SOTB (State of the Blog) and The New Project

I’ve been blogging since summer of 2005, meaning I’ve been at this almost twenty years. My online logorrhoea has spanned two blogs—initially, An Ontarian in Newfoundland (inactive but still on the web), and this one—as well as a handful of posts on Medium. And recently I started a Substack titled The Magical Humanist, which is (or will be) one-half of a collaborative project between myself and my wife Stephanie. The other half, still in the early phases, will be a series of video essays on topic pertaining to science fiction, fantasy, and genre fiction (and film and TV) more generally. I’ll be writing and narrating the videos, and Steph will be doing the production and editing, as well as contributing some original art (sample below).

On the Substack page I’ll be posting the transcripts of the videos along with bibliographical references; if the original draft of a given script is too long for the video (which I intend to keep to a rigid fifteen minute maximum length), I’ll post the unedited version. I’ll also be posting occasional essays too long and ponderous for video treatment, as well as shorter pieces detailing my leisure reading and viewing (“Extracurriculars”) and the stuff I’m currently teaching or otherwise working on academically (“Curriculars”).

The Magical Humanist in both its video and textual formats is, properly speaking, a project—by which I mean, it will build, iteratively, on my understanding of what I call “magical humanism,” a philosophy and fictional mode that falls at the intersection of philosophical pragmatism (as embodied by such thinkers as John Dewey and Richard Rorty) and certain precincts of contemporary fantasy (most specifically epitomized by Terry Pratchett).

It’s early days, but I’ve managed to post four pieces so far—two longer essays, one instalment of “Extracurriculars,” and a shorter essay about the virulent response from the MAGAsphere to Bishop Marion Budde’s plea in her National Prayer Service sermon (with Trump in the audience) for compassion and empathy. Before posting the piece, I wondered: is this appropriate to my page’s subject, and the larger project it entails?

I’ve gotten accustomed to posting occasional rants on this blog and my previous one, even though both had an ostensibly different purpose. I started “Ontarian” on moving to Newfoundland as a way of communicating thoughts on my new life as a university professor in a new province without resorting to the annoyance of mass emails. As the years passed however (I retired the blog in 2011), and the novelty of my new life wore off, it increasingly became a space in which to variously rant, vent, and ruminate on whatever topics, subjects, or obsessions drove me to the keyboard.

So, in 2011 I switched platforms and started “It’s All Narrative,” which I originally designed to be a more professional space in which to talk about anything narrative-related, which provided a pretty massive rubric. In hindsight, I should have called it “Thinking Out Loud.” (For reasons I’ll get into momentarily, that name change is now on the table.)

I was hesitant about posting the most recent piece to The Magical Humanist because I don’t want it to devolve into a place where I rant about the latest political enormity making me hypertensive again. In the end, I went ahead with it—because ultimately the sentiments spoke to the themes preoccupying The Magical Humanist’s project. And given that magical humanism as a philosophy is largely an attempt on my part to articulate my own moral and ethical objections to an ascendant revanchism of which Trumpism is a signal symptom, it’s unsurprising that three out of my four posts engage in one way or another with the 2024 election.

But still. Because I do want to keep The Magical Humanist mostly on topic, and because I’m loath to retire this blog, I’ll keep It’s All Narrative active (he says in his first post here since September, but who’s asking?) for those times when I am actually just thinking out loud.