This is what I love, come find me.

This piece was commissioned by This Town is Small to accompany the launch of Fanatics, an exhibition mounted in the Hilda Woolnough Gallery at The Arts Guild that opened April 15, 2026.

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On summer days we’d walk down the long laneway, arrive at the swimming hole, strip off our clothes, and dive into the water, a cool, deep pool at a bend in the river. We’d emerge, refreshed, and lie on the warm rocks, basking in the sun.

We were a group of friends in that way that you can only be in your 20s, and we were free from shyness. The usual rules didn’t apply; being naked together was okay. Indeed, not only okay, but vital, connected, seen.

I’ve learned in the years since that when we walked down that lane together, we were entering a magic circle, a place where regular rules didn’t apply, where we could act in ways that, outside of the circle, would be profane. A shared experience of transgression bound us together.

I’ve been seeking out that same feeling ever since.

Crowded into the back of the bookstore on a Sunday night to talk about fountain pens. Geeking out about typefaces with a fellow printer in his letterpress shop in the woods of Nova Scotia. Being silly trading “yes, and” on the improv stage. Gathering with fellow widowers on Zoom, in the heart of the pandemic, to talk about our dead partners.

Magic circles are my favourite places. They are where I feel most alive, most myself, most able to reconsider what “myself” means.

A friend once described being a nerd as being someone comfortable inhabiting their interests, no matter how weird, in community with others who share them.

In community with.

It’s central to the power of the magic circle, that community: revealing our innermost selves, accepted as we are, where our weirdness overlaps. It’s a home.

One of those widowers, in my pandemic grief Zoom, told the story of how he and his late wife would make their bed together every morning; he missed doing that so dearly it hurt. I have been unable to make my own bed, in the six years since, without thinking of that, and in that he gave me a gift: allowing myself to feel, allowing me to feel with him.

Magic circles change us. We might emerge titillated, energized, accepted. We might emerge daunted, challenged, stuck. But when we walk toward deep engagement, whether it’s with grief or Japanese paper, when we share what we usually don’t, we can’t walk out without something moving inside us.

That internal movement, in community, is a powerful drug.

I’ve been spending a lot of time of late trying to answer the question “what do I want.” Part of the answer lies in the realization that I’ve been chasing that pure feeling of stripping down naked, laying myself bare, in whatever form that takes.

“This is what I love, come find me.”

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Thanks to Alibis for Interaction, especially Luisa Carbonelli, Nene Ormes, and Johanna Koljonen, for teaching me about magic circles (and for drawing me into a particularly good one) and to my naked swimming mates, my grief club friends, and my fountain pen nerds for being comfortable in vulnerability with me.