be part of the Drunk Fiction reading series this month! I’ll be joining authors Brooke Lockyer, Selena Mercuri and Andrew Robertson. The event will also feature the launch of host Emily Weedon‘s novel, Hemo Sapiens (incl a Q&A). I’m going to be reading from Radioland, and copies will be available for sale (and I’m happy to sign your book if you pick one up!). This is happening Tuesday September 23rd in Little Portugal, at The Caledonian (856 College St). Hope to see you there!
I don’t know about you, but it’s been an active summer over here. Getting out, making the most of the weather, even when it’s been ungodly hot. This is partly due to summer traditionally being a slower time of year for psychotherapists, so let’s just say that I’ve been putting in more reps at the gym and visiting my favourite local places more often.
The only thing I haven’t been doing actively is writing fiction (or writing of any kind, other than texts to myself). Part of it, though it wasn’t intentional, is perhaps to take a breather. It’s a bit hard to communicate how writing has taken up a lot of emotional, mental and psychic energy, this year in particular.
I handed off Book Three to my agent in February, with all the angst that comes with this. The not-knowing, now in its seventh month, the having to work with the unknown around whether it will find a home, not to mention how this would inevitably affect me and my confidence as a writer.*
On top of this, I pushed to make some major revisions to a very personal essay, dealing with my uncle’s murder/guitar, and inevitably my childhood. I’ve never really worked on something like this, as raw as this, and I’ve found myself struggling to find my voice within the piece, discovering that I’m possibly holding myself at arm’s length away from it, no matter what progress I feel I’m making otherwise.
There’s also a fourth novel that I’m about 100 pages into, and I like it, but I’m struggling to fall back into it, and I can’t help but feel that the unresolved nature of Book Three’s future is adding some distortion to the proceedings. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m afraid of writing, but there’s a wariness. It feels as if I need to work to sort out my relationship with writing: why do I want to do this? What do I want out of this?
It’s funny to read the above, because I started it with saying that I was having a really active summer sans writing, and proceeded to list a series of writing-related issues; clearly my mind is still carrying on the business in some automatic or unconscious way. Ugh. In any case, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to take a breather, for some perspective. God knows I wish more writers would do this.
* there have been a few rejections but all have contained personalized feedback…which is rare. Everyone seems to generally like it, which I didn’t encounter when either of my two last books were being submitted around, so I’ll take what I can get.
Hi folks, I’m back from the break (and a bit of a vacation to boot). Today I was rummaging around She Said Boom on College Street for blues vinyl when I happened to come across the album After Work by John & Sylvia Embry. Something about it caught my attention and I managed to remember their name the next time I was at my laptop*. I did some research and listened to a couple of tracks and was really impressed. I find the Chicago blues scene to be intimidating…and geographically confusing (“Oh, that’s West Side blues” the fuck?), so I’ve been reticent to dive in. But hot damn is this some great stuff.
And yes, I’m buying that album.
* you might ask: why didn’t you take a photo w/ your phone or use your phone why didn’t you use your phone; this is because I hate looking like one of those people who use independently owned stores in order to do research for shit they end up buying on Amazon
So, it may not be exactly as I might’ve dreamed (talking about, you know, one of my novels), but I was thrilled to be included in a very excellent Guardian piece by Ioan Marc Jones discussing men who have a habit of making every conversation about themselves, in particular the author’s own attempt to better understand and reform his bad habits in this regard.
It’s a strikingly personal piece, and I think it has resonated with a lot of people, particularly women, who have had to sit quietly while yet another guy turns the focus to their thoughts and opinions rather than work better toward listening and creating actual conversation. I’m grateful to have been able to speak as a psychotherapist with more than a little understanding of this phenomena.
About a month ago, while I was attempting to respond to an email at work, I saw the LED notifier go red on my BlackBerry Key2–never a good sign–then watched the display switch off. I tried everything, but I’d been preparing for this day, and sure enough, when this workhorse of a smartphone wasn’t able to move past the boot screen without crashing, that day had finally come: it was dead. Not only that, but, more importantly to me, this would be the last BlackBerry I would likely ever use.
Since stepping into the smartphone world in 2008 with my purchase of a BlackBerry Bold 9000, I have used nothing but BlackBerry phones. I loved the physical keyboard and the infinite customizability of its other unique feature, the aforementioned LED notifier in the top right corner of the screen. And yes, from a more workplace-oriented perspective, the BlackBerry email server was like a secret fucking weapon–you got your emails the very moment they left the the sender’s fingertips. Working in film/TV postproduction, where getting a hundred emails a day was not rare, this was like a stock market investor being able to get ticker results before anyone else. I was dialled in, in a way that was perfect for me and my work/lifestyle. And it did everything that the iPhone did (or least that I cared about). I had never felt jealousy about iPhones, no matter how shiny or aesthetically primped the model. They were other people’s phones; phones that had nice aesthetics and a solid OS, but with standard accessories, like charging cables, that fall apart after a year due to cheap manufacturing.
And yet being a BlackBerry devotee was not an easy alliance, not least because of the strategic missteps that the parent company, then called Research In Motion, made in its effort to stem marketshare bleed to its biggest smartphone competitor, Apple, and their omnipresent iPhone. I remember, before purchasing my Bold, seeing the iPhone display in the Rogers store and how it had a working display that you could pick up and experience first-hand; by comparison, I literally had to ask the salesperson if I could look at his Bold [/snare drum/] just to see how it worked. Then there was the disastrous roll-out of the BlackBerry Storm, their first without their signature physical keyboard. It was a dog. Side note: I’ve had people come up to me over the years when they saw my BB, hearts swelling, sharing stories of their own relationship with this phone (at least one person bought me drinks based on this alone); however, recently in Mexico, a server who was reminiscing about using a BB also shared their heartbreak over their subsequent experience with the Storm. It was that bad, and it severed many BB relationships and ceded marketshare to Apple for obvious reasons. I’m not going to get into the story of BlackBerry, the company. It’s pretty heart-breaking, considering they were a made-in-Canada tech behemoth. The movie is great fun though, even if it’s not exactly the most complete telling of the BlackBerry story.
Truth is, I had a close relationship to this thing. It did what I needed it to do, in a way that allowed me to have just a little more tactility in a tool. Of course, with practically all smartphones being interchangeable glass plates of various dimensions, having the physical keyboard seemed even more rare and precious. It also became kind of frustrating. Since it was an Android phone I was able to use practically any popular app. Here I was with a Key2 manufactured in 2018 in 2025 without any major change in speed or interoperability with each new app update. But the Android operating version itself was fixed to the BIOS on the hardware of the phone itself, and thus it couldn’t be upgraded past a certain version number (this may not be entirely exact, but the gist is correct). Apps I relied upon became less and less reliable or didn’t run at all after a random update. I saw the end coming earlier this year and began to do some serious research for an eventual replacement. It was gross, like when you see a friend’s pictures of their old dog being introduced to the new puppy that’s going to replace it when its dead, and an unnecessary puppy at that.
2008 – 2025. Not a bad run.
I’m adapting to my first glass plate (official term: “slate”) phone, a Samsung S24 FE. There is no way, in case you’re curious, I would get another BlackBerry only to have to go through the same thing again; plus, being a very exclusive niche, they’re too expensive on the second-hand market.
It’s been a lot. I’ve had moments of frustration that I now realize are either me re-learning a familiar-but-modern operating system, or borne out of the genuine loss I feel for that familiar embodied interface. That most personal of tools. I’d describe the process of migrating to Samsung (which also uses Android) as like when I migrated from Linux to Apple, conceding at the time that I needed to stick with industry standards (see: film/TV). I went from having something I could tweak to my heart’s content to something that was a two-dimensional version of that…only way more convenient because of this very same fact. It was easy to use and I didn’t have to think about what was going on in the background. Fifteen years later, I’m typing this on a MacBook Pro, in case you’re wondering what the verdict was. I will say, I truly dislike the anonymity of the slate form factor, though I will concede that the “keyboard” is sufficiently responsive to the speed of my typing (and less pressing means less finger exhaustion).
It’s more than conceivable that there could be another keyboard-based phone in the style of BlackBerry released in the future–Gen Z is apparently a fan, which shows their good taste–it just wouldn’t have that name anymore (BlackBerry makes operating systems for cars now). Whether I would go back, however, is a question I don’t think I’ll be considering any time soon.
I have a conditional relationship with the Canadian flag. On the one hand, it’s the country I was born in, one which certainly came into its own culturally around the time I was born. It’s difficult to believe that prior to 1965 there was a much different (certainly more colonial) one. It’s a flag that, like any great design, makes the best of simplicity: two red bars and a leaf.
There’s the flag of one’s country and then there’s the nationalism that naturally gets attached to it. I’m averse to nationalism, though I recognize that in some situations it’s completely necessary, especially for existential survival.
In the winter of 2022, the so-called “freedom convoy” occupied downtown Ottawa. They were ostensibly against vaccine mandates (whether or not this was well-informed) and what they perceived to be the authoritarian impulses of Justin Trudeau and his government in terms of how they were handling the pandemic. They rolled into Ottawa, lining the streets with eighteen-wheelers and set up camp. And from there they basically held the nation’s capital hostage, terrorizing locals with the constant honking of air horns and making life hell for people there for the better part of three weeks. The significant piece about this was their ubiquitous use of the Canadian flag as part of their quasi-rebellious identity. During and after the occupation, if you saw someone driving with the Canadian flag on their car, there was a very good chance they supported this convoy movement (which, among other things, has its origin in white supremacist and Islamophobic movements). I hated seeing the Canadian flag as a result because I naturally associated it with stupidity and hatred, no matter how ambivalent I felt about Trudeau or the lockdowns. I had a tank top I sometimes wore on very hot days when I was out for a run, which had a maple leaf–not the flag, but just a red stylized leaf–and even that became difficult for me to justify for fear of being associated with the racist idiots.
And then Donald Trump came into power in 2024 and soon directly targeted Canada’s sovereignty. Suddenly, with our identity and existence threatened, the Canadian flag became a rallying point. Nationalism, something we don’t often reach for, became vogue. Like, in ways I don’t think I’ve seen since the signing of the Constitution in 1982. We took on the “elbows up” ethos of hockey, the national game (if you don’t count lacrosse, which is actually the national game). “Made in Canada” became (and remains for understandable reasons) a thing. And yet I feel I have a sort of cultural whiplash around the flag now flown, earnestly, by so many.
Nationalism, especially nationalism for sake of nationalism (which is what you see south of the border), can get ugly fast. It can be easily weaponized against imagined others, which doesn’t require a deep imagination to see how that can apply to the very people–immigrants, temporary foreign workers and racialized new Canadians–who actually help support this G7 country. It can become a bludgeon in the hands of those with dark hearts or small minds, as we’ve seen not only in what has transpired south of the border, but in countries such as Turkey, Hungary and most notably in Nazi Germany.
And yet, as I mentioned earlier, it’s naive to think that we, especially in the face of one of the strongest nations in the world literally threatening to annex us, to eliminate our sovereignty, would not reach for nationalist expressions. And the paradox is that, for all of nationalism’s ills, when faced with an existentialist threat from a much powerful neighbour, if we don’t define ourselves, if we don’t set out to reify our sometimes nebulous national identity, then someone else will.
I like to feel immersed, whether it be in an environment, or character, or perhaps only a sustained tone; mix of any of the above is even better. I like books that make the everyday somewhat strange, or alternately making the strange seem ubiquitous. As a writer, I think this is what makes so-called genre books (typically sci-fi, fantasy, horror, western, etc) that much more challenging to pull off satisfyingly. I mean, sure, a lot of writers can pull of a few paragraphs or even pages of a genre story, but to do so in a sustained way, with a determined consistency…that’s hard. It takes a lot of work to do it well. Yes, yes, the literary small town book with the domestic intrigue also requires much of the above, but go ahead, you add menacing tentacles and see how far you can go.
I have a complicated relationship with the genre universe. I work in genre but I’m not wedded to it in as totalizing a way as many writers so firmly are. To the far end of what annoys me about genre works are tired tropes (laser guns! robots!) left unexamined, and to the far end of what what annoys me about what we call literary fiction, is the sense of an author proceeding to insert their head up their ass. I actually expressed this at a author talk in Winnipeg and I don’t think it went over well, but I reserve the fact that the other author I was supposed to appear with got his calendar mixed up, leaving me, the organizers, and the local audience (more than half expecting the author who didn’t make it) high and dry. In retrospect I wished I’d engaged more with the host–a much more committed author of genre than I–so that it was less about solo author me and my book, and opened up the discussion so that it was more a conversation and less what ended up being a short Q&A. That handful of author talks I did while publicizing The Society of Experience across the country (okay, Ontario and the prairies) were a learning curve for me, mostly in terms of learning to take more consideration of what an audience wants to hear, versus whatever thoughts are occurring to me while I’m in the spotlight. First rodeo, etc.
When you write a book like The Society of Experience, which riffs on a couple of genres–namely sci-fi, but also western (Derek’s The Lonely Cowboy stories)–but remains steadfastly literary, it can be easy to find oneself unsure upon which patch of the ice floe to stand on. I certainly felt more at home in literary circles because it’s largely what I read the most, and the novel was firmly that, however in the handful of more genre-forward appearances I made–conventions, reading series’–I found myself more often not seeing myself in the audience. They tended to be more capital-G genre readers, and I felt a bit like an imposter. I mean, there are worse problems to have in life, but being an artist is about connecting, and when you don’t see yourself in the room it can be weird, as if you’re doing something wrong.
With my novels, I’d like to think I’m doing something different. I’m kinda saying hey literary folks, you don’t have to make it so kitchen sink realistic, like The Diviners or Of Mice and Men, although those are excellent works (and knowing how to render a realistic environment is a huge skill). And at the same time I’m also saying hey genre folks, you can have three dimensional characters wrestling with things that aren’t literal tentacles. I have a suspicion Stanislaw Lem liked detective stories because so many of my favourite short stories by him involve the solving of a crucial riddle, often involving a terrifying event. And while he wrote almost exclusively in genre (sci-fi) his curiosity and want to mix these influences with his scientific preoccupations make for fascinating reading. One story I would use as an example of this would be Ananke from the collection More Tales of Prix the Pilot; its use of a line from an Edgar Allan Poe story as a clue to an unravelling investigation on Mars is Lem firing on all cylinders. I swear it’s like taking a drug reading something like that; you just want to savour the rush for as long as you can.
A book is a book. A story is a story. It doesn’t need to correlate to any categorical expectation, other than it be worth the reader’s time and intelligence. And yet publishing–like any creative practice which survives on scant government funding and word-of-mouth– can get caught up in pettiness sometimes, which I find frustrating, and I don’t doubt, especially doing something different, that I’ve been the recipient of some sniping. I know I’m not a provocateur or some self-styled controversialist aiming to upset norms; I’m not trying to upset anything other than to demonstrate a hybrid style that is sometimes weird and different. Like most arts you need a thick skin for this, and I’m not just talking pub rejections.
I’ve been thinking about the issue of contrivance in fiction, how it works as the everyday fabric but can be used also as a point of critique. This is to say, for starters, what does it mean for a piece of work (book, TV show, play etc) to be critiqued as contrived (as in “Oh that was such a contrived scene…”)?
It’s tricker than it seems because it’s in the very nature of something fictional to be, on a very basic level, inherently contrived. Fiction is fiction. Whether it’s happening between two robots on a faraway planet, or under our nose, it’s not real, though it might feel so, even if it is accurately based on the truth (not going to get into autofiction here).
To use a good concrete example, I’m thinking of the three seasons of the popular streaming show The Bear. In particular, their respective finalés. It goes without saying that if you haven’t seen The Bear and have been meaning to, you might want to skip this (and if you haven’t seen The Bear, I heartily recommend it). Also worth noting that I’m only focusing on the finalés. Season Two, for example, might have (for me) the weaker ending, but I found it generally more satisfying than Season Three.
At the end of Season One, our chef protagonist discovers, amidst the chaos of running a busy family-owned sandwich shop facing imminent bankruptcy (and someone nearly going to jail for manslaughter), not to mention his own bouts of post-traumatic anxiety, that the chef’s dead brother (and former owner) had hidden around $300,000 in tomato sauce cans, communicated to the chef in a cryptic suicide letter. The restaurant is not only saved, but plans are laid for a high-end version. Was it a stretch? On paper, absolutely. And yet I didn’t really mind because somehow it seemed deserved. Perhaps it’s because–a credit to the writing on the show–it pulls together some very tender emotional threads, consistent with the other episodes, as the chef contends with the mystery that his brother was to him, and the hole of grief he feels around losing him in the midst of the chaos around him.
Season Two ends with the opening launch of the renovated incarnation of the restaurant, as the chef contends with small margins and high expectations while balancing a budding romantic relationship with a family friend. Everything is riding on opening night and the chef, in mid-service, winds up locked in the walk-in freezer when the handle breaks off on the other side. Alas, he cannot carefully control the chaos happening outside and has a meltdown, while his cousin on the other side of the door is comparing the chef’s neuroticisms to his mother’s, who in a flashback had literally driven her car into their home after a tumultuous family dinner. It’s funny, because on paper there’s clearly less outward contrivance in this finalé than Season One…and yet it didn’t work as well.
So what does this mean? I suppose it’s when something goes from the natural contrivance of fiction into an area that doesn’t feel deserved, either by flaws of logic, lack of genuineness or consistency with the whole. When it doesn’t “work” I suppose it doesn’t give me reason (or enough reasons) to believe that it’s a natural part of the landscape, no matter how far it may bend credulity (see Season One). It respects the limits of the world it resides within. Or another way of putting it: if I feel a bump in the road, convince me that it’s part of the ride. The more bumps, the more convincing I might require.
Certainly one of the things with the finalé of Season Two that doesn’t work, albeit on a very technical level, is the unbelievability of the chef getting locked in the freezer in the first place. Anyone who has worked in a restaurant (hello) knows that walk-in freezers have a release button on the inside that opens the door precisely because of such situations. It also lacks the comparatively symphonic threading together of Season One. Despite spreading the spotlight throughout the season to other characters, it comes back to the chef and his obsessive (likely traumatized) behaviour, his relationship with himself, his split responsibilities to his restaurant and to his girlfriend who is sitting at a table while all this is happening, waiting for him to acknowledge her. What bugged me mostly consisted of the chef squaring off with his cousin. What was this trying to achieve, I wondered? It felt like a too-convenient device to force a confrontation, where the cousin literally calls-out the chef’s unresolved inner challenges. Maybe because it was kinda lazy, given the confidence of the show overall? It’s a little too on-the-nose, even didactic, compared to the show-don’t-tell way in which Season One handled things. Am I saying it was bad? No, it just uses a plot-device that feels stolen from an 80s sitcom.
Where do they go from here? Well, Season Three manages to be the least capital-D dramatic of the three, but that might have to do with the reality of the overall arc of the series. They’re establishing themselves now. To grab terminology from group dynamics, The Bear went from storming (Season One), to norming (Season Two), and then performing (Season Three). In Season Two they launched the new restaurant without it burning down. In Season Three the pressure seems to be more existential, namely figuring out how to chase a Michelin star without skimping on the chef’s exacting standards, while needing to maximize table turnover in order to break even. The chef’s story is less centred overall, but the finalé features him–already experiencing anxiety attacks as he anticipates the first critical reviews of the restaurant to be filed–having a post-traumatic episode as he comes face-to-face with the chef he trained under, who cruelly undermined his self-worth–all while attending the closing of another mentor’s establishment.
I don’t have any big issues with the direction of Season Three; creating an emergency for the sake of having, say, Season One’s manic energy would seem somehow disingenuous here. I think it’s a sign of confidence if a show can shift gears without resorting to tricks. If anything felt off, it was the repeated depiction of the chef’s meltdown, his manic inner thoughts projecting themselves onto his world. After a while they didn’t serve to deepen or develop our understanding of what the chef was experiencing. Okay, meltdown, got it. Where does this wind up on the contrivance scale? Contrived? Stylistically perhaps, but not in terms of plot or story.
Anyhow, thank you for joining me on this thought exercise!
I was listening to BBC6 Music, a mainstay of mine, and found myself nodding along to the playlist by DJ/performer John Cooper Clarke (who was standing-in for Iggy Pop on his Iggy Confidential program) when this came on. An obscurity, even for Link Wray fans, from a 1989 album recorded in Germany, this track immediately grabbed my interest and I was surprised to see that it was by him because it felt so much more like a post-modern Rockabilly track the likes of which you’d more likely hear from Alan Vega (and/or his wonderful collaboration with Alex Chilton). The slimmed down instrumentation, consisting of just Wray crooning, along with balladeering guitar accompaniment (complete with a clip-clopping effect — also done on guitar? — creating a sense of someone on horseback, which wonderfully fits with the atmosphere of the piece), reminded me of the latter works of more recent bands, in particular The Walkmen’s laterworks. I just love this, even though the album itself ain’t much of a keeper.
