On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Looks like we're going to restart our writing workshop sessions in person again at the Rideau Branch of the Ottawa Public Library on Tuesday nights come September. I'll try to remember to upload the advertising design-work I've just had approved closer to the start date.

Meantime, I've got offline chores to do over noon hour, so I'll "see" you this afternoon, okay?

So, I committed an activist act just as I was logging in here. Signed up for this:

https://friends.ca/campaigns/michael-enright-in-conversation/

As good as Piya Chattopadhyay is in hosting the show now rebranded as The Sunday Magazine and I am also aware that Mr. Enright and CBC have continuing plans for a future in partnership...well, I've missed hearing his voice on the radio.

I'll be in Zoom mode with that writing workshop being run by the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre in tandem with the Toronto Writers Collective in about half an hour after I post this. It fills a couple of hours with job-skills practice and mental health support. That has to be good.

...with searching for work and researching for an article I hope to have written by tonight. The article is somewhat inspired by and focused upon that Planning Primer at City Hall I went to last week. I think that Spacing Ottawa might find a home for it, but we'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'll get whatever's done by tonight reviewed by the Pen and Paper Writing Workshop gang at the Rideau Branch of the Ottawa Library.

As for the job search, it seems a good idea to show, don't tell. You may remember earlier postings about the Federal Job Bank. This is what I was complaining about:

Since they've been forecast for Ottawa-Gatineau this morning...

Meanwhile, the writing workshop last night was fun and well-attended. We had a six-word story-writing challenge, poetry was also committed, and some long-form fiction too.

Still wrapping my brain around the news breaking last night about the Sony-Disney Spider-Man movie revenue-sharing spat.

Job search continues as well.

Bus maps, swapp'd away;
Swapp'd in: flowchart-style now,
Geographies gone.

Trapp'd on King Edward,
Babe in mother's arms, screaming.
Mother, herself trapp'd.

All praise be to angst!
That "sweet" torment, addictive
to far too many.

Reservation's made
to share some newish poems
at next week's meeting.

After eight months, I'm back at writing workshop. It's been too long.

More on other topics later...

...for the Pen and Paper Workshop. No idea how many will be able to show up, thanks to the weather tonight. If I don't see more than three other faces before 7 PM, I expect I'll be headed back home again.

I wrote this up for the Pen and Paper writers workshop earlier tonight. It related to a story shared by rfmcdpei today.


So I’m back to networking and searching and researching. Nothing new there, although the mix of jobs available keeps on changing. So do the resources used to chase those leads down. One of those leads, however, gave me a surprise this morning.

That resource is Workopolis. A web service spun out of the Globe and Mail as being somewhat of a distraction from its core business over a decade ago, Workopolis is one of a number of web sites devoted to making their money from advertisements aimed at Canadian job-seekers. Whether the ads are for jobs themselves or for services aimed at job-seekers doesn’t really matter a great deal.

And that’s the short version of what Workopolis is. A longer version of the explanation would take more time than any of us here at the moment can spare.

At present, I have about twenty “alerts” set up with Workopolis. Some are for specific types of jobs. Others are dedicated to watching what specific employers are seeking in prospective employees. Sometimes, those alerts will trigger unanticipated results. Including that surprise I mentioned at the top.

In this case, I had the alert subscription tagged as “ArtsMedia-Ottawa”. The rationale was that I wanted to keep an eye on job leads in – you guessed it! – arts and the media on a local scale. I have others for national and provincial-level leads. But the results evolved away from my intentions, and never more so than that day.

I’ll cite the text – partly to explain, partly to pass the word along, and partly to run up the word count:

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia seeks an Archbishop to oversee, supervise and rule the Spiritual and Administrative organizations of all Canadian parishes (20-25) across Canada. Must have a degree in Theology, fluency in English, Russian, Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic. Must be proclaimed by Holy Canons of Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, must be a Bishop and monk with 20 years of providing religious services and spiritual guidance with the Russian Orthodox Church . The Archbishop will be based at the Protection of the Holy Virgin Memorial Church, Ottawa, ON Canada and will be required to travel to parishes and dioceses across Canada and the USA. Wage $21.50 per hour for full-time (40 hours per week). Benefits: paid travel and accommodation expenses, medical coverage. Send your resume and cover letter to: (contact info deleted)

As you’ve likely guessed by now, I have no monastic experience. None. At all. Fluency in Russian, old Russian and Old Church Slavonic is also nonexistent.

The reason behind publicly posting this at all also escapes me. Was it a joke inspired by recent news events surrounding that church? Was it a real posting designed to avert legal actions by parties as yet unidentified? Your guess is as good as mine.

I await the results of investigations by others better qualified for that work than I am.

I’ve been having one of those days. The kind of day where there’s this one tooth in the back that keeps acting up, no matter how much headache medication you throw at your nervous system to suppress the little nuisance.

Once one of those aches takes hold, your concentration is more than likely going to be shot as far as creative effort is concerned. It won’t even have to resemble anything close to an actual cavity.

No, really.

Not being sure that I want to go into much further detail – some people would consider details of dental care to be under the category of “too much information” – but whilst remaining firmly rooted, the annoying teeth still sent out the occasional pang. So, this recurring pang disrupts a number of things, including the writing of cover letters in e-mail form, as well as the writing of actual essays.

Such as this one, yes.

Such was not the case yesterday.

I went to Lowertown yesterday for a barbecue hosted by a friend of mine, and there was no such distraction then. There were other distractions provided by the food and the travel route itself, true. Starting with an inflatable scarlet gorilla on Slater Street at Telus Place. That was an attention-grabber.

Someone actually thought such a “mascot” was worth paying money for. It’s not the first such “mascot” any of us have ever seen, true enough. You can all name at least one example of similar oddities in your own experience.

The impression I got of the northeastern corner of Lowertown is a visually mixed one. Co-op housing side-by-side with relics dating back to the 19th Century, forty-year-old single-family houses left to rot boarded-up, right next to some of the best-kept yards in the city. Housing, next to lawyers’ offices, across the street from a paramedic post, itself kitty-corner across the intersection of King Edward and Murray from the Shepherds of Good Hope.

Lowertown is a proper hodgepodge, the kind of neighbourhood that Jane Jacobs would have been satisfied to see survive into the present, despite the efforts to take it apart in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The widening of King Edward would be the one fly in that particular ointment, of course. Originally, it was to be a sunken freeway splitting Lowertown in two in the name of “urban improvement”, but for the protests inspired by Toronto’s example. That widening of King Edward could have been characterized as a sort of revenge against the resistance to top-down “improvement” imposed by City Hall and developers determined to know better than the people who lived there up to that point.

Anyway, the barbecue was fun.

I'll be at the writing workshop from 7 PM onward to about 845 PM.

Here's where, if you want to join the fun.