— 1 .

I’ve spent the past four weeks trying to find the headless man from See Me Get Big, a website that no longer exists and might not be findable at all. I don’t mean Error 404 page-not-found. I don’t mean archived either. I’m talking permanently deleted.

I can now say with 100% confidence it wasn’t snapshotted by the Internet Archive or the Wayback Machine. I’ve run dozens of searches, using every research trick I’ve picked up making documentaries, but still nothing.

The majority of search hits I’ve been getting have been for San Diego entertainment and restaurant pages, along with the most straight porn I’ve seen since my dial-up modem days. Guess who’s forgotten that the Internet in the early 2000s was just one big red-light district until Google Search came along.

But one specific website has kept reappearing across multiple searches of mine: a fitness site called abcbodybuilding.com. And going through definitely brought back some memories. The forum layouts and glitchy emojis, usernames that gave me déjà vu strong enough that I wondered if I’d visited the site myself back in the 2000s, like The Incredible Bulk, TheArmbender, and BIG_POPPA_PUMP.

The Wayback Machine had been preserving abcbodybuilding.com in patchy snapshots from 2001 onward. Some of these snapshots are complete, others are like digital Swiss cheese. Some links work, others don’t. Images and whole sections of the site fail to load.

I haven’t found the guy who ran See Me Get Big or links to his site yet. There’s a member website directory, but only the first page is viewable: the page with sites that start with A. This seems like the place where a link to See Me Get Big would most likely appear, but I can’t access the S section.

Still, this is the strongest lead I’ve had so far. Multiple search hits took me here, to a community of people in the same digital milieu as the San Diego guy. It’s been giving me “the feeling”—which, after all these years of documentary work, is something I know to follow.

There are too many web pages for me to realistically search, but I have found the real name of the guy who owned and ran abcbodybuilding.com, along with some of the names of its mods. Next step is to find them and contact them if they are still alive.

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— 2.

While procrastinating on this search last week, I learned that a wild goose chase doesn’t involve actual geese, not in the literal sense at least.

The origin of this idiom is a lot older than I thought, from a horse race that took place during the Elizabethan Era, that would start with a single rider racing out into open country alone. Then, one by one, the other riders would attempt to follow the first rider’s exact route. The second chases the first, third chases the second, and so on.

(I’ve seen enough British period dramas to assume this was all at full gallop, with clown-white face makeup and the frilliest of collars, topped off by sensational red wigs.)

Like geese flying in V-formation, each rider is locked into the path of whoever is racing ahead, and like the game of telephone, the trail distorts a little with every rider who follows it. By the time you realize the route makes no fucking sense, you're already too deep into the wilderness to do anything but keep going.

A pretty accurate description of what it feels like to search for a man I never met, whose name I never knew, and whose face I’ve never seen. But this morning it also reminded me of how the brain rewrites our memories over time, quietly swapping the real ones for false ones that feel like real memories, without us ever knowing.

Four weeks ago I asked if anyone remembered a website called See Me Get Big, a body transformation site I stumbled onto as a closeted teenager around 1999 or 2000, after clicking Google's new I Feel Lucky button in the family computer room.

How it featured a man in his 20s or early 30s who was documenting his weightlifting progress in headless torso photos and journal entries. How, after realizing what I had landed on, I had one ear cocked towards the closed door, listening for any footsteps in the hallway while the screen loaded one line at a time, cursor hovering over the back button so I could frantically click it if I heard the door handle jostle.

I told you he was gay, that he lived in San Diego, lifted in his backyard, and sewed his own underwear and swimwear for the photos he posted.

Now that I'm deeper into this, those details have started to feel a bit slippery. Most of these details came from a blog post I wrote about this guy back in 2008 for Xtra. But I was working from eight-year-old memories then, and twenty-six-year-old memories now. The details in the 2008 post might be distorted or false memories. And my claim that "he was gay" might just be wishful thinking from my teenage self, calcified into something that feels like fact.

At the moment, I can’t prove that he was gay. I can’t prove that he’s from San Diego. Nor can I prove that his website even existed.

On the bright side, I had a dream a couple nights ago that BIG_POPPA_PUMP and I were getting spray tans side by side. He had Colonel Sanders's face on Schwarzenegger's body. Flexing, always flexing, he turned to me and asked if I'd validated my parking. I told him I hadn't, and now he’s ghosting me.

— 3.

Beyond Substack and the Wayback Machine, I’ve been searching on Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.

Some good news: someone replied to one of those posts to tell me that they remember See Me Get Big too.

I immediately followed up with John, who didn’t remember much about him specifically, but was sure he’d seen See Me Get Big’s workout posts on Tumblr. Tumblr didn’t launch until 2008, which complicates the timeline. Could the San Diego man have kept posting for eight years straight? That would be some serious dedication. Could someone have re-uploaded his photos to Tumblr years later? Maybe. Or maybe John’s memory has stitched the old site together with something newer. Or he could be thinking of an entirely different headless torso.

Still, the social media response to this story was pretty encouraging:

Meanwhile, I posted to r/AskGaybrosOver30 on Reddit. Then on r/sandiego, where someone shared—you guessed it—links to 2000s-era straight porn sites, and this user came ready with some hard truths:

I mean u/anothercar isn’t wrong either. I’m trying to find a guy who posted shirtless photos of himself in his underwear 25 years ago. More interestingly, to me at least, this was the closest anyone came to asking me why I was searching for See Me Get Big.

I realized through this process that the more I search, the more I muddy the search itself:

Contamination loop? Or maybe I’ve started to build a hall of mirrors.

I also emailed the Lambda Archives of San Diego, which holds thousands of digitized queer periodicals from the era. Their archivist, Gabrielle, searched the collection and wrote me back in less than two hours. She searched in their databases as well as LGBTQ archival collections across the United States, but nothing came up. She didn’t close the door fully though:

We have another local LGBTQ newspaper Buzz (also named San Diego Circuits and The Bottom Line at different points in its existence) that is not digitized but overlaps with that time period. It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack unfortunately.

Disappointing, yes, but even dead ends are helpful because they begin to show you where the edges are.

Still, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t admit that doubt has started to creep in. Between Reddit and my own social channels, these posts were seen by close to 70,000 people. I could continue to create posts that cumulatively get hundreds of thousands of views, but unless this reaches him or someone he knows, I’m just a man becoming very good at creating content about not finding someone.

— 4.

So I have a theory about Mr. See Me Get Big. That in 1999 or 2000, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, he may have been one of the very first online fitness influencers.

I also believe that long before smartphones or social media popularized this kind of content, he was an early pioneer of the “headless torso” profile shot—which has grown into a defining visual convention for gay life online in the decades since. I would like to talk to him about what he helped start, and how he feels about what it’s become.

I have some wild geese to tend to. If you remember See Me Get Big, knew anyone in San Diego who was doing something like this online, or were part of early bodybuilding forums in that era, I’d love to hear from you.

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There used to be a button on early Internet search engines that you could click and it would randomly take you to a website. I would click it and wait—sometimes a full minute or more on dial-up—for whatever strange digital corner or the world was about to load, one line at a time, down your screen.

That’s how I found him. He was a gay man in San Diego, or at least I assume he was gay. It was either 1999 or the year 2000. He never showed his face. If I had to guess, I’d say he was in his late 20s or early 30s at the time. He was documenting his body transformation on a website he‘d created. (This was no small thing in those days, when the World Wide Web was new, and no one really understood what the Internet was or how it would change our lives.)

His goal was to drop from 250 to 190 pounds and bulk up with muscle. He lifted in his backyard. He also sewed his own underwear and swimwear, which he modelled in the weekly update photos he posted online.

His site was called See Me Get Big. The headless torso aesthetic that would later dominate dating and hookup apps was not yet the defining visual grammar of being a gay man online, so he was a trailblazer in that sense, too. And right now, for reasons I’ll write more about soon, I need to find him.

Back then, I was a closeted teenager living on Vancouver Island, with one ear always cocked towards the door to the family computer room, listening for the telltale footsteps in the hall that would mean my father or sisters were about to walk in. I had just come back from a failed attempt to move to Australia, and was trying to find other people like me online.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about the guy from San Diego and See Me Get Big. Back in 2009, when I was documenting my own fitness transformation online, I wrote briefly about this in a blog post for Xtra.

His site isn’t in the Wayback Machine. I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he’s still alive. But finding him back in the early 2000s changed my relationship to my body in ways I’m still tracing twenty years later.

If you were part of the early gay internet and any of this sounds familiar—if you knew him, linked to him, were in the same web ring, or visited this site yourself—I want to hear from you.

Reply here or email me: sean [at] seanhorlor.com.

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Eleven photos sat in a folder on my phone, along with a reel I’d spent months thinking about. I’d digitized old DVDs, dug through old archives, sifted through photos and press material I hadn’t looked at in years. All of it was ready. All of it sitting there while I told myself more reasons to wait.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think it comes back to something someone said a long time ago, during a period when I was posting constantly: to my blog, to Facebook and Twitter, unfiltered, totally myself, the way people did in the late 2000s. I was hosting a reality show. I had a first-person culture column in the local gay paper. I was twenty-something and making things and telling people about it. But at some point, during that period, a question someone asked me got lodged in my head: Why do you always make everything about yourself?

The question itself was fine. What I heard in it was not: that I was too much, that I was an attention whore, that I should be ashamed of myself. That voice showed up every time I wrote a blog post, every time I picked up my phone, every time we filmed an episode of the show. Eventually I just stopped arguing with it and accepted it as truth.

The decade that followed became my own personal Dark Ages. I said no to the third season of my show. I stopped posting photos of myself. I didn’t write about my life. I curated myself into irrelevance online: careful, professional, boring. I became a guest star in my own story, showing up only when strictly necessary and leaving as little evidence as possible. The irony is that I spent those same years making documentary films about other people’s lives, getting very good at coaxing strangers into the uncomfortable act of being seen, while privately deciding that I wasn’t worthy of that myself.

Looking back now, the lesson I took from it (make yourself smaller, take up less space, it’s not about you) was exactly wrong for someone whose creative practice depends on first-person investigation. Many artists choose to foreground the work over themselves, and I respect that. But our lives are the actual art. Filmmaking, poetry, essays, music, painting—these are just how we express a point of view that is fundamentally and unavoidably personal.

You can’t excavate your own life while also apologizing for having one, and I don’t want to apologize anymore.

So I posted both. The carousel first—eleven photos, twenty years of images, the shirtless Xtra cover, and everything that came after—and then a narrated reel with old clips from Don’t Quit Your Gay Job and my book promo days. I turned into another person when they went up, refreshing my phone like I was trying to buy last-minute Coachella tickets.

One message from poet Steve Reigns stopped me mid-scroll:

Part of me wants to be cynical. I know numbers aren’t the point, that reach isn’t the same thing as meaning. But maybe that’s just the old voice, the one that learned to preemptively minimize itself before anyone else could.

Consider this Exhibit A for what comes next:

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We’re four people deep from the stage, standing in the general admission pen. It’s only half full, and I look from face to face as we wait for the opener before FKA Twigs. The crowd is mostly Gen Z, queer, with a lot of non-binary and gender-fluid twenty-somethings wearing platform boots and stilettos. I’m over six feet, and so is my boyfriend, but I feel like I’m at a concert for giants.

Remember when we used to be tall? I joke to Rafa. He laughs, but my brain won’t let it go. I keep scanning the crowd and running the numbers, trying to figure out what these people were fed as kids and whether it’s time for me to invest in lifts.

When Brutalismus 3000 materializes on stage, the strobe lights hit so hard I can barely see them. The singer is already moving—bouncing, screaming into the mic in German—over punishing high-BPM techno that makes me feel like I’m in a Berlin leather bar at 3 a.m. She jerks to the front of the stage and starts doing the shots, one by one, then dances away with the bottle.

Between songs, the lighting tech keeps flooding the area we’re standing in with bright LED white. Behind us, the stadium is half empty. We’ve been fenced off from the seating area on the floor, and there’s too much space between the GA pen and the seated section. Every time the lights hit, I get a feeling like vertigo, like I’m dancing on the edge of something that hasn’t quite clicked into place yet.

The music is making me see past versions of myself everywhere. The kid who was here in this exact stadium in 1988 with his parents and younger sister, so young he had no idea who was on stage. The 1999 version in some other city, dancing alone in his wide-leg jeans at an industrial warehouse rave. Or, shirtless and newly single during Pride in 2008, in a basement after-hours so hot the ceiling was dripping.

For the past three weeks, my film work has taken everything: weekdays, mornings, evenings, and weekends. I haven’t had time to sit down and write for myself for almost a month. Lately, I’ve been caught up in the impossible math of a creative life, where something always has to give, and it’s usually you.

The thing I keep returning to this morning isn’t the show, which was extraordinary when FKA Twigs finally took over, but that question: remember when we were tall? There is something about standing in a queer crowd in your forties and realizing the generation behind you has grown past you—not metaphorically, literally—that has stayed with me these past few days.

I was feeling it strongly on Friday night, dancing in that pen, watching the lights give away what the darkness was trying to hide.

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Every inch of the shore in the hotel zone is crammed full—resorts, beach clubs, DJ booths, bodies. The water is that shade of eye-wincing blue that made someone decide to build all this here in the first place.

We find the right DJ eventually—Rafa has strong opinions about this—and take two beds next to a group I clock immediately. A guy with pink hair and washboard abs who could be Frankie Grande, or just a Tulum clone of him. He has an entourage: a male friend in leopard-print parachute pants, and a rotating cast of women in string bikinis with the kind of implants Posh Spice had in 2003. They are sucking on crab legs and taking photos of each other, cycling one by one through the spot under the umbrella next to Frankie.

They collectively glance at us when we pull off our tank tops, but lose interest and return to their phones.

Aside from a twink in a neon pink thong walking up and down the beach with a drink in his hand, there aren’t any other visible gays. So Rafa and I take off our swim shorts and lounge around in our swimming briefs. I tell myself this is about solidarity, as much as it's about confidence and not caring what anyone thinks. I also tell myself I’ve changed over the past twenty years, but maybe it’s time to be more honest about not changing.

I still moisturize twice a day. I still think about how my body will photograph before someone takes a photo. I still spend ninety minutes in the gym four or five times a week—I like to tell people this is about my health and mental well-being. (It is not about my health and mental well-being.)

At some point, Rafa pulls out his phone. He starts taking photos of me, then of himself. I start taking photos of him taking photos of himself. We order Aperol Spritzes and photograph those too. We joke about the group next to us, roll our eyes, tell each other we aren’t those people.

Later that night in bed, sheets sticking to my sunburned shoulders, I close my eyes and can see the pretitle logos of big streamers—HBO, Netflix, Apple+—playing on a loop in the dark. I have two doc series out to market with a US production company, and for the past month, I’ve been taking the kind of pitch meetings I used to dream about when I was first starting in film and television.

I couldn’t have picked a worse time to try to take a break. We wanted to celebrate Valentine’s Day in a destination we both loved, but I ended up having to take one of these pitches from our Airbnb, performing mid-career filmmaker while a leak from the air conditioner dripped into a cup off-camera. And instead of being present in the days that followed, I circle-thought over the gap between the work I believe in and the rooms that decide whether it gets made.

It made me think of something a good friend sent me before the trip, an excerpt from a Joan Didion interview:

INTERVIEWER: There’s a certain esthetic to the way you live. You once talked about using the good silver every day.

DIDION: Well, every day is all there is.

Didion understood something about public life that I’m still resisting: that the line between the work and the life is thinner than we pretend. Her writing voice, her sunglasses, the way she moved through the world—it was all part of the same aesthetic project.

The quote has been stuck in my head because there’s something I’ve promised to do this year but keep avoiding: to write publicly about my body and my past and what it means to age in an industry that’s always looking for the next young thing.

For the last two months, I’ve had a half-finished Instagram carousel sitting in my drafts folder. One of my resolutions this year was to finally stop lurking: to turn my essays here into reels, to do a video where I talk directly to camera, to post to TikTok for the first time. But I’ve also been avoiding it because social media’s particular flavour of exposure—the algorithm, the performance of casualness that isn’t casual at all—has always made me uncomfortable.

This tension between filmmaker who wants to get into the room with HBO and guy who’s afraid to use TikTok is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

On the plane home, I tell Rafa I’ll post some of our vacation shots to Instagram. He nods like it’s a reasonable thing to say. We both know I won’t.

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1.

I studied my boyfriend’s face while he read his phone on the couch. He scrolled, he frowned, and whenever he took a sip of coffee, his eyebrows arched, then settled back into place. That morning, he was more Clark Kent than Superman: all black hair, strong jaw, and broad shoulders, with that intense look he gets when he’s trying to be generous with something he doesn’t know how he feels about yet.

By the time he emerged from the loft, footsteps thudding down the stairs, I’d already revised the piece twice, panicked over the lead image, done one last edit, and sent it out into the void. Sundays are like that for me. I wake up early, restless, convinced that if I don’t take this time to write, another year will fly by with nothing to show for it but Post-it notes on the wall and a graveyard of half-finished Word documents accumulating on my desktop.

When Rafa finished reading, he didn’t say anything. Outside, a foghorn sounded somewhere nearby: long and low and insistent. He set his phone down on the arm of the couch and stared out at the window.

I live close enough to the harbour that fog settles here first and leaves last, but the past week had been something else. The world beyond my condo balcony had disappeared. The port and its red cranes were gone. So were the mountains across Burrard Inlet. While the rest of Vancouver moved in and out of clarity that week, I was socked in, my neighbourhood stubbornly opaque.

From the kitchen, I wait and watch him. I cross my arms and lean back into the countertop next to the stove. The work itself—whether film or writing—has never been enough for me. I want an audience. I want dialogue. I want to provoke a reaction, and Rafa’s lack of one was not what I wanted that morning.

“So what do you think?” I asked him.

“This feels like a filler post,” he said. “Where are the poll results?”

He wasn’t wrong. I had asked for them, promised them, and instead of writing about them directly, I’ve let the fog do what it always does: blur the edges, erase distance, give indecision a place to hide.

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2.

A few nights later, I drove home alone from the movie theatre. I hadn’t liked the film, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. I’d spent most of the movie worrying about the future instead, about money and momentum, and this recent feeling that whatever rules had governed my film career so far no longer seemed to apply. In the past, everything we pitched sold, yet in 2025, nothing did. Projects delayed. Budgets tightening. When the credits finally rolled, I was the zombie, exhausted in that specific way that comes after concentrating on the wrong thing for too long.

I’d planned to stay at Rafa’s that night, but changed my mind after the movie and took the secret route home instead. There’s a hidden road that runs along the port, ducking underneath the convention centre and cruise ship terminal. It’s a part of the city most people never see. Cut off from downtown by the railway yards, it re-emerges abruptly in the financial district, a paved ramp surfacing from underground, where the blue-and-green glass skyscrapers come into view all at once, glowing in the dark.

On the radio, a deep-voiced male host read through the latest weather update in a cheerful cadence:

Fog advisories continue across Metro Vancouver today and tomorrow. Near-zero visibility over some areas. A ridge of high pressure trapping moisture near the surface…

At ten o’clock, the fog was so thick I couldn’t see the water or the heliport. Without the streetlights overhead, I wouldn’t have been able to see the pavement at all. The only thing visible in the sky was the top of the Vancouver Centre, floating above the city like a space station from an old Star Trek episode, untethered to whatever lay below.

Earlier this month, I’d been filming this same route, a follow-along with a retired RCMP officer on his way to meet a source. Our cinematographer rode shotgun while I watched a monitor and asked questions from the backseat. This part of the shoot day was all uncontrolled shooting, no room to experiment, every decision weighed against time, access, and money. What’s best for the project isn’t always what you want to shoot or how you want to shoot, and learning the difference requires constant ego-checking and a kind of compartmentalization that leaves me feeling oddly hollow afterward.

I pulled over on the shoulder, turned off the engine, radio, and the headlights so I could sit in silence.

I’ve learned more about fog in the past week than I had in my entire life: radiation fog, advection fog, steam fog, upslope fog, precipitation fog, and freezing fog. Environment Canada called what was currently happening across Vancouver a temperature inversion. Visibility might improve in the afternoons, they said, but the fog would redevelop throughout the day, and on some nights, it wouldn’t lift at all.

3.

The morning the fog lifted, I ran into Sarah from down the hall on my way out with the dog.

It was just after six-thirty. I opened my door, and she was already there, two steps ahead of me, en route to the elevator. While we waited, we made the kind of small talk Canadians make because the weather here is always changing: how we’d take six months of fog over six months of rain, how nice it would be to see the sun again, and how it never seems to last. Outside, it was still dark, but the city was suddenly visible again, as if it had been returned to us overnight without explanation.

I’ve lived in this building for nearly a decade, yet recently decided to try harder to get to know my neighbours. I know that Sarah is restoring a castle in France. That her son has a corgi named Osmo. That she smokes hand-rolled cigarettes on a concrete ledge outside, but never smells like tobacco smoke. She has enormous eyes and a dramatic haircut and was fully dressed even at that hour—trousers, trench coat, leather boots—in contrast to my sweats and runners. It felt like half of me was still back in my apartment, not quite assembled.

After the elevator arrived, we descended in silence. The air felt lighter outside. The cranes were back. The mountains across Burrard Inlet had returned to their usual place in the distance, as if nothing unusual had happened at all. The fog that had blanketed the city for weeks was gone, replaced by the familiar outlines of a morning I recognized, but I didn’t feel any clearer.

I’ve been working on a memoir with the growing awareness that publishing another book will likely require a larger social media presence than I’ve ever wanted. I’ve always kept one foot in the world before smartphones, before people could reach into your life at any moment and expect an immediate response.

The thought of spending more time on Instagram and TikTok has made me realize I miss being unreachable. I miss being bored, too. I miss reading restaurant menus and the backs of condiment bottles, discovering a magazine I’d already flipped through in some other waiting room. I miss the smell of newsprint. I miss talking to strangers because there was nothing else to do but talk to them.

That world is gone, but if I want to keep making the work I care about, I have to participate in the one that replaced it. Change, or be changed. Or, as the poets from my past liked to joke: publish or die.

Which brings us back to the question at hand, and the poll I posted earlier:

It’s a…tie? This feels very 2026.

My boyfriend is firmly team The Highway. He wants love and loss with stakes and momentum. An investigation with consequences, witnesses who won’t be here forever, and twists, turns, and revelations. I like those kinds of stories too. For most of my adult life, motion has been my organizing principle. If something stalled, I pushed harder: pitching, shooting, editing—moving forward, always forward.

An equal number of you were team A Body of Work, the story about a Faustian bargain I made early in my career: about visibility and ambition, about turning myself into a product long before the term content creator existed. A rags-to-riches-to-rags story, full of desire and shame and betrayal, as well as an interrogation of the toxic cocktail of the 2000s that led us to influencer culture and the attention economy so many of us are desperate to leave today.

One of these stories will come next. I’m sorry to see The Other Woman shelved again for the time being. For now, I’m still in flux.

Recent essays that are part of this conversation:

There were four words scrawled above the title of my latest story in black ink: NO SENSE OF PLOT.

I remained seated as the other students filed out, clutching their marked-up pages, their half-finished conversations fading down the hall. Bright fluorescent lights buzzed in even rows across the ceiling. The professor who ran my third-year fiction workshop was already gone. She was known to play favourites. I wasn’t one of them.

I flipped through the rest of my story, expecting (hoping?) for direction, but the margins were nearly empty. Beyond a few spelling corrections and crossed-out words, the only other comments hovered in white space like one-word reviews on a movie poster:

AWKWARD
CONFUSING
VAGUE

No suggestions on how to map out and improve what little plot there was. No recommended readings. No “come to my office hours to discuss.” Just the accusation at the top of the page, and silence everywhere else.

The irony of the moment wasn’t lost on me. I was three years into my fine arts degree. There wasn’t much runway left and I still had no idea how to write fiction.

I loved poetry with its free association, imaginative leaps, connections that didn’t always have to make logical sense. I tried to apply that same skillset to storytelling, sitting down to a blank document, the white light from my laptop screen full of possibility, and letting the story take me wherever it wanted to go. What I ended up with were vibes instead of stories: moody characters, dialogue, and setting, but no conflict or sense of momentum. I knew something wasn’t working. I just had no idea what that something was.

The following week, I arrived early. Twelve of us sat around the three meeting tables pushed together to form a horseshoe, our chairs facing inward. The professor’s desk had been pulled back several feet, creating a clear line of demarcation. Us. Her.

She was the last to arrive that afternoon, wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket, her dark hair bobby-pinned up into impossible heights. She leaned against the front of her desk and asked, “Any questions from last week?”

My arm shot up. It was time to figure out what I was doing wrong before I wasted another year writing the same story over and over. I wanted to know if there was a formula—two characters with a problem, a set number of scenes, something that could be mapped and followed without fail. I imagined her responding like a professor from a movie, wiping the chalkboard clean before writing out a massive equation. Sunlight streamed through the classroom windows, catching the chalk dust in the air, and when she stepped back, it would reveal a clean solution that made everything click.

But another student spoke out first. She took their question and immediately segued into the workshop. As the class dragged on, I tried to find the right moment to interject, and when the moment came at the end of workshop, I blurted out, “But what is plot?”

The room froze. One of the sensitive straight guys stared at me, mouth open. It felt like everyone heard the quiet part I had left out: that all these writers seemed to know something I didn’t. The professor, whose back had been turned, slowly pivoted around, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she’d heard. “What do you mean?” she asked. “It’s what happens in a story.”

I nodded. “Yes, I know that. But what is it?”

A few people laughed. One of the professor’s favourites gave me side eyes as she slid her notebook into her bag and hurried for the door. A not-so-sensitive straight guy joked, “Dude, have you heard of a library?”

I could feel my face burning. The professor glanced at the clock, then back at me. “Let’s talk about this next week,” she said. But we never did, and I never brought it up again.

A year later, I finished my degree with the uneasy feeling that I had missed something essential about storytelling. I had taken lectures and seminars on narrative structure, but none of it stuck. I could talk about stories, but I didn’t know how to write one.

It took me years—and a documentary filmmaking career—to realize that the answer had been sitting in front of me the whole time.

Documentary filmmaking taught me what fiction never did. When someone wants something, they make a choice, and there are consequences. Those consequences force another choice, which leads to more consequences. I learned very quickly that reality has no patience for vibes. Plot stopped being theory.

Looking back now, I can’t remember a single story I wrote in university, but I still think a lot about the poets who taught me there. They weren’t interested in teaching us how stories work. They were more interested in how a life gets lived.

One of them, Patrick Lane, once told me, “You can write the life you want to live or live a life worth writing about.” At the time, I didn’t know what to do with that advice. Years later, I understand it differently. I made my choice. Now it’s time to investigate the consequences.

2026 Update: A couple of weeks ago, I asked readers to vote in a poll to choose a long-form serial story that I would write here in 2026. I’m leaving the poll open this week and will post the results next Sunday. Thanks for voting.

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I need your help.

It’s a line that’s used a lot in dramatic features and series, usually when characters hit a wall or realize that an obstacle is too big for them to tackle alone. Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. It sticks out like a ‘90s sitcom laugh track or a mic bump accidentally left in the mix.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that this specific line of dialogue is so overused it’s practically a genre convention. It’s comparable to that moment in a psychological thriller or true-crime procedural when someone flips over a corkboard, revealing photos and newspaper clippings connected by red string. The trope even has its own nicknames: Red String Theory.

If you’ve never noticed before, I’m sorry to be the one who ruins I need your help for you. Desperate times, after all, require us to sacrifice the things we love.

Before I knew it was a cliché, I used the line myself. I loved it so much I put it in one of the very first scripts I ever wrote. This was for a sizzle trailer for a feature-length narrative film I wanted to write and direct with my longtime collaborator, Steve J. Adams. The story was inspired by a newspaper article I read in 2006 about a young man who showed up at a church on a rainy winter night with no memory of who he was or how he got there.

Reading this now makes me cringe, but I remember being on set when we were rolling, and I called action. When Andrea, the actor playing Sue, delivered her line, I had a full-body reaction. I could feel the hair on my forearms stand up. It was a feeling of being exactly where I was supposed to be.

The film’s working title was The Mill and the Mountain. In 2013, Steve and I submitted it—along with our cinematographer, Sean Cox—to CineCoup, a film accelerator run like a social media competition. Teams pitched their films to an online audience. The winner would receive financing to make a full feature. After months of videos, posts, and promotion, I sat down and wrote a full script so we could qualify for the final round. We made it to the top ten. Then we got the chop.

I was devastated. Despite having no formal education in film and almost no experience writing or directing narrative, I was convinced this film would be my big break—an optimism I now recognize as both touching and deeply delusional, and possibly a prerequisite for a career in film.

Still, a couple of months later, we convinced a producer and a more experienced screenwriter to come on board. By 2014, the project stalled in rewrites and quietly died. We continued to squeak by on commercial work until someone who’d followed our CineCoup campaign offered us the chance to direct a six-part online documentary series.

Looking back, this is how my career has always seemed to work. I aim for one thing, miss, and end up somewhere else entirely. Ten years later, I’m a documentary filmmaker with a slate of projects on the go and a newfound nonfiction writing itch for which there is no cure.

Which is to say: I’ve gotten very good at knocking on doors.

Right now, I’m Sue Simson, standing outside your room at the Fort Saint James Motel. It’s minus twenty degrees. The sun is setting. I’m not wearing a proper winter coat, which in this country, at this time of year, means I’m counting on you to open up and let me in.

This time last year, I escaped to Brazil in hopes of avoiding yet another season of self-recrimination and emotional bookkeeping. It worked, sort of. While I was there, I made a handful of New Year’s resolutions while jumping over seven waves at Praia do Porto das Dunas, outside Fortaleza, on the north coast of Ceará. My boyfriend told me it was a Brazilian tradition, that it would be bad luck not to do it at the first beach we visited after meeting with his parents.

One of the resolutions I made was to try writing on Substack again, for the third and final time. I promised myself I’d take it seriously. That if I stopped again, I’d stop for good.

When I first started writing here in 2022, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to tell a serial story: one long investigation into a woman from my childhood whose presence I believed had quietly destabilized my family, and whose reappearance in my life a decade later made me want to revisit a version of the past I’ve never fully understood.

But in trying to tell that story, I collided with another one: a car accident I survived and never investigated, a first love that never had room to exist, followed immediately by the loss of my mother. I buried those things to move on. I refused to talk about them, even with the people closest to me. Now, years later, I have questions.

Trying to explore these two serial stories at once was too much, too soon. I stopped writing and let my film work consume me instead.

I tried Substack a second time a year later, writing essays in advance of the SXSW premiere of my second feature, Satan Wants You, a documentary about the Satanic Panic and all the strange ways memory and belief can fail us. But when my personal life fell apart after the film premiered, I gave up, and Substack became a place I associated with failure, sadness, unfinished things.

This past year, I came back a third time. I wrote twelve essays. Patterns started to emerge in the writing, but each piece felt like I was starting over from scratch, instead of building towards something bigger. What writing consistently this year taught me is simple: I don’t want to keep starting over. I want to tell one story, properly, from beginning to end. A serial. To do the thing I set out to do here in the first place.

And this is where you come in. I can’t do all of these stories at once. And I don’t want to pretend I can. So I’m asking you to help me choose which of these unfinished stories I finally commit to telling here over the next year:

Option 1: A Body of Work

Central idea: What happens when your body becomes your résumé?

I’ve been offered an opportunity to go back in front of the camera later this year. The last time I said yes to something like this was in 2009. My friend Rob and I had sold Don’t Quit Your Gay Job to a network on our first try and my life changed overnight. I went from an unemployed, struggling writer to the creator and host of a reality TV series. On camera, the show rewarded me for being all surface, no substance. I became a body, an object, that shirtless guy on TV. But off camera, competing for wins and screen time twisted me into someone I didn’t recognize, eventually costing me my friendship with Rob and the show itself. Years later, watching a new generation of men build entire careers out of being visible online, I’m curious about the performance of masculinity, about what visibility means now that it has exploded and fragmented through social media, and what chasing this kind of attention might cost me now.

Central idea: What happens when avoidance becomes survival?

In January 2001, shortly before my twentieth birthday, I had fallen in love with a man for the first time and was in the process of coming out. A week later, I was hit by a pickup truck while walking along a highway on Vancouver Island. When I woke up in the hospital, I had no memory of what had happened. Six months later, my mother died. Then I had to relive all this during a criminal trial that cleaved my life in two. This feature documentary (and accompanying long-from essay) would apply the tools I’ve learned as an investigative filmmaker to fill in the many blanks I have about that period of my life: court records, eyewitnesses, the driver, the people who loved me then—and to ask the questions I’ve avoided for over twenty years about why this moment won’t let me go.

Option 3: The Other Woman

Central idea: What happens when you inherit a story that isn’t yours?

A serial investigation into the first queer person I ever knew and the story I built around her as a child. It begins in the late 1980s on Vancouver Island, where my mother’s close friendship with a female neighbour coincided with my parents’ near-separation. Years after my mother’s death, that woman emailed me with the subject line Ghost From The Past, which was the inciting incident for this Substack. This series would follow my attempt to separate memory from myth: interviewing my family, retracing the places I grew up, and finally meeting her to ask the questions I never could as a kid.

Help me choose what comes next:

I’ll commit to the winning choice as a serialized project in 2026.

Thanks for spending time with me here. Happy New Year!

Whenever I leave my apartment, I put on old seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race for my Boston terrier, Five. I turn the volume up before I go, loud enough to block out the common hallway noises that used to make him bark, even though I know Five can’t hear anything. He’s fifteen, completely deaf, and starting to lose his vision.

I like to think that the blurry drag queens bickering on screen keep him company during the long silences that punctuate my leaving and returning home. A few days ago, I came back from the gym and found Five asleep on the couch, the television still glowing. RuPaul was mid-sentence, offering advice to a young queen struggling with being on camera. The queen protested, they usually do, but this time RuPaul wasn’t having it.

“You’re trying to control how people see you,” he said. “I don’t have time to do that. I’m too busy living my goddamn life!”

Normally, Drag Race is just background noise. But this stopped me. I wrote it down. What surprised me wasn’t that it resonated, but that it irritated me. By saying this on camera, wasn’t RuPaul doing exactly what he claimed not to care about? Wasn’t this, too, a way of controlling how people see you?

I stood there for a moment, half-unzipped gym bag at my feet, sweaty shirt stuck to my back, listening to RuPaul talk about authenticity and freedom and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks.

In the past, his advice had always felt like it was aimed at someone else: drag queens, influencers, people chasing attention and a spotlight. After I left my reality show, I didn’t want to be the story anymore. I was careful to shift the focus back onto my films, onto the work. But somewhere along the way, I stopped managing how I came across online altogether.

For years, I told myself that opting out of social media meant opting out of that entire economy of attention. That whatever was happening on those screens—visibility, self-presentation, performance, control—wasn’t about me.

That belief (mostly) held until two collaborators messaged me about another filmmaker earlier this week. Someone whose name had started to travel quietly, the way these things do. The messages were carefully coded: nothing that could be forwarded or screenshot, with just enough details to reveal a personality type I’d definitely encountered on set before.

I did what we all do now. I went to their Instagram and started scrolling. Not casually, but methodically, treating this person’s profile like it was a personnel file. What story are they telling about themselves? How are they presenting themselves visually? What’s missing? And does any of it line up with what I’d been told?

It was only after I closed the app that something else finally registered, a colder realization, arriving years too late: this is probably how other people in the industry look at me online, too.

I used to think social media was for influencers, for people who wanted to be watched. Scrolling through other people’s curated lives usually made me feel worse about my own, so I stopped. I told myself this was healthy, that opting out was a kind of integrity. After all, it wasn’t a full boycott. I just didn’t believe this was a place where serious storytelling happened.

Yet here I am, working in a visual industry, one where image is routinely used to construct both identity and meaning. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to me that treating my own online presence as an afterthought might be telling a story, too?

Two weeks ago, I wrote about taking my shirt off for a magazine and the complicated relationship I’ve always had between my body and my career. But after picking apart another filmmaker’s Instagram, I went back and looked at my own, and realized that story wasn’t finished with me yet.

About two years ago, around the time I became single again after a long relationship, something began to shift in what I posted online. What had once been a fairly coherent professional portfolio on Instagram—film festivals, reviews, trailers, the kind of account you scroll past and think, Does this man even have a personality?—splintered into something harder to read. Vacation photos appeared beside movie posters and press stills. Fitness updates jostled for space with Substack links, commercials I’d directed, old clips from my reality show.

The effect wasn’t evolution so much as accumulation of parts visually stitched together into some digital Franken-monster: HDR iPhone videos next to film trailers; a self-serious director portrait followed immediately by an oversaturated beach photo; a stark text quote beside a sit-down interview frame with entirely different lighting logic. Plenty of substance, scattered everywhere. No style strong enough to hold any of it in place.

And of course, this most recent return of shirtlessness, doing its familiar and dependable work.

Maybe I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. It’s not only about being seen, but also deciding how. After a breakup, a career stall, or some other losses, the body rushes in to fill the gap. The body is immediate. It’s readable. It doesn’t require context or backstory. Online, this manifests in the gym mirror or the vacation pool, a carefully casual shirtless photo taken at exactly the right angle.

I’m still here, the image seems to say. Do you see me?

A few other essays that are part of this conversation:

If you’re joining me here because of Sarah Marshall’s new podcast The Devil You Know, I need to explain something.

I feel like something has shifted, like I’m now part of this weird Satanic Panic multiverse as a character, not just a storyteller. I didn’t see that coming, but here we are:

You can also listen to it on the CBC online here.

Around this time last year, Sarah wrote and asked if I’d come on the show to talk about what it was like growing up in the Satanic capital of Canada in the ‘80s—and more specifically, what it felt like to live down the street from the woman the tabloids called the ‘Bride of Satan’.

(Yes, it sounds like I’m making this up. No, I’m not. It was real and part of my childhood.)

The Devil You Know is Sarah Marshall’s eight-part deep dive (with bonus episodes!) into the origins and afterlife of the global Satanic Panic: the book Michelle Remembers, the therapists who built a global moral panic, the believers, the doubters, the collateral damage, and the echoes we’re still living through today.

It’s smart, empathetic, devastating, and often very, very weird.

If you don’t know me or are new to this Substack, I made a feature documentary about the Satanic Panic (with Steve J. Adams) called Satan Wants You. Sarah appeared in that film, and a couple of years ago, I wrote about what it was like to interview her in a creepy old farmhouse on Vancouver Island.

What never crossed my mind was that one day she might end up interviewing me. And holy fuck was I nervous when the tables were turned. I get a particular kind of panic with podcasts and radio that I don’t get with video. Something about the microphone, imagining that I’m talking into a black void, and that all the people listening later will be able to hear every hesitation, lip smack, and breath.

But Sarah is thoughtful and meticulous and kind in all the ways you hope your favourite podcaster will be. We ended up talking for hours. And if you enjoyed her closer look at the book Michelle Remembers with me, you’re going to love the rest of her new series too.

If this piece resonated with you, please check out some of my other recent essays:

1.
Early mornings, evenings, weekends. Wedged around the slate of films and doc series I’m developing with my production company, I’ve spent the past three months excavating my career in the hours when no one’s watching. Collecting every review, every interview, every stray bit of media I’ve generated over the last two decades as a working artist, because that’s what this process has made me realize: it’s been twenty years.

This started innocently enough: I needed material for a new website to support some grants and proposals. But then it turned into something else. I began digging out old photographs saved on CDs and thumb drives. Ripping DVD discs. Digitizing the nightlife column I used to write for a local paper. Screengrabbing posts from my old blog for Xtra. I’ve transcribed every episode of my old reality show—except the one where we trained as police officers with the Vancouver Police Department, which is mysteriously unavailable in Canada. (When I ask myself why my imagination veers into conspiracy territory, well, give me a week and I’ll probably be deep in this rabbit hole too.)

I’ve done this kind of excavation countless times before, to study and understand the people who appear in my films. It’s part of my job as a documentarian: gather everything, build a timeline, find the story. But doing it to myself feels different. Which has made me wonder: what’s my motivation here? Do I have enough perspective to look at any of this objectively? How much of this is curiosity, and how much of it is narcissism?

But it’s also made me aware of a narrative drift. There’s what happened in the past, there are the stories I like to tell about the past, and then there are stories I tell myself about the past. And if I’m being honest, the real story probably lives in whatever I’ve been editing out.

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2.
I read somewhere recently that all actors and film directors are attention-seekers, that people drawn to professions like these were children who didn’t get enough love or validation from their parents. I can’t remember where I saw it, only that it annoyed me immediately, the same way a bad date does. Like when you’re not sure whether someone is flirting with you or mocking you.

This morning, I went hunting for the article about attention-seeking, ready to disagree with it on principle. The directing part especially rubbed me the wrong way. Is it because it’s true? (Insert quick Freudian detour about childhood here.) Or is it because on set, I don’t feel like an attention seeker at all?

Years ago, another director told me that directing is like conducting an orchestra: people assume you’re the center of attention, but you’re actually the only one with your back to the audience. To the casual observer, you’re just waving your arms around while everyone else makes the music.

3.
When I was a kid and lost my temper or lashed out at someone in anger, my mother would crouch down to my level and tell me, “Put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if they said something like that to you?” She believed in empathy as an act of imagination, a muscle you built young before the world convinced you to harden.

She also taught my younger sister and me how to take turns in a conversation: you speak, you listen, you ask a question, you listen again. “We have two ears and one mouth,” she’d say. “Try to use them in that order.” It was her way of telling me not to become a bore, but also of teaching me that being a person meant paying attention to other people.

Narcissism runs in my family. I have a fear of talking too much about myself, of taking up too much space, of becoming the kind of person my mother warned us not to be. Maybe that’s why the past few months of digging into my own life have made me uneasy. I can still hear her voice asking: Are you really curious, or are you just trying to make yourself the center of attention again?

4.
Making a documentary feels like taking a squiggly line and trying to pin it straight. There are a thousand beginnings and endings, but at some point you have to pick one and run with it.

Here’s the image I keep coming back to. In 2007, a poet friend pitched a review of my book to Xtra!, which, back then, had bi-weekly print issues in Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa. They said yes and wanted a photo to run with the article, but with a twist. They wanted me to put me on the cover shirtless.

My book had just come out. I’d done a few readings and interviews, and then everything went quiet. I was twenty-six and terrified no one would take me seriously as a poet if I did the cover the way Xtra wanted, and even more terrified that no one would notice the book at all. I didn’t know how to promote a debut, so I did the thing that felt predictable but also available to me: I said yes and led with my body.

The photographer was David Ellingsen. The shoot was in his studio. I remember thinking very hard about angles, the way I’d seen men do in Abercrombie ads, and intentionally wore low-rise jeans. I tried to convince myself that this was really about carrying around less shame about my body and about being gay.

In the end, I did what many twenty-something men with no modelling experience do. I fought the camera with my eyes, trying to project intensity instead of letting David capture whoever he actually saw. Or at least this is how I remember it. But twenty years later, I have questions: What exactly was I trying to do with this? And why did it feel so important to be seen that way?

It's strange to look back and realize that image knew more about me and my future than I did.

Excavated from a shoebox, a hard drive, and the part of my psyche labeled: DO NOT OPEN. If you’re curious, click here to read the review.

Every time I type something new into the search bar of my browser, I wonder if my search queries are getting flagged somewhere:

how to search national sex offender registry
how to search national sex offender registry canada
[name redacted] sex offender
[name redacted] sexual assault
canada nsor recidivism
as a member of media can I request records from canada’s sex offender registry
process canada rcmp FOIA request
process canada rcmp privacy act request
process british columbia court records request
process british columbia court records media blackout request redacted copy

I’ve been nervous about writing a post like this. These are search keywords I don’t want associated with my name anywhere online. I keep imagining a red light blinking in a dark server room every time I hit return. And I keep telling myself it’s research, but really it’s investigative work. Less director, more detective. How the line between the two gets blurry pretty fast.

In the kitchen, the faucet is leaking again. If I don’t twist the handle of the hot-water tap as hard as I can, with my full body weight, the slow drip will never stop. It becomes a metronome for the kind of work I’m doing at my dining-room table, a tempo joined now and then by other sounds: keyboard keys, my heartbeat, a neighbour’s footsteps overhead, an ambulance swelling and fading as it moves through East Vancouver.

When I look up again, it’s blue hour. Where’s the past hour gone? This kind of work warps my sense of time the same way the atmosphere magnifies the moon’s surface. Tonight, now that it’s higher on the horizon, I can make out the grey seas. Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatis, and Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility—though there’s nothing tranquil about it. Every crater is evidence, undeniable proof that something happened there, the kind of record that no one needs to verify.

I don’t know what’s happened to the past two weeks. I can’t remember the last time I saw my friends. The only time I leave my condo is to get groceries, bike to the gym, or run the dog outside.

In the mornings and afternoons, I’ve been pulling selects from months of interviews and vérité shooting for the editor who’s cutting a new sizzle for a documentary project I’m developing. The better part of today was spent paring down hours of footage from a scene where someone breaks down on camera to a handful of lines. I watched their lowest low on repeat. The mic picked up their breath before the words came, then a long exhale. It’s the sound of someone deciding whether to keep going, struggling to express what they’re feeling. It was a hard watch.

Yet when you listen to the same interview clip twenty times—their voice describing something awful in a calm, unbroken tone—you start to lose the reality of it. It becomes data, notes, story beats, timelines. Then, suddenly, you’re out in the world again and someone is handing you a coffee, or laughing, or asking what you’re working on, or telling you that they always wanted to work on true crime, and you wonder what kind of person wants to do this?

Upstairs, my dog snores in bed. Rewind, repeat. Rewind, repeat. The tap dripping. The click of keyboard keys. The pulse in my wrist as it rests against the tabletop. How the body learns the rhythm of obsession. How easy it is to lose track of my own life on days like this.

So in the evenings I search:

where can I view archived copies of the province newspaper from 2011-2014
accessing proquest bc archival newspapers
vancouver public newspaper archives
canada statute limitations unreported violent assault
why can I see someone’s Facebook profile but can’t add them as a friend
what does blue circle mean on messenger
what does grey check mark mean on messenger
how does my dog feel about me after 14 years

If there’s a better way to balance this, I have yet to find it. My process has always bordered on obsession. Poetry, non-fiction writing, my reality show, or the films I make now, it’s always been this way. Though this particular subject matter—missing persons, partner violence, and the institutional failures that allow both to keep happening—takes a bigger toll over time. It’s not the kind of creative work that recharges you. It’s a cup full of holes. It’s water pouring down a drain.

When I think back to my earlier films—the one about a gay couple who owned an insult diner, or the jazz singer who died and came back to life on Easter weekend—I wonder if curiosity has its own gravitational pull. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend years staring into other people’s shadows. Eventually, the dark starts staring back.

Things I can talk about here in a way I can’t on social media. Still, what’s stayed with me even more this month are the conversations I’ve been having with the important people in my life.

It all started with a question that seemed harmless at first: What’s your sense of purpose in life? I thought it might spark big-picture discussions that would help me understand my friends and family better, but what I got back was…complicated.

One close friend bristled at the question. They were defensive, then angry: Why are you asking me? Like how do you expect me to answer that? Another laughed and told me life was meaningless, so who needs purpose when we’re all going to die in the end anyway?

At least nihilists are consistent: no meaning, no problem! It’s been a weird month. In hindsight, a better question might have been: What gives your life meaning? I thought people would mention their families, kids, careers, or hobbies. What I didn’t expect was how threatening the word purpose can be.

What I learned from this experience is that I’m pretty sure most people would rather talk about sex. Politics, sure. Religion, even. But ask about someone’s purpose and suddenly it feels like you’ve pulled the pin on a grenade.

The irony, of course, is that I was asking everyone else because I was unsure myself. It’s been a couple of years of intense life changes—so much so that I started seeing a therapist in 2023 for the first time in decades. During one of our first sessions, she asked: “What are your values?”

She let me sit in silence for a long time, long enough that I could feel myself beginning to panic. This wasn’t one of those “oh, that’s an interesting question” pauses I give in interviews when I need a moment to think. It was more like a moment of shock. How could something so simple be so hard to put into words? And what does it say about me that I’ve gone this long without ever asking that question?

I shifted on the couch in my therapist’s office, leaning forward when I realized my T-shirt was sticking to my back. “What do you mean by values?” I finally asked.

She explained the therapeutic definition: values are what matter most to you, the compass points that help you orient yourself in the world, a framework we can use to make important decisions about our lives. Once she broke it down, it was easy to come up with a list: creativity, curiosity, intelligence, independence, compassion, adventurousness, humour, empathy. Words that felt both true and aspirational, like a self-portrait in bullet points.

But still, the larger question—what is my purpose?—was much harder to answer.

On the surface, the obvious reply is: storytelling. That’s what my life has revolved around since I was a teenager. Writing was the beginning and used to be my purpose, but it has since grown into something larger.

All of this has been on my mind again recently. It’s made me think of a short doc I did years ago with the poet and author Evelyn Lau for Knowledge Network. She was reflecting on her bestselling memoir Runaway and the career that followed. We talked about the same questions I’ve been circling: the search for purpose, the need for meaning.

Her answer was startling in its clarity.

“We talk about that search for purpose and meaning. That was never a question to me. I had a job to do in life and this was it: to write.”

I think about that a lot now — how she said it without hesitation, as if the answer had always been waiting inside her. I can’t say the same for myself. But I think I’m getting closer to figuring it out.

©Nootka Film Company Inc. Used here by permission.

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In the meantime, here are some recommendations from the past month:

FILM

The Last Showgirl

If you’re a working artist, this plays like a horror film. By the third act I was edge-of-my-seat, pearl-clutching. Still, there’s something magical about seeing Pamela Anderson in a dramatic role again, especially if you loved her Netflix doc by Ryan White. Director Gia Coppola and writer Kate Gersten feel almost prophetic in this portrait of a Vegas showgirl whose future is threatened after thirty years in the business. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall, because here we are in 2025 and the tourists who kept Vegas alive aren’t traveling to the U.S. anymore — and things are not looking good, folks.

STREAMING

The Comeback — Season 2

This once-a-decade Lisa Kudrow series is something else. It follows the trials and tribulations of former sitcom starlet Valerie Cherish as she tries to restart her acting career after years of obscurity. (Similar thematic territory to The Last Showgirl…is the universe trying to tell me something?)

Season 1 follows a reality crew filming Valerie’s return to a Friends-style cable sitcom during the reality TV boom of the early 2000s. The first episode of Season 2 felt like a repeat of Season 1 — but wow, things really spiral into full-blown insanity from there. Not just another cutting satire of reality TV, but a hilarious, take-no-prisoners takedown of HBO itself, as relevant today as it was when it first aired in 2014. And good news: Season 3 is coming in 2026.

BOOKS

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

There’s something about the way Rooney puts words together that fires up all the pleasure centers in my brain. The voice. The sentence construction. How beautiful, moving, and poetic her prose is. I loved her novel Normal People. But with Intermezzo, I’m a little torn. This book mostly follows the story of two brothers, neither of them particularly likeable. It sure has been a struggle to finish. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve read it.

ONLINE

Cosmpolitan: We Are in a Party Magician Renaissance

Some ideas for your next birthday party…

All The Little Things You Do Will End Up Coming Back To You
(Sean Horlor)

I had to time this just perfectly. I idled around the CD racks near the tills at the front of the record shop, waiting for the line to thin so I could make a clean dash to the female cashier. It was late fall but the air in A&B Sound felt hot and stuffy. Sweat prickled across my body, the underarms of my t-shirt already damp.

Three young GenXers were working the tills: a goth girl with her hair dyed black, a nose ring, and combat boots; a stoner in flannel with a toque and blown-out Vans; and a goateed grunge guy in corduroys and a Stone Temple Pilots shirt. The thought of ending up with either of the guys was making me panic. So I hatched a plan: wait for the line to vanish, bee-line to the girl, slide the CD in my hand across, pull the folded $20 bill from my front pocket, say nothing, take change, and flee. What could go wrong?

I stared at my reflection in the window, trying to psyche myself up to do this. I had combed out my curly hair into a center part and tried to tame the thick frizz with Dippity-Do gel, and was wearing a not-baggy-enough Club Monaco sweatshirt and boot-cut jeans. My nose and ears had grown faster than the rest of my face, but in the blur of the glass, my braces and volcanic acne disappeared.

A social outcast at school, I orbited a group of misfits and band geeks, never quite belonging anywhere. In here, though, I could still be anybody—unless the staff at A&B Sound could sense what my classmates already knew. If they mocked me too, it would confirm my deepest fear: that something at my core was unlikable and the torments at school might not be temporary.

What if she asked for my ID? What if she called my parents? It wasn’t a crime to buy a CD…or was it? It might be a crime to buy this one….

“Dude! Hey, dude!” The long-haired guy smiled and waved from behind the till. While lost in thought, I had drifted too close to the tills. He sounded stoned in a non-threatening Dazed and Confused way, but I knew it was a trap. So I pretended I didn’t hear him and angled towards the goth cashier instead.

When she picked up Madonna’s Erotica album, the store lighting flashed across the plastic jewel case. She flipped it over to read the track list, then back to the front, where Madonna’s face was sketched mid-orgasm in blue and white, lips parted. The cashier thumbed the Parental Advisory sticker and I froze.

The album was already a few years old, but still radioactive. Released in 1992 alongside her infamous coffee-table book Sex, it wasn’t just Madonna pushing buttons. She was sexualizing men the way men had always sexualized women and the backlash was instant and vicious. People protested the explicit content. Critics dismissed it as porn set to a synth beat. MTV banned her music videos. Radio stations refused to play her new singles. Buying it at fifteen wasn’t just about music. It felt like a giant fuck you to the moral watchdogs who wanted to police desire.

The cashier looked up at me. “Just this?” she asked.

She had that flat, cool-girl delivery, eyeliner smudged just so, tone practiced in irony. My mind raced. Did she stress just on purpose? Like: just this? In all the scenarios I had rehearsed in my bedroom at home, I had never accounted for this one, and wasn’t sure what to say next.

The truth was that until recently, I had relied on my oldest sister, Larissa, to buy music I was too terrified to purchase myself. She’d worked at A&B Sound at one point and I mustered the courage to ask her to buy me Mariah Carey’s Daydream and ABBA’s Greatest Hits album. Those transactions with her felt like buying dime-bag cannabis in the time before dispensaries, slipping her cash by hand in a dark corner of the downstairs basement, teenage palms moist, sweat beading on upper-lip peach fuzz, my face flushed with equal parts excitement, anticipation, and shame.

A&B Sound was my safe place back then, my hometown’s independent record store before the big-box chains arrived. I could spend hours browsing there, each album individually wrapped in plastic like a gift, the jewel cases clack-clack-clack in the alphabetized bins as I searched for something I’d heard on the radio. And that new electronics smell in the air, drifting up from downstairs where all the speakers, subwoofers, sound systems, and TVs were sold. It reminded me of lining up for Boxing Day shopping with my father, how we hunted for door-crashers and holiday bargains together while corny Christmas music blasted overhead.

Back at the counter, the goth girl waved her hand to get my attention. “Hello? Is this everything?”

I nodded, sliding her my $20. She scanned the CD, bagged it, and for a second her face stayed neutral. Then she leaned in slightly, winked, and said, “This one’s my favourite Madonna album.” She handed me the bag and pointed towards the store exit. “There are some posters from her new album by the door.”

I grabbed one, but instead of unrolling it, I left it curled in my closet (is that where closeted came from, I wondered), too ashamed to pin it on my bedroom wall. It wasn’t that anyone in my family would have cared, but pinning it up meant admitting something to myself, that the things I loved most were also the things most likely to expose me.

For a long time, buying music felt like walking into a trap: either pretend to be straight by buying albums I didn’t want, or risk being called out as a fag or worse by the cool kids behind the counter. I used to play out the worst-case scenario in my head: the cashier shouting to the other staff, everyone laughing, my name passed around like a punchline. In reality, nothing happened. But that’s the thing about shame — the fantasy of humiliation always felt more real than the truth.

When I think of A&B Sound now, before streaming and before competition from Future Shop and Best Buy sent it under, it’s more than just a store where shame and fandom collided. It was a place where I learned to own what I loved. Eventually, I did. I blasted the Erotica album in my Discman at school (headphones on), mouthing every line of Deeper and Deeper like I knew something that the rest of my school didn’t.

And years later, I stopped worrying about whether my taste outed me. I lost that Madonna poster the next time my family moved. But in the new house, I taped up two Mariah Carey posters above my bed without a second thought. It wasn’t subtle, but that was the point: no more hiding things in closets, musical or otherwise.

When There Is Nothing Left to Burn, You Have to Set Yourself on Fire
(Brittany Tiplady)

On one of my first shifts on the job, my co-worker, four years my senior, perched on the stool behind the concession of the small, historic movie theatre where we worked, and flipped through The Georgia Straight. She read the I Saw You listings and Dan Savage’s Savage Love column with the precision of a surgeon. It was circa 2006, I was 15, and the Straight had us all by the balls.

Shift after shift, while I tidied up after the concession rush, cleaning the nozzles of the sticky pop fountain and making another batch of popcorn for mid-movie refills, I began my finest anthropological work: earning the attention and curiosity of my cool, tattooed, pierced co-worker. My heart sank every time I learned I had to work a dreaded shift behind the concession without Mareina.

Eventually, she began to make playlists for me. This was a serious ritual in her world–somewhat of a test, or hazing. I was splayed open, eager, and panting for the challenge. My homework was dense with range: The Postal Service, Sufjan Stevens, Led Zeppelin, Wolf Parade, The Stars, Nine Inch Nails, and devastating albums like Bright Eyes’ Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground – I was to study the gods of music and report back.

Most of the recommendations she made to me, that illegally made their way onto my iPod, felt fluid, customized, and perfectly me. On a tiny, handwritten piece of crumbled paper, she had gifted me my entire personality.

On my chunky white iPod Video, between classes, I absently shuffled the halls of my suburban high school and ran my fingers across the smooth navigation circle, clicking until I found Damien Rice’s The Blower’s Daughter, Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, Feist’s Let It Die, Modern Romance, or Maps by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

My teenage heart was a grisly open wound, with a genuine fixation on suffering and just a pinch of performative melancholy. I posed as a serious music head with my playlists of tortured artists, but I was really just trying to find myself in them.

“She loves, Bright Eyes,” she says on the phone with her roommate after I had just given her my full review, practically holding an empty plate, pleading for more.

“No, like she says she loves Lua.”

I did love Lua, and every other Bright Eyes album and song. I was energized and awoken by his guttural lyrics, and after my first listen, I was a goner. Conor Oberst’s music became my life force. Listening to Oberst howl lyrics of melancholy helped me feel closer to my own mortality – I clutched to his music and the artists Mareina recommended to me as guideposts for teenage depression, heartache, and exploration. When I was a young journalist, I dreamt of following Bright Eyes on tour and writing their authorized biography – as any writer who has seen Almost Famous does.

I got Easy/Lucky/Free tattooed under my breast when I lived in South America many years after my lessons in playlists. My friends and I saw Bright Eyes three times in a year during the release of Shell Games from Vancouver to the Sasquatch Music Festival (RIP). I walked down the aisle to First Day of My Life at my wedding, and cried like a baby when he finally played it live at his most recent Vancouver show.

When Tumblr, and then social media, became a thing, I chose the handle @yellowbird for everything. And I never thought this life was possible / You're the yellow bird that I've been waiting for, Conor croons in his song Poison Oak from the 2005 album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. This type of neon, garish lovesickness was branded onto me. I wore a giant yellowbird necklace to my first Bright Eyes concert at the Commodore, where I somehow snuck in my massive DSLR. Nearly 20 years later, I still can’t let this adolescent moniker go – it represents so much of who I was, and who I remain to be: heart on my sleeve, hopesick, effervescent with yearning.

I don’t listen to Conor Oberst—or the other artists from my days as a gloomy indie aficionado—as much as I used to, but they are always there for me when I need them. These days, I’ve moved on to the pupils of the artists of yore, and I now bow to the altar of Phoebe Bridgers.

Last year, my old movie theatre colleague and I met up to see The Stars’ anniversary show. We were in a sea of tender elder millennials who took distorted photobooth pictures on their Macs, and once wore circle scarves and heavy sweeping bangs. The show opened with the quintessential recording of When There Is Nothing Left to Burn, You Have to Set Yourself on Fire from Your Ex-Lover is Dead.

Standing next to her in a theatre full of greying scenesters, the passage of time morphed and blurred. We held each other and sang Calendar Girl, lyrics on our tongues with blood memory:

If I am lost for a day, try to find me
But if I don't come back, then I won't look behind me
All of the things that I thought were so easy
Just got harder and harder each day

I always thought this feeling would fade once I finished school. You know, those first-day jitters triggered by the sight of new school supplies, the way the smell of freshly sharpened pencils could send you into a shame spiral so deep you’d need a protractor to find your way back again. And yet here we are again because the annual anxiety that came bundled with back-to-school season never fully went away.

High school ended, then university, and jobs and whole careers have come and gone since. But every August I can still feel it: that scalp-prickling wind-up to September, and this compulsion to wring every last drop of joy from every sunny day from now until October—when the great rains return to my corner of the North Pacific, and the annual doom and gloom settles in again until Summer Solstice returns next June.

Part of me knows that we are programmed to feel this way, that this seasonal dread has been hardwired into our nervous systems since childhood. But I still don’t know what to do with all this fear: that I worked too much, that I wasted summer, that I should’ve escaped more. More nights outside. More sneaking down to a dock long after dark. More drinking craft beer by firelight. More watching the Milky Way fill in the night sky before slowly sinking into the horizon. More talking about everything and nothing into the early hours with the people I love because isn’t that what summer is all about?

In any case, September is almost here. It’s the season of knuckling down, and if you’re a career artist, it also happens to be pitching season. On the film side, I’m taking two big documentary projects to market during the September-October pitching window in the US. I’m also developing three new feature docs here in Canada. (People sometimes ask why I co-direct; as a solo director, I could never juggle this many projects at once.) And lastly, because I’m a glutton for punishment, I’m also applying to two fellowships this month to work on personal projects. Pray for my inbox.

Last week, I wrote about a recent spell of writer’s block. When my therapist asked me to describe what this latest block felt like, I told her it felt like all the air going out of a room. A withdrawal. A pulling back from the world. And how it had “coincidentally” lined up with a long break from social media. She told me that she had noticed over the past two years that my life moves in cycles of expansion and contraction. Expansion being all the work with Finding Jodi and my other film projects this year. Contraction being what happened this August. (Also, turns out my therapist doesn’t even need a protractor…she already knows when my angles are off.)

But I was thinking this morning: what if contraction isn’t a bad thing? Maybe there’s a seasonality to writing that I’ve been ignoring. I write more in fall, winter, and spring. So maybe summer isn’t about grinding at the desk. Maybe it’s for brainstorming. For daydreaming. For scribbling impossible ideas on post-it notes and sticking them to the wall, a reminder that the creative surge will return in its own season. That contraction can also be a kind of preparation: an inhale before the next long exhale.

Here are a few things that got me through the August Scaries this month:

Film

Weapons (dir. Zach Cregger)

There’s something I really like about Zach Cregger’s last two films, and it has something to do with how he handles tone. He nails that squirm-in-your-seat unease of the best horror movies, but also understands comedic timing in a way that allows an audience to breathe. It’s classic tension/release stuff and I am here for it. I watched Barbarian for the first time last week before heading to see Weapons in theater. I started Barbarian late on a weeknight and bailed the moment a character reached the bottom steps to the basement because I knew I wouldn’t sleep. (Joke’s on me: the back half of Barbarian is a blast.) Weapons is as good as Barbarian, but for different reasons. I was hooked the moment I saw those teasers earlier this year—kids sprinting through the dark with their arms out. A true “what-the-fuck-is-this-film?” moment, and Weapons 100% delivers on that.

Streaming

Say Nothing (FX / Disney+)

Still thinking about this one. Based on the best-selling non-fiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe about the IRA and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the series keeps asking hard questions: what would you do if a hostile power occupied your country? Would you fight? If yes, how far would you go? And how much would you be willing to sacrifice for your freedom? With everything that’s happening in the world right now, the show has got me thinking about Palestine and Ukraine—and, closer to home, all the recent “chatter” about Canada becoming the 51st state.

Reading

Beautiful Ruins — Jess Walter

This is a peak summer read. If you need a little September escape from your life or work, this one is for you. Most of the book unfolds in a tiny Italian coastal village in the early 1960s during the filming of Cleopatra (starring Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton), with a parallel thread in early-2000s Los Angeles during the reality-TV boom. Old Hollywood glamour meets New Hollywood… well, you know. And that scene in the WWII bunker (no spoilers) **SIGH**

Online

“I’m Just a Baby” — Very Important People (IG)

My boyfriend sent me this clip from @veryimportantpeople on Instagram and I can’t stop watching it. Highly recommend a full deep dive: all the Spencer videos, then everything else.

When I was thirteen, I wrote a detective novel over summer break. I had discovered my parents’ collection of Agatha Christie paperbacks earlier that year, organized them in chronological order, and then read them straight through. At first, they were an easy escape from my troubles at school, but soon they became something more than a distraction.

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I had a hard time relating to Hercule Poirot, Christie’s dashing and theatrical detective from Belgium. His fussy moustache and long speeches just weren’t my thing. It was Miss Marple—a sharp-eyed, older woman from a small English village, as underestimated as she was overlooked—who was my true favourite. A septuagenarian female super sleuth who could solve a murder by tea time? Finally, here was a character that a teenage boy could really get behind!

By the end of June, I had read A Caribbean Mystery and The Murder at the Vicarage so many times the pages started to fall out. But loving those books wasn’t enough. I wanted to try to write my own. After my parents headed to work and my sisters left to do normal teenage summer things, I would start up the family computer in the corner of the dining room and write. We had one of those kneeling chairs that were briefly popular in the 90s. My family had left the Catholic Church long before then, but the act of writing in that chair felt devotional, almost spiritual.

Using Miss Marple as inspiration, I created my own heroine and set the story in a small village in southern England—the same region where my father was born, and where the name Horlor can be traced back to the 1300s. My detective was Mrs. Mary Fairweather, a gossipy Brontë-style widow of reduced circumstances. She lived in isolation in a borrowed cottage on the estate of an aristocratic friend and had a sheepdog that barked whenever someone was lying.

Set in the early 1920s, Mary’s world is turned upside down when the local vicar is discovered dead in the field behind her cottage. The town doctor quickly determines it’s a heart attack. But Mary, sharp as ever, finds an eyewitness who’d seen the vicar stumbling through town the night before, clutching his stomach in pain. “Bloody digitalis, my good man!” the doctor exclaims when the truth Mary had known all along was revealed: foxglove poisoning. Oh, Mary!

From there, my Agatha Christie pastiche had everything it should: hushed conversations in libraries, scandalous Americans, fiery housemaids who spoke their minds, and at least one suspicious butler polishing silver a little too vigorously.

Did I write outlines? Plot out shocking twists and turns? Develop characters with carefully considered arcs? Pshaw! <theatrical wave of the hand> I knew nothing about the craft of writing then, and it didn’t matter. Time sped up. Hours flew by in what felt like minutes. For a weird, introverted kid with few friends, the characters I had imagined on the page felt alive. I was the least lonely I had been in years.

By the end of the summer, I had written 125,000 words. Fueled by the blind confidence only a kid can muster, I drew up a list of publishing houses, tracking down their mailing addresses in the back pages of books from my parents’ bookcases. I spent my paper-route savings on postage and self-addressed stamped envelopes (yes, this was the era of SASEs!) and mailed off chapters and query letters to editors in New York and London. I was certain I had a bestseller in the making—and that once it sold, my parents would never have to work again.

Then the rejections poured in. It was my first taste of what it felt like to be a real writer. No praise or stinging criticism. Just form letters. And out of the dozen queries I sent, only one came back with a handwritten note in black ink: Do try us again!

How good that exclamation point felt back then. It was both proof that someone had read my work and encouragement to keep going. Now I imagine some overworked junior editor opening a manila envelope to discover the unhinged ramblings of a 13-year-old Canadian boy pretending to be a 70-year-old British woman, and thinking: God help us all if this one ever figures out how to use a comma.

Funny, because these past two months I’ve agonized over much more than commas. This most recent spell of writer’s block has been so bad that I’ve avoided writing altogether: ghosting Substack and social media, leaving messages and texts unread. Yes, my documentary work was part of the problem, but I’ve procrastinated and piled on so many excuses (it’s summer, I’m burnt out, I’m too tired to feel creative) that even my excuses have excuses.

I’ve been telling myself the thing I’m trying to write has to be big—an investigation, a series, something that no one else could write—when I should really just be starting with the basics. Like, you know, trusting your imagination. Or beginning with an outline or a few story beats so you have something on the page to write into.

I don’t know. Or maybe I need to train my dog to bark whenever I’m lying to myself about not having time to write, because here I am again, relearning the same lesson I’ve learned and forgotten a dozen times before: that the only way to get past writer's block is to write through it.

Different dining room, same writer, realizing once again that writing doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be written.

I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for—just this sense that I’ll recognize it when I find it. I always begin with “Louise Horlor” in floating quotes. Then her maiden name. I’ve tried old email handles, phone numbers, and half-remembered usernames. Over the years, I’ve expanded into newspaper archives, genealogy sites, land titles, court records, and data scrapers—the same tools journalists, investigators, and debt collectors now use to comb through the digital residue of our online lives.

You’d be surprised how many ways there are to find someone online. And yet, for years, she never turned up.

Until one day, she did.

We’re walking, my mother and I, along the rocky beach in front of my aunt’s cabin at Otter Point. It’s early in the new millennium—maybe June 2000—and we’re about an hour west of Victoria, on the southern coast of Vancouver Island. It’s midday and the tide is out. Brown seaweed steams in the bright white sun. The beach is all shifting gravel and slick stones. We sink a little with every step forward.

I ask her to wade into the ocean so I can take her photo. She’s wearing a grey Boca T-shirt and loose cotton shorts—clothes too light for the wind blowing off the open Pacific. Still, she humours me.

She stops ankle-deep. When I motion for her to go farther, she laughs like it’s the punchline to a joke we both know. She cups her hands around her mouth so the wind doesn’t steal her words, and shouts: “But it’s freezing!”

I’m 19 and the novelty of my new digital point-and-shoot camera hasn’t worn off yet. I drop into a serious-photographer stance—knees bent, eye squinting. She lifts one arm in an exaggerated ta-da, like she’s a wealthy socialite posing for a segment on Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous. All she’s missing is a flute of champagne and a live-in tennis instructor named Chad.

A gust of wind blows hair into her mouth and she sputters. For a second, we’re both laughing, neither of us saying anything, just trying to stay upright on the rocks. Our roles have reversed lately. She started chemo last month, and lately, I find myself watching her the way she used to watch me. Every time she wobbles on the rocks, my body tenses, instinctively bracing.

Her hair is newly streaked with blonde—something she did for herself before treatment. Now it clings to her cheek, damp from sea spray. She tucks it behind her ears. She hikes up her shorts as the waves roll in. When I lift the camera again, she looks directly into the lens and smiles.

My mother isn’t missing, estranged, or famous. She’s just dead, yet here I am, searching for her anyway. She passed away in 2001—before social media, before video sharing, before digital footprints, before we measured a life by what could be Googled. No memorial page. No tagged photos. No digital echo. She slipped out of time before online presence became a new form of existence. To love someone who only lived in the analog world is to experience true erasure. It’s like reaching for a light switch in a house that’s been demolished.

Then, during the pandemic, something changed. As more newspapers digitized their archives, I searched again, more out of habit than hope, and there it was: my mother’s name—one line buried in an obituary for my grandmother Mary from 1997. I stared at it for a long time. “Survived by her daughter Louise…” Proof she had existed, in a way Google could finally recognize. It wasn’t much, but it hit me hard anyway

It was around that time I began writing about my mother again—here, on Substack. I slipped her into stories I told about other things and brought her up during interviews. And then there was a memorial credit on IMDb, added by the director of the reality show I used to host. Next: a genealogy record, uploaded by my aunt. It felt like we were bringing her back, one line of metadata at a time.

This is what our culture does now. It resurrects through search results.

A couple of months ago, I started using Sora to turn old photos of mine into videos, around the time Pete Hegseth, the current U.S. Secretary of Defence, was having his viral moment. He’d leaked top-secret bombing plans in a Telegram group, accidentally inviting a journalist, and somehow became the subject of a thousand AI-generated thirst traps.

Even my directing partner made one—of Pete Hegseth channelling Kurt Russell in Overboard—and he sent it to me, along with a short text: Sora’s new update is fucking insane.

If you’ve never heard of Sora, it’s a photo and video generation tool from OpenAI, the same company behind ChatGPT. Technically, it’s a diffusion transformer, which is shorthand for “a denoising latent diffusion model with one transformer as the denoiser.” (Still with me? My brain also short-circuited halfway through that last sentence.) You might’ve used something like DALL-E or Midjourney before—generative AI photo tools that create surreal, sometimes uncanny images from text prompts. Sora builds on that idea, but it can now generate entire videos too.

OpenAI released a new feature around the same time the Hegseth memes were circulating: the ability to upload a still photo and prompt Sora to generate a 5- or 10-second video with realistic, cinematic movement. I told myself I was just testing it out—but really, I wanted to see if she’d move the way I remembered.

So let's say you decide to upload an old photo of your mother at the beach. You ask Sora to turn it into a 5-second video with a slow zoom, as if shot on a consumer-grade digital camera from the year 2000. What happens now?

What Sora does next isn’t literal. It doesn’t know your mom or that beach. According to OpenAI, Sora has a probabilistic understanding of similar scenes from its training data. If the image shows a woman standing in shallow ocean water holding up her shorts, it predicts (to varying degrees of accuracy) what someone might do in that scene. While posing, she will likely shift her weight slightly or laugh at the camera. Small waves will crest and recede around her legs. Since the wind is most likely to be coming off the ocean, it will blow her hair towards the shore.

Is it her? Of course not. But it makes me wonder: if someone else had created this AI video and posted this online, would I have believed it was real? The way she shifts her weight, the way the waves are breaking—it feels like my memory of that day.

In that way, Sora is closer to how memory works than photography. A photo captures one moment. When we look at that photo, we rely on our memories to fill in the moments before and after it, which is exactly what Sora does, too.

It’s tempting to think of our memories like photographs—fixed moments, frozen in time. But they aren’t. Not even close.

Years ago, while working on a film about false memories, I was fortunate enough to interview Elizabeth Loftus, one of the most influential memory scientists of our time. She compared memory to a Wikipedia page: “You can go in and edit it,” she said, “but so can other people.”

She told me that if you don’t record a memory within the first 24 hours—in a journal, a voice memo, or even a video—its edges will begin to blur. Your brain will start filling in the gaps with what feels right, rather than what’s true. Which means that every time you recall a memory, you’re retrieving the last version you remembered, not the original.

Like that photo of my mother at Otter Point. There’s my memory from that day and the memory of flipping past it in an album with my younger sister a decade later. The memory of her sending me a digital copy, then all the times we’ve posted it online: for Mother's Day, her birthday, or the anniversary of her death. All these layers of memory on memory, shaped by time and repetition.

At this point, I’ve probably remembered the memory more times than I lived it. It’s starting to feel like Sora knows more about that beach day than I do.

I’m getting closer to the age my mother was when she died. I’ve lived more of my life without her than with her. Sometime during the pandemic, I realized some of my clearest memories of her are tied to photographs, and I began writing on Substack to make sense of those images, wondering if they were distorting and concealing more than they revealed.

Around that same time, I found Elaine Kasket, a British psychologist who writes about the digital afterlife. She was posting short, candid essays on her Substack, Wednesday’s Ghost, about her personal life and what it was like to write again after years of silence. Her voice was honest and self-deprecating. It helped reignite a feeling I’d mostly lost—that the internet could still be a place for ideas and connection, not just shirtless selfies, shitposting, and anonymous trolling.

Posts by Kasket and others also made me feel less alone, especially during the first half of 2023, when I was promoting my film, Satan Wants You. Publicly, in press interviews and sold-out movie theatre screenings, I told stories about my bizarre childhood connection to the real-life couple who are often blamed for the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s. But privately, my thirteen-year relationship was collapsing in slow motion. I was trapped in a funhouse mirror, making the same mistakes my parents had made in their marriage decades earlier. I felt like I had learned nothing from my childhood—living proof that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.

In the months that followed, I deep-dived into her interviews, recorded talks, and her book. In All the Ghosts in the Machine: Illusions of Immortality in the Digital Age, she writes about how, under current laws, our data doesn’t belong to our families after we die. Technically, privacy ends at death, but tech companies continue to protect the “rights” of the deceased as if they’re still active users. Kasket calls it agency laundering: refusing to grant access to next of kin under the guise of protecting the wishes of people who no longer exist.

I keep thinking about how hard I’ve worked for decades just to find even a whisper of my mother online, in contrast to the families who now have to fight their way into dead loved ones’ accounts to save photos or say goodbye. Kasket explains that Facebook memorials become haunted rooms, places where the living and the dead are stuck in feedback loops, where grief becomes automated by birthday reminders and memory notifications, algorithmically resurfaced without context or consent. For some grievers, this digital connection to a deceased loved one is a relief, yet for others, it’s a form of torture.

And it goes deeper. Kasket warns that digital immortality isn’t about preservation: it’s about data retention. The dead don’t click ads, but their profiles still keep others scrolling. In her book, she describes Facebook as the largest cemetery in the world—a bleak milestone for a platform that still suggests I friend exes from the last millennium. Facebook already has hundreds of millions of profiles for deceased users, a number that could grow to over two billion by the end of this century. Not only is our grief monetized, but it also comes with a hefty carbon footprint, powered by data centers that will consume more and more energy to keep these dead profiles alive.

That’s the part I can’t shake: the idea that all this effort to remember (the searching, the reposting, the animating) might not be memory at all. It might just be waste. Digital ghost clutter. A burden we keep uploading because we don’t know how to let go.

One thing I’ve learned from years of making documentaries is that people often choose a version of the past they can live with. That could be the story of what happened, or the story we tell ourselves about what happened. Although we can’t change the past, we can change what it means to us, and I think that’s the story I’ve always been most interested in anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked my younger sister who took the photo at Otter Point. She told me to check with our aunt MaryAnne.

When I emailed my aunt, she wrote back almost immediately, with the kind of email that made me picture her in her quilting room, bright squares of fabric pinned overhead, typing slowly on the keypad of her phone, occasionally stopping to push her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

She consulted her journal from that time and confirmed the photo had been taken at her cottage. That part, at least, I had right. But then she added: Looks like it was taken early September 1999. Your mum overnighted at the cottage with me the day after Labour Day.

I stared at the date on my screen—September 1999. A full year earlier than I thought. How strange that my aunt was the one behind the camera when I had been so sure it was me.

She continued: Don’t have anything written about why she spent the night. Both your parents had been to the cottage in August for dinner. I vaguely remember her wanting to spend a weekend there by herself later that fall.

And then, almost as an afterthought: Possibly with you-know-who. She didn’t tell me that, but I suspected it may have been the case. She left your father that November, I think.

So my mind had layered over the past with a fiction to hide the truth. This moment I’d returned to again and again wasn’t a final memory of us together. It was a prelude to everything falling apart: her affair, the separation, the cancer diagnosis, and the slow fading away of her life from ours.

Can we trust our memories? It’s the question I asked in my very first Substack post. Clearly, I can’t. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the value isn’t in remembering everything perfectly, but in being willing to go back and look again.

Elaine Kasket writes that when we lose someone close, we don’t just remember them, we carry them. We fold them into who we are—their values, their characteristics, aspects of their personality—until they’re part of the story we tell about ourselves. And maybe that’s what grief does to us in the end. It’s not about preserving the past exactly as it was, but choosing to reshape it into something we can bear.

There’s a story I’ve told for years but have never written down.

It’s about the poet Patrick Lane. I’m not sure he would’ve appreciated this kind of hagiography. He wasn’t sentimental, and I’m not convinced he believed in legacy the way most writers do. The last time I saw him was at a poetry reading in 2008, where I stood in the back of a university bookstore, reading poems to five other poets, three empty rows of chairs, and one guy I’m pretty sure just came in to use the bathroom.

Patrick was one of the poets there, though he was part of the audience. He seemed surprised to see me and told me he thought I would be working as an actor in Los Angeles by now. I bought a copy of his memoir from the bookstore and asked him to sign it after the reading. He stared at me for a long beat before writing an inscription. He closed the book and passed it back to me. I didn’t read it right away, in front of him. He was pulled into another conversation before I could say goodbye.

I walked home that night in a fog of self-doubt, the kind I’d been carrying for a year, ever since my book came out. The rain had stopped, but something stranger had taken its place. Not quite mist, not quite drizzle. More like the cloud ceiling had quietly collapsed onto the streets of the West End. The air was thick with moisture, the edges of the streetlamps ringed with soft halos. A foghorn groaned from somewhere in English Bay, mournful and low, as if the city itself were exhaling.

I’d be on stage at the Vancouver International Writers Festival in two weeks to promote my book. It was the biggest break of my writing career, what I had been working towards since I was a teenager. And the hit to my ego, reading poems to an almost-empty room yet again that night, landed harder than I expected. What if Patrick was right? What if I wasn’t meant to be a writer? What if I had been chasing the wrong dream all this time?

When I finally reached Davie Street, I wondered if my sister Lindsay would still be up when I got home. She’d given up on her New York dreams that fall, had spent two years at NYU, then a year teaching at the Harvey Milk High School for queer kids in Lower Manhattan only to return home broke and burnt out.

The timing had worked out. Sort of. After selling everything I owned and a failed attempt to move to Bangkok to teach English with my now ex-boyfriend, I was back in Vancouver. I’d spent the past month sleeping on my best friend’s couch. I needed a roommate, and my sister needed a new start.

So we moved into a two-bedroom rental in The Columbia, a brown-brick tower above a grocery store in the heart of the Davie Village. We’d only lived there a few weeks before discovering our roommates: silverfish, and the occasional cockroach—a rarity in Vancouver, but somehow not in our suite.

Lindsay couldn’t find full-time teaching work. An old roommate pulled strings and got her a temporary placement, but the school was in Vancouver’s farthest suburbs. Two hours each way from downtown. I barely saw her during the week because when she wasn’t working, she was either commuting or sleeping.

I was in my mid-twenties then, freelancing as a writing consultant, mostly doing real estate copy, during the worst of the 2008 recession. I’d lost all but one client and was barely scraping together enough to cover rent and groceries. I had my author copies of my book from the publisher, but hadn’t sold a single book at the bookstore reading that night. And even though I knew readings weren’t about sales, I needed money. Any money.

Back at the condo, I found Lindsay in the kitchen—sweatpants, oversized sweatshirt, her blonde hair pushed back in a headband. She stood over the stove, cooking a single chicken breast in a scratched non-stick pan, assembling a spinach salad from a bag of tired-looking greens. She had just turned twenty-five, and I kept wondering how much leaving New York had upended the life she’d always imagined for herself.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

“Oh, you know,” I shrugged. She had enough to worry about without adding my bullshit to her pile.

I sat in the living room, on the second-hand leather couch we'd found on Craigslist, and pulled Patrick’s memoir from my bag. I opened the cover and read the inscription:

Names are forgotten in order that a man prosper in perfect anonymity.

With great affection,
Patrick

I stared at the page for a long time, reading it again and again. It felt like a riddle, but I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to tell me. So I stood up and walked into the kitchen.

“Patrick Lane was at the reading tonight,” I explained, passing her the open book. “I asked him to sign this.”

Lindsay read it silently, then looked at me and sighed. “What the fuck does that mean?” she asked.

And that was the thing: I didn’t know either.

The door banged open just before the hour. Wind swept in with the sessional instructor, carrying the smell of drought—dead grass, dry dirt, decomposing leaves. Linda Rogers floated through the room like she was being pulled by invisible threads: scarves and heavy necklaces, silver rings on every finger, the hem of her linen jacket catching on a desk as she passed.

The classroom for the introductory creative writing seminar taught by poet Linda Rogers had the strangest layout. The back half was raised two feet, like a kind of dias. I sat midway down the lower area, near a row of windows, trying to catch the light filtering through the trees outside. The branches from an oak scraped at the glass, casting shadows across the floor in slow, flickering patterns. You could hear gulls over the quad, and the low hum of traffic on Ring Road, which circled the campus at a ridiculously slow speed.

“I have a surprise for you,” Linda said, setting her oversized purse on the desk with a thunk. She tucked her hair behind her ears with the grace of someone used to being watched. “Be patient. He’s on his way.”

When Patrick Lane walked in a moment later, a ripple of recognition moved through the classroom. He looked like he’d just come from chopping wood: wool sweater, jeans stiff with wear, his hair a little wild. His eyes moved slowly across the room, assessing us without revealing anything. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even introduce himself.

“You’re all so young,” he said. “You should be out getting your hearts broken. Screwing up your lives. Doing something worth writing about.”

We laughed nervously. A few students shifted in their chairs.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

Linda crossed her arms, like she’d heard it before. Maybe she had. But I felt a flicker of anticipation—real, embarrassing excitement—low in my gut.

Patrick was the first living poet I’d ever met whose work I’d studied in high school. He was from a logging town in the interior of British Columbia. He’d spent years working in sawmills, housing construction, picking apples, driving trucks—anything that would allow him to keep going with his poetry. He had a vision for his future and didn’t let go of it. And as I watched him walk to the center of the classroom, something in me began to rearrange.

He read a few of his poems, including Mountain Oyster. Then he pulled a single folded sheet from his back pocket and smoothed it on the lectern. No binder. No handouts. Just a poem: “Stone” by Charles Simic.

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

When he finished, he looked up. “What’s the central metaphor here?” he asked. “And why does it work?”

Silence. Somewhere in the back, a radiator clanged.

I took notes as he walked us through it, line by line, explaining how poetry is really about imaginative leaps. How to fuse two unlike things into something unexpected. How to study something ordinary like a stone and see it in an entirely new way.

Then he gave us an assignment: “Write your own version of Stone. But make it yours.”

He folded the poem back into his pocket and tucked his book under his arm. For a moment, I thought he was going to leave the same way he arrived, in silence. But then he turned back with one final thought.

“If you really want to do this,” he said. “If you want a career as an artist, you’ll have to choose. You can have an interesting life or a comfortable life. But you can’t have both.”

I wrote this down verbatim and underlined it twice. I made my choice without hesitation. I was too young to know what I’d chosen then. But I do now.

We were trying to get the shot just as the SkyTrain descended from its elevated trackway to street level. I was leaning against a chain-link fence topped with loops of razor wire to keep people off the tracks. The light was almost gone, but this was the one the photographer wanted: the train racing overhead, the Georgia Viaduct blurring into dusk behind me, a pose that suggested defiance or mystery (we hadn’t decided yet).

Every time a new train approached, the photographer crouched low. I held still, waiting for that low whoosh of static and cool air as the train passed, then began making adjustments as soon as she yelled, “Now!”.

Hand to the fence. Look up into camera. Turn head. Look away. Repeat.

“Try something else,” she called. “No, make it cooler. Remember what I said in the email!”

Her email instructions had been straight to the point

> Practice more cool facial expressions whenever you have time.
> Facial/eye expressions are the key difference between a good
> model and a good-looking person. All right?

She went by Y.D., used an anonymized email address, and had the most polished portfolio I’d seen in the Craigslist trade-for-photo listings. Originally from China, she now lived in Vancouver with her husband and toddler. She didn’t speak much during the shoot, except to give quick, exacting feedback between shutter clicks.

“Keep your chin down,” she’d say. Or: “Look down and then look up. Yes. Like that.” Click. Click. “Okay, try something different.”

She was building her book, just like I was, and we were doing a trade. I couldn’t afford author photos. My publisher couldn’t either. She got portfolio material. I got a headshot.

The makeup artist, who also acted as the wardrobe stylist, stood just off-frame, holding a zip-up garment bag with my only suit in it and a duffel full of other “options.” She’d rimmed my eyes in black shadow, then smudged it with a stubby brush until it looked lived-in. Smoky. Edgy. I looked like a poet who might also front a sad-boy garage rock band.

“You look more like yourself when you smile,” Y.D. said, checking the screen. “But no, smiling is definitely not the right look.”

Not the right look. The photo shoot was beginning to mirror an underlying tension in my real life. I felt like two people: who I was and who I was trying to become. By day, I worked a 9-to-5 office job I hated. By night, I was finalizing the manuscript for my first book. It was the only thing that made me feel like my life had a purpose beyond the modular-carpet cubicle where I spent most of my waking hours.

My book Made Beautiful By Use came out in April 2007. We launched it in Victoria and Vancouver. In Victoria, friends and family showed up. In Vancouver, it was mostly other writers. There were a few reviews—in a local newspaper, a kind write-up in another magazine by a friend from university, a couple of niche literary blogs that disappeared within a year. Then there was the shirtless cover story in the local queer mag, written by poet Billeh Nickerson. “The New Face Of Gay Poetry” stared back at me from every newspaper box in the city for two weeks that summer.

It felt like the start of something.

And then—nothing. No festival invites. No cross-country book tour. No award nominations. Nothing.

I didn’t know what I didn’t know back then. I didn’t apply for grants or set up more readings myself. I didn’t submit new work to magazines to stay active. I didn’t reach out to any of the poets I admired or studied under. Too proud to ask for help. Too afraid of seeming pushy or needy or transactional.

I told myself I was giving it time, letting it circulate. But really, I was just afraid. So I waited. And when nothing happened, I disappeared.

I quit the office job, sold everything I owned, and moved to Thailand with the guy I was dating. I thought I’d teach English, find inspiration for a novel, reinvent myself. Instead, I failed—spectacularly. I came back broke, heartbroken, and seriously wondering if it was time to give up writing for good. Then my publisher called with a plot twist: I’d been invited to read at the Vancouver International Writers Festival.

When the next train passed overhead during the shoot, I adjusted my chin like Y.D. had coached me, hoping to radiate presence, gravity, a sense of arrival.

In the final photo, my eyes are rimmed in smoke, my mouth slightly open. I’m cross-legged on a concrete block in the middle of an empty skatepark, wearing the same suit I’d worn to my mother’s funeral years earlier. I looked like a poet and a twink had a custody battle, and nobody won.

I used that image for everything—bios, grant applications, festival submissions, a panel that eventually got cancelled. I must have stared at it a hundred times that year, trying to see what other people saw. Trying to see if I still looked like someone who was going to make it.

A pink Turkish carpet stretched across the stage, flanked by dahlias, ornamental grasses, and a single tree just beginning to turn yellow—like Martha Stewart’s basement guest room if she’d let her deadbeat gay nephew redecorate.

This was the setup for the Vancouver International Writers Festival’s big queer literature night—my first major festival appearance. The event was billed as “part poetry reading, part cabaret.” It wasn’t your typical literary affair. One lucky audience member was going home with a gift certificate for a free nipple piercing. My friend Rob Easton had been hired as one of the go-go dancers—scruffy, wearing a lemon-yellow American Apparel polo with matching briefs, tube socks yanked to mid-calf and topped by a single red and blue stripe. During breaks, he climbed onto a small raised platform in the crowd and pumped his hips while 200 literature lovers whooped and clapped along to the music between authors.

The host was Billeh Nickerson, a poet and friend with a stand-up comic’s timing and a rotating cast of facial hairstyles. That night, it was a vertical stripe down his chin—like an exclamation point. He was another mentor who’d opened a thousand doors for me, including this one. As a first-time author, I shouldn’t have been invited to read. But here I was, seated with my sister a few rows back, palms sweating through the pages I’d tucked inside my copy of Made Beautiful By Use.

There was no green room. No escape hatch. I was in the middle of the lineup—safe on paper, torture in real time. My thoughts spun: What if no one claps? What if I stutter? What if I freeze?

Then I heard my name. I climbed the stage.

I hadn’t learned the trick for stage fright yet—how, when your heart is in your throat, you find one person in the crowd and perform just for them. All I could hear was the pounding in my ears. The lights dipped low. I couldn’t make out a single face in the audience, not even my sister’s.

So I started with the more accessible poems from my book—ones with good “hmm” potential, the kind of sound you want to hear from a literary crowd. There were a few polite murmurs and mmm’s, but nothing that settled my nerves. I didn’t loosen up until Rob joined me on stage for some of the new poems I’d been workshopping—pieces from a manuscript I was tentatively calling Haute & Cool, a poetry collection loosely themed around fashion that I was co-authoring with David J. Brock. Rob stood centre, posing like a model while I read a poem about tube socks. He mugged for the crowd and posed theatrically. It landed. People laughed.

I finished with a poem about scarves, featuring Colonel Mustard trying to kill Miss Scarlet from Clue, and managed to get at least a third of the room chuckling. Then it was over. The lights went up. I stepped down and returned to my seat.

After the last reader, lines began to form at the back of the venue around the book signing tables of the more established writers. I pushed through the crowd, apologizing as I went, clutching my folder and pretending I wasn’t searching for eye contact. When I found my table, I saw my twenty author copies stacked neatly beside a pen and a branded Writers Fest tote with a thank-you card and a much-needed bottle of water.

I sat. I smiled. I waited.

A woman with silver hair pulled into a long ponytail gave me a once-over, then inspected my book without touching it. She pressed her lips together into a tight line and moved on to the next table.

My sister came by to say I did great and that she had to leave early because of her commute in the morning. Rob hugged me and promised to meet me for a drink at a hotel bar nearby. But nobody bought a book.

Was it my delivery? My poems? Was it because I’d read new work instead of leaning harder into the book? Or was this just what it meant to be a poet: to be watched, applauded, and forgotten, all in the span of fifteen minutes?

All my fears about poetry—its solitude, its small audience, its inability to pay my rent—crystallized in that moment. How could I call myself an author if no one wanted to read or buy my writing?

As the chairs scraped and the lights came up, I reached for the tote bag the festival had given me, opened the wide canvas mouth, and quietly slid all twenty copies of my book inside.

It’s strange, the things we carry. Patrick Lane’s memoir has made it through three apartments, two relationships, and one major career change into film and television. I sell or give away books every time I move, but There Is A Season always made it into the next box—usually near the top.

I didn’t read the inscription again until after Patrick had died, when the writerly ambition that had once lit me up like a flare had dulled into something quieter. Not gone, just different. Less cerebral. Less performative. Less concerned with who was watching.

The line was still there, written in his confident, looping handwriting:

Names are forgotten in order that a man prosper in perfect anonymity.

With great affection,
Patrick.

I think I finally understand what he was trying to tell me.

He was talking about letting go. Letting go of what you think your life is supposed to look like. Of needing your name in print, your face on a poster, your books stacked on a festival table. Letting go of the ego that says this poem must be heard instead of this poem must be written.

He was telling me that the real work—the lasting work—happens when no one is watching. That the clearest voice you’ll ever write in is the one not trying to prove anything to anyone.

Maybe that’s why he just handed me the book that night with the cover closed. Why he didn’t explain. Why he didn’t need to. He’d already told me everything he needed to say.

And from the vaults, an interview with Patrick Lane that includes typewriters and smoking and a dozen other writerly flexes by one of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated poets:

There’s a scene early in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans that I can’t stop thinking about.

It’s 1952, somewhere in New Jersey. The clicking of heels announces Sammy’s mother before she enters the room. Mitzi Fabelman, wrapped in a navy cardigan, stops and stands quietly behind her young son, her sharp blonde bob almost glowing in the half-light. In her hands: a Kodak Brownie 8mm movie camera, her bright red manicure gleaming against the industrial grey metal of the camera body.

Sammy is kneeling on the concrete floor of his father’s basement workshop, tucked beneath a tower of broken RCA television sets. In the glass of one screen, you catch his reflection—small hands holding a toy train engine, his face tight with anticipation.

“Sammy,” she says softly, “we’re going to use Daddy’s camera to film it. Only crash the train once, okay? And after we get the film developed, you can watch it over and over again. So it’s not so scary anymore.”

He looks up at her—hopeful, confused. She kneels to his height and hands him the camera. A shaft of winter sunlight from a small basement window falls directly on her head. There’s something unspoken in the gesture, almost religious: This will help you make sense of the world.

A few weeks earlier, Sammy had seen The Greatest Show on Earth, his first time inside a movie theatre. The train crash in the film was extremely graphic, involving a Barnum & Bailey circus train full of animals colliding first with a car and then with a passenger train full of families. It had left Sammy frozen in his movie seat, catatonic for hours afterward. His father, an engineer at RCA, tried to soothe him with science—explaining projectors, frame rates, how what they were watching on the big screen wasn’t real. His mother, a pianist and composer, tried something else. “Movies are dreams,” she told him, promising that he’d always leave a movie theatre smiling.

But he didn’t.

So she bought him a model train set for Hanukkah. And now, sensing a mirror of her own sensitivity in her son, she was giving him a camera—an invitation to take control of the image, to recreate the thing that scared him until he could shape his fear into something else. The artist’s first act: a kind of creative alchemy.

“One more thing, darling,” she tells him as he reaches out for the camera. “Don’t tell your father. It will be our secret movie, just yours and mine. Okay?”

In the following weeks, Sammy rebuilt the crash scene in their basement. He filmed the engine barreling down the track, cut to toy cars flipping, paper lions and tigers bursting free from their cages.

When the film came back from the lab, Sammy cleared space in his closet, pushed his clothes to the sides, and projected it onto the wall. His mother sat beside him, knees tucked to her chest, watching the flickering chaos unfold. The edits were jarring, but the point of view was unmistakably Sammy’s, and the beginning of a story was there.

When it ended, she clapped like a small child. “Oh Sammy,” she said. “More! More! More!”

It’s a beautiful scene, even if you don’t know the backstory. But it lands differently once you know the film is autobiographical. Spielberg waited until both his parents had died to make it. This wasn’t just a story—it was the story: his origin myth. A mother who sees her son’s creativity and gives him the tools to explore it. A young boy who learns to turn what he fears into art.

I can tell you from experience: this is exactly the kind of story people want to hear whenever they ask how you got into film. It’s something that came up constantly while I was doing press for my last film, Satan Wants You.

I have no shortage of stories. That time I got to call “action” on a TV commercial filming in our house when I was a kid. Or the psychic at the shopping mall who told my mother I was going to be famous. Or the day a porn star taught me how to strip on the set of Don’t Quit Your Gay Job, where I promised myself: Next time I humiliate myself on national television, I’ll be the one calling the shots.

All good stories. But none of them felt like the story.

Because the truth is, I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to write.

Which is why when people ask about how I got into film, the first person I think of is a poet.

The last time I saw Patrick Lane was in 2008.

It was a wet October evening in Vancouver. Robson Street shimmered under a film of water, the concrete slick with the glow of the city skyline, the red of a traffic light refracted across a dozen different puddles. Rush hour car exhaust drifted low, mixing with the fried onion smell from the hot-dog stand outside the art gallery.

I pulled my coat tighter and ducked beneath the overhang, heading down the stairs toward the University of British Columbia’s downtown campus. The courthouse loomed above in an impossible Brutalist geometry, its hard edges softened by overgrown vines dropping the last of their leaves before winter.

Beneath the courts, there was a plaza that felt like a secret. You could pass right over it without ever knowing it was there. Below street level, the university bookstore opened to an underground skating rink where dozens of skaters traced lazy orbits around the ice. Teenagers practiced dance routines next to the rink, a battered ghettoblaster pumping out bass-heavy hip hop tracks that echoed across the plaza in waves.

I paused to look through the bookstore windows before entering, catching my reflection in the darkened glass. Too boyish for twenty-seven. Shirt buttoned to the top, no tie. The short brown mullet was an improvement over the brassy blonde box-dye I’d tried earlier that year, but I still looked like someone trying very hard to appear like he wasn’t trying at all.

Inside, the bookshelves were being rolled to the edges to make room for a few rows of folding chairs. Instead of heading in to make small talk, I stayed outside a little longer to watch a lone figure skater commanding the centre of the rink. She kept repeating a difficult spin: starting low, leg extended parallel to the ice, before rising into a fast rotation with her arms overhead, a small circle within the larger ring of skaters hugging the edge of the rink.

The first time she fell was hard to watch. Her skates clipped mid-spin, and she pitched forward, instinctively curling her arms around her head to avoid a face-plant. She slid to a stop, sprawled on her stomach. A guy in hockey skates glided over—trimmed beard, sweaty t-shirt, full of confidence. He extended a hand to help her and my mind immediately filled in the blanks: she’d made nationals once before a bad coach ended the dream. He played minor league hockey up north, lost his shot at a scholarship after blowing out a knee. They skate here together on Wednesday nights. At home, they argue about laundry, the dishes, the volume of the never-ending hockey games on TV. He’s hopelessly in love with her, but she knows that he loves her more than she loves him.

It’s a habit I’ve had since childhood—making up stories about some stranger’s life in vivid detail as a way of escaping my own.

Back on the rink, the figure skater waved the hockey player off. While she took a breath and pushed herself up to try again, he skated backwards away from her, shrugging and then mouthing something to his friends.

Inside, Trina, the bookstore manager, greeted me at the door, clipboard in hand. It was an omnibus reading: five authors, all with new books. The only one I knew was Jennica Harper—who would eventually become the showrunner for Jann, a comedy series where singer-songwriter (and Canadian treasure) Jann Arden plays a fictionalized version of herself. But back then, we were just two early-career writers pretending not to size each other up.

As the room filled—and I use that word generously—I chatted with Jennica and the other writers. It’s never really about the books at those pre-reading mingles. It's more like dogs sniffing each other: side-eyes about who got what grant, fishing around to find out what you're working on next. When my turn came, like everyone else, I said that I too was working on a new collection.

“Poetry or fiction?”

“A Fall/Winter collection.”

“Like clothing?”

I nodded with what I hope. “It’s a poetry collection themed around fashion. There’s an entire section of haikus about tubesocks.”

What had started as a joke with my friend David James Brock—a playwright and poet I met in university—had quietly become a real project. We started emailing each other poems to stay in touch after he moved to Toronto. I sent him a poem about a balaclava. He replied with one about cut-off jeans. This continued back and forth until it wasn’t a joke anymore. Magazines started publishing our poems, and we were seriously considering co-authoring a book.

Trina began her welcome. Two of the three rows were empty. My publisher had pitched this as a warm-up before the Vancouver International Writers Festival in two weeks. But nothing makes your confidence evaporate faster than reading to a mostly empty room. A packed venue feeds your soul. An empty one steals it.

I prayed not to be called first.

Then, midway through Trina’s intro, I looked up—and there he was.

Patrick Lane.

He must have slipped in while I was distracted. He wasn’t on the program. He wasn’t launching a book. He was just there, sitting alone in the back row, legs crossed at the knee. Grey hair, brown moustache, wool sweater, boots damp from the rain. He looked like he’d come from teaching, or from mucking around in his garden.

He was just as I remembered him from the final year of my undergrad—both mentor and a kind of father figure, in that quiet, mysterious way great teachers sometimes are. One of the first living poets I’d ever met, he was a larger-than-life presence in Canadian literature. Alongside writers like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in the 1960s and ‘70s, he helped make it possible for writers to publish here in Canada, to write our own lives and landscapes into being.

Having him here was the poetry equivalent of Spielberg showing up to the screening of your first film. While I read from my book, he stared with that inscrutable expression of his, nodding his head occasionally at a line or two, not giving much away. He hadn’t changed. He even had the same clear-framed glasses.

Three of the writers swarmed Patrick at the end of the reading. I browsed the L section of the bookstore’s poetry shelves while they talked. I picked up a copy of his memoir, There Is A Season, and brought it to the counter to buy. I wanted him to sign it.

When I finally got to say hello, he seemed surprised to see me. We hugged.

“I thought you’d be in L.A. by now,” he said in that low, gravelly baritone. “On some TV or movie set. Acting.”

“Well, it’s funny that you said that. I’ve been trying to develop a documentary project with a friend…”

He grinned. “You must really hate money.”

We both laughed. But part of me froze. Acting?

I’d spent hours in his office, reading poems aloud, breaking them apart line by line. We talked about rhythm, structure, metaphor—how language can open and close like a fist. He told me that writing a great poem feels like opening a trapdoor to the universe, and that once you feel that, you’ll never want to stop writing. So why did he think I’d be an actor? What did he see that I didn’t?

Then Jennica and the bookstore manager approached, their voices bright with recognition, already drawing him into the next conversation. He squeezed my arm goodbye.

I stood there for a moment longer, book in hand, unsure if the moment between us had just ended or if I’d missed my cue to say something back. Something meaningful. Something final. But whatever it was, it passed. And so did he, vanishing back into the chatter and coat-swapping of a room already beginning to forget the poems we’d read.

Outside, the figure skater was still on the ice. Her face flushed from exertion, her ponytail damp, but she hadn’t stopped. She spun again—arms overhead, off-balance, still turning. Every time she missed the finish, failing to hit whatever invisible mark she had in her head, she started over again.

Maybe Patrick had seen something in me back then. But maybe it wasn’t what I thought he saw. I considered pulling his memoir from my bag, flipping to the title page to see what he’d written. Instead, I kept watching the skater.

She traced that imperfect circle again and again—faster now, chasing something only she could see. Maybe landing it wasn’t the point. Maybe the trick was just to keep spinning.

So what did that inscription say? I’ll tell you everything in my next post.

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The first time I clicked the link was in 2015. I was on my phone, in bed, with the volume off and the screen brightness turned down so my late-night scrolling wouldn’t wake my boyfriend.

When the email notification popped up, all I could think about was the space between things: my boyfriend’s steady breathing, our dog shifting under the covers near my feet. We had just moved to a condo that overlooked the Port of Vancouver. I still couldn’t get past the freight trains that ran behind the building, how they hissed and rumbled all night, every night, on their way down to the waterfront.

The email was from a guy I hadn’t seen in years, a doctor I’d dated briefly, but still thought about far more often than I should. His infrequent messages always sent a ripple of discomfort through my chest, then a flood of memories—reflections from a disco ball moving across his face on a dance floor, sweaty brown hair and striped sheets, sunrise coming through Venetian blinds, dust suspended in the morning light.

As usual, there was no greeting, no hi-how-are-ya-how’ve-you-been, just the link and a short message: you never told me about this :)

On one hand, I knew that I shouldn’t open it. The right thing to do would have been to delete the email, pull the dog towards me, and drift off to sleep. But it was late, and things weren’t great with my boyfriend, so I clicked the link.

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Queerty.com. 2011. The blog post, as blunt as it was brief, was about a straight, gay-for-pay pornstar from the 2000s—a man I never thought I’d hear about again. His stage name? Reese Rideout, though he went by another name off-screen. The post talked about his appearance on Don’t Quit Your Gay Job, a reality show that had tasked its two hosts with competing at different types of stereotypically ‘gay’ jobs. The blog explained that in this episode, the hosts were learning to work the stage from none other than Reese himself.

The real kicker: two YouTube video clips from the episode embedded beneath the post. For years, I had worried about scenes from this episode surfacing online. Would they cost me career opportunities? How could anyone take me seriously as a filmmaker after watching this shit? And here they were at last.

In the first, one camera tracked Reese Rideout performing on a raised stage below a red velvet curtain in an empty, dimly lit nightclub. Already shirtless, he was moving his hips slowly from side to side next to a giant, leopard-print chaise. He squared his body to camera and unbuttoned his grey jeans, letting them fall a few inches to reveal a pair of pink and white briefs. He was handsome with shaggy black hair, as muscular and ripped as a fitness model.

Then the video cut away from Reese to a second camera fixed on two younger men sitting on a low couch below the stage. And there, finally, was my friend Rob in a blue t-shirt, his blond hair buzzed short, and me sitting next to him in a pink shirt with a purple baseball hat clamped over my shaggy brown fringe.

In the next clip, Reese was explaining something—without the volume on, I couldn’t make out what—and then he smirked as if this whole thing was one big joke. There was something fluid in the way Reese moved on stage, a playfulness paired with a complete lack of self-consciousness. He was at home in his body and it showed, full of a kind of freedom that I’d never allowed myself to experience. All these years later, watching him again made me realize I would do anything to feel that way too.

The camera cut to Rob and me, perched on the couch, our bodies tense and rigid. Christ, we were young. We’d been close friends for years by then, but that day on set had felt different. No amount of joking around or awkward laughter could hide that we had no idea what we were doing. We were both pretending without knowing who we were pretending for: Reese, the cameras, or each other.

While the video continued to play, I ran my hand along the floor next to my side of the bed. Headphones? I was in luck, though now I was also starting to worry. If I kept moving around, my boyfriend would wake up, and how would I explain this?

Back on stage, Reese told Rob and me that there was a 'sexy' way to remove our pants and put our shoes back on. Corny reality show music plays in the background. Reese kicked off his boots and then tugged at the waist of his jeans, letting them fall to his ankles. He kicked one leg out from his body, raising it to hip level, holding it there so we could see every muscle straining. He moved in a way that balanced strength and flexibility, effortlessly commanding the stage. It made me feel self-conscious in a way I couldn’t shake.

Once both his legs were free, he punted the jeans away. “Sometimes when you’re putting your boots back on, a big stomp is cool.” He raised his leg again. Once the boot was on, he stomped down and thrust his crotch at us with exaggerated mockery, saying, 'Look at me, I’m putting my shoes on ughn!

Ok, maybe better with the volume off. Still, without it, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that Rob was asking all the questions while I studied Reese in silence. Rob told Reese a friend had warned us: don’t show them your hole.

“Really?” Reese grinned. “I get more tips when I show mine.”

Reese came to the edge of the stage, reaching out a hand to me, then to Rob. The video ended with him telling us it was time for us to try.

I stared at the play button to the second video for a long time, listening to my boyfriend breathing in and out beside me in bed. I wasn’t ready to watch it yet. So out of habit, I scrolled down to the comment section at the bottom of the blog.

One comment read: “Reese Rideout” is not a Kinsey 0

And below that: Reese’s speech and mannerisms don’t seem so “straight” to me.

butter face strikes again, another commenter wrote. the tattoo guy’s bod though…on balance i would. but i’d insist on a ski mask.

As I scrolled through the comments in the quiet of my bedroom, I felt myself retreat into a familiar, uncomfortable space—objectified, defined by others’ expectations.

Online comments from strangers weren’t just words on a screen; they were the script that shaped my self-worth. Back then, I had been reading social psychology books at night and became obsessed with the idea that the more attractive you were, the more people would see you as likable, knowledgeable, and trustworthy too. All I wanted was attention and thought I had it all figured out—redrawing the limits of my body in the gym, creating and hosting a reality show to put it all on display. I had worked so hard to become an object thinking it would simplify things, only to realize something I had always known: that desire is lonely work.

The second video began with a quick cut montage of Reese teaching us more specific stripping techniques on stage. Hip thrusting. Lap dancing. Opening your legs wide, reaching down to grab your ankles, and peeking at the audience through your legs.

Watching Reese coach us, I could feel how out of place I had been in my body back then. I was just trying to follow along while my interior monologue ran wild: Did I have enough charisma and personality for this? Was I muscular enough? Masculine enough? Man enough? 

Of all the episodes of the show, this one tapped into my deepest insecurities. It would just be me on stage. If I went full monty, there would be nowhere to hide, nothing between me and the crowd—not even my clothes. Could I play the role well enough to forget my flaws—or would I be exposed, not just physically, but in every way that terrified me?

But when I rewatched this again all these years later, the memory that materialized had nothing to do with my self-doubt or performance anxiety. It was of Reese telling me to take my shirt off, then tilting his head to watch. Thrilled by the attention, I yanked it off without hesitation. But forgot about my baseball hat, and it fell to the floor. Reese scooped it up and slid it onto his head. He winked at me and adjusted the brim, grinning ear-to-ear.

And sure enough, in the next clip, we were all standing shirtless together. Reese was wearing my hat, studying me while I asked if he would give us some solo coaching and run through our stripping routines for the show later that night. I realized now that I look a lot like Reese - muscular and tanning-bed brown, same shaggy 2000s-era hair. Except I was covered in tattoos and he didn’t have any. Maybe that was the attraction?

The next scene began with a tight shot of Reese’s face in profile. We had traded positions. He was staring up at me from the couch where Rob and I had been sitting while I waited to start my routine on stage. I was fully dressed again, but he was still shirtless. And Rob? He was waiting downstairs in the green room in the basement. That was the director’s idea. She didn’t want us to see each other’s routines in case it gave someone an advantage. The competition part of the reality show was real, even if so much of the show was not.

The corny reality show music started again, and Reese said, “Okay, Sean, show me what you got.”

I teetered across the stage towards Reese like a cow on ice, my eyes wide, nostrils flaring. The first half of my routine was just me trying to take my t-shirt off. I kept hiking it up and flashing my stomach before letting the shirt drop again.

When my nerves finally settled, I fell back into the leopard-print chaise. I pulled my belt off in one smooth motion and whipped my belt against the ground, causing Reese to jump back from the stage, his eyes telegraphing fear. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. Who wants to be sexy when you could be a scary stripper instead?

Soon I was on my hands and knees, doing push-ups for Reese as he sat watching off-stage. Here, at last, was some choreography I had practiced at home in the week leading up to filming. Then the next shot jumped forward in time: I was in electric yellow briefs, giving Reese a lap dance on the leopard-print chaise. Pretty tame stuff until I pushed him down in the cushions, my head ducking beside his to whisper something in his ear.

Whatever I said to him had an immediate effect because the dynamic between us changed. His hands came to my waist and he began to tug my underwear off, slowly revealing a white thong. It had hidden clasps on one side and was the final part of my routine. The plan was to push Reese away from me and return to the front of the stage, then rip the thong off as the music ended. But instead, I lost my balance trying to get my feet out of my briefs and grabbed Reese’s hair by accident—and to my surprise, both then and now, he shoved his face directly into my crotch.

I hadn’t remembered this, and it was so unexpected I fumbled my phone in bed. My boyfriend rolled over away from me. I paused the video and hid the screen against the bedsheets. While I waited for him to settle again, I was struck by the parallels between my old life and this one. Back then, I was desperate for validation, my self-worth tied to how I was seen. Yet here I was, in bed with the person who knew me most, feeling more distant than ever.

Once his breathing slowed down, I brought my phone back up and zoomed in on Reese’s face. Dark brown eyes, eyebrows black as his hair. He had a heart-shaped babyface, but a well-defined brow ridge, a larger nose, and a strong chin. The way Reese stared at me in the video felt like more than acting. But maybe I was imagining things. I had read somewhere that he had a wife and was 100% straight, that he just stripped and did gay porn for the money.

In the next scene, we sat close together on the chaise on stage, both of us still shirtless. His critique started with some practical advice. He told me to think about wearing shoes later, during the real show, because it’s a nightclub and there could be glass on the floor.

But I wanted to know about the rehearsal, so I asked: “What did you think?”

“Pretty good. You know, your tattoos are great.” He reached behind my back and the couch cushion, and rested his hand on my ass. “Especially the lower back ones.”

In true reality show fashion, this moment was punctuated with an angel’s harp strings trilling in the background. Ok, so clearly I wasn’t imagining things. Reese was flirting with me. Even the show’s editor had seen enough to turn our flirting into a will-they/won’t-they story beat.

I scrolled quickly through the rest of the video. There was Rob, on stage with an umbrella. His routine was a little more acrobatic, like something you’d see in a real strip club. But he didn’t pull Reese onto the stage like I did. During the feedback session, they sat far apart, leaning away from each other.

Back on the blog page, someone else had noticed this too: During the critiques, Reese sat close to the first guy, leaned in and even touched his back while with the second guy, Reese leaned back and never got close. Hmmm…

Another wrote: Looks like there is a little sugar there. I bet he enjoys his work.

And below that: Could you PLEASE stop celebrating the gay-for-pays and other hypocrites who exploit our community?

And further down still: Every porn video plays into some kind of fantasy, which is the entire point. Whether or not every gay porn model is gay really doesn’t matter.

Maybe I’d been looking at this the wrong way. It didn’t matter what I wanted, who I was, or how I felt. For the men watching this, I could be anyone or anything. Maybe that’s the fantasy. And wasn’t that the same fantasy I had been projecting on Reese? He was just there to do his job, to get paid and make some tips, and then head to the next city on his club tour.

Earlier in the first video clip, it cut to an interview with me, Rob, Reese, and the nightclub manager sitting together in the basement, talking about stripping and Reese’s career. Rob asked Reese: “What kind of person does it take to do this?”

Without missing a beat, Reese joked: “A pervert.”

Reese’s kind of freedom was intoxicating to watch. The way he moved, the way he didn’t care who saw him, who judged him—it was everything I thought I wanted. The freedom to be yourself and not give a fuck about what other people thought and said about who you are or what you do. Maybe that was the real lesson here, the one thing I was supposed to take into my live performance later that night, and then onward into the rest of my life. But I wasn’t ready for it then. Maybe I’m still not.