four recent (short) essays: Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross + Christine McNair,

As part of a work-in-process, "reading in the margins: a writing diary," I've been posting short essays on the works of prose writers on my enormously clever substack for a while now, with recent pieces posted over the past couple of months on the work of Canadian writers Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, and Christine McNair. Part of the thinking of these pieces was a way to explore prose writers who have affected my own thinking, and my own writing. While I've a small handful of further essays currently in-progress, you can also check out prior pieces in the same series, on the work of Jean McKay, Gail Scott, Joy Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Kristjana Gunnars. Where might it go next? It is one of but a handful of threads I've been exploring through substack, which I've been attempting to treat like a kind of weekly column: "the genealogy book," a non-fiction book-length genealogical project exploring some of these newly-discovered biological threads, counterpointed with the genealogical threads I was raised into; "the green notebook," a kind of day-book of writing and thinking; "little arguments: stories," a sequence of short short stories, possibly as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014); and an ongoing flurry of short stories, including what might be a follow-up to my new collection, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). There are also a couple of other projects/threads in there, but I won't give away everything here (this is where the curious might explore the site to see what might be, across the last two years of my weekly postings). It is free to follow me there, although I'm posting every third or fourth piece for paid-members only.