Dark Winter, Little Lights

November 2024-January 2025

Hello, and welcome to the many folks who are new around here! Who knew how many of you would be interested in turning tofu into fish?? Definitely not me, but I’m so jazzed this one resonated! If you’ve converted any fish recipes to tofu ones lately, I would love to hear about it!

The role of fish will now be played by tofu

To briefly recap what goes on at The World According to Tausch, there is typically a monthly update on what I wrote, read, and ate the month before, and there are vegan recipes published randomly — sometimes in an intense weekly spume, other times more sporadically. For 2025, I have a plan to be more consistent, but we’ll see how it goes. One thing I can almost guarantee is that whatever consistency I’ve implemented will fall apart around November. At the age of 46, I have to finally, fully accept that Q4 for me goes like this:

It just does. It’s fine. Things are chugging along as the pretty leaves fall in October, then suddenly all the sun’s been sucked from the November sky, my legs feel increasingly like lead, and while I’d once again convinced myself I was on top of it this year, for real-real, there I am in Eataly on December 23rd, elbowing people aside to grab one last truffle-infused product for my parents’ obliquely-themed gift. As I’ve said in years past, I do like giving gifts, and baking cookies, and my family; I like the day of Christmas itself just fine. But the Dark Winter will always be a hard season for this sun-loving, anti-capitalist introvert. It just will.

Compounding this year’s typical malaise was the fact that a beloved family member died in early January, following a long illness. December was spent anticipating grief, January was spent in it; Los Angeles burned in my peripheral vision, fascism took centre stage in the States (sending solidarity and love to my American friends), and the Toronto winter was colder than it has been in years. Still, there were flashes of light.

Writing

Having noticed some years ago that my writing output in December is always disappointing, I consciously try to book a little time off my day job in November to work on my book. Ideally, I go somewhere with a bit of nature that looks good in winter, like my beloved Gibraltar Point. Just three or four days dedicated to my own weird work helps me feel more grounded and less bitter when my brain inevitably cedes to grumpy, grinchy mush. This year, I took a three hour train ride to Brockville, Ontario, where I wrote and stared at the St. Lawrence River.

How is the river so wide??

To bring any newcomers up to speed: my novel-in-progress is an autofiction / fabulism hybrid type thing, featuring fantastical marine mammals. It culminates in the main characters’ journey from Toronto to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. To get the details right, I’ve been trying to spend as much time on Lake Ontario and the river as I can.

I was only there two nights, but man, did that little trip do my November brain some good. It certainly didn’t hurt that I happened to be there for one of the only sunny days that whole month. It also didn’t hurt that my writing coach-turned-friend

Heidi Reimer

lives just down the river from Brockville. We got to have a long, freezing walk and tea and a chat at her beautiful house.

Heidi, right; me, left. Very cold, but look at that sun!

I wrote my first novel as my grad school thesis, and it was, for the most part, based on things that had actually happened to me or people I knew. After graduation, I was struggling hard to get my second book off the ground. I once complained to a friend from my program who seemed to be buzzing along with his next book, and he said, “You don’t have to actually do everything you write about, you know?” Now, this is perfectly true, and I’m sure was meant benignly, but I experienced this suggestion as a stinging slap. It made me feel that what I’d written before was fraudulent, I had to fucking make things up, was I a novelist or was I not? This hang-up was, to say the least, not generative.

For me, synthesizing my actual experiences into coherent prose is a huge part of the practice, the act that is meaningful to me, what I think makes my work credible and sometimes fun. I am using my imagination much more in this current novel than ever before (see fantastical marine mammals), but I realized while chatting with Heidi that I still harboured shame about wanting, maybe needing, to actually visit all the marinas and ports my characters would pass before I could write the thing right. I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t just watch some YouTubes of these places and crank the thing out. But I need to feel the vibe of a place, and lord does that feel dramatically inefficient. What if I don’t need to do that at all, and it’s just an excuse to spend all my money on chill solo trips?

Heidi was a great first draft coach for me because she, too, encountered stultifying perfectionism and other fun hang-ups in her early writing life. And she was a great friend to me that day as we walked in the biting wind and chatted about this shame of mine for a bit. To Heidi, visiting the river in order to write about it made perfect sense. And, I mean, of course it did! This is how tons of writers do research! I’m not doing a uniquely weird thing! Suddenly my shame about it felt far sillier than my need to vibe with this particular port and turn it into a sentence or three. That’s just how I do it, and why the fuck not?

Thinking about it later, I was surprised that I’d unconsciously been listening, again, to one of those weird old ghosts who floats around droning, “You’re doing it wrong!” I thought I’d truly learned to ignore them by now. For the most part, I have. But it’s really nice to have a new writing friend who I can trust to remind me: “No, you’re really not.”

Reading:

I don’t fully remember what all I read in the blur of Dark Winter, but here are some books that stood out:

• All You Can Kill by Pasha Malla: Holy shit, I loved this book. It’s a sequel to Malla’s Kill the Mall, and both books are billed as horror. What I think of as horror is way too scary for me. So I would never have read these books if Pasha weren’t an old friend whose hilarious sentences and wild mind I’d follow anywhere. A while back, I wrote that reading Kiese Laymon’s Long Division made me feel “a bit sick, like I’m in a bad dream” but “in such a good, profound way,” and Malla’s work makes me feel the same. This isn’t gross-out body horror; more “what the fuck is going on, why are these people like this; oh no, no, don’t do that; ope, here’s three pages listing different types of birds; here’s the full, actual horror of North American culture captured neatly in an arch description of an all-inclusive buffet; here’s a banister coming, sinuously, to life; here’s my heart breaking again for the soft middle of this ultra-bizarre narrator who’s just this side of too oblivious and annoying to endure; here’s me snort-laughing out loud again and again.”

• Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham: This is written — in both the third and first person somehow at once — from the point of view of a Black trans woman, just released from prison and trying to find her way in Brooklyn after twenty years away. Given the literary conversations of the last decade, I did wonder while reading if Hannaham — a Black, queer, cis man — was writing credibly from this perspective; whether he did right by trans people by doing so; whether there were elements of trauma porn. I don’t think I’m the right person to answer any of that, so I went looking for trans peoples’ responses to this book. So far I haven’t found any, but if you have, let me know? From a craft perspective, I found this book pretty thrilling, it was funny as hell, and the harrowing bits were, well, extremely so.

• The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells: I read the first book of this wildly popular sci-fi series back in April of last year, and didn’t continue until the Dark Winter set in. Late December and January, as we sat with our dying loved one, and then with his absence, I devoured the remaining six books, then looped back and re-read the first. I can’t even tell you how much these books helped me through that rough time. Sure, I’m a big proponent of sitting in the muck of your feelings and all of that. But Jesus Christ, one comes to need a break! Our Murderbot is just cynical and swear-y enough to not be grating, but it’s always clear its intentions are good. Yes, it will kill and maim with the guns built into its arms throughout the spectacular action scenes. But it will only kill the truly bad guys, and only to save itself and its human friends, who it deeply loves in spite of itself, and its history of enslavement at our species’ hands. The world of the books is rabidly corporate; familiar and bleak. But there are utopian enclaves that sand the edges off. The Murderbot self-soothes by watching and re-watching serial dramas, sometimes bonding over these with its sentient spaceship pal.
  
  While mainlining these books during most of my idle hours the last two months, I also started listening to interviews with Martha Wells while I did the dishes. I think it’s in this one where she talks about how, as a weird, isolated child, she got so much pleasure and respite from disappearing into Star Trek, and later connecting with her fellow fans. She says that one of the reasons the Murderbot uses TV to self-regulate is to show some respect to this somewhat dissociative practice that had long served her, too. Hearing and reading Wells affirm the choice to exit reality and recharge by sinking into smart-yet-easy, entertaining narrative for a spell actually made me bawl my eyes out at that moment in time. I needed to hear it. I’m grateful to Wells and her Murderbot for what they do.

Eating:

On Christmas Eve, our loved one moved into a hospice a ways east of where we live, so we ended up eating in some new-to-us spots. We ate dinner a few times at Lee’s Dumpling House on Gerrard, and while the vegan options were few, to me they were perfect. The doughy bite of the steamed veggie dumplings; the aggressive spiciness of the slabs of homestyle tofu; and a huge plate of garlicky gai lan provided the right combo of soft comfort, appropriate burn, and green nourishment for this time in our lives. It was also busier with takeout customers than dine-in, which appealed to our enduringly Covid-cautious selves.

We spent December 27th, my 46th birthday, at the hospice, followed by happy hour at the Broadview Hotel’s rooftop, also dead empty at 4pm on a winter’s eve. I was pleasantly surprised to find that their mushroom skewers came with vegan feta by default, and that they were pretty good, as were the cocktails in my uninformed opinion. The room was pretty dark, but there were loads of little lights.