Forget the five-year plan and embrace the beautiful glitch of living in the North.
Why are you literally fighting for your life over an algorithm that does not even know you exist?
You are currently vibrating at a frequency that is honestly alarming because the local arts council hasn’t replied to your email, or maybe because the heating in your makeshift studio is doing that weird clanking sound again. It’s giving ‘Main Character having a mid-season breakdown,’ and while I support your drama, we need to talk about your aura. You’re out here trying to micromanage the universe like you’re the lead developer of a simulation. Newsflash: the simulation is glitched, the servers are located in a basement in Thunder Bay, and none of us have the admin password. You are stressing over things that are structurally out of your hands, and it’s making your art taste like copper and anxiety.
Let’s be real, trying to control the ‘outcome’ of your creative career in Northern Ontario is like trying to stop a blizzard with a hairdryer. You can’t control the funding cuts. You can’t control if the three people who actually show up to your gallery opening are just there for the free sourdough crackers. You definitely can’t control if the vibe shift happens and suddenly everyone thinks your niche hyper-fixation on moss-covered rocks is ‘so 2025.’ When you spend all your energy worrying about the logistics of the future, you’re basically just paying rent on a house you don’t even live in yet. It’s expensive, it’s exhausting, and the landlord is a hallucination of your own making.
There is a specific kind of freedom in being absolutely cooked by circumstances. When everything is already a bit of a dumpster fire—like when your car won’t start at minus forty and your grant application got rejected for a typo—that is your invitation to go feral. If you can’t control the big stuff, why are you still acting like a polite NPC? This is the moment to make the weirdest, most unmarketable, most ‘for-the-plot’ art possible. Paint on the back of old pizza boxes. Record a podcast that is just the sound of the wind through the pines and your own heavy breathing. If the system is broken, you do not have to follow the system’s rules for success. You are free.
Stop checking your notifications to see if you’ve been ‘validated’ by the city folk yet. They are busy paying four thousand dollars to live in a closet; they do not have the secret to happiness, I promise. Your power isn’t in your ability to predict the weather or the economy; it’s in your ability to keep your heart soft while the world tries to turn it into a brick. Resilience isn’t about standing perfectly still in a storm; it’s about learning to do a silly little dance while the rain ruins your hair. You are allowed to exist without a five-year plan. You are allowed to be a work in progress in a world that is also a work in progress.
So, take a deep breath and let the chaos wash over you like a lukewarm lake in July. Focus on the stuff you can actually touch: the texture of the paper, the way the light hits the snow, the weirdly specific inside jokes you share with the three people who actually get your vision. Everything else is just background noise in a language you do not speak. If the world is going to do what it’s going to do regardless of your stress levels, you might as well use that saved energy to make something that makes you laugh. Stay weird, stay unhinged, and for the love of all that is holy, stop refreshing that email inbox.
Thoughts on art and the state of the world!
These fragments trace the rhizomatic flow of thought through art, life, and place — scattered impressions from studio corners, fleeting ideas scrawled in notebooks, whispered exchanges at galleries, and observations picked up on quiet northern roads. Some fragments linger on technique, intuition, and doubt; others drift through community, culture, and the subtle poetry of everyday moments. They offer no conclusions, only openings, inviting readers to follow connections wherever they emerge.
Wandering laterally between process, memory, and environment, these pieces map associations across creativity, identity, and belonging. They intersect with humor, failure, resilience, and collaboration, and trace the ways artistic thinking seeps into gardens, small-town rhythms, friendships, and civic life across Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario — and further afield. Each thought functions as a node, part of a living network of reflection, expanding and branching with possibility.
Discover more associative fragments, conceptual wanderings, and artful reflections on our thoughts page.
