I’ve written a lot about the relationality of writing and editing, but until recently I hadn’t really stopped to contemplate the more day-to-day undercurrents of what it means to be a practice, something that you have a very literal relationship with1.

I have a tricky relationship to drafting because I put so much stress on showing up and performing at high levels within the confines of my practice. But this past Sunday, as the sun slipped away and I sat in a giant refurbished warehouse environment with dozens of others, listening to a multi-channel sound installation by Lea Bertucci, I opened my notebook and wrote. I didn’t think about whether the writing was good. I let it move slowly, almost luxuriously. At the same time, it felt like an autonomic process, akin to breathing or swallowing. Opening myself to the process and to time like that was a transcendent experience. A surrender to deep peace.

Drafting is so difficult for me, much of the time, because I tend to stumble into dead spots where it feels like what’s there is petrified wood, and then I have to stop. I hold tight to control and I resist surrender. There have been so many times where I find myself wading ankle-deep in the mud of a draft and then I get totally stuck in the squelch. What I write, what I put down on the page, feels as mortifying as saying something untoward in a crowd of hostile strangers. For decades I’ve felt shame around this process and felt it as lacking. Now I feel that it might be a gift.

I want to do this work because I find it transformative and because I believe that we are always shifting and changing anyway, and that writing is one way to metabolize that2. I feel like I have tapped into something here that is far bigger than I am, something that is an aliveness in the movement of the world. When I write about this work as relational, what I mean is this: there are layers in our world-movement; layers in how we take in and feed back what it means to be alive here, in a world like ours. When I sat in that warehouse on Sunday night, watching Lea Bertucci’s fingers on the mixing board coaxing the flute sounds out of that sound installation, this is what I saw.

This is what I want for you.

I want you to be able to access your own curiosity in such a way that tapping into your writing and revision process like this feels possible. And I’m excited and proud to share that today I’m launching Echolocation Editorial, my editing and coaching business to support you in doing just that.

As a queer and trans writer and editor, I support the writing and revision process by reading your work through a lens of sensory specificity. I work particularly with fiction writers who want to ground their narratives in embodiment and the erotic—in the broadest sense of the term, across orientation and expression—and my approach supports queer and trans authors (and allies) to feel seen with regard to their own lived experience and the imagined, yet no less vibrant, lives of their characters.

Check Out Fiction Services

For academic and nonfiction writers, my approach is similarly grounded and will support you to identify and illuminate the stakes of your work while rooting those stakes in an embodied ethos.

Check Out Nonfiction/Academic Services

It would truly be my honor to work with you. Please reach out if you’re interested.

Contact Me

I want to be honest—I’ve been avoiding you. Preparing to launch my editorial business has not been easy, and as a result I’ve found myself putting off drafting my newsletter week after week. I feel like a kid who’s skipped school and now has to report to the principal’s office—only I’m also the principal because I’m the one who set up this container in the first place and I’m not even really enjoying it.

But I’m trying to practice being okay with discomfort, and writing is honestly pretty great for this.

The first fifteen to twenty minutes of drafting anything are usually a special kind of hell for me. Maybe that’s not an especially reassuring thing to hear from a writing coach and editor. I do think, though, that drafting is one way I can work against my own perfectionism, where the only truly good writing is the writing inside my head, the writing that is not yet real and honestly never will be. And once those first fifteen to twenty minutes of actually putting words on the page have passed, I tend to experience an opening-up.

Editing and drafting require somewhat different mindsets. Sometimes I talk to writers who are natural drafters—they feel comfortable and even excited by the newness of their ideas taking shape, however messily, on the page. Then there are those of us who find revision to be a much more comfortable process; I enjoy it because it enables me to rework something that’s already there. The anxiety of the first draft, with its blank page and lack of parameters, is gone, and the question shifts from the limitless confines of “what can I possibly write?” to the much more bounded query of “what is this thing actually trying to say?” which for me is where the interesting work starts to happen. Compared to drafting, it’s a largely analytic process, which is where my brain tends to be happiest.

Despite their differences, both the writing and the editing mindset ideally invite a kind of curiosity and playfulness. To me, creative practice is a phrase that can be invoked to describe anything that’s energetic, that has movement, or that isn’t stagnant. I’m thinking here about play in conjunction with experimentation, and with failure.

Something that’s genuinely helping me right now is songwriting. I’ve been reading the book How to Write One Song by Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, and while I’ve written perhaps a dozen or so songs in my life, I’ve never until this year approached it as something like a steady practice (that is, as something that has movement, an anti-perfectionist approach). Writing songs when you haven’t written all that many songs before is an exercise in both joy and humility. I’ve needed to be okay with being a beginner songwriter and writing what feels like the most absurd and misshapen songs ever put to voice memo. But the first time I recorded myself stirring a melting popsicle into a glass and then chopped it up and remixed it in GarageBand, I laughed in delight the whole time.

Writing prose, by contrast, tends to catch me in a serious mood; I’m so anxious to control everything and it makes me nervous when I inevitably can’t. I try to remember that Julia Cameron writes about valuing curiosity over control, and names that while the forces of capitalism and white supremacy pour concrete, we sculpt clay. We can allow small-stakes creative practices like getting dressed each day to be experiments, a framework I learned from Parke Ballantine’s brilliant Wardrobe Rituals workshop. I realized in that workshop that even the concept of “flattering” clothing is a social construct steeped in fatphobia, misogynistic body-shaming and Eurocentric beauty ideals, and that I want my own sense of style to be informed by play and aesthetic joy. Conceptualizing that as a kind of lovely queer failure has helped me move closer to surrendering in my other work.

Jeff Tweedy says that writing a song teaches you how to fail. Not only that, it teaches you that failure is good. “Don’t let that pain go to waste,” he writes. I also learned from How to Write One Song that once Jeff Tweedy listened to the version of Wilco’s 2001 Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album that he actually liked, it sounded like nothing he could’ve imagined without going through the process of it sounding wrong to him.

Recently I rewatched Wild Combination, the documentary about cellist and composer Arthur Russell. “There’s a boundless feel to his music,” one of Arthur’s contemporaries recalled, “He made his own shapes with it.” I think maybe drafting and revising are also about learning to make your own shapes, leaning into the discomfort that comes with trying something new, and surrendering to curiosity and play.

And that’s honestly something I want to keep showing up for.

More soon!

I first encountered feminist film theorist Linda Williams’ work nearly twenty years ago, as an undergraduate film studies major, in reading her foundational 1991 essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” The essay begins by recognizing a common issue in the rhetoric behind the critique of certain films, namely that the presence of sex, violence, and emotion therein is often dismissed as excessive and possessing no logic beyond the imperative to excite. The films in question lean generically towards the lowbrow, ranging from horror to pornography to melodrama, and it’s true that compared to more classical cinematic genres, these films are certainly sensationalist. But Williams has a brilliant insight, here—she argues that for these “body genres,” excess is precisely the point.

While I will not be sketching out the remainder of Williams’ argument in this post, I want to rest for a moment here. I’m interested in this opening strand of William’s argument because the way she articulates how critics have written about these “excessive” genres bears a striking similarity to how right-wingers and reactionaries all across the anglophone sphere have talked about queer and trans people.

You’ve probably heard these sentiments, even if you don’t think that you have. They underly every complaint of “well, I don’t mind what people do in the privacy of their own homes, but do they have to be so in-your-face about it all the time?” The fact is, just existing as a queer and/or trans person can be, and often is, flagged as obscene, pornographic, and illicit—just look at the boom of legislation targeting trans and gender non-conforming people (particularly trans women) moving through state legislatures across the so-called U.S. today, not to mention the federal directives ensuring that trans people will be misgendered on any federal documentation, such as passports.

An approach some queer and trans people and organizations have taken is one that counters this rhetoric through direct opposition—we’re not obscene, we’re just trying to live our lives. While I sympathize with this critique in its aims against dehumanization, I’m simultaneously somewhat wary of any approach that functions by carving out an Other to which we can contrast ourselves. If we’re not obscene, then something—or someone—else must be, and implicitly that something or someone is then denigrated in our place. I don’t think that the path to queer and trans liberation should be paved by excising the pornographic, no matter how we define it. I think that might actually play right into their hands.

What I think needs to happen is a careful examination of queer and trans cultural attitudes to normativity. This is hardly a new charge; queer/trans self-proclaimed perverts and deviants have existed and have been fighting the good fight against assimilation into dominant straight and cis culture for a long time. Because—and this gets us back to Linda Williams’ intervention—what if the excess is actually the point?

The concept of the erotic can be very useful for us here. I love how Lucie Fielding uses it in the new second edition version of her book Trans Sex: Nurturing Trans Erotic Embodiment and Gender-Pleasure, where she invokes it “with the intention of speaking of playfulness, sensuality, kink, relationships, embodiments, and intimacies that include the sexual but are not limited to sex, the sexual, or sexual energies.” She continues: “The erotic is a creative, a generative force, and also an unruly, un-settling, ‘destabilizing,’ and deliciously ungovernable one.”

While of course engagement with the erotic is hardly limited to queer and trans people, many of us, at least to some degree, are rooted in some kind of relationship to erotic embodiment because we’ve had to orient to it just by virtue of being excluded from normative constructs of what actually constitutes bodies, gender, and sexuality to begin with. Until relatively recently, the standard heterosexual timeline running from dating to marriage wasn’t even available to queer people, and many still desire today to live their lives moving towards an entirely different horizon of love.

All of this is to say, queer and trans people often orient to the erotic—in the broad sense Fielding describes it, which she grounds in the three beautifully unlikely bedfellows of psychoanalysis, Audre Lorde, and recent writings on asexuality—in a manner that takes a different shape from societal expectations. Because of this, queer and trans writers are in some ways uniquely positioned to address the erotic in our work.

As a queer and trans developmental editor, I support the writing and revision process by reading both fiction and nonfiction through a lens of sensory specificity. I work particularly with writers who want to ground their narratives in embodiment and the erotic—in the broadest sense of the term, across orientation and expression—and my approach supports queer and trans authors to feel seen with regard to their own lived experience and, for fiction writers, the imagined, yet no less vibrant, lives of their characters.

If you’re a queer and/or trans1 writer working on something right now, big or small, and you feel like you might benefit from editorial support or coaching, stay tuned for ways you can work with me in the upcoming weeks.

“Relation” is a word that pops up frequently in my practice. When I first started journaling in 2017, inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s own diary entries, I was already thinking through concepts like interdependence in these terms. “I had understood, then,” I wrote here in July 2024 about the origins of my journaling practice, “that there was some kind of essential and dynamic relation between the world, the self, and the creative process.”

Writing can often feel like an uncomfortably solitary practice. So much of it requires just sitting down and making your own way across the page in front of you, and this generally without the accompaniment of other writers, unless you’re actively co-authoring something. But without wishing to minimize or dismiss the isolation writers (including myself) can experience, we can simultaneously recognize that the creative process is, at its heart, fundamentally relational.

I have previously invoked the scientific fact of echolocation as a metaphor to articulate this sense of relationality. Echolocation, in the way I’m employing it, involves shaping your path forward using input from your environment. It involves connecting on a relational level to your own work, to yourself, to the work that already exists in the world (in the realm of genre and canon), and to the world more broadly. This process is not only deeply important for crafting the writing itself, it’s also vital for our growth and satisfaction as writers—and it’s precisely this kind of work that developmental editing engages.

A brief publishing pathway primer: in both fiction and nonfiction environs, once a piece (generally but not always a full manuscript) has been revised as fully as possible by its author, it goes through four different phases of editing over the course of the publication process1. The first of these is developmental editing, which attends to a piece’s foundational, big picture structure and any issues therein. Developmental editors of fiction ask questions like, “does this character’s arc work against other characters’ goals to generate tension and conflict?” and “is there adequate foreshadowing for the climactic twist so that it’s believable to readers, but not so much that it’s overtly predictable?” Nonfiction developmental editors, on the other hand, will be invested in a piece’s argument and whether the evidence deployed actually supports the conclusions drawn.

I first came to developmental editing for fiction training last year because I knew that if I wanted my own writing to catch the strain of aliveness in the same way that paper catches fire, I needed to climb inside the body of Story and feel my way around; I needed to know more about how story-bodies actually move. I’ve always cultivated a fascination for the way creative processes work from the inside out, and I also felt compelled by the vulnerability that inheres in editorial work; the trust that the writer places in their editor to hold their work well. I sensed that this was an area in which I, too, could do good things.

In other words, I came to editorial work for the lessons on story structure, but I stayed for the promise of the writer/editor relationship as an anchor in the swirl of the day-to-day chaos of writing.

I am currently completing my training as a fiction editor, and have some experience in the developmental editing of academic nonfiction in the humanities alongside PhD-level training in Cultural Studies. I’m continually learning that developmental editing is a process of critical evaluation, and chiefly one that is performed in relationship. It’s that relationship which enables the process to render something other than top-down judgment. Developmental editors are experts who make recommendations, yes, but our engagement with the work is ideally motivated by curiosity and care, and the final decision regarding the writing itself is always the author’s.

If having a mentor and companion along for your current writing project sounds perfect, I have good news—in March, I’ll be opening up my schedule for developmental editing and coaching clients in both fiction and nonfiction, including for projects in the very early or even idea stages. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a little more about what this kind of work looks like and what you can expect from this newsletter going forward.

In 2026, I want to write in ways that feel good.

What if we didn’t expect so much from our writing? What if we allowed the process itself to hold us, carry us, sit with us like a friend? What if we didn’t try so hard to control what comes out and just let it flow?

Writing is a chaos machine, and I hate losing control. I hate feeling like I need to watch where I step. Even after all these years, I still have minimal tolerance for feeling like I’m out of my depth, and drafting nearly always feels like that. Loving writing feels like loving a somewhat difficult cat, one who wriggles in your arms and tries to escape and sometimes you just have to let it go and let it approach you instead.

Secretly I think the thing about novel-writing is that sometimes—for me, at least—it’s more tempting to want to be perceived as someone who writes novels than it is to actually, you know. Write the novel. Whereas now I’m at the point in my writing practice where it actually feels kind of pleasurable to not really know what I’m doing, and what the final goal is. I know that eventually I will probably want and need one, but right now this feels good.

Or rather, it feels good to the part of me that likes to move slowly yet playfully, experimenting within this creative voidspace. The part of me that wants to know what exactly I’m working on and wants to know it yesterday is definitely freaking out.

Can I step into a state of mystery and just being ready to receive wisdom when it comes? Can I be okay resting in the not-knowing?

Some intentions for 20261:

I’m ready to grow beyond always reaching for the escape hatch in my life. When has being safe ever truly made me happy? I will not find happiness in avoidance.

I want to know trees and birds and my local biosphere. I want to pay attention. I want to be open, and I also want to honor my own and others’ opacity2. I want to get clear on what actually truly matters.

I want to become more comfortable with silence as a companion.

If writing starts to feel like a punishment, I will stop and reevaluate the process and/or project as needed.

I want to send letters to friends.

I want to experiment with at least one new genre and/or form this year.

I want to care less about the end goal and more about process, how it feels, and what I learn.

I want to continue to cultivate a process that’s supportive and flexible enough for dwelling in the unknown—which is to say, writing.

What is it that you want this year?

The poetic has historically both intrigued and puzzled me, particularly in that the forms of attention it requires are specific and refined. Most of my appreciation of and attachment to poetry comes through the vector of song—Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Leonard Cohen, Joanna Newsom, to name a few—and I can’t deny it’s at least in part due to the way that the fullness of a song imprints more easily upon my memory than a lyric alone. But what keeps me coming back to the poetic (sans melody) is a kind of snap or frisson that runs through its current, though I’ve also found a similar charge of erotic energy in certain non fiction pieces, particularly in the form of the critical essay.

Criticism is a means of thinking with, and parallel to, your object—a book, film, or other cultural text you’re interested in—and drawing readers into new relations alongside the both of you together. Like poetry, good criticism creates an avenue between the reader and the text for the breath to move; a separate space that both distances the reader and ultimately brings them closer through a kind of defamiliarization.

Criticism’s pedagogical capacity shifts the window of possibility for what can be discussed and represented. While it has a bit of a reputation for being, well, critical, the best criticism is also highly creative. It’s less about tearing someone else’s work down1 and more a means of making space for something new, whether that’s a bold new theoretical framework or simply a different way of conceptualizing something that’s already out there.

Reading this kind of criticism always makes me want to write.

It’s not that I think I’m so capable of writing great criticism, or even that I think I’m not; all that matters much less than taking in the ways writers catalogue their observations and obsessions, and finding an answering thrum of excitement and possibility in myself. As with poetry, I think, with no little awe: people can talk about the world in this way?

This Sunday the sixteenth, I’m teaching a ninety minute zoom workshop called “Writing the Critical Essay—for Fun!” that takes this sense of awe and excitement as a grounding principle and springboard for developing our own writing practices. I want to open a space for writers of all levels to come together and learn about the possibilities of criticism; its rich and varied expressions and just how enlivening and, yes, fun, it can be.

Because, here’s the thing. You’re not writing an essay for school anymore. You’re writing because something about criticism intrigues you, whether it’s the horizon of potentiality I mentioned earlier or simply because there’s a book, film, song, or painting you love that you really want to sit with and think more deeply about.

This kind of criticism, the kind that stirs something within me when I read it, is criticism for the people. It’s an act of love, and of curiosity.

It’s an act of cultivating new worlds and new possibilities. Hope to see you there!

Learn More and Register

Back in August, I wrote a little about process and practice, stating that

Process refers to the means by which something develops or moves forward, while practice is a word for the particular kind of repetition out of which process can emerge. You could say that process is housed within practice.

And I received a comment from my wonderful writer colleague that complicated this thought; Rami questioned the order within which I had assigned these concepts to stand, and suggested that perhaps they “do not nest but are co-created, they are forever looping back on themselves.”

I’m finding this a generative reframing of my initial thoughts, and have been turning this conceptualization of process/practice as chiasmatic feedback look over and back again in my mind since. It makes sense that these ways of being and growing (with) one’s writing would endlessly inform one another into further stages of iteration.

I was recently asked whether I had any tips on stepping into a writing practice, and it struck me that this could also be an opportunity to think more intentionally about the relationship between process and practice. Some of the approaches I share below are more pragmatic and practical, and others are more about mindset shifts and one’s overall philosophical approach to the work. Most of these tips were drawn out from what I’ve already written, which I elaborate on and link to where relevant.

Ten Tips on Developing a Writing Practice

1. Everything is research: my approach here is to get you started from as broad and abundant a mindset as possible. Anything and everything can be the basis for your writing, which is why it’s important to take notes on what you notice and on the ways you’re interacting with your environment. Get curious, and notice what you’re most drawn to and interested in spending more time with.

2. Start with specificity: it may help to begin with a writing prompt or some other kind of structuring limitation. Some years ago, I heard that in one study, children playing on the beach were more likely to go farther out when given a direct boundary than when told they could play anywhere they wanted. We enjoy pushing our limits, but we have to have a sense of what they are, first. Our minds cannot conceptualize infinite possibility. You can even make up your own prompts by choosing a line from a nearby book at random and writing something in response. Or, you can give yourself a writing constraint, such as avoiding adverbs or writing in a standard poetic form like a sonnet or haiku.

3. Use timers to just get started against the fear of the blank page: for me, starting is often the hardest part. Setting a timer for ten minutes and doing some freewriting, stream-of-consciousness style, can be really helpful in overcoming my own doubts and fears that the writing is just not going to work this time.

4. At the same time, remember that you’re never truly starting with a blank page: while there’s indeed something intimidating about the white expanse of the surface in front of you, it may help to recall that, in one iteration of Jewish cosmology (Bereshit, known in English as the Book of Genesis), creation emerges not from nothing but from a primordial chaos. For me, this actually lowers the stakes—I’m not starting from a totally blank slate but from the chaos of my innermost thoughts and feelings, which I can allow to spill out onto the page in front of me. Because, chaos? Well, chaos can be edited. Blank pages can’t. In other words, it matters less what you put onto the page to start and more that you put something, anything, there in the first place.

5. Play around with your mode of writing: in a wonderful interview with Amina Cain, Sofia Samatar says, “The feeling of scribbling in a journal creates an immediacy, a sense that anything might happen.” But don’t necessarily rule out typing either, whether on a laptop or on your phone. Experiment with what makes it easiest for you to move into a state of play. It’s crucial that it feel as low-stakes as possible. Don’t use your most aspirational blank notebook if you’re afraid to “ruin” it when a pad of paper from the dollar store works just as well.

6. Get into the physicality of writing: Gloria Anzaldúa talks in her book Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro about writing as “gestures of the body,” saying that “Writing is not about being in your head; it’s about being in your body. The body responds physically, emotionally, and intellectually to external and internal stimuli, and writing records, orders, and theorizes about these responses.” Stay curious about the ways writing is an embodied process, from the physical task of getting words down on the page whether by pen or keyboard, to remembering that stretching and back support are good writerly friends.

7. Release perfectionism and the desire for stasis: your writing will never be as perfect as your idea is in your head, and that’s a good thing. Because your writing is a living, breathing thing, and, chiefly, something that can be read by other people.

8. Align your actions with your values: you might not be the kind of person who writes every day, and that’s okay! Maybe being compassionate with yourself is more important right now than unyielding self-discipline (and personally, I’m always in favor of more self-compassion). Ask yourself what actually matters to you, and then make choices that reflect those values.

9. Remember that this is relational work: no one ever writes or thinks or speaks in isolation. To write is to understand that there is some kind of essential and dynamic relation between the world, the self, and the creative process. You’re never truly alone.

10. Don’t be afraid to fuck it up: in her aforementioned interview with Amina Cain, Sofia Samatar asks, after Clarice Lispector, “For what purpose am I saving myself,” following this inquiry with a charge, á la Octavia Butler, towards intensity. “Cold or hot, hard or soft, gut-wrenching or deeply stilling, utter intensity!” In other words, don’t fear commitment. Besides, with writing, unlike with painting or many other artistic disciplines, it’s possible to go back to earlier versions if what you’re working on isn’t really working out. So there’s really no need to hold back for fear you’ll lose something.

With process and practice co-iterative and inextricable from one another, it stands to reason that changes to one will impact the other. Getting started engaging with a writing practice, in other words, will have knock-on effects for your writing process, which may itself evolve and change depending on what exactly you’re writing.

If you’re interested in learning more about cultivating both practice and process in nonfiction writing, I’ll soon be launching a two hour workshop on brainstorming, developing, and writing essays in the mode of cultural criticism, to take place in November on Zoom.

Learn More

And if fiction is more your style, don’t worry, I have more news on that front coming soon!

It’s teshuvah season again, the time of the Jewish year where we return to the versions of ourselves we want to become. There’s a classic book by Rabbi Alan Lew that lots of people generally read during these holidays, and while I’ve read some of it, I can say that for me the best thing that book ever did was present itself to me as a title: This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.

I didn’t learn to swim until I was about nine or ten years old, and I have a quite visceral memory of coming in for lessons one day, swimming for beginners where I was the oldest one there by several years, and the instructor telling us we were ready to go jump in the deep end. This was after many weeks, to be clear, but I had not yet begun to swim unassisted. The six year olds all around me cheerfully acquiesced, and I made a run for it because I knew with utter certainty that if I jumped into the deep end I would literally die.

So I took off. The instructor caught up with my little running steps in about three strides, scooped me up—kicking and screaming by this point, I’m sure—and tossed me in. There was a window high above the pool where parents and guardians could look in from an adjacent room and see how we were doing, and I remember that my dad was there but he was obliviously reading a book and I gripped onto that image as what I knew would be my final conscious experience of life on earth.

And then I surfaced, spluttering but treading water.

Looking back on it now, I have some concerns, namely that this was a breach of my boundaries and bodily consent that occurred primarily because I was a child, and children’s boundaries do not matter at the societal level. At the same time, however, I don’t really know what the right move would have been. You see, I’m the type of person who never feels ready. For like, anything. Pretty much ever.

It’s kind of just what happens when you’re a perfectionist with OCD. Every time I write, I’m faced with that same specter of death again, as irrational as that may sound. My internal writing monologue: I know that once I start it’ll be easier, this isn’t dying it’s just living, which is, yeah, also kind of dying in a sense but not like, literally. I’m safe. In this moment I am safe. It’s a constant reminder.

On the other hand, feeling too comfortable can just as easily lead to stasis. There’s a need for something, for a very narrow bridge of sorts between danger and comfort, into a space that makes you feel alive.

Writing this newsletter during these High Holy Days feels like that. The question of who I want to become is, for me, always inextricable from the question of what do I want to work on. What, exactly, do I want to inscribe with this aliveness? I keep ideas for various projects captured across digital and analog tools—miro boards, notion pages, and paper notebooks—and each year I wonder if I’m going to make any more progress on them than I did the year before.

Last year, I wrote a bit about where I get my ideas; my research process, so to speak. I can basically sum up my approach as: everything is research, so get curious about the world around you, and take notes. I still stand by this approach, but today I want to touch briefly on another way you can get ideas if you’d like to write or make art and aren’t sure how to get started.

What are you already into? What do you spend your time doing, or thinking about? I wrote here last month that I no longer want to cordon off the part of me that spends time being perhaps too online as a part of me that has nothing to say to the rest of my experience. Being overly online has given me a perspective and positionality that, for better or worse, I can inhabit and write from. Maybe you spend a lot of time birdwatching, or training for marathons. Maybe you watch old episodes of Air Crash Investigation on YouTube.

Whatever it is that you’re already investing your time and energy into, ask yourself what is so fascinating to you about that thing. Why are you obsessed with it?

Did you know that the etymology of the words “fascination” and “obsession” are both grounded in concepts associated with the occult? Fascination comes from the fourteenth-century French fasciner, which means “to bewitch, enchant,” and the term obsess meant “to haunt” in the fifteenth century. I’ve been thinking about this lately because the two terms even as they stand today carry with them, for me, a tinge of the mystic. Something about them diverges from logic; from the neatness of tidy categorization and into the sweet and frightening space of overwhelm.

If, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in Touching Feeling, “obsession is the most durable form of intellectual capital,” how might we move forward with an understanding of our obsessions as generative?

I’ll be back in your inbox next week with more on cultivating inspiration, plus an exciting announcement!

I haven’t written here since April. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to say—I always have something to say, and that’s the trouble—it’s more that the alchemy that renders private thoughts into public consumption sometimes feels in equal measure rough and tender.

I’m finding myself back in a space of questioning and curiosity regarding my own creative practice. One month ago, I had top surgery, and since then I’ve been enjoying a pretty gentle recovery, having taken a month-long hiatus from most social media at the same time. There’s a sense in which the hiatus has felt like a carving away, or perhaps a pulling back of the superfluous in my life. Making room for something else to push through.

Oftentimes I find myself standing on the banks of a river of art, theorizing the best way to navigate it. Jump in? Take a boat? Sketch its shape while leaning against a nearby tree? I feel like I spend more time asking myself how to make art than I spend actually making art.

Sometimes it’s good to actually take the plunge. I find myself pulled into the refresh cycle of checking email, discord, other sites through which I sometimes receive messages and information as my pattern of incessantly checking social media finds a secondary outlet. Sometimes—what feels too infrequent, to be honest—I put down the screen entirely and I do jump in. I write a few lyrics, I hand-stitch some fabric, I brainstorm-journal about a possible conceptual art project.

In some ways, I’ve spent the past decade plus trying to ascertain my ideal positionality when it comes to my own inputs and outputs. By which I mean, how can I intentionally ground my practice in terms of the art, media, and, for lack of a better word, content I consume and whatever it is that comes out of me in response? What this might require, I’ve been contemplating, is a kind of cosmological understanding of both process and practice.

By “cosmological understanding” I suppose I mean a framework that’s grounded in the way the world—and my life specifically—actually works. The first thing that’s important to note about this for me is that I want to avoid easy binarization. For too long I’ve segmented out the part of me that spends a lot of time on social media as some secondary aspect of myself that does not actually have an impact on the rest of my life, or perhaps more interestingly, that has nothing important to say to the rest of my life or personhood. When, really, having spent much of the last decade or so engaging heavily with certain social media communities has fundamentally impacted how I write, how I speak, and how I engage with others.

Process and practice are two words for interrelated concepts, both regarding the way things are created. Process refers to the means by which something develops or moves forward, while practice is a word for the particular kind of repetition out of which process can emerge. You could say that process is housed within practice.

Thus, my writing practice makes space for writing as a process—specifically, the entire cycle, from just showing up with my pen in hopes that I might catch something interesting, to working at an idea, to drafting something in full flesh, to revision and finalization. Cosmologically, this conjunction of practice and process works best when I am well and presently attuned to what is coming into my creative consciousness, and to what is going out.

Unsurprisingly, this is most easily managed when I am feeling good; when I have energy, focus, and motivation. It is much harder when I am stressed and I have not been meeting my basic needs (I am hungry, tired, etc). When I’m feeling good, I feel like I’ve really figured the whole thing out, and that I have the ability to shift tactics if and when I need to. When I’m feeling less good, I can find myself feeling trapped or overwhelmed by a drive to follow my fancy from website to website, going down a rabbit hole of links or refreshing email in a way whereupon any conceptualization of the outside world and my goals drops away from me as if severed.

So, no, I don’t have the answers, not really, but having an understanding of the way my process and practice actually works and the ways that being online (and offline) interfaces with that has gone a long way towards my understanding of how to ground myself.

Which is kind of all anyone can ask for, isn’t it?

The relationship between desire and these cultural inputs and outputs is complex; their intersections multifaceted. I could write about how I’ve been thinking through conceptualizations of home and grounding in place and shaping home as a white antizionist diaspora Jew on Indigenous land, when the institutions that claim us are saying so-called Israel is home and when the U.S. is becoming more and more dangerous for trans people. Or I could write about the ways in which the past, a decade back specifically, has risen up in my life once again in the form of the tenth-anniversary rerelease of a once-favorite album1, and in my having just attended a one-man show featuring an actor whose career I’ve been giddily following since his breakout in the early 2010s2. These things I loved a decade ago, these cultural artifacts that still bear an imprint of my ardor, is that something like home?

Sometimes I store these ideas up for purely imagined later days, days that I’ll never reach because there never ends up being an ideal time to parse them out in writing. And so, what’s the point of storing them up? I’m trying to push back against a scarcity I feel, a kind of full-body clench around my ideas. Not ready to let them go, but then they just get stale.

Something about writing is a full-body letting go, which is not to say that it’s easy. Writing is an exercise in control—gaining it, losing it, sinking your teeth into the heart of it and hanging on as it slips away. Inevitably you have to lose it to get it back, or else you end up severing yourself from the possibility of all surprise.

Yesterday, I had the privilege and delight of attending a zine workshop and book launch at the with , whose self-published The Emergency Was Curiosity is an “illustrated book report” in response to Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

Sofia Samatar writes in Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life—which I wrote about briefly last time—“One thing I knew was that I would never be a good content provider. I would have liked to be a form provider.” This gesturing towards the materiality of writing was present and alive at yesterday’s book launch. Christie spoke of her interest in the book report as form and genre, landing specifically on the delightful neologism fan-(non)fiction to articulate the relationship between her book and Jenny Odell’s. As she talked about the genesis of the book report, Christie shared that she knew a number of people who, for whatever reason, weren’t able to really get into How to Do Nothing, and how she saw her own project as a way to share her love for Odell’s book. To me, this feels like a much more meaningful and generative alternative to what I assume is the rising propensity of people to ask ChatGPT to summarize books for them, or even the use of Sparknotes (if those still exist in a post-AI world).

I think a lot about a quote from :

work to understand things, and not just the things themselves but the conditions that created them and the impact those things had on the world around them. let those things become a part of you instead of a distraction from yourself. i think the act of loving something should be generative and consuming — it should add something to who you are and lead you to a new understanding of all the parts that were already there.

There are always going to be ways in which we take books and films and plays inside of ourselves and crystalize around them. There is a porosity to the world and its objects, and to us, which we cannot escape—and thank god! I have a lot of gratitude for the messy intertextuality of it all, for the books and films and plays and albums that made me; that are still making me.

It’s hard to write about this in the daylight. There’s something about night and early morning writing that feels both lower-pressure and also that preserves the sense of opacity that gives Samatar’s book its title. The societal assignation of night hours for sleep makes stealing them for writing feel special and a little bit risky. In the thick darkness, I open the book and read through the praise section that, as with most books, precedes the fundamental authorial subject matter at the center. I don’t ordinarily spend that much time with this section of most books, but the blurbs excerpted here read like an actual litany; like something sacred that ought to be held in silence and close to the chest.

To read Opacities is to sit with writing as a form of possibility.

My impulse in writing is to break the skin. My impulse is to draw blood, peel back the layers, smooth out, let the wet through. Fifteen years ago, when I was an undergrad, Eileen Myles said during a reading on my campus that writing is a nervous habit for them. When I raised this at a subsequent reading with Lydia Davis, she said, “oh, Eileen.” Now, I think that there are so many ways to be self-conscious but maybe at the center they are all the same.

To me, writing feels like—I was going to say a compulsion. But I hesitate to say that, I think because I don’t want to pathologize. That impulse is so familiar and so troubled by my own ambition. Reading Samatar’s latest as someone who hasn’t published much opens me up to questioning my envy—why do I thirst after the interviews, the accolades? There’s something present in my desire for feedback, in a literal sense, specifically for an energetic movement and friction against and in response to my own work.

The thing about many of my night writing sessions—language becomes accessible because it resides on the same plane as ordinary thought. I don’t strive for it, I grasp and it’s already there in my hand like July fireflies. Not having to tread water like a man who thinks he’s drowning and panics, but floating on my back and looking up at the stars. Effortless.

It’s kind of like those puzzles where you have to look awry to see the woman in the vase, or whatever. But once you get it, that’s it. You have it.

I always want to capture as much as I can in those moments because they feel so rare and so loose. But that might actually just reaffirm a false binary, and what if I didn’t choose to reify the idea that writing is actually a difficult, inaccessible state for me ninety percent of the time? What if it’s always flowing under the surface of things, like a river? Can I open to that? Can I retrieve that possibility?

Explaining the affective impact on me of this collision is an impossible task, but perhaps it’ll come through a bit when I tell you that I ended up listening to the song that accompanied the opening credits on loop for about thirty minutes straight, for several days in a row.

This song was not exactly new to me. I’d heard it before as a kid, when my parents would play Monterey Pop Festival classics in the living room on long Saturday afternoons, Jefferson Airplane star Grace Slick’s absolutely eviscerating voice streaming out of our television speakers:

Don't you want somebody to love

Don't you need somebody to love

Wouldn't you love somebody to love

You better find somebody to love

Love, love

How had I never before been so winded by this song? How could I have possibly missed the fervor of its harried desperation?

I began the legal name and gender marker change process this year, picking up the court order approving both at the end of February. As much as I know that state recognition is not liberation, I can’t deny the relief I felt seeing my actual name on an official government document, knowing that interfacing with doctors, insurance, my bank, and many other bureaucratic institutions that require my legal name will at least feel less dysphoric to some degree.

Earlier this month, I also went to the social security office to make the change on the federal level. The woman there who helped me was very kind and apologetic regarding her inability to change my gender marker on their side, and even asked me if I’d done anything yet to celebrate my recent name change.

The whole experience has me really thinking more about transition as an agential process. I’ve been thinking a lot about ’s January newsletter, where he writes:

One of the reasons I find transition to be a useful lens through which to look at climate change and our relationship with the environment is that transition requires choice. Transition posits the self as the site of change made with agency to your body, your name; every way in which you live your life completely changes. It requires a split, a divergence, and a figuring out how to live outside the norm and against the mainstream; it is not a top-down process. The scale of this complete and total reworking of one’s life is, I think, similar to that which will be required of us to keep living and loving and, hopefully, resisting power.

But how do we actually come to make choices and take agency in such a transphobic world, a world that does everything it can to keep people from even considering transition as an option? Trans desire isn’t modeled on a societal level at all—quite the opposite, in fact, despite whatever transphobes have been saying—so as trans people, we have to find other ways of feeling into desire. And there’s honestly so much power in that, it bowls me over every time I think about it. That we still manage to come face to face with our desire despite it all. That, amidst all the fear that comes before making choices, we manage to even create a path to get there.

This spring, I’ll be working on an autotheoretical essay/piece of criticism that assesses the ways in which narratives and forces including slash fandom1 and its positionality within our broader capitalist system enabled me both to eventually transition, and simultaneously prevented me from doing so for over a decade. I’ll be analyzing these through the lens of the television show Hannibal, which aired on NBC from 2013-2015, and which I consider through the lens of a fantasy of forced masculinization2.

I’m writing this essay for an anthology called the American* Fujo* Literary Journal, which has just netted double its Kickstarter funding goal! The campaign officially ended on March 16th, but you can still back it to receive a digital or print copy (don’t wait though! Not sure how long that’ll still be true). American* Fujo3* is “a new literary journal about the intersections of gender & sexuality, power, and virtual space in fandom,” and something you may not know about me because it’s not something I often talk about publicly is that I have been active in fandom spaces since the early 2010s (I even met my partner on Tumblr!). The anthology is invested in the ways in which queer/trans identification and fandom become co-constitutive or otherwise intertwined.

Alongside this essay, I’ve also been working on my novel4, and I’ve noticed myself coming back to one strand of thought again and again—if I really want to write this book, I need to inhabit my queer/trans desire and be curious about my inquiry, because a majority of my most erotically-charged relationships to narratives and media are basically the ones that invent new kinds of homoeroticism in service (and sometimes in critique) of, and thus indelibly shaped by, capitalism—Sweet Smell of Success, Hannibal, Reservoir Dogs, Querelle, Interview with the Vampire, and even my engagement with and interest in Formula One5, that pinnacle of pure evil/international motorsport6.

I have always been compelled by the specter of obsession; of unruly desire with a thrumming undercurrent of menace. It’s no wonder listening to “Somebody to Love” feels like a punch in the stomach that I nevertheless keep asking for again and again.

What I need is to be bold enough to follow the throughlines of my desire, the parts of me which have been indelibly shaped by capitalism, not to cleanly excavate those throughlines—we are always already complicit, after all—but to see if I can articulate the way that power works through them and how it animates desire in this world.

It’s this question, among others, that keeps me writing.

It’s this question, among others, that keeps me resisting.

I’ve been getting up earlier and staying in bed for shorter periods of time over the past two weeks—as I mentioned, my insomnia has been worse lately, but also I genuinely just really love early mornings, seeing sunrise, and not being in bed for twelve hours straight.

Earlier this week I walked to the laundromat at 7am and saw the last-quarter moon; the other day I checked my weather app for moonset time and learned that moonset that day was at 10:47am, the next full moon was in 22 days, and that the moon was 251,178 miles away. This last fact filled me with a bright kind of fondness and made me laugh; something about putting that (I would think) largely unchangeable fact1 next to the planetary body’s more mercurial times of rising and impetus towards emptiness or fullness.

As though one day we might wake up with the moon a mere 251 miles away.

My two-week break from social media continues apace, with one major side-effect: I hadn’t realized how much news I was actually getting from just ambiently existing on social media all day every day. While I do always double-check breaking news sourced from twitter, I haven’t actually needed to do so this week or last because I literally have not been seeing any news. I have heard about some of the major headlines from friends in group chats and that’s about it.

So it was with no little trepidation on Tuesday morning that I intentionally sought out news on Monday’s executive orders. I braced myself. The details slid into the bottom of my stomach like cold water anyway.

I don’t want to get too into it right now, but these orders—though they will certainly be contested in court—will give those in power legitimacy to be even more explicitly racist, xenophobic, transphobic, and anti-climate than they already are. I myself and many people I know are directly impacted and endangered by several of these orders.

So, what can we do? In short, keep organizing, and if you are not already doing so, get organized. put together a great list entitled “Some Actions that Are Not Protesting or Voting” that I initially found in her newsletter here. Even just looking around us, it’s easy to tell things are not getting better, and they’re likely about to get a whole lot worse—so let’s come together and do something about it.

Likewise, while a ceasefire has finally been declared in Gaza—and thank God, over five hundred days too late but thank God—Palestinians there still need our support. Consider donating to The Sameer Project, a Palestinian-led mutual aid project.

I wrote last week that “my assignment is to see where writing can flow into embodiment and interdependence,” and I’ve been continuing to walk that avenue of inquiry. I’ve also started working with a behavior change coach for a myriad of executive function issues, which has been kind of a game-changer even less than two weeks in. One of the behaviors that my coach and I have elected to focus on is “every day, put away five things in the apartment.”

I cannot even begin to tell you how annoying this was over the course of the first week. I hated doing it, and kept pushing it to the end of each day, when I did it at all. I wrote petulantly in my daily tracker that it felt like carefully plucking out five grands of sand from a very large expanse of beach and tucking them back into place alongside their sand siblings, only for the tide to rush in moments later and render the entire exercise moot.

“Elliott,” Jon said in response to this, “You don’t have to make it mean so much. It’s just five things.”

I hadn’t even begun to recover from that when they gently pointed out that if I were to see my living space getting messy and feel as though my tidying was completely futile….I would simply never clean my apartment.

“It’s in the nature of places to get messy over time,” they continued.

Naturally, this had me feeling like Bugs Bunny having just noticed he’d walked right off the edge of a cliff, but I promised to keep practicing putting away five things a day for the next week without making it mean more about the grand scheme of life and my living space.

And so, I’ve been reconsidering my relationship to practice, and to change. Just as it’s the nature of mess to accumulate, change is inherent in our every breath. You might even say it’s the only lasting truth2.

It’s a truth I’ve been resistant to my entire life.

“Why do we have to eat all the time,” I have been known to say, “Three meals a day? Doesn’t that seem a little excessive?”

Just last week, I drew a comic about washing dishes as an innately Sisyphean task. “At least Sisyphus got buff,” I concluded in the final panel, “All I’ve got are more dishes.”

I don’t think I realized just how closely perfectionism is intertwined with (a desire for) stasis, just how much effort I’ve expended in dreading the practices of daily life—nor all the ways in which that same dread and resistance spills over into my creative practice. It makes sense, in the end. Did I really think I would be able to separate them, to draw any kind of material distinction between writing and living?

If the only lasting truth is change, then of course there will be days that any kind of practice, from eating to moving your body to working on your novel is hard and annoying and seemingly without reprieve. There will also be days where you want to bottle your own confidence for some later date of judicious application.

And then there will be days where you wake up at 5am and see the waning crescent moon and the streetlights illuminating your tree-lined block, and you will get to work, and feel gladness in that, and it will be enough.

I’ve been trying to fix my chronic insomnia, but really what I am trying to do is be with my chronic insomnia.

I am typing this with my eyes closed.

When I dream, it’s often mid-morning already, 8 or 9 or 10, the images as vivid in my mind as they’re impossible to trace afterwards, leaving only an irregular stain by way of an absent presence.

There is so much I want to change. There is so much that I need to do.

Can breathing be enough1?

I’ve been trying to work on this dispatch for over a week. The prospect of writing another essay feels exhausting. There are so many strands to weave through, so many small joys and revelations and textures of refusal2. There is, all in all, the feeling of some great confluence of collective ideation, or even of breath, as what I’m beginning to understand in my context, and with my positionality, seems to be popping up for many others as well.

As though we are all echoes of each other with no originary voice and no teleological progression—an unbounded spiral.

On January 2nd, I had a spiritual consultation with the wonderful Ayelet Hashachar. I had booked the session on the first night of Hanukkah, after seeing photos of Israeli soldiers celebrating the holiday over broken and lifeless Palestinian bodies—each of the dead an entire universe3, extinguished.

I came to Ayelet with an avalanche of questions. How was it possible for anyone to be Jewish right now? Could I simply stop practicing and opt out, as someone not even considered halachically Jewish by many, being patrilineal? Could it be possible today to reconcile a historical materialist approach with a kind of mystical practice or outlook, as Walter Benjamin did?

Ayelet took in these questions and asked me one in return. What if I were to nourish and strengthen my mundane, everyday self and ground that self in the world as a bottom-up approach to these inquiries? After all, even in Kabbalah, action must come before divine emanation.

In other words, had I tried actually being in my body about it?

Honestly, I was a bit stunned that she had intuited the problem so accurately. Because I’m a relatively emotional person, I sometimes think I’m more connected to my body and attuned to its needs than I really am at any given point in time. In truth, I’m quite practiced at ignoring my needs and desires, generally routing them through the portal of social media instead. Tired? Check the sites. Hungry? Check the sites. Feeling general malaise? Check the sites.

But the following Friday evening, the day after my consultation with Ayelet, I allowed myself—for the first time in months—to actually feel the presence of Shabbat settle over me, a palace in time4.

Our conversation grounded and resituated me in the material world with jewishness as a kind of sensuous experience. And, having a spiritual crisis5 in the sense of crossroads or turning point has led me to feeling more situated in my jewish6 positionality. I felt that somehow, in repudiating Jewishness, I had finally understood something about it. And while there’s a certain level of opacity to that understanding, the kind of cloud cover7 that you can find over any relationship involving divinity or even just someone or something other than the surface textures of yourself, I have found myself in the wrestling—not the ethically bankrupt wrestling of our mainstream institutions wringing their hands and equivocating about “violence on both sides,” but the kind of wrestling that asks, if a system is what it actually does rather than what it says it does, where do we go from here?

I consider the shift in darkness from the month of Kislev, at the end of which Hanukkah falls, into Tevet8, at which point the nights are finally growing shorter but the dark still lies cold and long before us. In the creation myth of Genesis, light comes from darkness in the Tehom, the primordial deep. Creation comes not from nothingness (creatio ex nihilo) but from chaos, and the transition from chaos to creation does not move forward via a suppression or banishment of the former but through its embrace. This radical acceptance towards what might be seen as the irrational excesses of Tehomot and of darkness has been articulated by Catherine Keller as a “tehomophilic” approach, one that I understand to be similar to Avgi Saketopoulou’s conceptualization of “traumatophilia,” in which trauma is treated not through attempting to excise it from embodied memory but by way of resisting narratives of repair and mastery in favor of staying curious in the face of the unknown9.

I’m thinking about a rather chaotic, disorganized practice I’ve been engaging with recently. I call this practice markmaking, because I want to collapse the boundaries between writing and creating visual art. Writing began as a pictorial system, and both writing and art have roots in divinatory practice, as I mentioned in my last dispatch. This year I want to lean into the most perverse10 and delicious markmaking practice imaginable. I want to trust myself enough to know that it’s ok to fall, perhaps even if it’s not really ok. I want to trust myself and my practice enough to know that I can draw these intuitive connections between things and follow them in a direction that ultimately means something, even if the meaning startles me. I don’t want to force meaning anymore.

In episode 63 of For the Worldbuilders podcast, asks, “what if our next big art project is coming back home to a body with needs and desires?” At the beginning of this week, on the full moon of Tevet, I began a two week break from all social media. My assignment is to see where writing can flow into embodiment and interdependence. I want small writing to matter, the writing that goes into letters to friends and creating a water syllabus11 for where I live in south central Brooklyn. I want to break out of the success-oriented metrics and constraints I fitted to my skin so closely I thought they had become it.

I want to make more illegible art and writing. I want to do more with my hands and feel into the affective and embodied difference between typing and writing by hand. I want to think about how Gloria Anzaldúa referred to writing as “gestures of the body.12”

Here’s some of what I wrote at 4:30 this morning to close out this strand of thought:

Sitting up with the dark like a friend on a sickbed visit, or someone coming home, slow blinking, bare skeleton architecture13 of the branches outside my window. Blurred vision lags and cuts, jaw clenched thick with memory biting down. It always feels good to make something. My knee locks up for a few minutes before it occurs to me that I can just move it, shift my position, reorient to embodiment, whole and sliced through, healing night. There’s a lot you can do with a poem, turns out, with a rock you picked up on the beach in Wabanaki territory in Saco, Maine and some fabric for kriah14, and, not to be gauche, but those might just be the same thing with a difference of degree.

Before I go, I want to let you know about a beautiful program that is offering starting later this month called The Treehouse. Registration is open now and I’d love to see you there! I wasn’t asked or paid to put this in my newsletter, it’s just that this offering has supported me so deeply this year that I want to give it a shoutout. Here’s what I wrote about the program before Ayana’s last launch in October:

Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work.

As a participant in both the Seed a World Retreat and the Treehouse over the past year, I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as her guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other.

I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs has called “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.” Join us?

(Subtitle of this newsletter post paraphrased from Sofia Samatar, Opacities: Writing and the Writing Life)

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to rewatch two of my favorite kind of strange films. I say strange in the most complimentary sense, as I continue to feel deeply moved, stirred by each of them in ways that seem to go beyond what I had anticipated.

The first of these films is Lizzie Borden’s 1983 docufiction production Born in Flames, which in deliciously chaotic and spectacularly vibrant punk style sketches an alternative timeline where the United States has embraced a form of Democratic Socialism a decade before the narrative’s beginning. Taking place in New York City on the anniversary of what newscasters call a peaceful revolution and transition to this new system, Born in Flames demonstrates the ways in which this revolution has only managed to create surface-level societal improvements, wherein the bulk of the structure is still dependent upon the subjugation of women.

Borden takes aim squarely at the complicity of the news media in manufacturing consent for the oppression that women continue to face under the new Democratic Socialist system, and one of the characters’ most pressing concerns throughout becomes the need to usurp control over the condescending, simplistic, and counterrevolutionary narrative that the news portrays.

I learned this year from the Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) website that Juliano Mer Khamis—the founder of Jenin’s Freedom Theatre—believed that the Third Intifada would be a cultural intifada. This is a call to move towards creating a revolutionary cultural front, where those of us living in the imperial core do our utmost to disrupt the war machinery at the center of U.S. cultural production. For WAWOG, this is collective work that refuses the individualist model of the artist and critic as separate from the people they are accountable to.

Following along this line of thought, Born in Flames also critiques the figure of the liberal-centrist journalist, spending a bit of time looking at the three young upper middle class white women who are editors for one of the central party newspapers, the Socialist Youth Review. When Adelaide Norris, a Black lesbian and one of the leaders of the Women’s Army—the growing militant faction of women working together across difference upon which the film centers—talks to these women about their coverage of the Army, they speak in condescending soundbites about wanting to present a united front for the party and how the Women’s Army isn’t going about creating change through the proper avenues, in other words, through the preexisting systems of party governance.

Frustrated, Adelaide remarks that they don’t get it—but invites them to an upcoming demonstration nevertheless. “At least come out of class guilt,” she quips, and the film then cuts to the demonstration, where we can see that the editors are deep in conversation together. As the narrative progresses, they become supporters of the Women’s Army, eventually losing their positions as editors after writing an expose on the Party’s murder—and subsequent cover-up—of Adelaide Norris herself, whom the party has smeared as a counterrevolutionary upstart.

These editors are not the film’s protagonists, indeed, they play a relatively minor and supporting role in its narrative that speaks to the role of white people with class privilege in social change movement work. As someone who shares those intersecting forms of privileged identity, I found the film’s portrayal of the editors to be an instructive expression of the ways in which people like me can come into greater accountability to our movements through a journey of radicalization—and it’s especially noteworthy and ironic that Kathryn Bigelow played one of the editors in question before moving on to her directorial career as an academy darling for imperialist films such as The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Much of Born in Flames features (fictionalized) surveillance footage and narration from what’s presumably the FBI, an intriguing directorial choice that also implicates those of us interested in or working with archival materials. “In its intended form,” writes guest editors Eman Abdelhadi, Kaleem Hawa, and Jasper Saah in Queer Palestine, a zine published by Pinko earlier this year, “the archive is a record of truth that we are expunged from.” As queer Palestinians, they write of the need for a popular archive, one which holds the power of remembering and forgetting alike. Within Born in Flames, reclaimed surveillance footage intermixes with guerrilla radio broadcasts from the back of u-haul trucks and the Women’s Army’s revolutionary hijacking of a television news broadcast towards the film’s conclusion, allowing the film as a whole to serve as kind of fictionalized counter, or popular, archive.

One of the most compelling aspects of the film is the way it allows its characters to disagree and to be in conflict with one another without sacrificing the revolutionary fire they’re working to cultivate together. The alternative history timeline works as a kind of distancing device, allowing us to see our own current time in both sharp relief as counterposed to this vision of a false utopia, and also the many resonances that echo across space and time and into the present.

If Born in Flames left me with what felt like a searing light pulsing within my chest, The Green Knight, by contrast, felt like a softly glowing secret I carried with me back out into the rain outside the IMAX theatre. On the surface, as films, they couldn’t appear more different—Born in Flames is a radically collective feminist polemic where The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021) appears upon first watch to be a hero’s journey narrative that focuses predominantly upon one man’s life and choices. Their parallels, however, along with the generative friction of their differences, compel me to take a closer look at them in potential conversation.

While The Green Knight is not an overtly radical film, it is in many ways fundamentally about the questions, anxieties, and possibilities of accountability to one’s values and living a life that approaches the ethical as a kind of horizon. That the film is technically about an individual—Gawain, the young nephew of the legendary King Arthur—is in practice somewhat subverted by the ways in which Gawain’s journey is quite an archetypal one. As I watched the film for the second time, in fact, I found myself unable to stop thinking about it as a live-action representation of the tarot, a parallel which I don’t entirely believe is unintentional.

The Green Knight is a narrative framed explicitly as a game, and within this game there actually exist several more, smaller games. Divination, spell-casting, and tarot cards appear at several points throughout, each with some degree of plot relevance. As a film, it unfurls like a dream, seeming to adhere more closely to a logic of correspondences than to traditionally explicit plot causality—and I would be remiss here not to note that tarot, despite its oft-disputed origins, has been hypothesized to have emerged in an earlier form as an Italian card game.

Turning this film over in my mind since seeing it for the third time earlier this month, I was reminded of Carlo Ginzburg’s essay “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” wherein he argues for the utility of the clue as part of an epistemological method emergent in the humanities towards the end of the nineteenth century, a model that may help scholars break out of the perceived dichotomy between rationality and irrationality. Narration, Ginzburg postulates, may have emerged from the act of deciphering tracks in a hunting society, which in itself has intriguing parallels with Mesopotamian divinatory methods. Like divination, writing—especially in languages utilizing a more pictorial alphabet—served as a symbol pointing to something beyond itself.

Writing, drawing, and narration thus have an inextricable relationship with the ways in which we conceptualize our past and our future. This feels important because writing history (and writing fiction, which is itself always inflected by history!) is an inherently political act, which leads us back to the question of the artist’s role in the revolution.

Where Born in Flames incites us to act, The Green Knight reminds us that accountability begins with the self in cosmological context. What is our relationship to the world around us? How do we tend those levels of relationality, and tend them well?

In need of a last-minute Hanukkah, Christmas, or end-of-year gift? Check out , the proceeds for which go directly to families in need! I have taken a handful of incredible workshops with this all-volunteer team and highly recommend their important work. You can browse workshops here.

End-of-year blessings, all. May next year bring, to paraphrase Mariame Kaba, more justice and some peace.

As an antizionist diaspora Jew, I was also interested to look into what kinds of speculative fiction Israeli zionists are writing—what kind of relationship do they have to SF, to fantasy, to horror? How can antizionist Jews write against these canons? Reading ahead into our assignments for next week, I looked at the introduction to an anthology of Israeli speculative fiction from 2018 and was honestly a little aghast at what I found there.

The anthology’s editors are, as one might expect, pretty aligned with the liberal zionist project, whereupon the state of Israel can be critiqued but never conceptualized as a settler-colony; where Palestinian freedom fighters are termed “terrorists” without a second thought as to why they might be fighting in the first place. It is within this context that I encountered the following footnote:

There is, you may note, one primary scoff-inducing sentiment here—the idea that yes, of course there is a group experiencing daily horror within the nation-state of Israel, and naturally that group is…Israelis. But even beyond this particular sentence, something about this footnote set my brain whirring.

Just how impoverished can your cultural and literary analysis be in order to truly believe that horror is, at its core, at all imaginary?

“Horror,” John Clute wrote in The Darkening Garden: a Short Lexicon of Horror1, “is about pulling back the rind of the world.” When I think about horror, I consider how it is always reflective of contemporary cultural anxieties; how it can sometimes enable a kind of working-through that might not otherwise be possible.

A working-through that certainly wouldn’t be possible if one were to understand horror as existing in an apolitical, disconnected vacuum that has nothing to say about the culture that produced it.

I told myself earlier this week that I wanted to do some gentle reading and writing, but there is nothing gentle about war and genocide. I’m not sure if it’s possible to still hold this intention. Reading about the mass death and erasure of Palestinians murdered in the name of Jewish safety, knowing that most of my fellow Jews literally don’t give a shit, too wrapped up in their own trauma and projection and attachment to upholding white supremacy. This is where I feel the most tension—is that the right word, tension?—around the contradictions that have forced Judaism and the Jewish intellectual and spiritual tradition to become a home for fascism, but it’s also that the writing is on the wall for everyone else as well; just as Jewishness has acquired real power on the world stage, there lies the danger for a kind of elite capture of other marginalized identities and traditions. And of course even as I’m saying this I’m aware that there is no originary, authentic Jewishness to contort. A system is what it does, after all, not simply what it says it does.

I’m interested in how Jews experience antisemitism and have experienced genocide and attempted eradication seemingly endlessly by way of a contextless victimhood narrative but have at the same time become the nexus of settler-colonial white supremacy in the form of Israel through a narrative that makes “never again” a prerogative for Jews alone.

I’m also interested in the imperial boomerang and how Jews only became visible as victims through a liberal rights narrative and through whiteness (the Roma haven’t had the same experience, and of course Black and Indigenous people haven’t either), but the boomerang moved from the colonies to Europe in the Shoah and then to Palestine and other colonial outposts and it’s already coming back to the U.S. (think of how U.S. cops receive training in Israel).

Part of the way this becomes difficult for Jews is because the popular narrative of antisemitism has overcorrected in not allowing for Jews to have power or money; it paints a picture of Jews as perennially powerless which I would argue is actually antisemitic and pretty fucking dehumanizing! And so, these narratives of power and class and queerness also in terms of pinkwashing are all deployed in Israel’s favor.

I guess I’m wondering if it is possible to write Jewish horror that is materially committed to antizionism without writing a story that isn’t mine to tell. But at the same time, I’m not really sure how to write it in a way that isn’t just insultingly simple, or allegorical.

Last week, I took a workshop through Workshops4Gaza with the SF author Daniel José Older. He said something that made me really rethink what I thought I knew about worldbuilding in fiction—he told us that time + place + power = context.

We talked about humanizing our characters, not in service to dominant narratives and power, but to interrogate those structures. It’s important to go beyond good and evil and to interrogate the ways in which power functions in the world and inside of us. There’s no need to be didactic, he said; if you build a world with a political analysis, the plot can do whatever it needs to do structurally in terms of rising and falling action, and it will be pushed forward by the worldbuilding.

The day after that workshop, I sat down and wrote the following. No conclusions, and it’s more a collection of general musings than any kind of coherent piece, but maybe it’ll turn into one further down the line.

What happens when the solution is scarier than the problem?

There are ways of segmenting time that have not already been discovered. There is the potential for a radical discontinuity, completeness beyond possibility. What is happening is already hurtling towards self-serviced redemption. What else can you call the annual pageants of Yom HaKippurim, swollen with Zionist fervor?

Redemption for whom? Redemption for whom?

What does it mean to reject Zionism as a Jew in a way that has material consequences and recognition?

How can we move towards life?

Yom HaKippurim, a day like Purim. I wrote the word Yom Kippurim earlier, meaning many Yom Kippurs, not yet conscious of the connection between Purim and Yom Kippur. I found that connection on a zionist website mourning the tragedy and loss of life of October 7th, without a single mention of Israel’s flattening of Gaza.

But that, too, makes sense. Esther and Mordechai carved out rescue for us and a pogrom for others.

Zionism demands a severance between what has been done to us and what we do to others. There is no continuity in that space. There is, instead, an unravelling of causality.

When Never Again becomes so narrowly defined as to apply to just the Jewish people we become a force for domination and there remains no possibility of Never Again for someone else.

Thank you for reading. We’re now over a year into a genocide that’s killed over one hundred thousand Palestinians, and displaced hundreds of thousands more as the Nakba continues. Life this past year has felt incoherent. How can we go on while parents carry bags filled with their children’s remains? How many people have to die horrifically, and across how many countries, for this to stop?

I’ve been doing some work over the past six months to support Palestinian organizing in NYC, and I can honestly say that even throwing a thumbnail of sand in the gears of genocide (to paraphrase Rasha Abdulhadi) has helped me to feel less powerless. Want to join me?

A group of Palestinian and solidarity organizations are raising over one million dollars for essential services for people in Gaza, and they are currently just thirty three thousand away from their goal. Please consider giving what you can.

There are a few reasons for this, chiefly among them not wanting to romanticize what was for me and many others a difficult stage of life, particularly since children are an oppressed class largely without rights who suffer from the cultural expectation of being their parents’ property. But if I’m honest, the other reason is that I’ve always thought inner child work sounded a bit “cringe.”

On one level, the idea that there’s a wounded and vulnerable part of you that hasn’t really grown up makes total sense. On the other hand, I’m overfamiliar with internet discourse where adult queers spend too much time arguing about children’s cartoons. There’s something about the figure of the inner child that feels embarrassing and regressive to give any ground to.

That said, isn’t this kind of shaming thought pattern part of the problem? I shamed myself enough as a kid, I know that now. Much of the arc of my childhood memory is still crusted over with shame. Why am I still doing that? There’s got to be a way to think about one’s inner child while still being accountable to being an adult. And maybe that’s also part of the problem, this idea that I need to shame that part of myself into just growing up, already.

This past weekend, I was in Philly to visit friends and to see a rarely-screened film widely unavailable until this year, The Fall (Tarsem, 2006). While in town, my partner and I stopped at an art supply store, and I found myself excited in a way that I can only identify as childlike. I hadn’t been excited in that way, filled with wonder at pure possibility, for a long time.

Before I knew it, I had assembled an armful of things I liked, including multicolored pencils in glittering casings, a sketchbook small and light enough to fit in my tote, a cat coloring book where the pages are translucent to create a stained glass effect, a set of notecards with mushrooms on them, and a notebook with cover art by Brian Froud.

This latter was perhaps what I’m most excited about—Brian Froud is the artist behind my favorite book when I was a preteen, Good Faeries/Bad Faeries. Looking at his whimsical, weird art again more than twenty years later transported me back to the strangeness of being eleven or twelve; of having a wild imagination.

And then we saw The Fall, a film shot primarily from the perspective of a child; one of the most visually stunning films I’ve ever seen.

Heading back to our friend’s place that evening, I noticed beneath the concrete where the sidewalk joined the curb a line of light from the SEPTA train system flashing from underground as we walked and I tried to look; to remember. I walked down wet, rainy corridors, several times slipping and nearly falling in my smooth-soled sneakers. I tried to commit everything to sense memory, I wanted to be able to think back and account for the things I could remember, and my sense of direction, as always, was very poor. Combined with the oddness of seeing that light shining out from below the sidewalk, it made me feel more child-like, as I found myself more focused on the strange wet beauty of my surroundings than on getting from point A to point B.

Back home in Brooklyn, I keep asking myself would you rather be “cool” and adult, or able to open yourself to that vulnerable kind of imaginative play you actually need in order to write?

I’ve been having trouble writing. I want to say that this is a recent development, but the truth is, I suffer from a kind of constant amnesia that makes me forget that the first five sentences on any given day are always the hardest, next to the potentially endless dance of revision. Much easier to just not write at all.

That’s not entirely true, either. I spend most of my free time noodling around in my journals. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I’ve been having trouble writing in public. I feel overwhelmed by my potential subject choices; I get caught up in compulsive thought loops that drive me to seek somatic safety by following a given line of mind-draft as far as it will go, long before I’ve even put it on the page. Writing in public feels uncomfortable, and one of my strongest instincts is to seek comfort when and where I can. I’ve also needed—and struggled—to be compassionate with myself, as writing over ninety thousand words in the past three months has put me on the edge of burnout and it’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve started being able to reengage with any of my more creative ideas and impulses.

I think there’s just always been something about practice that’s felt intimidating to me, in much the same way as when I exhaustedly exclaim, “do I really have to feed myself three times a day, every day, for the rest of my life??” I mean, who has the energy? And really, I think it comes down to feeling like every new opportunity to practice a regular habit is an opportunity to completely fuck it up. I’m struck now by the ways I’ve imposed the perfectionism of white supremacy culture on myself.

How can I get out of my own way? Of course, it’s not always going to be constant flow all the time, but I’ve noticed that I strive for control over the creative process when what’s called for is something more like surrender. I’ve been thinking about something said in a Seeda School Open Studio earlier this month, which centered on making space for opacity1 in our artistic practice. She reassured us that it’s actually okay to not know what we’re making; to just be patient and see what emerges from the process.

Each time I remember that, it feels challenging—but it also feels like breathing. I’m reminded of just how much I’m still focused on the question that over twenty years of schooling have instilled in me: is what I’m making Good Enough?

I give that question an unwieldy amount of attention, far more so than the questions of “how do I feel making this?” or “what is making this doing for me, ie, what is becoming possible through this process?” I’ve often bristled at Anne Lamott’s advice to “write shitty first drafts,” advice meant to facilitate the transition from thought to page, because the thought of writing something not good enough, even in an early draft, feels immobilizing to me, so much so that on the occasions where I have managed to actually do so, I feel intense waves of shame for having written something so “awful.” At least in my head my ideas could be perfect, ever-shifting, and utterly formless—which is to say, unreal, but at the very least, not embarrassing.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that you never actually make anything at all. The fear of my inner critic has become all encompassing. Of course it makes sense that there’s a massive gap between my perfect idea and what’s on the page, I’m not especially practiced in writing “badly” enough to create something interesting! Instead, I end up in a kind of in-between space I’ve decided just now to call Metatextual Purgatory.

The story of finding myself in this place goes something like this: I’ve been trying to write two separate novels for several years, now. All in all, I have around thirty thousand words combined for both of them together in terms of drafted scenes—but I would estimate that I have probably something closer to one hundred thousand words more of notes to myself about the novels, most of them in my ever-growing collection of analog notebooks.

I started writing these notes in an effort to bridge the vertiginous gap between my thoughts and the scenes I could not picture but knew I needed to write. I figured if I couldn’t figure out what these characters had to say to each other, and where, and when, I might as well write in-process notes to myself about what that felt like. And that was all well and good, for a while, except at some point you really kind of do actually want to remove the training wheels and just ride the damn bike.

Metatextual Purgatory has become a kind of enjoyable procrastination technique that I can’t figure out how to navigate my way out of. One technique that’s helped me with drafting before—I’m even using it to write this post today—has been working in an iterative fashion, defining the task, the outcome, and just creating a 1.0 model to start with. Startup culture tends to work this way, and I do think that as far as that practice goes, they may have a point. But I haven’t figured out how to adapt this approach for a more opaque kind of process, where you may have no idea of the boundaries of the task or the outcome. What’s the sweet spot between opacity and structure? How can I ride this chaos?

How can I take a step back and let my process lead the way?

One last thing to close out: it was my friend Merci’s birthday this Sunday, and she just launched her candlemaking business! Her candles are made from soy wax with nontoxic scents. Check them out and support Black transfemme businesses!

This particular card features a person lying on the ground, surrounded by the eponymous eight swords. While they do look pretty menacing, the swords aren’t actually pinning the person to the ground, and the individual in question could seemingly get up and step out if they chose to do so. And yet, they continue to lie on the ground, head in their hands, refusing to look around them and actually assess the situation. 

For several years in my mid to late twenties, I pulled this card constantly, seemingly at random. I have come to know it intimately as an impulse I still favor, one that denies my own agency and access to power in favor of clinging to fantasies that I never had a choice. Around the same time this card first started showing up for me, I happened to read an essay by Shannon Perez-Darby called “The Secret Joy of Accountability: Self-accountability as a Building Block for Change,” which you can find in the anthology The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha)1.

Shannon Perez-Darby is an abolitionist and an anti-violence advocate and activist, and her essay was written in the context of supporting domestic violence survivors, articulated through her own experience as a survivor. Though I have not personally experienced domestic violence, I felt that the piece spoke to a certain embodied and rhetorical tendency that I really related to—the tendency to tell the story of what one has experienced (in this context, intimate partner violence) in ways that serve to focus on powerlessness; what was done to a person. Perez-Darby writes of the “devastating” nature of that story, and the many ways in which it served her, including by helping her rally support and eventually to leave her partner. “But what that story never did,” she writes, “was help me heal.” 

Perez-Darby is deeply careful here to articulate that her positionality should not be collapsed into victim-blaming; that she does fear that incorporating this kind of nuance to one’s survival story risks a bad-faith reading that tramples over the needs of survivors. And, at the same time, she describes returning over and over again to the same question: “What would it look like to take responsibility for the complex choices I made in a grounded, centered, and accountable way?” 

It was through this essay that I first learned that transformative justice and responding to violence “...begins with building our own internal capacity [italics in original] to look at and be responsible for our choices,” and that accountability is a gradual process and practice of aligning our actions with our values. Learning about self-accountability was, for me, a vital counterweight to my Eight of Swords impulse towards self-sabotaging behaviors which denied my own agency.

Recently, I learned a little bit about the psychology behind motivation that also helped me think through how best to approach practicing self-accountability. It turns out there are three psychological needs that underlie motivation to start or shift a habit—autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy is about agency; the extent to which you have control over your choices. Competence is believing that you have the capacity to actually engage in a certain behavior or change in behavior. And relatedness is cultivating a sense of belonging, so you don’t feel entirely at sea in your efforts to change; there are other people engaging in the process and practicing with you. 

I’m writing this one week away from Rosh Hashanah. We are currently moving through the final month of the Jewish year, Elul, which I have always found a potent portal for inquiry and transformation, as it marks the beginning of teshuvah season. Often translated as repentance, the concept is really more about (re)turning to oneself. I’m finding that thinking about teshuvah and self-accountability together has enabled me to realize that taking action (one of the words traditionally associated with Elul!), even in very small ways, actually creates the motivation I need to keep going with my teshuvah, as well as supports me to feel my own agency and more accurately assess how much power I have in any given moment, situation, or relation.

The center of my teshuvah practice this Elul has been…reading. Grounded in and supported by a four week asynchronous workshop called Avid, taught by writer Alyssa Natoci, I have been reading for at least 22 minutes every day, most often in the late mornings in the park near where I live in Brooklyn. Reading daily has helped me build confidence, trust in myself, and a greater sense of self-worth by strengthening my capacity for attention, wonder, and following through on my promises to myself. In starting this practice, I wanted to open up a circulatory ecosystem of reading and artistic practice that would ripple out into the rest of my life. In the process, I’ve become someone who doesn’t constantly flake out on his promises to himself, which has, in turn, led to greater self-accountability and alignment with my values. 

To take it even further, this practice has enabled me to build a present for myself where I can actually imagine a future for what feels like the first time in my life—both for myself, and for all people and the more-than-human world. As a trans person, I always found it very difficult to imagine my future; before transition it simply felt murky and unappealing, and now it often feels weighted with the transphobia I know has been omnipresent here and likely to expand further regardless of November’s election results. But practicing staying accountable to myself has helped me craft a present that I’m invested in shaping—and in order to envision a future, you do have to start with the present.

Naturally, I pulled the Eight of Swords again while writing this, so we’ll see what continues to unfold from this inquiry over the next few weeks.

I first started keeping a regular notebook in summer of 2017, which was when I visited an exhibit of Henry David Thoreau’s journals at the Morgan Library & Museum and read two particular sentences he had written in a notebook on the 17th of August, 1851. 

“How many ova have I swallowed? Who knows what will hatch within me?”

I ingested these sentences with a profound hunger, a need that catalyzed a fundamental transformation regarding how I was living my life. I went home, dug out an old, unused notebook, and began writing in a way I hadn’t practiced since I was a young teen. 

Generally, I refer to this practice as journaling, but I’ve also called it echolocation. Since 2017, I’ve filled dozens of soft and hardcover notebooks. Most of them sit slumped on the back shelves in our library/office space, heavy with words that kept saving my life; words that become harder to read as the years go by (both because the ink is fading, and because I’m somewhat embarrassed by how easy it is to use them as a cudgel for when I feel like nothing in my life has really changed since they first touched paper). 

On one level, the ova feel somewhat overdetermined (ovadetermined? sorry). You may or may not be familiar with the figure of the trans egg, that is, with the person who has not yet realized they are—or might be—trans (but who could be (painfully, exquisitely) close to that realization). I still have yet to see the film I Saw the TV Glow but I gather that this is one of its central modes of inquiry. Who knows what will hatch within me? I certainly didn’t. 

I did know, in summer of 2017, that I was very taken by these metaphorical ova; by the ambiguity of this hatching and its potential. Just now, in writing this, I actually looked up the passage for the first time since I saw it at the museum. I had remembered it exactly, but I hadn’t quite recalled the context. Here’s the next sentence: 

“There were some seeds of thought, methinks, floating in that water, which are expanding in me.” 

The water to which Thoreau is referring is from “the very brooks,” which he notes at the top of that day’s journal entry “seem fuller of reflections than they were.” 

I had read this and had come home knowing that I needed to start writing longhand again, and that I needed to do it regularly. I had understood then that there was some kind of essential and dynamic relation between the world, the self, and the creative process. 

Echolocation, then, or the tracing of patterns and relationships through writing, has been at the center of my creative practice for seven years. For most of those years, I really didn’t know what to do with those notebooks. It’s only been in the past couple of months that I’ve started developing a system to parse out what from my echolocation might be most generative for my public-facing practice, that is, for this newsletter and for other writing I might consider publishing.

This practice of echolocation became, for me, a kind of trans method1 as I moved through the world, a way to shape and reshape myself years before I started hormones. It’s been a way to engage with the world and to cultivate relationships between myself and the art and culture that’s already out there.

I recently returned to a romance ghostwriting gig I first held in 20192, and I can really feel the difference five more years of engaging with my writing practice has made. Balancing paid writing work with writing I do by and for myself—work that is currently unpaid—was and remains a challenge. Many days I spend far too much time on my paid work (I’m paid by the word, not the hour), and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with everything I want to practice or be in process with. Nevertheless, I notice that when I treat this gig as just one element of my creative ecosystem3, one output among many, it becomes easier to navigate both the frustrations and the breakthroughs of daily practice. 

A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I went to the Museum of the Moving Image to see their Jim Henson exhibit, which I loved—but another exhibit caught my eye, as well. Entitled My Veins are the Wires, My Body is Your Keyboard, the exhibit featured Auriea Harvey’s digital and sculptural work. I spent some time there just looking over her sketchbooks and drawings and thinking about the ways in which they seem to have supported her three-dimensional and digital works.

The exhibit enabled me to really think about my own life and work; the ways in which my echolocation as trans method has facilitated my ability to connect, and theorize about, the various aspects of my life as practice/process. Yesterday in Jewish time marked the 17th of Tammuz, which is the beginning of a grief period called Bein Hametzarim, three weeks of being in the Narrowness. There is much to grieve, on both the collective and personal levels, and at the same time I’m remembering what my teachers Elana June Margolis and Annie-Rose London say about how any strand of grief will touch all other strands, and how Kahlil Gibran writes “your joy is your sorrow unmasked.”

All grief is interconnected. Joy and sorrow sprout from the same pot.

The practice of grief is therefore a practice of interdisciplinarity; of crossover, much like any other creative practice/process.

And what is living but a series of practices and processes?