At Mount Royal University, the reckoning is no different than at any other school: I peoplewatch faces bathed in the blue light of phones in fluorescent-lit hallways. Thumbs moving with the mechanical precision of assembly line workers. Each swipe lasts exactly 15 seconds before the next dopamine hit. Laptops display split screens dressed half academic paper, half Netflix. Between classes I walk around campus and watch students congregate around outlets like pilgrims at a shrine. Seventeen TikToks, four Instagram reels, three Snapchat stories, two YouTube shorts. Migration patterns of human attention are clear: from longform writing to longform video, from longform video to fifteen-second bursts of consciousness. We are dissolving in real-time, surely. Salt in hot water.

The East Gate Starbucks is my favourite observation point. From here, I can see the parade of devices carried as external organs. Thousands of social media posts and messages pass through our bodies every second. Ghost signals passing through my bones as radiation. When I pass through the Riddell Library’s spiral doors, I think about how the internet was supposed to be our Library of Alexandria — infinite, democratic, eternal. Instead, it has become a carnival of infinite distractions. Everything all of the time. Ephemeral.

On Tuesday afternoon I’m sitting in my usual spot in the library when the power goes out and plunges the building into an unexpected purple-pink twilight. The emergency lights cast strange shadows. Dozens of students looking up simultaneously, as if waking from a collective dream. What happens next surprises me. The student who was watching TikToks about writing actually pulls out a notebook. The girl who spent every class watching Netflix under her desk strikes up a conversation with her neighbour about Gothic literature. For forty-three minutes, while the maintenance team works to restore power, I witness people sketching in margins. Flipping through physical books. Talking in full sentences. The air feels different.

It reminds me of the day I found an old GeoCities archive on a forgotten hard drive. Buried among the animated GIFs and comic sans text were blog posts from the late 90s — raw, sometimes-bizarre thoughts from people who weren’t trying to build personal brands or monetize existence. One post, written by a teenager in 1998, read: “Sometimes I think the internet is the only place where I can be really honest.” I think of the sacredness wrapped in HTML. Ceremony disguised as content. Each post both therapy session and proof of existence. A seed planted in soil that might one day grow into something more. I am a child of the Internet’s Wild West, born on the cusp between Millennial and Generation Z — too young for LiveJournal, too old for TikTok. I watched sites and communities like GeoCities rise and fall like Atlantis, always standing at the shore, words caught in my throat, believing I had nothing worth saying.

It wasn’t until I became a cook at a children’s hospice that I finally began to write publicly. Death has a way of loosening one’s grip on perfectionism. My first posts on Medium.com emerged like careful footprints in fresh snow, each title a small rebellion against God:

  • Death Writing: Meaningless Ideas, Timeless Work, and Paper
  • The Art of Losing: How lucky it is — to not be victorious
  • Dying Without Seeing You Again: Living on fire without putting yourself out — and cherishing the heat

For almost a decade, I crafted these small testaments to existence. Each piece was a stone added to a cairn, marking my path through the wilderness. But now even Medium, that last outpost of thoughtful digital writing, feels like an independent bookstore on clearance sale in a dilapidated, liminal mall.

  • The Land of Ghosts and Glory: Queer Identity and the Indigenous Paradigm
  • Every Atom of My Blood: What a documentary about Romanian Literature retaught me about everything
  • Our Finite Everything

I once learned about winter counts — pictographic histories painted on buffalo hide, each image representing one year’s most significant event. I think about each essay, each poem as a digital winter count. Each title a pictograph, each paper a hide stretched and worked until it becomes usable, becomes art. I have an epiphany. We’re not watching the death of literacy; we’re watching its mutation. In the 4th floor of the university library, there’s a climate-controlled room full of medieval manuscripts — hands cramping around quills, monks illuminating manuscripts, the slow accretion of human knowledge. Now, in the Tim Horton’s line, I watch a student craft a perfectly worded Instagram caption, her thumbs flying over the glass screen with the same intensity those monks must have felt. The medium changes, but the urge remains: to make marks that matter, to leave traces of our consciousness.

During a fire drill the next week, as we all stand in the frigid October air of Calgary, I notice something else. Conversations shift. A student who never speaks in class tells me about her grandmother who kept secret diaries in syllabics. Another shares how he’s building an archive of his family’s immigration stories. A professor admits she’s been writing fanfiction for twenty years under a pseudonym. We are all secret writers, it seems. Finding our own ways to practice bloodwriting.

Bloodwriting begins with a pulse. The thrum of your fingers against keys. Flutters in your chest when you press publish. A quiet conviction that your words — however simple or however small — deserve to exist in the world. It’s not craft or talent or followers. Bloodwriting is the courage to leave a mark, to say: Hi, I am here, I think, I feel, I exist.

The surprise isn’t that people are reading less; it’s that they’re reading differently. Between classes, I start noticing the secret readers: the maintenance worker listening to an audiobook while changing air filters, the cafeteria cashier reading webnovels on her phone, the security guard who turns out to be working on a dissertation about storytelling in diaspora communities. The university itself is a kind of text, layered with narratives I’m only beginning to decode. Gloria Anzaldúa asked “why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.” Bloodwriting is this act of creation and compensation, but it’s also an act of connection. Every word you write begins a thread — invisible but real — connecting you to others who resonate with your truth. These threads weave a different kind of web, one that exists beneath or above or beyond the commercial internet — a web of human voices speaking their truth in all its messy, glorious complexity.

When our ancestors painted on cave walls, they mixed their own blood with the ochre to make the images more powerful. More alive. Everything that matters costs us something of ourselves. Every time you open a blank document, you’re creating a small altar.

One day, in the bathroom stall — that last bastion of enforced non-digital space — I find someone has scratched a URL into the metal wall. It leads to a Tumblr blog about grief and healing, written by a former student. The most recent post has two comments. The first says: “I’ve been looking for words like these my whole life.” The second is a string of emojis that somehow manages to convey more emotion than most novels I’ve read.

The term “digital native” suggests we were born knowing how to navigate this landscape of screens and signals. But that’s not quite right. What we were born knowing — what every human is born knowing — is the need to make marks that matter. We are all trying to prove we were here, we lived, we had something to say. Adrienne Rich called writing “re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” Bloodwriting is re-vision — entering our own lives from new directions, making and remaking ourselves explicitly in public, turning our wounds into windows.

During midterms a few years ago, I discovered that the university’s WiFi has a dead zone exactly three tables wide in the northwest corner of the old library — the one now being excavated for asbestos. Students avoid it like a curse, but I start sitting there intentionally. In this accidental Faraday cage, this bubble of digital silence, my writing changes. It becomes more urgent, less concerned with performance. I think about my work at the hospice again, about the ways that proximity to death clarifies things. About how every piece of writing is, in its own way, a hospice: a space where ideas can live out their natural life, die when they need to, be remembered.

Bloodwriting asks only for truth, for presence, for the courage to keep making marks even when — especially when — it feels like shouting into the void. Audre Lorde reminds us that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Neither is bloodwriting a luxury. It is survival. It is resistance. It is proof.

The semester edges toward winter. The days grow shorter, and the lights of phones and laptops burn brighter in the darkness. In one of my finals, I write about how penny dreadfuls and serial novels were accused of rotting young minds, much like TikTok today.

You certainly don’t need an MFA to bloodwrite. You don’t need perfect grammar or a sophisticated understanding of narrative structure. You need only what you already have: your life, your truth, your device, your willing fingers. Every smartphone is a publishing house, every social media account a potential grimoire. The democratization of voice that the early internet promised? It’s still possible, one bloodwritten post at a time.

When the Luddites broke machines in the 19th century, they weren’t against technology — they were against the dehumanization caused by technology. Bloodwriting is modern Luddism: not a rejection of digital tools, but a reclamation for human purposes.

Snow falls on campus, and the paths between buildings become treacherous. Students walk with their heads down, but now it’s to watch for ice, not screens. In these moments of enforced awareness, I see them notice things: the way snow catches in the brutalist architecture, the steam rising from the heating vents, the tracks we leave behind that will be covered by fresh snow, only to be made again tomorrow.

This too is bloodwriting. The daily practice of paying attention, of making marks that matter, of insisting on depth in an age of surfaces. Stories are medicine, healing both the teller and the listener. Bloodwriting carries this healing power into digital space. Every time you write your truth you’re creating medicine. You’re healing yourself, and you’re leaving healing for others to find.

Sometimes, late at night in the library, when the screens around me flicker like stars, I think about those monks, wrinkled drunk hands cramping around quills, believing in the importance of making marks on paper. I think about my own hands on this keyboard, practicing this ancient human urge to record, to remember, to reach out across time and space and say: this matters, this matters, this matters. And sometimes, in the quiet moments between keystrokes, I swear I can hear them writing back.