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Out & Back Substack — February, 2024
The map is not the territory
In which I cover myself with vainglory and misapprehension
The Signs
Microstory
Who remembers Aunt Molly and Darkeytown
Slaves and ex-slaves in Norfolk County
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Out & Back Substack — January, 2024
Demon Lover
Microstory
Lives of Slaves
An experimental reading of the West Indian slave registries
Learning to read the ground
Sugar ruins and working estates in Grenada
My Puritan Ancestors & the Tavern of the Dark Moon
A family story
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Out & Back Substack — December, 2023
Some things cannot be put right
Microstory
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Out & Back Substack — November, 2023
The Mount Rich Carib Stones
Ghosts in the jungle
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Out & Back Substack — October, 2023
A fusion of beauty and thought: Tomoé Hill’s Olympia
An appreciation
Dreddz Empire Bar & Garage
Hiking across Carriacou to Dumfriest
There are no addresses in Grenada
My researches in the islands
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Out & Back Substack — September, 2023
Harry’s Version
Microstory
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Out & Back Substack — August, 2023
Stormy Weather
Microstory
Jay Gatsby with a shotgun at Long Point
Lake Erie’s Long Point and the company that saved it
Catastrophe porn, canoe adventures in Canada
A woman’s way through unknown Labrador
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“Angle of List” New Story | Minor Literature[s]
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I have a new story “Angle of List” up at the estimable UK magazine Minor Literature[s]. Click here to read the story.
Here’s a taste:
Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. He knew it was 6am because there was a clock next to the bed. It always said 6am, which puzzled him a little. The dog scratched insanely at the door to be let out. The wind shrieked against the window panes. There was an insistent metallic pounding in the distance. He had a red book in his hand.
He felt like a man in a box. He had a red book in one hand and a notepad in the other. “You need to pee. The bathroom is straight ahead when you go out the door. Put on your slippers. It’s cold. Keep the notepad with you.” The handwriting was exuberant, plunging descenders, extravagant ascenders, generous vowels like small breasts, tiny hearts for dots and periods. But the tone was imperative, even mildly coercive. “Don’t turn off into any of the other bedrooms or you’ll get lost again.”
(July, 2023)
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Out & Back Substack — July 2023
The Lost Letter
On my great-grandfather’s suicide
Weird Norfolk County: King Arthur’s Hunt
Apparitions I have known, or at least read about
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Clark Blaise’s “North American Education” | CNQ 113
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An essay on one of Clark Blaise’s earliest and best short stories, an amazing dissection of the pathologies of patriarchy and how they are taught to little boys. In Canadian Notes & Queries, Issue No. 113 (Spring/Summer, 2023).
Here’s a taste of the essay:
A new reading of “A North American Education” turns up multiple instances of Frankie’s sad indoctrination in affairs of the heart, not just sexual mechanics, but the little boy’s entire orientation to the feminine and his own physical being. Step by step, his French-Canadian furniture salesman father teaches him shame, the objectification of women, and the male arts of infidelity, betrayal, and complicity. “Thibidault et fils.” Father and son are ineluctably knotted together in their allegiance to a dysfunctional and crippling masculinity, encapsulated in the aftermath of that awful scene at the Kentucky county fair.
(June, 2023)
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Out & Back — June 2023
A North American Education
A close reading of the story
Robinson Crusoe and me
A strange loop…
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Out & Back — May 2023
The soul of the machine, or why it cannot produce art
DG bot vs Chat bot
Eldon and Shannon
A micro-story…
My American Cousin
Bruce McCall, a writer for the New Yorker
Lady Baker, slaves, & and the sword hunters of Hamran
A curious story…
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The Colour of Forgetting, An Introduction
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My introduction to Merle Collins 1995 novel The Colour of Forgetting, a West Indian masterpiece now freshly republished by Peepal Tree Press in the U.K. in their Caribbean Classics series.
Here’s a taste:
The Colour of Forgetting (1995) by Grenadian novelist Merle Collins is a uniquely inventive novel that fits the West Indian mold, that is, it fits no mold. On an obvious level, it presents as a multi-generational novel that covers the history of Grenada from the French colonial period beginning in the 1650s to the decade following the American invasion in 1983. It focuses on a family named Malheureuse, descendants of a French carpenter who murdered a slave named John Bull and whose children had children with enslaved women. The Malheureuse family thus inherits the blood of both murderer and victim, European colonist and enslaved African.
This admixture, through the generations, causes “confusion,” confusion being an oft-repeated thematic tag. “The Malheureuse blood pass on to the slave women generation that Boss-man Malheureuse breed. To John Bull nation. Mixture in the blood of the story.” Collins’s characters, the Malheureuse descendants, experience a sinister pattern of intimate betrayal and self-harm because of this forked filiation, which comes down through the generations as fate. “It is a hard thing to accept that it happen, but is like we working against weself from time.” The family itself becomes a metonym for the people of the Grenada.
(June, 2023)
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, April 2023
The Waning of the World
Microstories
Confusion in the Blood
Introduction to Merle Collins’s novel The Colour of Forgetting
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, March 2023
Happy, a Song
that will make you happy
The Early Days of Tech
Microstory
As It Falls
A note on Donald Breckenridge’s new novel
Human, All Too Human
My relationship with ChatGPT
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, February 2023
The McNeilledge Table
More family furniture tales
I know I have sworn off teaching but…
Old habits die hard–story model and exercise
Coffee enemas, Sunday night hockey, Viagra jokes, & playing Scrabble with cats
Random excerpts from a writer’s intimate diary
Death on the Mountain
My unfortunate Uncle William and his adventures in the Alps
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Out & Back — The latest newsletters, January 2023
Happy
How to stop being “a writer” and be happy instead
Neon Memories
Continued adventures of a young writer determined to make an ass of himself
Peludis and Radames
Microstory with notes
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Photographs below were taken by Douglas Glover except for the ones in which he appears, which were taken by Jacob Glover (Nova Scotia beach pictures) and Melissa Fisher (British Columbia beach picture).
“And I thought how Proust teaches us that all love resides
in anticipation and not the beloved,
that love achieved is only on loan,
that we are martyrs to our desires, which are endless.”
Douglas Glover, Savage Love