I have this blog as my browser home screen, which means that when I go a long time between posts, every time I open Firefox I’m scolded by the months that have passed since I last wrote something here. So … February 9th until today is just shy of five months. This blog is no stranger to long hiatuses, but that’s ridiculous.
Especially considering I haven’t lacked for anything to write about. I have copious notes toward a whole host of things, some of which are now too far gone to be relevant, some of which are more substantive. But then, that’s part of the problem: as anyone who knows me will attest, I tend toward the prolix. And I’ve come to think this blog isn’t the best forum for long thinky pieces; really, what I should do here is something like a weekly check in. Short, fun, friendly.
To that end, I started a Medium account, which will be the place for my thinky pieces. What I’ll do when I post there is post here as well with a TL;DR synopsis and a link.
Which begins today! (Happy Canada Day, BTW). I’ve been working on something for far longer than had been my intention, which I’d hoped to get up early in June in honour of Pride Month. Well … a day late. But here nonetheless. It’s a longish read, but hopefully engaging and thought-provoking. It’s titled “Sir Terry vs. The Gender Auditors.”
TL;DR: A year ago or so a Twitter fight erupted between people seeking to posthumously recruit Terry Pratchett to the anti-trans “gender critical” (GC) fold and those who said, essentially, “Have you READ his books?” As a paid-up member of the latter group, I delve into precisely how Terry Pratchett’s fiction articulates a philosophy (which I call magical humanism) emphatically at odds with the GCs.
I took an unconscionably long time to write this essay for a variety of reasons, but one was a not-infrequent recurrence of self-doubt—I’m leery of being a cishet guy holding forth on LGBTQ issues. At the same time, I have watched the ongoing anti-queer backlash unfolding with fear and heartache, as well as a feeling of helplessness. Silence doesn’t feel like an option. So take that as you will and hopefully I’m not being presumptuous in my allyship.
You can read the essay here. Please comment if you have thoughts!
Anyway … hopefully this will be the first of many. I have a bunch of other things in the hopper, and I’ll be aiming for a monthly posting (though that is certainly overly optimistic). Meanwhile, I’ll have more frequent short blog posts here, especially as classes approach and I get deeper into prep work and I’ll need a nerding-out space.
Also: one of the other reasons I’ve been absent from this blog? I wrote a novel! I finished the initial draft on April 14, and I’m now into the third round of revisions. More on that, and more on the process of writing it, in upcoming posts.
And in the spirit of more and breezier blog posting, here’s a cat. Gloucester the cat, to be precise, in his natural habitat (i.e. a bag).
it's all narrative 