Dear Friends,

What's this! Another newsletter, so fast on the heels of the last? Forgive me – it's time-sensitive and extraordinary.

The short version: This Is How You Lose the Time War is presently, at this moment of writing, half-price on Amazon.com, available for the princely sum of $8.79 in paperback.

It is also currently ranked #21 in Books. On Amazon. Like, in all books. All the books on Amazon.

Why is it #21 in Books on Amazon?

Because of this tweet, screenshotted below in two parts because Twitter is, forever, right up until the end, super weird.

As far as I can tell, someone going by the name Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood runs a fan account for a 90s anime called Trigun which was recently rebooted, and tweeted about loving Time War with imperative enthusiasm, and somehow over the course of 24 hours that tweet went viral with people chiming in to say how much, how passionately, how violently they love the book, and it blew up, and despite the fact that Twitter Does Not Sell Books enough people bought our book in a short enough period that whatever algorithmic alchemy determines Amazon's best-sellers took notice, and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas.

Stu had first shown me the tweet – which turned up for him in his For You tab on Twitter with no connection to anyone he follows or knows – and I blinked and wondered who Bigolas Dickolas was. A celebrity? A popular TikTok account? What was going on? What could account for the pace, the reach of this virality? The account had, at the time, around twelve thousand followers, which in terms of Twitter isn't huge – celebrity there is usually reckoned in the hundreds of thousands at least.

To say this doesn't usually happen is to invent a new category for understatement. Time War came out in 2019. It is approaching four years of being out in the world. This is wildly unusual at this point in any book's life cycle, especially one as strange and baroque as ours. I cannot explain it, and am releasing the desire to try. This is lightning striking repeatedly into the same bottle, and all I can do is marvel at it and give thanks for it. Not just to Bigolas Dickolas – blessed be their name – but to every person who read this book and loved it enough to share their passion for it at any point in the last four years. Max and I are so grateful, so overwhelmed, and so delighted.

And if you're new here and want to know what all the fuss is about – well, now's a great time to buy it! And while the audiobook isn't discounted, it is a fantastic performance from Emily Woo Zeller (Blue) and Cynthia Farrell (Red) and, as our benevolent spirit so eloquently put it, "it's only like four hours."

Dear Friends,

I've found it so difficult to write a newsletter lately. So much has happened since last I wrote – big life-changing things, small quiet things, changes of scene and season. I've felt suspended, often, between the desire to write a heartfelt outpouring about the river and the forest and the meadow and the sky with which I kept close company all April, and the equal and opposite desire to write a sensible, robust accounting of how I spent my time last month and the first week of this, to offer updates on work and general circumstances.

In the past I've made vague, hand-wavy attempts at bifurcating these postings between Letters of News and a more haphazard wilderness of writing whatever I'm feeling, usually but not always on a Friday, sometimes an actual essay, sometimes slipping back into the musing, earnest, letter-to-the-world wonder that was blogging in its early days. I don't want to write less than once a month; I don't want to write more than once a week; I still crave an elusive schedule that I will find generative rather than restrictive, more like a sonnet than a sestina.

While I figure that out – some news!

First: I'm thrilled to share that I've contributed to Star Wars canon!

“What I have told you was true…from a certain point of view.”

Since 2017, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s quotable line from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi — a defense of his own retelling of Anakin Skywalker’s death at the hands of Darth Vader — has heralded an anthology series celebrating each 40th anniversary of the original trilogy films.

Today, StarWars.com and This Week! In Star Wars are excited to reveal the third installment in the collection, From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi, including the cover art by artist Will Staehle.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the film’s debut on May 25, 1983, 40 storytellers explore the story of Return of the Jedi through the eyes of supporting characters, including heroes, villains, droids, aliens, and creatures.

I'm in tremendous company, and very proud of what I wrote, which was a departure for me on several levels – but I hope to share more about that soon. The anthology comes out September 5; in the meantime, you can pre-order it here, or from your favourite indie.

Next: a new Otherworldly column went up last month, covering Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett, The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi, and Infinity Gate by M. R. Carey. (It's a gift link, so feel free to share it with anyone stymied by paywalls!). It's another one of those delicious columns where I fully adored everything I covered, and I'm always so grateful when that happens.

Finally, the biggest news: we've moved house.

The last time we did this was the autumn of 2020, moving from a 2 bedroom apartment in a walk-up to a 3 bedroom apartment in a high-rise. It was a vast improvement on our previous circumstance; Stu and I had separate offices, we had balconies on which I could grow things in pots, the kitchen had a stove I could open all the way. There were things to adjust to, living in a condo, but overall I found it to be a haven for us, one in which we endured pandemic immurement and I figured out remote teaching and the cats murder-chirped at pigeons to their hearts' (dis)content.

This time we've moved into a house, and we (and the cats) hardly know what to do with ourselves.

There's a yard! There's a kitchen so good that one of our movers nodded "dope kitchen" while walking through it. We've doubled our daily step counts merely by existing in a place with stairs.

There've been challenges too: the house is old and venerable, which means subsidence, which means I'm engaging my core as I write this to keep my office chair from rolling away towards the door. There are lots of little ramshackle problems to solve; we've been here two days and are already wrestling ants in the kitchen. And as ever with renting, we don't know how long we'll be here, but we're going to do our best to make the most of it. Like Millie's doing:

Wishing you all a sweet, gentle easing into whatever you have coming next,

Amal

Postscripts:

• The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. I urge you to read the announcement here, stand in solidarity with the union and support striking members however you can. I joined the WGA last year, and this was my first strike vote, but given the truly amazing contempt the studios have shown the union thus far, I very much doubt it will be my last. Here's a recent New Yorker piece offering a glimpse into TV writers' lives.
• This profile of Kelly Link by Lila Shapiro is so beautiful and so worth reading. Also Kelly has a new collection out called White Cat, Black Dog which I can't wait to tuck into.
• Speaking of new collections – the marvellous Kathleen Jennings' first collection of short stories, Kindling, is forthcoming from Small Beer Press in October! I've long adored everything of Kathleen's I've read, and she's tremendously generous with her own reading and insights into creative work; she's an artist as well as an author, and my brain absolutely tingles in the wake of her posts. You can read a ton of her stuff for free at her website, or sign up to her Patreon.
• Back in March, Max Gladstone and I were In Conversation about Dead Country, the latest instalment in his Craft Sequence, under the auspices of Mysterious Galaxy Books. There's video of that event available now, and you can watch it here!
• A while back I saw this video of the B-52s performing on SNL and it has not left my mind. I'm simply in awe of how anyone could curate this much chaos into so immaculate a structure.
• My very dear friend Jessica Wick had a bad accident recently and has had to take two months off work to recover. This is a fundraiser to help support her and help her (literally) get back on her feet. Any amount helps, but so does boosting stuff on social media if you're so inclined.

Also, welcome to new subscribers! For reading this far, you deserve a photo of Devon as he helped me write this letter.

Dear Friends,

I've written before about how much hospitality means to me, and how double-edged is my engagement with it: that while I expansively wish to invite my guest to treat my home as theirs and will do whatever I can to ensure their comfort, when it's my turn to be a guest I wish to take up as little space and cause as little trouble as possible.

For example: if a dear friend texted me from another city and asked if she could crash at my place about 12 hours from now and stay for, oh, four days or so, I would try to bounce into action and say yes of course, but I wouldn't dream of putting anyone else in that position.

Until, well, this past Tuesday. When I did exactly that.

In fairness we've been friends for just over 20 years and she had, in fact, invited me a few weeks ago! Because this friend is Margo MacDonald, solo performer of Dressed As People: A Triptych of Uncanny Abduction, which I wrote part of, and after I was blown away by its stage debut at the Undercurrents festival in Ottawa, I said, I really wasn't planning on going to see it in Toronto, but now I must. At least once. And she said, come, stay, take in the play in a new space!

Life's tumults occurred, it's been a very weird couple of weeks, and the thought of figuring out timing and train tickets simply refused to cohere through a miasma of stresses and strangeness – but out of that fug of uncertainty a friend unexpectedly offered me a same-day lift, and suddenly I was texting Margo and ask if she still wanted to see me, well, that night, until Sunday?

So I'm in Toronto, in Margo's beautiful home, which is so full of exquisite loveliness that it's impossible to set a drink down without it becoming a still life.

This is a working visit, largely anchored to the stretch of Queen street between Logan and Carlaw avenues where Red Sandcastle Theatre is to be found. But I've been in great luck while here, as a very beautiful book store called Queen Books is practically next door to the theatre, and I was able to catch Sienna Tristen, Brandon Crilly and Suzan Palumbo in conversation there.

Queen Books even had a single copy of This Is How You Lose the Time War which they generously allowed me to deface.

There are only three performances of Dressed As People left: tonight, a Saturday matinee, and the closing show on Saturday evening. I intend to see ... All of them, because the show is just that fantastic, and I keep catching new nuances in Kelly Robson and A. M. Dellamonica's words as well as Margo's performance. I also have no idea when it will be staged again.

But after the matinee, I'll be joining my fellow playwrights (I guess I'm a playwright now?!) in conversation about the show, so if you have questions or want to learn more about how this collaboration came about you can get them answered! And if any of you are local and have wanted to get copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War signed, please feel free to just come up and ask before or after the show – I love to do it, and I'll make sure to have my signing pen on me.

You can get your tickets to Dressed As People here. We can't wait to see you.

Dear Friends,

I'm writing this from yet another white-out day of constant snow and craving a little more colour in my life, so I thought I'd throw this together in between staring out the window at all the birds I cannot see.

First: on Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 6 PM PT / 9PM ET, Mysterious Galaxy Books is hosting Max Gladstone and me in conversation about Dead Country, the beginning of the end of Max' amazing Craft Sequence. I feel very close to this book, because I was reading it in chunks as Max was writing it, and I'm thrilled to get to be part of its launch into the world. If you buy the book from Mysterious Galaxy you can also get a signed bookplate – just write "bookplate" in the "order comments" area before you check out. Sign up for the event directly here!

Next: on the very same night, Dressed As People opens at the Red Sandcastle Theatre in Toronto! It runs from March 7 to 18. Ghosts, scary fairies, mysterious encounters at sea – this triptych of uncanny abductions performed by Margo MacDonald is, in my completely unbiased opinion, tremendous, and I can't recommend it enough. I hope you can make it out! I'm also very glad that the theatre has a mandatory masking policy.

Last: My good friend Shing Yin Khor is currently crowdfunding an amazing new Tarot deck called The Strange Beasts Tarot. I love Shing's art utterly, and the project's already funded and has hit its first stretch goal, so this is mostly by way of saying you have a scant few days left to get in on this extremely cool thing!

THAT SAID – if the project hits its final remaining stretch goal, Shing will also design and edit

an accompanying zine of tarot games and writings from designers, poets and writers such as Caro Asercion, Emerald Barkley, Kate Dollarhyde, Amal El-Mohtar, Emily Friedman, Sarah Gailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Jeeyon Shim, Alyssa Wong and more.

These works will be compiled in a mailed zine supplement that will be automatically included for everyone who pledges for a complete deck of cards, and be supplemented by my behind-the-scenes notes and art on making this deck.

All I can tell you is that when Shing invited me to take part in this project my brain lit up with an idea for a Tarot-based game for this specific deck, and it floods my head with sunshine whenever I think of it. I really want to share it with you in this specific context, so I hope you'll take a look! The fundraiser closes at 11:59 PM PST on March 9.

That's it for now!

Wishing you all the very best,

Amal

PS: Welcome to new subscribers! In case you missed it, I recently shared this keynote talk I gave at AugurCon in November; meanwhile here was the previous Letter of News.

Dear Readers,

What follows is the transcript – edited and condensed for clarity – of a keynote talk I was invited to give during AugurCon, a virtual 2-day convention that took place last November organized by the staff of Augur Magazine. It's a little rambly and a little long, but it's about a lot of things I've had on my mind for months: anxiety and paranoid reading, what does the word "community" really mean, how do we live with each other on the internet, etc.

Mostly, though, it's about birds.

I hope you enjoy it!

All best,

Amal

Part 1: Anxiety Made Me a Bad Reader

I’m going to begin this talk with a sort of apology. I was approached to write this keynote towards the end of September, and in the very thorough email inviting me to write a speech, I saw the words "Our theme for this year's con is creating communities of care."

I immediately panicked. What, I thought, do I know about creating communities? Absolutely nothing. I know nothing! I might have possibly, once upon a time in my early 20s, known something – a very strange thing to say in and of itself – but sure, maybe at the time when I had the boundless energy and foolish confidence to launch a poetry magazine with my friends Jessica Wick and Oliver Hunter, maybe then I knew something about building community. That was in April of 2006, fully 16 years ago, and at least three internets ago. We called this magazine Goblin Fruit, and it brought more into my life than good poetry. It brought me real delicious friends, friends with whom I'd make art in turn, like C.S.E. Cooney. Friends who'd come to edit Goblin Fruit alongside me, like Caitlyn Paxson.

But Goblin Fruit's been on hiatus since 2016. And six years is a long time in which to forget things and get tired and allow thorns to kind of grow up around the thing to which you'd like to return. My point is that if ever I knew something about how to build a community, I was absolutely certain I’d forgotten it.

In fact, not only did I know nothing about creating communities of care, I was reading Augur Magazine's invitation in the immediate wake of a tremendous experience of community building. I'd just returned from a week at an artistic residency called the Wayward Retreat out on Quadra Island in British Columbia. Every day spent in that magical place had made me feel deep-rooted awe in the care and consideration that went into building a specifically artistic community.

So I had been the beneficiary of someone else knowing how to build community. But the idea that I myself knew anything about that – beyond to praise them with great praise – seemed a little off. In fact, I was so panicked by the prospect that I had somehow misrepresented myself – that I had accidentally conned the fine people of Augur Magazine into thinking I knew anything about their very important stated theme – that I didn't realise I'd misread the invitation.

The paragraph informing me about AugurCon's theme this year concludes with a very clear sentence: "While 'creating communities of care' is our theme, however, you are welcome to craft your speech in any direction you prefer." (emphases mine.)

Anxiety had made me a bad reader. In fact, to my great shame, I put off responding to this email for some time. It took an in-person intervention from Terese Mason Pierre to free me from my anxious prison – took her literally coming to find me in person at a cafe in Ottawa, and telling me that I could in fact write about anything I wanted – before I very sheepishly accepted this invitation.

But not before getting a little further confirmation.

"When you say I can write about anything," I said, "you mean I can literally write a speech about birds?"

"Yes," said Terese, with what I can only describe as patient bemusement. "You can literally write a speech about birds."

So I decided to do exactly that. Brace yourselves, friends, because for the next 30 minutes, I'll be talking a great deal about birds.

Part 2: Talking About Birds

Or at least, I was going to do that. Ha-ha, plot twist! I was going to write about birds. I was going to tell you about all the things I love about birds and birding; that would have taken at least 10 minutes. I would have told you about how birds are instrumental to my teaching creative writing, and how for years, I used a bird-related exercise to get students to understand that we write from unexamined defaults.

In fact, I'll give you a small taste of this exercise. Prepare yourselves for pedagogy. In your various chats and streams on Discord, on YouTube, wherever you are experiencing this talk right now, prepare yourselves to post something. All right, I'm going to ask you to do something. Here we go. Don't think about it too hard. I want you to write down the first bird that comes to mind when you hear the word bird. Don't think about it too hard, just write it and post it right now. I'm gonna give it a second.

My hope is that you are presently reading the responses that have bubbled up around yours. So the purpose of this exercise is to, first of all, recognise that everyone has a different default bird in their head whether or not they know anything in particular about birds, whether they are experienced birders or amateurs, or whether they have literally never given any thought to birds outside of the weird exercise their professor is momentarily asking them to do.

Then you build on that. You start to ask, what traits define a bird for you? Is it flight and a beak? There are birds that don't fly. Is it webbed feet and a bill? There are birds that don't swim. You have to start asking yourself: what does a hummingbird have in common with an ostrich? And all of that weird perusal of birds is in service of establishing that we have different expectations and assumptions structuring our imaginations. And it does us good to unpack them and share them and delight in them together.

I was also going to talk about birds and divination. I thought it would be very, very clever of me to write about auguries for AugurCon. I thought, I'll tell people about how interesting it is that the word “augur” is both a noun and a verb; that an augur is someone authorized – this is very important – authorised to interpret the flight of birds. But the flight of birds itself augurs something, in turn, and isn’t it fascinating there is this reciprocal sort of relationship at the level of grammar.

I was going to tell you how it says something about readers and writers – something about how birds fly without knowing how their flight will be interpreted by the weird jogging apes below them. I was going to tell you that augurs have a lot to do with science fiction especially, reading signs in the present to say something entirely speculative about the future.

All this stuff, obviously, is known to the brilliant people who have put together AugurCon and Augur Magazine. But I thought, you know, why not tease that out, why not tease that out specifically to make it about birds.

Finally, I thought, I'll tell people about how important birds have become to me personally in the last three years. How I have a yearly ritual in which I step outside on January 1 to look for a bird, and that the first bird I see on the first day of the new year will mean something to me about the coming year. And whatever that means is not something that I interpret according to books or associations that you find in literature, but actually something drawn out of the strange complexities of the moment, of the context that I have brought to the bird that I behold on that first day. How, for instance, I decide whether the first bird I hear or the first bird I see is my first bird, all of that weirdness that you kind of run through the filter of your own presuppositions and the things that you need from the world.

I thought, I'll tell people about how birding, especially learning to bird by ear, feels like learning a new language (even though I have no expectation of ever being understood by a bird) because the thing that makes me feel like I'm learning a language is the fact that I'm making my environment more legible in a way that it wasn't before.

I was preparing – I cannot stress this enough – a speech about birds. But then, Elon Musk bought Twitter. And I realised that I did actually have things to say about community, and the things that are important to building it and preserving it. So I hope you'll indulge me in this despite having led with a great deal of assertions to the contrary.

Part 3: The False Promise of Hawks

So let's talk about bird apps! I've been thinking about birds and Twitter in tandem for some time, in literal and figurative ways of various depths and complexities. In fact, Twitter recently provided me with that species of roast we call a personal attack while actually meaning that we have found joyful recognition in it. So Jesse Case, in an inexplicably deleted tweet, wrote:

As you age, it's ridiculous how fast bird-watching creeps up on you. You spend your whole life being 100% indifferent to birds, and then one day you're like "damn is that a yellow-rumped warbler"

While I cannot remember a time in my life when I was 100% indifferent to birds, the spirit of the observation stands. I am in this tweet, and I do like it.

Anyway, Twitter and birds. Let's start with the obvious. Twitter gets called "the bird app." It's got a little stylized bird shape as its logo. And that logo bears about as much resemblance to an actual bird as a tweet does to a conversation. The utterances we make there are called tweets, which is a thing that birds do, although that, too, is an absurd reduction of something of tremendous complexity we only dimly understand. But there are currently two other bird apps in my life besides Twitter, though they're very mixed up with it and its usage.

One of them is not strictly speaking an app, but it is a game that I play on the computer, so bear with me. It's called Wingspan, and it's a game in which you semi-competitively build up a presence of birds in different habitats to the sound of a truly gorgeous soundtrack.

(It exists – brief digression – in a physical format as well. That's how it existed first, but I really do feel that the online experience of the game is that rare occurrence where the translation to a digital medium has improved it. Now there is a soundtrack and beautiful little animations of the beautiful bird art. It's tremendously soothing, to the point that when I go out walking, looking for birds, and I see one, I start hearing the soundtrack in my head. So anyway, Wingspan: beautiful game. It's like if Ticket to Ride were relaxing.)

The other bird app is Merlin, which is put together by the Cornell ornithology lab. And it's basically somewhere between Shazam for birds and a real-life Pokédex. It helps you to identify birds around you, either by taking photographs of them, or by recording the sounds that they make.

So the way it works is that I walk around outside with my phone held aloft, recording the dawn chorus, and the app lights up with the different birds I'm hearing. It's often happened that I've never seen the birds in question before, or never realised that I'd seen them.

Often language gives us the means to perceive elements of our environment which we might not have been able to do before encountering the words for them. For instance, I recently learned that my husband did not really know what birch trees were, or that they existed. I told him that there were white trees, and he just did not believe me, despite having seen birch trees many times in his life. But now that he knows the words “birch tree,” and that they refer to a white tree, he sees them everywhere. Anyway, language structures our experiences. (Linguists please don’t @ me.)

But my point is that you walk around with this app, and you see it light up, and it gives you information about your environment that you did not have before, and it gives you the means to interpret it. So the app will give me information about the appearance of birds that I haven't seen, sometimes their behaviour, enough that I can trace the source of their songs to their origins.

So I can be hearing a bird and not realise that I've heard the sound a million times before, but now that the app has isolated it from the general dawn chorus, from the general mass of things, I'm paying attention to it. And so if I look towards the source of the sound and I know what to look for, I can maybe spot the bird that was making that sound and have a new relationship with it.

Thanks to this app, I saw – in the way that "seeing" means "recognise, acknowledge and appreciate" – a warbling vireo for the first time. I can tell now when yellow-rumped warblers are around just by hearing them, just by listening for them. And I can recognise the little heart shaped divots in their tails as a tell if they're not singing.

I don't know if you can tell from the way I'm talking about this, but this has brought great joy into my life. It has made me wake up earlier to find my way into parks and along waterways, just as the dawn is breaking, when there are fewer people around, in order to find birds. It's made me go on longer walks, and enriched those walks with wonder.

But Merlin isn't perfect. It's a tool, and a tool that has a certain degree of failure built into it. It has a very high rate of accuracy in identifying the recordings that you are putting into it. But it can be fooled. I learned this one day when I stopped along the river, hearing a strange loud rippling call from a ways away, too faint to really catch with the app from where I was standing on my side of the river. But it intrigued me, and I'd never heard anything like it before.

So I started to kind of foolhardily venture out onto some rocks, onto the river, to precariously just, you know – laugh at me as you imagine this – perched on a slippery rock, trying to hold my phone as close to the source of the sound clearly emanating from the other side of the river as possible, so that I could capture it in the app and learn something about the bird that was making it. I eventually managed to catch enough of it for Merlin to give me an ID: it claimed I was hearing a sharp-shinned hawk, which I've never seen before, so far as I'm aware, and certainly didn't know the sound of. But then, seconds later, as I continued to record, it said that I was hearing a Cooper's hawk.

Both of these hawks would be rarities for me, so-called lifers. Both possibilities had me deeply excited; but which one was it, was it the sharp-shinned hawk or the Cooper's hawk? Or were they both here? And that would be very weird and special, wouldn't it? I didn't see them that day. But the possibility of seeing them took me back the next day, and the following, in hope of glimpsing these birds and, you know, logging them into my Pokédex. And then I realised, as I stood there, like literally on day three or so of this endeavour, I realised that the sounds were weirdly regular, that there was something maybe slightly off about the situation.

And as I looked at my surroundings I took in a number of things. Took in the relative chillness of the birds that were around me, that didn't seem to be particularly affected by these hawks. And my vague sense that raptors tend not to be near each other too much. And the fact that those are just not birds that I expect to see at this time of year, in this place.

I suddenly put together the fact that I was not hearing hawks at all; I was hearing a recording of hawks. I was hearing recordings of hawks that were being broadcast by a high-rise across the river to scare away pigeons.

I began to feel very silly. I felt like I had been tricked. And I got angry at the app for failing to, you know, give me this information, and making me feel like a bit of a fool.

I was excited by the false promise of hawks. But the intention of the recording was to scare away pigeons with the false promise of hawks. I turned up day after day expecting to see hawks, but the intention – I can't actually tell how well this worked, I could not see whether there were pigeons standing there like crows on a scarecrow, just totally showing up the failure of the mechanism – but the intention of this device is to confuse pigeons and prevent them from congregating. To have a bad threat assessment, essentially, of the area.

In either case, me turning up hoping to see hawks, or the pigeons failing to, are both failures of interpretation: using one flattened, out-of-context utterance to arrive at an erroneous conclusion. I don't know if you can tell which bird app I'm talking about any more.

Part 4: What Twitter Gave Us and What We Took

Now, for the last several months, I've been using the good bird app to make the bad bird app more bearable. I go on long morning walks to encounter birds, delight in them, and then bring that delight back to Twitter in photos or descriptions. My hope is that I'll interrupt someone's doomscrolling with a photo of a snowy egret, or news of a black crowned night heron, or my excitement at successfully identifying an American tree sparrow.

But it's also been a kind of bribe to myself: if I leave my apartment early enough in the morning and fill my head with birds, there's less room for all the other stuff. Using the bird app to talk about birds is a medium-funny joke that I keep making, but there's a kind of desperation behind it. If we talk about birds, I hope maybe we'll remember how to talk to each other joyfully. And, hopefully, maybe we'll remember how to listen to each other and hear something other than the sound of raptors closing in.

Now, I say all of this sort of anticipating pushback, because I've been seeing a lot of it on Twitter lately. Twitter is very bad at allowing two different ideas to exist in the same place at the same time. And the keenest proof of that to me is just watching people talk about what we're losing when we lose Twitter, something which is happening in fits and starts, and truly astonishing layoffs, and all sorts of other horrible things which the current buffoonish billionaire who owns Twitter is doing to it.

So what I see is people on Twitter talking about Twitter in terms of, on the one hand, a hellsite, right? I have certainly called Twitter a hellsite. A bad, bad place where you go to become unhappy. A bad, bad place where you doomscroll until something – perhaps the image of a bird! – interrupts it, and you think, maybe I should go outside. A place for bad faith interpretation, for general unpleasantness, for things that ramp up your adrenal system and cause you to feel all kinds of shaky, bad things throughout your day.

People encounter this description of Twitter as a hellsite and they say, How dare you, actually. I – it is me talking to myself here – I, for instance, have made a number of important professional contacts through Twitter. I met my literal spouse through Twitter, I have used Twitter to find friends, to build connections and relationships that have been enormously nourishing and sustaining to me during very difficult times. How dare you – I! – call Twitter a hellsite.

And the frustrating thing about this is that it is proving that initial point. It cannot somehow be both: it cannot both be a hellsite, and also a place where people find community. It cannot both be a place where, for instance, you can accomplish all sorts of worthwhile activism that you couldn't before, but also be subjected to truly incredible kinds of harassment that didn't exist before. These are things that should not be at odds, that should be able to be united within the one greater truth: that Twitter is a tool, and that a tool can be used in different ways. Against the people who have embraced it, or in their favour.

At the same time that Twitter brought me some of the most important relationships of my life, it also brought us a Trump presidency. I say “us” here because, without being American, the rest of the world has also been subjected to the obvious hegemony of that presidency. All of these things are true. These multitudes should be contained within this one site. But its very protocols make impossible the co-existence of those two truths. Instead, any time Twitter encounters difference, it creates out of that difference an opposition. Things can be different from each other without being opposite to each other, but not on Twitter.

And out of those oppositions it creates oppressions. So that disagreement with someone about something which, outside of Twitter, might not have been a friendship-breaking ordeal, on Twitter gains all kinds of layers of scrutiny and misreading and misinterpretation, because, as I said at the very outset of this talk, anxiety makes us bad readers. Anxiety can make us paranoid readers, and where we are experiencing anxiety and paranoia, we might miss the things that are, for instance, someone kindly and joyfully offering us the opportunity to speak about something that we care about.

Twitter brought very good things into my life. And yet, over the last several months, I have been trying as hard as I can to spend as little time on it as possible, because it became a place that was no longer serving my needs. It became a place that was inimical to me, and to the friendships that I had made there, and to the art that was being supported by the connections that I had made there.

But I'm very, very alive to the fears that people have with its loss, the clamour that people are making about how they don't know how they'll support their magazines, or their livelihoods, or any of the things that they use Twitter for. But to this, I want to say, with the fullness of my heart: Twitter did not give you community. You snatched community from the jaws of Twitter. From the jaws of the algorithm, from the toxic engagement that was supposed to prevent community in the first place.

You cannot approach community as a service that is being provided to you. Community is something that has to be engaged with in a spirit of mutuality and reciprocity. And at this point, I want to make a sort of truck driver's gear change to talk about the Wayward retreat, which I mentioned at the beginning of this talk.

Part 5: Wayward Communities

The Wayward retreat is a truly marvellous endeavour -- a space curated for artists to come together in a spirit of mutuality, collaboration, and a kind of quiet sociability. I want to talk about the things Wayward taught me about community – things I hadn't realised that I had learned until I watched Twitter spiral apart.

First: boundaries are not the same thing as gatekeeping. If you look at the Wayward website, you'll see that in addition to a code of conduct that’s both generous and comprehensive, it's doing a number of things that we might not usually associate with building community. One of those things is that it is very explicitly not trying to be everything for everyone. It says at the outset, in its frequently asked questions – in fact, why don't I just literally read it from the FAQ, which I have in front of me:

I DON’T REALLY WANT TO SOCIALIZE. I JUST WANT TO GO TO THE WOODS AND WORK A LOT. IS THIS RETREAT FOR ME?

Probably not. Though this retreat dedicates most of your time to solo work, there are multiple group activities throughout the week. We find the community atmosphere is an essential part of the experience and creates a positive effect on the work created here.

Another question:

I HAVEN’T MADE MUCH ART YET, BUT I’D LIKE TO START. IS THIS RETREAT FOR ME?

Probably not. It is intended for artists already pursuing their craft with full-time intention (even if they hold down day jobs to pay the bills.)

A boundary is not the same thing as gatekeeping. And yet we often conflate those things. Here I see Wayward organizers telling prospective attendees “this retreat might not be for you, not because you are being barred from it, but because it will not actually serve the things that you need.” It's very important to recognise that you are not being rejected by being told ahead of time that the things that are here are maybe not the things that you need; you are, in fact, being seen and being appreciated in your difference.

Next: Share in the work. A simple but crucial element of the retreat experience is a carefully crafted chores rota. You have to, when you are at the retreat, wash dishes, help prepare meals and clean up after them. This made clear that even though one person was cooking for everyone, over the course of the week everyone played a part in appreciating that gift by sharing in the labour that made it possible.

It was wonderful to appreciate how much friction or disagreement or bad feeling that could arise among fourteen people was simply eliminated from the equation by this one simple provision. I was so grateful to be told what to do, grateful to have been invited into the labour required to keep this community running.

Finally: Strictures as structures. There were times of the day and spaces in the building that were marked out for quiet work. A ringing bell and friendly signage signalled that quiet time had begun or ended, that this living room was not presently a place for sustained conversation. If you wanted that, you had to go elsewhere for it – outside into the garden or woods or lake.

These limits helped structure our experience, and gave us a firm sense of what we could do in what space when, with plentiful opportunity to explore and enjoy ourselves outside them. And from those strictures, all kinds of good things flourished: the chores rota, for instance, had been organized to prioritize pairings of people who hadn’t yet had one-on-one conversation time in other activities, so that everyone was getting a chance to have a kind of interaction that could allow deeper connections to take root.

Understand, too: we were all strangers to each other as we arrived in this space. The amount of care required to think about what, not just one person, but what a group of people new to each other might need in order to allow harmony and fellowship to grow between them – to transform them from strangers into people who shared a community – was dazzling to contemplate.

I'm belabouring this because I want to build up to the most wonderful part of the retreat for me – beyond the incredible food we were being served, beyond the natural beauty of the location, beyond the fact that it was totally off-grid and we had no access to the internet unless we wanted to literally climb a mountain and hold our phones up in order to get one bar of reception. (Only one person did, in order to receive new baby photos.) Threaded throughout the experience of this retreat was a collaborative piece of art that took the form of a game of artistic Telephone, played through the geographic space we were inhabiting.

It worked like this. After an initial catalysing prompt given to the first participant, each of us, over the course of the whole week, were given a two-hour chunk of focused time in which to produce an artwork based on a prompt from the person who’d just completed theirs. So one person gets this prompt, creates an artwork or an experience, and then distils that art or experience into a representative fragment small enough to fit into a glass bottle. And that bottle and its contents become a seed of inspiration passed on to the next person in the chain, who will then, in turn, create something inspired by that small thing.

What was in the jar varied. I did not realise this at the time because we were all being very carefully insulated from each other and from what the whole experience was going to look like. (“It’s not being kept from you,” we were told. “It’s being kept for you.”) So when I received my bottle, in it was a sheet of paper. And there were drawings on it, things that were suggesting sound and vibrations. The thing that most struck me though, was that on the outside of it were the words, "you are safe."

And I had to take this and build something with it.

Now, we had been instructed to try and move outside of our comfort zones in this. If someone was a visual artist, they were encouraged not to lean on that skill set, but to try and push themselves in a different direction. I'm a writer, and I felt that trying to do something that wasn't just putting words on a page was maybe what was being asked for here. But I was also terrified.

I have this sort of chip on my shoulder about writing as an art form, that I think many writers do. Or maybe it is just me, I don't know. I certainly sometimes remind myself that writing is, how can I put this? Obviously, writing is an artform, I don't have any problem remembering that. But there is a certain kind of reverence that I have for a tactile object that is created by a person, whether it's fibre art, or painting, or drawing, or sketching, or sculpture, or anything that involves making something physical, that I feel is distinct from writing. Which usually is, you know, imaginary pixels on a computer somewhere that just lacks that physical aspect.

So I thought, instead, okay, well, what else do I know how to do? I know music; maybe I'll write a song? Maybe I'll do something that involves singing? And then I thought, oh, yeah, maybe I could do something where I get a bunch of people together to sing. And as soon as I thought that, I became very, very anxious, thinking about how could I possibly craft this experience in two hours.

I wasn't seeking the consent of the participants in it. I knew that this was going to involve everyone on some level, but I didn't have the means of asking people, did they feel comfortable singing? Did they have a lifelong fear of lifting their voices in song? People can feel very anxious about lots of different things. And I didn't want to tread on that, in this space that had been so carefully curated for us to do something beautiful together with.

So I asked one of the organisers, who’s herself an experience designer, to help me out. I said, this is what I'm afraid of. These are my concerns. What do I do with them? And she said something that I will never forget, and that I treasure. She said: make them feel safe enough to be brave.

I suddenly knew what I wanted to do. I realised that maybe the way to make people feel safe in this particular situation was to make sure that everyone had a very, very small role, a role that could potentially be opted out of if necessary. Something not unlike a chores rota.

I gathered long sprigs of lavender and sword ferns. On a tall stone staircase, I marked some steps with lavender and some with ferns. When the group approached me, I gave them either lavender or a fern and sent them to stand on the appropriate steps until the staircase was filled. And then I conducted them as if they were parts of an orchestra, directing them to clap or hum based on whether they were holding ferns or lavender, to build their confidence in making music together without engaging any fear of singing. Then I made them stop, and I talked about the difference between singing and speaking and how much I wanted to hear their voices in the world.

And I saw, and I could feel, that there was a kind of circuit humming between us, as a consequence of the care that I had taken in giving people small things that they could accomplish together. I sought to make them feel safe enough to be brave with me, in lifting their voices in song with me, after teaching them a single line with a simple melody. To bring this back to birds – it’s a line from a poem called Matériel, by Don McKay: "To dress up like the birds and be and be and be."

It was a profound experience for me. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful artistic expressions it's been my pleasure to live so far. I felt like I had been given this enormous trust, and that I had managed to create the conditions for something beautiful and harmonic to arise from it. Some people during the singing literally took it upon themselves to harmonise, some of them just sang what I was singing, some of them hummed or clapped, and it all just worked. It all came together.

So I made it about birds, because of course I did. But the seed that I left for the next person, not knowing who it would be, was a bottle that had in it a fern, a sprig of lavender, and a piece of paper with my attempt at drawing feathers, and a few other things that ended up inspiring, for that next person, a kind of bird-related augury. Which I won't belabour, but which is my cue to bring this to the last thing that I really want to talk about here: augurs and auguries.

Part 6: Auguries

Tweets and auguries have this thing in common: they are both short, gnomic utterances, devoid of context and requiring interpretation. And one of the most famous uses of augury, which feels frustratingly relevant to the way that I see people speaking on the internet lately, is to do with the legendarium surrounding the founding of Rome.

Perhaps you know the story, perhaps you don't, but the general gist – there are many versions – is that there are twins, Remus and Romulus, who are abandoned at birth, exposed on the countryside. They end up surviving because they get suckled by a she-wolf, and they grow up together, they do a bunch of stuff. After a lifetime of gaining martial prowess and being generally excellent by the standards of pre-Roman excellence, they decide that they are going to found a city together. They want to set it on a hill.

If you know Rome (which I don't, actually, except out of English literature) there are seven hills. And there is some debate about which hill they want to build the city on. Will it be the Palatine? Or will it be the Aventine? Remus wants to found the city on the Aventine. (I really hope I get this right.) Romulus wants to found it on the Palatine. They cannot decide between them, and so they decide to turn to auguries. They decide that they are going to let the birds tell them where they should go to found their city.

Remus observes six auspicious birds hovering over the Aventine. Romulus observes twelve auspicious birds hovering over the Palatine. They start fighting, and Romulus ends up literally killing Remus, killing his twin brother. And Rome gets founded on the Palatine. There's the end of the story. There are other versions where Remus survives and founds a different city.

But the one that has come to me at any rate, and that feels germane to our social media moment, feels like this one. Two people, who are brothers, with everything in common, trying to decide where to go and where to build their community. And instead of finding a way to talk about this and build community together, they decide to kill each other in a spat about birds. Mastodon or Hive? Cohost or Instagram? Ah, where will we go? What will we do? Where will we end up? How will we continue to build our communities together and have our livelihoods? Sell our books, get people to read our short stories, fund our magazines, how will we do this?

Despite my forays into divination, I can't read the future. I cannot read this flight of birds around us right now, as people flee Twitter and try to build their communities elsewhere. What I can say is that AugurCon is fucking amazing. And it is run by people who are so dedicated to creating this space that is valuable and joyful and sustaining. And that makes room, that creates the conditions for the kinds of conversations, hopefully, to arise, that you might not find in a flattened recording-of-a-recording, contextless, dead, horrible, broadcast nonsense thing that makes you feel like there's nothing out there but hawks waiting to kill you. Or that might make a space uninhabitable to you because of the ways in which we fail to interpret each other.

I cannot read birds or tell this future, but I want to learn our voices. I want to see us thrive in our habitats. I don't want us to mistake a crowded hallway for a community. I don't want us to think that Twitter gave us something that we didn't give each other. And so many of those things that are important are generosity, and kindness, and good faith, and the willingness to just believe for a moment that the person speaking to you doesn't actually mean you harm.

I want to be able to tell the difference between a hawk and a recording of a hawk. I want us to be augurs and I want us to dress up like the birds and be and be and be. And I want us to give each other dusks and dawns in song. I want us to just give more and expect more of each other.

And I want to end, as I get a little weepy here, with a poem. It's a poem called “Why I need the birds,” by Lisel Mueller. You can find it in a collection that I highly recommend called Alive Together.

Thank you all so much for listening to me at such great length. Thank you so much to the organisers of AugurCon and the editors of Augur magazine for doing all the work that they do. And thank you so much for having me.

Dear friends,

February's felt uncharacteristically long, and I think it's mostly been the snow. But today the sun touched my body and I briefly came into ecstatic, feral life, so here's a newsletter before I succumb again to torpor.

I paused to fact-check myself before continuing, and must grudgingly report that in January Ottawa had both more snowfall and more snow days, but what can I say: February still felt longer, and more immuring. Maybe because in January I was sick and in February I was better, and the desire to leave home and venture towards rivers and trees and birds was stronger? Maybe because so much of what I had to defer in January accumulated, snow-like, in February, and I've been shovelling my way out of more work than I expected? Or maybe because the month has been such a yo-yo, having both the hottest February day on record and the coldest, within about a week of each other, and I keep reading calamity in the weather, and hearing Florence Welch sing what if one day there's no such thing as snow?

Winter aside, though, I have some cool things to share and some lovely things to look forward to.

First: I have a new column up at the New York Times Book Review, in which I cover Frances Hardinge's Unraveller, Annalee Newitz' The Terraformers, and Freya Marske's A Restless Truth. (That's a gift link, so anyone should be able to access it.)

Second: I saw Dressed As People! While dressed as a person!

In 2021, my dear friend Margo MacDonald invited Kelly Robson, A. M. Dellamonica and me to each write her a monologue on the theme of "uncanny abduction." We did, and the result became Dressed as People: A Triptych of Uncanny Abduction. It debuted during Ottawa's virtual Fringe Festival, where it took home the Audience Choice & Outstanding Solo Performance awards, but this year it's getting tangibly staged twice, and the first set of shows took place during Ottawa's Undercurrents festival last week: directed by Mary Ellis as before, but this time with sound design by Alli Harris and lighting design by Laura Wheeler.

I caught it on closing night and it was, frankly, a triumph. I fully expected Margo to be mesmerizing and to blow me away, because I've been watching her perform for just over 20 years; what I didn't know how to expect was the dimension and texture added by the set and sound and light design, how it would feel to get to see these pieces take up space. My sister described experiencing Kelly Robson's devastating "Skinless" as "a dull ache" in her heart; A. M. Dellamonica's "Repositioning" had us roaring with laughter and then going suddenly, tensely quiet with every almost-revelation.

My piece, titled "The Shape of My Teeth," was between them, and despite having heard Kelly's name announced with her piece before Margo began performing, I was completely unprepared for hearing my own name spoken over the sound system. It was the first of several knocks at my heart; at one point I found myself leaning forward, mouth open, tearing up, unable to believe that I'd written anything of what Margo was saying, because surely if I had it couldn't affect me like this, but I had, and it was, and that's theatre.

The audience that night sounded so young and so passionate and so queer. People came up to us afterwards to talk about the pieces and how much they loved them, and I felt like some dark, dusty room inside my body had lit up – dimly, the bulb flickering and confused, but still showing the contours of the space in which I used to talk about art and life and love in crowds of people, filling each other up with excitement and joy and gratitude and the terror and relief of being seen.

I really wasn't planning on going to see it in Toronto, but now I must. At least once. You can too, if you want: it's playing at the Red Sandcastle Theatre from March 7-18. Tell your friends, plan your journeys! I'll be doing the same – I just want to be in this photo again.

Third: The Book of Witches!

I received my advance reader's copy of The Book of Witches, an exciting anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan and illustrated by Alyssa Winans, with a table of contents that makes me want to drop everything and just curl up with it for a weekend. My own contribution is called "John Hollowback and the Witch."

I've mentioned in previous letters that this story broke a short fiction dry spell of a few years' length – the last one before this being "Florilegia: or, Some Lies About Flowers," which came out in an anthology called The Mythic Dream (2019) – and I had quite a hard time writing it:

Anyway after a Bold Edit courtesy of my beloved C. S. E. Cooney, and after taking my own oft-cited advice and reading the whole thing out loud, things clicked, got fixed, and I'm very happy with it. Here's the first page:

The Book of Witches will be published on August 1, but you can pre-order it now!

Finally: welcome to new readers, and thanks so much for signing up to read these letters. This is the first one I've sent since redesigning the website, and I hope it's all working smoothly!

That said – since I have this whole beautiful ARC to explore, and a brand new comment section to break in, why don't we play a game: leave a comment naming your favourite witch, and I'll randomly pair you with a story from the anthology, and share its title and first line with you. Good for up to 29 comments!

Thanks again for reading, friends.

Wishing you all good things in the week to come,

Amal

PS: Next letter will be a bit different – an edited transcript of a keynote talk I gave in November. It's about birds. Most things in this newsletter are, as it turns out.

Dear Friends,

I've often said that I feel there should be one full month between the end of December and the beginning of the New Year. Our late capitalist modernity doesn't allow me this, but I try to give it to myself anyway by celebrating no fewer than three New Years between December 31 and Feb 3.

The first of them falls on January 1. This is when I seek my New Year's Bird, say "bistreynti 3aleikoum" to as many members of my family as I can before they get me back, and try to do as little housework as possible. The second is the Lunar New Year, whenever it arrives; the third is Imbolc, or, to me personally, the New Year That Counts – the one that feels like a new year has not only arrived, but shrugged off its coat, put its bags down and settled in. Celebrated (by me) on February 2, it's the third one, the final one, the one that's given me the span of time I feel I require to acclimate to the change in calendar.

Usually I observe it with a lot of housecleaning and other domesticity: baking bread or cookies, tidying and dusting and hoovering, opening a window, lighting a candle at sunset and thinking about the year ahead. After this point I don't say "happy new year" in emails anymore; whatever mood it's in, the year's no longer new, its sleeves rolled up around working arms.

I got sick on January 2, and spent most of the month miserable and housebound. As January receded into the distance with emails unanswered and family birthdays delayed, I told myself this was fine, though – I had a cushion! A New Year's Margin. February 2 would roll around and I'd make something of it, clear my eyes, fill my heart, and still be able to feel like I'd gotten this year off to a decent start.

But on Imbolc, I slept in. I'd baked a loaf a couple of days earlier and forgotten to get the sourdough ready for a new one. The week leading up to it was thick with snowstorms giving way to a deep freeze, and opening a window seemed foolhardy. My attempts at cleaning were hurried and haphazard instead of the pleasant, meditative occupation I'd promised myself. Nothing was aligning, and everything felt frustrating and out of joint. I'd given myself three shots at this, and now I was out.

There's nothing quite like failing at something to make you interrogate why you wanted to succeed. What was it, ultimately, that I wanted from accomplishing a few small tasks in a certain order, at a certain time on a certain day? Wasn't it supposed to be a comfort and a pleasure? A release from a pressure to Newly Begin in step with everyone else in a way that I thought unfair and athwart its stated spirit? Hadn't I, finally, only delayed and reorganized that pressure in the guise of relief? And hadn't I still let it crush me?

The upshot of it is, it's February 4. Yesterday I dusted my desk. Today I've fed the sourdough. Tomorrow I'll bake something with it. The days are getting longer whether or not I can see the sun.

Happy New Year, friends. Merry Imbolc. I wish you something warm and good to seize on every new day between now and the next one.

Postscripts of News:

• In 2021, my dear friend Margo MacDonald invited Kelly Robson, Alyx Dellamonica and me to each write her a monologue on the theme of "uncanny abduction." We did, and the result became Dressed as People: A Triptych of Uncanny Abduction. It debuted during Ottawa's virtual Fringe Festival, where it took home the Audience Choice & Outstanding Solo Performance awards – but I'm thrilled to share that it's coming to an actual stage with an actual audience! On February 15, 17 and 18 you can catch it in Ottawa at the Undercurrents Festival. Tickets are on a pay-what-you-choose sliding scale, from $5 to $75, but once they're gone they're gone, so get them soon!
• There'll be a longer run of Dressed as People in Toronto at the Red Sandcastle Theatre from March 7-18, and you can get those tickets now too!
• In other Dear Friends Doing Theatre News – my darling C.S.E. Cooney is putting on a one-night-in-NYC showing of Ballads from a Distant Star. If you've been following me or Cooney or Caitlyn Paxson long enough to be aware of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, you'll be familiar with the conceit; if not, and you can get to NYC for March 30, I highly recommend checking this out. There's a 6:30PM and an 8:30PM showing.
• My wonderful assistant's been working on redesigning my website, which should be live as of next newsletter! But as part of that, we're trying out a new comment system, which will means old comments on older posts will soon vanish. If there's anything in there you want to hold on to or retrieve, now's the time!

Dear Friends,

This is not the newsletter in which I talk about Twitter being gutted by a billionaire buffoon, or my feelings about having spent thirteen years building a presence on a service that's being swiftly rendered unusable. But it is the newsletter in which I want to welcome everyone who signed up to it in the last few weeks: welcome, and thank you so much for allowing me to write to you.

It's been a while. I last sent a letter in September, and now have a ridiculous backlog of autumn photos to share which are thoroughly out of season – both kinds of autumn, the summer-autumn and the winter-autumn, the jewelled bursts of garnet and topaz in the trees giving way to fine filigrees of frost on the grass.

All that got blanketed in snow by the time I started writing this: there was one sudden, decisive snowfall at the precise middle of the month, and from one day to the next everything was transformed, all that scattered jewel-light matted and dimmed.

(Dropping a tweet into this newsletter feels like a bold move right now; I hope it works. If it doesn't, well, just trust that the snowfall was impressive and a side-by-side before-and-after demonstrated this.)

But in the week since I started writing this, we caught a warm spell, and now the world outside my window's a drab, wet green-brown. And I should maybe rethink the process of anchoring each newsletter to some seasonal expression of weather at this time of year.

In brief, though, I've been absent because I've been writing – around the contours of the new job – at a pace and with a relentlessness I haven't had access to in many years. I came back from the Wayward retreat dazzled by the company I got to keep as well as the care and foresight the organizers put into building the conditions that would allow creativity to flourish, and I wanted to study those conditions, to see what I could pull into my daily life.

So for all of October, I set an alarm and woke early. I laid out soft clothes the night before to shuffle my sleepy body into with as little effort as possible come morning, and would go to bed as early as circumstances allowed to try and make the whole work. Then I'd walk to meet the birds. I'd walk to move my body and outrun the sucking wound of the internet, to catch every last crumb of light and colour on my tongue before the darkness and the snow set in.

And in the last six weeks I've finished a novelette that's haunted me for a year, a column, a year's best list, and a keynote presentation, and I feel pretty good about all of them. I've delivered – and been delivered from – all my deadlines for the year, which is incredible to me. I honestly cannot remember the last time I went into December actually anticipating real rest, instead of the most stressful and anxiety-ridden portion of an academic winter term. There's room – in my head, in my days – for making plans, for reading books I don't have to review, for thinking idly and fruitfully. I keep talking about the relief of this in violent, almost vindictive terms: my relief is ferocious, it's vicious. I'm so furiously glad to have quit the work I was doing in favour of the work I am doing, to have reclaimed these parts of myself. I'm so looking forward to writing more here, to having cleared these decks.

I wish you all this kind of joy: this release, this relief.

Postscripts:

• Over at the NYTBR I had a column go up in October looking at translation in a few SFF books: Babel by R. F. Kuang, The Anchored World by Jasmine Sawers, and Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka. A longer column went up last week, looking at books featuring multiplied and divided selves: The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin, The Scratch Daughters by H. A. Clarke, A Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares, and The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman. (Both links are gifted so you should be able to read without a subscription.)
• The keynote I wrote was for AugurCon, which concluded this weekend, but which is run by Augur Magazine, a beautiful endeavour run by people I admire. They're opening up to submissions again from December 15!
• This essay by Madeline Ashby about how M. Night Shyamalan's The Village anticipates our present internet era is superb, just a dazzlingly disciplined piece of writing. "The Village speaks to the airless insularity of any niche that can’t survive the arrival of another generation."
• Cory Doctorow wrote this essay titled "Social Quitting," putting the Twitter exodus into a longer timeline of social media ups and downs, that I found very persuasive.
• I've been utterly absorbed by Andor, the most recent Star Wars TV show, and not a day has gone by since it started airing that I haven't thought about it and its explicitly anti-fascist project. I'm going to write quite a lot about Andor in the coming weeks, and if you haven't watched it yet I can only highly and helplessly recommend it with my whole heart. I also don't think you need to have watched or enjoyed any other Star Wars story to be blown away by it.
• If you're looking for signed-by-me copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War for the holidays, you can order them from Perfect Books, my favourite local independent. They'll ship internationally for an additional fee, and I pop in every week or so to sign whatever stock they have; if you write to or call them far enough in advance I can probably also inscribe a copy to your intended recipient.

That's it for now – wishing you all a fine rest of the month and a smooth shift into the next,

Amal

Dear Friends,

I’m writing from the ocean. That’s probably incorrect, but it’s what it feels like: sky and water meeting, hazy blue mountains in our wake.

I’m actually on a ferry bound to Nanaimo from somewhere north of Vancouver, and I’m in a group of marvelous, brilliant people, all heading to the Wayward Retreat on Quadra Island. Between us and it is a 2 hour drive and another ferry, and once on the island we won’t have cellular data or any kind of internet, just a lone landline connecting us to people outside the retreat.

I've accumulated so much news since last I wrote – undertaken truly gigantic changes to my life – and I kept thinking I’d find time somewhere in the last few weeks to write about it all before vanishing into the wilderness for a week. I wasn't able to. It felt important to do so – but that importance started to gain mass and gravity and distorted the mental terrain around it to the point I couldn't seem to begin.

So, in brief: I resigned my position teaching Creative Writing at the University of Ottawa, started a new, very different job that I'm wildly excited about, and I'll tell you more about it next week.

The ferry’s close to docking. I’m looking forward to writing, and talking, and foraging, and watching birds, and I hope to carry some of that back from the island, something beautiful and easing to share. I hope to be refreshed and replenished. And in the meantime I wish you all deep, joyful nourishment wherever you can find it.

All best,

Amal

Postscripts

• If you've always wanted a double-signed copy of This Is How You Lose the Time War – a copy signed by both Max Gladstone and myself – you're in luck: there are about 10 such copies at Argo Bookshop in Montreal, and they will ship anywhere in the world if you pay the appropriate shipping cost in addition to the cost of the book. There might also be a few double-signed copies left at Perfect Books in Ottawa, but I haven't had a chance to check with them recently.
• If you're new to this newsletter – welcome! So glad to have you here.

Dear Friends,

I want to write about August, and how in my mind it's a red-gold month of lions and fruit, a tawny, stalking heat, a haze thick with tomato vines and ripening blackberries, a horizon line between summer and autumn. But I also want to write about July, and what a miracle it was to travel through, and how strange and good it is to feel for the first time in so long that I have more news to share than I can easily shape into a letter – news that didn't just tumble into an inbox but that came from making things happen in a season, with people.

When last I wrote I'd boarded my first international flight since March 2020. What followed was a visit to Scotland in clear phases: five days for holing up with family (watching birds, foraging raspberries, visiting Culzean castle and touching the sea); five days for the Once and Future Fantasies conference (hugging much-missed friends and making new ones, taking in excellent talks and sharing good conversations); and four days to recover (getting work done while hiding from an apocalyptic heat wave, attempting a lightning round of visiting friends in Edinburgh). Within that was a steady pace of rapid-testing and self-monitoring, of counting days down from the last high-risk activity, and a lot of literal and figurative held breath as we navigated airports.

But we didn't get sick, and my gratitude and disbelief is so profound that whenever I talk about it I still impulsively knock on wood before realizing what I'm doing, as if it isn't already in the past. And that's part of the strangeness of everything – of Stu and I turning to each other to say that we've just had a flash of Sauchiehall Street, or Buchanan Street, or the angle of Kelvin Way meeting Gibson Street, out of nowhere, like bubbles rising to the surface after the sediment's been stirred.

There's something I call the Good Jet Lag, which for me has historically followed most westbound transatlantic travel: for about a week, sometimes two, I effortlessly go to bed at 9PM and wake between 5AM and 6AM, greeting the dawn and seeing the day unroll before me like a gauzy ribbon, optimistic and endearing, asking nothing of me I cannot give purely by virtue of having risen well and stepped into the early light. This happened, and for the first time it also happened to Stu, and there followed some glorious mornings where we'd be up chatting for hours over coffee and then say hey, let's go swimming, and find it was only just 9AM, and the sheer golden summer feeling of relief and ease and simple all-consuming joy was everywhere and was so, so good.

And I wrote so much – not absolutely, but relatively, wrote more in a single month than I'd written in the past few years: a story, a column, a secret, a revision of the story, letters and postcards, notes on panels, ideas in margins, pitches. I emptied a fountain pen. July brimmed, it teemed, it poured over its edges, and here I am in August trying to follow the shining spill of it forward, beyond the horizon line, into something that feels again like life.

So much is changing. In the meantime, I'm wishing you, always, every good and nourishing thing, wherever you are in your own personal calendars.

Amal

• My latest column went up earlier this week! It's loosely themed around books trying to fix what's broken in their worlds. I look at Blake Crouch's Upgrade, Robert Jackon Bennett's series-concluding Locklands, and Alex Jennings' beautiful debut The Ballad of Perilous Graves. (I want to write something much longer about the latter in comparison with CSE Cooney's Saint Death's Daughter, and not only because Miscellaneous Stones and Perilous Graves are protagonist names that feel like close kin to each other.)
• I'm thrilled to share that my short-story-turned-novelette "John Hollowback and the Witch" will be in Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming anthology The Book of Witches. I worked so hard on this, speedran all the tumult of writer-feelings that had been in abeyance the last few years, delivered what felt like a thoroughly broken manuscript, had it accepted regardless, and then had such a hard time revising it that I turned in desperation to something I tell students to do: I read it out loud, all 7500 words of it. That and a friend's loving eyes fixed it, and now it's something I feel I can stand behind.
• I recommend Helena Fitzgerald's griefbacon all the time but I found today's love letter to Counting Crows' August and Everything After especially moving.

Yesterday, I was in Ottawa; then very briefly in Halifax; now I am in Glasgow. The day's been cool, damp, intermittently rainy; as I write this, the last light of a 10PM sunset soaks through lavender-grey clouds over a deep, abiding green.

The last time this happened something was terribly wrong. This time, the trip – to visit family, and attend this conference – has been planned for months, but all plans this year are vague haphazard star-wishing and tea-leaf-reading. I'd been dreading and longing for travel in roughly equal measure until Seventh Wave language ramped up in Ontario and the dread took over. Airports right now are horror shows of staff shortages, cancelled flights, lost baggage, overbooked hotels and attempts to sleep on a patch of terminal floor; every sequence of travel photos on my social media feeds seems to end with a rapid test showing proof of covid positivity. I found myself asking Stu if we were just committing to getting covid now, if we had to think of it this way, having taken every possible precaution within our control except not boarding our first flight since March 2020.

But against all odds our journey here was all right (though of course whether or not we get sick remains an open question). We arrived to the airport 3 hours early; our flights weren't delayed more than 20-ish minutes each; the flights themselves were peaceful. The moment a plane takes off into the air has always been one of wild, immense joy to me, and feeling that rumble and that lift after so long was a quiet ecstasy – as was seeing, and photographing, the sunset from the sky, its own commonplace love language now made so precious and so rare. I kept hearing Joni Mitchell in my head, looking at the tops of clouds and feeling how much I'd missed the sight.

It was surreal to spend twelve hours in airports with mask mandates only to emerge into one without any, but once we glimpsed Stu's dad at arrivals everything came into a kind of alignment. We were really here. We are really here. I keep noticing it, and pausing, and brimming over with it, and the dread has, for now, utterly seeped away into the reality of loving reunion, of shared food, of gardens.

Stu and I went for a long walk this afternoon, through beautiful woodland and meadows in what is ostensibly a suburb, but looks so different from what that word means to me in a Canadian context. I've seen bullfinches and magpies and carrion crows, tits and chickadees, a sweet bold robin, raucous herring gulls, and the thrillingly sinister blood-red faces of European goldfinches.

It's so good to be here. I loved a nettle for stinging me.  

Wishing you a deep, long, refreshing weekend that opens up like a path into the rest of the month,

Amal

Postscripts:

• I finished a short story, and it was accepted for the anthology I wrote it for! Wild! More on that soon!
• My friend Gregory Wilson is running a Kickstarter! It has 7 days left and a ways to go before reaching its goal to fund the publication of "a dark fantasy trilogy and a 5E-powered RPG based on The Gray Assassin world." Greg also runs the Adventures in Middle-earth campaign that I've been part of for... Wow, almost 5 years, so while I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of this specific project, I can't help but imagine Greg's sensitivity, kindness and generosity as a game master will be assets here, and I'd love to see this project succeed.
• It is truly incredible to be back in the UK at this specific moment in time. Stu and I saw the following during our walk and I just want to co-sign its statement of values if not its poor depiction of proper masking.

Dear Friends,

I've been remiss in writing to you; I blink and a new Friday's rolled around, I blink again and it's midnight, and it always seems more correct to wait for the next Friday than to break the cycle over the weekend. No more! Here we are on a Saturday.

But would you believe – I scarcely can – that I've been writing? Fiction? Every day? That I'm a hair's breadth away from finishing the first short story I've written in actual years? That it's about a witch and a man with a hollow back, and that I first started writing it in (gulp, gasp) 2010?

And that you can hear me read from it tonight, in the company of all these fierce and splendid people?

Some friends listed above I've known now for over 20 years. We're all really looking forward to an evening of short reads and long talks; there'll be a Q&A at the end.

It's at 8PM EST tonight over Zoom, but make sure to register first! It's free!

Hope to see you there, and that you're having a good weekend otherwise,

Amal

Postscripts:

• Sam J. Miller's first collection of short fiction, Boys, Beasts & Men, is out now! I was honoured to write its introduction. The book seems to currently be a victim of its own success (and likely supply chain issues etc) and the paperback is temporarily out of stock at a lot of the big e-tailers, but ebooks abound, your local bookstores may have it, and meanwhile you can whet your appetite for it by reading Lee Mandelo's gorgeous appreciation of the whole here.
• Cat Manning – who has no shortage of tremendous accolades but is most notable in the context of this newsletter as the person who introduced me to blaseball – has published a Shakespeare game in an academic journal, a thing I did not previously understand was possible, and which makes me feel like my own protracted time in academia has been one giant missed opportunity. In her own words, "thrilled to be able to say that my first peer-reviewed academic work is [checks notes] Shakespeare fanfic".
• I've fallen in love with The Cornell Lab's Merlin app for identifying birds by sound or sight. Its UI is so smooth, it's so accurate, (a sizeable category difference from Song Sleuth, which I'd been using previously), and it led directly to me spotting a warbling vireo. Its interface pings the same parts of my brain that read music, and consequently I find it much easier to remember songs and calls and associate them with the correct bird. Or maybe it's the part of my brain that learns language, and recalls the sounds like vocabulary? Or maybe they both ping together like parts of a chord. I don't know, I just love the app.
• Speaking of songs: I love Rina Sawayama's music, her chameleonic aesthetics, her whole deal, and the new video for "This Hell" is no exception. It's a delight, it's funny, it made me a little weepy. The signs! Her new album comes out September 2 and I simply cannot wait. Also I long to embody the look and energy of the following image.

Dear Friends,

During this month of May I had a perfect week. It was not this past week, which has been very difficult (we're OK), nor the one before that, which was probably largely fine. The week beginning on Monday, May 9, lives in my memory as one long lifting of my heart, this ribbon of warm days and golden light and ripening green, and I'd like to tell you about it. It was a week during which I left the house every day and did something entirely for pleasure, for indulgence, on no schedule except that of my joy. It was hot enough to swim outside in shockingly cold water, repeatedly, three days in a week; to drive to Chelsea for ice cream; to walk in the Gatineau park and lose my heart to trilliums; to celebrate the reopening of a favourite taco truck, and to go again; to walk in old haunts, haunt old walks, without feeling a loss or a pang.

This perfect week reached its apex on Friday, May 13, with the arrival of Florence + the Machine's Dance Fever, the band's fifth studio album. I'd been looking forward to it as an ecstatic event for months, playing each pre-release over and over until they wore grooves in my brain. That Friday morning I woke early, put headphones on, put my phone in Do Not Disturb mode and went out for a walk in the park with the album.

Bright yellow goslings clamoured around their parents. Trees brimmed with cool green light. Everywhere pushed forward the tender velocity of spring; this irresistible freshness, this fragility and power, butterfly wings still wet from chrysalis. The sticky, tangy scent of broken buds in the air mixed with warm wet earth, with leaves on water, with the voice of a woman who seems, every album, to tell me the story of myself at that precise moment in time.

Whenever I look forward to an album so much that I absorb every new single into my body like a sacrament, those songs form their own small record in my head. I listened to "King," "Free," "Heaven is Here," and"My Love" in that order for weeks, and the sequence of them was a kind of clenched fist, not wholly unlike a bud building towards its own release. Walking in the park, listening to the album burst and bloom out of that knot of songs, giving and receiving, something of Ada Limón's "Instructions on Not Giving Up" echoed in me:

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

There's a specific kind of feeling I personally refer to as "is this revelation or is it my thirties," and this album – judging purely by the comfortingly feral catharsis my closest female friends and I are all experiencing from it – refuses that false dichotomy. There's a scrawl of lyrics that scaffold the story of my engagement with it – thoughts about mythology, futurity, art and violence and insufficiency – and since I experience Florence + the Machine's albums like novels, sinking into the narrative lyricism of them, their self-conscious aesthetics that are so thoroughly, viscerally my own, I thought I'd surface them for you here. Apologies to everyone who skips the italicized poetry in fantasy novels.

I need my golden crown of sorrow, my bloody sword to swing
I need my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology
I am no mother, I am no bride, I am King

but for a moment, when I'm dancing, I am free

I listen to music from 2006 and feel kind of sick

I used to see the future and now I see nothing

Heaven is here if you want it

I couldn't help it, yes, I let it get in
the helpless optimism of spring
worn out and tired and my heart near retired
and the world bent double with weeping
and yet, the birds begin to sing*

Saw the future in the face of a daffodil

*this is where I started crying, this bait-and-switch in "Daffodil", Florence Welch's fluting ethereal voice feathering at the edges before crashing into loam and roots and a sly hungry beat.

I listened to the whole thing through and then some as the heat of the day came on, and took sweaty, dramatic photos against a charismatic river rock while unbeknownst to me a pair of mallards dabbled near my head. I was unavailable to anyone and everyone but them. And then once I'd thoroughly indulged myself, photographing the green and the river and the tangled swoops of my hair as if they were all the same thing, I went home, carrying the hazy golden cloud of music with me.

Every day of that week was a kind of opening to new wonder. I was aware of it, too – aware of thinking I should write about it, I should pin it in place with words, I should mark the revelry of my feelings. I did in texts to friends and helpless conversation with Stu, marvelling, over and over again, at how good it felt to feel good.

Please feel free to tell me about the music that makes you feel this kind of pattern-matching to your own life – or just tell me your favourite Dance Fever tracks, and/or, if you're Spotify-enabled, which of those songs has Chosen you.

Postscripts:

• I have a new column up at the NYTBR! It's a double-length one, covering seven books: And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin, Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White, Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson, Spear by Nicola Griffith, Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel, In a Garden Burning Gold by Rory Power, and The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah. I hope you find something to enjoy among them.
• Ada Limón has a new collection of poems out called The Hurting Kind, which I'm very eager to get my hands on, especially having read this utterly beautiful interview she did with Nicole Chung.
• Tochi Onyebuchi, a genius and wonderful human whose work and conversation I deeply enjoy, has just launched a newsletter, and I highly recommend subscribing to it. In this first offering he talks about what happens to the act of writing when people start paying you for it, and I found myself just nodding along in sympathy throughout.
• The Nebula Awards were last weekend, and in addition to the excellent works of literature being honoured there, Petra Mayer was posthumously awarded a Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. I contributed to the ceremony in a very small way by recording some remarks about her for it, and Petra's dear friend Liza Graham accepted the award on her behalf. Writing and recording my own words was very difficult, and felt wildly insufficient; in trying to write something I could read on camera without my voice cracking I found myself splitting the difference between formality and feeling. But as soon as Liza started speaking – with all the vivid warmth and love I wanted to access but couldn't seem to record – I felt like Petra was there among us.

Dear Friends,

On Monday, I paid my taxes; on Friday, I turned in the last of the grade books. Three courses taught, the work of some 200 students all marked, and term is officially over, very nearly flush with the Cruellest Month's end. I won't teach again until September at the earliest.

I cannot – or, let's be honest, would prefer not to – remember the last time I could stare down a full four months of time during which I would not have to do any work but write. It feels like an inflection point – a cusp, an open door. Months, and a summer coming on, and the beginnings of a path to walk through it, some milestones already set for me to meet.

These last few days I've felt a kind of simmering, a mix of anxiety and anticipation accompanied by a very clear-headed knowledge of how much work needed doing and how and when it was going to get done. Finishing it has felt like a series of small miracles, grace after grace, days that had more than one thing in them. I found myself thinking, Thursday and Friday, "I did all the things on my list," and hearing Wendy Cope's "The Orange" in my head, and then tearing up because I always do when I think of that poem and its last few lines.

(There's a symmetry there, too, which I only just realized, writing this: "The Orange" is the poem I open my introductory poetry courses with. To think of it at the closing feels good, feels right.)

Is there a poem that makes you choke up when you try to read it out loud?

*

I keep thinking of what I did this week that made me feel so peaceful, so complete. I marked exams, yes, but I also read books, and took my friends' dog for walks, and helped them build a fence, and baked bread, and went for runs, and watched very small colourful birds near the river: ruby-crowned kinglet, golden-winged warbler, black-and-white warbler, pine siskin. These things feel like treasure, and not just because the birds have jewels in their names.

I bought myself a Parrish Relics piece a couple of weeks ago, the words "oak" and "summer" in its title. It arrived in the post today with all the weight of a talisman: a reward for work completed and a signpost towards what I want to do next. I want to be seen in these colours again; I want to be outdoors again. I want to be in summer, touch trees and people. I want to write under the auspices of this good and beautiful art.

Wishing you a safe and lovely weekend, and an easy route into May,

Amal

Postscripts:

• This Helen Rosner interview with John Darnielle is one of the most beautiful conversations I've ever read. Like poetry, I keep it among the troves of things that I want to read out loud and cry through.
• Speaking of crying, Helena Fitzgerald's griefbacon is 30% off until Monday, so now's an especially great time to subscribe to one of my favourite newsletters. To insufferably quote myself else-internet, subscribe "if you want to cry on a semi-regular basis about music, seasons, cities, & the never finished work of growing up." (Also Helena has an essay in the just-released THE LONELY STORIES: 22 Celebrated Writers on the Joys & Struggles of Being Alone, which looks frankly amazing, so you can also hold her writing between your hands without clutching your phone if you wish.)
• Speaking of the never finished work of growing up – did you know that literally anyone can recommend a book to be considered for the inaugural Le Guin Prize for Fiction? The nomination period closes at midnight PDT on April 30, which, as aforementioned, is extremely soon (...today?!). I'd just really love them to receive an outpouring of recommendations from people who want to honour Le Guin's work and legacy, so encourage you to read the eligibility requirements and recommend something you admire.

Dear Friends,

Against all odds it's April, the Cruellest Month as per The Waste Land, and here I am quoting it as I do every year at this time, shoring its fragments against my ruin.

This is only a brief missive as I am swamped with marking, but I want to ask: which month, by your lights, is Cruellest, and why?

April has held the title from Literature since I was 18, so I can't really displace it at this point, despite seeing it, historically, as a month of release: from winter, from classes, and more recently, from teaching those classes. Release can be a kind of cruelty, I suppose, in the manner of foam rollers and myofascial work, or in myriad others; interpret it however you wish.

Wishing you a deep and lovely weekend,

Amal

Postscripts of News:

• I have a new column up at the NYTBR, covering Sarah Tolmie's All the Horses of Iceland, Jo Harkin's Tell Me An Ending, and Sarah Lotz' The Impossible Us (out in the UK as Impossible). I really can't understate how incredible it was to read these very different books in sequence; the memory of getting to do so is this warm golden thread running from the end of February through my heart. I also super recommend reading Sarah Tolmie's Big Idea post about sagas and the writing of her novella.
• Last week I was a guest on Breaking the Glass Slipper, and had a lovely time chatting with Lucy and Charlotte about Ursula K. Le Guin, Star Trek, Naomi Mitchison, Coleridge, wicked fairies, and plenty more.
• There's a new episode of Sparkle Salon! This is the thing where, thanks to Meg Frank tweeting a stray desire, I periodically get to put on earrings and lipstick and have a wide-ranging zoom conversation with Malka Older, Karen Lord, Arkady Martine, Annalee Newitz and Katie Mack about whatever we feel like. This time around it was populism and democracy, go figure. If you missed our first episode (no worries about continuity, it simply exists) you can find it here.
• This beautiful poster of my poem "Thunderstorm in Glasgow, July 25, 2013", illustrated by Molly Crabapple, is now effectively limited edition; it won't be available anymore after June, so get yours while it's still possible to do so!
• Caitlyn Paxson has a gorgeous newsletter called Book and Bramble!
• I am obsessed with Our Flag Means Death and when I'm not lurking in fannish discords and rewatching fanvids I wander the flat murmuring "you wear fine things well" to the cats, my husband, the spider plant as I'm watering it. I can't recommend it enough, and if you weren't wowed by the first episode, give it the full first three before deciding if it's your jam. Here I am wearing fine things to convince you.