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The title of my honours thesis back in university was “HOW THE ENGLISH DEGREE WILL SAVE THE WORLD”. I wrote about Queering, decolonizing and democratizing literary studies for Generation Z. My Pilot G-2 pen writing frantically on ruled paper, coffee rings blooming across the margins.

An overly-bold and arrogant title, I know. The sort of title you write at 2am when your desk lamp is the only light left in the building. My justification was that I saw far too many undergraduates, and even postgrads, hedge. Too modest and meek to stand up and triumphantly state themselves and their work. Voices dropping to whispers in seminar rooms, eyes fixed on scuffed linoleum floors, shoulders curved inward like closing parentheses.

Here’s an idea. What if everything you consumed was freely available? Not pirated. Not “technically legal.” Actually, genuinely free. Public domain. Creative Commons. Open source. Free software. Free culture.

News came out in the past few days about the fact that the largest shadow library on the Internet, Anna’s Archive, has successfully scraped Spotify’s music catalog and is planning on releasing it to the public in whole. 256 million tracks of metadata, 86 million audio files, nearly 300 terabytes of data, representing 99.6% of all listens on Spotify.

My dad told me that his step-father, Robert Matsyk, was a news editor at the Winnipeg Free Press decades ago. He’s proud of me for getting into this line of work—for sinking my teeth into literary journalism. For the fact I’m writing good work that people read.

And I can’t help but think of what Bob was doing—what his daily workflow looked like and what journalism really meant to him. The entire field and industry of journalism decades ago intrigues me. It’s a ghost now, isn’t it?

To be honest, I’m not someone who cares for traditional publishing. Maybe it’s a fear of rejection, maybe it’s my anti-authoritarian streak. Regardless, I’m not somebody proudly within the CanLit landscape or on any CBCReads list.

The First Time Someone Said Yes

One of the only times I was published by others was in a chapbook nobody read. Grainy photocopied pages with a saddle-stitched binding, a stapler that left rust marks on the cover. I don’t have any links to a copy, I don’t even remember the names of the people involved. I imagine the publication was printed in a basement that smelled like mildew and burnt espresso.

Let’s be honest. You’re probably reading this for free right now, and that’s the problem. “Free” trained us to scroll past everything that matters. The attention economy has taught you that, outside of streaming services, nothing is worth paying for.

The Case for Paying Attention (and Paying for It)

Which means nothing is worth making well, which means we’re all drowning in an ocean of content nobody remembers ten minutes after consuming it.

Someone screenshots my poem about the grocery store at 2 AM. Where I wrote about the cashier timekeeping her way toward morning resurrection. My name is stripped off, added to a TikTok montage with city lights bleeding through rain-streaked windows, slow-motion footage of lonely third-shift workers, that Cigarettes After Sex song everyone uses.

Take My Words. Crop My Name. Make It Yours. Here’s Why.

Five hundred thousand views in four days. No credit. No link back. No tag. Just my words floating over someone else’s aesthetic, someone else’s curated melancholy. The comments scroll past, “I work night shift at a grocery store. This made me cry.” “Needed this today.”