Well! It’s been a while since I posted anything here, hasn’t it? It’s been an uppy-downy summer, and I haven’t had much luck maintaining any kind of work schedule. I mentioned back in July that three of my family members had been quarantining upstairs with COVID while the other uninfected family member and I camped out in the living room. Everyone recovered fine (as far as we can tell at this point) and we managed to keep the virus contained, but as soon as the whole ordeal was over I crashed hard. Like a lot of ADHDers, I’m great in a crisis. Like a lot of (all?) autistics, when my nervous system overheats (metaphorically), I’m out of commission for a good long while. It took me the rest of July to get back on track, work-wise, and then after a solid week of writing I had to put everything on hold for family visits and back-to-school prep (for me and for the kids). So here I am, on Labour Day, squeezed into my home studio (read: linen closet) to record lectures for the creative writing course I’m teaching, and wondering where the summer went.

In exciting news, though, I managed to snag myself a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to work on a collection of nonfiction essays I’ve been picking at. My first Canada Council grant! Having grown up with writers and witnessing the seasonal anxiety that was always attached to the words “Canada Council deadline,” I feel like I’ve finally arrived. Academic awards obviously mean a lot to me, but the Canada Council has always occupied a kind of mythic place in my mind. So! More details on that project as it progresses.

Other exciting news? Oh, I’ll be presenting an extract from one of my dissertation chapters at the International Hopkins Conference later this month, and I feel like I’m out of my depth because I’m in no way a Hopkins scholar, or even a Victorianist for that matter, but there you go. Everyone involved seems lovely and I’m sure they’ll be kind to me, but I’m nervous nonetheless. Publishing-wise, I’ve got a new essay (actually one of my comprehensive exam papers) in the most recent issue of the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, and another in Janus Unbound. So even if I haven’t managed to get much work done this summer, I’ve gotten work out there, as they say, and I suppose that counts for something, right?