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The most useful advice I’ve retained from my undergraduate program in creative writing is a lesson about structure from producer and screenwriter Peggy Thompson. She trained us to watch movies with a stopwatch, clocking the timing of different plot points, such as the call to action, the midpoint, and the climax—her rationale being that viewers’ commitment to mainstream films is tied to their expectations. If the plot twists don’t make sense or the story is taking too long to unfold, we’re more likely to walk out.

I called Thompson to discuss what struck me as similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the story-structure pitfalls she had taught us. The first part of the pandemic was rife with dramatic calls to action—the introduction of physical distancing, nightly cheers for health care workers. Then came progress in curbing infection rates, then (as in any epic struggle) setbacks. But, instead of resolving, as the plot of even the most basic Hollywood movie manages to do, things kept getting worse: ineffective lockdowns, quickly spreading variants, confusing vaccine rollouts. As many critics of the institutional response to the pandemic have observed, you could hardly tell the second act from the third, let alone a potential fourth—especially in regions that have been in and out of states of emergency for months. Now, more than a year since the pandemic started, we seem to have “lost the plot,” Thompson concurred.

We were moved to learn that a doctor recently requested hundreds of copies of The Walrus for COVID-19 patients at half a dozen Toronto-area hospitals. Perhaps in life, unlike in art, the biggest victories don’t have tidy endings—but that doesn’t make our progress any less meaningful or compelling.


- Jessica Johnson

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Resilience is often a celebrated state of being. But is it useful to use resilience as a policy? Resilience might be the watch word if you’re fighting a zombie apocalypse or evading a meteor that threatens all life on earth, but if we zoom out, celebrating resilience doesn’t solve or change issues that plague society, like inequality. Vinita Srivastava spoke about the need for structural change to the systems that no longer serve us.
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This weeks newsletter was written by Jessica Johnson, produced by Jason Herterich, and copy-edited by Jonah Brunet.

Congratulations to William from Montreal for winning three books in our Summer Reading contest!
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