At a recent reading in one of Chapters' newest bookstores, Vancouver writer Clint Burnham is regaling the six members of the audience with a story about a drug-addled loser who bites off his own member. A portly fellow emerges from the stacks and proceeds, slowly, to the table where Burnham is still reading. He picks up the jug of water on the table. With a violent hurl, he douses Burnham. The writer sputters something like, "What the hell?" "Hey," the man shrugs. "I'm just expressing my opinion." He walks off.

This incident, perfect and horrible, got me thinking about the complications inherent in expressing our opinions. We live in a world in which we are encouraged to air our thoughts. Pop songs tell us we are superstars, movies remind us that we have the power to shape our lives, TV shows exhort us to call in and say what we think. But few of us have real access to the mass media. In a world in which nothing happens until it has been recorded and broadcast, the vast majority of us are silenced.

Writer Jim Munroe's zine, Holiday in the Sun, focuses on his recent experience publishing his novel (Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask) with HarperCollins Canada. Munroe wants us to understand how, even with a much-vaunted "book deal," the author can't necessarily bring work to an audience exactly the way he or she wants it. "It was draining to fight against the way things are usually done," Munroe writes. He details everything from struggles over front-cover design to the process in which HarperCollins sold the book to an American publisher. He is particularly aggrieved by the publisher's decision not to include his Web address, preventing Munroe from getting direct feedback from his readers via e-mail.

The Gaspereau Review, a literary journal published in Wolfville, N.S., features an oddly gripping essay by Susan Haley in its summer 1999 issue. The piece, Little Susan & The Big J.D., pits Haley against the insurmountable economics of chopping down forests. It begins with Susan admitting that she keeps two separate diaries. There is her "forestry" diary, in which she calmly addresses the clear-cutting of lots adjacent to her own -- "went out and looked at Irving's cut again ... The cuts turned out to be much more extensive than the Irving Manager let on" -- and her more traditional daily diary. Although the piece concentrates on juxtaposing Haley's forestry diary with an essay on our collective failure to protect our natural resources, it is her early admission that gives the work its power. It's as if Haley has to separate her observations of the forest's decline from her daily life. In a world that constantly broadcasts what we don't want to hear, we are forced to distance our opinions from our actions, from our day-to-day. If we don't, we might just end up lashing out, throwing a splash of cold water at the source of a problem that is actually far more diffuse.

Or else, we will take our inability to articulate what we most urgently feel out on ourselves. We tattoo, pierce and otherwise violate our bodies as a way to get those around us to notice that, we, too, have an opinion that matters. In an interview in the Winnipeg-based arts magazine BorderCrossings (August, 1999), the Windsor-born painter and sculptor John Scott talks about using his own skin and blood in his works. Scott discusses his battle with a crippling bone disease, as well as his view that we struggle with a postmodern split between the everyday and our belief that the individual can affect the everyday. Scott's ugly, deformed, cruel paintings of anthropomorphic bunnies -- some of them outlined in ominously thin traces of faded red -- remind us that there is something more at stake than just offended sensibilities. Scott speaks to the deeply personal way each of us struggles on, smoldering in our silence, anticipating the moment that the pop promise of inclusivity and equality can be realized.

"You've got to get out of bed," says Scott in the interview. "I know it sounds stupid but it's true, you've got to get out of bed."