In August of last year, for reasons that were not obvious to me at the time, I wrote two essays about writing for a living and posted them to this blog. The first, “Writing about restaurants,” was about food writing and the second, “Writing about movies,” a couple weeks later, was about my life as a film critic. After this week, I won’t be doing either of those things professionally, at least for a while.
This isn’t because of any bad news, nor, for me, is it bad news in and of itself. Looking back now, I can see myself grappling in those essays with 10 years of writing professionally. My first-ever published article appeared in the Montreal Mirror on May 18, 2000; it was a review of the movie Road Trip, and it began with the sentence “Let’s get one thing straight: there is nothing wrong, intrinsically, with the college sex romp,” as auspicious a start to a writing career as one could want. I had never written for student newspapers, in high school or at university, nor had I studied journalism; much like everything else in my life, I fell ass-backwards into the job, thanks to an indulgent ex-girlfriend who worked at the paper and was nice enough to give me a hand in my post-collegiate flailings.
Which is not to say I didn’t love the job, which began as freelance film criticism, branched out to food writing, and eventually came to encompass editing the film section itself; having made my bones reviewing Pokemon movies, I was now in the enviable position of hiring other people to do much the same. I got to review a lot of great, and hilariously not-great movies; to interview some of my cinematic idols; to travel; to carry a pretty excellent job in a city not exactly teeming with opportunities for anglophone writers. But as good a job as it has been, I’ve felt a shadow over my spirit for the last year or so, a feeling that it’s time to move on even if it means letting go of a good thing and move on, and I think those two essays linked above were on some level an attempt to grapple with and reflect on a decision I’d already made on some subconscious (or unconscious, I’m not really too clear on the distinction) level.
So now… on to other things, things that involve writing, and movies, but in other ways. To be honest, I’ll probably start blogging compulsively once I no longer have a weekly outlet to express myself. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for reading.
M
