Back so soon, Shannan, you might say? To which I don’t say anything because the distended collective “you” doesn’t actually exist and we all in fact are fucking individuals no matter HOW MUCH anyone, anywhere tries to sardine us into an amorphous blob with money-tits so they can drain our little hearts dry with their greedy capitalist—

woof okay chill out, me.

Anyway, reading all your comments on this post here —

— made me think about that word we toss so much at this point it’s kind of becoming a shapeless blob itself.

Yeah, community.

I doubt I have much profound shit to share about community, seeing as I’ve either dramatically left many or been kicked out of them in my 32 long years. But you know sometimes losers and failures can impart great wisdom, so I guess here’s mine.

• after running away from home at 17, I thought I’d escaped a hellish situation but lesson number 1 is that escape doesn’t equal freedom

• before that, I remember the most community I felt was with my grandfather who used to take me to the library almost every day and tell me to “pick the books with awards on them because life is short and you want to read the good stuff first”

• community was him and me reading our own shit in a public library so lesson number 2 is that community doesn’t need to be a gathering and doesn’t need to involve active interaction

• when my grandfather’s visa was refused due to my father’s irresponsibilities (more on that later maybe) and he couldn’t come back to live with us anymore, I was once again left alone with my parents

• that was the day of my first suicide attempt and by all accounts it was a poor attempt but thank god right, ha. ha ha.

• I tried after that to make it work with them because I was in a super weird “situationship” with my parents.

• if you didn’t have emotionally/physically/sexually abusive parents you probably will flinch at my using that word in connection to my parents, but unfortunately if you did, I can bet my butt you get what I mean

• trying to make it work just made it worse

• lesson number 3 is two-fold, one is that children’s first real encounter with community is their parents and them and when this is fucked, it takes a whole lot to unfuck and lesson number 3.5 is tho you can fix broken communities you cannot force community out of thin air (remember what I said above, we are all-caps INDIVIDUALS)

• lesson number 4 is that community is a sacred often unspoken contract we make with ourselves as well as well as with those with whom we partake in community

• so fast-forward when I ran away from home I wasn’t immediately homeless, I had a home of sorts to go to, and this home was the home of a 42-year old woman who was my yoga-teacher and who had been texting me a lot months before I ran away helping me out with whatever I needed…yeah you can see where this is going, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t, not then

• she introduced me to all her friends her family and the other girls she mentored and let me be her “model” in the yoga classes she taught and then even let me teach my own very first yoga class

• needless to say I was feeling so fucking special

• soon found out, she’d just had a miscarriage when I moved in with her and her husband

• she told me on evening that she’d be my mom now and set things right and my old life I could forget because it didn’t matter who’d hurt me, she would never, she’d love me like a mother was supposed to

• a year later post a series of escalating circumstances, I was living in Toronto’s Covenant House

• lesson number 5 is that there is a giant difference between community and cult and to be able to tell the difference is a fucking privilege and if you’re one of those people who could always do it, you’re blessed with great intelligence and if you’re one of those people who got to the point of understanding this much later, welcome to the club, and if you’re one of those people who still don’t get this…I…I don’t know what to say, good luck I guess

• the moment I started living with the aforementioned woman, she helped me get on welfare and then had the welfare cheques deposited in her account

• she kept them but I never questioned it because she was keeping me under her roof and cooked for me and taught me to cook and helped me finish my final high school courses over Summer because when I ran away from home I also ran away from high school

• lesson number 6 is fuck high school and yeah it’ s not a lesson but seriously fuck high school

• Covenant House was so fucking amazing to me. I did not appreciate it one bit. I was bitter beyond belief that I “had” to live in a homeless youth shelter. I looked down at all the other kids there. I would literally wrinkle my lips and turn my nose up at them. I watched those kids with so much fucking disdain. These were drug addicted teens scraped from the streets of Toronto. These were knocked up 13/14/15 year olds. These were kids with piercings and tattoos all over their cut up bodies. These were kids who acted downright allergic to books and couldn’t talk in straight sentences. And me!? I was HERE!? I who was writing and reading full sentences by age 3. I who finished my first novel at age 5. I who had hundreds of thousands of pages of poetry sitting in my childhood bedroom still somewhere. I who had won all these writing awards already and wasn’t even an adult. I who knew 4 different languages, had read every major religious book and most of the obscure ones. Shannan the Great. Shannan the Better Than Everyone. Shannan the One Everyone Should Have Looked Up To. What the fuck was I doing with these ugly ass slimy idiots?

• Yeah I thought all these things and worse. I said them too often to the FREE DAILY PSYCHOLOGIST given to me at Covenant House. He listened calmly. I was so rude to him. Man, fuck me. I told him I hate that you’re a man, I want to talk to a woman and that very gentle sweet old dude said I’m sorry, I’ll try to see if a female psychologist is available. And kept listening to me bitch.

• Lesson number 7 is that sometimes you are given a chance at community and even if you don’t take it, community overwhelms you and saves you in ways you only realize later, sometimes much later, sometimes never.

• Lesson number 8 is that community isn’t permanent. Sometimes community comes to you, stays with you, departs. You change communities, communities change. Life is not stasis. Nothing remains but us, the individuals, scattered across the wild world like fucking salt. And it’s a beautiful damn thing.

• Covenant House gave me a place to sleep safe and sound, they provided me my vegan meals when I told them in my holier-than-thou rant that I couldn’t believe they only served meat (how fucking privileged and bratty was I man, and I don’t even have the excuse of saying I was born into a rich family LOL), they gave me emotional, mental, spiritual care, they got me free therapy both one-on-one and group DBT (so fucking useful).

• And then I ran away from there too hahaha.

• Lesson number 9 is that the lessons you don’t learn the first time, follow you like lost dogs and they won’t go away till you take them home with you, feed them, clothe them, love them, raise them, and let them at last die peacefully

K pretty sure I have more to say about all this so probably expect a part 2 at some point. Maybe in a week maybe in a year, I don’t know. Life’s busy and good now, so I’m too happy to be on a strict schedule.

lots of love and blessings,

Shannan

I’m finally starting to feel like a real person again. I can finally say I’m happy, I’m excited, the long road ahead feels alive with the brownie-sundae sugar-buzz of possibility and goodness.

These last two months though have been a whirlwind. And before that, the last two decades also.

I don’t quite know how to update you any of it. I don’t even think I need to. I doubt any of you have been waiting to hear from me. I promise I don’t say that like your borderline college girlfriend (jk not jk), but just in earnest. We are all of us too busy now in our modern lives in the West to truly await another’s letters. Long, long gone are the days when we sought companionship in the form of distant lovers and friends. Now, despite being liberated of those pesky N95 masks, we wear masks of our own making and despite there being no legal ramifications to it, we look down upon the popping of our ephemeral bubbles.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing thing. And before you come out with your daggers of “hey hey Shannan used the it’s not x it’s y AI phrasing”, let me call you into my little lair here and give you a hug and say, shhh, child, why do you let them tell you what you can and can’t say, still, after ALL THAT!?

In any case, I checked my Substack Dashboard today for kicks and saw there were almost 7000 of you! When I was a loner in middle school sitting on the portable steps during recess reading Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and listening to Michael Jackson and Damien Rice and Bright Eyes, I’d have never thunk so many strangers on the internet would willingly sign up to listen to my ramblings, but here we are.

In the spirit of this meandering comeback letter, I’ll share some highlights (and lowlights?) of how the last couple months have been and what I think the next might/ought to look like. Here goes.

• I dropped out of my MFA program because it fucking sucked

• I probably shouldn’t say so because in this industry you’re supposed to stay on cordial terms with everyone and pretend to like something even if you don’t and make a lot of superficial friends and get along and go to usually bad readings and get drunk and enjoy the romantic idea of being a writer more than being a writer but I just can’t so there, yes, I dropped out of my MFA program because it fucking sucked

• If you’re reading this and you know which program I’m talking about and you had a great time or are having a great time at that program, I’m genuinely happy for you because it’s a good thing to have a great time at your MFA program and I’m all for good things

• If you’re reading this and you are a part of the faculty of that MFA program then let me say that I respect you for what you do, and alongside that I think just as much as a student ought to learn from a teacher, so ought a teacher to learn from a student, and my one cent is that y’all have a fair bit to learn (so do I but let me reiterate, so do you)

• I am not anti MFAs, I think they are the way forward for many artists and I think lots and lots of funding should go to them alongside lots and lots of direction and guidance to help utilize that funding in a legitimate way

• I think MFAs today focus far too much on your background and culture and race and politics than your craft sensibilities and just, you know, learning to read and write

• I do think politics is inextricable from art

• I think a classroom ought to be a space where experiment is encouraged as much as if not more than experience

• Where you come from matters, who you are matters, our identities matter, but ultimately they are all MATTER, they are not us… we are humans, beyond the purview of this material world, we are all of us spiritual beings, and in forgetting that, we lose something intrinsic to the practice of art

• Nuance could be a cool name for a pet, it sounds like a fat French cat

• Part of the reason I dropped out has nothing to do with how horrible my experience was at the MFA program and a lot to do with how horrible my experience was living in Trump’s USA

• Fuck Trump so fucking much

• So glad I can say that now that I’m in Canada

• Seriously, fuck that dude

• And honestly fuck the people who didn’t do everything they could to keep him out of office

• The harm he’s caused reverberates torrentially across the world each and every second

• Sometimes the lesser of two evils is a temporary good

• All evil is evil, but some evil is less evil

• All good is good, and true good towards one is as powerful as true good towards all

• As my husband, the fucking magnificent poet once wrote, THE UNIVERSE IS A KINGDOM OF KINDNESS

• I believe that in every possible way

• It hurts me day in day out to witness the suffering of others and because of this I refuse to read the news

• I’m a coward, but this is how I go on

• I try to put everything I have into raising a beautiful child in all her being, giving her the childhood I never had, and putting as much good into the world as I can through poetry and art, and this is how I go on

• Moving to Canada has been a fucking relief, did I mention that?

• I ran away from home at 17 from a violent and abusive home and came back years later to discover that my father had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt on my credit card (credit cards I’d never created, but that he had using my social insurance number with forged signatures)

• It took me over half a decade to fix my credit (still not fully there), put myself through my undergrad, raise my kid as a single mom, pay for my divorce from an abusive arranged first marriage, and finally feel free in some way

• Now, at 31, I am happy and it is good, capital G-good even, and I am grateful I can say that I saw…I see what a beautiful life is, or at least how to make one

• When I was 11 and then again at 14, I tried to end my life and routinely between 10-16 I spent many waking hours dreaming up ways to die

• At the time I felt like a coward for not going through with it but now I feel like a fucking superhero for continuing to stay alive, no matter how hard it got

• To write about darkness when you’re in the light is a beautiful, gentle, tender thing

• You get to appreciate all the ways in which the darkness is formed, and how it looks from the outside, how you reach in from this space of bright light and can almost touch and smell what it was once like, and yet, miraculously, you’re safe and cradled in the light

• I’m meditating again and starting yoga again

• I was a trained yoga instructor in a last life (which is to say a decade ago)

• I think an MFA that involved yoga and meditation might have been so cool

• If no one ever reads my poetry and novel, it’ll be okay

• Whether or not any of you are believers, all creativity comes from and is meant for God. You can sub out the word God for Universe or the local McDonalds, but the essence remains the same.

• This is not ours, it never was, life is a gift to be given back, art is a gift to be given back, joy is a gift to be given back

• Seriously though the MFA sucked a lot of life out of me. And so did living in the US during an insane fucking time

• Revolutions don’t need to overthrow empires

• Many revolutions are themselves manufactured by empire

• One’s work is one’s duty is one’s life force is of utmost importance

• I keep thinking about this part of an interview of Leonard Cohen’s where he says: “It's hard work. I think everybody, or most people, work hard and I've always been happy to be employed... I think that the real poison, if there is one, it's unemployment, even for the people who have jobs, there are so many people I know who have jobs but they aren't really employed, they don't feel they can really throw themselves into their work and I've had the privilege in my life to have been able to throw myself into my work.”

• As for the future of Beautiful Losers, I don’t know, but I don’t think it will be conventional. I think I want to write whatever I want, as always, but I don’t want to sound like all the thousands of Substacks out there.

• So maybe next time I’ll tell you about the time I joined a cult in New Zealand.

• Or I’ll share some more of my poetry curriculum

Love,

Shannan

As I bid adieu to 2025 and try to feel like a grown-up learning ice-skating for the first time on the shining glittering liminal rink that is 2026, there are few things of which I feel certain.

One big one, however: loving literature is plain tough. It’s always been tough, I suppose, being a cerebral person, feeling alien even when not alienated per se. Thinking differently, loving strangely, on and on. I saw in these last weeks so many year-end wraps, new year predictions, all sorts of scares, dares, nightmares.

Specific to publishing, the consensus seems to be both that it’s doing better than ever (self-publishing is no longer “shameful”! Positive win!) and that it’s in dire straits (we all knew publishers were just glorified gamblers right, come on, was this truly news for anyone?). One thing I noticed: none of these…shall we say…editorials, seemed to talk about lit mags. A lot of them, though, did have opinions about Substack. And what Substack publishing means for writers, gatekeepers, editors, and so on. Some of these opinions were less than rosy:

I gave an official statement of sorts to Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg. Here it is in full:

What I mostly sense here is the gatekeeper’s anxiety. Gatekeeping has its functions, of course, but this concern that editors/agents/publishers are framing as being for the writer is likely faux-concern. Take for example the magazine editor worried about half-baked ideas going out for free, ideas they would have apparently “paid for.” This assumes a world where editors see raw potential and develop it. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Magazines don’t have the mandate for that kind of mentorship. No one is sitting around going “ah this is the next Joan Didion if only I could help them fix their mixed metaphors and concretize their obscure pop culture references and add a bit more Americanah.”

Chalk that up too many writers or too few venues/overworked editors, whatever. The thing about people in traditonal publishing is that they’re married to traditions, so anything that challenges the status quo destabilizes them. I imagine some agents and editors are afraid that they might become irrelevant as more and more people continue to find an audience. Substack lets people do that while potentially getting paid. The alternative isn’t “that writer gets properly developed by gatekeepers,” it’s “that writer never gets any feedback or develops an audience at all and ends up doing odd jobs without any health benefits.”

And then, almost more egregious is that distraction line. How hilariously paternalistic. Some people’s Substacks are their next book. Some people’s newsletters are how they connect to readers. Some people use it as a workshop space. The idea that there’s one correct path (write book → get agent → get editor → get published → repeat) and everything else is “distraction” serves institutions, not writers. The most interesting thing perhaps is that much of the same people who are saying this kind of stuff to unpublished writers are saying the exact opposite to trad-published ones: get on Substack, dance on Tiktok, put pre-order links all over your online creative spaces — it’s obscene.

And I say all this as a writer who desires to “traditionally” publish a book. I do agree that not every writer needs to be on Substack (or any social media for that matter). But an intellectually and artistically free society necessitates the ability to choose without feeling belittled or cornered.

That the kind of editors, agents, publicists New York Magazine might anonymously interview for these clipped hot-takes would think that Substack is, decidedly, *bad for you wittle writers*…well…again…this isn’t a plot-twist, my dear Watson (sorry not sorry but we’ve been delightfully drowning in Sherlock Holmes this holiday season). And of course, let me be kind and say that these are snippets. Certainly if one spoke in confidence, there’d also be nuance, understanding, acknowledgement of the specific as opposed to judgement of the general?

Thing is, bring yourself face to face, heart to heart, with any individual person or their creation and you’ll quickly see that nothing can truly be boxed in. We are not copies of copies of copies as the so-called art and literature produced by AI. We are, inconceivably, utterly, hopelessly unique despite being borne of the irreproducible self-replicating mechanism that is…humanity and civilization.

How is that possible? I’ll leave that to the scientists and theologians. For me, the realization has been thus: so what if Substack will be set on fire or sink to the bowels of Enshittification? So what if the rate of reading declines grows yet steeper and by the end of 2026 no one, not a soul, not you nor me nor anyone, is truly reading anything, merely scanning and scrolling? So fucking what, I say, if the words upon words we write throughout this year and years past, reach no one but the space just beyond our lips, hanging there in an abysmally illiterate universe?

What’s the alternative? Don’t write? Don’t think? Don’t try and uplift other writers and thinkers? Don’t try and create new ways to reach outwards in the darkness? Don’t do what it is that you can’t live without doing?

I suppose. But this is true insomuch as you might think death to be alternative to living. And those of us who’ve felt aflame with life at some point or another will be able to uproariously yawp that no, indeed, death of the body is not the perfect opposite of life, but rather death of the soul. And what do we say to killing that deepest, most beguiling, truest part of us that goes on in this world despite it all?

Not today. Or, in other words: fuck that.

It is in that mood, then, that both (my we’ve-been-reincarnated-together-for-a-hundred-years husband) and I are deciding to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” that might be portended by all the doomsdaying that goes on here, there, everywhere.

Practically speaking, we’re juggling several projects. Our poetry magazine, ONLY POEMS, is 2.5 years old and growing more beautifully than we could have ever hoped for. I wonder if anyone ever predicated that in circa 2023. That over 50,000 people would fall in love with a poetry magazine started by two grad students while their toddler slept. No, probably not.

I say this not to gloat in anyway. I’ve laid my heart at the same altar as Leonard Cohen’s music and can earnestly say when I sing along in my broken voice to “If It Be Your Will”, I feel the truth of universe singing with me.

Rather, I say this to prove a little point. None of your creative ideas need to be the ones that “everyone’s” talking about and predicting, and trend-charting and so on and so forth. Do the thing you can’t help but do. That, in and of itself, is success.

Besides OP, we’ve also launched Strange Pilgrims, a literary magazine for prose seeking to publish the most “real, surreal, & brutally beautiful writing.” This one went viral on Substack and we received over 7000 submissions in our first ever call. It’ll be interesting to see how that momentum continues and how, inevitably, things stabilize and what beautiful strange stuff emerges from that.

Other than this, on a more personal level, we are writing, if you’ll believe it or not. Beyond Substack, beyond editorials, opinions, and so on, we are at work on first books. Karan’s just gotten an awesome book deal for his debut poetry collection and I’ll share more about this in the coming weeks (perhaps get him to come out of his shyness and share the process of it himself!).

As for me, I’m still writing that horror-magic realist novel. Writing short stories that blend fantasy and meta-modernism and the mundane with a bit of sci-fi. Writing poems about being the only person after the end of the world left alive.

A confession, so often this year I’ve pulled myself from trying to even indulge in thoughts of “gaming the system.” Let me be frank, with the level of publishing research and insider insight I have right now (which isn’t as much as say a Big 5 editor or top agent would but is quite a bit more than someone not so entrenched in this space as me would), do I think I could vomit up a cozy-romantasy with the just the right selling-points and land some kind of solid deal?

I bloody well think so.

Do I want to do that?

Oh, sigh, don’t we all want to sometimes betray our souls and be positively beleaguered with tons of fuck-you-money?

I’d say so.

Have I (or, let’s face it, Karan) pulled myself away from that ridiculous precipice and come back to the page, the blank page, the blinking page, my page, my words, myself, every single time?

Damn right.

My friends, you are the best person out there for the job. And the job is, quite simply, to be yourself. Be more and more of who you truly are ever more and more as the months and years pass. And by the end of this ride, you will have found the truest self.

I’ll leave us with these words of a literary master I adore, Ursula K. Le Guin from A Wizard of Earthsea:

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”

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Hi friends,

As you might have guessed based on how I look, I don’t exactly celebrate Thanksgiving. To be very honest, I don’t know much about the holiday outside the fact that there are turkeys involved and that Black Friday comes afterwards. Being a vegetarian since I was 7, when people do invite me to Thanksgiving feasts, I generally stand around awkwardly. However, I do enjoy appropriating the spirit of certain capitalism-washed holidays, so I’ve decided to actually think about the things I’m grateful for, consciously.

It’s an easy list to begin. I’m grateful for my daughter not dying when she was born. Below is a flash essay that won me a little scholarship for my undergrad and also helped me get into a fully-funded MFA.

I hope you enjoy reading it!

Seven seconds old Ana resembles storm-clouds, midnight seen through insomnia, branches of veins under skin, blue-whale flesh. Babies are not meant to be blue. Anasuya is blue because she is struggling to breathe. Her eyes are open — black and alive.

I am alone, blue-gowned, in a small curtained space. Both my hands are needled with IV tubes. A heart and oxygen monitor whimpers beside the bed.

A deep stirring movement where the uterus lies, like ladle scrapes in a pot. An absence of sensation below the abdomen — akin to hunger, a cousin to frostbite, beginning blue around the toenails and fingernails and radiates outward in a compass of colour — white, smoke, ash.

I want Anasuya’s body on my body, skin to skin, blue or pink. After five hours and thirty-two minutes I am sanctioned to see her.

A yellowed hand attaches a fluorescent pad to a bouquet of cords in her belly button. I am jealous of the hand. I want to gnaw it away. My baby. Your baby is very sick, a doctor tells me with clinical dispassion.

So I hold her with my eyes — twin moons, fish fins, dark as doubt. I tell her it’s going to be alright because this is the unedited script given to all parents with dying children.

They take her to a hospital nine miles away. The sky outside is blue and yellow and not the least bit aware that it ought to be crackling and black.

I experienced her first as a ClearBlue flash, then a wild-horse heartbeat on a doppler, bone and pixel diagram on ultrasound, widening birdwing-beat against ribcage and bladder, a name sung in a dream, and now as a blue child with black eyes.

That pain in itself is not painful — but the impatience that comes with it, the desperation for it to pass, the unknowing, the wolf-eaten calendar, the dream-drawn hourglass.

No suffering lasts. Either the sufferer will die, or the suffering will. Anasuya and I are home in a handful of days as though nothing happened. And maybe nothing did. Birth, after all, appears inconsequential in the face of death. Yet, the horror of those first seconds lives in our dual-dreamland. We weep together. Then we rescue each other, her nine-day-old palms in my nine-thousand-day-old palms.

By month’s end, I take her to the coast. I whisper into her small conch shell ear that the ocean is not really blue, but only appears so because it reflects the glimmering sapphire sky in its watery heart. Like water and light, we can also reflect within us all the hope and beauty of the world and cascade, beat, wave, blue and brilliant against the pale, cold, white, harsh, immeasurable truths of the ceaseless world. Ana chortles, as if in agreement.

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I’m going to say something that might make writing coaches hate me: most days, you shouldn’t write at all.

There. I said it. Let the productivity gurus come for me. Though, just know that you’ll also be coming for Toni Morrison, who puts it far more eloquently than I ever could:

When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not. But that doesn’t bother me anymore. I tell my students there is such a thing as “writer’s block,” and they should respect it. You shouldn’t write through it. It’s blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven’t got it right now.

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For years, I tortured myself with the bullshit “write every day” mantra. I set word count goals. I tracked my streaks (god save us from all these gamified apps for every single aspect of our creative and personal lives!).

Things got so bad that I even felt guilty every time I chose to read a book instead of drafting a new poem or story, felt like a bad “writer” every time I stared out the window instead of opening my manuscript, every time I went to bed having produced a whole lotta nothing.

The Cult of Productivity in Writing constitutes quite a specific frame work of sorts: wake up at 5 AM, write before your day job, hit your word count, nevvver break the chain. Think: discipline, consistency, output and other words that often lose their meaning. Success is measured in how any drafts you complete as opposed to how your understanding might have deepened.

Write every day and you’ll finish your novel. Write every day and you’ll get published. Write every day and you’ll finally be a real writer.

And yet…writing was never just about typing or scribbling away.

Most of the best writing I’ve ever done happened when no sane person would see me as say “yeah, that woman’s writing something, I guess.”

Think: long walks in solitude on quiet, rainy evenings thinking about my characters like they were memories from another life, crossing over. Soaking in the shower, letting the right metaphor rise like steam before me, mine to curl my fingers through and make real.

And how can I forget the countless instances of reading another’s poems or stories, allowing their words to wash over me, run through me, utterly changing my brain chemistry, like a drug where the only side effect is that it kicks you in the butt to write something just as good, if not better.

A metaphor for the writing process that I much prefer to the assembly line is the mind as a heap of beautifully grotesque compost.

You throw everything in there: the conversation you overheard at the coffee shop, the way light fell through your kitchen window, that article about octopuses you read at 2 AM, your mother’s hands, the smell of rain on hot pavement, a line from a poem that’s been haunting you for months, your ex’s voice, the taste of blood in your mouth when your kid accidentally clocked you in the chin while playing…

And then…you let it fucking rot…slowly, allowing for the creep and the sink and the curdling…the crackling coolness to settle over that burning ash of life. Let it all grow dark and rich and strange and maybe even glow and pulse and fill with imperceptible light. Let the worms of wisdom do their work.

And, remember these words of Leonard Cohen, always:

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

This kind of…composting of the creative process requires patience. It requires inactivity. It requires faith that something is happening even when you can’t see it.

The best poems and stories rarely come from daily excavation, least of all in the beginning. They arise from fermentation of a kind. They might come when the thing you noticed may be three months ago fucking finally collides with the dream you had last week and the childhood memory that surfaced while you were doing dishes or folding laundry or whatever, fill in the blanking.

Here are some things I wish someone had told me ten years ago:

1. You are allowed to have fallow seasons.

2. You are allowed to read for six months without writing a word and call it work dammit because it is!

3. You are allowed to lie on your sofa and stare at the ceiling while your subconscious floats up into the ether and back again and yoyos around like a helium balloon like this

4. You are allowed to go months without touching your manuscript because you’re not ready yet, because it’s not ready yet, because your creative compost needs more time to, you know, compost.

5. You are allowed to write three pages in a fevered state and then a whole lotta nothing for weeks on end

6. You are allowed to be a writer who doesn’t write every day.

7. You are allowed to give the middle finger to a traditional publishing journey, and then actually kind of want it again years later.

8. Feel free to contradict yourself. You’re a motherfucking writer.

Some writers do write every day. Good for them, for real! Still, here’s something we perhaps miss when considering such creative productivity:

They’re not always writing new work. They’re journaling. They’re freewriting absolute garbage. They’re doing writing exercises. They’re rewriting the same thing over and over. Many of them might be deeply anxious people using a daily practice to manage that anxiety, which is beautiful!

What iI’m trying to say I guess though, is that the myth of constant productivity serves capitalism, not art!!. It serves people selling courses and productivity apps and coaching packages. It serves the publishing or entertainment or social media industry that wants a steady stream of content. It serves everyone except YOU, the actual writer, trying to make something real and honest, arrived at through a sheer inexplicable mix of desire, faith, and fate.

It’s radical to refuse to be productive when and if you can manage that economically. Every day you don’t write is not a day wasted, but rather a day spent adding to the compost pile. A day of decomposition…where the soil of your mind (or soul, if you want to get woo-woo with me, why not!) is healing itself.

Your worth as a writer is not determined by your daily word count, nor by how much and where you’ve been published. Hell—it’s not even determined by whether you showed up to your desk this morning.

Your worth as a writer is determined by whether you’re paying attention to your life, and whether you’re brave enough to wait until you have something worth saying.

So let it rot.

Your words will grow when they’re good and fermented.

And they’ll be worth the wait.

✦ What’s your relationship with productivity culture in writing? Have you given yourself permission to slow down, break free of it…or maybe it’s working for!? I’d love to hear about it in the comments, if you’d like to share. ↓

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Dear friends,

This essay was originally published in Grain Magazine (Spring 2024). I wrote it in the Summer of 2023 when we were living in India for nine months. I speak a bit about my experience in a cult, Levin from Anne Karenina, the strange concept of “time-off”, and the beginning of my return to a sense of beautiful solitude.

I hope you enjoy it,

~S

K has a distaste for multitasking that I couldn’t quite grasp in the beginning. Someone in this house is not able to do anything without also doing another thing, he says. Someone being me. I am shortlisting writing contests to submit our poems for while Ted Lasso cracks some off-kilter American jokes to his British footballers. A cup of black coffee grows tepid by my knee. I have Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe opened in another window. Time to time, I check for new emails and scroll through Instagram.

These last two acts are not intentional, really. Just something for my eyes and fingers to do while I wait for websites to load. He’s probably been watching me do this digital dance for a while before he lets out an animated sigh. I blink away from my screen and look at him. Do you know how to breathe, he asks, a soft smile playing on his lips to ease up any tension such a question might elicit. Despite the plethora of meditation apps (advertisements of which ironically keep popping up on my Instagram) and t-shirts urging us to keep calm and carry on, breathing — and doing just one thing — appears to be a lost art.

Now, I’m not an advocate of the “good old times” when social media didn’t exist and we couldn’t look up cats wearing tuxedos and smoking a cigar with a split-second Google search. I don’t think I even believe in the concept of “good old times”. Zadie Smith elucidates that the idea of the “good old times” for one set of people would, for her, mean not being able to vote, to study, or to marry the person she loves.

Time, like math, is dispassionate.

Which is not to say that it’s a calculating, cold entity out to poison the few good years we’ve got left, leaving us with nothing but tin scraps of memory we can cut our hands on trying to salvage. No, but it is forever dissolving and forming anew, simultaneously.

And the times we have now, replete as they are with doomscrolling and reaction videos, Youtube blogs and Snapchat filters, Tiktok wars and Meta-heads — are just as good or bad as any other. But it’s almost a logical, historical fact — scientifically verified at that — that our attention spans have shrivelled up.

And you have practiced meditation, K urges, for eight and a half years, right? He is right. Apparently. I did sit in a coven of chanters for two or so odd hours every morning between the ages of 17 and 24 mumbling mantra after mantra on a mala of 108 tulsi beads.

I’m supposed to be an expert at just doing one thing. Instead I’m playing the proverbial headless chicken trying to attach a hundred heads onto its manic body.

Perhaps I feel I’ve lost so many years to the cult, I suggest. He rolls his dark eyes (and I realize that I love kissing his almost-unibrow). See, even while thinking one thing I can’t just think one thing. That’s bullshit and you know it, he says, you just can’t be alone with yourself.

I was alone for so long, I whine in my best sad tween pop star twang. His bullshit-detecting meter maxes out.

This is how I find myself walking without airpods and phone to pick up our kid from daycare that afternoon. When Justine told me that she went hiking in the Oregon mountains for over five hours, I asked her what music she listened to as she walked.

Nothing, she replied, when I hike I just like to walk and hear the sounds around me. I found it sickeningly undoable. I am someone forever armed with my Spotify playlists whether it is a two hour trek or a seven minute stroll to the grocery store.

I couldn’t imagine just listening to nothing.

But you’re not listening to nothing, K says before I leave. Even in complete silence, you’re hearing your pulse. You could finally let your mind breathe. Allow the ecosystem of your being a chance to rejuvenate, reseed, and flourish with something clear, beyond the noise our grind-obsessed digital culture hoses us down with.

So I listen to the screech of buses alongside the koels’ call-and-response. I hear a grandmother beckoning a child, her accordion-voice coalescing with the toddler’s bell-like plea to stay out longer.

Car engines, street hawkers, the rustle of leaves — my brain is panicking a little at the lack of external input but I breathe from belly to lungs to throat to nose to air. Sweat pools in all the dark spaces of my body as sunrays battle with the wind. Blown dust makes me cough.

Yet that same dust, as the dirt of the earth creepy-crawling with worms and birdshit is fertile ground for the flowering weeds that burst through the sidewalks, the tree trunks that root and rage out into the sky.

Life defies bilateral categorization. Yin-yang works its magic because in reality there is always flow, the mixing of the high and low, and the balance achieved as the experiencer surfs in serenity.

But such serenity is achieved after great strife, often.

The serenity of being able to wade through a sea of social media and find positivity, a community, calls for change, incitements towards it, encouragement, and maybe even actionable plans. But even the not-quite Gen-Z’er in me finds this to be a bit of a wormhole.

How often have I missed out on a beautiful sunset because I’m liking pictures of a sunset? (A lot more than I’d like it to be.) How many times have I watched my daughter do something incredible with the 16:9 frame of my stupidly expensive iPhone camera in front of my face even though that incredible thing my daughter is doing is happening right behind that camera, in real life, in real time. This one’s unforgivable, I think.

But then she waddles down the daycare stairs and I’m instinctively low-key lunging for my phone to freeze this moment, jail it in the iCloud. Then I realize that K’s confiscated my magic-moment-locking machine and all I’ve got are my eyes and her bird-like laughter.

Though I might not readily admit it to him upon our return home, it feels freeing to not feel some phantom pressing compulsion to make a keepsake out of every fleeting parcel of time. Isn’t time meant to pass? Aren’t we supposed to be learning the art of letting go?

No, I’m not advocating we permanently delete all our children’s photos off our phones (though I do know more than a handful of friends who might be spared the hassle of oohing-aahing over my latest baby anecdote accompanied with a blurry, off-angle image that’s truly only appealing to me). Yet some peace with impermanence would feel a bit exhilarating, right?

I used to be landlocked in an orthodox religious cult.

Well, not literally landlocked. I moved around more than a cursor on the screen of a certain poet-mother I know. But for all intents and purposes, I was a contributing member of the Hare Krishnas across Canada, New Zealand, America, and India. Dear god.

There were mandatory morning classes we had to attend where different members of the community would go off about various problems in the world as they reflected and connected (oftentimes in a comically obscure way) with whatever religious text we were meant to be studying at the time.

The value of time was a big topic, coming in third to making money for the movement (through selling books to the ignorant public “by hook or by crook” — a real mantra they espoused) and not having sex (sorry to everyone who thought I was in one of the “fun” cults).

I look back at these freeze-framed moments (many stuck in my rage-addled head but also still all over my phone’s ‘Remember This’ carousels) with a mix of bemusement and bitterness.

Time was indispensable currency.

One thing the cult requires of its members is the chanting of 16 rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra, which might clock in at around two hours if you’re not turbo-speed mumbling your way through it.

A lot of people who are just at the boundary line of stepping over into the converted zone often say that they just don’t have the time to chant all those rounds. And the answer we were supposed to give back? You’ll actually have more time if you do this because all other distractions will diminish. You will lose your taste for things like going to the movies, eating out (at restaurants and other dark places), living a balanced functional life which includes work and family, bowling on Saturday afternoons, drinking and so on. And in a way all of those things did happen.

As people converted and chanted, their extracurricular interests dropped like stink-bugs. But what filled all the free time that was now cooing in their laps like an excitable child? For me, and many other young women like me, it was hours and hours of gruelling “service”. And much of this service involved selling books out on the streets, rain or shine or thunderstorm or shooting or protest or I’m-so-exhausted-I-think-I-couldn’t-even-lift-a-knife-to-slit-my-wrists.

I laugh now thinking back to this. How did I not see it? A religious institution vilifies distractions in the age of social media as one of the singular drivers of our personal existential ruin while simultaneously using the same capitalistic hierarchies and values to funnel well-behaved young proselytizers on to the streets in order to make the religious institute boatloads of money that the dim-witted, head-bowed, hands-folded book-pushers will never see a cent of.

Capitalism is sneaky like that.

Even people who make a whole cult of not buying into it use the same tenets of capitalism to convince others that they too can join this cult that disparages capitalism and goes against the grain.

But there is no other grain. There is no existential gluten-free option. Nothing escapes the time-eat-time world we exist within. Nothing has ever escaped it. We have always existed in a world scattered with as many choices as milkweed seeds in the wind come spring.

Around 24, I began trying to find a way through this mad wind. I became pregnant, miscarried, repented. The guru I’d pledged my life to had told me that my worth was in cooking and cleaning and learning to be a submissive member of the time-conscious cult. The miscarriage happened, he indicated, because sins had to be retributed for. I did not outwardly rebel. But something in me cracked.

I remember reading about Levin’s spiritual epiphany towards the end of Anna Karenina —

my first foray back into the world of literature. This character had been as much a religious agnostic as a social and cultural one throughout the book. But almost suddenly — as if discovering a new particle in the trenches of a gutted warzone — he comes to divinity. I found it ironic that as Levin came to his spirituality, I was losing mine.

Well, depending on whom you asked. I was stepping away from the indoctrinated atmosphere that had more in common with a bullfighter ring than a pleasant meditation space. I receded from the constant beehive of gossip about ex-members or members rumoured to be entering that zone. I no longer flaunted my bead bag or book scores (how many books I’d sold, when, in how many hours, and how much money I had made for the Hare Krishnas).

The bigger I got with the baby, the quieter I felt inside.

I felt that I was becoming as large as the planet itself, and against such magnitude, what could be sung or whispered. I did not feel like hiding, but I also had no desire to be put on display as a perfect religious married woman. I lingered on my sofa hearing Tolstoy’s words unspool in and out of my conscious experience.

I watched the garden outgrow its metal boxes. I mapped the moon across the mountains, going from sliver to whole. Sometimes, I just closed my eyes as the windiest city in the world tremored with its baby earthquakes and the trees leaned a little too close to the dirt.

The physical fullness of carrying Ana in my body allowed for this silence to feel natural. Somewhere between that time and the birth that threatened death, the unzipping of my marriage, the dance of divorce, my new relationship, moving back in with my mom, back to Canada from New Zealand, and moving for a few months back to India to be united with my beloved — I appear to have unpetalled myself.

I am happy, almost ecstatic witnessing the miracle Levin grasped, but I am also erratic, dare I say, manic with the desire to do everything all at once.

I feel afraid of silence.

Anxious about things yet to come, future events that threaten pain, I crowd my mind with voices from the world that can soothe or at the very least distract me. Hanging from a precipice, I have a box full of bandages and think myself protected.

Just this morning, K quoted Don Paterson to me from his book of aphorisms: something something we are the wounds of time. How beautiful and cruel, to be thought of as the bleeding hole within the body of Time.

Time, we learned from the countless classes on the Bhagavad-gita I attended in the cult, is a form of God. That famous quote Oppenheimer chimed in with after witnessing the first detonation of the nuclear bomb in 1945? That’s a misquote of the Gita verse that goes: kālo ’smi loka-kṣaya-kṛt pravṛddho / lokān samāhartum iha pravṛttaḥ. Or: Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people. Kala is translated as death sometimes, but it really means time.

Of course, Oppenheimer might be spiritually right.

Death and time are synonyms in the realm of existence. With time, death arrives. Death obliterates our time. Is time meaningless then, or the most important resource we have? Isn’t it wise of me to fill it with as much as I possibly can?

Time Magazine has this article about doing nothing, and that being one of the most important things you can do. When philosopher Brian O’Conner writes about leisure, I think about how we use the concept of “time-off” to recharge enough to be able to do even more than we had done before. We rest in order to be able to redouble our efforts for filling time, for accomplishing, and conquering.

There is an embarrassment, it appears, within our current social world, in truly allowing for nothingness, for rest, solitude.

This was evident in the cult, though naturally I did not truly pick up on it until I left. I remember dreading looking into the toilet seat and noticing blood. Back then, periods meant three days of horrific pain — something that almost all women in the cult experienced.

Painful periods are a reality many women experience but it has become so ubiquitous that we might forget that merely basic biology does not necessitate such pain. Pain is always a symptom of something larger. For women, this symptom just has more categories to manifest within.

Overworked, stuffed into rooms like chickens before beheading, sleepless, eating a diet packed with apparently holy foods that consisted almost entirely of carbs (and many of us girls would hoard desserts from the evening dinners at the preaching center as a pre-breakfast, a way to add, in the form of faux-chocolate carob cake, some external sweetness and sexiness into our bland, bleak lives).

Of course the egg bidding farewell to my body would be enraged. The fuck kind of a shithole did you keep me locked up in, bitch. I imagine those little bundles of potential screaming as they tore through my uterus and out my vagina into the toilet bowl of horror.

Okay, I’m dialing it up but I need you to understand that being on your period usually meant more work, not less. In the guise of rest, we might not have to go outside to sell books on the street to unsuspecting college students or working moms rushing to catch the train home, but we did have to cook, clean, make social media posts to advertise the next event, and do a litany of other such “restful” services.

But this is the cult, you might say. Cults are notorious for milking people worse than a Nestlé wet dream.

And I’d say, sure, yes, but this aversion to rest exists in our world and that’s where those people get it from also. Unsurprisingly, the religious texts we were pushing on the streets actually prized stillness, gentleness, silence, slowness as a virtue.

The gift of not doing anything, of being with yourself, of being quiet against the heavy metal concert of the world.

But those passages were never read in classes, never discussed at lunch-time. No one made up weird physical or mnemonic devices to memorize them. Because such things are what truly go against the grain. And they cannot be publicized in a space that prizes performance, rewards the hustle.

That space is a microcosm of our time-scant world. The promise of digital media, of social media, was the same as the promise of the 16 rounds. You’ll have more time, more convenience, more to enjoy, more to keep safe, keep close, more with less.

By and large, the opposite has happened.

Yes, we can look something up without a trip to the library. Yes, we can make connections with a retweet without stepping outside our home getting to know our neighbours. But something crucial to the human experience is endangered. The being in the human. Just being open to whatever rivers and wonders and rains the real clouds might rivulet our way.

I return home with our daughter who runs to hug her dada. Some Mozart opera I won’t pretend to know the name or number of is willowing into the sunlit, breeze-infused room. K, who is a lover of music, is also a worshipper of silence.

Rilke, he reminds me, says, “Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.”

Back in our room, raging with summer now filled with the garbled tri-lingual laughter of our crackling child, I’m not quite sure what to tell him about my first soundless walk in I-don’t-know-how-long. Nor does he ask. He’s probably forgotten he even confiscated my phone.

Breathing in the humid air, I smile at him and mouth a thank-you. What for, he asks, genuinely confused. I don’t have time to tell him, because Ana is demanding our collective attention. The gratitude remains in the air and between us, silent and yet filled with the beauty of music and wildness, of nature and the way it conjures time through evoked memory, of birds that refuse to be captured.

Stop it — stop falling prey to influencer courses that teach you how to grow your brand & build your audience & churn out content in your wheelhouse (what the fuck even is that word).

Subscribe now

You’re not stupid, you’re better than this inglorious steaming dump of shite.

We joke about algorithm this & algorithm that & now we’re at the point where we literally talk directly to the fucking Algorithm asking it to lead us to so-called like-minded people as though we were blind beggars in a glittering empire roaming the golden streets with our hungry bellies & broken hearts. They’ve brought us to our knees & it’s exactly where they want us, so they can stuff the giant dick that is AI slop down our throats & fuck us blue till kingdom come.

& if for a hot second you think that because you have a bunch of followers & therefore have some ownership & agency over your audience then let me tell you — you’re being fucked harder than the rest of us1.

Go to any influencer — & by this I mean literally ANY one with over 10K followers — account (any one that’s left that isn’t hinged on vomited up robotic brave-new-world- bullshit) & see how they are forced to post, day in day fucking out, the SAME EXACT CRAP TORPEDOED OUTTA THEIR ASS.

They might have started innocently enough to share their art. Maybe they took a photo of something they looked cute in & posted that. Maybe they fired off a little tweet or a posted about their plants or kids or baking. & now? If they deviate even slightly from that line, guess what? PUNISHMENT! CONDEMNATION! RAIN OF HELLFIRE.

Or, well…low engagement. But the thing is, at this point, for so many people — that’s what it feels like. Which is sad. But also, I get it. We’ve been funneled into the attention economy & realized that even though most things are free, the true cost is that very ethereal uncapturable other part of us…it’s not our personal info, not just that, it’s our time which is made of up of our life made up of our actions that come from that essential unique self beyond any of this drivel. & that’s what’s being commodified & torn to shreds here. & we’re stuck, like good little boys & girls, with our hands out & pants down, whipped into shape. The shape of an amorphous singular blob.

Sure, maybe within that blob are little units of supposed individuality. But you must only find them there. Want to organize a protest & show how much you care abut the burning world? Find your gang here, spot your activist niche, market your martyrdom! Want to learn how to cook? Come on over, that’s in this part of the blob, full of flower sprinkles & cute kids or dogs with their faces covered in cake. Yum. Want to rage about how women suck? Come, come, we got a little blobby corner for that. Want to rage about how men can go fuck themselves? Shout about that here. Hate gay people? Come on over, sit down beside daddy. Sick of the cis hets — eviscerate them over here. & do it all with a tote bag with your favorite quote or a dropshipped t-shirt with a wacky cartoon animal doing something human. In the end, that’ll be the most human thing about you.

I don’t know what to fucking do. I want to cry. I want to go outside. I want to tell you to do the same thing. If you’re a creator or an artist starting out or who has already started, I want to warn you — please, don’t listen to them. Don’t enter the blob. Don’t pick a lane, don’t stay in line, don’t get herded off into that gooey all-consuming blob. You are YOU, no one else is YOU. SORRY if that sounds like shit, I don’t fucking care, it’s the truest thing there is.

Don’t pick a niche. Write about whatever the hell you want. Make art. Knit fucking socks. I don’t care, BE YOUR CONFUSING COMPLICATED SELF, MOTHERFUCKER.

Substack is also social media, but so far, it feels a little less insane. Yes, they’ve got the reels tab now, but so far I’ve mainly seen people reading poems or one dude making a wooden duck. It probably won’t stay like that. Most definitely, this platform will burn too.

Soon enough, you’ll get tons of AI accounts here manned by some evil dude in a baseball cap & a case of cheap beer. So, yea, find your people, but CONNECT with them beyond the algorithm.

Try to crawl back to what the internet was supposed to be.

Make time to meet people in person. Make friends with the people who love your art & your words. Go for hikes. Start a book club at your local library. Talk to living breathing humans. & for god’s sake: don’t buy courses that promise to help you go viral. Stop trying to go viral. Don’t be a catalyst for the disease they’ve already spread.

I say all this to myself as much as to anyone.

In the words of one of my favorite poets2, Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.