Patrick Pittman

About MeReporting & CriticismMagazinesDocumentaryTheatreCommercial ContentKnowledge Translation, Strategy & ForesightThought Leadership CoachingSoftware & Web Development
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Dili, Timor Leste

Hi, I’m Patrick. I talk to people, about all kinds of things, in all kinds of places. I particularly like to talk to people out at the edges, where others aren’t always looking. I help others understand and talk to people too.

More about me...Things I’ve written, made, done, and so forth...

148: Go through life being strong

Calming piano in the polycrisis, things we've been making, resisting financialized platforms, lovely cat food labels, and: did we learn anything?

Buckslip

Buckslipstarted life as a regular, pretty simple email. It’s evolved into a more thorough, kind of very personal publication, in which a small gang of us wander the landscape that we’re all living through together, and weave a few sensemaking threads from what we find. Interviews, analysis, digressions, anxiety.

Learn more and subscribe here

Some particular good stuff

Documentary

May Flowers

“Maybe this May will be the last of the bad months before things start to get better.” May Flowers captures one month in the life of Toronto during pandemic times, just as the city is about to emerge from a period of maddening isolation—and one of the longest emergency lockdowns in the world. A feature length documentary, co-directed by me and Chris Frey.

The Story
Article
2026

Grief Breaks the Brain: A Writer's Long Journey Back to the Page

In which I try to push past the base cultural sense of what "writer's block" might be, and get to the science underneath.

Arcade
Article
2026

Batten the Hatches: On Sarah Hall’s Helm

Everything the wind blows on has decisions to make. My review of Sarah Hall's glorious Helm, and accompanying breeze through a broader conversation about non-human consciousness.

Arcade
Article
2024

A Perception of Misbehaviour—the Legacy of Op Art

Reconsidering the legacy of a much maligned moment in contemporary art within a sixty-year trajectory of digital and new media art making.

The Alpine Review
Article
2016

On the Edge, Calling Back

I visited with Barry Lopez, one of the great environmental writers of our time, in the wilds of Oregon to reflect on ethics, hope, mortality, and the importance of good people in times that are not.

Development

Three Magazine

Working with designer Chris Lange, end-to-end development of the website for St Joseph Communications' latest print magazine, 3, a magazine "for those who live beyond borders and boundaries". Enterprise-grade pure Wordpress built using the Roots stack.

Knowledge Translation

Could, Should, Might, Don't

An end-to-end multi-year project with the incomparable Nick Foster, shepherding, coaching and structuring his book idea from loose potential forms through to finding an agent and closing major international deals with some of the best publishers in the world. I didn’t write this, Nick did, but I feel as proud of my role in bringing it into the world as anything I’ve worked on. Nick has important things to say about the way we all think about the future, and this book brings them all together beautifully. As his publishers at MCD/Macmillan describe it: "An invaluable guide to how to think—and not to think—about the future, by one of the premier futurists of our time."

Knowledge Translation

Strangers Need Strange Moments Together

What a delight it was for Chris and I to help Daily tous les jours bring this magical book into the world over the past few years. Melissa Mongiat and Mouna Andraos have a particular superpower that we need more than ever right now, to show us how we might re-enchant public spaces even in moments of crisis, and bring people together in moments of beautiful weirdness and joy. It’s pretty cool that they’re willing to share that secret sauce, and that they’ve done so so beautifully in these pages. We were there from the start, turning ideas into structure and guiding the writing and refinement process lovingly and carefully.

Latest on Bluesky

Patrick Pittman

Patrick Pittman

@patrickpittman.bsky.social

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When my brain broke, I set about trying to fix it the same way I do with anything — by pulling it apart to figure out what's jammed. This started as a cultural history of writer's block, and ended up in the neuroscience of how creativity itself works (or doesn't): thestory.au/articles/wri...

Grief Breaks the Brain: A Writer's Long Journey Back to the Page

thestory.au

Grief Breaks the Brain: A Writer's Long Journey Back to the Page

When tragedy destroyed his ability to write, Patrick Pittman went looking for a way back to the page. But is the cure for writer’s block in your heart, or in your head?

Jul 24, 2026 at 12:54 PM
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