Congratulations to Shirley Harshenin whose story "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" won gold at the 2023 National Magazine Awards for One-of-a-Kind Storytelling! "Invisible Walls: A Decentred Hermit Crab Sticky Note Narrative" appeared in Issue 292 (Summer Creative Nonfiction 2022).
I’m a worrier. I worry when I see someone holding a smart-phone up to a baby rather than endure a little fussing, and I worry when another Dad says he puts his kids to bed telling them to amuse themselves with the iPad until they’re tired. Algorithms appear to be designed to give people more of the same, so that we become more entrenched, both in terms of the arts and our political views, even aside from the way scrolling wrecks our ability to concentrate and, you know, read a book.
For the past two summers, I have lived at a relatively remote field station in Northwestern Ontario, which lends itself well to books I can read several times over. Flyway, by Sarah Ens, shares many of my preoccupations – prairie animals, family migration, settler relationships with stolen land – although from a different perspective than my own as Ens charts her family’s place in the Russian Mennonite diaspora and among migrating birds.
I often listen to the same album on repeat when I’m engaged in intense writing sessions – the rhythmic familiarity seems to provide the perfect level of inspiring-but-not-too-distracting background noise. The album I’ve listened to the most over the past couple of years, and that I always recommend to others, is my fellow Winnipegger, Begonia’s, Fear, which she released in 2019.
Every few years, I become fixated on an album and listen to it on repeat until my husband, children and cat are all desperate for reprieve. During the winter of 2021, Lotta Sea Lice was that album. A collaboration between speak-singing indie darlings Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett, it’s a subtle, well-crafted album that’s perfect to write to — it plods along pleasantly in the background until, one day, you realize that the songs are sneaky earworms and you never feel like listening to anything else.
