I’m not interested in picking apart this one post or starting a fight with one internet stranger. But the algorithm has served this tired take often enough to convince me that it’s a trending sentiment; now I must do the algorithm’s bidding by weighing in. In the populist fashion du jour, Carm’s post and others like it present a plausible villain (professional critics) as the culprit for a nebulous, but perhaps real issue (that individuals are increasingly not thinking about and relating to art for themselves). And despite Carm’s being the category of shallow criticism algorithms tend to reward—the very same type of criticism she takes issue with—I’m grateful she expressed her opinion and prompted this rabbit hole of reflection. That’s what criticism is all about!

Critiquing Criticism

To call criticism an “unnatural way of consuming art” is to misunderstand the critical instinct entirely, so this section is a bit of a back to basics.

Criticism is thinking critically and publicly about a thing. Art, like everything else we care about, has prompted a critical response for as long as it has existed. Individuals submit their responses into a bubbling cauldron (the discourse) and popular opinions and authority figures rise to the top, dictated by the power structures of the day: algorithms, governments, editors, and so on.

The debate of whether we should have criticism, and authority figures within it, is as pointless as asking whether we should think about stuff, and whether we should consider and promote thought that isn’t ours. The debate of which power structures are trustworthy and democratic in doling out authority, and how they seep into critical practice, is an important one, but has no bearing on the fundamental value of criticism. Upon accepting that there will always be arts criticism and a hierarchy of authority within it, we are left to debate the qualities of critical output that best serve art, and the criticism that’s therefore worthwhile to produce and give our attention to. These ideals are forever in flux, since criticism is a reflection of what artists, and the people who consume it, are grappling with in a given moment. For arts criticism to flourish, it demands a continuous critical response.

The popular rejection of professional arts criticism I most frequently encounter online tends to be blissfully unaware that it, too, is arts criticism, and it tends to be amongst the laziest examples you can find. Its typical approach is to cherry-pick criticism’s most popular format, the review, as a stand-in for an entire artistic practice. This is hardly surprising; reviews are the most attention-grabbing and accessible output. But many other functions, in addition to reviewing or judging, fall under the critical umbrella. More accomplished artists and critics than I have spent their careers exploring these functions. In reflecting on a few of my favourite excerpts below, I hope to establish a basic understanding of where the critical spirit originates from, and what, at its best, it can achieve.

I love this quote, taken from the The Case for Criticism episode of The New Yorkers’ Critics at Large podcast, for three reasons. Firstly, because the critical instinct as Cunningham describes it should resonate with anyone who appreciates art, lowbrow, highbrow, whatever; it frames the critic’s effort as universal. Secondly, because of the verbs he chooses: looking, wanting, extending, analyzing, juicing, battling, practicing, using, expressing—which can mostly be categorized as visceral rather than intellectual, aligning with his broader point that criticism, though typically framed as an intellectual practice, is predicated on a visceral response, of being moved so deeply by art that further attention (intellectual or otherwise) is demanded. Thirdly, because you could substitute every instance of “critic” with “artist” and in either case, the quote would read as valid.

Critical practice demands that its subject of focus reflects upon itself and invents fresh forms. It challenges the default tendency of a thing to play it safe and repeat. The critic’s own practice is not absolved from this demand.

In Against Interpretation, Sontag calls for critics to resist the popular temptation to assign value to art (its value is self-evident) by way of intellectually excavating its “content” (what it’s trying to say) from its “form” (the art object). People who respond viscerally to art, and who are thus disposed to performing criticism, per Cunningham’s quote, tend to be disillusioned by criticism that dictates the point of the art, or why the art is (or isn’t) intellectually valuable. Critics who rely on these functions emerge as authorities because those who lack a critical disposition—they don’t respond viscerally to art, or they are uncurious about, or unequipped to communicate, their response—desire a coherent something to say about the art, and the most accessible something is either what its point is, or a value judgement about it. To feel that you have cracked the “invisible code” of an artwork, or that you can deftly reduce it to a value judgement, is to have tamed the untameable thing.

Good criticism resists this behaviour. It is also difficult to produce and consume. If we want less reductive output from popular critics, we need to earn it. We need more people who care about art, like Carm, to develop their sensory muscles by themselves practicing criticism, thinking critically and publicly about art, how it makes them feel, and how criticism meets its needs. And then we need other critics, like myself, to respond. We need more critics.

These three excerpts from Wilde’s The Critic As Artist illustrate how the faculties of the artist and the critic are inexorably linked, and that the broad way in which we describe the artistic impulse (a spontaneous, creative response to living) maps neatly onto the critical impulse (a spontaneous, creative response to experiencing art). Unlike a painting, or a novel, criticism has no strict medium or format: not a review, an abstract poem, nor a hundred-page essay; not an academic paper, nor a video breakdown, nor an off-the-cuff rant. Wilde argues that the critical act is thus more purely creative than the artistic act such as the painter’s or musician’s, given its lack of formal constraints. This latter contention feels less applicable in contemporary art than it would in 1891, but the broader point holds that criticism meets the qualifications of what we call art. Successful criticism, like successful art, expands perceptions and invites people to viscerally experience and inhabit its subject matter. And as in art, failure is a prerequisite to success. A thriving critical ecosystem demands that an overwhelming quantity of output fails to meet its ideals but keeps striving nonetheless.

I find writing arts criticism to be at least as creatively and intellectually stimulating as writing fiction. Since I am working with the output of a real person, I invariably take more care and responsibility in my treatment of the subject matter. My first instinct after reading Carm’s piece was to denounce it via a dismissive Substack note. But my visceral response suggested that some part of her argument resonated with me, or at least spoke to a grievance I recognized. Rather than setting out to dismantle the source material, I felt that the more critically honest task was to explore and contrast my own views on the topic.

What About “Bad Actors” Doing Cynical Criticism?

Perhaps these ideals of arts criticism read as naïve at a time where algorithms reward laziness, outrage, [insert any human quality platforms exacerbate minus the good ones]—qualities some bad actor critics are, no doubt, exploiting. But what they are really exploiting is a population that lacks a coherent value system for what to expect from criticism, and in many cases lacks even a working definition of what criticism is. Hence the previous section!

In holding critics to higher standards, we should be careful not to make the common error of conflating bad actors with critics who write negative reviews. The latter is an important function of criticism. Reflecting upon why art fails (from the critic’s perspective) helps a critic cultivate taste and better understand their ideals of art. Exploring a negative response reveals much about the critic’s sensibility; the output of a critic with no negative responses fails to convey a distinctive personality or an authentic experience of art1. Critics need both!

Importantly, however, a negative response should remain loyal to the material that inspired it. A bad actor critic designs their output around an audience response—outrage, pandering, whatever—rather than attempting to convey a sincere reaction to the source material. The critical practice strives to treat its source material (art) with the same unfiltered clarity that artists treat theirs (life), even when the source material lets us down. How do we measure the sincerity of a response? We don’t! I have no interest in telling Carm that her criticism was insincere or that she is deliberately a “bad actor”. All I can do is share my own sincere reaction, and hope that it is appreciated and heard.

Briefly on Fantano

I watch Fantano’s album / EP / singles roundups to discover projects that streaming algorithms would be unlikely to promote. One roundup put me onto the EP Twice Around the Sun by Ugly: an ambitious UK post rock or art rock band who became my most listened-to that year. Less frequently, I tune in for Fantano’s album reviews, typically for projects I already have strong opinions about. I am rarely wow’d by their depth of insight or originality—I doubt even he would disagree that his platform favours volume over depth—but I also don’t find them to be unintelligent or unfair. His ad-and-user-funded platform means he gets to review the albums he wants, including obscure projects that receive an order-of-magnitude fewer views than Taylor Swift or Kendrick. There is little reward for covering obscure projects, especially if only to shit on them; presumably he does so when he feels the work deserves a push. Should his popular content feel cheap, cynical, or click-baity, remember that it funds this passionate reporting which might more closely resemble what inspired him to start reviewing music.

That does not mean I would call myself a fan of the melon. His ranking out of 10, reserved for the last ~twenty seconds of his videos, has become as central to his brand as his critical pans, which he often delivers with a sneer and a barely-concealed delight that make his face especially punchable. He spends anywhere between five and twenty-five minutes exploring his response to the work before revealing the score, but the knowledge that it’s coming at the end cheapens the entire product. His critique, however sincere, invariably becomes a justification of that final valuation which, in art, need not be made.

Luckily for us, there are other art critics doing more sensitive criticism, who don’t reduce art to rankings and have plenty of personality without being mean-spirited or taking (ostensible) pleasure from their negative reviews.

A Smattering of Arts Criticism I Like

If you’re not consuming good arts criticism, you’re not trying. It is readily available and published everywhere. Here are some examples from a quick browse.

God is in the Algorithm by Daniel Falatko [Substack]. Here the critic does a deep-dive on the career of NBA YoungBoy, an all-time top-selling artist in American music history who has remained invisible to a large swathe of mainstream listeners thanks, in part, to legacy media’s unwillingness to cover an artist who defies the narrative frameworks they rely on. This is an outstanding blend of journalism and arts / cultural / media criticism.

Notes on Emotionalism by Sophia Lapres [Public Parking]. I had to include some CanCon! Here the critic muses abstractedly upon the trend of “emotionalism” in art. Reflections on genre tends to be my preferred category of criticism, and the qualities of “emotionalism”—cutesy, indulgent, self-aware—feel especially relevant in art right now.

Drake, in Search of Lost Time by Benjamin Krusling [Paris Review]. Here the critic extends a depressing character portrait of Drake and the sterility of his music onto the culture he has become ubiquitous within, its averageness and low-grade disappointment functioning as a sort of realism that listeners—the author included—find themselves helplessly entangled within and taking pleasure from, paving the way for a likely never-before-attempted, but nonetheless satisfying, comparison of Drake’s oeuvre and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight [YouTube]. Here the critic explores the transition from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism in popular cinema.

This random post by lavish_fragments [Reddit]. Here the critic does a conventional book review of Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, finding much merit in the novel. While I wouldn’t call this groundbreaking criticism, nor did the review resonate (Perfection was, in my view, too committed to satire to feel human; the characters never felt like anything beyond symbolic stand-ins, which was clever and probably intentional on the author’s part since the characters, too, were striving, and failing, to become more than symbols, making the book a sharp and successful literary exercise but leaving no impression on me as a human), I felt it worthwhile to highlight because Reddit is “lowbrow” and anonymous. A high-effort post like this, sustained by passion and anonymous engagement, transforms the common jeer that “they don’t make statues of critics” into a source of pride, and perhaps criticism’s most admirable quality. The critical spirit alone is enough to sustain itself.

End

If we can accept that the practice of arts criticism—thinking critically and publicly about art—is hopelessly intertwined with art, and thus inevitable (and perhaps even essential) in a world where art matters, and we can also think critically about arts criticism to arrive at a set of critical ideals that best serve art, the question that will always follow is whether we are achieving that ideal in the present moment. We must never stop asking that question and promoting critics who take the time to answer it well! Without striving after ideals, art and criticism stagnate. Self-assessment promotes diversity and dynamism in art and thought. It’s what makes space for variation and genre, for lowbrow and highbrow art (and criticism). It’s what resists, rather than perpetuates, the homogenization of opinion and culture. Only in the last century or so has a modicum of diversity in racial, gender, and sexual identity entered the artistic canon. We owe this to the rise in diversity in both professional and layperson critical voices and the internet’s democratization of critical output. The problem of algorithmic amplification of shallow or cynical criticism can, similarly, only be undone by a new generation of critics who react and respond to the present.

So get to work, dear readers—or should I say, critics!

Good morning from NYC!

The birds are chirping and the streets are buzzing and my debut story collection, We Are Busy Being Alive is now available for pre-order in Canada and the US!

The collection, forthcoming with Anvil Press in June 2026, features sixteen stories written over ~five years. Ten will see the light of day for the first time. The others were previously published in Biblioasis Press’ Best Canadian Stories, The New Quarterly, and subTerrain.

PRE-ORDER [CANADA]

PRE-ORDER [US]

ADVANCE PRAISE:

With bone-dry humour and the precision of a lens, Midha finds humanity in our increasingly distracted and perilous world.

—Bill Gaston, author of Tunnel Island

Below is an image from when I locked myself in my childhood-bedroom-turned-3-year-old-niece’s-playroom for several hours to map out the story order. I can’t wait to tell her, in a decade or so, that Rishi mama’s BREAKOUT AWARD WINNING DEBUT was plotted & schemed on her little easel.

The order above still holds, though while waiting for my editor’s feedback I’ve been manically second-guessing the story that will appear in the coveted first slot. The current choice ranks in my top 3 favourites and best captures the book’s dominant tone and themes. My fear is that it’s too quiet and moody to kick things off; the other top contender opens with a bang, is more absurd and comical, but offers less emotional payoff at the end. In the spirit of my previous letter, in which I wrote about letting an art project run free, perhaps I should leave the decision with you, readers:

For the cover, I selected the oil painting Night Walker by Toronto-based artist Matt Thomas. This painting has been saved in an Instagram folder called “If I ever write a book…” since 2023. I think it perfectly captures the searching, dreamy quality of the stories. As my closest reader and most trusted editor said, beautifully, of We Are Busy Being Alive: “There’s melancholy but there’s also magic. It’s a book that loves the world.” He could have just as easily been describing Matt’s painting.

The book description ties in nicely with the artwork:

Set in a North American milieu of detachment and alienation, the stories in We Are Busy Being Alive document the attempts of disillusioned characters to re-enchant themselves with a seemingly indifferent world. Their flailing quests after a sense of purpose are equal parts tragic, absurd, frivolous, and touchingly human.

A drug-fuelled romance with a stolen painting; a sexual awakening at the dentist’s; a crisis of personality from the months-long haze of a forest fire. Small spectacles dangle outside the confines of the everyday, keeping the restless characters reaching.

The stories are a nudge out the door and into the lonesome night, with a wink and a shrug as if to say—what else to do? Through each quiet inflection of hope, mischief, and despair, We Are Busy Being Alive reacquaints readers with the magical qualities of their miserable, monumental lives.

Friends—please pre-order! Booksellers and media outlets look to pre-order volumes when deciding which books to stock and support. Here are the links to place an order through your local indie bookstore in Canada + US:

PRE-ORDER [CANADA]

PRE-ORDER [US]

Perhaps you’ve had the thought, in your time reading welktober—once, twice, hopefully more—that Damn, it’s nice to receive these sweet spiritual nothings, nuggets of whimsy and silliness, and thoughtful reflections on art and life, to my inbox. If so, this book is for you! You will love it. Perhaps you’ve even gone so far as to pledge a paid subscription to welktober—as many of you have with zero solicitation on my end (you guys f*cking rock)—but have not seen a charge to your credit card because I haven’t switched on payments, and you’ve thought, Damn, welktober is generous with his time and words, I wish there were a way to compensate him for his efforts. Here is your chance! A pre-order would be a more-than-sufficient thank you for any letters you’ve enjoyed.

Launch events in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver to be announced soon.

I’ll leave you with a pic of the elusive little man I am chasing after when I write. He has all the answers.

𝓧𝔁,

Rishi

It’s important, if an art gallery has a bench, to sit on the bench. As I did so at Balint Zsako’s exhibition, Tango, currently showing at Patel Brown Gallery, I found myself hatching an experiment (this is why we sit on benches). In my experiment, 1,000 galleries would be sent the same 73 gouache and watercolour paintings, to be curated as they pleased. The connecting limbs that extend to the edges of most paintings, reaching for a partner, serve as control variables, of sorts: they make the arrangement of artworks interchangeable, so long as the pieces are shown in series.

Despite the near-infinite (10⁶⁰ to 10⁸⁰) permutations for the pieces to be arranged, it seemed plausible that a Fibonacci sequence would emerge across the 1,000 exhibitions. Perhaps patterns would be dictated by complementary colours or the rule of thirds. Perhaps they would vary by region. Perhaps the southern hemisphere, on the verge of winter, would sever the lines between buds, roots, and the vases which fed them.

Art has no business telling you what to do with it; it merely reaches past its container, beckoning to be led elsewhere. As viewers, we crave to satisfy this ambition, approaching exhibitions like puzzles, not to “solve”, but to experiment and rearrange. My working arrangement of Tango—liable to be windshield-wiped across the floor and reshuffled—is that Zsako is encouraging this collaborative effort, between art and viewer, to find a moment of stability, one arrangement out of 10⁸⁰, while acknowledging its fickleness.

The paintings, designed to be paired off and placed in series, reflect the task all viewers engage with when experiencing art. The modularity of their arrangement, meanwhile, undermines the impulse. The work is interchangeable; it refuses to be pinned down. You can make the art, curate it, own it, but you can never control its final destination; viewers forever cast their wobbly experiments, moods, and seasons upon it, as I am doing now.

I am inspired by artists, like Zsako, who let their art projects run wild, in a manner of speaking; a quality I hope to embrace in my creative output, and in the approaching publication of my book. One great appeal of my newest hobby, salsa dancing, is the constant reminder to let go. As a panicked beginner, I find myself wishing I could switch roles with my partner, put my hands out and follow along while the leader does all the thinking. This “doing all the thinking” mindset is precisely what makes me a stiff leader. Over-dictation zaps life from art, which only needs a few anchors between which it can move freely in the viewer’s mind. I’m made to think of a lovely excerpt from The Name of the World by Denis Johnson, during the narrator’s visit to a gallery:

This picture [...] was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand lines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I’ve said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.

To my way of thinking, this project [...] implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church’s grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments—implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.

Implicated. This wasn’t my reaction only. I talked with lots of people who’d seen this work, and they all felt the same, but in various ways, if that makes sense. They felt uneasy around it, challenged, disturbed. I suppose that’s what made it art, rather than drawing.

This excerpt perfectly captures how I relate to art objects as tools for speculation. In some cases, I don’t even see the art (sorry, artists); I gobble it up and disappear into my head. The art offers a few boundary conditions to daydream within—more boundaries than my fiction projects, to be sure—but when done well, it refuses to divulge too much. The objects are like buoys, bobbing in place, disparate, slippery moments of rest along a meandering journey. Knowing you have a safe place to land, between episodes of flailing, allows you to venture further, and more securely.

An art consultant, chatting with the gallerist near the bench where I sat, asked if she could take some pieces for a client before the show ends. No problem, said the gallerist. They have backups. They’d already rearranged the show a few times to accommodate sales. Finally! I thought, an exhibition that’s truly “dynamic”—an adjective you encounter in one out of five exhibition texts, since it scans without having to say anything. It made sense that paintings designed to be flexible, almost agnostic to their destination, were selling. Not to mention their other assets: off-kilter and whimsical without overstating those qualities; trusting the compositions to breathe; fresh palettes, instantly appealing, reminiscent of Matisse’s La Danse.

I rose from the bench with a headache. Three exhibitions is two more than I normally visit in a day. But this third one was rewarding. I sensed, cautiously, that I might even get to write about it. I started the hour-long walk home. It was a pleasant Saturday afternoon, the first day this year that felt like spring. Maybe that’s all the exhibition wanted to say, I thought: that spring is here, that the landscape is soon to come alive with vernal greens and ochres and violets. That, too, would be a fine way to arrange the puzzle.

I first encountered Zsako’s work through his series Modern Dance (2014-15), which also has a “modular” design. Here is a GIF of artworks from that series, which the artist designed to be rearranged on his website:

Related Reads

Speculations on Tristam Landsowne’s surreal watercolours:

On art that “transcends its form”:

If you live in a materially rich, spiritually impoverished country, you’ve likely sought out places during your travels that feature the 20 centilitre (200 mL) beer as a standard menu item. Perhaps you ordered a glass and found it to be charming, full of whimsy, joy, and other qualities lacking in your existence back home. Perhaps you returned to a dark, overpriced bar in Chicago, or Vancouver, where you huddled with your cohort in an impenetrable circle, 20 oz. pints in-hand, and got needlessly drunk while conversing in detached streams of condescension and satire. If this resonates even remotely, I advise you to welcome the 20 cl beer into your miserable life. It is a superior format not only for practical beer-drinking reasons, but also as a political, cultural, and aesthetic statement.

In this drinking format, the beer source (keg/can/bottle) is kept refrigerated and removed from the immediate reach of the drinker with his 20 cl glass. He gets the satisfaction of imbibing more (emptying, refilling), but consumes less thanks to the frequent need to return to the well, and the interruptions this entails. The result is a perpetual state of getting drunk (joy, hope, whimsy) rather than being drunk (yuck, dumb, abyss). If drunkness is pursued to alleviate boredom, existential angst, and to put off thinking about, and addressing, other issues, drinking is pursued to linger for longer than you normally would in public places, surrounded by strangers who wish to do the same. The 20 cl beer serves the latter purpose with style, grace, and less impact to your health and wealth. Fascism stands little chance against an entire civilization sitting around in bars, parks, backyards, and living rooms, sipping from cunty little glasses with their pinky fingers stuck out, not getting zombie-mode drunk but slightly tickled while exchanging ideas on what it means to be decent and kind in 2026.

Perhaps you think of yourself as having some refinement in your beer taste. You don’t. There is no such thing as having complex or interesting preferences about beer. The only thing you taste, when you taste 95% of beer, is temperature. The spectrum of quality is the spectrum between 23°C (undrinkable) and 1°C (outstanding). This overrides all other adjectives you’ve latched on to by a factor of one-thousand. A perfectly hazy IPA and a perfectly nothing-burger Coors Light are equally undrinkable at 23°C and equally outstanding at 1°C. The practical advantage of the 20 cl beer comes from its maintaining a perfect temperature profile from full to empty, even for slow drinkers. (I have tested this over many sipping speeds, in climates ranging from the mild dry season in the Serengeti to the sweltering tropics of Montelíbano.)

Especially for younger nations cursed with the colonial gene, whose early years were spent being ping-ponged around a dysfunctional foster care system, we must be scathing in the curation of our inherited habits. Sometime around adolescence, in nation-state-years, we are liable to go haywire. Abandon all lessons from our elders as we embark on (or pretend to be innocent bystanders of) blatant empire-expansion projects that often linger into our twenties and thirties. We should consider alternate paths while our personalities are still pliable. For most of human history, alcohol has served as a worthy companion during periods of soul-searching. Used correctly, I believe it can alter the trajectory of a nation, even a species. I propose that the uncouth, deeply embarrassing 60 oz. pitcher of lukewarm piss beer—rivalling Euclidian zoning for the most distasteful idea we’ve adopted from the US—can be permanently barred from Canada, where I write from, and from all other interested nations (including the US), in place of a 20 cl glass of frosty Mexican lager or crisp German Kölsch. This also extends to the 20 oz. pint, which has a handful of worthwhile applications (e.g. Guinness) but is otherwise inferior to the 20 cl format for reasons already stated. It’s not too late to wean ourselves off from these corrupting influences and link arms as we brainstorm a kinder future (over 20 cl beers).

The next time you wish to drink beer, I urgently advise that you first acquire a 20 cl glass. Notice that the mom and pop shops who sell them embody the infectious, whimsical spirit of the vessel. Buy a few cans or bottles and keep them at a distance, refrigerated. Sit in your living room or on the bar stool and sip from your 20 cl with your pinky finger lifted. Let your mind drift, calmly, to your global compatriots who are engaged in the same activity, and those who have been prevented from doing so by imperialist and authoritarian impulses. Buy a stranger a 20 cl, because they only cost a few bucks. Clink your glasses and ask where they came from, where they hope to be. Refill as needed. One beer will feel like three, and all three will remain cold and crispy from top to bottom.

The hungry fools
Who rule the world can’t catch us
Surely they can’t ruin everything
I just want
I wanna be here with you
Not bracing
For what comes next

— I Want To Be Here by case/lang/veirs

Related Reads

On having a favourite tree:

On solving contemporary art’s self-seriousness:

It always starts this way: Dusk, and I am walking. The night is laid out like a half-rendered treasure map, blurred symbols, wonky coordinates. My bag contains what it always does:

• Flashlight

• Camping chair

• Baggy of pills and powders

• 1L Vita Coco

• Notepad

• Pen

On the night in question, I was on my way home, nursing the boba I always picked up after a day on campus, waiting for the streetcar in a neighbourhood I would prefer not to be spotted in. You’ve been there. Tiny dresses, biceps. Repressed sexual tension. Packs of women stampeding from one bar to the next, high-heels kicking up clouds of perfume-scented dust. Boys chanting Thunderstruck by AC/DC while their friend vomits. Girls crying on curbs, makeup running like inkblots, their friends force-feeding them slices of cold pizza.

I boarded the streetcar and stood staring out the tram window, sucking on the straw while scoffing at my professor’s suggestion, an hour prior, to Start brainstorming our independent thesis projects. In my daydreaming I hovered slightly over the man who slept on the nearest seat. He smelled mostly of urine but I caught a whiff of feces, too. My knee bumped against his, waking him from his stupor. He stood up rapidly and grabbed me by the jowls.

“YOUR ASS IS GRASS, KID. YOUR. ASS. IS. GRASS.”

The warning was growled at my face from an inch away. Bits of spittle flew from his teeth and one even went into my eyeball. I remember being surprised by how cold, almost refreshing, the spray felt against my skin. The density of freckles on his face dispelled any risk of him being a threatening man. He released me, clapped my shoulders as if wishing me good luck, and got off the train. The chief tragedy of the event was my spilled tea. I imagined the streetcar conductor slipping on the tapioca balls strewn across the floor as he traversed the corridor to check on me. In his and other onlookers’ eyes I could see the desire to claim the crisis as theirs, the headline quickly formulating: Innocent girl accosted by homeless man on the public transit. Wanting no part in their narratives, I hurried out the door and walked the rest of the five kilometres home. All the while I repeated the freckled man’s mantra, moving the emphasis around in the sentence. Your Ass is Grass. Your Ass is Grass. Your Ass is Grass.

By the time I reached home, I had a framework for my thesis.

I outlined the concept to my professor the next day. He nodded enthusiastically and waxed poetic about Grass and the Gluteus Maximus, once naturally occurring, now firmly in the claws of Neoliberalism, lawns and Asses exploited and fetishized, vessels to be optimized, resource sinks, status symbols… he kept rambling, the words bringing him no closer to the thing. It sounded like there was mud in his mouth. My brain was calculating his drivel at a quarter-speed. All the while I was staring out the window watching a rollerblader do wobbly figure eights around two manholes, carving out infinity symbols. I’d seen my professor’s art and it was nothing special. He was always stealing glances at my breasts, which is embarrassing for him because I’m flat-chested. I needed him to approve my project budget. Otherwise he could fuck off. The world gives you all the instructions you need.

My project hours were split between two research activities. Activity one: laying in the Grass, trying to make myself bug-sized, surveying other humans interacting with the Grass. Activity two: sneaking into gyms around the city to observe other women sculpting their Asses.

From the gyms, I learned that the wealthier the demographic, the less willing they were to divulge that Ass-sculpting was why they were here. High-status gyms used terms like “functional fitness” and their workouts included flipping tires and climbing ladders, simulating productive, blue-collar labour. Their bodies were the most beautiful of any, but since body sculpting was vulgar to them, they perceived their physiques as happy coincidences, the results of rigorous usage. Passersby were invited to gaze at the bodies pushing sleds and slamming balls through windows so pristine that bumblebees kept flying into them, bouncing off with hollow pops before continuing on their way. The bodies of a few bees that popped too aggressively collected along the windowsill. The poor-people gyms, meanwhile, were in windowless basements, attracting neither bees nor passersby. They upheld no facade of productivity; women with the most massive-est Asses I had ever seen stared at their Asses in the mirror as they isolated their lower glutes and then upper glutes and then side glutes and then switched legs.

My park research revealed that few people were comfortable touching Grass, despite the trending sentiment. The parks they frequented were manicured, the seas of green they sought out pristine; they nonetheless smothered the Grass with blankets before settling down. Despite being unworthy of touch, the Grass was subjected to strict standards from the humans. Teams of leaf blowers were set loose by the taxpayers, progressing in a line from one end of the fields to the other, blasting fallen leaves, brambles, and uprooted weeds into the street, then spraying the Grass with mysterious perfumes.

I carried on with my research for several months.

After a busy day installing my thesis exhibition, to be opened to the public the next morning, I left campus to pick up a well-deserved boba. I then stopped at a bar to pee before catching the streetcar. There was an unusually long line for the women’s toilet, from which a man emerged after some minutes. His unfocused eyes hardly seemed to register the line. His face was red and splotchy. A full pint in his hand.

“Wrong bathroom, dude!” said the lady at the back of the line.

He stumbled towards her and stopped well within her personal space, pushing his face near hers as if peeking through a foggy window. I readied my body for a sacrificial insertion between his and hers.

“I didn’t pay attention to the bathroom I went into,” he explained, “because gender,” he twirled his finger around her nose, “is not,” he landed his finger gently upon her nose, “fuck, I don’t know.” He shrugged and walked away.

I scanned the bar for this man after using the toilet. Serendipitously—but also unsurprisingly—he was having a beer with the freckled man who inspired my thesis, eight months prior. I went over and invited them to visit my new show. “An exclusive first look,” I said. “Press only!” His friend from the bathroom grabbed my tea, sucked on the straw, spat out a tapioca ball, and said, “what the fuck is this shit.”

“Come on, get up off your Asses. I’ll pick up your tabs.” I was feeling confident from the line of ketamine I’d snorted fifteen minutes prior. They rose wearily and I led them through campus and up to the exhibition space. There I flicked on the lights, plugged my phone into the soundsystem, and pressed play. The room came to life with the whirring motors of several leaf blowers, recorded on my phone from the park, layered into a haunting drone sustained at the appliance’s average output of 95 dB. The men covered their ears.

The room was split into three sections. Two were modelled after gyms, the bougie side with astroturf and “functional fitness” equipment strewn about, the cheap side with hard rubber and filthy dumbbells. The third section was lined with real sod, rolled out over a tarp, the grass springy underfoot and surrounded by a white picket fence preventing access. Digital clocks were installed on the scuffed-up walls, with red lines rearranging into numbers reporting the leaf blower GHG emissions and water volumes required to keep the tiny lawn pristine. I yelled at the men, who lingered by the entrance, describing the two teams of women actors who would be working out here tomorrow, in their respective sections, targeting their Asses, grunting and groaning and drenched in sweat. This seemed to excite the men. The freckled one started slamming a weighted ball on the bougie side and his friend started doing bicep curls on the cheap side. The wattage output from their exercises popped up on a leaderboard beneath a giant wall poster, which read as follows:

The leaderboard made the men pump harder—just as I’d hoped. I led them to a corner containing a defunct leaf blower I had discovered in a landfill. A plaque on its body read,

I was born in America in the 70s, during a long drought. Water consumption limits were enforced by your government, forcing your people to restrict usage to tasks you deemed “high priority”, such as showering and maintaining your lawns. Thus you invented me: the perfect alternative to hosing down decks and driveways. You loved me, it seemed. Tens of millions of my brothers and sisters were born, sharing your homes. And then something changed. A subset of your species called “Democrats” clamped down on our freedoms. Your sons and daughters labeled us an abomination, sentencing us to the landfill. Perhaps your people should weigh the consequences before birthing and abandoning an entire species. It is an intolerable existence, to not know if one is loved.

I turned to the freckled man. “I only have one question. You told me that Your Ass is Grass. Which implies you were referring to my Ass. But my Ass is not sculpted. I’ve never exercised, not even once. Did you mean to say One’s Ass?”

“This is some bullshit,” he said. His friend laughed.

“That’s true,” I said. “I lodge social commentaries from pristine white rooms as if I’m excluded from the world. But the rejection of sculpting is an aesthetic choice, too. No-scaping is an act of landscaping. I still look at the mirror every day, and I usually look at my flat, saggy Ass.”

I guess I had closed my eyes while conveying these thoughts. When I opened them, the men were on their way out the door. The freckled man turned around and asked if I had any money. I gave him what I had and they left. His friend was carrying a few of the dumbbells, having ripped off the sensors I attached, which was fine.

I popped on my headphones as I passed through the club district to catch the streetcar. Jazzy Belle by Outkast was playing as I walked, vibing, high as a filament, thinking Damn this access to good art is convenient, what conveniences will we have in the future that will change my life the way Spotify has? Perhaps if I pursued this line of thought far enough, and regularly enough, in that same future I would be a wealthy founder whose fortune could subsidize wars in foreign countries. But I did not do so because Jazzy Belle sounded good.

André 3000 told me to walk home instead of the streetcar.

As the sun began to set, I passed by three young men smoking outside a bar. One finished his beer, burped, and proclaimed, with arms outstretched, as if Zarathustra coming down from the mountain, that “HOT GIRLS ARE UGLY.” His two disciples nodded, and I found myself joining their ranks, nodding along. I followed from a distance as they sleepwalked down the sidewalk, side-by-side, occupying its width. They paused at a streetcar stop, where the dark figure of a woman waited in the glass enclosure. Her silhouette framed by the neon lights from the diner across the street. We could only see the back of her head. But the scene, and the drugs, were doing their thing; she was not hot, and she was certainly not ugly. She was beautiful.

“That’s wonderful,” the Zarathustra-man said. And then he blushed.

“It’s full of wonder,” said one disciple.

“I’ve seen a lot of less interesting things,” said the third.

The Zarathustra man had already entered the glass enclosure to introduce himself to the woman. The disciples looked at each other.

“What a strange temptation,” one said, “to disturb something so wonderful.”

But both men were clearly jealous.

Instead of going home, I went to the park, where I set up my camping chair in the Grass. Hot girls are ugly. Hot girls, are ugly. Hot. Girls. Are. Ugly. My flashlight was one of those high-powered police-grade models that I kept for safety. A moth was attracted to it, and as I considered the maxim, he hovered happily around the beam. I shone the light on him while flitting in and out of sleep from dusk through sunrise. I gave that moth the best night of his life.

The next morning was my exhibition opening. I received an email from my professor, as I packed up at the park, with the subject line, Your Ass is Grass: Project Nomination for Best Overall Concept. The email preview text read Despite the shambolic execution we discussed, the jury found your project to… I deleted the email without opening it. This is some bullshit, diagnosed the wise man, correctly, before passing his hat off to the three wise, young men outside the bar. I reached home as the city awakened, taking note of its indifference to that austere exhibition room, to my professor, and to the whims of an arbitrary jury, selected from a faculty of failed artists. I was ready to start my next project.

Why don’t you attend your exhibitions? I am often asked. Because the art itself is nothing. It does not matter. The only thing that matters is the life I lead, the things I do that result, somehow, in art. Like a hyperactive puppy, my job is to chase bubbles delicate and fickle, whose sheen is glamorous in the light, not caring if they pop upon contact and I am left flailing at nothing. Think that’s a cop-out? Congratulations. Go make your own art.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this piece, you’ll also enjoy Confessions of a Gallerina, told from the same narrator, who describes herself as a Chinatown art wench.

In other news, here is a snippet of feedback from my friend, and most trusted reader, after reviewing my debut story collection (Anvil Press, June 2026). Can’t wait to share it with you all.

I

I ascertained, in my tenth year, that I had been raised by a foreign species. They wore clean clothes and smiled with their teeth, but beneath the surface they were primitive creatures, whose purpose was to light trivial things on fire so they could furiously stomp them out. The fire that was this ski trip started with a stomp-off between Mom and Dad over booking a vacation that promised “zero relaxation”—as if either knew how to relax by a pool, or a beach. They’d spent a full week smouldering over the snow report, only to wake this morning to surprise powder and redirect the flamethrower at our sleeping bodies, infiltrating the kids’ room, raving about lift lines, stripping sheets and assembling sandwiches and stuffing feet into boots whose stiffness they’d whine about for the rest of the day.

The inferno was tempered for a few hours thanks to first tracks and blue skies and the Fireball cracked open at noon. I could feel its presence re-kindling, later that night, in the pace they sucked down their drinks, in Auntie and Uncle’s tongue-kissing in the hot tub, in the snarl of my father to GET BACK HERE when the kids, freaked out by the kissing, leapt onto the pool deck to launch snowballs at the teenagers loitering outside the property fence. Their return fire forced us to take shelter under the waterslide—but now the beacons were lit. Our parents vacated the tub, cursing at the cold as they ascended the icy staircase to the waterslide platform, where they had a clear line of fire over the fence.

RELEASE THE TREBUCHETS, I yelled, as we built snowballs under the slide and lobbed them up to our parents. I had just seen Return of the King and this was Minas Tirith, with orcs swarming the walls. Only I might’ve mistaken who was Orc and who was Man. A glimpse of Dad with a devilish grin before unloading his fury into a throw that tore his rotator cuff, as we would discover the next morning. A yelp as my uncle tagged a teenager squarely, and cruelly, in the face. As our frozen skin tingled back in the tub, after the teenagers had fled, I noted the glares from the mothers at the fathers; they had revealed too much of the creatures beneath, now the kids would know for sure.

Back at school, I posed my Species hypothesis to my favourite teachers. Mr. Savoie from Science class frowned and pointed at the anatomy board. Homo sapiens we are, he said, like Yoda—regardless of age, ethnicity, sex. Mrs. Cameron from English perked up at the question, gesturing at the book on my desk with a wry smile. A theme we’ll cover soon, she said. I take it you’ve read ahead. I nodded back as if I had, indeed, absorbed a single sentence from Bridge to Terabithia. They were aliens, too, these teachers. I was relieved to be part of a species that needn’t smother their instincts with whisky and weather reports, nor pretend that books and diagrams held a single truth about the world.

II

Doing pull-ups at the outdoor gym beside the high school, trading sets with a disheveled man who’d already crushed three Labatt 50s during his workout, which mostly consisted of dangling from the bar with a wet cigarette between his lips. I’ve always had a soft spot for this place. The motley crew of muscular bodies, goth kids by the bleachers, speakers fighting for air space, and chatty throngs of middle-aged women speed-walking the track, contained a social fabric that made me sorry for my hours spent in a mirror-lined room, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and clean sneakers, pursuing a vanity project that mattered to no one. Here it felt, however marginally, that I was participating in the world. The school’s clock tower loomed over the track, reporting the same hour it had all summer. Here was the worst school in the inner city, according to the Toronto District School Board; a ranking that seemed unworthy of the dialogue occurring between its stately façade and the neighbourhood, best embodied by the woman twerking against a soccer net to a blaring Missy Elliott track, her ass pointed at the unfazed monument.

A family approached as I finished a set, two parents trailed by six children. The mother wearing a headscarf and the father a flowing tunic. I dragged over a tire for one of the kids to grab the bar. His siblings tried to yank him down as he clung on, kicking at their flailing arms. The father asked, with a thick accent—perhaps North African—for directions to the “maple school”. I pointed at the building. That’s the one. He stared at it with his mouth open. The bar-wielding kid dropped to the ground.

No, no—the school, the high school, said the mother. That IS the school. I pointed at the engraving over the entrance. A brief silence as she whispered a prayer, then started to sob. The kids, chattering in Arabic, swarmed around the tallest boy who remained frozen, gaping. The father also stuck on an island, before shaking his head and wrapping an arm around his wife.

They continued hugging, laughing. I wished they might stay there a while, on that happy side of the struggle. My prayer was answered by a lady who’d been circling the school, arguing with its walls, as she smashed her bottle against it with a guttural, blood-curling scream. The family flinched, the parents’ spines stiffened. I went for another round of pull-ups.

III

Because I was a grown-up now, with my own life, and parameters, I resisted settling seamlessly back into my childhood bedroom. The crisp sheets, folded towels, and first sleeps on a mattress that once had my contours memorized did not deter me from telling anyone who would listen about my feeling “boxed-in”. A feeling exacerbated by the literal boxes everywhere: in my old closet, in random corners, in every shelf of the garage. I announced to my parents, on the first night, that I was spearheading a decluttering project. Each day we’ll pick a room to attack. We’ll be ruthless. I framed the activity as being for them.

Like last year and the year before, the project stalled. I watched memories light up my dad’s face as he flipped through old CDs, bickered with my mom over the tackiness of that ornamental plate, and conceded the battles on both fronts. My hopes of proving myself as a man who takes charge of things outside these walls quickly faded. I emerged from the depths of a month-long adolescent regression by way of a return flight notification, wearing my father’s sweatsuit, feeling blobby and indolent, having blissfully forgotten the routines and rituals that propel my real life, in that other place.

On the evening before my flight, I came home tipsy, 3am, banging pots against the stove and slamming the fridge door while preparing a snack. I used to do this as a teenager; an inadvertent, drunken signal to my parents that I’d survived the night. On this occasion, I imagined the sounds stirring them into a cozy half-dream in which I never left—where the friction of our co-existence became the norm and they had to encourage me to seek the world rather than my flocking to it impatiently. I lost track of my limbs, amid this hallucination, and elbowed the cast-iron to the floor. A heavy thud, a dent in the hardwood. A failed performance under the spotlight of the kitchen stove, a turd of Beyond Meat burger smushed against my sock. A glimpse of loneliness quickly undone by a lamp flicking on upstairs, the hurried footsteps of two bodies descending.

The first thing I see, upon regaining consciousness, is the reflection of my pale face in the mirror. Though it is not quite my face. The bags beneath my eyes are pronounced enough to be mistaken for bruises. My beard is gone, exposing a film of ashy skin stretched taut around bone, leaving none of my skeleton to be imagined. The swollen creases of my brain squeeze my temples, pushing my eyeballs out past their sockets. It is not a bathroom I have woken up in before. Since I am hovered above the sink and the tap is running, I proceed to rinse my face. On the way out I pass a urinal containing a pool of stagnant, ochre-coloured piss, which I hurriedly flush away.

The pub I emerge to has plush leather booths, rich mahogany panelling, and twelve beers on tap. Through a saloon door behind the bar wafts the scent of bacon and cheerful voices chatting over the din of kitchen activity. I imagine my mother’s voice rising above the clatter to call me to breakfast. Bucolic images of a country home and a cluttered kitchen and a whistling kettle—memories which are not my own. I lean over the bar to pour myself a pint and leave.

The bar exits to a courtyard I haven’t seen for months, a tourist square in the old part of town. A fresh breeze and pinkish sky confirm the morning hour. Surprised by my distance from home, I seek the reassurance of a fellow laying on a bench in the centre of the square. His face is masked by an open hardcover book.

“What’s the date?”

“Twenty-sixth,” he says, without removing the book from his face.

“Ah, my birthday.”

No reaction from the fellow.

I have lost track of my whereabouts for ten days, which seems excessive for any occasion. I place the pint on the cobblestone and walk away. After a few steps I turn back to see the bench fellow upright, reaching for the glass. Satisfied by this conclusion, I keep still and wait for the next chapter. The imposing façade of the national gallery looms over the courtyard, its scale causing it to pulse somewhat. I chuckle and stride towards it.

“Hello, Mr. Bains,” says Cheryl, who is standing by the door, doing as little as anyone else who works here. I peck her on the cheek and scurry towards coat check. The clerk accepts my sweater, along with my wallet, phone, and keys. When I remove my shoes and socks he frowns but does not object. As if trying to undermine everything I have just achieved, a lady hands me a map. I find a blue bin and hurriedly release it. I march up a staircase and through various labyrinths, maximizing distance from the foyer. The building is empty, the marble cold on my toes, the corridors generously spaced. Nothing encountered is accidental; everything exists for an aesthetic or functional purpose. I know they have done this well when I can hardly distinguish the two.

I am charmed by the very first painting I see: a nude woman and three oranges. The composition is arrogantly simple: five strokes on paper outlining her figure in black, a sparse wooden frame; a work that could be mistaken for a grade-school arts-and-crafts project. Before having to convince myself of its genius, I am standing on her balcony. Vineyards line the rolling hills against a backdrop of ocean and a strip of land in the distance—perhaps Morocco. In the gated area below is a manicured lawn patterned with the occasional orange tree, through which a gravel road winds. She waits beneath one of these trees. A salty breeze shakes an orange from a branch and into her basket. She turns to the balcony where I stand and screams in delight. I wake to the Matisse rotated 90 degrees (I have laid myself down) with her windswept laughter tumbling through the room and a dribble of spit on my chin.

Each return to sleep is a stroll through the vineyard, a soda on the balcony of her terracotta mansion, the ascent of a spiral staircase with her leading me by the hands, before I am plucked awake to a fresh bout of reality. Without opening my eyes, I dive headfirst back into the dream. Truthfully, the visits grow tiresome. Towards the end—we both know it’s the end—we lie naked in her sun-drenched bed and I offer her a warning: she is too content with her situation. Yes, each day is as idyllic as the rest, visitors will marvel over her perfect world for a time, but that is the beginning and the end of her existence. It is not a life to be satisfied with. She must leave! She must suffer. She must have a rotten life.

To this she giggles, though her radiant smile is disturbed. She shakes her head and the tension is flung aside like a speck of water. She prances into the vineyard with echoes of her singing voice reverberating through the valley.

I use my fingers to pry open my eyes. My body lays supine, facing away from the Matisse. In a corner across the room, framed by the sight line between my lifeless legs, an employee watches me from a white plastic chair. I crane my neck and his body stiffens. His immaculate sailor’s outfit and albino skin blend him with the white wall, his hair concealed by a white captain’s hat aside from two thick, pointed strands of black hair protruding over his forehead like an anime character. He raises his eyebrows, presumably an expression of concern for the man upon the floor. I lift my open palm and place my thumb against my forefinger. He nods and goes away.

I risk a final glance at the lady of oranges and am filled with shame for my parting words. Giving advice, especially to the young, is a despicable indulgence. A fool is anyone who claims to know anything.

The next room is the grandest I have ever seen. Beneath the domed ceiling is a sprawling black leather couch with a hard flat surface which could host a tentative game of bocce. I sit on the edge. A woman with a sketchbook and an oily plastic bag of olives (there are no rules in this world anymore) shares her sketch of an Otto Dix painting with my eye. I nod in approval, though I do not have an opinion. I notice my hand sliding around in her bag of olives, grasping for any single one. Her hand joins the fray. As our oily fingers flap against each other, I wonder about the centre of the couch—surely thousands have ventured there, but what is the point of crawling such a distance? The sketching woman does not stir as I attempt this. A streak of olive oil marks the length of my journey across the leather, which is smooth like stones in a river, eroded by the innumerable asses of bored children brought to the museum against their will.

I lie in the centre of the couch and stare into the glass cupula which magnifies the high sun. Glitters of dust float lackadaisically in the rays of light. I yearn for one of these beams to hook me by the sternum and lift me. I am always masquerading as a man living freely, but I would like to lead with the heart in earnest. My limbs could hang pointlessly, my heart forward, erect, my head pulled back by gravity, restricting my windpipe and putting my mind softly to rest.

READ THE REST

This piece was recently published in subTerrain’s Dreams issue. I love this small, but mighty lit mag. They have given a home to some of my most utterly plotless writings, publications that led to my inclusion in the Best Canadian Stories 2026 anthology and my current book deal. They also commission custom illustrations from visual artists to accompany each piece—a rare thing nowadays. Please consider supporting them.

To read the full story, you can order a copy of the magazine in print (here) or digital (here). The piece will also appear in my story collection with Anvil Press, out June 2026.

I have concluded that the reason my memory sucks (it sucks) is because Everywhere I go, I am somewhere else. This may come as a surprise to those who have described me as “grounded”, or “present”, but the explanation is simple: when you never are where you actually are, an unshakeable stillness precedes you. The world you’re in, with its threats and impositions, is not the world you’re in; this makes it easy to appear at peace with the world you’re in. So please don’t be fooled by the façade; I am the antithesis of grounded, or present. Just now, I am transporting the sentences my friend is earnestly producing from a few feet away to a faraway place called Shame, shame for being somewhere else—but I’ve already left that land for another, call it Inspiration, because here is an idea for a piece of writing, which I’m sure will be relatable, about not being in the room my friend is currently talking to me in.

The first weeks of 2026 might have been exceptional, had I been there for any of them. They began with a ten-day chinook in Calgary. Chinooks are warm winds that blow east from the Rockies, suddenly raising temperatures by 10 to 20°C, peppering a harsh winter with several intermittent springs. Something about the science of them bestows the city with clear, blue skies, protected by a thick band of cloud (a chinook arch) holding steady over the mountains to the west. Dramatic sunsets filter through these cloud formations, providing a spectacle for their viewers paired with a much-needed surge of vitamin-D. This latter detail was the focal point of my chinook experience. I told my body: Get that vitamin-D, body. You need it. I placed the thing under the setting sun and shut my eyes, transporting myself to a meta-space in which I could feel the vitamins soaking into my skin, triggering a function in my nervous system that produces serotonin, making me happy—or at least affirming a sense that I could feel happy. I told my body to smile, and it smiled. I pulled out my phone to capture the sky and now I was not soaking in a pool of serotonin, but in a distant boardroom in which ten of me sat, each pitching a different use-case for this photograph: Instagram story, group chat, Sub stack note, trash bin, photoshop for touch-ups, or just leave it in my Photos album and share it with no one. A resounding Yes! to the latter. Keep it to yourself. The decision felt, momentarily, like a return to the present (me, happy, under the sun), but I left that place quickly to marvel at my present-ness, at having exercised the restraint not to tarnish the thing by broadcasting it online, at having successfully opted for the real experience.

Another January event I might have loved: my visit to the Banff Centre for Arts, to hear readings from the current cohort of writers-in-residence. A program I had applied to six months ago and been rejected from; or maybe I had been accepted and was arriving for day one of my residency—it doesn’t matter, you decide. You can’t be rejected if you are not, and were never, present under the spotlight to be scrutinized. I receive hundreds of so-called rejections in a year. By the time they arrive in my inbox, several months after submission, the work, and the person who wrote it, have been re-edited beyond recognition. These readers, publishers, evaluators, want to partake, for some reason, in the affliction of never being where they actually are, they want to go anywhere else, and they want other people to take them there. When you don’t deliver on that promise, they press reject. Sometimes they press accept, using abstract nouns like precision and authority to describe how well you wrote down the place you went to when you were not where you were. The success of this endeavour does not matter.

That’s the logic I was mostly inhabiting, recited glibly from the chair of a Charlie Rose interview, as I toured the Banff campus and poked my head into a few buildings, empty and silent given the dinner hour. Focus, Rishi—this is a sacred space, a campus for artistic indulgence carved out of a national park. To better grasp how sacred it was I populated the various rooms, behind closed doors, with the studio scenes from Kelly Reichardt’s film, Showing Up. Artists tinkering away at their obsessions, freed from a fundamental tension between the finicky demands of creative practice and life’s burdens constantly encroaching. I ended my tour at a top-floor cafeteria to watch the sun dip behind the Sundance Mountain Range, its silhouette framed by a crisp gradient, from peach to lavender—but did I really need to use peach and lavender? Orange and purple would suffice. The reader has seen a sunset, they will receive the data all the same. But peach and lavender conveyed more pastel-y hues that did, in fact, reflect the crispness of the winter night. I strayed a bit too long, amidst these wanderings, to take a worthwhile photograph of the sunset, let alone participate in it, whatever that means.

Another thing about Never being where you actually are: art has a tremendous sway on the places you inhabit instead of the place you’re in. As the writers-in-residence shared their work, I willingly handed off my command-centre’s keys to their poetic poems and prosaic poems and poetic proses and prosaic proses; keys I would never entrust to a living, breathing human. My body laughed and cried and loved and marveled, the tension between where I am and where I’m supposed to be briefly resolved, because in this room I am not supposed to be in this room, I am supposed to be where I actually am, which is within your wonderful art; thank you, readers—the work was authoritative. It was precise.

Later that night, I was not winding eastwards along the Trans-Canada Highway towards Calgary. I was rattling off a checklist of parameters: road empty, conditions clear, good album playing, and—lo and behold—the Aurora Borealis dancing in direct view of my driver’s window. The gravity of this moment was not the basic fact of a green, low-amplitude sine wave shimmering along the entirety of my trip, becoming especially bright in the Stoney Nakoda territory, where the mountains give way to rolling foothills; it was the realization that I had never once seen the Aurora Borealis and now needed to capture it, to own it. To lay down an anchor along the slippery slopes of a life.

I pulled off the highway at an unmarked exit, parked in the middle of an empty overpass, and killed the headlights. I stepped into the cold to sit on the front hood of the car and watch the flickering greens, their staticky crackles and pops contrasting bizarrely with the hum of the highway beneath. This scene could be a government ad, I thought. It even has the diversity angle with me as the leading man. Come to Canada, immigrants! The American dream died in 1980, more nails enter the coffin every hour of every day; we’re not sure why they still bother hammering. You will love our safety net, your sons and daughters and in-betweens can pursue art and stare at the northern lights. They can lead lives so frivolous that their first concern, as they stare at the northern lights, is whether they are more attached to their “internal lives” or their “lived experiences”. And their next concern, perhaps, will be to wish they could paint mystical landscapes like Matthew Wong, or compose songs like Björk, or pen poems like Rilke, to illustrate what was happening before their eyes, wishing they possessed some precocious talent for subjective (mis)representation to bridge the gap between reality and its retelling—an effort that ultimately fails, and is pointless, but at least feels truer and less pointless than the failures spat out by our ever-improving gadgets, like the one that was in my hand, which was trying and failing to take a video of the Northern Lights.

I put my phone away. Surely I could find at least one abstract noun for the feelings being felt as my body beheld the spectacle overhead. The word was available, on the tip of my t—ah, yes. Grace. That’s the one. I couldn’t tell you an exact definition, but you know it when you feel it. I returned to my car and tried to watch the lights for another minute, but I was already gone, racing ahead to a room called Inspiration, where my body could sit down to write.

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813): 0/10
This book refused to burn even in an industrial cremation tank.

2. The Babysitter at Rest by Jen George (2016): 17/10
This book was already on fire when I picked it up at the library. The librarian passed it to me using cast iron fireplace tongs and said, thank Jesus, get this book out of here.

3. Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri (2018): 5/10
This book burned exactly as one would expect a book to burn.

4. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner (2011): NA/10
The hideous front and back covers of this book ignited immediately, leaving the main contents unscathed. The writing was exquisite and, in many ways, reflects the tone I strive after in my fiction but have yet to achieve. I was thus unable to burn it any further, as it would feel vindictive.

5. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018): 3/10
This book was so disinterested in itself that the fire would fizzle out every 2-3 pages. It kept calling the fire “cringe” and mocking the solemnity of my book burning procession. It took a long time to burn.

6. Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (2017): NA/10
I started burning this book but then stamped out the fire and threw it in Lake Ontario because I didn’t even care.

7. Stoner by John Edward Williams (1965): 8/10
This book was eager to be incinerated from the annals of history, to rapidly return to the oblivion from which it came. A modest sigh escaped from the spine as it popped—presumably in relief for never having to be the source material for another Substack post. The flame was lessened briefly by my tears during Stoner’s glorious affair with Katherine, and for the last few pages.

8. We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi (2024): NA/10
Naturally, the only book I read from our current decade was written by, and for, a self-hating liberal. This book would not take a flame unless it was sourced from the burning of my own flesh or the humanities department of an elite college with the faculty trapped inside. I was unwilling to do this so the book went unburned.

9. The Driftless Area by Tom Drury (2006): 9/10
This book burned swiftly and was then reincarnated as Underworld by Don DeLillo.

10. Fat City by Leonard Gardner (1969): 10/10
The pages were pre-coated with bacon grease and muscatel; the book burned hot and bright, the fire becoming the talk of the town for thirty seconds before disintegrating into a thimble of flaky ash. It was never thought of or mentioned again.

11. A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin (2015): 4/10
This book’s burn profile was inconsistent. It ravaged, waned, stopped entirely; when I approached again with the lighter it self-ignited. And then repeat. At some points it seemed to un-burn, if that’s even possible. All the while, I laughed, cried, loved, marveled. A roller-coaster of a burn.

12. My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgård (2009): -∞/10
This book continued writing itself as it burned, with page upon new page describing the experience of being burned in plain, yet painstaking detail. It has never quite been able to consume itself, and is presently keeping my feet warm beneath my desk.

13. Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag (1966): 2/10
The essays on camp, Camus, and the title essay, burned steady and strong. I was too dumb or distracted to figure out how to light the others on fire, and frequently fell asleep while trying to do so.

14. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver (1981): 8/10
This was a re-burn. I suspect, when I first “burned” it in college, that it was entirely performative—that I was trying to impress someone or other with the suggestion that I burn terse literary fiction. I’m not sure why I thought this would get me laid in an engineering program at a fratty university. This time around, the burn was authentic, and well-oxygenated from the space between Carver’s sentences.

15. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (2011): Magic/10
This burn summoned a floating Blueberrinni Octopussinni who recited an AI slop riddle that, according to B.O., reveals the true identity of Elena Ferrante:

I am a union of craft and motion.

My first half sits hunched in a dim shop, squinting at seams, my fingers dancing. I take what is shapeless and make it conform. In London, I once dressed kings.

My second half is the hawk’s descent—silent, sudden, over before you blink. It’s the quality a river lacks but a wildfire possesses. It takes money from A to B—often internationally.

~~~

Thanks for reading about my year in book burning. It was a good year of burning. Most of the books were excellent. If you’d like more details and further context on their burn profiles, or wish to dispute my reportage based on your own burn experiences, please don’t hesitate to DM or email.

Sincerely,

Rishi

I’m starting this letter on a plane to Calgary, where I’ll be spending the holidays. My first hour of flight has largely consisted of a boy in the seat behind me punching the screen of his in-flight TV, causing my head to bounce against the headrest around 150 BPM. I was hoping to stare out the window and feel ennui before embarking on this reflection, but as the report will outline, 2025 was the year of yielding to higher powers. Perhaps the rhythm with which the boy is shooting down spaceships, or doing virtual backflips, will filter through to these sentences.

As we close the books on another fiscal year, I remain deeply indebted to you, the hundreds of investors (readers) who continue holding and promoting stock in a chronically unprofitable venture. Having long abandoned traditional means of increasing shareholder value, and despite the continued absence of strategic windfalls (see Table 1), morale at welktober HQ, where innovation trumps valuation, remains high.

The highlight of 2025, as you know, was the submission of our product team’s first patent in Q3, titled Ninety-Minute Walk with 222 ml Diet Coke Poured into Icy Thermos and Nothing in Pockets™. This innovation visited welktober HQ on a sultry early-summer night when we combined two known icons—a crisp Diet Coke, a long stroll—with a zesty third: keeping your wallet, phone, and keys (leave that front door unlocked, baby) at home and allowing the sights & sounds of the city to take you. As welktober’s combined product manager and target demographic, I was obliged to test this invention thirty-plus times through the summer to ensure product-market-fit, and can thus guarantee two favourable outcomes from regular use:

1. Seances, holy interventions, etc. While walking on a quiet, residential street after 10pm, a half-smoked lit cigarette sailed from the heavens in a streak of scarlet and smacked the sidewalk, fizzling out by my exposed pinky toe. I scanned the street for signs of human life, for a balcony to launch a cigarette from: nothing overhead; the street was deserted. I was charmed to learn that God prefers a cheeky cigarette over vapes and nicotine pouches; something tells me she would enjoy rounding out this vice with a Ninety-Minute Walk with 222 ml Diet Coke Poured into Icy Thermos and Nothing in Pockets™.

2. Breakthroughs in mind-body connection. Strolling past a baseball diamond on a rainy evening, I encountered a baby blue plastic bowling pin, perhaps a kids toy, sitting on the bleachers, and was met with a ferocious urge to smack the pin as hard as I could with my umbrella, a home run kind of swing that would send it flying into the fence which enclosed the diamond. It was standing there so plump and upright and available. But I didn’t do it. The act felt violent and invasive, especially with children nearby innocently kicking a ball in the grass. I tormented myself, for the rest of the walk, over abandoning that carnal impulse. The bowling pin later haunted my thoughts while I tried to read in bed. After much rumination, I stepped back into the night and returned to the baseball diamond to find the pin waiting, erect as ever. I wound up my umbrella and smacked it hard. The stiff metal made a satisfying thud against hollow plastic, and the pin twirled slow-mo through the humid night before hitting the fence and falling to the ground in an anti-climactic, but nonetheless worthwhile, conclusion.

I must confess to one extended instance of corporate wrongdoing in 2025. Halfway through Q1, welktober acquired its 69th investor (reader). On that particularly bleak February, as several feet of snow pounded Toronto, checking and re-checking that glorious number on Substack dot com was equivalent to swallowing a pill that made the dreary nights feel cozy and communal, as if all sixty-nine of you were present in my candle-lit room while I combed the folds of my brain for precious gems. It took no time at all to become addicted to the pills. For the rest of Q1 and Q2 I was self-medicating on the hamster wheel, hallucinating my newsletter to be not what it was—a csv list of email addresses to which I send sweet nothings—but a “channel” for “content” with a “schedule” and a “niche”. You, the reader, likely invested during this period, since it caused my subscriber count to multiply several times over.

Thankfully, the drug instigated a visit from a holy man, and subsequent ego death, one Friday morning in early Q3, on my commute to the Toronto Reference Library. My brain, still strung out from the previous night’s letter, was perturbed by the serenity of the streetcar. You’ll never find it more subdued, yet teeming with potential, than when heading east towards the financial district around 7am on a Friday. I searched the busy car for anyone who could hear the silence, but each commuter was still in bed, spiritually, with headphones in, or screens an inch from their eyeballs, and thousand-yard stares. Just as I made to whip out my device to join the ranks—and check my newsletter stats, no doubt—my eyes fell upon those of an older gentleman with nothing attached to his hands, ears, or eyes, who was watching me intently, who perhaps had been doing so for minutes, or months. We held each other’s gazes as we listened to the hum of awakening bodies. In that privately shared, publicly held moment, this man became welktober’s combined board of director and CEO. I have not checked my Substack dot com dashboard since his intervention. Subscriber growth has grinded to a peaceful halt, and was perhaps even net negative in Q4. I am thankful to have recognized, with the guidance of a wise man, how insidiously an algorithm can get its dumb, greedy fingers into an act I (naïvely) thought incorruptible.

In repentance for this brief loss of principles, I revisited welktober’s corporate manifesto in early Q4 2025, just as the weather cooled, printed the document, and included it as kindling in my inaugural fireplace of the winter season while spinning Who’s Zoomin’ Who? on vinyl, reading a printed-out essay a writer friend had courageously and vulnerably sent me, and deleting my Goodreads account, for good measure.

As enlightened shareholders, I’m sure you’ll agree that the fiscal year was an overwhelming success despite the few mentioned setbacks, and will, accordingly, send this report to your spiritually affluent peers to invest for 2026.

Sincerely,

Rishi

Appendix: Sights from the Fiscal Year

This section will probably clip in your inbox idk

Q1

Q2

Q3

Q4

What have I been preoccupied with lately? A thick piece of rope dangling from the tailpipe of a parked car I walk past most days, on my way to the gym. I’m not fascinated by the rope, per se, but the temptation to pull it. It is dying to be pulled. What might be the result? Will the car explode? Will a never-ending line emerge, as if from a magician’s hat? Will a prize be waiting on the other end? Each lap to and fro lends plausibility to these conclusions and many more. Invariably, obsession wins me over. I crouch by the tailpipe and yank on the rope. Out it comes, about eighteen inches long, its far end matted with grease. I carry it home and store it in a shoebox containing several other objects that have been the subjects of recent, inexplicable obsession.

How did you respond to the latest impulse that came knocking at your door? Did you study it surreptitiously through the peephole, before leaving it to wither on your front porch? Did you let it inside, only to ridicule it with labels borrowed from the language of affliction? That’s my OCD kicking in. Ignore [X] I’m literally insane. [Y] is my autism. To unabashedly embrace obsession is to risk being seen as an indulgent lunatic, detached from “what really matters”.

Cast in a more generous light, however, it is to let yourself be an artist.

When artists talk, often at length, about “process”, that holy concept, they are referring to a set of ever-changing rituals that minimize interference between the mysterious void from which impulses arrive, and action. How these rituals manifest becomes a proxy for the artist herself. In Luca Soldovieri’s practice, it involves grinding niche objects (dead moth, speedometer needle, receipt for ½ dozen tulips) into a fine dust to be categorized meticulously and later used as illustration media. In Azadeh Elmizadeh’s, it involves hiking into the rugged mountains surrounding Tehran, imprinting blank linens with the texture of the landscape before using them as a painting surface in her Toronto studio. The more compelling the artist’s work, the more sacred their process tends to be, the more likely they are to have followed their instincts to the furthest reaches. This is why AI—a deliberate abandonment of process—does not make worthwhile art. It can only displace the work of artists who overlook process, who create art purely with a “viable product” in mind, whether commercially or technically. Per E.H. Gombrich’s popular (and oft-misused) dictum, “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.”

All art forms are deeply intertwined with process, yet I consider visual art to be the most (or, perhaps, the most conspicuously) process-driven of the bunch. I suspect this is due to a combination of the tactility of the final product and the marketability of the visual artist’s process: we often expect their hand to be visible in the finished work; we love to see footage of the messy, neurotic, nitpickiness of their studio practice. This intimacy with process, and tolerance for unpolished work, tends not to be so widely (or publicly) embraced with writers, filmmakers, musicians, and so on. Perhaps a positive, even necessary outcome of AI is that the deeply human element of process will become more apparent in the finished work of all mediums.

I’ve been blessed, over the years, to have hundreds of conversations with visual artists revolving around their process. Each has helped me accept the excesses of my own writing practice, which includes—as an example amongst many—the recurrent scouring of past weeks’ worth of iPhone notes, journal entries, photos taken, posts saved, mysterious shoebox objects, etc. for thoughts, descriptions, and ideas, all of which end up in “Sentence Master.xlsx”, a spreadsheet containing thousands of rows of sentences and paragraphs, categorized extensively with tags and attributes. Years ago, when the impulse to populate this spreadsheet would arrive, I ridiculed it with something along the lines of, Hemingway climbed mountains, shot zebras, impregnated women, and wrote several books in less time than you’ve spent tending to a spreadsheet mining the drudgery of your life for inspiration. But through hearing so many other artists describe their impulses with pride—they often aren’t sexy or marketable; they are what they are, unanalyzed, unquestioned—I have come to understand that the dedication to such pursuits is the truest, and perhaps only, measure of artistic fulfillment.

The next time an impulse comes knocking, you might welcome it as a long-awaited guest. Maybe it manifests as re-organizing the storage room, curating a niche playlist, or spending an afternoon scouring the city for a specific brand of Korean fermented chili bean paste (Doubanjiang). Whatever the rope might be, notice it. Give it a yank.

Related Reads

The work of Luca Soldovieri:

The work of Azadeh Elmizadeh:

Some notes on my writing routine:

Good morning everyone,

I’ll be reading my short story We Are Busy Being Alive next Wednesday, November 26th at Queen Books as part of the launch for the Best Canadian Stories 2026 anthology. If you’re in Toronto + available, I would love to see you there!

This piece was selected alongside fourteen others that, in the words of the editor, “provide a distinctive sample of the best Canadian short fiction published over the previous year.” The stories are indeed fabulous and delightfully strange. I am very honoured.

Four writers, including myself, will be reading excerpts from their stories. The anthology will be available for sale at the launch. It can also be ordered here.

PS

I know you consented to it, but I’ll never get over the presumptuousness of repeatedly violating your inboxes with 2,000 word emails, none of which have “actionable value propositions”. A quick reply rids me of this insecurity (unless you do, indeed, feel violated, in which case why are you still subscribed?).

Here is a sample of my favourite email replies so far. I encourage you to send or comment (though I know 95%+ of you are too smart to be using Substack dot com) something equally inspired. It makes my day.

—

“lol”
in response to Confessions of a Gallerina

“<3”
in response to Making Art in a Burning House

“you give off chill pedophile vibes like you lowkey like kids but you went to therapy and got impulse control so you would never hurt one if you know what i mean. im a pedophile too and it makes me happy when i read your emails cuz it feels like i can participate too. good on you bro thank you so much”
in response to When the Coffee is Ass

“forwarded to Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, who is also my godmother”
in response to The Silence

“I like to creep around my home and act like a goblin I don’t know why but I just enjoy doing this. Maybe it’s my way of dealing with stress or something but I just do it about once every week. Generally I’ll carry around a sack and creep around in a sort of crouch-walking position making goblin noises, then I’ll walk around my house and pick up various different “trinkets” and put them in my bag while saying stuff like “I’ll be having that” and laughing maniacally in my goblin voice (“trinkets” can include anything from shit I find on the ground to cutlery or other utensils). The other day I was talking with my neighbours and they mentioned hearing weird noises and I was panicking the entire conversation. I’m 99% sure they don’t know it’s me but god that 1% chance is seriously weighing on my mind.”
in response to I Am Not a Violent Man

“please don’t quit your day job,
with love,”
in response to Confessions of a Gallerina

“nice one”
in response to Know thy Tree

“We know you used A.I. You obviously didn’t write that. No one on Earth uses the long dash “—” like that except A.I. Pathetic. Now everyone knows you’re a dumb, lazy, uninspired piece of shit.”
in response to Crying on the Treadmill

“haiku:
an absolutely
divine email the best yet
thank you. unsubscribed”
in response to High Art Brainrot

“are u a virgin”
in response to When the Coffee is Ass

—

Please send more haikus.

Bye for now,

Rishi

Leave a comment

To onlookers in the room, the exuberant wiggles that escape from Diane’s hips as she mounts the treadmill are registered, quite naturally, as a moment of frailty. She surveys the gym, her conquered kingdom, from the raised platform. After six months’ recovery, she has successfully resurrected her weightlifting routine without a whisper of pain or re-injury. Now she can relax. Throw on an episode of Normal People for her thirty-minute stroll at 3 mph and 1.5% incline. Gaze wistfully out the window at the winter landscape as if she were a heartbroken Marianne Sheridan exploring the boundaries of young adulthood on her year abroad in Sweden, rather than a late-middle-aged woman at a community centre in Toronto hovering her heart rate around 100 bpm because her doctor said so. She wiggles her hips once more; they feel sturdy, responsive, ready for action.

Her exercise mat, foam roller, yoga block, and five-pound dumbbell are bundled in her arms. Due to the gym’s filthiness, and its membership by men who mostly seem homeless, she prefers to bring her own equipment. Ever since one of these men (presumably) stole her AirPods, she also prefers to keep the belongings within arms reach. She hangs the mat over the treadmill’s right handrail, places the foam roller in front of her, its edges supported by the left and right handrails and its midsection braced against the front console, stacks the yoga block atop the the roller, the dumbbell atop the block, and finally balances her phone—rotated horizontally for widescreen viewing—atop the dumbbell. This delicate, tower-like structure, supported along the slope of the treadmill’s console, positions her phone at a height that minimizes the craning of her neck. She punches in the treadmill settings, presses play on episode ten of Normal People, and starts walking.

Despite being a paying Amazon member, her stream is interspersed with several minutes of ad breaks. The first ad, for Dubai Travel, suggests that Dubai is a better destination than Paris, Rome, and London (ha!). She hates this ad. Despite having the media literacy of a “boomer”, according to her niece and nephew, she easily recognizes it as the “AI slop” they keep complaining about. While trying to mute the ad with the tiny button on the screen, she takes both hands off the foam roller, which starts rolling down the handrail towards her chest. Her phone lands in the water bottle holder as she scrambles to secure the block and the dumbbell. She reassembles the structure, excusing her clumsiness as an opportunity to practice her fine motor skills while walking. Multitasking is good for the brain.

In the first minutes of the episode, Connell learns that his friend from high school, Rob, has committed suicide. The poor boy can hardly handle his emotions on a good day. Diane wishes to step inside of his grief, but her phone keeps sliding out from its tilted position such that the screen faces the ceiling. After a few instances of returning the phone to the correct angle, she tries swapping the positions of the yoga block and the dumbbell, thinking the grippy-ness of the foam block might better hold the phone in place. Unfortunately, the block is larger than the dumbbell, and when she takes a heavy step on the wobbly treadmill, the block’s unsupported front edge tumbles forward, sending the phone to the treadmill track, and subsequently, to the floor behind it.

She pauses the treadmill and reclaims the phone, forgetting that her hands were bracing the foam roller, which rolls the length of the handrail and lands at her feet. The yoga block and the dumbbell have fallen to the treadmill track. She feels the pressure of surrounding gazes as she collects the items and rebuilds the structure, this time hanging the exercise mat over the console rather than the handrail; the cushiness of the material might provide more friction for the objects than the slick plastic. She also shortens the structure by relocating the dumbbell to the water bottle holder, sturdying the column at the cost of a few degrees of neck strain. This seems to work; the foam roller only requires the pressure of one finger to stay upright. Her breakthrough is diminished, however, by the exercise mat preventing access to the buttons on the console. She digs her hand under the mat and presses a button that feels important. Thankfully, the treadmill returns to life.

Diane gasps when Marianne shows up, unannounced, to Rob’s funeral. Despite the tragic circumstances and the tedious presence of Connell’s new girlfriend, the tension between Connell and Marianne is palpable. Rob’s grieving father calls Connell a “good man”, causing Connell to break down; he does not feel like a good man. The surge of emotion Diane had been anticipating since the opening scene extends from some invisible depth of her soul, settling into a lump in her throat. Her nephew is exactly Connell’s age, in his first year of university; she cannot bear to imagine him facing such a loss. With her misty eyes she steps too far forward on the treadmill and catches the tip of the mat, whose bottom edge is dangling near the track. The mat is tugged downwards, sending the items on the console tumbling. She pauses the treadmill and blinks the tears from her eyes before reassembling the column, this time ensuring the mat is hung such that the bottom edge dangles closer to her knees.

The episode is around the halfway point. Marianne is back in Sweden and Connell is depressed. They’ve started Skyping each other. Marianne leaves the call running overnight, so the first thing Connell sees upon waking is her figure bathed in brilliant morning light as she works at her desk. Diane is deeply touched by this. She faintly recalls the nourishment of starting a day in the presence of the man she loved most in this world, and prays, sheepishly, that she might experience a fraction of that feeling once more. The Skype scenes are perhaps her favourite from the series thus far, but there is a man standing somewhere behind the treadmill speaking loudly in her direction, disturbing the moment. She pauses the stream, removes her headphones, and presses buttons at random through the exercise mat until the treadmill stops.

“Can I help you, sir?”

He is not looking at her; he is talking gibberish to himself in her general direction. His sweat-soaked t-shirt is glued to his skin, his nipples visible through the white fabric. He smells like urine. The edges of his Tim Hortons cup are frayed into oblivion; she imagines little strands of paper disintegrating into his mouth with each sip. She sighs and turns back around, presses START on the treadmill, and resumes the episode. Now the stream is playing an ad for BetRivers Casino. This one is even more brazenly “AI slop” than the previous. The actors’ faces lack a single blemish. They are perfectly smooth and symmetrical, as if sculpted from marble. Their expressions are entirely misaligned to the script.

The ad transitions abruptly to Connell’s full-blown meltdown with his therapist. Paul Mescal really is a terrific actor, she thinks, as she weeps in earnest. She walks with a wide gait to avoid her teardrops patterning the treadmill; stepping on them seems like a bad omen. Her sobs are drawing attention from the men in the room. Let them stare, she thinks. At least she’s being noticed—if only for a few minutes. She wonders if women of her age are even more irrelevant to the world than these homeless characters, who are, at least, a noteworthy thing to evade, to walk around with a large radius and avoid eye contact with. For better or worse, her invisibility has never been so openly acknowledged. Perhaps that’s why these men have gone outwardly mad; it’s the only way anyone will pay attention to them. She regrets these unkind thoughts but they have already come and gone.

She notices, through her peripheral vision, a young man on a stationary bicycle holding his phone at a suspicious angle—perhaps he is trying to film her? In twisting her neck to catch him in the act, a familiar pinch in her upper-spine sends a jolt through her spinal column. Her hands jump to her neck, releasing the foam roller and collapsing the items to the treadmill track. She massages her shoulders, wondering how many weeks this small incident will set her back, how many sleepless nights it might cause, then pauses the machine. She gathers her belongings from the floor and faces the young man, perhaps in his late-twenties, early-thirties, still staring at his phone, trying to be “nonchalant” the way her niece and nephew always are when they stare at theirs. She glares into the dead, unseeing eyes of his phone camera. Yes, that’s me, I’m the old, neurotic bitch balling her eyes out at the gym. Here for your entertainment.

She rebuilds the column, crying gently. Her repetitions have paid off; the structure’s balance is perfect. She does not even need to support it with her hands. While the third round of ads is playing, she has the bright idea to mute her headphones rather than the stream, preventing any risk of displacing the phone. She watches the snow fall out the window, relishing the corporation’s wasted advertising dollars. This is what her niece and nephew would call “touching grass.” Normal People resumes. The closing scene is idyllic; a lighthearted Skype exchange between Connell and Marianne, Connell looking hopeful for the first time in months, and the lovers’ tender, straightforward declaration, before the end credits, that they miss one another. She closes the app. The blurred screen of the treadmill timer—her eyes are, once again, damp—hits thirty minutes. She dismounts the machine, sanitizes her equipment and hands, then wipes the salty sweat and tears from her face. The stiffness in her neck has mostly settled. Between the crying and the completion of the workout, she feels as if a great weight has been lifted.

Such are the triumphs, she supposes, that keep us treading along.

If you’re reading this (if you have enough free time to read random literary blogs, that is), you probably think of your life as being mostly characterized by goodness. If life can be thought of as a long rail path leading towards you-know-what, most of your hours are likely spent on a train called Good, gliding pleasantly, if not wistfully, through the countryside. But no one train can go on forever. After some months, or years—and without warning—you’ll feel your momentum slowing. The train will screech to a halt and a jarring announcement will ring through the AP system. The doors will open and the conductor will shove you into a crowded station called Bad.

Each time this happens, you’ll marvel at how decrepit and ugly Bad is, how quickly you forgot about its badness after you last left it behind. Like most people, you’ll do everything you can to avoid engaging with Bad. You’ll put on headphones, take pills, reminisce about the time on Good, employing an army of distractions and coping mechanisms until Good inevitably returns, at which point you’ll board the train without hesitation. You’ll notice, each time, as you pull away from the station, that a handful of people stayed behind on the platform entirely of their own volition. The calm resignation in their eyes will unnerve you, but after a few hours on Good, you’ll have forgotten all about those poor fools.

The crisis began two days ago, when I was at the coffee shop buying beans. I stood at the counter, my hand hovering over the bags of Sam James Butter Knife Espresso like a dowsing rod, and was surprised to find my fingers fingering towards an adjacent brand I’d not seen before. These mystery beans were housed in a brown bag with no details aside from “1 lbs” scribbled in Sharpie and a twenty dollar price tag. Twenty for a pound is unheard of in this economy, said my lizard brain. I threw one of the bags in my tote, pressed 0% tip on the checkout machine (the barista had not once lifted his eyes from the device in his lap), and bumped my phone against the machine at various angles until it made a noise.

The next morning I pulled an espresso shot with more anticipation than usual, eager to test out the new beans, only to discover that the coffee was ass. Flavourless, stale, difficult to extract; likely sitting on the barista’s shelf for weeks. My disappointment, though severe, was averted amid the busy workday and the long night of writing, and did not return until the following morning, when I woke in a state of dread. I generally enjoy waking up, but in this instance it did not seem of particular interest. The reward for my morning stretches and meditation is to sip coffee and write this journal. But when the coffee—the reward dangling on the other side of the effort—is ass, you approach the effort with the forthcoming ass-ness embodied; your stretches are a bit less stretchy, the current of your inhale-exhale is subject to rogue waves that send your thoughts spiralling, and with one thought in particular: when will this bag of ass coffee be finished with.

I am, as this journal knows, an austere man. I watch twenty-somethings with two functioning legs call an Uber instead of walking thirty minutes; I spy on the Amazon and Instacart packages arriving near-daily to my neighbour’s door, praying—for their own good—that they will get stolen; I feign interest while people boast about hotels I will never set foot in, in cities I will never visit; I compare the deepening of my friends’ slouches to my stiff spine as they drink five drinks in rapid succession; all the while I am thinking: Gluttons. Sleepwalkers. Pigs. Have they been successful in pretending away their discomfort? Don’t they know that their bones are made of dirt? That their skin, wrapped around their dirt bones, is an oily wall with little holes for spindles of protein to poke through and fall out? I return to patching my jeans, salvaging the few spoons of cottage cheese that aren’t rotten, waiting in the cold rain for the 63 bus to arrive (it never arrives; my socks are wet; I am very late). My only respite is this 7am coffee, produced by the few remaining objects of luxury in my household: an espresso machine, a burr grinder, the five-dollar barista oat milk. Fifteen minutes to sip and write and reflect on the chaste day ahead, propelled by the buttery mouthfeel of the cortado, whose foam-to-coffee ratio I have—no, wait. This coffee is ass. The balance is all off. My austerity measures no longer seem honourable, they are foolish. They are the reason I’ve fallen victim to this crisis; I chose the cheaper, larger bag of beans, which will take three weeks to finish, which I refuse to dump out early because that would make me as pathetic as the rest of the yuppies in this city.

On days eleven through fourteen of the ass coffee crisis, I distract myself by working on my Halloween costume. The project involves wandering the streets to collect fallen maple leaves in a garbage bag, focusing on those that have retained their bright reds and yellows and their platonic shape. Since the leaves are soaked from the week-long rain and I gave away my blow dryer, I collect them in a baking tray and bake them in the oven on the lowest heat. Then I attach a strip of double-sided tape to the backside of each leaf and paste them over every inch of a long-sleeve shirt and a pair of track pants, front and back, head to toe.

On Halloween eve, I gingerly poke my limbs through the arm and leg holes of the crunchy, delicate outfit, avoiding contact with the fabric like a game of Operation, then wait stiffly by the door with a bowl of Popeyes Candy Sticks until the doorbell rings, accompanied by a pre-pubescent TRICK OR TREAT. Two brothers stand before me. One’s costume is homemade and the other’s is store bought. I give two candy sticks to the former and one to the latter, who stares at his brother’s bowl with his mouth hanging open. Their mother, who stands behind them, tilts her head and frowns at me.

“What’s your costume, mister?” says the store bought kid.

I look down at my costume. Somehow, I had not anticipated this question.

“A bush.”

“A bush isn’t scary,” says the other kid.

“Tell that to Iraq.”

The mother frowns again and steps closer to her kids.

“Or a sixteen-year-old boy.” I couldn’t resist.

The whisper of a smile appears on her lips, then disappears. She asks if I forgot to give Jason a second candy, using that tone parents use with kids who forget to say Please and Thank You.

“No,” I say, mimicking her tone, “I did not.”

My candy supply runs out after fifteen visits, as calculated. For the rest of the night, when the doorbell rings, I open the door and turn my empty bowl upside-down. “Tough luck, kiddos.” They whine, they scowl. One parent asks why I bothered answering the door. Someone needs to teach these brats that not every cry for help will be answered, I want to say, but I keep my mouth shut and shrug.

The pound of ass coffee gradually depletes, in the ensuing days, without a word of my complaint—aside from this journal—and by day eighteen of twenty-one, the early days of despair are a distant trauma. I feel grateful for the two weeks of deprivation, a divine intervention which has allowed the pleasure of my existence to descend yet another rung on the ladder of inconsequentiality, from hot bean water to the lesser luxury of Butter Rice. I boil four cups of rice in a large pot, then fold in a stick of butter and a few teaspoons of salt. Whenever I need to reawaken myself to my life, I heat up a few scoops of the Butter Rice and eat it with the tiniest spoon I own, one of those cocaine spoons from my old days of hedonism, or, alternatively, I eat it grain-by-grain with chopsticks, luxuriating in the procedure.

The lewd decadence of the pre-ass-coffee days has faded away entirely by day twenty.

On day twenty-one, I am back at the coffee shop. Laid out before me are the same two options: the all-caps, black-and-white, sans serif text of the Sam James; the nondescript paper bag of ass. I stand there staring at them for much too long. The barista watches me without interest as I weigh the options, though I am not really weighing. My mind is vacant, pleasantly numb, noticing, instead, the familiar ebbs and flows of the coffee shop. The purging of the steam wand, the hollow tapping against the knock box, dim chatter, girls giggling, Gymnopédies through the speakers, the homeless man who always stops by for a free cup of coffee, who is now standing beside me as I consider the beans—but I am not considering, my mind is made. I do not touch either of the bags.

“I’ll have a hot water with lemon, please.” My grandmother’s classic order. The most severe woman I ever knew.

“A what?”

“A hot water. With a slice of lemon.”

“We don’t have lemons.”

“Just the hot water then.”

The barista pours me a cup of hot water. I tell him to charge me for the homeless man’s coffee and punch in a 10% tip on the checkout machine (he briefly lifted his eyes from the device in his lap), and bump my phone against the machine until it makes a noise. I sip the hot water—which is not ass—during the short walk home, enjoying the autumn leaves. I continue sipping as I transport the espresso machine, the burr grinder, and the barista oat milk from my kitchen to the curb.

The air in the kitchen feels lighter upon my return. I am struck by a desire to fill the newfound spaciousness with some form of pollution. It doesn’t matter what it is. I could scurry back outside to reclaim my so-called possessions. I could play the new Rosalía single my entire generation is gushing about as if they recorded it themselves. I could power swipe on Hinge, making tens of split-second decisions on whether the five details summarizing her life are worthy of the five summarizing mine. I could spend my desire on more desire, logging on to anywebsite.com to browse the images, each of which is not worth a thousand words, but only five, the five words being YOU ARE NOT SUFFERING ENOUGH, with a like or a checkout button beside them. I chuckle at these possibilities as I sip the hot water and spoon some Butter Rice into a bowl. As it warms in the microwave, I sit alone in the spaciousness, doing nothing.

Last week I attended the launch for author/poet Souvankham Thammavongsa’s new novel, Pick a Colour, at the Toronto Reference Library. I came in with high expectations—having enjoyed many of Thammavongsa’s short stories and past interviews—and she did not disappoint. Her speech, like her written word, flitted gracefully from a mischievous smirk to heartfelt poetry and back again, sending ripples through the room as we sat up a bit straighter and shook our heads.

Regrettably, the host who shared Thammavongsa’s stage lacked anything close to the same passion for her medium. By the end of the conversation, his questions (sampled below) were met with audible groans from the crowd. Thammavongsa’s dignified responses, meanwhile, inspired fervent applause—a show of respect perhaps amplified by our collective exhale before the next question arrived.

What stuck with me from the event, more than anything else, was not the host’s questioning (he was out of his element and trying his best). It’s not that he was a white male, or a boomer, or that he traveled to the event from his cottage in a car whose seats, I imagine, are of a supple leather (though he might insist such details are what this letter is about). The most revealing moment was his throwaway comment early in the Q&A, paraphrased below:

Host: I should let you know from the get-go, and somewhat sheepishly, that I never read fiction, but I’m really glad to have been chosen to host this event—it finally gave me an excuse to!

The butterflies set in with this opening admission, and my stomach did not unclench until he left the stage. The dissonance of the interview has stuck with me for over a week, inspiring a sensibility I now wish to exorcise: a clumsy caricature sweeping the globe, whom I’ll title the Fictionless Man.

It should first be clarified that the Fictionless Man (FM from here on out) is not quite so simply a man who does not read fiction. In fact, it would be very FM-pilled to interpret the name so literally. The FM need not be a person who identifies as a man (though he often is) nor is he necessarily a person who doesn’t read fiction (though he often doesn’t).

The guiding principle of the FM is a rejection of uncertainty. Unsolved questions floating in the ether are like mosquitoes buzzing in his ear; he strikes them dead with any one of his doubt-eradicating tools. AI chatbots have improved his proficiency at this task, though many FMs find even the chatbots too balanced and verbose, opting instead for their oldest, trustiest categories of world-minimization: economics (supply, demand) and identity factors (race, religion, sexuality, gender). The FM’s capacity for framing problems under these two umbrellas should not be trivialized; the solutions such framing generates are more coherent, and actionable, than those foolishly drawn from poets or academics, who insist on expanding the world he is trying to narrow. The clarity of his output makes the FM indispensable to corporations, and society more broadly.

The FM does not like being challenged by art. He questions, and is baffled by, the merit awarded to “high art”, a category that tends to lack a clear thesis, or—worse—has a thesis that vaguely contradicts his personal project. He thinks it foolish to continue toiling after anything that AI can produce as well as humans, including art, because the humanity that makes art art is not a critical factor in his assessment of art. Like anything else the FM accepts into his life, the art he embraces serves a productive purpose.

Returning to last week’s book launch. Most of the questions or statements the host brought to Thammavongsa were a thinly-veiled “tell us the actual point of your art. Is it about Race? Diaspora? Gender? Exploitation of immigrants? He was begging for a reductive headline, oblivious to fiction’s pursuit of the opposite; it excavates and widens, unveiling context from which any such themes may (or may not) emerge. Of course, starting an analysis from the bottom-up—with individuals—is too unwieldy for a FM. Individuals take entire novels to explain, which he has already told us he does not have time for.

Invisibility is a recurring word in the buzz around Thammavongsa’s new novel, referring to our failure to see, in this case, the people who do our nails (or deliver our UberEats, or wash our dishes). Where the pace of daily life detaches us such that we cast individuals as categories, or productive units, allowing us to treat them with subtle (or not so subtle) indifference, fiction steps in to prolong our attention away from ourselves. It discourages solipsism by helping us carry the work of seeing the subjectivity of others into real life. The fictionless host did not realize that his questions—each an attempt to flatten Thammavongsa’s round characters—were precisely, and ironically, the invisible-izing force her fiction resists. Each of her responses was a graceful refutation, often starting with well, in the case of my characters…, signifying to the FM that her art was not capable of, nor interested in, speaking for an entire ethnic / professional / gender community, as he so wished for her to do.

Perhaps the most tragic quality of the Fictionless Man is that he does not recognize the humanity he has abandoned; he only makes space for one story, and the story is his.

Since you, beloved readers, are sensitive and intelligent, I’m sure by now you’ve thought—wait, welktober, aren’t you subjecting the FM to the very same reductive minimization you’re critiquing? Hypocrite!

That would be correct. No man meets the extreme conditions I have laid out for the FM. Rather, the FM is a sensibility within all of us. He needs to exist, to some extent; we can’t walk through the world opening every door, expanding every question with nuance; sometimes we need to glance at things, make simplifying judgments, and run with them. Sometimes it is quite appropriate to do so.

I wrote this letter not only to sneer (a little sneering) but to make a clumsy point: my FM is flourishing, always striving to shrink the universe, and frequently succeeding; he is probably flourishing in you, too. Most of us are forced to operate in such a way that demands the FM’s consolidated output. Perhaps by assigning him a title, a recognition of his strengths, weaknesses, desires—almost as if he were a fictional character—we can better acknowledge the FM in ourselves and, importantly, in people with influence and positions of power. The much discoursed conversation between cold-blooded strategist, Ezra Klein, and author of lived experience, Ta-Nehisi Coates, was an excellent illustration of a (healthy! much needed!) debate between a FM and a man dedicated to confronting his own. Shining a spotlight upon your latent FM, as this debate did upon Klein’s, reveals the danger lurking beneath his utility. Notice his detached rhetoric. Give him a gentle pat on the head as he yearns to gobble up the world. Pick up a novel that will lull him to sleep for a while.

Today, an exciting update: my debut short story collection has survived a full read-through without my feeling the need to tear it to pieces. Quite the opposite, in fact; the last page is stained with several tears of joy and relief. The manuscript has been passed off to the more qualified and (hopefully) less destructive hands of my publisher for review.

In light of this milestone, I’m allowing myself the small indulgence of sharing some behind-the-scenes footage of the work that went into these stories. I can only assume that most of my newsletter readers have not read the fiction I’ve published (via trad publishers), which—for better or worse—undergoes much more scrutiny than anything I share via welktober.

Here is a sample of the typical treatment a story receives.

Morning Meditation
First thing in the morning, before starting “real work”, I do what is effectively a meditation in written form. This involves looking at something—a plant, an object, whatever—and writing one page of interesting details observed. I would recommend this to anyone, writer or otherwise, as a supremely unproductive way to start the day. I have been describing the view from my patio, above, every morning for the past four weeks (almost thirty pages!), unearthing wonderful details that have been overlooked for the past five years.

First Draft
The first draft of anything (including this email) is written longhand. If the ideas are spilling out too fast for the pen, I’ll record a voice note to avoid missing a good thought—but that’s a rare, blessed occasion. I stay away from my computer as much as possible. As is true of most writers, my process is largely a negotiation with my inner editor, offering him crumbs to sustain his important work without appeasing him such that he gets greedy and cannibalizes the good writing already done. Edits are much too available on a word processor; MacBooks are Munich for the inner editor.

Note: yes the above is a real first draft, yes it is shitty, and no you need not squint and read it.

Transcribing
Bringing the first draft into the digital realm is my least favourite task, so I prefer to drink alcohol while doing it. I also keep a writer who uses plain, efficient language (e.g. Raymond Carver) within arms reach for when I get discouraged or overzealous with edits.

Why is this my most dreaded task? Because the first draft is almost always shit. This means re-writing, which often kills the few nuggets of sentiment that originally inspired the piece. Once lost, these can be hard to recover. If a piece gets abandoned, it tends to happen during this stage.

In the rare cases where the first draft is not shit, I’m mindlessly transcribing words between paper and screen. There is, as such, no scenario where this task is enjoyed.

Print, Edit by Hand, Update Document, Repeat
A story will go through ~three cycles of this, on average. The first round is often intense (above image = first round), as the changes tend to be structural. Many stories get abandoned here. Second and third round edits tend to occur at the word or sentence level. I prefer to do the latter reads at a cafe, park, or bar, rather than at my desk. I keep my pen in my pocket and try to read them fast, as if I were a normal person.

I have made a point of not buying a printer, and instead printing at the library, which is a 10 minute bike ride away. This adds another layer of friction to editing. It’s not worth a re-reprint for minor word changes, which I often end up undoing a few days later. Once a story feels like it’s at 90%+, my distance from a printer (and my love for trees!) discourages me from needlessly overworking it.

Put the mfs in Order
After doing all of the above ~thirty times and emerging with ~fifteen stories I like, we have enough material for a book, which now needs to be put in a sensible order. I quite enjoyed this process. The stories lived on my bedroom floor for about a week. I’d check the order first thing in the morning and before bed and do little tweaks until a few days passed with no changes.

The little circles on the top left of the folders were my misguided attempts to rank the stories from 1 (best) to 3 (worst), so I could ensure “quality” was distributed across the collection. I eventually abandoned this approach; my concept of good and bad with regards to my work is as fickle as the wind.

Read it Somewhere Peaceful and Weep
Try and breathe. Try not to be self-aggrandizing (like I’m doing now), because it really doesn’t matter; it’s a stack of paper. Pretend you’re at the park reading The Bell Jar or some classic novel—that no matter what your impression is of the work, you’re going to tell people you love it.

Voila
Send the thing to the publisher and emerge from the Hobbit Hole for a while. Thanks for stopping by!

I’m writing today to admit a very bad thing that I did, that I’ve been doing, that I’m still doing. But before getting to the bad thing, I ought to provide some context. So here is the context.

Context

I used to work for a commercial gallery in Toronto. Like most contemporary galleries, it was a lean, scrappy operation—just the Gallery Director, named Alisha, myself, named Georgia, and a roster of eight artists. My title was Assistant Director, which meant I did everything the Gallery Director didn’t want to.

I had been Assistant Director for four years. During this time, Alisha had come to trust me. Like, a lot. The gallery was open Wednesdays through Saturdays, but she only came in on Saturdays, for an hour or two, unless we were installing a show or hosting an opening. That means I was alone in the gallery for 20+ hours a week. I handled correspondence with collectors and artists, ran the newsletter and Instagram, processed orders, closed deals with visitors, booked the flights Alisha was constantly taking, and so on. I did this with little to no oversight. Despite the considerable responsibility I had taken on, I had not received a raise from my $18.75 hourly wage in two years (yes, I asked). Alisha never brought me to Basel or Miami or New York (yes, I asked). She never solicited my input on the gallery’s programming or artist selection (yes, I gave it anyway).

Why stay at such a job, you ask? Well, the answer is rather cliché. My MFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice left me with few other options, and I needed money to maintain an art practice of my own. The job didn’t offer benefits, but neither would the bar or café I’d inevitably work at if not the gallery, which looked better on my CV. And there was the faintest glimmer of hope, I supposed, that Alicia, aged forty-two, might eventually pass me the torch if I stuck around long enough. I knew the operation inside-out, after all.

A more recent responsibility I had been given was to manage the gallery’s new e-commerce platform. Like anyone who works in e-commerce, I had no idea how e-commerce works. We paid a consultant three-quarters my yearly salary to set it up and then it was set up. Orders showed up in my inbox, and I arranged for shipping with our shipper. It was as simple as that.

One morning, several e-commerce emails arrived in rapid succession. A client was trying to place an order for a $6,200 painting. They had tried to checkout four times, but their card kept getting declined. Before I could see what painting it was, the gallery’s phone started ringing. Before I could say hello, a man from Montréal, Daniel Matte, was ranting about how our website was shitty and broken, how badly he had messed up with his boyfriend, how urgently he needed the painting to make amends. He sounded very old, very gay, very rich, and very French. You don’t have to work in art to know this is the Venn Diagram of a client that can ruin your career. I told him not to worry, not to worry. Calmez-vous. With no idea how to troubleshoot the e-commerce, I had him read out his credit card details, which I punched into our terminal manually. Voila, I said. The order had gone through. He thanked me and said his boyfriend will be over within an hour to pick up the painting en-route to Montréal.

I was surprised by how young his boyfriend appeared. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, close to my age, whereas Daniel Matte, based on my LinkedIn triangulation, could not have been younger than fifty. But alas, they were Québécois, and this was the age of Larry Gagosian. I was not in a position to judge. I chatted with the young man amicably, flirtatiously even, before he hoisted the art piece—a fuzzy, ambient abstract wrapped in bubble wrap—out the gallery door. I watched him slide it gently into his trunk from the window. He was a handsome little boy. He did not appear upset, as Daniel had suggested. He seemed thrilled about the art. You’re p’tit jeune loved it, I think, I texted Daniel. With the long leash I had been given, I was always sending playful, indecorous messages to clients. I thought it was appreciated in that uptight world. In fact, I believed my communications were the sole reason for the gallery’s success. It certainly wasn’t from the programming.

I remember the exact moment we received the email from the credit card company, four months later, notifying us about the chargeback on Daniel Matte’s card, which was not, in fact, Daniel’s—Daniel didn’t exist—but a stolen card that “Daniel” had used fraudulently. I was reading an email from one of the gallery’s artists aloud to Alisha, over FaceTime. I still have a screenshot of the artist’s email, which said the following:

I hope you do a show of abstract Totally Original images such as mine, not everything I have is “stellar” but this series of new work is heads above your other abstracts which are mainly derivative of stars like Gerhart Richter and Abstract New York 1950s, Helen Frankenthaler or Joan Mitchell. Just saying, not a criticism. It would be great to get it into a museum or serious collection if you have a chance. One area in which I have no skill is marketing, such as you and Alisha, you are truly talented, amazing and focused. Bravo!

I finished reading the email and we burst out laughing. Then the email from the credit card company arrived. Oh No, I said. A bit of bad with the good, I remember saying—though I wasn’t sure what the good was. I told Alisha everything. All the details you already know, and more. Both of us had forgotten about the sale by then. It had hardly been discussed, all those months ago, beyond a quick debrief about Daniel’s dramatic phone call.

Alisha’s face deflated. You’re an idiot, she said. No, no, I said. I am not. Listen. What you have to understand is that this man, over the phone, well, how do I put it. He was gay. He was as gay as the sky. And when a man like that makes you an urgent offer and slaps down his credit card, you’ve got to accept it.

I was not being funny. I believed this to be incontrovertibly true, based on my observations in the art world. Also, I didn’t feel an ounce of remorse about the mistake. I was running the gallery for the next five hours, for less than $100, while Alisha was at her father’s property in Biarritz.

Well, you know how this works, Alisha said.

No, I do not.

We’ve already paid the artist her 50% and, for obvious reasons, we’re not asking for it back. This story can’t get out to anyone, in fact. It’s embarrassing. We need to cover that 50%. You need to cover it.

I think it’s illegal for you to ask me to do that.

Don’t be ridiculous, Georgia. You know we can’t afford a $3,200 hit. And I know you probably can’t either but listen. How about this. Hmmm, OK. I’ll cover half the 50% personally. That’s $1,600. So you need to find $1,600 and there’s no rush. So don’t worry about that. That’s fair, isn’t it? Just put aside a bit at a time, and when you have it, let me know. I won’t even ask about it. It’s just an eventual thing. I’ve got to go, hunny. It’s getting late here.

Alisha hung up. I closed down the gallery, even though it had only been open for seventeen minutes, and went for a long walk. Reflecting on the incident with Daniel, my mistake was obvious, and stupid. But it all happened so fast. From the point of view of the criminal, his was a well-targeted scheme. Galleries were overstretched, their employees often underpaid, non-technical, lacking in business acumen. Despite their practiced air of indifference, most were desperate to make a sale. The only part that didn’t add up was how the criminal was making money off the art. The prices these mid-tier artists sold for existed largely because of the gallery’s reputation; it seemed improbable they would fetch anything close to the same on the black market.

Then I turned to the other issue. I did not have $1,600. In fact, I had $3,400 in credit card debt and a student loan and rent in the most expensive city in the country. I knew that Alisha’s gallery sold at least $20,000 in art per month, based on the invoices I processed. Minus 50% commission, that’s $120,000 a year, before expenses. Not that much money either, I supposed. But Alisha was always taking art out of the office that never came back, without a paper trail, which led me to believe she was selling it outside of my purview to conceal how much the gallery really made. I don’t know, maybe I was being paranoid. The fact remained, I could not afford $1,600.

I happened to run into fake-Daniel’s fake-boyfriend twice, around the city, in the ensuing months. The first encounter was two months after the chargeback. By then, I had set aside twenty-eight dollars to pay Alisha. I was walking down Dufferin Street when he walked right past me. We made eye contact, though I couldn’t recall where I recognized him from. I kept walking for fifteen seconds before realizing, then spun around to see him sprinting down the street. He disappeared into an alley and I started laughing. The idiot thought I would chase him. It was thirty-two degrees with the humidex and I was wearing my ballet flats, one of which had the sole re-attached with Krazy Glue.

He could not get away so easily on our second encounter, which occurred in a tiny gallery space. Not Alisha’s gallery, but a very similar one in the area. In fact, if you put the two gallery interiors and the work of their artists side-by-side, only about 100 people in Toronto would be able to discern the difference. The paintings on display were also soft, ambient abstracts. I walked into the room to find Daniel’s fake-boyfriend standing there, in front of a large painting, wearing skinny jeans. Skinny jeans. He had so much to learn.

I went right up to him.

So, ambient abstracts are the play for the black market, I said. Smart. Not too distinctive for the police. Big normie market. Easy to pawn off.

I was standing at his side, staring at the painting, as if we were a couple. I almost wanted to grab his hand. Not aggressively—tenderly. He turned to face me. His expression gave nothing away. Pardon? A french accent.

What I want to know is how you make the money, I whispered, shaking my fist. Where do you sell these stolen paintings. We filed a police report. I scoured Marketplace and Kijiji. You must have to take them so far away from here. Further than Montréal, surely. Alberta? Or down south.

He walked over to a different painting, clearly perturbed.

Listen, I said. I grabbed his arm. There were lots of people around and I’m a pretty girl, so it was fine. I owe my boss for that painting. You wanna steal from a stuck-up gallery, I get it. But look at me. I’m a fucking Chinatown art wench, not some trust fund kid. I eat A&W three nights a week. And I know who your daddy is. I’m onto your shit.

He pulled his arm away and left the gallery in a hurry. I followed right behind him. I’m not sure where I found this bravery. I guess it’s because he was just a kid, like me. A skinny little bitch with curly hair and he owed me $1,600.

Across the street from the gallery entrance, he mounted a motorcycle and put on a full-face helmet. I approached his bike without slowing. When I got close enough, he stuffed his hand in his pocket. Don’t come any closer, he said. I swear to god.

His accent was hard to take seriously. It was so dumb and French. And I knew, for a fact, that he didn’t have a weapon, because I could see every outline in the pockets of those skinny jeans. I’m not here to rat you out, you little punk, I said. I want you to take me on your bike. To your boss. Take me to Daniel.

Why the fuck would I do that.

I turned around and looked at the facade of the contemporary gallery. That fluorescent white cube beckoning through the pristine windows, the fashionable people staring at the walls pretending to know what they were looking at, the bottle of lukewarm sparkling wine by the entrance, the gorgeous gallerina at the desk with a bored, vacant expression. She had been in my MFA program, too. I had read her thesis. With those beauty and brains, she could go anywhere, do anything.

I turned back to him and took a step closer to his bike. I patted the leather of the seat, then put all my weight against it through my fist. Take me to Daniel, boy, I said. Because I know exactly how these galleries work. I’ve been running one for four years. And I’m looking for a better job.

I’ll start this letter by affirming to you that I would never condone violence against another living being. In the rare instances where violence must be justified—as a necessary measure, or an unintended outcome, in the pursuit of one’s safety, for example—it is a net negative for all involved. That’s obvious. I didn’t even need to say that, but I did.

And now that I’ve made that clear, I can tell you that like anyone else, I succumb to the occasional act of violence. I am not a violent person; there is, in my opinion, no such thing. Violence lives outside of us, we succumb to it or we don’t, and the more we do, the more likely we are to succumb again. Considering the low-grade anger, bordering on violence, that surrounds my day-to-day—the man outside my window, for instance, who is laying on his horn and yelling English threats at the Uber Delivery guy in front of him, who is yelling Punjabi threats back, or the ear-splitting celebration laps of death machines at the Canadian Air Show each Labour Day weekend that not a single Toronto resident asked for—I am proud that the frequency with which I succumb to it is relatively low. But I do succumb. Let me explain how, and why.

I recently came home from a long trip. Having the unfortunate combination of compulsive cleanliness needs, and a housemate, means that the house I return to is always in worse condition than it was left. This is most evident when I go away in the summer months, when bugs are known to have sex and birth children in the comfort of our homes, protected from the cutthroat conditions outside. During this time, household bug volumes increase about twofold if I am home, and tenfold if I am not. The bugs are not disturbed by my housemate, it would seem, and I suppose that’s because he’s not particularly disturbed by them. From afar, during my travels, I imagine my house to be a peaceful, benevolent ecosystem. I was taught about this in Biology class—it’s called a commensalist relationship, in which one species, the bugs, benefits greatly, while the other species is unaffected. Sadly, I do not possess such magnanimity. Like most people, bugs instil in me a moderate revulsion, which I would attribute to their angularity, crunchiness, and ability to occupy spaces I cannot see. Often the revulsion is benign enough not to act upon. But there is one species that flourishes in the muggy Toronto summers, Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly, that produces a rage within me I have not met anywhere else.

Now might be a good time to mention that I tried to be vegan for one year. And for almost six years, I have been vegetarian. Wait—scratch that. About a year ago, I started eating the occasional wild-caught fish. And I eat eggs, but they are the $10 free-range ethical ones, whatever that means. In the age of factory farming and food scarcity and climate change, I have not a single argument against the merits of veganism—ethically, it is the correct choice—but failing to live up to one’s ethical standards is part of being human, and I am a human.

So anyway, I plopped down my suitcase and explored the house I had been away from for a month. There were the typical minor offenses: the floors needed a deep-clean; my bedding more ruffled than I’d normally leave it, suggesting someone crashed without my knowledge; the Tupperware in the pantry separated from their lids—all things that could be quickly undone. I saved the kitchen for last, expecting the worst, and the worst was confirmed. Drosophila melanogaster, fucking everywhere. In the compost bin with their little maggot babies. Hovering around the garbage can. Zigzagging around anything that smelled like something, moving so sluggishly that they were practically begging to die. I didn’t unpack my bags, as I normally do first thing upon returning from a trip. I didn’t even change outfits from the plane. My priorities had been reshuffled.

Now, remember. I am not a violent person. Over the years, I have developed a system to humanely deal with Drosophila melanogaster. Step one is to create an ethical trap. The trap consists of a shallow bowl—a soy sauce saucer, for instance—in which I put a few tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, along with 3-5 soft blueberries, and a drop of soap. I then stretch saran wrap tightly over the bowl and poke 3-5 holes in the wrap with a push-pin. Once a fly enters the trap, for some reason it has no idea how to get out. They can’t climb upside-down on saran wrap, they don’t even try—perhaps because the transparency of it breaks their tiny brains, and they think it’s the sky. Most of them live and reproduce on the blueberries. Should any venture into the vinegar moat, the drop of soap breaks the surface tension, ensuring they drown immediately, thus humanely. Every twenty-four hours or so, I dump the contents outside so the mostly-surviving flies can carry on elsewhere. Then I rebuild the trap.

With the unprecedented fruit fly volumes after my recent trip, however, managing the traps was becoming a burden. Blueberries are expensive, as is apple cider vinegar. One night, I did not feel like going outside to empty a very full trap. Without thinking too much about it, I put it in the freezer. Thirty minutes later, I took it out. All the flies were dead. I told myself they were like frogs in a boiling pot; they never knew they were dying and then they died. This apologue was hardly applicable—the freezer attack was not gradual—and even if it was, it wouldn’t change the fact that I was boiling metaphorical frogs and freezing literal bugs alive. But that was my justification. Gradually, this indifference expanded to new realms. If a particularly juicy fruit fly was hovering in the open air, I would smack it between my palms as if on autopilot. CLAP. I would open my hands to a little dead thing, a tiny smear of blood, which would bring me a weird, carnal satisfaction, then I would wash it down the sink.

One time, I went on a fruit fly rampage. I’m not sure what set it off. I clapped one fly, then about thirty more. I kicked the garbage and compost bins repeatedly to release them, and continued my mass murder. I took down mothers, fathers, children, entire lineages, in a matter of minutes. It was fun. I was having a great time.

Another time I sat down on my toilet and on the floor, beside my thumb toe, a beetle was flipped upside-down, its limbs swiping uselessly at the air. It was trying with all its might to flip itself over. What a stupid creature, I thought, cruelly. I didn’t flip it over. I sat down on the toilet a few hours later and it was still there flailing, albeit a bit less. A day later it was still there, still upside-down, but dead.

I am not a violent person, I wrote in my journal, while reflecting on the 15-minute rampage. One is forced to do things for the safety of themselves, and by extension, their home. Flies are stupid, filthy, transient creatures. They make babies on your tomatoes and your bananas, proliferating quickly; leave them be and you’ll be outnumbered a million to one. This home—this set of bricks and appliances, protected by a piece of paper called a deed, which I entered into some years ago and will soon exit—takes precedence over an army of creatures whose brain cells have a thousandth the capacity of mine, who wake up and die in a matter of weeks. One must be careful about who they admit into their home. I wrote out this justification on paper, against the kitchen table of solid oak, feeling good about the sturdiness of my life, my surroundings, my ideas. My housemate entered the kitchen and opened the fridge. Two fruit flies were hovering around his head as he rummaged around. He didn’t notice them; he was indifferent, he was humming a song. One of the flies even landed on his hat, as if they were already acquainted, crawling towards his ear as if about to share a secret. I put down my pen and raised my clapping hands. The murderous rage struck me fast and hard, the attack straightforward and irresistible. This time, it had nothing to do with the fly.

In the Parable of the burning house1 from the Lotus Sutra, children play in a room of toys with such contentment that they fail to notice their house is on fire. Their parent urges them to leave, but they are unwilling to part with their toys, and the parent cannot carry them out due to a narrow exit. The parent is only able to convince the children to leave with the lie that the very same toys await them outside.

The parable suggests that earthly life consists of a series of burning houses, each threatened by fires of varying shape and size, each full of toys urging us to stay. It emphasizes the need for constant leaps of faith away from the flames—even when such leaps require us to deceive ourselves or suspend our belief systems, which often exist in service of our toys. The narrow exit implies that we alone can enact this escape.

I am no Buddhist, but there is a mystical quality in the way this parable inserted itself into my queue (interrupting Connie Converse, of course) while I was proofreading the short stories I’ve been writing over the past half-decade, trying to decide which ones to include in my forthcoming collection. I paused to absorb it, then continued flipping through pages in the manuscript, chuckling at the burning houses my narrators were stuck within. They keep failing to take the escape routes whispering (or screaming) at them from the pages. The pieces are, of course, largely inspired by my life; many of these burning houses are mine.

Perhaps you, clever readers, have already deduced what my toys are. If you know me personally, you might have been aware of what they were long before reading this. For me, however, it took the intervention of this parable to accept that my most cherished toys are these words you’re reading, these Lego blocks I’ve assembled into elaborate structures. Give me a spare moment and I’ll return to the play room. Have you seen this structure? It won an award. With 3,000 blocks, I recreated the entire contents of my burning house, documenting each of my burns while flames continued to lick at my extremities.

Most artists characterize their suffering through their work—this is nothing new. Nor does it devalue the art. The art becomes a toy, however, when its achievement—the satisfaction of completing it—absolves the maker of corrective action. Addictions are good at convincing the addict of their productivity. Substances trick the abuser’s body into thinking it needs them to function; a wealth-obsessed person marvels at her growing portfolio before returning to the hamster wheel to accrue more wealth; I, the writer, take pride in finding new ways to carve through (or conceal) my issues with language, laying out the results for anyone to see. I label this growth and carry on doing nothing about the issues.

Two examples of art-toys, of the lowest and highest order, respectively: the numerous viral “art critics” of Substack who lack a basic understanding of what critical engagement entails, pouring the full weight of their fragile egos into writing that shallowly demeans or praises the work of others; Alice Munro—legendary short story writer, champion of women’s stories—failing to confront the very same raging fire in her own house2 that gets explored with tenderness and lucidity in so much of her fiction.

Parables are not laws, of course; metaphors can be twisted and broken. I believe that art can simultaneously function as the distracting toy and the concerned parent. My fiction, as a toy, digests, dramatizes, diagnoses. Its service as the parent might come from encouraging characters to brave a dangerous escape. It’s an easy excuse, while locked inside of a burning house, to say that my narrator’s fulfillment would be saccharine, or cliche. But people in the real world surprise themselves every day. They abandon their toys and step into burning hallways. They get scorched, they relapse, they find exits—the outcomes matter less than the leap of faith that was attempted.

Could finding the right words on the page summon bravery outside of it? I suppose that’s my leap of faith. Of course, there’s always the possibility that this letter is just another toy.

Loosely inspired by The Silence, a short story by Zadie Smith.

It starts with a forced silence. Later it might not be forced, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The silence is not yet inside of you; it has to be sought out, manufactured. Today, you found it hiding in the extra-silent study room of the already-silent public library. Last night, your living room was not quite perfectly silent until you drank exactly three ounces of liquor; no less, no more. Some go into nature to find it, others meditate for hours, and many, many, spend their lives frustrated because they don’t find enough. It’s there, though. That's the frustrating part. It’s always there, it’s just skittish. The world hasn’t been kind to it.

Sometimes you will annoy others, or yourself, in pursuit of the silence. Like when staying at your parent’s house and they leave the news on—an ambient soundtrack of Gaza Epstein Forest Fire Zelenskyy—and you turn it off every time because they’re not really listening, and then they turn it on an hour later, disturbed by the silence, and five minutes later you turn it off again. Or when the silence avails itself somewhere you can’t get to because you’re at a dinner party, and everyone’s words that were so charming seconds before are now grating and artificial.

You eventually reach one of those silent places. For a while, nothing happens. The silence festers around you. You are not so porous to it, but the heightened levels in the air cause a gradual, imperceptible seeping. After six minutes, or forty-five, you notice that your brain has fallen silent. Your body is shocked by this. It registers the silence as an illness. And then it makes you sick. You vomit something out. Poetry or a floral arrangement or a dance move or a compliment to your partner. The puke is sitting there, on the page, in the vase, in the pose you’ve struck, in your partner’s surprised face, and you look at it and think, where did that come from.

Now the reader is thinking, ah, the writer symbolizes artistic inspiration, or the creative impulse, with silence. That’s absolutely what the writer is doing. But that’s not quite right. The silence precedes inspiration or impulse. It has no purpose. It is a formless opening, inside of which you are totally safe. Where the world is exactly what it is. Inspiration and impulse are rarely silent, or purposeless, or safe. You kick off into their turbulence from the safety of silence. You don’t even kick, you are launched. The codes are built into your system like the action potential of a cell. Attempting to wade in from the not-silence leaves you floundering; you lack momentum.

But there is little use in thinking about the above. This is not a step-by-step process. There is only one step. You are called to a silent place and then you submit to it. After each instance of absorbing the silence and spewing something out, a little stays with you. Silence accumulates. You won’t need to extract it as often from external places. You’ll produce it in surroundings that are not silent at all. Others will begin to sense it upon you. Some will not appreciate this—remember, the silence is toxic. It can’t be bought or sold, it contains nothing of the ego; modernity has no use for it.

But other silent-seekers will be drawn to you, the same way you were beckoned to the study room in the public library, where you sat and puked out this letter. They will happen upon you as if by chance and you will give away your silence to them without question. When it makes them ill, you’ll silently encourage them. You’ll realize these people are everywhere, calling silently to each other. Despite every barrier erected, they, and you, will keep converging in an expanding constellation of silence. You’ll resist the temptation to call yourself anything—not artists, intellectuals, monks. You’ll resist the temptation to interpret whatever spews out from your silence, to label it art, to assign it adjectives and categories. You’ll return to the silence to mine it, nurture it, share it, forgetting the need to insult it with explanations. Unlike everything else in this noisy world, it has already said what it needs to say.