Far away from dry land and its bitter memories

I wrote a book.

 It wasn’t always going to be this way. One day I just decided to run. I packed two bags of my belongings, left the Yukon, landed in Toronto. Stayed in the spare room in a loft next to a pretty good coffee shop in the dead of a winter that felt different than all the winters I had known before. No real plan, no vision or goal for the future. Just running for the sake of movement and for fear of the danger lurking in all the dark places I knew too well at home. 

I didn’t really think I lived in Toronto until I found a coffee shop where someone knew my order from repeated visits. It’s gone now, like so many good things in this world, but for a time Empire Espresso on College street, with a blue bench out front and endless opportunity to while away the days was a beacon of home. This is how you live in a city, by becoming familiar to its streets. Empire is gone now, but its spirit remains. Find people, smoke cigarettes with them on the bench with the wind in your hair and let your roots dig into the concrete. 

That’s where this all kind of started, I think. When I was no longer running, when I had now planted and become part of the soil. I wrote ideas on scraps of paper or in the notes app on my phone. I wrote a blog I have long since removed and destroyed out of embarrassment, but I thought about a future I had not envisioned when I fled here. I just knew I wasn’t safe where I had been before, and you can’t plan for the future when all you can understand is the memory of hits that landed a little too hard, and what hits might come in the future. 

I’m not a writer per se. I’m a third generation journeyman glazier, retired now, with most of a high school education and a spotty memory. I had no community of writers or peers or anything at all. I had two bags, and then a bench, and then roots in the soil. I worked hard at finding any opportunity to write and read my name in the byline and wonder if I was any good at this at all. 

I’m never going to be fully sure if I am, but I’m here all the same, and my debut book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, will be published on May 6, 2025 through the American Music Series at the University of Texas Press. You can even pre-order it by clicking the button below.

This is the most nakedly embarrassing thing I’ve had to do, but it’s an important ask. It’s monumentally important for a first time unknown author to get pre-orders, ask your library to stock it, ask your local shop to order it. If you like my work, or know someone who does or might or whatever, I would love it if you would consider it. 

This is the start of the long and winding road of self promotion, and I will endeavor to keep that to a minimum as best as possible, but it's important to my own success and future that I do this and I have been running for so long that it's nice to feel grounded in desire for the first time in many, many years and part of that desire is to be able to keep doing the work that I love. Take pride in the labor that has gotten me here. I’ve never really done that before, but I'm eager to learn how. 

Teasing a little from the book, the opening of which features "Fisherman's Blues" by The Waterboys. Here's one of my all-time favourites Ted Leo (who is on tour now in celebration of the 20th anniversary of Shake The Sheets) covering it for a Live at Third Man Records session more than a decade ago.

Okay, love you, see you all next week.