Subject Headings is a playground.
Like every bookish, quiet, introverted girl in a small high school in a non-descript part of the world, I wanted to be a writer. In fact, I was still insisting that was my dream when I started applying to university - notably, not looking at any creative writing programs, because I think some part of me realized writing was not going to be the thing which paid my bills.
Of course, it’s not the thing which pays your bills if you never try at all. After many years of burning myself out on academic writing, followed by not writing because I was too exhausted by having to engage in garbage corporate writing in my real job, I decided I really, really missed writing about…things. Just anything! Writing to indulge myself, writing because I needed to write. Subject Headings will be a place for me to share some of my writings which don’t have another home: too long for Twitter, I have no interest in trying to make a blog pretty, and I can’t somehow sneak it into my professional life, where I do a lot of very focused, promotional writing for my library (and have a lot of editorial control, but maybe not so much that I can start writing about non-library things).
“Subject Headings” is a reference to the terms used by research databases to organize the articles inside.
About me:
I grew up in Atlantic Canada, bounced around the region a bit after graduating from high school, and ended up in rural northern New Brunswick. After finishing my bachelor’s, I decided I was going to be a librarian (based on one small conversation with my cousin’s then-boyfriend), so I moved to Halifax, started my Master of Library and Information Studies, and despite having a background in the social sciences and humanities, fell in love with health sciences librarianship. I’ve been a hospital librarian since 2015. Being a hospital librarian, a role which promotes evidence-based information and teaches critical appraisal of information, during the COVID-19 pandemic (an event which didn’t do much for either of those things), will almost certainly influence the pieces I write here.
In 2021, with some encouragement, I started writing book reviews for The Miramichi Reader. It was this work that reminded me how much I enjoyed writing, how much I wanted to get better at it! and how I just really needed to do the thing.
