I'm EM Abatis, and I make words. This is my designated professional account, for my very serious not-at-all silly poetry and original fiction. (Maybe a couple reviews, too, if I'm so inclined.) I'll also reblog things that inspire me, whether it be poetry, visual art, music, or thousand-word infodumps about the bronzed cowbird. I'll tag my stuff with "my poetry" or "my fiction" and other people's stuff with "look! art!!!"
My work sometimes dips into dark or adult subject matter, but I've never written something that couldn't feasibly be read to a high school class. That being said, I'll tag possible triggers, even if the poem is vague and obscure about it, as it usually is.
I tend to write short, experimental things. Poetic inspirations include Gertrude Stein (especially Tender Buttons), Douglas Kearney (especially Patter), William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and many others I can't think of at the moment.
Real reactions to my work include "I have no idea what just happened, but I loved it," and "That was so funny - was that supposed to be funny?" and "You're like the reincarnation of Edgar Allen Poe, except as an alien." If that sounds like your jam, stick around! If you have questions about my process, or anything else really, please feel free to ask! 🦇
My instagram is em_abatis though I don't post there often and don't really know how the site works. I'm much more comfy on Tumblr.
My current big fiction project is a middle grade/children's/whatever chapter book about existentialist philosophy, the limitations of language, and grief, which I'm tentatively titling "What Dahlia Knows", but I'll tag anything about it with "the icy wip" Intro Here
I'm also working on a short story collection about monsters in everyday settings (Masterpost Here), something I've been calling "skeleton collect-a-thon,"(Intro Here) a "Strawberry Shortcake-meets-DnD" fantasy novel, and a weird literary post-apocalypse called "On Scene." (Intro Here)
So ablaze with rage was She, some hairs
unwound from their imposing knot, as
nails flaked with rat’s blood dug into
Her scalp, as though to net them lest they
strike again. I tried to speak, but She
did curl Her fists into white
snail shells, which tore Her flaming hair.
“Are you dumber than we thought? Out!”
Reblog this post with a little bit of information about one of your characters. Then, let your followers send questions in...and have THAT CHARACTER be the one to answer them!
As always, if you reblog this post from anywhere other than the main Summerfest blog, make sure you send that person an ask!
Doing both William and Innocence because I cannot separate them.
William. Will. My boy. The Narrator. Wife guy. Is so on board with whatever Innocence is doing, even when it's hurting him. Takes a break every few stanzas to gush about how pretty and smart she is. He gives her the divine capital-H pronoun treatment. He's also trans.
Then there's Innocence. Doesn't know what painting is. Has never heard a note of music in her life. Thinks eating salt is heresy. Makes little friends out of frankenstein-ed together rats and birds and bugs. She's so angry and so vitamin D deficient it's not even funny.
Recently I ran across an article about an art center that was doing creative expression classes for people with disabilities. Not that unusual, I've encountered that and trauma-oriented art therapy before, but it was the first time I'd come across the idea since getting diagnosed with ADHD. While the class was aimed more at high-needs disabilities, it occurred to me that I could -- if I wanted -- make non-prose art about being disabled.
Outside of my work in scene design I've never been much of a visual artist because I've never felt I had the combination of "something to say" and "a meaningful way to say it", but I started to question how meaningful and complex I really had to be to just make some statements about having ADHD. I can do it in prose, after all.
So I started thinking about how you would talk, in visual language, about things like time blindness, shame stemming from undiagnosed disability, the shift in behavior that medication can induce. Ways to express my condition to people who don't experience it. I still didn't really know how to build the pieces but whenever I went to an art museum I'd think about how I might do a gallery installation. The centerpiece of my mental gallery was a pair of barcodes, one marked "Neurotypical" and one marked "Neurodivergent".
[ID: An interior view of a small booklet, with pages marked 1 and 2, showing barcodes -- on the left, labeled Neurotypical, and on the right, in slightly weirder configuration, labeled Neurodivergent.]
And then I thought, why not make a zine? Nothing you're thinking of couldn't be put in zine form instead of on a gallery wall.
[ID: The booklet continues to pages 3 and 4; on page 3 is a postage-style label reading AUTISM with up arrows on either side, and on page 4 is a QR code labeled ADHD. The QR code technically should work but it just dumps a block of text I wrote about having ADHD into a browser.]
I grew up with zine culture in the 90s and I always wanted to make one but much like with visual art, I never felt like I had the right kind of thing to say; either I had too much to say or too little, and anyway I wasn't confident that what I wanted to do wouldn't just come off as trite and obvious. But you can make a six-page zine out of a single sheet of paper, so I did: I made Helpful Labels For Strange Brains by idab zines, a division of Extribulum Press. (i--dab is a term for a cuneiform tablet that contains a royal communication.)
[ID: The last two pages feature the same image -- a cereal bowl with a spoon in it, the spoon containing a single Adderall pill. One image, however, is captioned "Wake up. Pour yourself a cup of iced coffee. Fix a bowl of cereal. It's going to be a good day." while the other is covered in a detailed ADHD-style step-by-step process for the same actions, culminating in "It's going to be a day like that."]
I'm pretty pleased with how it came out -- the art all looks intentional and it still has that "taped this together after school" aesthetic I remember fondly from the 90s. And the confines of six pages, each only a few inches square, offers a good structure to keep things clear, simple, and meaningful.
[ID: The cover of the zine, labeled "Helpful Labels For Strange Brains" in a kind of esoteric stampy font.]
Especially nice is that if you wanted to you could just hand out the flat sheet, and let folks fold it into a booklet or not -- there's instructions for folding it on the back of the zine. Additionally I have some sticker backed printer paper so I could print it such that you could literally turn the labels into real labels.
Anyway if you want it, here ya go. You can print it on a single sheet of paper and follow the instructions on the back to fold it. I thought about selling it but I do not have the spoons to do a bunch of printing and folding and shipping.
William adored Innocence even before he met her, but I don't think he truly fell in love until he started to realize he was a man. He saw her being abused, and saw himself as the only person who was willing and able to protect her, and if he could protect her by marrying her, that's what he was going to do.
As for Innocence's thoughts on the matter, that's up to interpretation and also a bit of a spoiler ;)
Way back in the day—I think on my old account, which I lost the password and the email for—, I wrote a WIP intro for Lessons in Humanity from a Future Physicist. Looking back, it’s not up to the standards that I hold now, which is a sign that things have changed for the better. Things have also changed since then.
Lessons in Humanity is my oldest work. This year, it turns ten years old. That’s older than 3/4 of my sister’s kids, older than my relationship, and older than even my own name. It’s crazy to think that I’ve been writing this book for almost half of my life, and crazier still that I keep changing things about it. These are characters I made when I was a lonely, angsty tweenager who was feeling weird things about my gender and place in the world.
The first draft of Lessons in Humanity, which was called We’re All Dead After All, was a disaster of depression that honestly concerns me, looking back at it. I was deeply sad at this time. Things have vastly improved since then, though I still do like a tragic story every now and then.
It’s no longer a story drenched in my own pre-teen depression; it’s a story about growing up and changing. I think that’s what makes it so personal to me; that I’ve been changing things about it as I’ve grown up and changed.
Lessons in Humanity is about Kam Suzuki and his best friend Zach Amsel as they begin their first semester at Miami University (in Oxford, Ohio). While there, Kam has a difficult time adjusting to the change and finds himself crumbling under the weight of some issues he has yet to deal with.
A more literal way to put it is: Kam experiences the absolute Hell I went through (mentally) when I graduated university.
It’s more of a literary fiction character study than something with a big, overarching plot. Think My Year of Rest and Relaxation literary fiction versus The Secret History literary fiction. Nothing big and grand happens in it. It’s a quiet story about a guy slowly wearing himself into nothing and then building himself back up (with the help of his friends). There’s a romantic subplot that I only ended up adding because it felt natural.
I think what makes Lessons in Humanity so important to me isn’t just that I’ve been working on it for almost half my life. It’s also that, whenever I go through a difficult time of change, I come back to it. Case in point: I’m writing this update right now because, in six weeks, the American branch of my company will lay us all off. Lessons in Humanity brings me comfort when I feel directionless because Kam feels the same way. Dare I call it my comfort work.
As a (likely-autistic) trans guy myself, Kam was me before I was even me. For all the time I’ve been writing him, Kam has been a way to understand myself and the things I felt. Of course he’s like me.
My biggest hope with this book is that it does for others what it’s been doing for me. I love Lessons in Humanity when I’m feeling unsure and afraid of change. If it can comfort other people in those times—or any other time—, then I consider it to be a success, no matter what. The idea of Lessons in Humanity from a Future Physicist being someone’s comfort book makes me want to cry.
I haven’t done a full rewrite of Lessons in Humanity since 2020. Since then, I’ve gone to university and gotten (part) of the full experience, and I’m going to add quite a bit of realism to what wasn’t accurate before.
(My husband and I are going to go on a small trip to Oxford, Ohio in October once the layoffs are finished so I can get a little bit of a refresher on the town. I haven’t been in two years, and that was back when I was doing Doordash.)
Kam Suzuki
One of my first ever queer characters, Kam will always hold a dear place in my heart. It’s not that much of a joke when I say that Kam is my self-insert character. When you list out our traits, we look almost the same. And yet, I do take some steps to make Kam a little different from me. I take aspects of people in my life that I love (which I do for all of my characters) that are far different from me and put them in him.
Despite being obsessed with his physical fitness, Kam is someone who doesn’t deal with his problems. He locks them in his chest and lets them claw away at him until he can’t stand it anymore. Unfortunately, that happens to him during the events of Lessons in Humanity. There’s some stuff he’s been holding in for far too long, like his trauma from walking in on his twin brother’s suicide attempt, along with his general hatred of things changing and fear of abandonment.
Kam’s lifelong dream is to work for NASA. He’s been obsessed with space and science since he was a small child, so of course, he’s a Physics major. He’s also the type of person who works himself to the bone for success. (In this way, we are the same.)
Zach Amsel
Something I love about Zach is that it feels like he’s the other part of me. What Kam didn’t get, it seems like Zach got. Zamsel is the type of indie soft boy that I easily catch crushes for, with my “anxious but slutty bisexual” energy and unruly curly hair.
When it comes to Zamsel, I would just like to say: his playlist is composed of a lot of The Front Bottoms. He’s a sad boy who gets into a lot of bad situations with toxic romantic partners that take advantage of him. While I’ve changed the timeline of a couple relationships of his, the fact that he’s willing to get with almost anyone who shows interest in him is equal parts depressing and frustrating. For both everyone in the novel and myself.
Bad taste aside, Zamsel is a sweet guy with an incredible competitive streak. He and Kam have been competing with each other for years now, and they still push each other towards success.
Nikki Espinosa-Jasso
Nikki is a Mechanical Engineering student who shares an art class with Kam and Zamsel. She’s a year older and wiser, a bit jaded, and overall, a little abrasive on the surface, but she has a heart of gold. I think we’ve all met a person like her. Her main love languages are acts of service and getting food together.
She’s receiving what is pretty much a total overhaul. Where she used to be a quasi-mother figure to Kam and Zach, I’ve decided to make her a little more feral and a lot less maternal. Nikki needs to be a more interesting person outside of the boys.
Vic Suzuki
Kam’s brother who is still in high school since he didn’t skip a grade when Kam did. When I first created him, he was your typical 2014-era emo, which has now become a 2024 Tiktok alt boy, I guess. Blue hair, lots of piercings, black hoodies under leather jackets, bold tattoos, bisexuality. He was my gender goal when I created him, and honestly, I’m pretty damn close to it right now.
In the past, Vic was depressed to the point of attempting suicide, which Kam walked in on and was traumatized by. Vic doesn’t know this. He’s gotten better since then, and has far better coping mechanisms. Honestly, he has some of the best mental health in the book, which is a huge change from how he was in WADAA.
He has goals now (that don’t include being dead). Vic is trying to line up a tattoo apprenticeship when he graduates high school.
Gerard Shimmish
Kicked out of his parent’s house for being gay, Gerard has been living with the Suzuki family for about a year and a half. He’s Vic’s boyfriend and best friend, and a general ray of sunshine. We don’t see as much of Gerard as we did in WADAA, which is a shame. Gerard is a character I pour a lot of my optimism into.
His big thing is helping people. He wants to be a social worker or a psychiatrist. Something where he works with LGBT youth like himself.
He’s getting some minor character edits to make him a little more interesting, but overall, I think Gerard’s a sweetheart. I might borrow some traits from my husband to give him some more depth.
There's not a lot of good decisions in Innocence, but I think learning to read is always a net-good.
I did ask her as we cleaned and cooked
and mended, whether she knew
how to read and write. “Oh, yes,” said she.
“I learned it from my husband dearest.
His parents sent him off to school when
he was just a boy. We have some books
should you wish to learn, to talk with ease
to your more high-born lady.”
I accepted eagerly, and thus
commenced my merry secret studies.
For weeks, come Sundays, in her kitchen,
I would learn the curves of Rs and Cs,
Of slithering S-es and steadfast
M. I would capitalize
my Is, and in my mind, my H-es.
