This dear old blog of mine has been in maintenance mode for the past 6 years (!). This is not a random length of time, but a reflection of the time it took me to do some essential things–to dig down and write my PhD dissertation (a revised version of which came out as a scholarly monograph with Bloomsbury Academic in March 2025, and is available here), then to brace myself for the post-PhD job search, and at last, thankfully, to adjust to my new position as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at MacEwan (I joined the Department of English in July 2023).

All of this has been extraordinary good fortune and life-changing in many good ways. But it has also kept a certain part of me, of my life, in “maintenance mode,” just like this old blog devoted to process and imperfection and to catching and sharing the writing life in progress.

I’ve decided, after running into a dear writer friend recently who I hadn’t had a chance to chat with in absolute ages, to revive this space for process-thinking and to let it do its thing again, which is to make a place for a certain kind of in medias res writing and thinking. Life writing. Notes. Things that arise and will disappear if they aren’t skimmed and saved. Not that letting things be ephemeral is bad at all. But if, like me, you only put out a book (or, as in the past year, three books (!)) once every decade or two, there is a lot that goes on that just disappears.

As Joan Didion says, and as the friend I ran into recently reminded me, some of us need to write in order to find out what we really think. As a prof, I know this is true: it’s like we can’t quite go all the way through with our thinking, can’t quite articulate the extent and edges of a thought, if we don’t do the work to try to write it down. That act of trying to write something down–like that exercise where the artist Gianluca Gimini asked friends and strangers to try to draw a bicycle by heart–often shows us where our thinking is still surprisingly fuzzy.

That word “articulate” always makes me think of the “articulated knees” in a pair of fleece hiking pants I have–the knees of the pants are sewn with extra fabric so that the leg, while hiking, has access to its full range of motion. To articulate the knee of a pair of pants means to make space for the knee’s full range of motion: I love that. Sometimes a mood, or a place we’re stuck, really needs the assist of a sentence–that syntactical squeeze–in order to emerge into something like its full range. And we, the creaturely beings bearing such moods, such in-process thinking, might feel relieved, if nothing else, by the transposition of what we carry and embody into something like an object that can be turned around, regarded, shared.

As of this summer, I’ve been a single parent for 13 years. My oldest child graduates from high school on Monday, which is astonishing to me. The conditions under which I started this blog are long gone. But the purpose it served then, I find, still persists–even as the details have been reconfigured. Maybe a writer of the kind I am will always benefit from a space to catch some of the preliminary thinking I am doing that I might never find time to give less preliminary form to. Mid life has so many diversions, demands, distractions–joyful and otherwise–that it can be extremely hard to find time to nurture the flourishing understory of thought and language that can send seedlings up toward the canopy while also composting down, over time, into good and fertile soil.

I’m thinking of this metaphor, “maintenance mode,” as a way to conceive of that kind of space and time we sometimes need or are forced to enter for pragmatic reasons, because other responsibilities are simply in the ascendant. We don’t abandon our writing completely, but maybe it becomes more of a task like other tasks. And maybe those of us who write and have found the most enlivening part of our writing lives–the preliminary, process-rather-than-product oriented aspect of writing process–for one reason or another kept in maintenance mode for a significant period of time, maybe we could sense or discern a moment when it becomes possible, again, to take our lives, our artistic selves, back out of maintenance mode. Maybe we could re-enter the stream, like a salmon pulled from a bucket, maybe, and spared its fate, and tossed back into the water it was pulled from.

Could we slip back in, wriggling and instinctual, and swim home?

It will take me time to update this outdated site–to add new books, a current bio, all of that. But, in the meantime, I am slipping back into this water to say hello.