[PHOTO] Parking lot by Wellesley station

Walking south cross the parking lot south of Wellesley station to Buddies in Bad Times for a Naked Heart session yesterday morning, I had time to take note of the quiet skyline of downtown Toronto in the morning.

[PHOTO] Naked Heart 2018 report (@nakedheartfest, #nakedheart)

I spent most of this weekend just past attending the latest iteration of the Naked Heart literary festival, organized by Glad Day Bookshop and run out of several venues in Church and Wellesley including the 562 Church Street event space and the Buddies in Bad Times theatre.



The sessions I picked this year tended more towards an exploration of the mechanics of writing for publication, with a few readings.

• My first session Saturday morning was The Writer's Hustle, a panel discussion with three other writers exploring how they make writing work for them as a chosen career despite its dismal economics. (Day jobs, among other things, are necessary.)


• Unruly Vision: Writing Unruly Bodies in Fiction was a very enjoying workshop led by Sanchari Sur, who led several dozen writers towards useful strategies for creating and envisioning characters.


• Queer est un mot français! was a very enjoyable reading by three Francophone Ontarian authors, Amélie Dumoulin, Pierre-Luc Landry, and Sylvie Bérard, at Glad Day. This was the first time such a French-language session had been organized for Naked Heart; I hope for more in the future.
  
• Terrence Abrahams led an informative session, Subject Line: Submission, on looking for potential publishing magazines, on strategies to adopt.
  
• Spectrums of Sanity: Mental Health and the Writer was another panel discussion at Buddies in Bad Times, with five authors talking about how they took care of themselves as they wrote.


• What's Love Got To Do With It? was an enjoyable panel discussion at 562 Church, with four different authors talking about the way love has been represented in literature in relationship to queer lives. Why not have happy endings?


• Grit Lit was an excellent late-evening series of readings by ten authors at Glad Day, reading passages from their works. These were always direct and raw, never crude.


• Sunday morning, my first session was The Author Foundry: The Un-Artistic Aspects of Your Submission Package at Buddies. Author Sheryl Wright did an incredible job explaining the mechanics of hunting for publishers and the finer details of the literary genre of the submission, details which need to be paid attention to if a work is to have a chance of success.


• Policing the Body - Resistance and Renewal was a great panel discussion looking at the ways in which queer bodies are targeted by a hostile world. How can people fight back?


• Celebrating Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto was a launch session for two books put out by the Marvellous Grounds collective. I enjoyed the readings of some of the different contributing authors, telling stories about the past and present of Toronto from an angles that I needed to see.


• My final session was First Person - Ethics & Experience, a panel of five writers held at Glad Day. These five all talked about the ways in which they balanced their commitment as writers to the exploration of their truths with their responsibilities to their communities to fairly represent them.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• D-Brief notes the recent discovery of some ancient cave art in Borneo more than forty thousand years old.


• Cody Delistraty profiles Sarah Reid, a Toronto developmental psychologist who can identify the work, even to some extent the identity, of serial killers.


• Far Outliers looks at the people who would go on to found, under Meiji, the Nagasaki Naval Academy.


• A Fistful of Euros wonders what will happen if the governing coalition in Germany breaks.


• JSTOR Daily suggests that the challenges of second-wave feminism to traditional gender norms nearly killed off nursing as a profession.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes that Jeff Session is ending his career as US Attorney-General on a racist note.


• Lingua Franca notes the results of an online informal survey suggesting that people do not become less tolerant of language change as they age.


• Marginal Revolution notes a paper suggesting that religion can have protective effects against depression. All I would add is that the issues of the teenager, and of the religion, clearly matters.


• Aminatta Forma at the NYR Daily notes the distinctive experiences of the first generations of educated Africans, emerging from colonialism, using Barack Obama.


• The Planetary Society Blog looks at the new private SpaceIL moon lander.


• Drew Rowsome reviews the new Stephen King novel, Elevation.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes that trying to explain unusual 'Oumuamua by immediately assuming it to be an alien artifact is not good science.


• Strange Company looks at the mysterious 1905 death of the wealthy Margaretta von Hoffman Todd.


• Window on Eurasia notes the way in which the boundaries of the "Russian world" are contracting under Putin, notably in Ukraine.

[NEWS] Thirteen more links about the First World War (#ww1)

• The Buzz shared a list of recommended books, from the Toronto Public Library, looking back at the First World War.


• CBC Montreal describes how the Belgian city of Mons greeted the inheritors of their Canadian liberators.


• CBC reports on how the grief of one Newfoundland family at the loss of a son in the First World War spelled the doom of the entire community of Three Arms.


• CBC Montreal describes how the city of Montréal greeted news of the armistice back in 1918.


• Crooked Timber notes the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War. Have we forgotten the lessons, or did we ever learn them?


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing notes how the mechanization of the First World War set it apart from other conflicts, inspiring (for instance) Tolkien.


• Global News reports on the nearly one million Muslims who served as soldiers in the First World War.


• The Guardian reports on how Islander Leo Cheverie went to France to pay respects to his two great-uncles, killed in the First World War.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on Henry Gunther, the American who was the very last casualty of the First World War.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a map showing the casualty rates of different European combatants in the First World War.


• Adrian Phillips at Spacing Toronto uses Remembrance Day as a frame to examine monuments both permanent and temporary in Toronto.


• Katie Daubs at the Toronto Star reports on the fake news that caused Toronto to prematurely celebrate the end of the First World War.


• Window on Eurasia notes how many key elements of the modern world, from borders to ideologies, were created by the First World War.