Tag Archives: writing

February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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December 28, 2025 · 11:57 pm

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.

It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.

The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.

Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.

So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.

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November 8, 2025 · 3:25 pm

Dream State: Strong start and then

I made a mistake in telling a few friends to read Eric Puchner’s Dream State when I was only a third of the way in. It’s such a strong start – evocative writing, a pulling theme (how does one major decision or one major event shape the rest of your life?), interesting characters. Set amid the present and near future of climate catastrophe to make the aging of the characters over the course of the novel vivid against what can feel in our incremental experience of time unnoticed in the sharp changes for the reader between decades for a glacier or a lake or an endangered species.

And it’s not like the writing changed – the scene on the mountain with Elias is haunting and beautiful – it’s more I lost conviction that I knew why any of the characters were making any of their decisions. I suspect it’s a form thing – with the big jumps in time (with the exception of one incredible passage where the two children age together over summers over the course of the passage and the reader feels the slipperiness of time in the verb tenses and the dialogue) happen between chapters the reader is given snapshot moments to make sense of Big character decisions, and honestly, so much happens ‘off stage’ that it’s hard to believe the impact of those decisions on the characters and how they behave next. We have to take it on the faith of third person narration that yes, indeed, Garret and Cece still love on another because that’s what a long marriage means? I guess?

So sorry to M. and K. for forcefully recommending this one before reaching the end. If you haven’t yet started it, I’d say it would be a fine beach read, but not something I’d interrupt a year of comic book reading to go out and get.

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August 19, 2025 · 12:40 pm

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next.

I may be a bad feminist, but I found Jeannette Winterson’s 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Go Next far too focused on proving that women can be/have been computer scientists and can be/have been important to understandings of artificial intelligence. Like sure, yes, this is all true. And also so what. Okay, I know that in the case of the essays, the so what is that as we construct new forms of intelligence – or as new kinds of intelligence and beings emerge in the transhumanist future – we ought to learn from the past and create this future in more equitable ways. But it just read to me as… obvious?

Though clearly it is not obvious when it is the tech bros creating and profiting from new forms of AI and new AI products – and as Winterson argues the risk in all of this is that these men – like the industralists before them – will seek to maximize profit at the expense of the labour or women (and children). Though with AI less so the labour and more so the data or the ways in which these systems are designed, optimized (and implicitly, aligned – or not). I’d not call this one deeply researched, but with that it’s also not overly technical – and so if you wanted an accessible (and perhaps a bit surface) exploration of current (well now not so current because of the publication date of 2021 makes this ancient) technology then sure.

So while most of the book I yawned my way though, I did find the last essay (I should mention its a series of – sometime repetitive – essays about AI/technology and the past and future) on a future where a transhumanist self is defined not by intelligence but by love to be compelling. Oh I know it’s the Unitarian in me, and I know its a desire for there to be something that connects us, but that call to love as the ultimate end is well, deeply appealing. Even if Winterson doesn’t attempt to define what love is (or where, how, when it operates – or operates differently from a god BUT WHATEVER).

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