“...emotions, yearnings, reactions and ambitions which as a result of society’s shortcomings we all share.”

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“The illusion has been shattered that a work of art has a fixed value: its value is dependent on the creative ability of the onlooker, which in turn is stimulated by the suggestion the work of art arouses. Only living art can activate the creative spirit, and only living art is of general significance. For only living art gives expression to the emotions, yearnings, reactions and ambitions which as a result of society’s shortcomings we all share.”
― Constant, Manifesto (1948)


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Serializing Failure (Instalment #2)

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I'm currently serializing my novel-in-progress Failure Finds its Happy End on my Patreon. It is a novel about a person who decides to start an art movement. For the indefinite future all posts will be free content, so there's no reason not to follow (and get a new instalment every month in your inbox.) You can find the second instalment here.


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Michael Eddy on Authenticity is a Feeling

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"Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, by Jacob Wren

Wren's book is a sort of biography of his performance art group PME-ART. His account of their work, whose aim is stripping away theatricality and “being yourself in a performance situation,” is therefore an exercise in nonfiction. But putting something in a performative frame or committing it to the printed word involve a sophisticated understanding of authenticity where irony, fluidity and hallucination are part of the deal (I tend to project confidence into the awkwardness of PME-ART performers, which can make them alienating as opposed to vulnerable). I think Wren agrees with me: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because nonfiction is always also a kind of fiction.”"

- Michael Eddy, Committed to Irony




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My Terrains Vacants Brief Summary

[I was recently invited by Écotone - Espace d'expérimentation to be part of their Terrains Vacants residency. I was also asked to write a brief summary of my experience, as follows.]

The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was (during the first moments of my first week: March 23-29, 2026.) I always listen to music when I work – and when I’m not working as well – but I didn’t bring any music. I decided to leave my computer at home in order to spend time away from the internet. (As everyone knows, I am much too addicted to the internet.) So… I would spend some time in silence. That seemed like a good enough idea.

In my application I’d proposed I would spend the time trying to come up with an idea for a solo performance. Almost all of my performance work has been made in collaboration with other artists. My motivations to make a solo performance were multiple and questionable. I’ve always found working with other people difficult and might like a break from such difficulties. Funding is increasingly challenging to come by, and less people on stage also means less funds required. But perhaps my main motivation is to make work in which I have the agency and freedom to completely change things in the moment, with no one else relying on me, no one who might be thrown off by any sudden, spontaneous changes.

Sitting there in that empty, very quiet room at the La Cité-des-Hospitalières, I quickly came up with a preliminary idea. I thought of calling it A Personal History of Everything and Everyone. I conceived of it as a kind of “composition in real time.” One version of the idea was built around a table full of objects. Each object would connect to a theme. The performance would consist of me picking up objects at random and speaking about the related theme for each one. I also had a desire to speak about current events, so I wanted there to be enough objects that there would always be one I could connect to any current event on my mind. I had way more ideas for themes than I did for objects. Some of the themes I was interested in speaking about included: Oil, Music, Prize Culture, Failure, Books, Chronic Pain, A World Without Money, Solidarity, Depression, Travel, Friendship, Cooking, Regret, Nature, Animism, Honesty, Repair and Liveness. People familiar with my work might notice that many of these themes are the ones I find myself returning to over and over again.

When I came back for my second week (June 15-21, 2026), I began, conventionally enough, by looking over my notes from the first week, and was fascinated by how I now had almost no interest in any of my ideas from the previous round. Upon further reflection, this seemed to me indicative of a larger pattern within my artistic practice. I have a great deal of difficulty staying interested in any idea for very long. In my normal artistic work-life, some outside factor forces me to commit to one idea over another: there are collaborators on the project who I feel a responsibility to, or we get a grant, or I tell people about the idea and they encourage me to pursue it, or we are invited to perform somewhere. Each of things (and others) forces me to commit to an idea rather than abandoning it. Since I basically believe that any idea can result in good work, in the end I’m not so certain it matters which idea I choose. If I had the idea in the first place it probably means I have at least some interest in doing it. Any idea can result in good work, it just depends what you do with it.

I then switched tactics, focusing on the more fundamental question of whether I genuinely wanted to make a solo performance and, if so, why. My basic feeling was that I did and here are the reasons I came up with:
- Freedom to change things on the fly.
- Freedom to speak about current events.
- Honesty about who I am and what I’m able to do.
- A preference for doing something that’s less good, yet more true to me, versus doing something that’s better but further away from my true abilities.
- Making performances cheaply and quickly.
- I want to be alone.

I still don’t yet have an idea for a specific solo performance I want to do, but if I ever come up with such an idea I will likely do it. I have a feeling it might have something to do with being old, and for that to work I still might have to get a bit older. I consider the idea that when the rest of my beard turns white, I will begin the process.

In my day-to-day life, I already spend a great deal of time alone, consumed by introspective thoughts. In a way, this residency formalized this process. There was definitely something existential about it. I don’t really make art for myself, I make art because I have a desire to convey something to an audience. Paradoxically, I find I am most able to convey something to an audience if I follow, as closely as possible, my own personal artistic desires. I now realize that a large part of the Terrains Vacants residency was about being in a space, over time, without any specific goals. I’ve always been fond of the John Cage quote: “The goal is not to have a goal.” I’ve always felt lost, and this residency allowed me to reconnect with my ongoing feeling of existential lostness. And so it continues.



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Does aging make you impatient?

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I don't remember being this impatient when I was younger. Does aging make you impatient? Two things on their way to being finished, and yet I still have to wait.

The first record by The Air Contains Honey comes out this November. It's called The Air Contains Honey Sings Quotes. You're going to like it, but you'll have to (impatiently) wait until November (on the other hand, first single out in September.)

And then my next novel Desire Without Expectation comes out in May 2027. Here are a few lines:

"We were there to set fire to the oil wells. So, as you can imagine, we had many enemies. Setting fire to oil wells almost sounds to me now like the genre of idea an agent provocateur would actively encourage. My thinking on the topic of what’s to be done has changed a great deal since that time. I now believe we have to build something, and we’re not going to get far tearing anything down before we’ve built something up to replace it. As I said, those were different times. I look back down at the cover of the book. I don’t want to be thinking about the past. I’d prefer to be thinking about the future."



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WIELS calls for applications from Canadian artists

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WIELS calls for applications from Canadian artists (Canadian nationals, or those living and working in Canada) for a 6-month residency in Brussels. More info here.


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Three lines from Failure Finds its Happy End

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“We were trying to make a very public society, but no one paid attention, so it ended up being a secret society.”



“In the end we thought maybe our manifesto could be a manifesto of questions.”



“There are so many injustices in the world, you could speak out against them twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life and still not have nearly enough time.”

*

All three lines are from my novel-in-progress Failure Finds its Happy End, which I am currently serializing on my Patreon here.

If I ever finish what I seem to be calling my final trilogy, Failure Finds its Happy End might be the plus one.



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Olivia Laing Quote

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“The plants themselves encoded something utopian for me, a vision of how the world ought to be. At the same time I had a disinclination to act so powerful it felt ordained. It wasn’t just laziness; it was a sense of the pointlessness of human effort, that almost every action had some damaging consequence, and that it was better to simply let things be. […] Staying power had come later, in my thirties; the helpful revelation that there is no mystery to any creative endeavour save for turning up each day and knuckling down to it, hour after tedious or – but this was far rarer – joyful hour. That was when I started making gardens and writing books, the unhappy years of failed dreaming an increasingly unvisited memory.”
— Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise



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"...even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance."

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"And I’ve always had such a difficult, conflicted relationship with performing. All of the things you say are true: I do like the immediacy, connection, and the idea of a public life that are embodied in the act of performance. And, at the same time, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to find or create even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance. There is a sense of ongoing failure that makes the real moments of immediacy and connection in performance all that much more precious. I feel that I’ve wasted my life and I also feel that I haven’t. In a way, for me the act of performance is embodied in this sentiment."

- Jacob Wren, from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART with Sylvie Lachance and Geneviève Robichaud


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one big project per year

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Somehow my life has organized itself into one big project per year:

2026: The very first record by The Air Contains Honey

2027: My next novel Desire Without Expectation

2028: The new PME-ART show How Does Change Happen?

(All of these projects somehow make me very nervous for very different reasons.)


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Keep doing the same thing versus Try doing something new.

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Keep doing the same thing versus Try doing something new.

I wrote this down after seeing The Ex play a few nights ago. I had this feeling that they just keep doing the same thing and it just keeps on being good. That for them "doing the same thing" might be the right choice. But I'm not sure. I don't know enough about The Ex enough to know that they keep doing the same thing. And definitely, over the years, they also tried many new things. But I'm always wondering how much my work should change and how. And I'm never sure quite what the best way to think about it is.


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Kawai Shen Quote

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“Despite the suspension of norms in the mosh pit and the lifting of prohibitions on exercising aggression and violence, moshing was never a free-for-all. Like any social endeavour, there were unwritten rules of conduct. Entering a new millennium ushered in by forest fires, warmongering, and a global pandemic, I repeat to myself the lessons I’ve learned. Grasp the hands of the fallen so they are not trampled. Do not tolerate those monopolizing space for themselves. There is something honest and necessary in the proximity that pain causes, in the urgency to stay connected to each other. There can be unity in disorder. Seek it out, make it grow.”
― Kawai Shen, Wavering Futures


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Things haven't gone quite how I planned...

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An update on my attempt to start a Patreon (and the book I'm writing to procrastinate working on the other book that I'm supposed to be finishing.)


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Some favourite records of 2026 (so far)

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[I do a list at the end of every year. And sometimes I also do a shorter list in the middle. Not all of these records were released this year, but this was the year I heard and enjoyed them.]


Dijon – Baby
Titanic – HAGEN
Setting – Setting
keiyaA – hooke’s law
Nadah El Shazly – Laini Tani
Maurice Louca – Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي
Chyna Baejing and Boneweso – BAEJING BALLAD
mary sue, bloomcycle – Self Expressions From Selling Reflections On The Internet



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Some favourite books of 2026 (so far)

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[I do a list at the end of every year. And sometimes I also do a shorter list in the middle. Not all of these books were published this year, but this was the year I read and enjoyed them.]


Sofia Mostaghimi – Desperada
Michael Eddy – Koh-i-Noor
Kawai Shen – Wavering Futures
Patrick Cottrell – Afternoon Hours of a Hermit
Makenna Goodman – Helen of Nowhere
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr – The Most Secret Memory of Men (Translated by Lara Vergnaud)
Mohamed Kheir – Slipping (Translated by Robin Moger)
Giada Scodellaro – Ruins, Child



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Ten years of Rich and Poor

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Thinking about how my novel Rich and Poor came out in 2016, which is now ten years ago. (And, thanks to Luigi Mangione, it has even started selling again.)

*

“I will kill him. It will solve nothing and help no one, but for me at least, it will bring something to an end. The poor must kill the rich, one at a time, at every opportunity. One man kills another and the message is clear, your wealth is cruel and unnatural. You can put fences, guards and dogs around your home, so you are like a prisoner in your own life, but if you are rich you will live in fear. You will fear your servants. You will look out the window of your limousine and, at every traffic light, wonder if each and every passerby has a gun and bullet with your name on it. It is only that the killing must be completely random. The victims having nothing in common other than their wealth, the killers nothing in common other than their poverty. The message should be clear: if you are rich you can be killed at any time. The police would arrest millions but there would always be another poor man that could suddenly snap. We would only have to kill ten to start, to strike fear in the hearts of every billionaire in the world. And he will be the first. I will see to it.

On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don’t want to shoot him. I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don’t want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again.”

– Jacob Wren, Rich and Poor



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Oliver Fugler Quote

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“Many of our biggest blunders have occurred when trying to keep pace with the industry, when applying pressure that one or many of us can’t bear. Commonly, publishers are portrayed as deadline fiends, hounding willy-nilly artists for their work, and with any extra pressure on any one of the parties, the cycle stutters and heaves.

A disability justice lens, and its rhetorical influence on and co-creation with BIPOC and queer and trans communities, would have us all understand that that kind of pressure serves none of us, in the end. We are here, rather, to care about and for each other, and if it takes time and resources and adjustments, that’s not a barrier but rather the conditions that we must lovingly meet in order to live.”

― Oliver Fugler, from the Intro to Sharp Pink Claws: New Writing by Metonymy Press Authors, Vol. 2

[Check out all the amazing books at Metonymy Press.]



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Some passages from Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell

Some passages from Afternoon Hours of a Hermit by Patrick Cottrell:


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“Friendship has been a form of poison to me, I thought as I tried to picture my friends, especially my writer friends. I kept trying to picture them, my writer friends from the contemporary literature and adjunct scene in Brooklyn. No, the writer friends I pictured only reminded me of the palpable anxiety and awkwardness I felt whenever I interacted with them.”


*


“Perhaps part of the problem was I had surrounded myself with the fiction writers instead of the poets. I had chosen the wrong world to immerse myself in; the poets were nightclub docents of mourning and melancholia and the fiction writers were real estate agents.”


*


“I was ecstatic with joy whenever I had the opportunity to overhear what people said about me as if I weren’t there. Whenever I ran out of things to talk about during my creative writing workshop with the troubled youth, I would, without warning, get up from the conference table and wander out into the hallway, where, if I wasn’t careful, I could spend the rest of the class eavesdropping on my troubled youth, although they hardly ever said my name. I was nothing to them; they preferred to talk about debt, activism, gender, trauma, etc. I was disappointed when I didn’t hear my name come up.”


*


“A few years and nothing to show for all my troubles but the beginning of my psychological thriller, perhaps ten or twelve pages at most, the first ten or twelve pages are the easiest to write, I once said to Thomas Bernhard during office hours, the first ten or twelve pages are effortless, seamless, boundless, effortlessness; it’s the rest of it that’s completely insufferable. It never opens up the way I want it to, I explained to my mother and Aunt Sue. I only wanted to conjure a latticework of light and tranquility, but because of my limitations, I always end up suffocated in a broom closet of despair.”


*


“And some people might find it hard to believe I managed to write a book, a published one, knowing what they know about me, but during my time in graduate school, I learned it’s the most demented and mentally unwell writers who have the easiest time getting their books published, even the most awful, unhinged, stupid, and neurotic person can write and publish a book, then step into a roomful of strangers and talk about it and persuade them to buy it. Almost all my writer friends are suicidal in some way, I reflected, mostly in a soft, ambient way, their suicidal thoughts humming in the background like a refrigerator or a noise-machine, while others are openly suicidal, more suicidal forward.”


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Excerpt from the novel-in-progress Failure Finds its Happy End

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I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how I might start an art movement. In general, people seemed to feel starting a new art movement was not possible, if they thought about it at all. It was something that occurred in the past, during the twentieth century and before, and was now no longer viable. When I can’t figure out how to do something in real life, the next best thing is to write a novel about it. But I don’t just want it to be a novel, I also want it to be a fable.

Many art movements I’ve read about over the years followed a fairly specific pattern that greatly interests me. There is an extended period in which a group of artists – friends living or hanging out in the same neighborhood with cheap rent – work in relative obscurity, often spending a great deal of time together drinking to excess. During this time they debate artistic questions, share influences and resources, while each individually continuing to make work and develop their practice. Through such debate certain commonalities emerge, alongside many differences. Often, somewhere in the mix, there is a manifesto or a few. At some point there is a breakthrough moment when one or two of the artists achieves sudden success, the unexpected yet hoped for fruits of this longer period of hidden, communal development. During this breakthrough the movement is given a name, often by a critic or hanger on, and the name sticks, a name most of the artists involved don’t particularly like. Many of the artists quickly go from struggling and having little money to being known and having more money than they know what to do with. The drinking becomes more extreme. A few of the artists are singled out as being the most important avatars of the movement and many of the others are relegated to the status of minor players. Imitators and posers quickly flood the scene. There is instant nostalgia for the tight knit sense of community they had not so long ago experienced. Often at least one of the artists dies, unable to handle the sudden rush of celebrity or through drinking. In general, all this takes place over the course of about five years. Much later, after everyone is dead or old, the movement becomes even more glamourous in retrospect and a great deal of fluff is written about it. I would like the art movement I help found to echo some aspects of this trajectory while jettisoning others.

So first I had to find the people, then we had to bond over the course of a substantial interval of relative obscurity. I was hoping for less alcohol than previous art movements, but we’d have to see which stimulants were the drugs of choice. I imagined it a little bit like putting together a boy band, though definitely not all boys, those days were long gone, no more boys’ clubs and no more centring whiteness. And it had to be about something substantial, something political, something worth doing.

Meanwhile, there was much going on in the world. There was war, there was genocide, there was fascism, there was an enormous amount of protest against war, genocide and fascism. I would join a protest practically every week. It seemed likely to me that the other artists I was looking for were also part of these protests. And therefore, as we marched, I should talk to as many strangers as possible Often this did not go as well as planned.

Did art movements of the past emerge organically or did the artists involved actively work to make them happen? Some mix of both? Always an aspect of zeitgeist involved, some generational shift. (Art movements often started by the very young, which I am not.) There’s of course a shift occurring now, with U.S. hegemony in the process of coming apart as the seams. Is this the kind of shift you can build an art movement on? Usually, art movements are built from shifts that are more forward looking, optimistic: this is the new thing that will forever improve art as society improves alongside it, these possibilities based squarely within the idea of progress, and since progress is a lie, we’ll need to find another basis. Things don’t progress, they go in circles like the seasons.

This book will be my contribution to an art movement that doesn’t yet exist, a kind of history in advance.

*

I'm still working on what I'm calling my final trilogy — Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024), Desire Without Expectation (2027) and Faithful Unbeliever (2030) — but, if I ever finish this trilogy, Failure Finds its Happy End might be the plus one.

As well, my current plan is to serialize Failure Finds its Happy End on my Patreon here.



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Elle Barbara's ‘One Man Show’ / May 22, 2026

The legendary underground musician Elle Barbara presents ‘One Man Show’ on May 22, 2026 at Montreal’s iconic Theatre Outremont. More than a concert, ‘One Man Show’ is an on-stage exploration of Elle Barbara’s Black Space’s 2025 album ‘Word on the Street,’ in a spectacle created in collaboration with noted choreographer Raja Feather Kelly. Sure to be one of the events of the summer.
Purchase tickets: https://theatreoutremont.tuxedobillet.com/web/elle-barbara
Listen and purchase: Elle Barbara’s Black Space’s 2025 album ‘Word on the Street’