Jacob McArthur Mooney

Ah yes, here's the October baseball I remember...

My wife reads endlessly but also has an impeccable numbers sense, and this means that she foregoes bookmarks. She just stops reading, downs the book, remembers she's on page 167. And pages 305 and 84 of her other two books-in-progress. One of the top eight or nine most astonishing things about her.

TOMORROW NIGHT! CIUT 89.5 FM 10pm - 11pm - Host @valentinoassenza.bsky.social welcomes Ira Wells with his latest book “On Book Banning” @biblioasis.bsky.social - Also on the show Jacob McArthur Mooney @mcarthurmooney.bsky.social talking about his latest novel “The Northern” @ecwpress.bsky.social

I finally had the time to read this and it was really worthwhile. A character focussed coming of age story in the world of low level baseball and baseball cards. Dreams vs reality. It’s always fun to see #ldnont represented in a novel, even for a chapter. #booksky

Stolen valour because I suspect this used to be a softball uniform.

Really glad you liked it, John!

Me wearing a red and navy baseball shirt with a picture of Darryl Strawberry and the team name "The Sobbin' Strawberries"

Today's goodness is sponsored by my wife, who thrifted me this shirt someone made.

It has a lot to recommend it. Available at TPL through Libby if you still have an account.

53. It is fall. Are we falling Those trees lose leaves. That is why foliage is called foliage And leaves are called leaves. leaves. Who calls your falling. Is it your calling. Is your calling leaving Is your leaving calling Is your coming going. Is your leaving leafing That is, in leaf. It is fall. Are we filing Leaves of absence. Are we in freefall. Do we feel it. Are we following. That is, filing after Will we too be filed after In a book

I can't decide if I like this or I think it is Dr Seuss for grad students.

Why Writers Quit (or go crazy) Part 3 Is it better to burn out, fade away, or become a life coach

Why Writers Quit (or go crazy) Part 3
open.substack.com/pub/zoewhitt...

22. Berlin is green. It is made up of old growth and new growth. A fire took place here, a conflagration. It's called conflagration because it started with flags. A flag is a mark. If there's a mark, there's a market. I come from the market, make dinner, and en- gage in struggle It is a struggle to get my daughters to sleep. They sleep on bunk beds The bunk beds are contemporary. They come from Ikea. They were transported by trucks. My daughters are transported. There is a herd of unicorns on the rug below them. They come from developing markets In markets that are already developed, philoso- phers say that unicorns do not exist.

Today's read is from The Feeling Sonnets by Eugene Ostashevsky

Erev Yom Kippur and the National Day for Truth & Reconciliation share a date this year (Sept 30). The op-eds write themselves...

176. It was never the Music at all, it was always the Sound; and though there's no way for him to under- stand this, perhaps the Sound moves him now be- cause, a little more than twenty years after its birth, the Sound has become about itself, the Sound is about its own truth and corruption in the same way that, a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin' in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful. When the Sound has circled to swallow its tail, it becomes a world of its own, god or no god, or in which Vikar is god--or in any event a god that kills fathers rather than sons.

Today's read is Zeroville by Steve Erickson, which is mostly about the movies but contains the best paragraph about punk music.

YOUR BIRTHDAY IS OUR BIRTHDAY Everyone remembers the nightmare of being born, the raging maelstrom of turning one and the emotional meat-grinder of turning two. Or the abject terror upon waking that first morning of our sixth year, peeling the curtains like some awful scab as parents' footsteps down the hall mix with that bone-chilling, barely whispered Happy Birthday song. It's terrifying, turning ten- so many vultures. And there's the dumpster fire of fourteen. The crocodile aquarium of twenty-one. The pain at twenty-five we must not name. And yet, I've said nothing at all of the ghost rave of thirty-three the quivering stem of fifty-eight, or even the lonely moonlit loon of seventy-five, out there on the dark water of the years to come, who calls and calls and calls. Happy birthday! As per uszh stay three metres away from the nearest balloon. Nobody ordered a sad clown but alas, he is here, hunched by the punch bowl, with bells on.

from Existing Music, the new Nick Thran.

What a terrible time to have lungs.

The most common refrain in the parenting social media ecosystem is "Schools should start teaching {thing that is already subject to 100+ curriculum hours in most public schools}"

Audiobook Cover: "The Northern" by Jacob McArthur Mooney Read by Peter Outerbridge Stylized image in orange and blue of a baseball player holding a bat . It is the summer of 1952 and three men — well, one man and two boys — are on a spiritual and commercial mission. Dispatched from Minnesota to Western Ontario, they have been hired by an upstart Mormon baseball card company to find licensees for their products among the young men filing out Korean War–era rosters in the Northern League, at the bottom-most rung of professional baseball. What the Northern has for them, and the secrets and deceptions they have for each other, will drive their two weeks in Canada into ever-growing chaos.

Audiobook Narrator Spotlight: Peter Outerbridge

Peter Outerbridge is one of my fave Canadian actors and I'm looking forward to listening to his narration of "The Northern" by @mcarthurmooney.bsky.social a #ReadTheNorth selection from the Toronto Public Library toronto.overdrive.com/media/11965360

The Northern: A Novel A novel concerned with sports, labor, growing up, and God, The Northern is a funny and heartbreaking book about the series of disappointments that characterize the progress of growing up.

Baseball fans: I have three indie-published Canadian books for you to spend time with this summer. #CanLit

The Northern by @mcarthurmooney.bsky.social from @ecwpress.bsky.social. ecwpress.com/products/nor...

Turning Pages logo - open book with pages flared, next to cover of The Northern which features a stoic baseball player at bat

Spoke to poet @mcarthurmooney.bsky.social about his novel The Northern ( @ecwpress.bsky.social ) for Turning Pages today. Episode is up now: umfm.com/programming/...

Google and Meta search both report that Cape Breton Island has its own time zone 12 minutes ahead of mainland Nova Scotia time because they are both drawing that information from a Beaverton article I wrote in 2024

There is no calmer thought than a locked and trusted door. A room lit such that shadows cast elective patches on the walls you've hung with children's faces. Focus: the news is not your father. You can be bereaved and also hated But you were called to understand, not alliterate. You decorous asshole don't you count your dead? Remember: it's only gallows humor if it's you that's in the gallows Or if you own the gallows Or if you own the gallows, but it's also you that's in them. Wouldn't that be weird? The antidote to mourning is loneliness, friends We take it from each other.

Happy to have a poem called "Fields & Arenas" up at @bookninja.bsky.social 's famously minimalist New Poetry today.

newpoetry.ca/2025/06/09/f...

It is again that time of year when I have to suffer people using the word "graduand."

Happy birthday to The Northern. Would be great to see friends and neighbours at @anotherstoryto.bsky.social tonight for books, beverages, and entertainment from myself, Lex, and @utilityofboredom.bsky.social .

Toronto Lit Up: The Northern - TIFA Join us at Another Story Bookshop on May 26 for the launch of The Northern by Jacob McArthur Mooney (ECW Press). The author will be joined by Alexis von Konigslow and Andrew Forbes for readings. Toron...

I have events next week! I'll be in Toronto on Monday supporting @mcarthurmooney.bsky.social and Alexis von Konigslow as they launch their novels.

Details:

festivalofauthors.ca/event/toront...

I am fully 100% onboard with unisex washrooms but I must ask for signage that tells me, when there are multiple options, which door can be relied on to lead to urinals, as I am a busy modern person and I have the capacity and desire to pee standing.

But check out all his majesty.

Logo of the Davisville PS Dragons

Referring to my kids' school mascot as "Trogdor" and he's looking at me like he's already shopping for rest homes.

I would like us to go back to using "outlandish" to mean "foreign."

Absolutely giggly about getting to appear on this show, as a listener for 10 years now. I'm as much an EW fan as a baseball fan, I think. Thanks Ben for bringing me on!

Hey thanks Georgie! No refunds.