Recession Pop

Nostalgia's calling, pick up!

Dear friends, foes, and love interests,

Long time no see.

I forgot my love for words and language in the repetitive cesspit of short-form video and written content, where my vocabulary shrank and everyone was pulling a single big word from the lexicon to make them sound interesting for a week, I’m looking at you, “demure.”

That being said, my love for writing has fallen back into my lap. When I was last in Ottawa, I attended and performed at the flo. literary magazine launch party for their sixth volume. I heard all sorts of poems and short stories by people who truly cared about words and storytelling. The audience was a mix of people who equally cared about these words and stories for their innate wordiness and those who cared more for the people who wrote them. The beauty of both has not been lost on me.

Me, performing (taken by Jack O’Sullivan)

Being in a writer’s world for a moment woke up a small part of my love for language, but what really slapped me awake was Chelsea G. Summers’ A Certain Hunger. This book is about a cannibalistic food critic who adores words, form, and fame. I am not ashamed to admit that I ended up having to look up an average of 1.4 words per page. Summers’ book fell into my lap via Tender Is The Flesh (another cannibalism book that has turned many a meat-eater *temporarily* vegetarian) and the love her main character Dorethy Daniels has for endless description, is nothing short of contagious.

I couldn’t help but start thinking of writing -something I have been dreading for months - every time I was reading. I started listening to podcasts about writers’ rooms and the art of editing, I wrote songs and poems and plotted articles, but I kept returning to all the work I had planned for Fan Behaviour. To everyone waiting for a specific piece to come out, I am sorry. The pile is growing but you can take this article as a testament to its shrinking.

So for my big return (everyone is raving about it already, I’m sure!), I decided I wanted to write about something a bit different, something no one was expecting. . . take the pressure off a bit, write with more passion. So, lets talk about the call of nostalgia, through the lens of recession pop.