hello & welcome

isn't it expected to be late to the party in 2020?

Hi. My name is Megan. I’m a twenty-five year-old small-town Canadian, hailing from a couple hours north of Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario. The ink on my Master’s degree in Cultural Studies has yet to finish drying. I write things, and more often than not, those things are about music. Or music is otherwise implicated in them in some way. Everything is at least music-adjacent.

While I would never call myself a musician, I technically do have some musical training. My music degree-wielding mother stuck me in piano lessons when I was eight years old. I hated practicing, but learning how to read music was, admittedly, pretty nifty. This set a good foundation for my middle and high-school band stints playing the alto saxophone, and a couple years of vocal lessons. A child of the Taylor Swift generation, I began to teach myself guitar on an old nylon-stringed Yamaha the summer between eight and ninth grade. Naturally, I wanted to be able to accompany the songs I had started writing at age 11 or 12. I posted some of these on the internet in later years, and have thankfully since wiped them from public domain. TLDR; I am devastatingly mediocre, and that’s probably a generous assessment. (It’s my newsletter, okay?)

I went on to minor in music during my undergraduate English Literature degree at the University of Guelph, after an introductory musicology course became my saving grace during the tumult of my first semester. It all eventually spiralled into deciding to apply for grad school to continue writing about (writing about) music. You can read the resultant MRP here.

When I love something, I tend to be an overflowing sink about it. Dionne Brand famously wrote “show restraint” on one of my poetry assignments in undergrad. “Famously,” because she’s the most famous person to have given me this critique. There have been many others, though, and they’ve only hurt slightly less. I’m considering getting those two hallowed words tattooed on me so that maybe, by osmosis, the advice will actually take.

The thing about loving music, and writing about it, is that it always loves you— and writes you— back. Whether you need more from it or less, it always delivers. You can let it buzz unassumingly in the background. You can sleep inside its brain and let it envelop your whole world. There is always something new to find in the endless nuances of the same three-minute song you’ve played a thousand times. There is always another way to make sense of it in relation to what you’re going through and the emotions you’re processing. It changes with different environments; with varying degrees of stillness and movement. And, of course, there is always more to be discovered and rediscovered. Its sheer abundance is both overwhelming and life-affirming. There is ever-teeming potential for the perfect song at the perfect moment.

Which is to say, the meanings multiply. The music and the words pile up in times tables. Forgive me for seeing myself in the excess. As a poet who spends a good deal of time Googling synonyms, I promise I’m still selective. Persnickety, even.

I don’t have much planned out in terms of what this newsletter will look like. (However, we are coming into year-end list season…) But I do know that it will definitely be fun. I hope something here resonates with you, or at least makes you laugh; whether it’s intentional, or at me embarrassing myself in front of the internet. Just as long as you don’t tell me which!

Okay, talk soon.

-m