The Aftermath (Patreon)

Dear friends, old and new – 

Wow.

Well . . .

If you're not inclined to lurk on Instagram (I mean, I really don't blame you ...), you might not have seen that I (very ambitiously, I thought), decided to print up SIXTY extra copies* of Writing the Circus (*extra as in, beyond what I print to mail to you, dear Patrons).

And  that those sixty extra copies sold out in less than 48 hours.

:: blink blink::

Folks, I'm just so pleased I think I've had rosy pink cheeks for the whole month of July. I've received wonderful feedback from you and from the public. There's been more interaction and interest in the project than I expected or dared to hope. People are piling up on the waitlist for the second print run that I'll be doing sometime before the end of the month.

I just want to say a massive, heartfelt thank you to all of you who supported this project. It's still in its infancy, but you all had the faith in me to believe in it while it was still a twinkle in all of our eyes. I have truly high hopes for the ways in which this project might continue to grow and expand. <3

In particular, great thanks are owed to two incredible women who functioned as my sounding board and editors during the final 4 weeks of creating Issue 1. One of them is Mary-Margaret Scrimger, a Toronto circus artist and writer who turns a phrase better than any and creates some of the most wonderfully whimsical static trapeze you could ever hope to feast your eyes upon (hint: it involves a performance entirely upside down and backwards in which she puppets an alien named HENRY using her butt as his face and giant googlie eyes on her feet). The second is Rachel Strickland, another incredible artist who I am, in fact, a patron of myself here on Patreon. If you haven't searched up her work, her writing and her art is sweet like honey and stays sticky on your brain long after you've tasted it.

With the completion of Issue 1, I've switched my attention to polishing the first book of short stories which are part of the larger project that I created this Patreon for (what's up, $30 patrons! woooo!).

I'm digging back in to my adventures last year in Mongolia, embellishing and elaborating on the parts that I couldn't when I was there, on the ground, in April and May of 2019. It's the first place I'll be returning to when travel bans are lifted. It was horrifically challenging. Emotionally and physically gruelling. But something about it keeps calling me back. And so . . . who am I to say no?

Emboldened by your strong support & the response of the greater circus community, my brain is also spinning off in the direction of larger and larger research projects: 

• during the last two months of political unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement in Canada & the US, I've found myself looking and looking for any scrap of information I can find specifically on the intersection of circus and racism (specific to 18th, 19th, and 20th century North America)(I'll be honest, I want to create a giant 700 page global tome of knowledge, but I'm making a real endeavour not to set [any more] ridiculously large projects for myself [this year]).
  
• My Mongolia writing revisited is making me think once more on the importance of preserving the voices and narratives of certain people, at certain points in history. Without elaborating much further at the moment, I'm feeling terribly drawn to attempting to gather some kind of oral history of the Mongolian circus artists who have immigrated to the United States (not Canada ... that I know of ...), as well as those who stayed in Mongolia following the dissolution of Mongolia as a satellite Soviet State in the late 20th century. I love Mongolian contortion & its history with an irrational passion, and want to preserve these voices before they start disappearing.  
  
  The manager of the studio where I trained in Ulaanbaatar is willing to help me conduct interviews in UB, in Mongolian, and assist with translations (should the borders ever open again ...). I've finally found ONE SINGLE APP that teaches spoken and written Mongolian (I've already taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet, which helps .... haha). In short, I'm prepping everything I can in the background ... and letting it gestate ...
  
• I've purposefully grown my circus library over quarantine. I now own wonderful books on the history of circus in the United States, on circus bodies in the UK and Europe, on sideshow performers, on the semiotics of circus performers, and so much more.
  
  But you know what I can't find?
  
  Circus books on the history of circus in Canada.
  (Beyond recent/contemporary history in the province of Québec).
  
  But the very first circus came to Montréal by way of England in the late 1700s.
  Yes, you read that correctly!
  I know there's information out there.
  I've started to trawl online/digital archives at the Toronto Reference Library.
  A plot is slowly hatching in my mind.
  What the hell am I getting myself into . . .
  
  
  Anyways. That's it for my mad schemes, cooking away in the background.
  I have included here today the slides that I posted to IG as a "Disability Studies Primer",*******  for those of you who wanted to know a little more about that background but don't use social media that often. I will be continuing to post educational content regularly that elaborates on disability studies, racism, circus history, and more. These will continue to serve as complementary discussions for what you found so far, and will continue to find, in Writing the Circus.
  
  Got any more questions?
  Any opinions on those research projects?
  Any leads for said research projects ?
  Interested in having some excerpts of those new and emerging Mongolia stories soon?
  
  Do me a favour and click through to the Patreon post itself (I know most of you are reading this in your e-mail inboxes) and leave me a comment! Or click that little heart in the corner (I blatantly steal this request from the great mind of Rachel Strickland) – so that I know you've read this ;)
  
  Stay strange & wonderful --
  
  
  ess
  
  
  ****CORRECTION: these attachments are weird and Ill share them as a separate image post as well. Derp.