There, I said it. There’s a lot of stuff out there telling you to keep a notebook if you’re a writer, so you can make notes, take observations, write your entire novel in longhand. But recently, I’ve written sooooo much stuff on my phone. Why? I pretend to hear you…

Did you grow up thinking jealousy was some sort of sin, something to be avoided, feel guilty about, pretend you didn’t have? I’m gonna guess yeah. I certainly did, even though I don’t remember anyone ever saying it directly. …

This is a question I’ve been asked a bunch recently. Maybe it’s because I’ve written enough stuff by now so that when someone asks to read my work and I send them waaaay too many short stories, they feel a bit overwhelmed. Maybe it’s because most of what I write…

How to thank writers for writing — I recently wrote an email to an author friend I have. Well, I dunno if he’s a friend. An acquaintance? I took a course he taught, and he seemed pretty cool. …

I took a month recently and went on a writer’s retreat. The plan was: go away, write a chapter of my PhD. No distractions, no demands, no normal life stuff to get in the way. Good plan. Except… Except I didn’t manage to finish my data analysis in advance of…

I’m taking a month-long writing class. No, I don’t have time for it, don’t be silly. But I’m doing it anyway. One of the other participants mentioned that they’d read Neil Gaiman’s Art Matters: Because your imagination can change the world and that it encouraged them to move into writing…

It’s been a long time since I’ve used this blog for anything, longer since it was a place to post entertaining (and sometimes less entertaining) new parent stories. It’s never had a firm identity, never been just a one-type-of-thing blog. And that’s ok. …

Most people rely on supermarkets, and these megastores dominate our food economy. They are part of a system that depends on large-scale agriculture and production, smooth-flowing international food trade and fast turnaround times. But what happens when system vulnerabilities are exposed and they break down? What catches our fall? We…

Researchers developed a Local Food Systems Toolkit to evaluate the economic impact of local food systems policies, programming and initiatives, with the hopes of making the evaluation of impacts more standardised and accessible to policymakers and funders. — If every dollar or pound spent within the local economy has the potential to increase localised spending and support smaller-scale enterprise, does this mean that local food systems show similar impacts? This local multiplier effect is what Becca Jablonski, Dawn Thilmany McFadden, and their team of Agricultural Economists from across…