Writer With A Heart Of Gold

[tigerbeepress]

Our first release of 2017 is…a medical diagram! Tag yourself; we’re modest heart ☺️ 

“Progressive States of the Primary Emotive Organ” now available for purchase on totes here, 

Sign up for our mailing list here to get a limited time discount, an announcement of our first poetry chapbook, and other news. 

[charoshane]

So proud of this, which we’ve been working on for months! Had to get it just right....

[nprfreshair]

I think I do overshare. It’s my way of trying to understand myself. … It creates community when you talk about private things.

Carrie Fisher, speaking to Terry Gross last month  (via nprfreshair)

[tigerbeepress]

$43,125 to $13,227

In 2016, between payments for my freelancing writing and sales of TigerBee books, I took in $43,125. I feel good about this number; it’s not as much as I would have liked, but it seems like a respectable sum. (Don’t tell me if it isn’t; let me live in my dream world.)

Here’s how it breaks down:

$21,454 from (30) articles. The least I was paid for a single piece was $50; the most was $1500. 

$12,400 from my site’s book sales

$546 from Amazon sales

$8,815 from third party booksellers, like Emily Books and indie bookstores. (Strand is our biggest buyer, btw. Thank you, @strandbooks, I owe you my first born.) 

If you’re wondering exactly how many books were sold—me too! I did not do a great job of keeping records on this, but it was over 1300. Prostitute Laundry is the bestseller of the TB Catalog, which makes sense because it’s the most normal seeming, it’s been out the longest, has gotten the most hype + coverage, etc. etc. 

If you’re wondering how this compares to my 2015 income, I can help. That year I made $7855 from 31 pieces of writing. The least I was paid for a single piece was $50 and the most was $800. But then I got a big chunk of money from my Kickstarter campaign ($27,512.32.) That was nice.

But. Those figures are gross sums. It’s not my profit, what I ended with after paying all my work-incurred bills. It doesn’t factor in how much I owe in taxes or my expenses. And there were a lot of expenses this year because I was investing in a press, a press that makes its own books instead of just assembling the content and then outsourcing the manufacture. It could have been cheaper if we used paper that wasn’t as nice or paid our contributors less but that wasn’t what we chose to do. So what I ended up spending on the press in 2016 was $29,898: everything I made through freelancing and then some. 

Here’s some information (but not all the information, trust me it would be tedious to break it down any further) about how those expenses shook out, roughly:

$4125 for contributors. (That means anyone who wrote or drew anything for a book, and a copyeditor.)

$2400 for paper. (It literally grows on tress and it still cost this much? Not cool.)

$7000 for postage and packing materials. (Am training a fleet of birds to deliver them in 2017.) 

$1500 for ink. (Am training an octopus to squirt multicolor for 2017. Her name is Jody and I think she’s a great addition to the team.)

$4560 for all sorts of assorted office charges: a lawyer to draw up contracts, the e-contract service so contributors can sign remotely, website hosting, various hardware for making books like a stapler and printer and binding machine, ISBN numbers and barcodes (those fuckers are expensive, it’s a racket,) etc.  

$6753 for N.B. and PL, which are made by Bookmobile (a lovely company that creates beautiful products.) 

Now let me say this about all of that. Pretty much everything material in my life is the result not of writing but of sex work, which I did for over a decade, rapaciously. I made a lot and I saved a lot, and I had other jobs in tandem though they usually paid very little. (Like: teaching, writing.) I was also in a relationship with a generous partner for a long time, and that further facilitated my saving, though—sadly, in retrospect—I spent a lot, too. Basically my third income right now is consigning designer clothes that don’t make sense for my lifestyle anymore and I wish I were joking about that but I am not. 

I’m in an extremely privileged financial situation and I still worry about money almost every day. It’s my great fear that I’m building something that can’t sustain itself, and that sometime in my 40s I’ll have spent all of what should have been my retirement fund. These concerns are not entirely rational; I’m pretty good with money, meaning good at acquiring it and holding on to it, and if I really fell apart my family could probably help me put myself back together. But I also have the sensibility of someone who used to earn major hooker money, and I live with the anxiety that I won’t shake myself out of that mentality until it’s too late, and that writing will never pay me much more than it pays me now and that I’ll spend my later years, my 50s or my 60s, living hand to mouth and feeling really stressed and sick all the time, like even more so than I feel stressed and sick now. 

But, neuroticism aside, I am so grateful to everyone who’s supported us, who’s worked with us, who’s sold our books. I hope this is useful for you if you’re a freelancer or considering self-publishing or just a nosey person like me who loves learning about other people’s financial business. I don’t know if I’m living the dream but I’m living a dream, and if you’re reading this you have probably helped me do it. 

<3 Charlotte 

[charoshane]

In Repetition, Rebecca Reilly quotes a survivor of a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge: 'As my hand left the rail I thought, I can fix everything in my life but this.' I was moved by this when I read it in 2015, when I still considered suicide as personally unnecessary and irrelevant as vaping. But when I thought of this line now, it simply didn’t apply. The greatest pleasure I’d known had been the pleasure of fruitful effort, rewarded focus, accretive success. It was the pleasure of purpose and it had deserted me. I didn’t need to fix everything, I just needed to fix the only thing. And not only was I ignorant of how to fix myself but I didn’t see the value in it. In other words, I didn’t want to.

My latest, for @hazlittmag about what happens when desire deserts you. 

[charoshane]

My Favorite Books of 2016

I read well over 100 books this year which I say not to brag (although, obviously, to brag a little) but to provide some perspective about the size of my field for consideration and to explain why there are so many titles. Most of these weren’t published in 2016 so you’re not going to see the same 10-15 that kept showing up on all the usual year-end lists. You’re welcome! Here we go:

THE UNFORGETTABLE 

Zippermouth by Laurie Weeks — Sweet, funny, propulsive. I adored it. 

Dark Pool Party by Hannah Black — No one’s brain works like hers.

Eros The Bittersweet by Anne Carson — Also read this year, and recommended, of course: Antigonick, Decreation, and Float, which I reviewed for The New Republic

Straw Dogs by John Gray — Invigorating and smart, albeit peppered with extreme declarations supported by little to no evidence. You have to be willing to put up with a voice that assumes complete authority without always earning it, i.e., a man’s. 

White Out by Michael W. Clune— If you were going to read only one book on this entire list, I’d probably urge you to make it this one. And I know, I know, he is a man, and I just took that dig at men! But truly, this is a masterpiece, and you know it has to be exceptional to override my reverse sexism. Hilarious, vivid, insightful, insert additional superlative here and additional superlative here and then just go read it.  (Gamelife, his subsequent book, is also very good, but it’s hard to write something perfect twice in a row. That’s more Anne Carson’s domain.)

10:04 by Ben Lerner — What can I say? Ben Lerner is a genius, this book is genius, 2016 was the year I could not deny that men actually wrote some things worth reading. I continue to almost shudder in admiration every time I think about this title. 

The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner — I thought about its ideas a lot, and referenced it in the Float review linked above. Pick 10:04 over this if you’re only doing one, maybe, or start with this one instead because it’s short and direct (?)

The Gift by Barbara Browning — God bless @ruthcurry for giving me this book on election night. It was the only thing I could read over the following two days: gentle, loving, wise. I am so grateful to have had this book when I did. It has shades of 10:04, which I say just to compliment them both, not to imply it’s derivative. It doesn’t come out until spring of this year, but please give yourself the gift of reading it ASAP. (See what I did there?) 

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson — I put off reading this for years—can you guess why—but once I started I could not stop. I usually went back and reread the stories that had come before, before I progressed to the next. Good albums are like that too; too arresting for you to get very far into them right away, because you keep replaying the opening track(s).

All The Lives I Want by Alana Massey — It’s no secret that I’m friends with this little dynamo and I understand why you'd be liberally salting this recommendation as a result. But I’d never recommend a book I didn’t think was worth reading. Life is too short to pretend bad things are good, even if the maker of that bad thing is my friend. I just can’t do it! So believe me when I say that although I already respected Alana’s daunting ability to turn a phrase, I was so impressed with this book. It’s relentlessly intelligent, and mischievous, full of verve and focus and conviction. It made me want to write, which is the highest compliment I can give. 

Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb — I’d never heard of Amélie Nothomb until I came across this recommendation from @magicmolly but now I think I’ve read everything of her’s that’s available in English. (Loving Sabotage is the best but there are striking passages in all the others, too.)

The Vet’s Daughter and Our Spoons Came From Woolworth’s by Barbara Comyns —  They’re both surprising horror stories told by unsentimental but vulnerable female narrators. I loved them very much. 

The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle — I picked this up a few times as a kid but I couldn’t find any sex in it, so I didn't bother giving it a proper read. Now that I have, I can say it is exceptional: delicate, lyrical, original. I cried, and then I cried again. I know it’s about a unicorn, but fuck you.  

Other books I recommend without reservation:

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte 

The Man in the Ceiling by Jules Feiffer (I cried!)

The Millstone by Margaret Drabble (Truly the year I fell in love with British female novelists.)

Drawing Blood by Molly Crabapple (generous, beautiful, singular)

Problems by Jade Sharma

D.V. by Diana Vreeland

I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris by Elizabeth Hall

Little Labors by Rivka Galchen (Good enough to inspire me to read her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, which I’m glad to have read but perhaps should have been a short story instead of an entire book.)

Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (When I’m reading Hardwick, I am amazed by her, but her writing also tends to leave my brain immediately, like it’s a dissipating smoke.)

Orgasmic Bodies by Hannah Frith (Academic but not too dense, and packed with important ideas)

Intimacies by Adam Phillips and Leo Bernsani (another academic one, but all about anal sex. [Ok, not only anal.]) 

The Lost Daughter by (duh!) Elena Ferrante, whom I wrote about a little here, much to a certain Freddie DB’s disapproval  

Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez

Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson (Recommended to me ages ago by Mallory Ortberg so you know it’s good.)

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (Related: I read Memento Mori and sort of hated it!) 

The Selfishness of Others by Kristen Dombek 

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick (+ The End of the Novel of Love)

Investing Sex: Surrealist Discussions (I dunno, it’s kind of stupid because it’s mostly a bunch of young straight guys sitting around talking about women’s orgasms like the complete jackasses they are, but it’s also fun and reminded me of things I forget too often, like how fundamentally boring sex can be.)

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman (bizarre, assured, unsettling. I was dying to talk about it with someone during and after I read it but that loneliness is what I get for reading everything at the wrong time. And for having no friends.) 

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (HAUNTING. So haunting.)

The Bitch in the House (It’s rare for anthologies to be good, I think, because they invite such a compromise on quality of writing . But this one is!)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl by Phoebe Gloeckner (Also, A Girl’s Life and Other Stories, which is a rehash of a lot of what’s in Diary but I liked it anyway. You have to be prepared for true teenage diary writing though. Gloeckner has stresses it’s fiction but she also includes excerpts at the end from her real diary as a kid, and they appear almost verbatim in the book. It’s self-involved and repetitive and tedious in places—like diaries are supposed to be!—but I still found it worthwhile. )

Diary of an Emotional Idiot by Maggie Estep (And/or Soft Maniacs by the same.)

And obviously I loved everything @tigerbeepress released this year. I have a particular soft spot for my collaboration with @merrittk, and for Bad Drawings, which turned out more perfect than I could have imagined. 

[tigerbeepress]

Carrie Fisher interviewing Madonna for Rolling Stone, 1991

[charoshane]

“I ultimately end up making my own work.”

[rosescotia-deactivated20170827]

Sex workers deserve to be free from violence, abuse, and all the forms of direct and indirect criminilisation we face. 

Happy International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. 

[britticisms]

‘On Balance’ is a new book featuring, “ten Libras on physicality, grief, restlessness, and the perfect impossibility of equilibrium.” I am one of them. I wrote about meditation, suppression and loss. I am glad this story is finally out. Thank you, @charoshane and @tigerbeepress

⛓ in my profile has more information on the book.

[ruthcurry]

So Sad Today

Recently I was #blessed to receive an advance copy of So Sad Today, which I read very quickly and enjoyed thoroughly (as much as one can ‘enjoy’ a book about living with a mental illness, anyway) and then gave to Emily. When I dropped it off at her house her kid was a little fussy.  Emily comforted him while we chatted, sort of murmuring nonsense stuff into his little ear and gently bouncing him, at one point repeating “Why so sad? Why so sad?” to him in one tone of voice in between saying something completely different to me in another, and then I said “So sad today!!” and we both looked at the book and then at Raffi and laughed.  I look forward to running this joke into the ground.

What I liked about So Sad Today is that it takes the experience of severe, chronic depression and treats it, not with a detail-obsessed, third-person remove (here I am thinking about that David Foster Wallace story, “The Depressed Person”) or a first-person from-the-trenches account, either highly medicalized or ending in triumph (I once took The Noonday Demon to the beach. “Your beach read is a book about depression?” – EG), but as a joke.  A dark joke, with intense repercussions, but a joke.  Don’t get me wrong; So Sad Today is, as the title suggests, very sad.  But it is trying to make the reader laugh.

I also treated my severe chronic depression like a joke.  What I mean by this is that I didn’t take it seriously. I didn’t do anything about it for a very long time, and when someone tried to talk to me about how I was, really, about my depression, a close friend or medical professional, maybe, I would almost always lie or change the subject, in a way I considered to be a ‘joke.’ But it wasn’t a joke, because my behavior was a. a deflection tactic, prima facie, and b. not funny.  If a friend asks how you are, and you say, “Fantastic!”, or worse, “You know, fantastic!”, relying on their ability to read between the lines and intuit that by “you know”  you mean “You know the nasty hoodie I call my “Darkness Visible” sweatshirt that never leaves my house? Well, I’ve been wearing it for 6 days straight,” you are not being funny.  

With acquaintances and strangers it was much worse. “Ha ha!” I’d think.  “This person doesn’t know that by ‘Fantastic!’ I mean, ‘I feel like I want to die 7 out of every 10 seconds!’  What a hilarious brilliant use of irony! God, I’m funny!” Right, yes, because all of this is so fucking hilarious and my own health will never be important enough for me to do anything about, because I hate myself – how funny.

Are all my jokes about listening to Mogwai and crying really jokes?

Are my jokes about listening to Mogwai and crying  just like 6 years ago really jokes?

I remember around the time I was doing this a lot, laughing at my awful inside jokes with myself about how I was actually “fine,” I also was a few months into a job that I had hoped would be temporary but ended up being pretty permanent.  My responsibilities weren’t enough to fill a complete 8 hour workday, so I spent a lot of time in a beige cubicle clicking around aimlessly on a computer and a lot of time hungover, because clicking around aimlessly on a computer was something I could do quite competently while hungover. Also if I was hungover almost daily I could attribute how bad I felt to the hangover, and not something scarier about my brain chemistry and general disposition. None of this was doing that brain chemistry and disposition any favors as far as feeling purposeful or worthwhile or hopeful about the future, either, but that didn’t seem obvious or even connected.  

Anyway, it was right around lunch, late October or November, grey and disgusting outside, and I was “fine.” An all-office email went out saying there was Turkish food in the conference room left over from a meeting, first come, first served.  The innocuous stampede of people moving towards the free food that always formed like clockwork 2-5 minutes following the receipt of such an email low-key amused me the way it always did – “People love free food!  Ha ha, we’re all such broke animals and life is nothing but a struggle to push someone else, at least one person, beneath you” – and I joined it.  When I reached the buffet there was not much left, and nothing I really personally enjoyed (a small list of things, growing smaller by the day), but I put some random food on my plate.  This way at least I would not have to eat my packed lunch, which was doubtless horrible, like all meals I prepared, or go outside in the rain to waste money I didn’t have on something else that would probably also be bad.  Then the person in front of me in line turned around quickly or stopped suddenly or maybe I wasn’t paying attention and just walked right into them – whatever, the end result was that my plate flew out of my hand, up, high in the air, fully revolving at least once, and landed food-side-down on the carpet.  I can see a way in which this is spectacular and pretty genuinely funny, but in the moment I thought everyone in the room already hated me (because who didn’t?) and I hated myself for being so clumsy and awful, and I burst into tears immediately, right there, in the conference room full of my nice, bookish, nonthreatening coworkers.  I knew I was way overreacting so while the person I had bumped into or whatever apologized I ran out of the room and into the stairwell. I didn’t even pick the plate up from the floor or try to clean anything, which for me and my identity as a Helpful Person is a huge-ish deal.

Once I was safe in the stairwell sitting on the bare concrete landing I cried and cried.  I could not stop.  I thought about how I was crying over pretty literally spilt milk and cried even more about how stupid I was.  I cried about how there was tzatziki or something all over my dress, which was old and stained already and didn’t really fit me or look good anymore because I had lost weight and also chopped off all my hair, and how I didn’t have anything else to wear that I didn’t also hate, at home or in the world, and about how if I tried to shop for something new I would just loathe myself for all the money I had ever spent and didn’t have and then I wouldn’t be able to actually make a decision and buy something, anything, anyway, just like I could not currently  make a decision about the most inconsequential things, such as as to whether to eat my packed lunch or go out for food or go back to the conference room and clean up my mess and get some different Turkish leftovers.  I kept crying and crying, really awful, uncontrollable, silent but wet Claire Danes-style sobs, for a long time.  I would slow down for a while but I couldn’t really stop.  Finally I just left work for the day, even though it was maybe 1:45, because I thought I was probably going to die.

We hyperbolize as a way to express ourselves strongly.  If we prefer a certain shade of nail polish, we’re obsessed with it. When I don’t like someone, I say they’re worthless.  I wanted to die, it was so terrible, we say, about an inconvenient travel experience.  

The thing about depression is that it does not recognize hyperbole. Life is worthless, you are worthless, none of this will ever change and things will always be this way, except the future, which, while remaining the same, will also somehow certainly be worse. You know these to be facts the way you know your birthday and your eye color.

My Darkness Visible hoodie might be a punchline, but it is not a joke.  I spent a long time not really understanding the difference. Now I do.

“‘We convince ourselves we can own the identity of the anxious or depressed person.  Then it sneaks up again.’  It’s like I got this.  Then the mental illness is like, No, I’ve got you.”

I read that and felt like I had been kicked in the stomach.  I might have actually involuntarily said, “oof.”  I cried some, not as much as on the day of the Turkish food buffet, but some.  

I am better now.  In February, I finally started seeing a non-crappy therapist.  In March, I began seeing a non-crappy psychiatrist. Sometime in April I started feeling better.  I remember I was walking to or from Emily’s house, waiting for the light to change on the corner of St. James and Greene.  I felt weird.  I wasn’t dreading something I couldn’t understand or describe, I didn’t instantly hate everything I saw and felt, nothing annoyed me, I didn’t wish I was in bed.  I didn’t feel empty or raw or worthless, or like I needed to be alone in the dark. I hadn’t cried yesterday or the day before. There were things I wanted to do in addition to seeing Emily that day, and I knew I would do them.   Is this a good mood? I wondered.  Is this what being in a good mood feels like?

Now I am in a good mood more often than not.  I still get sad, and I still have days when I feel terrible and my mood sucks. I have days where I am terrified that my wellbeing is a fluke and it’s just a matter of time before I am back to being So Sad Forever.  I also get sad sometimes about everything I lost or never did during the many years I was depressed. I lost friends and opportunities and relationships and a LOT of money, it turns out. When I read that a couple weeks ago – “No, I’ve got you,” – I felt sad for what a stupid lie I had believed for so long, the lie I had to tell myself about how my feelings were a joke, even though they almost killed me. Because I’m a smart person who doesn’t have feelings, or can’t be serious about them, because that’s not cool.  Or something.  I don’t know.  I don’t have to know everything anymore.  I don’t even know why I wrote this, except to say – to promise – that if you feel this way, you don’t have to either.  I know that seems crazy and pointless,  and you don’t have to believe me.  I wouldn’t – didn’t– believe me. But you don’t.

[leighalanna]

Radical Feminism In Action!

A lady came in to my work this evening to celebrate her upcoming nuptials. I learned very quickly three things about her:

1) She is not the most capable drinker.

2) Her wife-to-be sounds lovely.

3) She believes to the core of her being that pornography, and all forms of sex trade, are inherently and irrevocably damaging to all women who participate in it.

This last point I learned the most about – she kept me talking to her, at several points physically blocking me from leaving, for almost half an hour, waxing rhapsodic about how damaging it was for men to treat me like a piece of meat, and how I was too smart to let myself be degraded like this, and how upset my girlfriend would be if she ever understood how tainted by men I’d been. Oh, and how it wasn’t that I was doing anything wrong (other than being tainted, and becoming a piece of meat, I guess), they should just Make It A Crime to use women like me. She eventually worked herself up to such a frenzy that she demanded I cover myself, and tried to take off her shirt to help me achieve that end. Which was at least amusing.

Guess how much this woman paid me, for coming into my place of work, and monopolizing my time, and insisting that play audience to a description of how little worth I have as a human being. Zero dollars! Guess how many of my bills were paid by her wishing that it be a crime to give me money. Zero bills!

[catapultbooks]

It’s okay if someone is disgusted or offended by my performance. It’s just a performance. The person I am still belongs to me, it’s not readily available for anyone who wants to reject it or cozy up to it, and I very much need that.

“ There’s no spectrum of nuance for why people might expose themselves.” — Prostitute Laundry — Medium

Jenny Zhang and Charlotte Shane discuss performance, intimacy, and the different ways work can be received by audiences.

(via catapultstory)

[charoshane]

I’m answering questions over at the Prostitute Laundry Book Club (and looking for fanfic!) if you’d like to join.

[charoshane]

I didn’t set out to stop reading fiction written by men, or to stop watching movies and TV with male protagonists, I just got tired.

Erin Kissane

[charoshane]

I Can’t Talk About “Prostitute” Forever

(That’s a lie; I obviously can and probably will, but would really, really prefer not to.)

“Prostitute” is a word that some sex workers find extremely offensive and as such have agitated to keep it out of mainstream media, especially news reports, which almost inevitably only reference a woman’s sex work in the context of her assault or death. 

I happen to love the word dearly and use it, well, kind of a lot but only in reference to myself or friends who I know don’t mind or with whom it bonds me. I wrote a pretty thorough essay about why I do that. 

You don’t have to like the word “prostitute;” in fact, you can hate it. I’m fine with you hating it. I’m never going to call anyone a prostitute unless I know they’re ok with that, so don’t worry about me coming at you with the p-word. But I don’t agree that it’s a slur, or that it’s progressive and useful to treat it as a slur and tell non-SWers that it is. Stuff like this makes me really unhappy and frustrated because I think it’s actually bad for the cause, if “the cause” is educating people that sex work—in all its forms but particularly in the no frills fucking someone who paid you form—is not wrong, immoral, or deserving of criminalization. I wrote a whole essay about why which you’re welcome to read through. I linked it right there, and also a few sentences ago. But I’m not an activist, so beyond making my ideas available publicly, there’s no danger of me spearheading a “prostitute” rival and holding a rally to “save prostitute” or something like that. Although now that I think about it, that sounds really fun and like a party I would love to go to. 

Whether you are or aren’t or have ever been a sex worker, just ask someone how they want to be identified, if at all, by the sex work they do. If you’re not in a position to ask them, why are you talking about them in this capacity anyway? If you’re just generally pontificating on the state of all sex workers—well, that’s tricky, and there are probably a lot of nuances you’re ironing over.  But maybe “people who sell sex” would work, if you feel you need something more specific than “sex worker”? 

People who use “hooker” and “whore” and “prostitute” as punchlines for (inevitably, painfully unfunny) jokes and rants and stupid tweets are using those words because they want to be disrespectful and cavalier about the worth and basic human dignity of people who sell sex. They’re not misguided or undereducated. And that’s part of why I refuse to 1) get into conversation or arguments with those people (duh) and 2) let them dictate anything about how I live my life or talk about myself. 

(This, sorry, is moronic—of course being proud to call myself a prostitute isn’t “a majority feeling” just like “prostitutes are fundamentally unobjectionable humans who deserve basic human rights” isn’t “a majority feeling.” Please don’t try to use my own writing as a tool to argue against the point I was making. This is not how sex workers who ostensibly respect and want to act as allies to one another behave. Plus, you’ll lose.) 

Hope I don’t feel compelled to rant angrily about this again in the near future! Thanks for actually reading that whole essay I wrote instead of just yelling at me that my liking the word doesn’t mean it’s not a slur. (You not liking it isn’t really grounds for determining that it’s a categorical slur, either.)  😘😘😘

[charoshane]

My thoughts on trying to mitigate the damage of being made a sucker by love. (Also about mercy, moms, marriage, writing.)  

[charoshane]

I wrote about wimmelbooks, Where’s Waldo, and the challenges of taking in the world for @hazlittmag

[charoshane]

Very flattered to be profiled by Caitlin White for @brooklynmag! (Read more)