Me!
A slow day for me is 4 coffees and I am ravenous at 3 pm. Every day.
I really only settled into life as a writer and artist recently – when I learned to pay attention to my habits in relation to my writing and art-making and committed to my own practice and processes.
When I read, I need to make notes by hand.
Which is not terribly efficient. But it’s what needs to happen. It’s not easy to commit to this least efficient of methods. The world demands productivity and efficiency of us. It’s hard to shut those voices out. But, when I honor my own process, that’s when I actually get work done.
Sometimes we know we need to commit to the wildly important work, but we can’t seem to make it happen.
That’s because we don’t have the skills. Which doesn’t mean we’re defective people. We all need to develop new skills and capacities throughout our lives. We cannot simply decide to be different. It takes practice before we embody our new ways of relating to the world.
We can think of our personal skills as tool belts, or kitchens.
Each tool belt is different. Each one makes different projects possible and renders some impossible. A toolbox with only a hammer has a limited range. A kitchen with only a cake pan is going to be a lot of fun for a couple of days but makes soup out of reach.
And even once you have the pot, questions remain. How high to keep the heat? Is it a heavy bottomed pot? Is it a tomato-based soup or a creamy soup?
Once you develop skill with the pot, you’ll have soup & cake. And that, my friends, is a meal.
The Creds
I am an award-winning writer and scholar. Most recently my essay, The Stutter of Emmett’s Stutter won subTerrain’s 2021 Lush Triumphant Prize for creative nonfiction. I earned a Master’s scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for my MFA through UBC’s School of Creative Writing. From 2007-2009 I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany where I also held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship. I earned my PhD from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in 2007 and my dissertation won the University’s Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement at the Doctoral Level. It’s an actual medal. I’ll show it to you some time. I also make non-award-winning art that I’m still happy to show you. 😉
