RSVP!

Good morning everyone!

I returned from a three-week visit to Colombia on Sunday. It was a wonderful time, between an Indian / Colombian crossover wedding, catching rides in dinky busses along the Caribbean coast, spectacular sunsets in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, and acquiring altitude sickness in Bogotá resulting in a pleasant sort of fugue state which forced my body to slow down. I read Jane Eyre for the first time. I accepted invitations to two writing residencies, one which I’ll be attending in July and another in May next year. I saw a top-three, if not all-time favourite art exhibition in Bogotá, which I will write about as soon as I find the time. But presently there is no time to be had, for it seems that in my time away, my book became a real thing: typesetting is complete, ARCs are being distributed, and, of particular concern for this letter, launch events are being planned! (It’s all painfully last minute, but I’ve learned that such is the nature of indie publishing.)

The pub date for my debut story collection, We Are Busy Being Alive (full details here, if you missed the announcement post) is June 30th. I’ll be having my TORONTO LAUNCH on that very evening. The day after is Canada Day, which means it’s a holiday, which means we can party.

​The launch is at my favourite bookstore in the city: TYPE Books on Queen W. I'll be reading work from the collection and having a conversation with Claire Foster, who is an author, translator, kind human, and bookseller at TYPE. The book will be available for purchase on-site.

​There will be also be an afterparty nearby. Details TBA.

If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP! This will help me ensure there is enough space at the venue(s) and that you can all be adequately nourished in body and mind.

RSVP

OK, that’s all for now. Here are a few pictures from Colombia. Have a nice day.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

While everyone (incl. me) is logging their little entries on Letterboxd and Goodreads, frothing at the mouth to declare the top albums of 2025, repping their preferred Espresso Martini spots or dive bars to cosplay blue collar, I am left wondering why our generation’s obsession with shallow, caption-ranking-listicle-driven discourse has not extended to urban greenery.

Here I am to fill the void.

I was raised in a young prairie town with a cool, dry climate and short summers—a region we might consider “third world” or “emerging” for the kingdom Plantae, particularly trees. Lacking adequate greenery to engage with, I turned, as any teenager would, to drugs. I told my parents I was taking the dog out with my first-ever joint hidden in my pocket, smoked the entire thing in one sitting, and promptly had a panic attack in the grass.

My sanity was upheld only thanks to a White Spruce tree, which I watched sway in the park for 45 minutes. This was a pivotal moment in my relationship with the world of trees. Inanimate lumps of wood transformed, just then, into beings I could whisper telepathically to and would eventually come to love. If we can borrow from the language of sexual awakenings, the White Spruce on the southeast corner of Elboya Park was my Elastigirl.

Today, I am thankful for my vegetatively impoverished childhood, which led me to access an appreciation for urban flora that my Vancouver friends, with their old-growths, and my Toronto friends, with their spring blossoms and fall colours, often take for granted. After living in Toronto now for over a decade, I can still proudly say that every spring, summer, fall overwhelms me with frondescent inspiration. And this does not just apply to Toronto, which is a good but not great home for trees—my travel photos almost entirely consist of trees or art. They are one and the same.

A few weeks ago, I happened upon a great, albeit neglected website which documents Toronto wildlife sightings, including a well-populated Trees & Shrubbery section. The page’s early internet aesthetics feel very 2025 (unintentionally), though the last logging appears to have been made in 2021. Tickled by this project, I emailed the website admin to congratulate them, hoping they might pick the project back up. I like the idea of an app for documenting foliage. But perhaps it is for the best that we cannot attach our egos to trees via curated digital profiles and shareable collections, to inevitably be monetized.

The discovery of the website above + having taken shelter under so many leafy canopies during Toronto’s month-long heat wave inspired me to share a few of my favourite tree sightings. I think everyone should know thy favourite tree. It is easier than knowing thyself, and philosophically more gratifying since the latter propagates our already inflated sense of self rather than our place in a larger world. Accordingly, I will be asking you about your favourite trees, in your respective cities, next time I see you. Please be ready for the question or feel free to email/DM me a picture + approx. location.

Without further ado,

This dawn redwood is a discovery from just this week. I saw an Instagram story containing its majesty and contacted the poster for an ID. He was wise to not give me exact coordinates, simply telling me it's in High Park, thus prompting a treasure hunt in which I biked back and forth along the shores of Grenadier Pond for an hour or so until spotting it. She lives in a secluded spot with a bench right beneath her, where I finished reading My Beautiful Friend while the sun set, undoubtedly a *chef’s kiss* summer moment.

This saucer magnolia is not my favourite in Toronto per se but it’s an 8/10 tree plus bonus points for being on my favourite street, Rusholme Rd, somewhere between College and Bloor. I caught this lovely picture of the tree in full spring blossom in May of this year.

This weeping willow on Argyle St is probably my favourite in the city. It dominates the quiet little side street. On windy days it dances and sways not just with grace but precarity, a tightrope that any life-well-lived should straddle. The humans who share the space installed a steel beam which runs vertically beside the trunk. I couldn’t figure out what the beam was achieving without trespassing, but I’m glad to know we are doing something to extend its presence. Who knows how much longer it will be there.

Have a nice weekend!

Tatum Dooley of Art Forecast recently shared a letter about the awkwardness of art openings and tips on how to navigate them more comfortably. I appreciated her open acknowledgement of this topic, which might seem trivial on the surface but has real implications for the accessibility of contemporary art—an issue I take much interest in. It’s nice to know that well-connected people are not immune to, or dismissive of, the social tensions which surround these events.

While Tatum’s advice is widely applicable, her letter was tailored to artists seeking gallery connections. I believe there is another cohort that needs hand-holding on this topic, perhaps even more so than artists: those who simply enjoy, or wish to enjoy, being part of their arts community. Lacking an expansive art vocabulary, connections, or an express purpose for being there, this cohort often feels silently excluded from gallery events.

One of the most common questions I get at openings is: Are you an artist? While the question isn’t meant to be exclusionary, it’s easy to interpret it that way. Posed differently, it becomes: Why else would you be here? I feel it’s important to emphasize that there is a perfectly valid (albeit rarely acted upon) desire to be involved in one’s arts community as an enthusiast, or for largely social reasons. No one should feel ashamed by this. Visual art is fun and challenging, artists are amongst the most interesting and involved people in their communities, we live in cities to expand our parameters and meet people from all walks of life, and galleries attract a fascinating (and beautiful!) cohort. Though they often don’t feel like it, openings are designed to welcome the wider public into the gallery network. They benefit greatly from a buzzing crowd, and the more diverse the visitors, the more welcoming the event feels to others.

It thus falls upon you, reader, to not self-exclude.

As an introvert who has weathered the awkwardness of many openings, alone, without the designation of “art professional” nor contacts in art, I’d like to share a few tidbits of my own on this subject. This might be thought of as a philosophical add-on to Tatum’s more practical pointers on etiquette.

I think the most important point to acknowledge, at risk of being obvious (it wasn't to me!), is that the art tends to be secondary at an opening. Especially if the room is full, which is the goal. In early welktober days, I went to openings to get ideas for my pieces. This never worked. There simply isn’t enough space to engage with the art. Maybe you’re different, and can shut off the social activity around you, but I repeat: that’s not really the point of an opening. Should this be your intent, you’ll fare better when the gallery is empty and quiet (I love a Friday afternoon), or during the artist talk. By all means, have a walk around and enjoy the art, but if you’re going on opening night, you’re going first and foremost to socialize.

Chatting with people at the opening may very well result in an insight or connection to the work that no amount of silent staring or studying of the exhibition text could achieve. But I want to caution people against expecting this. I believe that most of the anxiety surrounding art events is rooted in the expectation of unearthing some golden insight, or having a conversation more elevated than small talk, or what would occur at a bar.

Please remember that talking about visual art is hard. It’s not your first language. This is why art writing exists—to translate. Most of the time it fails (unless I do it ha ha). Many artists who created the damn thing dread talking about it more than any other part of the process. Accordingly, temper your expectations around your own capacity for spontaneous art dialogue. Listen around and you’ll notice that many regulars and arts professionals are not talking all that deeply about the art. They’ll surely say, at minimum, a quick congrats! or it looks amazing!, but they are not seeking perfection, or making the moment about them. I am not discouraging you from sharing genuine questions or comments about the art. But if you find yourself struggling after some elusive, lighting-in-a-bottle statement, you’re likely better off asking the artist how their night is going, or complimenting their outfit (they’re probably serving).

I am ultimately petitioning for more acceptance—for yourself, and others—around processing within art dialogue. We should not be expected to walk out of the theatre, close the book, or lift the needle from the record, with a concrete sense of whether we liked the work and why, let alone an understanding of the more complex feelings it evoked. The more interesting the work, the longer this processing tends to take. To try and rush it usually results in an unsavoury flattening of the art which I wrote about here. It’s perfectly fine to shrug and say that you don’t know how you feel about it yet.

I close, however, with one word of warning: an ambivalent response is not recommended on opening night, the point of which is to celebrate the artist and the show. This is the wrong setting to shrug and express indifference. Per Tatum’s tips on etiquette—the number one thing to avoid at an art opening is negativity, or anything that could be perceived as such. Your words don’t have to win the Nobel Prize, but they should be kind.

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I recently slipped into a rage bait vortex of content creators who go to contemporary exhibitions to shit on the art. Perhaps you’ve seen this. They film a pile of garbage in a white room, then flip the camera and say, see now look, this is what modern art has become. Woke faux intellectuals, rich people, blank canvasses, tax shelters, circle jerk, illuminati, etc. Most commenters laugh and say good riddance to art. The art loyalists open their lengthy rebuttals with first of all, this is contemporary art not modern art which is so annoying that you don’t read any further. Trolls find a way to feast on the earnestness of any well-argued points. Such engagement massively outweighs the handful of 🔥 and 👏🏽 comments in the gallery’s install shot carousel. Contemporary art is served to the masses on social platforms often through a lens of ridicule.

This content exploits the very real challenge contemporary visual art faces in asserting itself through the mediation of screens, which strip it of often necessary context. We exist in a moment when context is rarely desired, where the success of an art project is measured (by many) for its ability to immerse and tidily resolve in as little time as possible. I wrote, in a past letter, that visual artists should care more about immersing viewers and rely less on the project’s stated purpose, but that’s not to say I want art to be made digestible for those who bring nothing to it. If the content creators from paragraph 1, who have already made up their minds before stepping into the gallery, continue to feel excluded from visual art, I’m not convinced that the art world is worse off for it.

That’s not to say I don’t sympathize with their and their follower’s grievances. For the love of a sweeping statement, I’ll go ahead and say that of the mainstream contemporary art forms, visual art is the one that’s least willing to adhere to the demands of viewers and the least willing to meet people where they are. Many people perceive even middlebrow art as being too academic, intellectual, ambiguous, or self-obsessed to be genuinely in touch with society; it exists largely for the sake of itself. I think this assessment is valid.

On the surface, to agree with such a claim feels like a fatal blow to art. But then you ponder the aforementioned qualities: academic, intellectual, ambiguous (searching), self-obsessed — isn’t that exactly how you want your art club to be? This club formed around people who are… obsessed with art. Most of whom would pursue it regardless of the “market” that latched onto it. It’s not the art club’s fault that it appeals to an outsized number of hot / rich / famous people who may or may not care about art. It would be foolish not to welcome this cohort with open arms. The vast majority in the club, however, the worker bees of the art world, care a lot about the actual art. They are not cool and exclusive, they are academic and nerdy and would probably be delighted if asked about their weird project at your next dinner party (though their answer might be annoying).

Contemporary visual art has plenty of issues. But when we look to the other mainstream art industries for guidance, perhaps we realize that it’s not in as bad of shape as it's made out to be — at least philosophically. Here are some cases for why.

*Note: I’m largely omitting the literary publishing industry as a reference because I’m a wee baby about to enter it and manifesting perfection. It’s my newsletter I’ll be delusional if I want to.*

Visual art is OK with making you work.

Relative to the rampant dumbing down of film and TV thanks to overlords opting for lazy recycling over original content, contemporary art’s comfort in making you labour to understand it, and not caring if you don’t, might be seen as a mark of integrity which survived through to the institutional level. Artists are making art for themselves and their colleagues, dialoguing with each other through projects which are often difficult to access as a result. The work can, at times, feel tone deaf and circular, but the general process serves to elevate artistic practice. Unlike three quarters of Netflix slop, it wasn’t designed as background noise for your scrolling comfort.

Commercial galleries as power brokers are far from perfect, but they’re good.

Relative to the gouging of artists which occurs at the hands of Spotify and other music streamers, the commercial galleries (who are the primary brokers) of the art world feel like angels. Yes, they take a chunky commission on sales (~50%), and some have reputations for withholding funds from artists and other shady behaviours, but many, many gallerists are beloved by their artists with whom they have long standing and mutually beneficial relationships. Most gallerists are not living the lavish lifestyle their Instagram feeds might suggest; they are cobbling grant (or daddy’s) funds together and breaking even on costs, often sustaining themselves on passion. Their functionality is more akin to niche, indie labels or collectives doing whatever they can to elevate their cohort. There are monopolistic forces at the top, no doubt, but nowhere near what exists in music, film, TV.

The pricing model sucks for us, but arts workers need to get paid.

Contrary to the race-to-the-bottom price models of streamers, visual art has the opposite issue: gallerists prop up prices so as to not undermine their collectors’ portfolios, to the detriment of artists who aren’t selling due to said prices. Also because galleries are not low-cost operations — they ship delicate art to fairs around the globe and pay rent in the most expensive cities. Yes, there are problems with this: it sucks that few can buy art except for the rich; gallery pricing can feel arbitrary and exploitative; there is a huge revenue gap between haves and have-nots artists. But on the flip side, there remains an expectation that even mid-tier or emerging artists should respect and uphold a price point that, if they were selling, would award them a living wage. The price point is delusional for many artists, but at least they are aspiring in the right direction. Those who complain about the exploitation of artists in other industries while complaining about the price point of visual art need to reconcile what it means to give an artist a living wage.

Public exhibition is the gold standard.

Per the previous point, you and I probably won’t get to own the art of highly successful artists. But their work almost always passes through the hands of commercial galleries and institutions who adhere, often with great care, to a tradition of public exhibition which allows anyone to experience the art. During these exhibitions, sales are often not the primary metric of success. In many cases, top-selling artists subsidize exhibitions with artistic merit but low commercial viability (e.g. a multimedia installations). Quality and originality of programming continues to be a key metric in the perception of institutions and galleries. And the industry demands people to leave home and see the work in real life. These standards could be considered miracles in 2025.

Art objects will remain objects.

Basically all the shittiness in other art industries relative to which visual art feels OK comes at the hands of streamers. So that’s what I’ll close on. The majority of visual art objects cannot and will not have their experiences mediated by digital platforms. Other popular art forms—music, film, literature—can be parsed onto the screen with minor loss of experiential quality. Sure, nothing beats a concert or a cinema with a buzzing crowd, but we can throw on Tiny Desk or Prime Video and correctly claim to have experienced the art. The same could even be said for theatre productions, I would imagine, although I hope this isn’t happening.

Conversely, it is almost impossible for me to feel that I’ve experienced visual art (let alone write about it) without having viewed the work in person. AR tools that let you tour an exhibition from your laptop are awful and I don’t see them improving anytime soon. Few people would claim to have experienced an artist’s work after scrolling their feed, or claim to have experienced an exhibition from the gallery’s installation shots. This might be an argument for art’s irrelevance (it can’t remain competitive in a culture dominated by screens), but I disagree. As I write this, my smart TV plays a screensaver of Google Arts & Culture, rotating pics of iconic artworks, none of which I could ever claimed to have “experienced” — and thank god for that. It's on my bucket list to see The Scream at the National Museum in Oslo.

TL;DR
If your criticisms towards the state of contemporary visual art hinge upon it being an inferior experience via digital mediation, or because it feels like an overly challenging, academic, or self-obsessed club, consider the possibility that these are its best qualities. It sustains itself on its own interest, stays connected through public gathering, and doesn’t pay much attention to how it is perceived from afar. That’s how the best clubs work.

Here are some recent engagements with my local catdom xoxo

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You read it correctly — that thing is a watercolour.

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“I sometimes use [Photoshop], but I’d prefer not to anymore — it solves too many problems for me.” Lansdowne’s response to a question about how he maps out his paintings. He motioned to Supply Line Shrine, above, as an example of a piece he didn’t use Photoshop to plan. It’s one of the best paintings in the show and clearly the crowd favourite. I somehow doubt that’s a coincidence.

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Given the technical difficulty of these works, you’d think some problem solving assistance would be welcomed by the artist. But his response speaks to the importance of ambiguity in these paintings. To go a bit meta, the difficulty in making them feels worthy of the impossible task of unearthing why one is compelled to make them. I’m conscious of not puncturing that mystery with too precise of language.

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I wrote in this letter about a meditation I do often: letting my eyes fall on whatever they find interesting and mentally noting its details. Unwittingly, it has helped me recognize what piques my visual interest. My eyes reach for moments of contrast and dividing lines. I find enclosures for objects and enjoy when they feel correctly stowed away. A chatbot could surely explain the compositional theory behind this, but satisfaction from a quick answer has been on the decline since the advent of SEO articles. Not knowing is fabulous.

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What do we spend the majority of our hours looking at? The blackness behind closed eyelids, technically. But our eyes don’t tolerate that abyss for long; our brains fill the emptiness with sights and sounds. I wake up and hurriedly jot my dreams into bullet points, snapping the journal shut before my day-mind can attack it with conclusions. There is sufficient wonder in documenting whatever my subconscious happened upon.

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Remember typing questions into AskJeeves? Who was Jeeves and why did we trust him? Did anyone use Quora?

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After closed eyelids, the next majority share of my looking hours is donated to the computer screen. Feeding the pixels is a universe somehow more incomprehensible than the contents of dreams, for dreams are constrained to one brain left to its weirdness. Each browser tab, conversely, is a portal into every curiosity that infects every brain, and nowadays, if the portal falls short we can produce our desires with a quick prompt.

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This digital madness demands order. To not use folder structures, stratified playlists, spreadsheet grids, bookmarks, is to flirt with insanity. A desktop screen with misc files floating around like landmines is enough to rupture my overstimulated brain. But equally absurd are my attempts to manage the overload. Saved posts, linked essays, ToDo lists, photo albums. Boxes dragged into other boxes. I no longer remember where items in some containers came from, or the path I followed to discover them. I could spend an entire lifetime pruning this web of hyperconnectivity. It’s disturbing, but it’s also wonderful. Many of the things I have come across will stay with me forever. In a sea of sensory excess, a handful of items hold steady like still life paintings, weathering the currents.

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Maybe the ideas above are what Lansdowne is capturing in these paintings.

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Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest Theory of the Universe. Walking through a forest at night, its silence and darkness could be mistaken for emptiness; in reality it is teeming with wildlife on the lookout for predators. Expanding this to the universe: we see no activity because civilizations who are advanced enough to know anything know better than to reveal themselves. Yancey Strickler applies this concept to The Dark Forest of the Internet: the enshittification and downright danger of mainstream platforms has us retreating to decentralized “dark forests”: newsletters, OnlyFans, discord channels, private profiles, etc. Major platforms are the most exposed pathway through. You see what you need and cut off into darkness, to safety.

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This model returns a sense of wonder to being online. The idea of trudging through a mysterious place not basking in gross fluorescent light, where people are not chasing you down for a fraction of your attention. You stumble across communities powered by genuine mutual interest. In theory, they become close-knit enough to — wait for it — meet up in real life. The darkest of all forests occurs when we’ve logged off. In the meantime, while searching, you step through doorways, frames leading to other frames, sniffing towards your niche. Eventually you arrive at whatever was calling you: a moldy orange, a New Mexico landscape, a patch of ermine fur.

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Taking great pains to uncover your interests is a process inherent to art, but as you know by now, I believe the mysterious forces which propel art could be incorporated into so much more.

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Maybe the ideas above are what Lansdowne is capturing in his paintings.

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I so love the fear, upon pressing send, that every word I’ve written has nothing to do with what Landsowne is capturing in his paintings. The art became a receptacle for my current diet of abstract internet baggage, but at least the result was my own excavation. I trust it more than answers scooped from external sources, including the artist himself.

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As we purge the world of every mystery, the choice to live in the not-knowing, to commit to unproductive searching, becomes an act of luxury. Artists have long been acclimated to the unknown. As the forest darkens, they briefly flash a guiding beacon.

Canadian visual art doesn’t have much of an identity. And I’m not talking about the lack of a defining aesthetic or sensibility that comes to mind when someone says ‘Canadian art’; such a debate would require people to be talking about Canadian art. They don’t. The most prominent art movements from Canada are probably the Woodlands School and Group of Seven, but we have an inflated sense of their recognition outside our borders. Remember when you realized that no one else cares about The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus or Matthew Good Band? The CanCon effect applies to visual art, too.

I am thinking about the Canadian identity that comes across, globally, in other art categories. In music, most notably we have the conscious singer-songwriters: Joni, Neil, Leonard, Gordon. Very respectable, very on-brand. More recently, we have the mega-stars whose identity could be dubiously summarized as forever teenagers (?): Justin, Drake, Avril, Nickelback, Tate. In acting, our talent for producing goofy white boys is unparalleled: Gosling, Carrey, Reynolds, Aykroyd, Baruchel, Rogen, Cera, Levy, Myers… the list goes on. It feels safe to say that we punch above our weight in the categories above. Could we do the same with visual art?

A proposition for a Canadian art direction that would be new and refreshing on the world stage.

There is a mood waiting to be seized upon that is a natural extension from the actors we have exported to Hollywood in droves: unseriousness. If contemporary art dies (it won’t, but), one warranted cause of death would be its inability to enjoy life. The people are dying for levity and laughter, and Canadians, in our demonstrated unseriousness, have the tools to make humour our national art mandate. We even have a guiding beacon at our disposal for this transition. I hereby elect Canadian artist, icon, and TV personality Hannah Epstein, to take us to the promised land.

Epstein has already provided this service, to some extent, via her project Canvassing Canadians (above), commissioned by CBC Arts. Through it, she surveys everyday Canadians about their interests and tastes in Canadian art. The interviews are playful and unpretentious, and reveal (understandably) that few Canadians know anything about their art scene — but they want to! She never scoffs and always provides bite-sized, approachable education by highlighting a local artist or arts organization. I would love to see more CanCon like this.

Epstein’s work, too, is a pillar of (skilled) unseriousness that Canadian artists could take as inspo. Her hooked rug works often incorporate memes, current events, comic and video game imagery, and classic lowbrow concepts like the snake taking a bite out of an apple between Eve’s legs while Adam looks on in distress. This declarative crudeness is refreshing. The most typical tone for “funny” in contemporary art is a pithy, cynical, meta commentary on the self-seriousness of art or the commerciality of it all — but dunking on contemporary art is not subversive or funny; we’ve heard it a million times. I like that Epstein’s art is silly for the sake of itself; it does not seem overly concerned with making a point.

What do we think, readers? Could Canadians claim a new art identity and offer some much-needed levity to contemporary art? The comedic potential in my tiny list of subscribers alone is impressive; all the funniest people I’ve ever met are reading these words. You know who you are, and almost none of you are making art. Make art!

This baffled me entirely. But I was also touched because I am, admittedly, content. In light of the charming question, I have decided, foolishly, to share some advice with you, fellow readers. Take it or leave it.

1. Don’t listen to anyone

   Giving unsolicited advice is the worst of indulgences. Accepting and thanking someone for it is rewarding a junkie with a cheap high. Do not engage. Delete this email. The advice is for me, not you.
   

2. A mathematical model for transportation and stupidity
   The means we use to get around in life are not taken nearly as seriously as they need to be. The mode of transportation you rely on is directly correlated to the stupidity you invite into your life.
   
   I used my engineering degree to derive the following model:

   

   

   The stupidity of any transport is proportional to the speed of the transport to the power of 1.5, divided by the number of people it transports.
   
   According to this model, people who drive often, and everywhere, are the dumbest (or most spiritually ill) humans on earth. This is easily verifiable from safety statistics alone, but there are numerous cultural, environmental, and spiritual arguments for this as well. Going on a road trip with 4 friends increases intelligence.
   
   Planes are stupid, too. Look no further than the insanity that overwhelms seemingly normal people in airports. Bikers are idiots (I’m a biker), but considerably less so. Walkers and transit users are, obviously, enlightened. Not only are you showing your face in the community, but you are reducing congestion and pollution, and you get the spiritual benefit of exercise + meandering (in the case of walking) and looking out the window wistfully (in the case of transit). Also, note that walking slowly exponentially increases intelligence.

   
   Note: the mathematicians in my readership should help me improve holes in this model. For example, being stuck in standstill traffic on the 401 reduces stupidity. I would suggest adding an emissions factor to correct for this, thank u.
   

3. Walkers, bikers, and transit users: stop being so horny
   Carrying on from above, the equation seems to be breaking down in recent observations around Toronto. Walkers, bikers, and transit users are exhibiting unusually high levels of stupidity, beyond what’s accounted for in my model. Specifically, we seem to be hornily waiting for drivers to make mistakes, so that we can slap the hoods of their cars and yell at them, or some other behaviour which boils down to policing and creating unnecessary tension in the streets. We also seem to be trying to increase our speeds, resulting in stupid outcomes.
   
   Fellow bikers, walkers, transit users: you chose the path of wisdom, whimsy, compassion. Slow down. Do not degrade yourself. Recognize how the laws of my model apply to drivers. We don’t yell at gravity, or get in fights with it. Notice what’s coming, avert yourself from the wrecking ball, give an understanding nod, and carry on.
   

4. Check out Perfectly Imperfect
   I really like it because of simplicity and elite creative direction. It’s a website / app to do exactly what I’m doing rn: recommending stuff. It doesn’t have to be a product — it can be a mood, activity, style tip, whatever. Importantly, it’s not affiliate powered (the recs aren’t sponsored links). Just cool, funny, creative people logging what they like. The vibes are wholesome and unserious, which is a sexy combo.

   

   

   

   

5. Watch Perfect Days by Wim Wenders
   If I have any claim to being a monk-in-training, then Hirayama in Perfect Days is the transcendent teacher. The movie follows him, a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo, as he goes about his austere and simple life with great care. He is incredibly diligent in his work, indifferent to it being framed as demeaning and low-value by society. Amongst his greatest pleasures is listening to his cassettes (Lou Reed, Patti Smith) during the van trips to and from the bathrooms he cleans — but really, he is enthralled by every step of his routine-oriented day, including the inevitable forces which upset it. He watches the fast-moving city around him with childlike wonder, taking particular pleasure in the dancing and dappling of light as it filters through foliage onto surfaces (a top 3 pastime of mine). Bless the Japanese for having a word for this phenomenon and the feeling associated with it: Komorebi.

   

6. Avoid owning things that you would not care to present at a show & tell
   In other words, buy things whose production is connected to other humans, or that crossed your path by way of chance and spontaneity. This does not require you to be rich or spend time at artisanal markets. My stupid little art collection, which I’ve assembled over a decade, probably amounts to less than $500 in value. Here are a few pieces:

   

   

   

   For unromantic products, like vacuums and sponges, infuse the routines they are connected to with childlike wonder à la Perfect Days and maybe the products will assume a glory of their own.
   

7. STOP Repping and Dunking on Cities
   I thought this would have died with our twenties but no. I’ll go to Vancouver or Montreal and people will gasp in condescension when I tell them I live in Toronto. In Toronto, I’ll tell someone I grew up in Calgary and they’ll say I’m so sorry to hear that. Then I’ll go home to Calgary and people have a chip on their shoulders about how under appreciated it is. Is this a Canadian thing??? Stop, everyone. Just stop. You are seeking validation from roads and buildings. You are confusing the places you spend money with your personality.
   

8. Visit my barber, Dex
   He really is the sweetest man. I look forward to our conversations more than his haircuts, which are of the highest quality. During one cut, we shared recent encounters that uplifted our faith in ppl. During another, he explained how to build a pipe bomb. If you provide a service (e.g. you work at a coffee shop) he might be open to bartering his service for yours. He is very plugged in to the city and the local arts, and has given me several cherished recommendations.
   
   The real advice here: promote people doing good shit in your community.
   

9. Hang on to some deep and dark secrets.
   Because a monk can’t be perfect. Hirayama in Perfect Days is haunted by something, too, that is never revealed. Hang on to them for dear life. It keeps things exciting while you are being a monk.
   

10. To close, a few entries I found while flipping through my journal.
    

    1. “These deer are so nice. They just stand there, they don’t say anything.”
       - My grandmother, looking at deer
       

    2. At a rave.
       A girl buzzing around the crowd from person to person, asking each if they need gum. Everyone shrugs her off and returns to the music. It’s very obvious she’s in that state on drugs where she wants to help and connect with everyone, but everyone recognizes this, feels superior to it, having exhibited better etiquette and restraint in their drug usage. She eventually makes her way to me and asks if I want gum. I smile weakly and shrug her off — same as everyone. She asks the girl behind me and the girl goes, YES girl we would love some gum. She turns to her friend and says, girl get some gum from this generous bitch. The gum girl hands out her gum and walks away beaming, ear to ear. The girl behind me says to her friend, Poor thing, she is so stoned.
       

    3. “Here’s to peace, and those who get in the way of it”
       - Hot priest from Fleabag

Good morning everyone. I’m starting this letter from the patio of a small café in San Rafael, Mexico City. It is dusk. To my left, food stall owners sing songs as they sponge down their carts, sharing buckets of soapy water. To my right, in a small plaza, a group of dancers has gathered. They range from young adults to late middle-aged and practice a slow dance to a tinny, portable speaker playing Natalia Lafourcade. At a fire station across the street, bomberos are clearing the busy sidewalk to train an 100m sprint down the block. Three racers get in position, geared up in firefighting suits. After taking off, their colleagues gather around to cheer, arm-in-arm, as the racers charge across the finish line and buckle over in exhaustion.

This symphony of activity is a constant here; in three days I have already somewhat numbed myself to the visual overload.

I came here to see art. On each day, I visited three galleries, covering the distances between on bicycle, trying and failing to avoid highways, collecting a film of dirt as trucks transporting god-knows-what lurched alongside. Thankfully, contemporary galleries in any city can be relied upon for pristine bathrooms to freshen up. Also thankfully, the galleries were excellent. Not just the art but the spaces themselves. They seem less constrained than Canadian galleries, often experimenting with colour, bold design elements, and integration with exteriors. It is particularly reassuring to see art in the presence of outdoor plants. They are having a conversation we are not privy to.

In 10 hours I’ll be taking the earliest flight out of the city, to Oaxaca. I meant to sit at this cafe and write a listicle-esque gallery guide, but predictably, having arrived here from a colourful Indian wedding, and with the approaching end of my stay, I am far too inundated by romance + nostalgia to trade in bullet points. Even the little cucaracha which just scuttled past my shoe and into the gutter is infused with some higher purpose. So please bear with some slightly looser, more meandering observations.

The best exhibition I saw this week was Hilda Palafox’s, also known as Poni, titled A una palma de distancia [A palm’s length away] at Proyectos Monclova. The artist’s enlarged figures move through an ambiguous, foggy environment, a setting which would feel hopelessly desolate were it not for their gestures of outreach, the focal points to each piece. There is a performative, choreographed quality to their movements, as if a degree of spectacle provides the momentum required to overcome an environment which so fiercely discourages reaching out.

The pieces centre around communication via touch. I interpret this as a sort of back to basics: as language breaks down and trust in images erodes, perhaps we return to a means of communication that can’t be short-circuited. To embrace touch, however, would be to embrace an instinct that we’ve largely repressed, and for obvious reasons: it’s been abused time and time again, pandemics, ppl with long, unkempt fingernails, and so on. The touching instinct has not only atrophied but morphed into its polar opposite: fleeing to occupy the emptiest spaces, protecting said spaces fervently. By default, we lend a wide berth on the sidewalk, find the most isolated spot on the subway, and apologize for spending a half-second too long in someone’s “personal space”. These milder instincts boil up to our walled fortresses which contain every possible gadget, never permitting a stranger’s fingerprints on the belongings we use a few times a year. In such an environment, the idea of reaching out and touching, particularly with someone we hardly know, becomes an act of impropriety. Some would say this outcome was necessary; I find it sad and boring.

Having written all of that, I am still sitting at this café in San Rafael, scanning examples of physical and emotional human connection from left to right. Amongst the first things I jotted down: If the artist believes there is a social problem in Mexico, a visit to Canada would quickly re-romanticize her to her country. I recall my first-ever salsa class in Toronto, some weeks before this trip. The teacher had to drag us off the walls to pair off like teenagers at a school dance. When the music and instruction stopped, partners would throw their hands away from each other as if touching a hot stove. To realize that people in cities like Mexico City are lamenting their social well-being, relative to which Canada’s is near-primitive, suggests that our crisis of isolation lives more prominently in our perception than our lived condition.

We are bombarded by imagery of social abandonment, bolstered by stats & diagnoses, memes satirizing our loneliness, all of which diffuse into the notion of a permanent condition. Disconnection becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The artist implicitly acknowledges this insidious perception through the empty spaces in her works. Gaps exist inside of the paintings — physical impediments between humans such as walls, or the spaces between outstretched limbs — and outside of them, in the use of diptychs and triptychs creating space between panels. Though often small, the gaps are felt. In keeping them ambiguous, the artist is not suggesting a specific condition of disconnect that plagues us; not smartphones, politics, whatever. The emptiness is not concentrated in Mexico City, or Toronto; pick any place and you’ll find the perception that our social selves have been abandoned. But importantly, the artist does not linger on these gaps. They are an emptiness from which the hopefulness of the work emerges. The artist gives agency to her subjects, who reach through the fog they have cast themselves within. The illusion is punctured by a moment of bravery.

Now I am at the beach with some friends in Oaxaca. We rented beach chairs closely sandwiched between two groups of Mexican travellers. The group on my right is three girls, roughly my age. Hoping to practice my Spanish, I follow their conversation and try to find the right moment to interject. There is eye contact and polite smiles, enough encouragement to proceed, but I don’t find the right moment. And neither do they. We allow the disconnect to settle. The two feet between our chairs seems to expand with each minute. Then, a laughably simple act dispels the myth: the middle-aged lady to our left asks if we’ve tried a Coco Loco. She hands over a coconut full of gin and coconut water. When it is finished, she has the coconut cut open and hands it over again, telling us to try the meat inside. In Mexico, we share everything, she says, in response to our polite refusal. She invites the three girls to our right into the conversation by telling them we are getting the gringos drunk. Soon enough, and with minimal effort, we are all sharing Coco Locos in the sand.

This is socializing 101, you might be thinking. Especially if you’re outgoing. But Palafox’s work is a reminder that sanctifying these small moments, giving them a performative, theatrical (and actionable!) quality, might be the best defence we have against our intensifying perceptions of isolation.

Some hours later, I am back in Mexico City for a layover during my route home from Oaxaca to Toronto. Almost 5 hours, overnight, still fuzzy from the Coco Locos. I contort myself awkwardly in the airport seating, trying to get horizontal. The weird sleep prompts weird dreams, including the Inception moment where you are falling right before you wake up. I grasp at the air in a rapid start. My outstretched lands upon the head of a young man who sits on the other side of the tandem row of chairs. He was sleeping too. Lo siento, lo siento, I say. He laughs at the graveness of my apology. He takes my hand, puts it back on my head, gives it a couple pats, and we go back to sleep.

Finishing this letter from the plane as we descend into Toronto, listening to the saddest music I could find, coaxing out the post-travel blues which are starting to press in gently. The sadness is not about returning to work or routines (I miss both) but a cliché feeling that home is inadequate. That the likelihood of encountering a scene similar to the opening of this letter is non-existent; that I will sit at a similar café only to see bodies rushing past, headphones on, miles of traffic each containing a robot in his private, air-conditioned pod, opting to engage with a podcast host rather than people. But then I will remember that this, too, is how Hilda Palafox likely sees her home of Mexico City. The onus rests with me, and us, to reject such perceptions, to reach out through eyes, mouth, and hands, to pretend every place we encounter is a wellspring of chance and romance, teeming with potential. And should this feel too difficult, should society feel too repressive, we can seek the same, at minimum, through art. Enough pretending eventually makes it true (manifesting, as the kids say).

I disembark the plane and head directly for a water fountain. I despise buying bottled water; having to do so in Mexico meant that I was mildly dehydrated for the last two weeks. My bottle is under the fountain and I press the button. Cold, clean water, and it's free. A moment of glee. He remains a gringo despite every effort.

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Remember the art class activity where you cover an object with paper and rub a pencil overtop, imprinting the texture beneath? I vaguely recall this being one of my most exciting artistic breakthroughs as a child, only to realize that the maple leaves everyone else traced were just as beautiful as mine.

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This technique is called frottage. A term defined by the surrealists, not to be confused with dry humping (although I’m sure they wanted us to). It’s what Azadeh Elmizadeh used to develop the textured foundations of the 6 large paintings in this exhibition.

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During a visit to Iran, she would hike into the mountains surrounding the city of Tehran with bundles of linen, rubbing natural pigments into the material while pressing it against the rocky surfaces. She then rinsed the linen in streams and pools along the mountainside, further exposing the material to the elements and volatility of the landscape.

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I confess to knowing near-nothing of Iran beyond the smokescreen of Western media. My best reference for Tehran is from the minimalist cinematography in Taste of Cherry by Abbas Kiarostami. As Elmizadeh described her process to me, I relied on this stunted vocabulary, envisioning a lone figure in an arid, hilly landscape, with outlines of the city punching through a layer of smog and dust in the background.

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Uninformed as it was, this imagined scene of solitude, paired with the tactile interaction between artist, media, and landscape, felt deeply touching. The linens were steeped, quite literally, in history. Imprints collected were free from the distance and time which inevitably distort our perceptions of a place.

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An example of said distortion. My Indian heritage was instilled exclusively through family, at home, with few opportunities to make non-Indian friends at school. Not that I sought them. I was rebellious and resisted almost everything Indian about me. There was no hope in adopting a cultural identity that I couldn’t “find” myself. Today, regrettably, my conception of India is better defined by observations of first-gen immigrants to Canada and a handful of fading family traditions, than the country itself, which I have not visited since 2010.

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To rebuild those bonds to the country would require a process not unlike what Elmizadeh undertook in the early development of these paintings: a tangible, personal collection of experiences and interactions with the place. Perhaps with these lines established, I could develop or maintain layers of meaning from afar.

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And that’s precisely what the artist did. The imprinted surfaces traveled from Tehran to her studio in Toronto, where layers of meaning were developed with paint.

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I’m only a bit embarrassed to admit that when I first saw the faint, birdlike figures appearing in 5 of the 6 large pieces, my mind went to Pokémon the Movie 2000, where the legendary birds — Articuno, Zapdos, Moltres, Lugia — are revealed; another pivotal moment in my childhood (c’mon). I imagined catching a fleeting outline of the rare figures in the clouds, wondering if what I saw was real.

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The birdlike presence in most of the paintings, and its disappearance into the climactic, un-stretched piece at the front of the room (above) signals the ephemerality of the sighting. You stare into the void, hoping to see it again.

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The symbology of flight, disappearance and reappearance, paired with the knowledge of where these pieces began, further associates with ideas of migration and maintenance of tradition. The artist and the bird, perhaps one in the same, freed from the bonds of border, but coloured by their landscapes, symbols, histories of origin — even if, at times, the connections feel like a whisper.

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I am conscious of writing about an artist from Iran who presents work concerning it, and jumping to language like fleeing, loss, migration, etc. This has little to do with any one country; I bring my own baggage to the work. Such are the verbs which apply to my own relationship with my heritage.

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An excerpt from an essay in Anna Badkhen’s gut-wrenching Bright Unbearable Reality:

I think about the people around the globe who have gone through, are going through, such impotent dread, who also, day after day, worry about their loved ones far away; [...] each moment at least one person is missing for millions of us, often out of reach, flung apart as we are, undone transcontinentally. The grief makes it impossible to move: This is aporia, an absence of path, a passagelessness that engenders a state of powerless, immobilized confusion, of being at a loss, a no-way that is not the same as a presence, a separation of heart and will.

Yet there is something else: the connections that may fade but never disappear, the gossamer threads of intimacy we float behind us as we disperse, the kinship that may be undone in time but that our memories sustain as vivid, iridescent as a painted bunting's plumage. Picture the brief animation anthropologists sometimes use to demonstrate human impact on the planet—a pale, luminescent tapestry of roads, railways, pipe-lines, cables, air routes, and shipping lanes latticing a nighttime earth—except instead of physical infrastructure, imagine the other ways in which the Anthropocene connects us: the poly-threaded, shimmering veil of yearning and missing and care and love.

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The pieces, aside from one, are decidedly prominent in the small gallery. The warmth of them encroaches outwards. Typically when stepping into an exhibition, I do a quick scan of the layout from the entrance; in this case I was hypnotically drawn forwards to the centre of the room. There is symmetry to the pieces’ arrangement until, remembering to scan, I noticed a smaller painting off in its own corner near the entrance. I wondered about this outlier, titled As We Weep, So Too Does the Sky.

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For me, this piece functions as an entry point, or an exit, from the rest of the works which present as a series. It’s a cryptic dreamscape, depicting the sky’s response to a mourning ritual in which a gathering of women weep together, calling forth the respite of rainfall. Here, the sky weeps in return, its tears suggested to leave behind the extensive salt lakes in the country, and the salty waters in which the paintings were originally bathed.

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The large paintings in series contain elements of the sky, water, land, which the artist carries forth in spirit. This smaller piece captures the intertwining of the physical and spiritual in a cycle of tradition. The continuation of this tradition hinges on the ritual of reconnecting with the land.

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If the women are weeping for rainfall, what is the sky weeping for? Perhaps it is simply benevolent in answering their call. Perhaps it wishes to encourage them to keep reaching out. Perhaps it has witnessed, over the sweep of time, that those birds which once flew freely are less prominent; that when we abandon the work of seeking where we came from, tracing and carrying it forwards, the places cease to exist.

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To close, some pictures from our last trip to Rajasthan, India, ~15 years ago.

She’s an Instagram artist, a friend remarked, about a beautiful, well-dressed woman we passed by in the street. She’d seen her around everywhere, in all the places you’d expect to encounter an Instagram artist, carrying out the lifestyle you’d also expect. My friend’s tone was flat, neutral, as if reporting the results of an anthropological study. And no follow-up required from my end; I had already filled in the gaps. Figurative work with a graphic style, bendy, expressive limbs fingering a martini glass or a coffee mug. Work which never strayed too far from these confines, resulting in a beautiful, cohesive grid. It didn’t matter that the attributes associated with Instagram artist might be completely different in my friend’s imagination.

Some days later, the same friend asked me about a new friend I had recently met for a coffee, excited about a potentially new face in the mix. He’s really nice. He’s an accountant. Also, he’s a rapper. He raps over acoustic guitar. An acoustic rapper. Her and I shared a tight-lipped smile. We were trying to rid ourselves of the habit of judging people who are just doing things, who are pursuing their interests, because, well… because it’s a horrible thing to do. We were sticking to the facts. Letting our judgements rest in the spaces and silences between.

When just starting to explore art, I remember trailing a couple at an art fair as they moved from piece to piece, flattening each one with associations executed like database queries (It’s giving Agnes. Richter squeegee knockoffs. Japonisme all over again.). I envied their ability to talk about art this way. I wanted to be able to produce something less trite than I love the colour palettes. I stood in front of a large painting by Vanessa McKernan (maybe it was this one) and felt the pressure mounting as the artist waited for me to speak. It reminds me of a scene from an old medical textbook. Like an operating theatre, with the students observing. The artist raised her eyebrows. She agreed with the interpretation, but had never heard it described that way. To me, at the time, this was the highest compliment. I left the interaction fulfilled. It took me a while to realize that I never expressed how strongly I engaged with her painting, that in trying to find the right sentence to conquer the work, I skipped the part about why its existence mattered.

Do you hate me yet? Let’s keep going. As I write this, I am sitting in one of those mansions whose innards seems picked feature-for-feature out of an interior design catalogue. Predictably, the house is full of rich boomer art. Do I have to describe it to you, reader? Perhaps you feel as smug as I do in knowing exactly what I mean. It’s a good feeling. It’s a weapon I can wield which allows me to not have to engage with the art for more than half a second. But I will resist the urge to stop here, as if I have already made a valid critique. Why is this one instance of uninspiring art causing me such spite? Perhaps it’s the knowledge that it likely costed $5,000 - $10,000, despite looking like it could have been ordered on artcanvasprints.com or similar, contrasted with the knowledge of the art purchases I would make with the same budget. In other words, before this painting had a chance to be seen, I smothered it with my context, which was largely one of bitterness towards its owner. I mentally consumed it and killed it in the same way that I killed the Instagram artist and the Acoustic rapper and the painting that resembled an Operating theatre.

It felt good though.

I read the article from The Face about vibes being omnipresent and a hundred Substack letters proclaiming that slapping a core on something is not a stand-in for having experienced the thing, that our culture needs to move on from this cheap trick. Then a hundred Substack notes saying, Finally, a place where brains can come to be nourished after the long famine of TikTok. Oh, Substack writers, I thought, we are already becoming a caricature of ourselves. I was standing on those writer’s heads in a pulsating human pyramid, categorizing everyone below me into hard blocks to firm up my footing, to launch myself one rung closer to the top. Only, there were rows upon rows of people above me, stepping on my head, too. What’s at the top of this pyramid? I wondered.

In art, this pyramid is taller and more cut-throat than most other places. Death-by-categorization has been alive and well since long before terminology around vibes and cores and the diagnosis of a wider cultural phenomenon. Only it masquerades as being more cultivated, thanks to the academic backing of genre and movement. I respect other people’s ability to eloquently pave a path through the art historical record or apply meaningful technical critiques — this takes practice and passion. But I don’t know why I felt (and still often feel) the need to participate while clearly lacking the skills or interest to do so. This angle of commentary provides value for a fraction of people who enjoy art. Not unlike those guys who watch sports predominantly to rattle off stats and argue with the other guy doing the same. We encounter an unusually high concentration of folks doing this in art and feel like it is the prerequisite to entry. And since most of us can’t do it, terms like Instagram art, Designer art, Bro art are wielded with glee.

I recently went on some dates with an Instagram artist. She had something like 80k followers, and I was one of them, and had been for a while before we matched. This led to all sorts of questions about how best to navigate my parasocial relationship to her before meeting for the first time. I already knew her cat’s name, for example. Do I mention her art, or that I’m familiar with it? Of course, it wasn’t that complicated. Her line of work came up naturally. I admitted that I had seen her on Instagram. She admitted, on a later date, that her life was nothing like what her Instagram feed suggested. In fact, it shocked her how little of the perceived success had trickled through to her career. She made nowhere near enough sales on Instagram to earn a living and still worked a day job; the good galleries had yet to show any interest in her, perhaps because she was too visible, too commercial, already discovered. I studied her work more carefully than ever before. There was much more to it than the handful of attributes I had originally plucked from the grid. It didn’t at all deserve the categorization of Instagram art.

It took time and many such regrettable judgements for me to recognize the tools I do possess with regards to viewing and interpreting art. I write fiction, whose task is almost always exploring a visceral response. Perhaps this is something I can do for art, too, with a level of care and attention that helps others do the same. I started welktober because I thought that’s what art writing is supposed to be, but rarely is. Capturing a response and channeling it into another thing that might even be considered art. In a time where the tendency is to vibe check 100x more than we consume, and to consume 50x more than we produce, I hope this line of inquiry can help rid ourselves (myself) of our (my) worst tendencies.

Sincerely,
a Substack writer