in which you need not clutch your story

[outwardandbeyond]

I wish I had managed to save a single physical copy of any of the publications I wormed my way into when I was a kid. It’s all long gone and out of print. I simply submitted things, and left out the part where I was a minor. "if all we had was you and i” made it into a now-defunct Seattle based literary magazine; I think I was paid $25 or $30 for it.

I also managed to land myself a photography show at the local coffee shop (The Poulsbohemian) my senior year, but the month I was supposed to hang it there was a mudslide beneath it and the structural integrity of the building was so compromised that the room I would have used remained closed until I left town. 

Feeling mildly embarrassed (but also whatever) about the time my high school creative writing teacher Mr. Davis asked to see extra work of mine outside of class hours, and I handed him a packet of things with fairly Adult Themes that he had awkwardly no idea what to do with; sorry about that, kind sir. 

[outwardandbeyond]

A.D.

how can it still be home?, some home

of any kind

when there aren't any warm familiar lights

& hums from different rooms

now just buzzing music played to keep the silence

from swallowing you down its monstrous throat

& suddenly, all this space

[outwardandbeyond]

if all we had was you and i

then it'd come down to the spores in the bed and the cracks in our skins that would open

to admit the more poisonous of rays, a less sonorous method of release.

you'd count every joint on my body for each time i'd test the buoyancy

of our lungs, clap a hand over our mouths - every time you'd bend against my weight.

[outwardandbeyond]

Morning pages are working, keep going

Possible artist date for this week: Creek Show

Set time with J & A? It sounds like a lot of fun but would being a co-host of a podcast constitute my villain era? 

Creative Community, fam - either get brave and start talking to people about it, or be indirect and writerly about it and write about it and THEN ask people about it

I think it’s time to do a sensitivity reset and switch back to decaf, buck-o

Remember - water and movement grounds the nervous system so drink water and get out there and intimidate the gym bros right back (hell yeah I’m learning how to cope with my human frailty by slowly and deliberately working on building targeted muscle groups, eat that Muscle Milk the III!)

[outwardandbeyond]

2004-2005, wandering around Seattle by myself. Film taken with my dad’s old Olympus that I took with me when I left home. 

Remembering how when I was maybe 25, someone I knew who was a bit older than me, and probably fancied themselves wiser told me that perhaps I just hadn’t lived enough yet to really be able to write about anything. That maybe that’s why nothing would come - I just hadn’t experienced enough yet.

Probably the opposite was true - I had maybe lived too much, at least in some ways. That what was really necessary was living a little less, moving away from a paradigm of fight or flight and into one of rest and digest (I once made a joke about needing four stomaches like a cow, and while it was about something else entirely, metaphorically it feels like it would have been quite helpful actually).

(This might be part of a piece that is maybe one piece or maybe two - I am still figuring that out. The visuals help jog the memories, and I am grateful both personally and artistically to be able to look at these old images and be able to quite literally inhabit my vantage point again; it’s more evocative than I expected, and I feel like there’s a lot to explore here still)

[outwardandbeyond]

I realized today that I write best not when I am quite literally on the move 

I need to book myself a solo trip 

I have a lot cooking, but if I do not finish one recipe I will never finish any of them so let’s choose

You can look at the same thing from however many angles you like, but it’s usually the first take that has what you’re looking for

[outwardandbeyond]

context and memory

I think that maybe the best thing about writing again is that I am accessing parts of my brain that I thought I had lost.

I have always struggled with memory, and while I knew in a way, I don’t think I fully respected how much that was linked to the trauma repair process. There’s that whole phenomenon of drunk memory - I can’t find the actual name for it now, and Google isn’t helping - but it’s similar to the idea of studying in the same place where you are going to take a test, because we encode things differently depending on context. When we revisit that context the memories rise up, bringing those impressions back to us,  and back into that actionable, pre-frontal cortex space where we get to make decisions and carry out complex and coordinated behaviors in the world based on what we find.

I don’t know if I’ve ever written so consistently or so easily in my life - and it feels a bit like all sorts of memories are getting loosened, silt and pebbles and hanks of weeds coming down with the current, accumulating into new vistas built up from things I’d forgotten.

Like for example - I’ve been chewing on creative community a lot. I have ideas, I know what I want, and I think I'm feeling brave enough to try it.

But contemplation has brought back to the foreground so many other different kinds of little creative communities that I’d been part of that had fallen off the memory shelf. Like the little group of would-be writers and readers I happened on once, who would convene on the occasional Sunday morning on someone’s porch, books strewn about where everyone read quietly to themselves and if you felt compelled to, you would read the poem aloud to the room. They called it poetry church. 

I had completely forgotten about that playful and exploratory moment in time, but last Sunday in a formal group conversation that somehow wound up mostly being about compost-and-we-as-a-culture-discarding-what-is-actually-quite-fecund-and-yes-this-is-about-poop-actually, one of the attendees connected this theme (somehow!) to the Quaker religious services they had been attending throughout the pandemic as a way of finding peace and grounding. How the basis of the service was to sit in silence, and that when someone is compelled to speak they simply do so. They said something about how it’s not really about you being the one doing the talking, but that something is rising up, and being spoken through you.

This afternoon, drowsing awake from a nap, I made the connection across years and lines that that sweet gathering had actually been fully based off Quaker practice. To sit in silence, and speak only if something moved you. Poetry church. 

What I am looking for in the right now is definitely more about discipline and accountability and generativity and how your relationship with output changes when you know those structures are in place to support you. 

But just to remember this unbidden, and to witness it rise up when I least expected it made me take heart that even as my memories have not always been reliable or readily available to me, it’s never meant that what was underneath that dissonant fugue was actually gone.

It’s that what was there was simply waiting on the right context to arrive.

[outwardandbeyond]

an incomplete list of things I am working on

Creativity & Obsession: On Adaptation and Not Pathologizing the Things We Love 

Love Is Blind is a Stupider and More Expensive Version of Millennials Dating Each Other in Chatrooms

Actual Self Care is Knowing How to Work With Your Brain, Body & Nervous System I am also putting together something inarticulate about music; a very, very long form and overdue piece to, for and about my dad; thinking a lot about the parallels between anti-abortion legislation and the labor movement (though this is not my original idea by any means); and trying to puzzle through what it might take legally to write an actual in-depth piece about pregnancy safety in states like Texas with archaic restrictions (do I approach abortion orgs so their legal folks can help out? does anyone even fucking know?) to help others and also myself because I am truthfully still terrified about what it might mean to try this again. 

[outwardandbeyond]

just ordered myself a little birthday treat

[outwardandbeyond]

Thinking of how many creators I know who have been screwed by various platforms at different points in time, and pondering ways of building a more sustainable creative community that isn’t reliant on unstable platforms. How when I met with Fanny last month, she talked about how really it came down to the opportunities to build real connection, and that all the rest could go to hell anyway. So, wondering a lot about how to build informal cross-disciplinary spaces that benefit creators and gives us access to one another in a way that’s generative. 

I don’t have an answer for that yet, but for now, this at least is where everything that isn’t quite an essay yet will live. 

[outwardandbeyond]

Rage is not to be avoided, diminished, belittled. Rage is God. Better believe my rage is steeped in love.

Shira Erlichman

I’ve been thinking a lot about often in my life I have been told that my anger is inappropriate, impolite. How it is garbage rhetoric meant to subdue those we’ve been culturally conditioned to subdue (sup white supremacy) --  especially when you consider that entire nation states and cults of worship are built around the rage of men.  Working in direct service for too many years certainly gave me a surplus of rage to burn off. The ways I chose to work through that rage were not always in my best interest, but that phase certainly gave me an education in taking-no-shit-but-doing-no-harm, and how sometimes what we’ve been conditioned to believe is harm actually isn’t (and vice versa).  But I didn’t have the clear realization until quite recently that the basis of my rage is not hatred, but love. That anger rises up in me so easily because it is the urge to protect, to defend, to keep what is worth keeping and discard the rest. 

As Bayo Akomolafe would say, rupture being the crack that opens up the container of the sacred. 

[outwardandbeyond]

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

- Annie Dillard

[outwardandbeyond]

The question if I would have asked Claire Vaye Watkins at her reading tonight if I’d had the wherewithal to collect my thoughts: 

You’ve talked tonight about exploring writing as art versus writing as therapeutic and the gendered fallacy surrounding that distinction in your process, and it was something you had begun to explore in your essay “On Pandering” released a few years back. For myself, and many women I know, our relationship with both creating and consuming art shifted dramatically with the 2016 election outcome and the years that followed. It’s something I’ve been puzzling over, the closest answer I can find having to do with hyper-vigilance and safety. 

So my question to you is, did it alter your relationship with writing and the process of making art in any way?

[outwardandbeyond]

What I’d like to do is not leave my couch for a week, wear the softest clothes imaginable, and binge watch trashy television. What I am doing instead is deliberately flying to a state that grows a lot of citrus fruit in the winter to witness in my grandfather’s dying.

There’s a lot more than that, but for now it’s where I’ll start.

[outwardandbeyond]

I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo. Again and again, I saw the phenomenon repeated. The meanest girls, the ones who started secret clubs to ostracize the poorly dressed, delighted to see Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters. They rejoiced when the prince kissed her. Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn't accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

[outwardandbeyond]

If you didn’t know before that I was a water sign you would know it by the fact that I get anxious if I don’t live near a river or ocean, that swimming at once heals and terrifies me, and that every six months I drown my phone in the bathtub

[outwardandbeyond]

In which I dreamed that our Lyft driver dropped us off at Chuck Schumer’s house, and that Chuck Schumer is an owl