Check out my latest essay about travelling Ontario in the time of COVID
Sold another essay recently, and it’s a return to my roots so to speak – travel writing! I used to sell travel writing all the time (probably because I was travelling so much!) but obviously because of COVID, travel has been restricted. So I wrote for the official Northern Ontario Travel magazine about how 2020 was very much about no-passport travel for me and my boyfriend. We took road-trips across northern Ontario and discovered places we ordinarily would never have ventured to. We also discovered a lot of perks of travelling in the time of COVID that were totally unexpected.
The piece includes all of my own original photography as well (yes those are my tender tootsies on the dashboard). The story is actually really funny (well it’s funny now in hindsight) because we also got horrible lost at one point with not a soul around for kilometres and we were saved by a local man named Keith. Let us forever sing the ballad of the legend of Keith of the north. Praise be.
Click here to read my story in its entirety. Enjoy and travel safely.
But wait, there’s more!
Recently I told you about the short play I was performing for the Next Stage Community Booster in the Toronto Fringe Festival. Welp, the festival was a huge success, and my short was even reviewed!
Mooney On Theatre (which is one of the most popular and all-expansive theatre critique sites in Toronto) said that my performance was “expressive,” “graceful,” and “definitely worth checking out.”
So . . . I don’t suck? News to me!
I’m so pleased my writing and performance resonated with so many people! Check out the entire review of my theatre piece here.
As always, don’t forget to check out Christine Estima dot com for more of my published works and performances!
Listen to my @CBCTapestry interview in full!
Recently, I mentioned that my feature essay in Maisonneuve Magazine was garnering some media attention. Now, the CBC Radio show Tapestry has taken an interest. They read my article and then interviewed me about my essay and my Arab family’s deep roots in Canada. The interview is about 20 minutes long and it even sounds like a radio play! There’s music and sound effects and other media, archival, and research clips peppered throughout. It’s a super fun listen, so please click this audio file to listen or click here!
The show aired on CBC Radio One this past weekend, but the entire interview is also available anytime to listen on their website. I’m so pleased that my article and my family’s story is resonating with so many people! It’s so great sometimes to be a writer and have your words really mean something to complete strangers.
Read my latest essay published in @WalrusMagazine !
Here’s something I’ve been keeping a lid on for some months, but am super excited to finally share! I sold a story to The Walrus! For my international readers, The Walrus is a Canadian magazine that could easily be likened to The New Yorker – a highly-curated arts and culture magazine with some amazing critical thinkers writing for and creating the magazine. It’s a national magazine, available across the country.
My essay, published today, is about the time last year when I found a roll of film on the curb and set out to find the lost photographer. It’s a really quirky story that involves a lot of six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon but also about expectations v reality. I may or may not mention Amélie once or twice within this piece. Check it out and share it with your friends!
So here’s something funny about this process of being a freelance writer that is related to this story – last year, another magazine (which shall remain nameless) bought this story. They sat on this story for 7 months. They edited it so it stripped out all the colour, flare, style, and tone of my writing. They were absolutely unreachable at times, and it was a super frustrating experience working with them. Finally, a publication date for this past January was set. They paid me in full in anticipation of the publication date. Then, ON THE DAY it was set to be published, I received an email from the editor, saying that they were killing the story because it was “too local” and not something that would appeal to people across the country.
What the shizz?
Not once in the 7 months that they had the story was the concern that it was “too local” ever raised. Also, that’s a bullshit criticism, you guys have read the story, do you find this story unappealing to people outside of Toronto? Rhetorical question.
And worst of all, before that publication had bought the story, I had pitched it elsewhere, & some places only got back to me after said-publication bought it. So I had turned down other publications for them! For those of you outside of the publishing world, you should know this kind of behaviour and practice is all SUPER UNPROFESSIONAL. I’ve had stories killed before, but not on the DAY it was to be published, for such a lame excuse, after paying me in full. Most writers I know have had similar experiences with them, and warned me about them. So in my reply, I told them exactly what I thought. May the bridges I burn light the way.
I subsequently erased ALL the edits they did on my piece, and went back to my true voice that they tried to strip from the piece. Sometimes editors try to “trim the fat” of a story, but any chef will tell you that the fat has all the flavour. Good writing requires a style and a voice, and I wasn’t going to let them convince me my voice needed to be trimmed.
Fast forward to this past autumn, The Walrus bought the story (and frankly, The Walrus is a much better publication, with a helluva lot more respect), and the process of fashioning and editing the piece with them has been light years ahead and beyond what said-shizz-publication was like. And I’m super proud of this end result. Because above all, I found a publication that nurtured and encouraged my voice and style.
There are a lot of shady things publications try to do to freelance writers . . . and most of the time, they get away with it. Being freelance means you don’t get the support of HR and you’re in this legal gray area most of the time. So I’ve learned that you have to be your best advocate in this business . . . because the world doesn’t owe you any favours. Hustle and work hard, and it will all sort itself out in the end.
And maybe, if you’re really lucky, you’ll get paid twice for the same story 😉
(Yes that was tacky of me, but I’m not deleting it.)
Don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com for more of my published essays, stories, and more!
Using A Disposable Underwater Camera in a Swimming Hole: my latest in @VICE
As promised, more of my travel writing has gone up on VICE, it’s a whirlwind of publications around here, fam. This piece is about the cenotes of Mexico, which are subterranean swimming holes, and I illustrate the piece with pics I took using an underwater disposable camera. As you can see, the results are quote ethereal, haunting, almost tableau-like. Read it in full here.
I’ve been really lucky as a travel writer to get a lot of my pieces published in some really great publications, but I feel like the amount of my published travel pieces pales in comparison to how much travel I’ve actually done in my life. I’ve traversed this planet many times over, and it’s no where near quitting time. So I hope this trend of getting all of my fubar clusterfucks, epic extravaganzas, and adventures published in print will continue.
Here’s to writing on the road!
Don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com for more!
Music Worth Writing About: my piece in @thepuritan’s #TownCrier
Remember a few months ago when my creative non-fiction piece ‘Sarajevo Roses‘ was published in The Puritan? The good peeps there asked me to contribute to their Town Crier section on the topic of music and what I like to listen to when I write. People ask me all the time what music is good for surging their creativity when they write. Here’s what I listen to. Maybe you’ll discover some new tunes that will inspire your writing. Click here or click the image above to read.
And as always, don’t forget to check out the official Christine Estima dot com to read more of my published works.
Check out my column in @MetroNewsCanada
Pick up a copy of the weekend edition of Metro News and turn to the centrefold for my latest column. I talk about the language we employ when talking about race and ethnicity.
It was really great to work with the team at Metro, the whole process was very fast-paced and positive. It was such a challenge to put everything I wanted to say into a mere 400 words, I’m used to writing 1500-word essays, so I welcomed the challenge to be brief and succinct. BUT I’M SO LOQUACIOUS!
Also, funny sidenote: that photograph of me there… That was taken yesterday with my iPad as I sat in a café on Spadina. OH THE GLAMOUR.
Fanks for reading, my munchkins, and don’t forget to check out ChristineEstima.com for more on my writing career.
Check out my academic essay in Palaver Journal!
I recently wrote an essay about narratives of romance in spoken word and sold it to Palaver Journal, an interdisciplinarian journal based out of the University of North Carolina. I did my Masters degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. FINALLY USING IT.
The basic idea behind the essay is that the practice and process that once were associated with writing love letters is now used almost exclusively in spoken word, as the former is in decline and the latter has risen from its ashes, so to speak. So what once was written is now verbal. What was private is now public.
My essay appears in their new Spring 2015 issue out now, and you can read it online for free. You can check out the entire issue here or you can just read my essay here. I appear on page 27!
And don’t forget to check out my all-new ChristineEstima.com for all of my published works and writing samples!
My Writing Space
I once blogged about my writing practice and process, and I feel this is a nice dovetail: my writing desk and space. We all need to carve out our own little nooks in this world, and this tiny corner is mine.
This where I do all my writing: all my short stories, all my blogging, and all my freelance articles are done here, including a little doodling and reading now and then. I decorated it like this because I think it reflects me and my personality best. Some people prefer really modern, sleek, office-y, stainless-steel-type designs, and others prefer a kind of non-descript, antiseptic look. But I wanted my space to be peppered with all of the things that inspired me, visually and spatially, and all the things that really mean something to me.
For example, these are my Lebanese grandparents making-out on their front porch in Montreal circa 1948. I typed out that Bukowski quote on my typewriter. All the picture frames were bought from London flea markets, but a few I found discarded on the sidewalk. Who throws out gorgeous picture frames?!
That photograph in the foreground of the two 1920s women pushing the pram: I have no idea who they are. I found them discarded on the flea market grounds in Brussels right before the sky opened up and an incredible tempest washed everything away. I feel like I saved them.
Those are Belgian telegrams, and also some French postcards ad German letters, which I bought from their respective flea markets. I typed out the quote at the bottom, and I found the image of the typewritten quote at the top online and then printed it out on photographic paper at a pharmacy in London.
I got the antique iron keys from a friend who bought them for me when I was living in Copenhagen. I typed out the Dumas quote, and it sits on a small blue photo album from the 1940s that I bought in Paris. The vase & saucer I got at a London flea market, and the typewriter ribbon tin I bought at the Brooklyn flea.
The pill bottles in the foreground I got at a flea here in Toronto. The red-cover books in the background are all travel guidebooks from the 1920s, 30s, & 40s. It’s so interesting to read about “where to find a public bathhouse in London,” or about how many Francs you can get for your Crowns, Half-Crowns, Shillings, and Sovereigns. There’s even a section on why French customs strictly prohibits British matches from entering the country, but you can bring your own cigarettes. Also, air travel was so new, that they don’t really mention it. They only mention taking the ferry from Dover to Calais! The guidebooks have fold-out maps and even photographs. Looking at Amsterdam then and comparing it to now is such a mind-fuck.
That’s a Bukowski quote.
I bought that cigar box from a flea market in Düsseldorf. I put all of the small monochrome photographs that I bought from flea markets around Europe in there. A note about the photographs: I don’t know the people. I am assuming they’ve all passed, seeing as how their personal family photo albums were for sale on flea markets. I buy them because they look so happy. I like their faces. Also, sometimes going through private photos reveals some interesting secrets, as I wrote in an essay for VICE recently … And if they’re not in the cigar box….
… they’re hanging on my wall. From left to right, I bought him in Brussels, him in Copenhagen, and her in Paris.
That babe second-from-right is my Mum when she was 18. The rest, left to right, Brussels, Brussels, Berlin, and the child on the right is from Amsterdam.
These ladies are so old, they’re beginning to fade, but I love them all the more because they’re so bad-ass. On the left, I bought them in Paris and on the back it’s dated June 18, 1929. On the right, I bough her in Brussels, it’s dated August 18, 1922. She’s so fucking cool, I can’t even. I’m all out of evens.
Bought both from Brussels. Street scenes and street photography from the early 20th century are so amazing to me. I love the composition of the left photo! Right photo on the back is dated May 1942 and it says they just returned from shopping.
There’s my gorgeous bee-yooot. Read this for the story behind the provenance of this baby.
Some of the books that really moved me that are resting on my desk are All That I Am by Anna Funder, The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert, and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.
I feel like I become a different person when I sit down at this desk. Outside, I’m gregarious and silly and hungry and moving and yelling and dancing and what not… but here, I am something else.
I have a lot more upcoming publications yet-to-be-announced, but now you know where I was when I wrote them.
Remember to update your links and visit the new home of ChristineEstima.com!
Check me out in the latest issue of AufBau Magazine (if you can read German)
AufBau is a monthly Swiss-German Jewish magazine that has been around for many decades. In the 1930s, regular contributors included Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt! Their latest issue, the August/September issue, is all about Canada with a focus on Toronto’s arts and cultural scene. Knowing full well that I’m not part of “the tribe,” they still asked me to contribute two articles to the issue! The first one is about Lorne Michaels and SNL’s continued relevance in Canada, and the second details the arts and cultural festivities that occur in Toronto each year.
Now, the issue is only in German, so if you can read German, click here or click on the above image! I’m on page 17 and later on page 23. I’ve been told that the English version might appear soon on their website… if so, I will link to that as it happens.
This is the first time I’ve ever been translated into another language. I feel pretty Ausgezeichnet, as the Germans might say.
Enjoy!
The Spadina Monologues 