Upcoming in the anthology launch, Hills’ Almanach des Collines.

Note: due to illness the launch has been bumped a week until Feb 13th.

I’m one of a dozen writers/artists with a vision of the future in the anthology. The mandate was that, the specifics of time for this place up to each person. I picked the timeframe of what was going on in 2126, making a sort of Farmers’ Almanac with ads and tips, calendar and so on based on what shifts might be there.

I worked with a model of climate change of permafrost melt, a species shift with assisted migration. The climate change models of tree change of North America was helpful. Canada Climate change models. Other species will shift north as well, as they already are, with the first sightings of opossums in Quebec. Plans to reintroduce extirpated species will occur as we value collectively the other animals among us. I spent quite a number of weeks diving into climate change.

The peach trees blooms become ubiquitous as southern trees march steadily north to their ideal conditions, the opossum becomes the new raccoon. Shifts.

A study looked at 86 tree species over the past 30 years and found two distinct migration patterns: hardwoods are heading west and softwoods are moving north. Their study reports that over the last three decades, hardwoods — such as red maple, scarlet oak and sweetbay magnolia — ranged west at an average clip of one and a half kilometers each year, while softwoods — including red pine, short-leafed pine and bald cypress — shifted north an average of one kilometer per year.

Fei’s study shows that, over the last three decades in the eastern U.S., hemlock have moved 13 kilometers north while beeches have roved nearly 12 kilometers west. Red oak are incoming while aspen and hemlock will have disappeared locally, moving farther north

Pelicans are among the animals expected to be seen in more North American cities between now and 2100, a new study finds and more turtles, salamanders & ticks.

I also sought out information on solar flares and cycles that could cause satellite network destruction. Solar storms could increase relevance of interdependence, models of hyperlocal living, suggesting more collective of mutual aid, community kitchens, compound living with multiple generations. A little anarchist, a little survivalist but in the Quaker sense of community not weaponry.

There would be in my vision of a century from now, a further trend of leaving churches and separation of church and state, and further norming around ubiquity of non-marked gender and sexuality so that queer families and non-binary people are an unremarkable shape in society. If we have a finite amount of intolerance that just cycles around at random target, what would be the collective hate?

I looked at national debt, and jubilees. Just before the timeframe the church had enough weight to declare a debt forgiveness internationally and redshift the scales of balance.

If the ocean trade on dirty fuel was not an option what is it that we would need to import? What did we cease doing locally because it was cheaper to import. I looked at the history of mining in the area, Buckingham graphite and Bryson’s zircon and foundry Local clay is a resource and mica.

What implications would that have? Would we be manufacturing small scale metal tools again as trade suffers from stumbling over passing over in a timely fashion from petroleum economy to more sustainable renewable energies. How are we responding to Leda clay and flood basins? What would we be eating?

Our own weather being erratic, greenhouses become more common. Because of sea level rise and drought crisis, there would be more migration of Arabic and North African people to the region as Canada continues to absorb more people in crisis. People with farms and orchard would include names of that origins. We would lose some local species but have peach trees, and increasingly be home to vineyards.

I posit the rise of indigenous population and land back claims honoured, with more power in language-status and in politics. A Kitigan Zibi leader being the premier of Quebec. Anishnaabe and Cree are nationally recognized languages of Quebec with French and English. An indigenous language learning model gets exported to other countries. I found this Cree dictionary useful and Objibwe, this Algonquin one.

People in and out of Canada would have a working knowledge of Anishnaabe and Cree as a third language option the way Spanish, German and Mandarin are now.

Because of sea level rise and drought crisis, there would be more migration of Arabic and North African people to the region as Canada continues to absorb more people in crisis. People with farms and orchard would include names of that origins. We would lose some local species but have peach trees, and increasingly be home to vineyards.

Fast fashion would give way to reusing fibres and design pods where you program in your desire at the equivalent of a depanneur.

Lifelong learning is default. Priorities culturally are for curiosity, such as

Youth winter camps: core subjects include genetics, clothing design, mechanical engineering, probability, robotics, grafting plants, language immersion, budgeting, meditation and deescalation, cognitive bias and propaganda, weaving, foraging, weather mapping and entomology.  Adult streams available 

I’ll be curious to see the implementations of the future, the rest of the dozen envision.

A new one up at above/ground press author spotlight #20 : Pearl Pirie related to my new chapbook, Heat Lamp, and poetic processes. Sample. Clicky-clicky to read all.

How deliberately does writing happen?

I set aside time each morning (often the whole morning) for thinking/writing, listening before the day “starts.” And, while waking with hot flashes and when walking the dog, it’s something to do—I can roll around rhythms, refine lines, leave gaps of not being too busy.

Thoughts accumulating slow.

To draw or take a photo or make a book cover there’s a visual hierarchy by size, proportion, detail, focus.

In stories I may take out extraneous, keeping the salient through-line.

In haiku I pare to concrete essentials where every syllable, phoneme and space must earn its place. A sonnet is an argument structure. People like the work done for them with a tidy package. Creativity is choosing aspects and distilling.

In free verse poetry is it the same work or objective? I accumulate things noticed which can read tonally flat. I let the reader add emotion and response rather than coach, which would underestimate reader and seem a propagandic bias. Where I add humour or a lede, is it caught if not signalled to? 

We each have chaos and randomness and data. It is not value added to not speculate on a pattern. To hold these cards to chest risks being inscrutable. To lay all down is prosaic, but to unpack a little may be necessary framework to be understood how I see things relating and why.

I like the mandala of everything in a poem, the leaching in, the leaking on, the letting out, the marginalia, the parts that don’t fit, the honouring of non-story, of no-conclusion, of clustering bits, of oblique, of pointing at wonder and neutrality and grief in everything.

If no pattern, why gather, why present it? 

But there’s white matter connecting under. It is not as obvious as a true or false sonnet or multiple choice haiku, or an isolate mood or depiction of diorama of traipsing a crying figure along a seashore.

It is open to inference instead of deduction. invitation to look together instead of echo each other. 

It’s another kind of reportage, reflection, assembly of things that hang together and matter in a similar inclusive ample way.

What draws suspense through a poem’s frame?

One goal of writing is to see fresh. Skim off the schtuff you are told or believe and actually see. To create not replicate a cliché. Which is not to say be a lone soul in the universe with Poet Voice Authority. But to be observant, frank and entertaining with a compelling way of presenting what is.

As hard as that is to describe, it’s harder to do.

To see fresh is to be renewed yourself. You can’t live obediently regurgitating and correctly…no I’m wrong. Some poets seem to Jekyll and Hyde. Furious, neurotic, anxious in person and calm in poem, or cheerful placid in person and goth horror in poem.

To write fresh, you need permission of that as an outlet, alertness in safety of page, however you feel confined or compelled to be while face-to-face or online. It need to be something valued.

To reassure and soothe and reinforce a system in poetry means perhaps it’s challenged elsewhere. On the page you can meditate on the world you want to exist, where there’s sublime old time patterns, a controlled mini-world of the poem.

Room for all kinds, right.

If poetry is a medicine, as Ronna Bloom prescribes, and a medicine is for one illness in particular, then people not ill in that way don’t find health through that. They need a different prescription of poetry. You need more playful chaos? You need more constraints? More affirmations? More revolution? Literary pharmacies are well-stocked for any condition.

The Notebook: A History of thinking on Paper by Roland Allen came out in 2024. It took a while for me to get into it. It has a lot of interesting facts but the premise is that the artifact of recording allows culture to shift, in science, art, cognition.

Through the page, the working memory can be anchored and passed to others in a more detailed sophisticated way than oral alone. The page is a tool for thinking, hobbling forward without being bound to working memory’s size. What effect does cheap paper have on art? It allows sketching. In The Notebook Allen relayed, p. 366,

“The MRI revealed that the control subject drew portraits using the right posterior parietal area, the brain’s facial-recognition module, with which we recognise people and judge their mood. Ocean was also drawing faces but, that part of his brain was quiet. Instead, the blood rushed to the right middle frontal area, associated with spatial awareness: the part of the brain whose usual purpose is to stop us from bumping into things as we walk. Ocean’s working mind, the scan revealed, didn’t consider the face as a face, but a collection of shapes.”

That distinction between the concept of a head vs. this particular lighting creating shapes on this particular set of shapes is something that makes a difference. It is not dispassionate so much as paying attention. Your mind can go a thousand places but the pencil, one place at a time.

He, NG, whose name is cursed, in the before time, said that there is a difference between how you read a novel as a reader vs. as a writer.

There is a way of being in the world when you gather for the mill instead of walk and listen.

Sometimes we rush to conclusion/product/poem too soon. Black Wolf by Louise Penny had some quote to the effect that Gamache holds off as long as possible of deciding patterns. Keep letting data in. concluding too soon is how you miss little aggregating truths.

Writing is in part learning to pay better attention. Further to the drawing,

“[…]significant growth in grey matter on the left anterior lobe of the cerebellum, an area behind your left earhole that governs fine muscle control. Finally, they saw a difference between the brain of hobbyists who were merely good at drawing, and those who had enjoyed full-time training.

Art school attendance yields an area of denser grey matter in the right precuneus, an area toward the top and back of your skull that deals with visual imagery a three-dimensional forms.

By comparing their work with other studies, [Dr. Rebecca] Chamberlain’s team can postulate that six months’ training would not be enough to build up this grey matter: three years of training and regular drawing practice would. Typically, Renaissance artists were apprenticed for three to five years.”

p. 369, The Notebook: A History of thinking on Paper by Roland Allen

It takes daily practice to see the connections behind how things are put together in dimension and shadow, perspective and texture. As they are. As much so for writing.

It is not just the showing up, but that does help. A distinction between dabbler and accomplished is the level of attentive analytical, observant engagement, practice. The curiosity of what makes something go. Taking it apart. The how and the why brings the next level.

In other finds, you can learn Latin online at Latin is Simple. Which is good because I mistakenly gave away my paper dictionary and haven’t found a decent replacement and two apps I’ve tried are terrible. And grade 10 Latin was a long time ago.

Also, Writing in Science is a deeper dive.

before the Hills’ Almanach des Collines launch. It launches on Friday February 6th at 6:30pm at the Wakefield Public Library.

and by then you could have your copy of the latest…

make me an offer…or tradesies.