Hi.
Brief Notes is writing newsletter by Britt Gillman. Find meandering essays, updates, writing-adjacent reflections, possible overshares, craft prompts, maybe-poems and potentially some fiction. So basically, nothing brief. At all.
My essays and short fiction have been published in the New York Times Modern Love Column, Eavesdrop Magazine, yolk, filling Station, Augur Magazine, kerning, EVENT, The North Renfrew Times and elsewhere.
In 2023, my essay “The Idioms of Mother Hens” won runner-up in the Prism International Creative Nonfiction Competition. In 2024, I won second-place in Event Magazine’s Creative Nonfiction Prize for my essay on growing up food-insecure with a single mother in the 1990s in Ajax, Ontario. In 2025, my essay, “Prairie Philosophy” on being in two places at once through the connected thread of my Mom on the phone, won runner-up in the GEIST Short-Long Distance Writing competition.
I’m a former community librarian who facilitated writer’s groups, led literary open mic nights and otherwise generally pestered people to read and write more. I love supporting CanLit and talking about books and writing. I love a good writing prompt, and share some of mine here frequently. I enjoy meeting and supporting other writers and asking questions of people who write, whom I find perpetually interesting. So, sometimes I have been lucky enough to stand with a microphone to moderate author readings and Q&A sessions. Iguana Books talks about my author reading with writer Marilyn Carr here.
My writing explores familial relations, class disparity, food (always food), our relationship to the earth and nature, motherhood, rage, ancestry, belonging, rest, and the ongoing search for every-day pleasure. I write to clarify, explore and make sense of it all; to validate, to connect, to dig the marrow from the bone.
I am currently working on a memoir-in-essays project that explores class and language through the folklore of idioms. Through this project, I’ve been writing a lot about the etymological connection between class and common language, but also about strange connections between language and belonging, like keeping chickens, keeping a home, walking, the colligation of food and sex, talking to ghosts and the secrets of trees. If any of those subjects interest you, I might share a little on them in here in time.
I’m a member of The Writer’s Union of Canada and the Creative Nonfiction Collective. I live in Eastern Ontario but grew up in Ajax and Barrie, Ontario.
Welcome to my Substack and virtual writing desk — which is also sometimes (in real life) my bed, a chair outside in the sun, and every now and then, a kitchen table while I cook. Please pull up your own chair. There is cat fur on all of mine.
I hope you will stay awhile.
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