In Mr. Holmes, we are prompted to ask: What happens to old people who are alone? To be specific, what happens to people whose solitude comes about because the gifts they have or the wounds they bear make it difficult for them to inhabit the world as others might?
There was actually a brief period in winter when I fell into a deep funk, found myself crying on the phone with a friend, and seriously considered giving up writing for good, because just getting people to even respond to pleas for payment had become so dispiriting.
Excerpt: When we berate the poor for their “waste” or, for that matter, the rich for their “excess,” we are simply engaging in personalised narratives that do nothing to explain or even reveal the larger systems of power at work.
Excerpt: What is it about writing that we don’t see it as something that deserves compensation as labour? And why do we think that it’s okay to pay millionaires and billionaires with our labor instead of demanding that they pay us?