I’m a 21st century human earthling (raised, however, in that distant 20th century past of typewriters and smoking indoors) lucky enough to have the internet at my fingertips while digging those same fingers into the soil, as I make my living in a similar way to those in the 21st century BCE: farming.
My farm is called Ferme et Forêt, located near Wakefield, Quebec, Canada, on unceded Algonquin territory, and as of this writing in early 2021, it is seven years old. While it continues to occupy most of my time, it’s now old enough that it can sometimes go off and play by itself, leaving me some time to engage with the wide world around me through the medium of writing.
Before becoming a farmer, I once called myself a writer. I attended (but never finished) film school, and dabbled in script writing and other creative scribbling, before finding a voice of sorts as a freelance writer of travel, personal essays, and intensively researched polemics on the errors of our economic thought and practice. Between 1999 and 2005, a couple dozen of my articles appeared in publications such as Saturday Night Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and the Ottawa Citizen – back when newspapers still had a budget for freelance writers.
The goal of this website is to present some of my favourite works from this previous period, as well as new ones. It is my hope that these words will entertain, inform, and inspire, but most of all will connect to others in the ecosystem of ideas, in the same way that, through farming, I strive to connect people to their environments through the magic of food.
I also write just about food and farming over here: Farmer’s Table.