Mis Amigos en La Grid

I have made my first contribution to The Grid. It's a short Bulletin piece about the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Galleria mall at Dufferin and Dupont, for which I have an inexplicable soft spot. Or perhaps not so inexplicable, if the piece does its job.

The dudes on the left are Amigos de Dundas. The dancer is Maria Cipriano -- "no. 1 baliarina."

I will soon begin Tweeting

I have been accepted as one of sixteen producers selected to participate in TIFF's inagural Studio industry program. As such, I have adopted a Twitter handle, and shall be thus @jrmcconvey.

What is the ideal length for a story? Does such a thing exist? Very long stories can be exhausting but hugely rewarding, while short ones can be like a decadent sweet, thrilling exactly because they don't last. It can be difficult to find places that publish short fiction over 3000 words, and while the limitations of space and curation are understandable, I find it an oddly arbitrary number for any publication that also exists online; it suggests we are not using the online space to its fullest potential. Meanwhile, comic book films begin to push the three hour mark and good television series or novel cycles stretch out stories over years.

Twitter forces admirable restraint. But can it capture the real beauty of language? There is so much beauty to be found in rhythm and flow, in words that cascade and bounce and tumble along like ripples in a fast river -- when, for example, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs"   -- and sometimes it seems to me that 140 characters isn't quite enough to capture how lovely it is when language works like a song as well as a message.

But we shall see. @jrmcconvey.