I LEFT MY HUMAN SKIN

to say quite simply

a single language exists

one beyond meridians

beyond the way I fear

destroying cultures

there is a sound

babies make, before speech

that is speech, mothers

suckling wet, weeping mouths

knowing tears, knowing the dead

remember the peacock who mesmerized

or that scene in The Secret of Roan Inish

where the selkie sheds her sealskin,

in which I felt myself leave my body

or the globed fish eyes

on the other side of the tank

or the lobster I wished to intercept

as they clawed against the silver pot—

stop watching the boys pull limbs off

Daddy Long Legs, saying they will grow

back, stop the hikers from eating scorpions

on a dare, stop me from pouring salt

on the backs of the slugs clung to sidewalk

on a quiet street where no one watched

but my brother, and the still river,

us thinking it was magic to disappear

their hiss was a god’s unknowable whistle

if only to say: careful who you vanish—

a parrot showed up at my doorstep during appetizers

I could do nothing for them, but lay at night on my sofa

we wept together for our trap of domestication

even the sanctuary I found them was netted

I thought of opening the window, looking away

from the hawks circling who had lived their lives free

like every small thing in this world

yearns for, wanting private meadows

wild, untameable freedom

is not only bloodlust, is not only fangs

is not only the harm we do,

but is a swell of togetherness

a child watching a cat’s wet emerald

eyes, and even if there was fear, even

if the animals snapped

there were shared calls

hollers or screams

moans or wails or whoop-de-doos

there was a single moment when

all noises organized into sound.

- ⁠will this always be our government?

- ⁠you’re pretty sure you were radicalized because Eminem’s “Mosh” was so good you made it your MySpace song for like three years and then you put Michael Moore on your Top 8.

- a time years ago when a friend sent an urgent text to come help flood her block in Crown Heights with “Free Palestine” posters because more Zionist stuff had gone up and so you came down with him in your backpack and then walked with him from the train to her apartment and her neighbors were on their stoop and cooed, “Hi doggy,” to him, which he ignored, but then they said “I love you,” to him and he stopped and wagged his tail and went up to them and they laughed, “He knows that one,” and how that made you feel good.

- ⁠another book is ready for pickup at the library but you already had to return the one you didn’t finish to pick up four more you haven’t started; maybe you were a better reader when you were a teacher.

And then it’s 10a. You’re drawing again and have nearly filled a notebook this past week. You start updating that hidden part of your website.

11a - you decide to make a salad out of a can of beets and shake like half a bottle of dill over it. Does that make it German?

Thoughts you have during lunch:

- you’re pretty sure you’ve applied for everything you think you should apply for and if things are out of your hands then it should be out of your head too and how can you believe in all this spiritual stuff if sometimes you still swell with doubt?

- ⁠was that Josh Johnson you passed on the street yesterday?

You look up Josh Johnson. There’s a new interview on YouTube. He talks about how people squint when they see him, and you laugh. Yeah that was him you saw. You’re surprised because you hardly recognize anyone. You end up watching the whole thing. He talks about the rhythms of success and finding a flow outside of yourself, something like what you’ve been trying to achieve.

6p - you clip your bike helmet to your backpack on your way to your friend’s book launch but you don’t end up using it. You just smack people as you turn around in the crowded room above The Strand. She does so well up there on stage—everyone who asks questions gets right to the heart of it. You sit with friends you haven’t seen in years and then walk down the street and then keep walking home, and it’s so quiet in your bedroom.

10p - you realize he’s okay. He’s getting better. It’s probably because he stole the popcorn you made that fell on the floor.

What was it you did during those other hours? You try to remember now, but the days blur together. Running along the FDR. Plank under the bridge. Was that today or yesterday? Reading a neighbor’s copy of Meaty by Samantha Irby while her dog finishes his bowl of water. Sam Irby worked in a vet clinic during her early career. At home you read Patricia Lockwood poems in the bathtub. The ones where nations are bodies having sex. That feels relevant in this moment, you think, if people could just look at countries this way—stop it with all these borders. Stop it with the nationalism. We’re literally just land linked together. Just people floating on top of earth in a giant ocean. Get a hold of yourself.

Your poem is going up for the summer in an art show in Pennsylvania, and you’re not sure if you can go. There’s going to be hawks there, maybe an owl. How do you explain to the market that this is your dream audience?

You wrote the poem about a parrot you rescued during the pandemic. One that showed up at the door of your childhood home.

11p - if you don’t sleep soon you’ll be tired again tomorrow, but there’s so much to think about. You realize you forgot to eat dinner but you’re not even hungry, and then you’re sleeping, asleep, mind off to wherever minds go when eyes close.

j

The list of the different shapes of my past labor came to me as I was watching ’s new project Living for the City, which begins its storytelling in Detroit, Michigan, a place I called home for five years of my living, a place that played a significant part in how I came to see the plausibility of my life as an artist. I was raised in a household that deeply respected Motown and all the music that came from Detroit, and I was a little bit in love with Eminem and Sufjan Stevens growing up so getting to see the latter live in Detroit and eat spaghetti at the former’s restaurant was particularly satisfying to my inner child. Being there, I also got to see Jack White’s Third Man Records and spent many nights at The Blind Pig.

As Hanif narrates the second half of the first episode, which deals with the intersection of music-making and labor, I had to pause and write down one of his sentences, which is often the case when I engage with his work. While speaking on the link between clocking into a job and then clocking out for just a few hours of making from one’s desires, a rhythm I knew well as I often held at least 2 jobs while taking a full-course load at school and paying overpriced rent to stay within walking distance of campus, he spoke of that balance of running between work and what you love and how at one point the scale tips, how labor and creative making wind together as separate, competing demands “until your dreaming allows you to clock out for good.”

The story I just finished ended up being set in Michigan, in a dreary artist studio, and the turn of piece took me by surprise. I hadn’t had that feeling in a while in my work—I’d been misjudging where the story was leading me and as I got quiet and devoted enough to listen to where the characters wanted to go, something really strange and magical happened with the plot. Something kind of lovely. Been really excited to send this one out.

I’ve been walking around open, curious about what the next piece will be, listening for its arrival.

Thinking back on my time in Michigan I remembered this one summer night I was in my small basement level studio apartment on the floor reading Kelly Link’s collection Magic for Beginners. It was not the kind of apartment that had AC or good heat let alone screens in the window, so at night I usually kept the windows sealed to keep the bugs out and instead turned the fans so they blasted towards me.

Midway through “Catskin” I heard a meow at my window, some scratching. I thought I was hallucinating, to be honest, given how witchy the story is, if you’ve read it. No way is a cat at my window in the middle of reading a story about cats, I thought. But the sound didn’t stop, and so I got up and checked the window. Sure enough there was a house cat who bounced his way inside as soon as I opened the glass, and he sat with me while I finished the book, then sometime after midnight left and continued with his rounds or maybe decided to go back home after all.

I also really loved the Detroit honored in Living for the City because the storytelling showed how it was I experienced live music there, mostly at basement shows.

Looking back over my list of jobs, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some, it was always funny to me how the one I had the longest, teaching college for almost a decade, was seeing as 1) I was rarely in school growing up and often got truancy letters for my absences—I really did not like going to school and was constantly looking for ways out of it 2) I didn’t want to go to college for that matter and didn’t go to college right away. But work was something I did, since 13 or so. I always saw the women in my life work, too. My mom had a factory job when she was a teenager and my grandma got a job right out of high school doing payroll for our local newspaper.

Most of my friends had jobs. Usually in food service and so if you knew the right times to go you could get free pizza or ice cream or coffee, whatever it was that could be snuck to you before the boss returned. These small thefts made labor tolerable, and usually I looked for service jobs I could take food from myself, so what Hanif was getting at, for me at least, was the way creativity and holding onto a creative practice in between (or, best case, during) the working hours is a similar kind of rebellion. A political practice in valuing the needs of body and spirit outside the demands of capital.

When I taught at CUNY-John Jay, I was on the campus that housed Audre Lorde’s archives (she’d been a professor there, too), and so we often did an in-class exercise unpacking “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” If you know anything about the legacy of John Jay students, you know most are on the path to becoming part of law enforcement or other arms of the carceral state. I was told when I started there at least 40% of students were armed (though how this statistic was gathered I never knew), and rare was a day where the lobby wasn’t filled with recruiters from various branches of the military or NYPD. Still, us Humanities professors offered a lens of dynamic seeing—how can we complicate thinking and feeling enough to achieve a more humanistic way of engaging with the world? How can we think about justice in a more nuanced way? How can we re-see what is “right” and “wrong,” both within ourselves and how we engage with the world?

Techno and disco started in the Detroit underground, as essential to the city’s story as Berry Gordy and Dilla and punk. These were places where people could be in their body and experience new rhythms. Through movement, they could question the ways their bodies were forced to be all day—to make discoveries, to have psychic space to ask a different kind of question of themselves, to step into possibilities and visions.

I remembered Hanif expressing a similar terror of leaving the secure rhythm of more formally recognized labor for what he loved at the end of his interview with Danielle Ponder on Object of Sound back in 2022. They were talking about the leap they both took into becoming full-time artists: “I have been thinking about the kind of bravery it takes to surrender to a belief that you are existing for a purpose beyond what you are doing…I found myself asking the question of ‘What would my life look like if I pursued this thing I just can’t take my mind off of?’”

What Lorde teaches us is pleasure isn’t selfish, and following what one loves isn’t delusional. It is an active resistance to a society that erodes feeling and complexity and nuance. Breaking out of the assembly line through self-expression isn’t luck, it’s will—

j

Today I was in-transit between meetings when I got a reminder text for a virtual therapy session that was starting in ten minutes—shit. I’d forgotten. My therapist is traveling so it wasn’t our usual time and we rarely meet online. I looked up at the underside of the Williamsburg bridge where I was about to hop on a bike. As luck would have it, I was also right by Gulick park (aka “the Godfather of Basketball”) and the court was empty. We had our session, I cried about my family, then sat there alone for a few minutes under the hoop. This feels right, I thought to myself. To be broken open on the court. To feel safe here. I wished I’d had a ball. I miss playing so much.

It’s been months since I’ve played in my regular game. Our captain experienced unexpected life changes and we haven’t been sure when / if we’ll bring the league back. Some of my teammates and I got together over the winter months we usually spent crammed together inside of an elementary school in Little Italy. We didn’t play, just talked. It felt a bit wrong to play together without the group, but as the uncertainty continued on, me and a friend started our search for a new regular game to join together and plan to try out a few options over the coming weeks. As a not-really-amazing player who is also coming off of bed rest, it’s a bit intimidating to walk into a new game, unsure of the expectations the players will have and if I can keep up, but I’ve been taking some runs (re-listening a lot to Jamila Woods’ song “Headfirst” and the whole of Danny Brown’s Stardust, especially “Lift You Up”) and long bike rides and just trusting my body will remember what to do. I haven’t been truly nervous about something in a while, and I felt a swell of gratitude today of being reminded of how good it feels to walk up to a line I’m unsure of, to be out of my depth, to remember that rush that comes right before crossing over (cue ’ “Shatter,” and, for that matter, “Anywhere With You,” which also happen to be in the running rotation along with Sampha’s “Evidence,” a treatise on just getting out of one’s head and doing, along with Hozier’s, overly fittingly, perhaps, “Run.”)

Maybe that’s what this pending change of season we’re approaching here on the east coast is all about—the swell just before the break.

Last summer, I’d met a guy who’d invited me to play in a game he ran in my neighborhood. It was a big group. We ran drills and played knockout, which I won, I think to his surprise, and as I sunk my shot from behind him in line I knew it would very likely be the last time we played together (it was).

The social politics of pick-up is why I’ve always leaned into playing on womxn-only teams. Like I said, I’m not even that great, and as much as I love the spirit of a pick-up game, there are rarely games I pass on the street that I feel I’d be evenly matched for let alone welcomed into, though here and there I still bring my ball to courts and shoot around alone.

The league I played in in my neighborhood was notoriously womxn-only but we’d regularly have male coaches and players reach out to “train us” or “teach us,” because even as popular as Liberty is now in NYC and as good as a movie as Love and Basketball is, there is a reason our captain always said no to these offers. Sometimes you just need a bubble.

The last weekly game I played was in my old neighborhood in Philly. I became friends with one of my neighbors who organized a team who played at the court on Lombard just down the block from me. I told him how when I was a kid I wanted to be a basketball player—not a woman basketball player, but a basketball player. After school, I followed my older brother and his friends to the cracked court behind our old elementary school. I was eleven years old and my grand entrance into the world so far was as an out of shape tween in jelly sandals.

I watched as they swirled around each other. I’d never seen men look graceful before, so close to vulnerability as they did playing basketball. At the same time, they seemed to know the power of their bodies and were strong enough to push past whoever was guarding them. They shot three-pointers and ducked under each other’s pits for lay-ups. They chased air balls off into the woods.

When I finally confessed to my mother that I wanted to play basketball myself at the start of middle school, not just be a fan, the first thing I did was ask the coach if my number could be 23, like Michael Jordan. We were the nerd team: Saint Ann’s CYO. When the coach said it was time to scrimmage, I looked around at my teammates, waiting for a cue, but the confusion was shared across the lot of us. Our Soffe shorts were rolled over only once (twice was cool). A scrawny girl whispered to her neighbor, asking if she had a hair tie. We were not prepared to scrimmage. Hardly any of us spent our free time logging miles or practicing our technique. I, for one, spent my weekends having sleepovers and watching The N, moving from the couch only to sneak more chips from the variety box my mother had bought from Costco as Degrassi flashed across my screen. But when it came to the idea of basketball, I felt a murmur, an excitement, a movement in my chest I couldn’t ignore.

At our first game, the tall girl who’d been made center by default dribbled the ball out of bounds no less than five times. Eventually, she was benched. As the second tallest, I was put in. I’d forgotten to tape bandaids over my pierced ears, which was a rule in the league. The ref stopped the game, retrieving bandaids from the First Aid kit and made a show of me putting them on. That game, I managed to make a few lucky shots. We only lost by ten. For this achievement, at the end of the season, I was given a medal: MVP.

I placed my trophy with my Michael Jordan doll on my bookshelf and waited for summer to come. Maybe I could keep up at the basketball court after all. Maybe this is who I’d be.

The week after our season ended, our coach mailed out a flyer for a summer youth clinic at the local college. I showed the paper to my mother and begged to go, feeling guilty for the cost. Money was tight since my father received his terminal diagnosis. Our family’s insurance was gone now that he was too sick to teach and my mother was self-employed as a therapist. But going to the basketball clinic felt like a need. If I could get stronger, if I could keep up with college athletes, if I could learn the plays and how to shoot, I could endure my life.

I didn’t know about Teresa Weatherspoon until that summer camp despite her being one of the most famous women in the league. She appeared at the center of the court as we ran sprints across the slick wooden floor. Weatherspoon was one of the top fifteen players in WNBA history. After lunch, we lined up to have her sign our jerseys. When she got to mine, she smiled at the number, “Surprised you got this one,” she said, laughing, then signed her name across Jordan’s big red numbers. I hadn’t known there was a woman I could idolize, that in another life perhaps I would have gotten her lucky 11.

Weatherspoon made The Shot, a historic half-court game-winning shot in the 1999 WNBA Finals. I knew it was going in when I threw it up, she said moments after releasing the ball. The place just got so quiet, she finished. I thought about that delicate moment stretched out thin with hopeful silence, how Weatherspoon looked around at her teammates before registering the success of her shot. Everyone was frozen. What they were waiting for was a miracle, a divine alignment nobody had ever seen before. And there it was.

Reflecting more on the moment, Weatherspoon revealed she doubted she made the shot, her body seated on the ground after releasing the ball, wondering if the reason nobody was dog piling her was because it’d been a miss. She said it felt like a half hour passed before the stadium reacted, before she stepped fully into her achievement. Twenty years later, Weatherspoon was finally inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame: I’m so thankful to God that he actually knows my name, she said as she started to cry. I’m so glad this game will remember my name.

After the clinic, I asked my brother and his friends if I could sub in for a game. Hesitant, likely forgetting I was even there, they agreed. The shortest guy on the court—a redheaded, freckled kid, checked me in. I passed the ball back hard, shocking him with the force of my return.

Alright, he said, guarding me. First to eleven wins. I passed the ball quickly to my brother who sunk the ball from the top of the key. The redhead sprinted under the net for the rebound, then dribbled it back up the court. I stood there, waiting for him, trying to block him, but he outran me. My brother got us the ball back, sunk a three-pointer, got the rebound, and then shot a few more. Finally, he passed the ball to me. The redhead charged me, cornering me under the hoop. He slapped back at my arms as I jumped up to edge the ball in, but I couldn’t get past him. I passed the ball to my brother, running back up the court. He passed the ball back to me. For a moment, I was free of the redhead. I made The Shot. My Shot.

But I landed hard on my knee. My skin opened up as an inch-long wound. Hot blood inked down my leg. The boys watched me with pinched faces, grossed out. I embodied the pain, liking the grime my body could produce, the vulgarity. I didn’t care how they saw me. I liked how I saw myself: I was tough.

It’s cool, I said, plucking a leaf from the ground and using it to dab at my cut. I pressed down until the bleeding stopped, not cleaning the blood caking on my leg hairs.

What, are you like gay now? the redhead asked me. The power of making the shot, the winning point, still floated in the atmosphere. My success translated to an uncomfortable reality, and the boys struggled to make sense of themselves inside of it. It wasn’t possible that the girl had won. And if it was, if girls were good at basketball, or any sport, they were untouchable, illegible, unfuckable. If you did end up being better than the guys, you would be confined to “women’s basketball,” which was safe for men because it meant even at the top of your field, you still weren’t as good as the NBA. I might be like Teresa, but I’d never be like Mike.

I stopped playing basketball in high school. My brother still took me with his friends to the court to play when I visited him in Minnesota at his college. Sometimes, we’d go to the elementary school when he was home for summer break.

In college, I signed up to try out for the intramural leagues, but the women’s team was full of ex-varsity players, women who’d kept with the sport, who hadn’t cared what people called them, or maybe had but played anyway. I’d abandoned the version of me who could’ve kept up with them. Instead, I swam laps at the pool, practiced yoga, walked miles to Ann Arbor’s Huron River from campus and back.

But during the summers, I worked as a counselor for the university’s academic camp, which came with a free room and a meal plan. I was back with the nerds. The only other students in our dorm were the athletes doing summer training. That year, the one where our basketball team would go to the final round of March Madness, we watched Trey Burke and Mitch McGary go to and from the gym. I felt something stir. I asked my colleagues if they wanted to start playing, and so after the campers went to sleep, we’d sneak down to the court and shoot until campus security kicked us off.

When I got to graduate school, I was the youngest fiction writer in my MFA program and one of only four women in my year. I’d moved to Philly, a city where I didn’t know anyone, to attend the program and lived alone in a downtown apartment that was half of my living stipend. I was surrounded by male peers who often explained the struggle of being a woman writer to me while cutting off women in the workshop.

I wondered if I’d made a mistake. I’d nearly rejected my offer from the program. Maybe I should’ve moved with my friend to the woods to live cheaply as an artist or followed the convoy of English majors from my university who were staffing Brooklyn’s coffee shops. Still, the degree seemed like a pathway to something else, a way out of my administrative assistant job at the campus’s women center, a step closer to being a full-time artist and away from being my musician boyfriend’s groupie. I wanted to be a writer not a women’s writer. I wanted to be a filmmaker not a female filmmaker. I wanted to act not be an actress. I feared becoming a genre within my own life’s work.

As I walked to the grocery store from my new apartment to buy food from the hot bar, still awaiting the arrival of my dishes in the mail, the sun was starting to set on my block.

I noticed tiny globe lights flickering on, illuminating a patch of trees. I followed the lights to a park. A basketball court where I’d soon play with my neighbor’s team. As I slowly said yes to being an artist, I’d come home after workshop, lace up, and play—

j

Around the time I was reading Donika Kelly’s Bestiary and this poem jumped out at me.

What we identified is that maybe I’m in a season in life where the efforting ends—who knows how long for, but right now my part is done, and growth for me is recognizing that turn toward the end of Kelly’s poem: “I am tired of mounting / this hill alone.”

That this residency with Pollinator is framed as one of “mutual support,” perhaps what I’m being ask of now too is to know it doesn’t have to be me who delivers. That it’s good and right and essential to let others mount the hill, that we already are.

Friday morning, still anesthesia-painkiller-delirious, I met with my group and as we went around sharing our project for the residency, I said a phrase I hadn’t said in quite some time: “I don’t know.” We talked through this idea of me being in a period of softening into receiving and simply seeing what’s on the other side of dreaming. How it’s actually kind of a sweet, slow curious feeling rather than one of being lost or confused. Something like newness. Kind of an unreal state in that I’ve always been one to take action in the face of an unknown, to be building towards something, but I don’t think that way is what will work in this season. How will my making and living shift because of this?

What I’ve landed on is that maybe this is a time, then, to approach life more through the lens of documentation. Because I don’t feel that familiar call to be the one to strike the match, maybe it’s about looking simply at my life right here, as is, noticing it, seeing what comes, what goes. Let it become what it is. Let my life become itself.

The night before surgery I went for a long walk on the Hudson River Greenway and wrote under the sun.

I was feeling into the idea of why “a dream coming true” had felt so slippery until now, especially in the realm of my life as an artist. Some of you already know the story of what happened when I wrote my first film, originally called What We Know, but the short version is I was a college student in the classroom of a predator who saw my vulnerable talent as an opportunity to control not only me, but my story. And that script was, at the time, a place where I could put a secret I hadn’t told anyone, one about my body and someone who took advantage of it, and as this professor became my mentor, he slipped his name into the author line of my screenplay, telling me it was normal in Hollywood to do so, and that’s exactly where he planned for this film to go. He was setting up meetings. He would direct it. He would use his contacts from his years out there, the studios he’d worked for, the knowledge and relationships he had and I didn’t. He turned our development meetings into lunches he paid for and basketball games and us alone in his car as he drove me home to my apartment. To bars where I couldn’t buy my own drinks without using a fake ID and at every turn I relented because he held in front of me my dream: to see my story on screen. I smiled through the painful constriction in my chest as he passed me an article about how feminists went too far by saying sex between students and teachers was problematic, and asked if I agreed. After over a year of this private dynamic, he came through with a small local crew of mostly students from our university and we went into production, his name still all over everything. Me grateful. So, so grateful. I told him all the time. But after turning down an offer to get a drink at a hotel bar midway through production, my project was shut down and years of excuses were given as to why I couldn’t get the footage. The cast and crew was told I didn’t want to finish the film. I was told the cast had personal issues and refused to work together. Enough years of misinformation went by before I asked the crew directly what had happened that it would’ve been impossible to finish the script with the original team regardless as they’d all graduated, moved to new cities, cut their hair, had agents now.

This experience held me back for quite a while—I did try to raise money for a reshoot, but what happened was some other filmmakers heard about what had happened to me through the campaign and told me what I needed was a lawyer not a budget. I got those lawyers and got my script back, got my footage, and released what we had completed as a web series called The University, which did go on to have a nice life of its own, and in the time it took to release I made friends with three different bands, all of whom ended up scoring the series, and so I told myself again and again: this would not have been possible before. The music held together the fragmented scenes, but still what I saw as a writer and director was a stunting of my original vision. Still, I approached the edit as a collage—an erasure. I took the fragments I had and made something whole. Years passed before I made new work, always with my ambition a bit tamped down. But it didn’t serve anyone, not me, not the work, not my future collaborators, to be less ambitious.

I know this is why I wince when I hear male writers and filmmakers talk about the impact of their mentors, how they’d be nowhere without them, that they have someone to call and send stories and who opened one door after another for them on the way. I thought of all the opportunities I didn’t leap at, didn’t even think I could have, all the times I held back asking for mentorship again, for asking for any help, really, because I’d been broken by the cost.

But there is always a cost. The cost of a dream is the death of an old self.

Recovery from surgery looked like visits from friends and movies on the ceiling. I lined up a series of okay-enough looking romcoms to help me drift in and out of sleep, and, from looking back on some videos I sent my friend who checked in on me from abroad, I was really into one called She’s In Portland, about a man forced to have the conversation he wished he had with a woman who’d passed through his life. I guess I also thought that the co-star of the film, Tommy Dewey, was actually Scott Porter and that because of “string theory” Minka Kelly’s character was being cheated on as karmic justice for her cheating on Scott-as-Jason Street in Friday Night Lights. Apparently there is a full list of other things I said post-op that were just as enthusiastic and confusing:

She’s In Portland did what a good barebones romcom does which is to show the cost of following one’s heart in love, which at times is embarrassment, and either way the loss of an old life, but also the lovely possibility that what was felt is true.

Yesterday, I made my first attempt of contact outside of my apartment visiting a friend on the Upper East Side for a long swim and fruit and tea and hiding out from the rain after.

I did successfully ride the bus despite some mild confusion, and the chill of the pool water helped bring my muscles back to life after days in bed.

And, as far as how it all turns out after these last few days of rest, I can happily say it’s not for me to know.

j

There’s been so much silence in my life lately and I’ve been fighting the impulse to fill it. Last month in particular, around my birthday, I just asked simply: “You still there?”

A few days later I got a request to host a one-off class at CUNY Medical School, and not thinking much of it I followed my GPS uptown. Something about the walk to campus from the subway felt familiar in my bones in a preverbal way. All of a sudden it clicked into place. I remembered taking the Red & Tan in with my dad to City College where he taught until he got sick.

He’d sit me on the scratchy bus seat next to him with a bag of chocolate Flipz as he looked through the stories he was going to teach. I sat at the back of the classroom, my feet swinging above the muted tiles, and listened to his students go on and on about meaning making. I was maybe five or six years old. I followed him through the cafeteria, and as he worsened, sometimes I was the one who helped lead us back home.

“Oh,” I said, laughing to myself as the bloom of West Harlem cherry blossoms filled the streets ahead of me. “There you are.”

When I met my host, she had on a “Trust God” t-shirt. She seemed like a safe person to tell of the synchronicity. She smiled and said, “My dad worked for City College, too.”

I hid the fact for a long time that my dad was a writer all throughout college and halfway through graduate school until some of these synchronicities got too loud to keep hidden—two of his old friends crossed paths with me at Rutgers and I was outed. Or, rather, I had a choice. Did my identity as a writer really hinge on me not being seen as the daughter of another? Why did I fear that so much? Was it a sense of being in another’s shadow? Being seen as a copycat? A nepo baby? Why that instead of part of a lineage?

I think it’s because it mattered so much to me then to know that I was choosing this path for myself and to know I was belonging to the spaces I was in because of my own talents. Most of my dad’s books had short small press runs anyway, and as my dreams grew bigger I worried, in an even more private way, he might judge me for taking a different path.

I take synchronicities as nudges—whether with him or other important people in my life. I don’t always know what to do with them, those significant encounters, but I notice them, collect them, keep them as evidence that the tethers are still there between us and hope their meanings will be revealed to me in doing so. But it can be hard at times to wonder if you’re the only one who notices, if chance encounters register as significantly for others as they do for you.

I wrote about my dad, synchronicity, and imagination for StoryQuarterly as I was graduating from my MFA at Rutgers in 2018, the secret now fully out, and in the years that followed I continued finding bits of my dad scattered on my path. Hosting a screening of his film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, which had a resurgence after 40 years of public disappearance, which I also wrote about here and here, but I do still struggle with how to balance his story alongside my own. When to stand alongside and when to stand alone.

Lately, I’ve been reading more strictly other women writers (my current pile below).

But really what I’ve been doing is spending most of my time away from the page listening. Last week, I got to see , the Appalachia Peoples Union Director for Showing Up for Racial Justice, for her launch of Song for a Hard-Hit People at Housing Works in Soho on invitation from friend and dedicated anti-racist organizer who was co-hosting the event alongside the launch of her magazine documenting white anti-racist organizing efforts, Libertroph (and who—synchronicity!—had a poem next to mine in the latest issue of Courage to Care’s journal The Arrow for their special issue on water as movement practice).

A few days later I went to an incredible panel for PEN World Voices on “The Lives of Animals: The False Divide Between Humans and Non-Humans” with Sangamithra Iyer, María Ospina, Kate Zambreno, and Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian. It felt like the exact room I needed to be in, surrounded by writers and readers who don’t need to be convinced animals belong in literature in what may seem at first to be strange or unruly ways.

Then, on Saturday, I loaded Ziggy up and we spent the afternoon in Prospect Park with friends I hadn’t seen in quite a while, many of whom took care of Ziggy for the hardest years of me learning to balance my mom’s illness with teaching and writing and simply trying to make a life. They showed up time and again when I was panicked for last minute care and struggled to make it home in time.

Then, Sunday, I got in some good movement at a theater and stayed at work on this new story.

I have surgery tomorrow, so how could I not also make that symbolic? I wrote about the first of these surgeries in a poem that no, dear put out, which I read publicly for the first time when I was in Knoxville for a residency. I was thinking of those weeks in Tennessee at Beth Howard’s launch. Last minute, we turned our reading into a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi—it was the summer post-Roe—and I felt really energized by how explicitly the southern artists I was reading with wove their art with activism.

A woman came up to me after and asked, “Was that an IUD poem?” I nodded, laughing: “Yup.” She had to get hers surgically removed, too. Now, five years later, almost to the day, the scarring left from that first surgery has to come out. It’s a pretty vulnerable surgery to get, minimal as it is, and sometimes even feels embarrassing to mention. But why? I’m not the one who left the scars.

One of my friends encouraged me to see the surgery as a celebration, especially with it occurring on a holiday dedicated to liberation (Cinco de Mayo). A clearing, the welcome of a healed womb, a healed home.

I’ll take it.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to get done this coming week or what recovery will look like, but as far as messages from the beyond go, I think I’ll keep this one close.

And, to whoever is out there listening, I hope you will let your synchronicities speak to you, too. That we can discover their meaning—

j

Her, erotic, meaning the core of the word which is a boundary / portal / vessel between having and wanting, which isn’t just what might be suggested by her nudity but her proximity to spiritual knowledge. She is not posing, and, if anything, is deep in thought, observing herself away from any particular gaze. What could be seen as demure and sheepish were her hands not to be in near-missable prayer. For me, the statue embodies a quiet self-possession. A woman so clearly herself, attuned to her inner voice. Inviting but unconcerned with approval or validation. Likely to continue her mid-spin all the way around and away should it prove necessary.

Today I was reading Marie Howe’s poem “Magdalene — The Seven Devils.” There’s a biblical verse she introduces the poem with: “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out” — Luke 8:2.

The poem plays with this struggle to identify a list of those seven devils within the speaker, which seem to exist only on the plane of irony given that the devils the speaker “confesses to” or “expels” throughout the poem are not only constantly interrupted or replaced, but seem to only speak to the fact that they are not elements of self that should be forgiven at all:

The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer
of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.

Like, how dare Mary, or anyone for that matter, have a body, let alone sensuality.

Howe, again:

No, not the sound — it was her body’s hunger
finally evident.
—what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath —that was the first devil.
It was always with me.
And that I didn’t think you — if I told you — would understand any of this —

I’ve been working the past few weeks on a new short story that’s got something to do with a pregnant artist, I think, and I’m not quite sure why I’ve been struggling to stay with it. I spent Friday night drinking tea alone at a bar trying to get out of my usual environment, and I got a few new pages out of it, while I was typing up the new pages yesterday I’m still not sure if I’m getting the world right.

I wonder if the piece came from me reading and listening on a lot to texts about making a decision to have a child, which is something I have been trying to decide for myself the past year or so, an answer I feel I should have at the ready if I start dating again, a self-imposed pressure I suppose, and so I thought maybe this character is coming to me to help me sort my way into some kind of answer.

I remember seeing the sculpture of Mary in 2024 when I had just enough left on a research stipend that brought me to The Netherlands to take a train to Paris where I could rent a small bed for two nights before flying home.

My last night in The Netherlands I’d gone dancing with friends of friends at a hostel. We took a shopping cart to the club.

It was a kind of freedom I hadn’t been able to find in my home life for years, maybe largely because I was hesitant to step outside of the identity I had at my particular job and therefore community. It just felt so good to fly together down that alley.

I had to get up earlier than I wanted to make the train, lucky to find a vegan pastry to make it through the several hours ahead of me during which I thought I’d get back to sleep but couldn’t.

I found my room and rested.

Only clouds above.

“I could stay here my whole life,” I remember thinking.

But the point of being here was lushness. I encouraged myself out—tired as I was—to the markets, to the museum, to the statue. Then, to the grass outside of the museum…

…and down and down the streets until I found a table outside of Shakespeare and Company to write.

The short story I started there is one that is still taking shape after two years but I recently just started sending around. Was thinking today how easily that one came compared to the piece I’ve been working on the last few weeks. Maybe it’s because with the Paris one I felt in writing it I was moving more fully into the territory I’d been hovering around while with this current piece is almost like a backward march into a voice and world that I thought I’d let go of—this very simple human plot of being pregnant and ill-partnered. Maybe it is part of the fear that’s been coming up as I half-read these make-a-choice-about-having-a-child books and talk to friends who have found themselves at very different points along the spectrum from childfree to childless to new mother to adoptive parent to sperm donor. I wonder if just coaxing myself into writing through this one will help me decide for myself, and maybe that’s why I’m a bit reluctant.

Last month when I read in the Village I was on a line-up with who read from her memoir The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us and hearing her read and chatting with her and her husband brought up all those questions for me around the mythology of motherhood I’d internalized during my own search for answers, both what it takes and what it takes from us.

“And so the biggest incentive, I think, for motherhood, would be a society that truly believes that women deserve and can live a good life, whether or not we decide to get married and have children,” Ackerman reflected on NPR.

It’s important to have child-bearing people like Ackerman wonder aloud what it means to become a parent and to make that questioning louder and more nuanced, to not so easily class people in one camp or the other, to cast morality on either choice. Brittany Luse did two great episodes this year on the topic:

The acute loneliness of moms

and

Many women don’t want kids. And for good reason

with the second having Luse say something that hit my particular anxiety around the topic square: “it kind of indicates to me that there is almost no right number. It's more of like a judgment on women's choices more broadly. Like, there is no right number of children to have.”

Yeah.

This made me think back to Ackerman when she shared how “we don't talk about it, exactly. Maternal ambivalence is the norm, and yet we're told that people that are hell yes are the norm…I think we do a disservice to ourselves and to all women when we say, you know, an alarm clock's going go off, or you're going to have an aha, when maybe that happens once we're already mothers. We grow into or become mothers through the act of mothering.”

When I name my fears around the speculation of being a mother, I do think of those moments on my very small bed with my very small window looking up at the clouds. The romance of solitude, the mythology of a figure like Mary Magdalene, the many other ways there are to mother or create life or make family.

Then there’s the final stanzas of Arcaelis Girmay poem “From ‘The Black Maria’”:

I have a few hours before I’m obligated anywhere tonight, so I guess what I’m hearing as I write this is to go back to the untenable story. Finish it. See what comes.

j

I was drawn to the levity of Kubota’s sculpture—so much of the artwork in the exhibit is powerful, inciting, questioning. I know there’s a lot of reasons to fear / hate / hide from technology and imagine from that vision techno-disasters through both our theory and our art-making, but I fear at times positions like this, while valid and accurate in scope, can become not only a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also limit design and collaborative possibilities.

Kubota was making art largely from the 1960s-90s when analog video ran counter to the hyper-perfection of Hollywood and the purity of “film” as a distinct medium. She integrated video as possible for a multimedia palette—her robot sculpture loops video of her jogging, allowing what may feel a disparate form (video) to integrate into the shape of her self-portrait (as one of the many hardworking women who approach their body as a technology to be perfected / transformed / harnessed / maintained).

She said she was inspired by The New Yorker’s 1991 Mother’s Day cover for the sculpture, so I had to look it up, and after was curious to see the cover for the year I was born in ‘92. Both seem to be in conversation with Kubota’s piece and feature a technology whether that be a hairdryer or a walkman, which motivate these women towards an idealized gaze. Both feature women (particularly a “mother”) who are almost unreal in their portrait—inhuman if you may—one a statue and the other a god (forget the dumpy (witchy?) artist woman walking in the background who looks like she’s going to be crushed by the superhuman Mommy).

After, I spent the rest of my visit immersed in Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ The Finesse.

Building off of artists like Kubota using video to collaborate with other forms of art-making, this piece was particularly invitational to the audience as it is projected onto mirrored screens with sculptures around the room. The drama of the film’s pauses whether in natural landscapes or at time full blacked out screens considers the gaze of not only the filmmaker but also you watching, and, you watching yourself, in particular you watching yourself in public, being watched.

The argument of this public self-making is built out explicitly in the story of the film—a chronicle of the Tamil liberation movement, an imagining of a more pluralistic governing, a self-determination within government and community, and a manifesto of what true communal living could be.

To say it plain: it was really cool and I liked it.

He also integrates the story-making of the O.J. Simpson trial (happening around the same time Kubota was sculpting) and the unfixedness of truth evident in its unfolding, highlighted by the use of a deep fake Kim Kardashian as narrator dissecting the identity politics of the trial.

There’s a great interview with him in Gagosian in which he states:

“I’m quite infatuated with that idea of the individual, the idea that we are human and ontologically distinct to everything that’s not human. I think maybe that idea is the foundational psyop of our civilization in that it’s the fiction upon which everything else is based: our economy, our political system, our culture. But the thing about growing up between two different cultures is that it’s easier to see through both. While I’m certainly infatuated with that idea of the individual—perhaps one of the greatest stories ever told—I also don’t entirely believe it. My paintings have become, for me, a way of seeing through that fiction.”

If we just start with us (well, me, I suppose) here in the United States there’s a particular legacy of the importance of proving oneself as part of the category of human in order to necessitate a (supposed) protection from state sanctioned harm, a lack of status of which extends to justifying everything from genocide to slavery to rape, and is so obviously still part of the discourse whether it’s a rationalization like “she’s somebody’s sister so you shouldn’t have roofied her” to “he got good grades so the cops were wrong in shooting him,” all of that language assumes the need to prove oneself as part of a certain class in order to be protected / valued / seen.

So, destabilizing the idea of the class of “human” rightly worries activists who have spent lifetimes battling for barebones recognition, but artists like Kulendran Thomas are ultimately looking, it seems to me, to the political and social consequence of using the category of “human” as distinction as ultimately a philosophical foundation on which harm may continue to flourish and suggests for us, as these special humans, to stand outside the flow of an ecological system rather than within. The alternate would view all entities as interconnected in their distinction rather than as part of a hierarchic system of superiority with incompatible needs whose competition is endless rather than resolvable and ultimately collaborative.

Cue me heading to the park and sitting with the trees.

Which had me thinking about the final installation I lingered in the longest: Anicka Yi’s In Love With The World. Over the years I stumbled into a freelance gig where I was editing a lot for Korean artists in translation and so was inadvertently learning a bit, just through fixing a sentence clause or two, about some of the contemporary artists in Korea, who they’re referencing, and what seems to be a shared interest in the fluidity of memory, globalization, and built technologies impact on both.

Anicka Yi was born in Seoul but lives / works in NYC, and her aerobes were some of the most playful, and I would say, hopeful pieces in the exhibit. Her machines are not here to devour us, or to be servants playing us music or vacuuming the floors, but to learn from our shared environment, be responsive, and, ultimately, flexible.

While I don’t think I’d move myself into the class of a techno-optimist, I do think anything that can challenge the strict classification of “human” and push the imagination to think beyond technology as either opponent or something to be mastered might be good to practice.

And, so, I think that’s where I’ll leave it for today—leave the desk—headed for wherever—

j

Let’s keep on moving down the track
And if the horse lies down
There’s a push just a mile uptown
If the horse lies down

Wake me up to drive, wake me up to drive
Even if I’m tired, I don’t wanna miss a ride

I just finished the 2-mile walk from the A train back to my apartment on this gray April afternoon, pausing under various trees on my way home to finish up the final lines for this letter in a text message to myself. If I’m honest, I’ll probably listen a few more times once I send this out and get over to the gym.

What I love about the song is how it takes me right into the heart of what it felt like to be on an aimless drive growing up and the freedom of, upon leaving home, finally being able to go unchecked on the road for hours and days if we wanted. Sleeping in those cars. Smoking in them. Having sex. Trespassing. Visiting each other. Crying, confessing, fighting. What it meant to be able to load up a car and just go, dollar bills being passed over the seat and crumpled together into some sort of legible pile of currency to fill up and buy a giant bag of fried plantains to share and maybe use someone’s fake to get a few 40s as we went on and on and on.

I never did get a car of my own, but a few of my friends had them, and my boyfriend throughout college, and the boyfriends after that. What I mean by this is that I was often shotgun, meaning I got to be taken along. Usually, this also meant I got to DJ. The car radio was how I got to know my friends better, how we showed each other where we were at inside our hearts, often quite sad, and how we could first talk about being in love. There is such intimacy of sharing music through a car radio, which Dijon holds perfectly in “Talk Down” (his Coachella slowed-down performance of that song was just so, so gorgeous, another one I’ve been replaying a lot since the live recording was released last week).

But I think I’ve been thinking a lot about the car as a psychic place these days mostly because my book has some of its most significant scenes set in a car, on a trip, in transit. Friends loaded in, music narrating life, what can’t be said aloud shared through song.

Hand upon my skin
Warm me up, and calm me down
I like to watch your chin
Chasing the familiar sound
Of a famous song
Put one on, let’s sing along
To the famous song

Wake me up to drive, wake me up to drive
Even if I’m tired, I don’t wanna miss a ride

Yeah. The soft, dreamy way Adrianne Lenker takes you into the felt sense of eyes flicking open, the way a once absent heart can slip back seamlessly the moment it’s shaken awake simply because the hand that’s shaking them knows the value of what could be missed. Which is just…nothing. Just being in a car. Just driving on. Just listening together. Don’t miss that, it’s everything, the song seems to be saying.

If you’re an artist of any kind you know of the fallow periods and what it’s like to be the only one who believes. The temptation of transforming or contorting yourself into a mirror of what’s popular or trendy or celebrated or safe and to know you must walk your own way. Even if it’s a quiet way, for now. To keep walking even as those around you flinch with fear. Even as you flinch with fear—walk your own way. Build your own life, your vision, your heart. Art, writing, it’s more than production. Hobby. It’s a way of being. There are so many who fear the cave—good, God. Don’t. I say this just as much for another who might need it as I do for myself.

My book gave me a home when everything I knew as home dissolved and took a new shape, time and time again. The book taught me to fall and have the grace to let another lift you. To go places others feared to go. To know the hands that were always meant to hold you will find you. They will.

It’s a book about road trips, indie bands, and friendship. It’s a book about the river I was raised on, the grief I learned to metabolize again and again. It’s about the loss of climate and life and friendship and the hope for return. Real hope, one that knows all about hopelessness. What the trees can teach us about renewal and resilience. Everything that stands in the way of love and how hard it is to be brave enough to let love in. Yes, it’s a bit of a lover girl book only in that there is a belief that connection is truly all that can save us whether in this life or the next. It’s a book I started as a teeny tiny short story in my first creative writing workshop at the University of Michigan in which Professor Tish O’Dowd left me a note that said, “hm, I think you might have something here,” and then I buried the story for years until I got to graduate school.

Often in college I would write in my boyfriend’s car in the parking lot of his band rehearsals when sitting on the couch of the studio they recorded in got too loud for me to hear myself. I realized I was writing again about those characters when I was living alone in Philadelphia, single for the first time in 5 years, and then over the next decade or so that book bloomed into hundreds of pages, ones that were estranged from me at times as we both went in and out of incubation, then, during a long, hard summer, somehow burst into clarity and stood there, stripped down, suddenly looking more and more like ourselves.

Lenker, again:

Vacancies, none
The same ideas from everyone
We never plan ahead
We take the gamble on instead
And if they turn us down
Find a warm bed in the next town
If they turn us down

It’s a book that let me see who I’d become. What I desired, which, it turns out, is so, so much. More than I thought I was allowed to want. To let that be okay, and more than that, possible. Worth all the labor and longing and drowning out of the naysayers. To see that at times I’d been the biggest one. The sticky nights alone in a tiny apartment. Saying no to friends and lovers and islanding myself. The scramble of shitty underpaid freelance jobs to avoid selling away my days. Being balled on the floor in tears. Dropping chapter after chapter and rewriting every word. Speaking each word aloud alone in my bedroom and only keeping what I could feel in my own heart. The false hope, the nights reading to half-empty rooms, of wondering if anyone could hear me. It’s a book I hope will hold readers in their pain and unknowns and make them stand in some strange meadow alone and listen to the voices that find them there. To trust them. To trust their own song—that language can be made of longing and that whatever feels unbearable in their lives or imagination is far, far from that.

We can bear it all, friends, truly we can.

Wake up. Take that drive.

Do it all again.

j

The New Year began with a new short story of mine coming out in BOMB, edited by Raluca Albu and featured the wild, surreal artwork of beloved Emma Caster-Dudzick.

A few months later, I taught a creative writing workshop for UNC - Wilmington and celebrated the Lunar New Year in Chinatown.

The next month, I read again in the East Village from an essay I had come out with Sunday Salon on how difficult it’s been for me to learn to receive, though sometimes the answer seems to be as clear as what one of my dearest friends tells me on the regular: “you deserve it all,” “just be in the womb.”

Okay.

I try. I begin to step back into the light. I let it feel good, and when it doesn’t I stay and ask myself why. I realize there are old forms I can no longer hold, old ways I can no longer be.

A colleague-turned-friend was in town at the start of April. I did many of the touristy things I often forget about the longer I live in NYC, reminding me of the magic I live within and often close my eyes to. How they traveled across continents and oceans just to be here for a few days. Both single, we talked about how the longer life goes on, the harder it can be to let someone in. How, like a subway car, there are less and less seats available as the train moves forward.

“Someone can still get on,” they said, laughing. “You just got to squish.”

As we say goodbye, they leave me with flowers, an early birthday present. “I hope you will let yourself open,” they say. I watch for days as the tulips remind me how.

A few days later, I turn 34 and go to a nu disco party with friends, one of whom gives me a bracelet with a simple suggestion: bloom.

If I can’t show up in the way I want to, I tend to not show up at all, which I think means what I need now is a looser form, one that can hold me as I feel into my new shape, a form that leaves room for irregular petals and leaves. I want to let whatever wants to come forward, what is ready to bloom, to do so. I want to get out of my own way.

So, for now, what I’ve done is unlock the archive here (no more paywalls!) and stripped away the Conversations With Animals-as-podcast framing. It feels like that was the project that landed me in this space after a fateful meeting with the extremely kind and patient who encouraged me to bring Conversations With Animals over to the platform and generously helped me get everything up and running, but as I look forward into all the other projects I want to share with the world, I think it’s time to reimagine what this space could be. I think it’s time to reimagine what I could be, don’t you?

“Isn't it reasonable to assume that, projecting early human life into the far-distant future may not be the disaster movie we have come to love, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to tell the truth, raise the bar? To stand one remove from timeliness, like an artist encouraging reflection, stoking imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting his or her own life on the line, to imagine work in a world worthy of life?”

- Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

I spent today reminding myself this dream didn’t happen—starting as I stretched in the cold water of my morning shower, worried I might be late for my new position. The one that would change everything. How many times have I felt that I’d finally found the thing that would?

I had this irritation that I didn’t really have the right outfit on me—my closet now split between my apartment in the city and my mom’s house upstate as I am back and forth so much these days. I scold myself for letting resentment creep up at the ways I am pulled—shouldn’t I be grateful to have so much I belong to that I am forced to stretch myself? I want to be doing good work in the world and sometimes it isn’t always clear that I am.

I wonder at times if maybe this period, with all the grief it carries, wraps around itself a kind of gift. Would I really be a better writer if I could go to all the events, do all the things, have endless time to myself to worry and wonder and read? It sounds magical, and when I descend to my desk I could, and sometimes do, stay there for days—breaking only for food, the gym, walking my dog, family matters. Lately it’s taken me longer to drop in. I wonder if it’s because I haven’t had lulls, empty spaces, time to saturate myself in enough art outside of my own. My creative hours are so precious I want it to go all into what I am creating. But having to carry so much I hadn’t expected over the past few years—what shape does it make of me? What does it do to the work I can’t see, other than when I blame it for fracturing it—fracturing my attention, fracturing my time, fracturing me…these are selfish thoughts I tell myself. Who is that I want to be?

There’s a memory I return to at times, often enough I eventually turned the fragments into a poem a few years ago that never did find its home with a journal so I figured I would share it myself with you today. Maybe you will be able to read it in the full collection one day soon. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I think I’ll keep this archival post free. Will be playing around with this pattern and our subscription model for the fall, but all to say…here is an ode to waking up to our own patterns. At least I think. That’s what it was for me.

I’ve wanted to write since I created my first book in fifth grade. I wish I could remember what it was about only that I bound it and illustrated the pages. I’ve wanted to write since my mother and I would craft stories at night with the same protagonist, crafting her saga together. Since my dad got sick and I tried understanding what he left behind in the words he had written, made a life from. Since I had a journal where I wrote chapters of a ragtag novel about a friend group trying to get to Party City so they could plan a funeral. Since I wrote a short story about a cat at ten that was accused of plagiarism given my age. Since I started a secret LiveJournal in my teens only one friend had a link to—I performed the identity of a man in lower Manhattan running a Mexican restaurant and his lonely observations of his shop and the city. What purpose did they serve other than to give my hours meaning? Because my heart wanted to? It wasn’t a means of survival in terms of being compensated, but it was in terms of imagining my life connected to others. That there was more to the world, and my world, than my father dying. Than feeling excluded at school, feeling rejected in many ways by the world’s love. I could create something beautiful. I could speak.

The first time I ever said these words aloud: I want to write, to strangers, to people who hadn’t known me outside of my original context was deep in the Utah wildlands. I was on mile twenty of over a hundred. 18 years old. I hadn’t really dealt with the grief of my father’s illness or other traumas I’d suffered—mostly I’d been partying them away, smoking, doing whatever felt cool and available to me to pass time in our small town.

So to say to these people who didn’t know me, to whom I could be anyone, that I wanted to write, was a claim that I hadn’t known I needed to make, to recognize something deep within myself that was coming all along. And so during the next few weeks of walking along the trails, I would do just that: I wrote. Fragments of song lyrics, little poems, scenes, mostly messy scrawls on life, love, and desire. This sadness I struggled to name. This desire to be better. What it was I was learning out there in the woods all by myself.

One night we set up camp and all we could decide as a group was that the energy felt off—a collective intuition that where we had chosen to rest was all wrong. A few nights before a mountain lion and her cub had passed by our sleeping heads, an unknowable pardon, and perhaps we were heightened to the quiet dangers that might rock us from the beauty we savored during the bright days. Maybe we argued that we needed to be closer to a water source, or that there wasn’t enough wood to start our fire, but regardless of the reason we gave we all agreed to find new places for our beds.

Within thirty minutes, a boulder shot down the edge of the mountain and rolled over where our bodies had been stretched minutes before. We didn’t talk about it much. We kind of knew. We listened. We trusted.

We moved.

J

Starting at the end of September and continuing until the end of the year, I will be re-releasing all CWA podcast episodes from the past three seasons, which includes a talk with award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Lo, racehorse rehabilitator CJ Wilson, and many, many more favorites. Season four of the podcast will launch this winter and you can expect episodes with a breakout novelist, a National Geographic journalist, international animal rights activists, and collaborations with other animal podcasts—stay tuned :).

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you: How are your final weeks of summer? Any notable animal encounters? What is on your mind as we head into the final quarter of the year?

Behind-the-scenes, I am reflecting on my time away from teaching—time spent studying in The Netherlands, starting a garden on my building’s rooftop, wondering about passive versus active rewilding, eating vegan croissants in Paris, taking cold showers and deep breathing, retreating to Upstate New York, honoring friendship’s loving gaze, being with the difficulties and pleasures of family, and discovering lessons of surrender during life’s transitions. I’ll be sharing some of these writings with you over the coming months including some beautiful photographs, films, and stories from Holland.

A friend encouraged me to finally start The Overstory and I am deep in its web at the moment. I’ll leave you with a short passage from an early section:

Adam salvages a bit of wood from the men who come to grind out the stump. He takes it into the basement, planes it down, and engraves it with his woodburning kit. He finds the words in a book: A tree is a passage between earth and sky.

With love,

Juliana

P.S. The climate justice meditation and yoga series I co-facilitate with , Connie, Siggi, and Sheila, is coming on its final summer session this Thursday. In NYC and looking for affordable ways to gather in contemplative community? We’d love to welcome you! Register here or sign up at the door (no one is turned away for lack of funds).

While the newsletter goes on a rest, there will new podcast episodes released over the next few weeks as spring blooms into summer. You can expect conversations with a lawyer collaborating with NYC to make infrastructure more creature-friendly, a sociologist examining the true impact of meat-free menus, a pet psychic, and more!

Listen to “Multi-species liberation movements with Dr. Kris Hill & Dr. Thomas Aiello” here!

Please make sure you subscribe and rate CWA on Spotify or Apple (or wherever you like to get your podcasts) to get notified when a new episode is out!

For today, this conversation is an invitation to consider the means and methods of protest movements, the reclamation of animal imagery, the entwinement of how racialized thinking and animal lives, and the radical idea that collective liberation necessitates a multi-species imagination.

Dr. Kris Hill holds a PhD in Anthrozoology. Since 2019, she authored or co-authored 15 peer-reviewed papers that are accepted or in print, have a further three under review, and two more in preparation. Amongst others, she has published in Society & Animals (SOAN), Anthrozoös, and Animal Studies Journal (ASJ). In 2023 she established the Cat Academic Think Tank (e-CATT), a cross-disciplinary group of academics whose interests are related to domestic cats (Felis catus) or small wild cat species. 

Dr. Thomas Aiello is a professor of history, Africana studies, and anthrozoology. He received his first PhD from the University of Arkansas in 2007 and his second from the University of Exeter in 2021. The bulk of his courses relate to all measures of African American history, from early slavery to Black Power, and all aspects of animal studies. His research interests are broader, covering twentieth century United States cultural and intellectual history, twentieth century African American cultural and intellectual history in a variety of different settings, and animal studies, critical animal studies, and anthrozoology.

Have a wonderful summer all and I’ll see you on the other side :).

Much love,

Juliana

The film is intentional in its framing to center people whose lives are intertwined with chickens whether as household pets, nuisance rooster neighbors, or small farm families who slaughter their birds for food.

At times the framing worked for me—the film felt sincere, grounded in the way people whose lives are touched by chickens beyond the supermarket shelf were at the heart of the story rather than “experts.” This choice empowers the individual to observe their relationships with chickens on their own terms.

At other times, I wondered if the film was normalizing bird-as-food narratives. So, I was excited to share my thoughts with Rebecca, below, and to hear her perspective as someone who spends her days with such a familiar, but under-known bird. You can watch along with us here.

Rebecca van Laer is the author of How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022) and the forthcoming memoir Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury). She lives in the Hudson Valley with two cats and five chickens.

Since some of the moments in the film felt to me Grey Gardens-esque in their framing, I started to wonder about that framing–why do you think Karin Estrada for instance is shown as the only subject who has a chicken as a pet? What does her portrayal do to the viewer’s perception of those who might want to protect chickens’ lives?

I think how you view this partially depends on how you define a “pet”—are animals who we extract labor and resources from exempt from being pets? The answer very well might be yes. At the same time, Janet Bonney’s relationship with her chickens mirrors my own (assuming she doesn’t slaughter them, although that’s unclear). My uncle once referred to chickens as “pets with benefits,” and I think there’s something accurate about that, although which “benefit” is primary—eggs or intimacy/joy—will vary between chicken owners.

But you’re very right that Karin Estrada is the only documentary subject who keeps a rooster in her home, treating him the way one might treat a pampered puppy. I think what you’re getting at is that her affection is quirky to the point of potentially inappropriate. Watching her give Cotton a bath and blowdry him, I asked outloud, “is that good for chickens?” The answer is pretty much “no”—chickens bathe in dust, not with water and soap. So while I think the documentary broadly seeks to show that chickens have greater intelligence and more complex inner and social lives than most people assume, it walks a delicate line in implying that caring for chickens too much verges into the “unnatural,” indeed perhaps suggesting that those who want to protect chickens lives’ are on some level irrational.

At the same time, it’s helpful to me to ask what it would really look like to protect chicken’s lives. In my years of living with chickens, I have come to love them, and in the process become more outraged at the system of industrial agriculture that they are inextricably a part of. It’s odd to live with this contradiction—to give my flock the best life possible, and at the same time not know what liberation would look like for their species, so bred and altered to our purposes. Karin Estrada at least provides an example, even if it seems silly on its face.

I was fascinated by the way the public rallied around the lives of chickens who were saved (or did the saving) in these sorts of phenomenal or “exceptional” ways. For instance, the beheaded chicken who lived for months after or the chicken who survived being frozen in a storm and was brought back to life through CPR getting newspaper headlines. Why are these individual lives seen as more valuable in a country that slaughters billions of chickens a year?

There is so much done to keep the reality of industrial agriculture under wraps. I think it would horrify people if they saw what went on—horrify them to some extent. Yet there might still be that psychic disconnect between what happens there, in these far-away warehouses, and what they’re doing when they order a fried chicken sandwich.

I think it is maybe something the documentary is grappling with. The realities of mass agriculture are depicted in a few scenes, but we certainly don’t see the chickens at the bottom of the tower covered in the shit from all those above. We don’t see slaughter. And the way that we receive statistical information is not via voice-over (as we do in many other parts of the film) but through text on the screen. This makes the truths harder and colder, so different from the intimate individual tales we hear.

It is so hard for people to care about things in the abstract. This is a problem of art, of fiction writing: we so often find ourselves telling stories about individuals to shine light on collective and structural problems. Because this is the level on which we first and most easily experience affection and love, it’s easier to tell stories this way, and to connect with them. So it doesn’t surprise me that many chicken-eating people can connect with a single chicken, a heroic chicken. The harder parter is getting that connection to spread, to encompass the greater species.

While some of the ethics of industrial agriculture are raised in the film, and certainly the sheer volume of chickens consumed brings forward how many lives are taken by this system, the film’s title seems to assert the role of chickens in American lives as farmed animals as the “natural history.” Is the film suggesting the state of affairs as natural? Why do you think that is?

It’s definitely an interesting title for a film that’s looking at something so specific—mass agriculture and a handful of chicken custodians in the US, without anything about the 10,000 year history of domestication, much less the life of jungle birds before we interfered in their evolution. It is really not a history, and then there’s the fact that many of the stories that it tells are told through these very funny (to me) reenactments rather than using real documentary footage. There is something that is, on the surface, so clearly artificial, that reading most generously, I hope the film is actually saying the opposite—that there is nothing natural at all about the ways to we have come to coexist with, exploit, and relate to chickens.

What have you learned about the lives and habits of chickens as you coexist with them? Did watching this film alter or inform your choice to choose this lifestyle?

My dad has kept chickens for a long time, and when we first got chickens, I will admit I was more interested in their function on my sort of miniature/aspiring homestead than I was interested in them as individual creatures. They eat food scraps; they make eggs; I’m a lacto-ovotarian with a lot of food that needs composting. It all seemed very practical. So my dad brought me a cat-carrier with four chickens in it.

The first thing most people say when I tell them I have chickens is something like “they’re so dumb.” This is basically propoganda. Chickens are not dumb; they’re about as smart as dogs. They have very complex social hierarchies. The first thing I learned is that a pecking order is a real thing. Our top chicken, Bertha, got into the coop the first evening and ruthlessly pecked everyone else as they came in. Within days, they’d established a hierarchy, and each chicken began to show her unique personality and perform her function within the flock. All day long, I hear their coos and clucks as they talk to each other.

Because I’ve developed individual relationships with chickens now, it’s that much harder for me to stomach the system they’re part of. I would love to have a very friendly pet chicken like Cotton, but in most cases, that means raising chicks. And when you buy chicks, even sexed chicks that are supposed to be female, you might get a rooster. We don’t have space for one, but I wouldn’t want to kill him. The local animal rescues are bursting with unwanted roosters. So I’ve decided we’ll stick to rescuing unwanted adult chickens (which we’ve done once so far).

Any favorite chicken stories?

Our top chicken, Bertha, passed away last year. (We brought out a chicken vet; it seems Bertha ingested a foreign object, and as much as we love our girls, chicken surgery is not in the budget.) Her second-in-command, Cali, has taken over as top chicken. While Bertha ruled through violence, Cali has asserted dominance mostly through posturing. No one challenges her, but she’s honestly bad at her job. Bertha could always get the flock to follow her out of danger or after treats, so it was easy to get the chickens in and out of their run. Cali really isn’t interested in the job of ruling—only in the perks like eating first and getting the best perch. Cali is a very relatable queen, and it goes to show how unique the social organism of the flock is.

Tune in to my conversation with Dr. Morrison, evolutionary biologist and professor, on how feathers are formed and what processes lead to each expression of color.

Apple, Amazon, IHeartRadio, Spotify, YouTube, GooglePodcasts, RadioPublic

A few weeks ago my students found an injured bird outside of our classroom at NYU and we used my hat and scarf to get them to the Wild Bird Fund. This time of year there are lots of fledglings to be found, even a nest of them right by my mom’s front door when I visited for Mother’s Day.

This past Friday, I was having coquito with a friend when a fledging flew into the cafe and landed on my arm.

They’d hit the wall before finding us, so we decided it was best to take them uptown, too…and so we got them into a box to the rescuers.

For this month’s archival dig, I’ll be sharing three poems, a series called “Three Johnny Carson poems” that were published in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2021. Two as they were originally published (below), featuring birds, and the third behind the paywall. You can get a trial, subscribe, or go to the original publisher here to read all three together. Enjoy! :)

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I was drowsy, stuffed with the series of vegan dinner rolls that were set before me in five hour intervals over the past 26 hours. I’d been lucky—on my flight from Seoul to I Gusti Ngurah Rai International Airport, I found myself in a row of empty seats which I quickly turned into a bed and slept a solid few hours for the first time since I left New York.

It was the longest flight I’d ever taken, and I was equally excited as I was nervous. Since the end of last year, I’ve felt like I’ve been in a waiting room, poking my head into the hallway every now and then to make sure I’m in the right place. The answer I often receive is yes, just keep sitting. It’ll only be a moment more.

I don’t mean this is a passive way. If you know me, you know not doing is not a habit I need to break. I have multiple projects going, and if I’m not creating I don’t feel like I’m me. I’ve stopped framing this like it’s a personality trait that needs improving and now embrace this as, simply, my creativity.

But quiet, empty time is essential to that very process.

I looked to the other side of my hotel room in a hazy state, having asked to receive a symbol to guide me on my time abroad. When I got close enough to see what it was that was drawing me over, I found a dragonfly. Hello, I said, mourning the creature while also being grateful for their arrival. Thank you for guiding me.

Over the next few days, the dragonfly kept coming to me in unexpected places. From treats shared with friends to tarot pulls after meditation sessions, I felt the flutter of dragonfly at my side.

Whether it’s the Norse goddess Freyja to Irish myths of the small creature being helpful fairies in disguise to those native to the Southeast Asian terrain I was traveling who see dragonflies as symbols of a blessed rice field, I’m not the first to encounter the insect and feel a sense of transformation, luck, and possibility.

Is it so bad to believe everything in life has meaning? That we are as in conversation with the universe as we allow ourselves to be?

A childhood friend—my first playdate—was staying with me the past few days and after dinner, over tea, we acknowledged the loudness of the unknown before us. But the next day, returning to the idea, we raised the question: What if it’s better than we can even imagine? How good could it get?

There are reasons to believe the future might be worse than what we have now—the existential threat of the climate crisis not being the only global threat confronting us, or the recent arrests of students and colleagues for peaceful demonstrations, or the many other ways it feels like an impenetrable REALLY? looms over much of life, but I can’t help to lean into the bit of lightness I feel when I begin to imagine, or notice, or attend to, the fantastical moments of collaboration already underway.

This week in my writing class at one of the many universities calling for a rightful divestment from genocide, we studied Danez Smith’s “dream where every black person is standing by the ocean” and Traci Brimhall’s “A Prelude to a Revolution.” We spoke together about the way fantasy and the surreal constructs both literal and metaphorical portals in these poems, and so in our psyche, and so in our life. When the boy rises from the ocean from spit in Smith’s poem, a restoration occurs. When the guards are on fire in Brimhall’s piece, a revolution begins.

But fledging from a dream incubated into full realization takes care, protection, and…resources.

During my final days in Bali, I walked with a friend through a rainstorm in Ubud. We hadn’t brought umbrellas, and she hadn’t packed a poncho like me, so we ducked into the first open structure we saw which turned out to be a small hostel. One of the workers offered her his poncho, and we continued down the road to our destination: the Eco Petulu Bird Sanctuary and Cafe. Here fallen baby egrets are taken in to recover during the spring and summer mating season until they can be released in the fall.

Dragonflies spend most of their life as a nymph underwater—they exist here without wings and go unseen as they move through this stage, familiar only to fellow underwater creatures. When they emerge, usually after about four years of living in this way, they scale a plant to emerge to the surface. Their skin sheds. They live a few months of life like this—in flight, often looking for a mate (which, I learned, can occur mid-flight, forming the shape of a heart).

But that whole time spent in the murk, did they sense what was coming? How do they know when it’s time to break free?