And, I’ll be taking submissions. The space is all about creative survival in this FxCKED up world. Send me your comics, your rants, your dreams. Keep it up to about 600 words maximum, up to 9 comic panels. For now, you can send to ashadoreSLP@gmail.com

If you’re receiving this, soon you’ll be receiving a notification that I’ve added you to Danger Clams. If you don’t like the content, feel free to unsubscribed. But of course I’d love to get to know you. We are all we’ve got right now.

xo

Asha

I bet there’s more.

Ask yourself until you have the answer.

And I hope by now, you know the drill.

Until next year, loves.

xo

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

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Because we’re almost at the end, we may as well dig into fertility. I recently co-wrote and produced a short film about leaking breastmilk that becomes a sentient, magical, super happy creature. The mother of this glorious little guy doesn’t want it to follow her around anymore. Of course, she eventually learns that it’s there to give her exactly what she needs.

Your question: Where is my unexpected baby? What is it trying to do for me?

Take this as far as you need to, or keep it simple.

Ask yourself the question, follow your mind around until you like the answer. Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

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Your questions:

What is at your feet, literally or figuratively?

Describe it.

Ask yourself the question in every way you can imagine until you like the answer.

Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

Subscribe now

Your questions:

What does it actually feel like when something takes your breath away?

When was the last time that happened?

Describe it.

Ask yourself the question, follow your mind around until you like the answer. Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

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We’re way past the midline, which is almost always wrapped in relief or regret. What’s it like for you? And why?

Your questions:

Why do (don’t I) I feel better when I know something crummy is halfway over?

When did getting “over the hump” make things faster, harder, or worse?

Ask yourself the question, follow your mind around until you like the answer. Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

Subscribe now

Your questions:

What does the heat really feel like? Think of the word heat in whatever way brings you to the most interesting space. Like Miami Heat or the swampy, choking heat of actual Miami. Like the way blush feels when you don’t want it to appear on your face but you can’t stop it.

Ask until you land on the most interesting answer. Memorize the best line.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

Subscribe now

Your questions:

What is my heaviest burden today? What would it really take for that burden to dissolve?

Ask until your answer makes you feel something in your body, something unexpected, maybe it’s own kind of brightening.

Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

Subscribe now

Your questions:

Where are you the most deranged, unhinged, or generally bananas? In what way does your thinking fly into chaos, conspiracy, or excessive rumination? Define that part of yourself. Give it a name.

Ask yourself the question, follow your mind around until you like the answer. Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

This week’s question is about truth. I know I know. It doesn’t really exist right now, not in any real way.

Your questions:

Think about something that keeps returning to your mind. A song or a shitty political moment in the news or a tragedy. It doesn’t matter the depth or tone.

Ask: What is the truth of this thing? Why does it keep coming back to me?

Ask yourself the question, follow your mind around until you like the answer. Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

This week’s question is about where your stress actually lives right now.

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Your questions:

Where is the stress right now in your body?

Once you find it, describe it.

Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

This week’s question is about anger. We’re getting all the fun stuff out of the way at the jump.

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Your questions:

What are you justifiably pissed about?

Why are you wrong about that?

But no, why are you really, really wrong?

It’s basically impossible to admit that we’re wrong when we’re justifiably pissed. Probably, your brain will give you SO many answers to this one. You’re looking for the unexpected answer. Keep asking until you surprise yourself.

You will eventually surprise yourself.

Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Whether you’re bussing, driving, or walking to work or school or wherever it is you go, these prompts are designed to work with your brain’s relentless desire to find answers.

Ask yourself a question, wait for your mind to answer you.

This week’s question is about humiliation. Might as well start in the belly of the thing.

Your questions:

What was the most humiliating thing that happened recently?

What would happen if I changed the part that was humiliating?

But what really would happen?

Often, our most embarrassing moments are opportunities, which is one of the most annoying parts of life. Why the hell should we have to go through all that to get our neurons firing like chaos bombs, creating all these portals to learning and new thoughts?

But still. You’re looking for the answer under the answer.

Ask yourself the question, follow your mind around until you like the answer. Memorize one sentence, a good sentence.

When you get to a piece of paper and 5 spare minutes, write the line and a paragraph underneath it. Use it to start your next story, essay, or poem.

Here’s to kicking off my monthly series, as promised, in or around the 5th of every month, with a list of things that stuck with me and things I’ve made.

ARTICLES

I just read this excellent article for folks who have a hard time with Mother’s Day, by Susan Shapiro.

I loved this article on how to stay productive at work after divorce by Andrea Javor.

And Sari Caine wrote a kick ass takedown of RFK’s comments about autism.

I’ve also had a few things come out lately, starting with my own thoughts about autism, RFK, and The Telepathy Tapes.

I also had the great opportunity to publish about my actual true love for DisneyLand.

Plus, I wrote an article about how to deal with problematic behaviors at work with something I call “fauxitude.”

BOOKS

I get to read the most amazing books for my podcast, which I post about in my seasonal posts. This month, I’m currently reading and totally loving:

Alive Day: a Memoir by Karie Fugett Gritty and awesome and alive, this memoir is set in parts in the deep south, which brings me sooo much joy.

All the Men I’ve Loved Again by Christine Pride This novel is fun, meaningful, and wholehearted. I just ordered two books that Pride co-authored, and I’m thrilled to dig back into her voice and clarity of story and style.

Wager by Adele Elise Williams These poems are just badass. Accessible. Dark and funny and exactly what I need, in pretty bursts.

Until next month.

xo

Ahead of me in line, another blonde mom ordered an epic ton of little cakes, loaves, and tarts. Her four kids crawled all over her husband at a cafe table behind us. I took a deep breath, simultaneously wishing my kids were here and feeling grateful that I didn’t have to manage childcare in this heat.

Customers filed in, lining up behind me. The blonde woman asked her husband and the bakery attendant questions about the lemon tart, the quality of the fruit, the filling in the eclairs. Another attendant filled five large, white bags, wrapping each item in soft paper. The mom argued with one of her children about which little cakes to buy for later. The husband made a quiet comment about the size of the mini fridge at their hotel.

That’s when I noticed the bees, a dozen of them, crawling across the fruit and honey on the decorative loaves inside the case. I squatted down to watch them step through the sticky bread, flitting their wings and bumping into dried orange rinds and glazed berries. It’s a wonder these necessary but clumsy little critters have survived as long as they have.

Behind me, the line shifted and groaned. A man fanned his face with a flyer. I stood up in time to hear the woman behind me curse in French. The blonde mom said, I think that’s everything!

The attendants tallied her bill on a large calculator. The folks behind me sighed. Wind leaked in from the front door, cooling us just a little. The attendant gave the mom her total. The mom looked at it, frowning. We all watched her and pretended not to watch her. Just pay the fucking bill, I thought.

She looked back at her husband, then at me. I smiled. I felt it happen on my face without my permision. A small smile, but genuine. She smiled back, clicked her tongue, said, I don’t know…It’s just…I think we need…one or two…no…ten…baguettes.

It’s a true testament to my fragile maturity that I didn’t audibly snort. The attendant, however, rolled her eyes with her whole body and bent over to retrieve the bread. The mom turned to me and the line behind me and said, There’s nothing like this where we live.

I think this is a maximalist era. Too many. Too much. Too long. Too short. All of our narratives refreshed themselves at the end of January, that inescapable shift that politics plunges us into without warning or consent, and now that narrative stretches. Thirty days. Sixty days. Ninety. Too long. Not long enough to end. Not yet.

I remember the baguette lady, the too-muchness of her order. Maybe because I grew up hungry or because I’m from the deep south, where we put fresh bread in the fridge to keep it from molding, I will wonder forever how many of those baguettes they threw away. Why do I care? I wonder and bet against myself, years later. Two baguettes, surely they could’ve only gotten through two. They had so many more enticing pastries. Baguettes are kind of a nothing bread, an afterthought, important only if it is the only bread you can get your hands on. Temporary bread. Too short. Too hard by the end of the day, to save.

How much wasted bread is too much? And what if it’s not bread - but time? And are we all kind of like those skinny rice and potato loaves - wrapped delicately in whatever fabrics, waiting for some crushing fate - either chewed through the mouths of strangers, or dropped unceremoniously in the trash in a hotel room in one of the most beautiful cities in the world?

Scarcity helps my art. Abundance - whether it’s joyful or tragic - chokes me. Like I’m reeling and twisting through an impossible, relentless pause. I don’t want to feel anything, but of course I want to feel everything. I’m desperate for quiet, but inside of quiet, I’m terrified of what comes next. How do we, as I learned from my graduate mentor, Lidia Yuknavitch, write ourselves out of this particular story when this particular story feels like a kaleidoscope of endless, brutal hauntings, like we’re being chased by the moment we’re alive inside and the terrible possibilities of what comes next?

When I returned from Europe, a swarm of bees made a hive under my new backyard deck. Within a week, my dog, Harley, a lumbering, sweetheart pitbull, became an expert at catching these bees, hopping, leaping, and biting them out of the air. When they fell to the ground, he nudged them with his nose, surprised that the dead creatures did not burst back into life so they could play the bee catching game together, again.

In early fall, Harley obsessed over an ant bite on his front leg. Within a week, the tiny puncture grew to a large, round sore. Every day, the wound grew. When I took him to the vet, they found a bacterial infection and a fungus growing there. Every day for two weeks, I sprayed and wrapped his wound, gave him a ten minute break from the giant, plastic medical hood, then clipped it back around his neck. The sore healed, and I released him from his hood.

Within three days, he opened it back up, and I strapped the hood back around his head.

This two weeks on, three days off, two weeks on again routine went on for almost six months.

He’s a menace with that thing on, my partner said, touching the bruises on my quads where my dog accidentally ran his plastic hood into me several times per day. Depth perception, it turns out, isn’t a trick that an old dog can learn with a huge cone around his neck.

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In the Paris bakery, I finally ordered my croissant, that last baguette, and a lemon tart. I watched the four kids follow their mom, her hands loaded with the white bags of gluten free treasures. Her husband returned briefly while I checked out, slipping the attendant a $20 bill and apologizing.

At the time, I thought, damn straight. I remembered all the cafes and restaurants where I’d worked in my teens and early twenties, how customers with huge orders felt like such a drag, their apparent wealth like a spotlight beaming across my desperation for a one-dollar tip.

I was so relieved when the family left. I wanted distance from them. I didn’t want the French folks to lump me into the American Karen category. Why the fuck do I care? I thought, as I left the bakery. Like I was embarrassed on this woman’s behalf. Like I had a good reason to look down on her for ordering like $300 worth of snacks for her family. What if they eat every single bite of those baguettes? I told myself I was being a classist dick, assuming my own authenticity because I grew up poor.

I tore into the croissant. How is it? my partner asked. I didn’t want to tell him it was burnt. I didn’t want to admit it had been a waste of time. Too many minutes of our precious vacation watching another person order bread. Do you remember Kara? I asked him.

What?

The physical therapist with the loud voice, I said. He shrugged, and I reminded him about the summer before when we’d traveled together from our home in Seattle to South Carolina for my daughter, Maggie’s, orthopedic surgery. It was her fourth surgery and the most extensive.

In the days after the operation, Maggie was nervous to walk or participate in PT - until Kara showed up. At first, I thought she was annoying with her booming, scratchy voice, not at all muffled by the mandatory face masks we wore 24/7 for the week Maggie was inpatient. BUCK UP! IT’LL BE FUN! Kara basically shouted at Maggie. She stood on the right of Maggie’s hospital bed, and I stood on the left. I, 2, 3, Kara said, Maggie took a deep breath, and we lifted the sheet under Maggie’s body, turning her so that her legs dangled off the bed. Maggie winced. Does it hurt? my partner asked. Maggie shook her head. IT’S AMAZING YOU’RE AMAZING, Kara said. Maggie smiled.

Over the course of two weeks, Maggie saw five physical therapists, but Kara’s sessions were always the ones that got her past any plateau. I warmed to Kara and started to enjoy her peculiar voice. So loud. So much fry. So, so much.

Because of the masks, I never saw Kara’s face. Just her hair, her eyes, and her voice.

The baguette lady sounded just like her. Same wispy blonde, and when she paused in the middle of her order spree and smiled, I smiled back. Kara? I thought for less than a second before womping back into my annoyance and judgment.

Who this person was didn’t really matter. In that heat, her whole body and life were swiftly reduced to something in my way, a hold up, a barrier to satiating my hunger, leaving the cafe, and carrying on with my vacation.

Maggie with a different PT after the big surgery.

That summer, when I first caught onto Harley’s bee destruction, I searched for ways to lure the wee critters to a new home. Nothing worked, and when I called local professionals, they said they were booked until fall. So, I surrendered.

In the mornings, I drank my coffee outside, and when a bee wiggled up from between the deck boards, I told it, Be careful motherfucker. I sprayed peppermint oil and sighed at the apparently totally not enticing flowers I’d planted across the yard. Zero bees found their way there.

Within minutes, my oaf of a dog would fly through the air, eyes wild, tongue out, ready to play with this tiny, new friend. When my dog inevitably destroyed the tiny, buzzing body, then looked at me, whining, I said , They don’t want to be friends with you, bud.

Sorry, I said to the pile of carcasses Harley left behind every afternoon as I swept them off the side of my deck.

The worst part was the way Harley used the cone of shame. After he killed a bee, it tumbled into his cone, and he swung his head, flying the bee back into the air so he could snap its little body again and again and again until it fell, unmoving, to the deck. Harley stamped his feet like an angry elephant. He walked back and forth between me and the unmoving bees, chirping and whining, licking my hand, like I could somehow change his reality.

Instead, I scratched behind his ears, grateful for the power of a sigh and a head pat, if you’re a dog.

I read somewhere that nearly a million books were published in 2024 globally, but only about 14,000 were reported in Publishers Marketplace. And still: 14k books is more than we’ll read in our lives. Even that number feels like noise. So many voices that voices become fabric, and if you’re a writer, it’s hard to feel specific when you know you’re just one of many, many threads.

And yet.

I’ve spent hundreds of minutes thinking about the baguette lady, whether she was Kara or not. I love my dog, but when the bees came back the following summer - and Harley was finally not encumbered by his hood - he completely destroyed the population of their hive within three weeks. The way storms wrecked whole neighborhoods when I grew up. The way whole airplanes swoop people out of their homes and lives, depositing them in a faraway prison. The way whole groups of people are targeted. The way joy feels hunted. So hunted. Too hunted.

How many years can we last in a world where joy feels hunted?

My favorite city in France was Biarritz, a coastal town with hard waves, great food, and a pretty statue at the end of a lit, rocky pathway. I grew up in a beachy vacation town, but Biarritz was a complete departure from my hometown and my real life. I loved it because it felt like an interruption. I love traveling because you never know what’s going to feel like an interruption, a precious, fleeting surprise. Like ear scratches and the small smiles between me and the baguette lady. Like the very best line written in each of those 14,000 books.

Like everyone, I want to shatter nightmares, and I don’t know if I can. Maybe there’s a way to enter the cracks in the nightmare, to write into them, to make the moments of pause into a canyon. Maybe someday the small, weird delights will outgrow the nightmare itself.

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Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson

In this extraordinary essay collection, the author explores motherhood via literature and literary figures. It’s a delicious read, and it gives me hope that the big 5 will start producing and promoting more essay collections.

You, From Below by Em J Parsley

In this slim novella, the speaker travels up an Appalachian mountain to deliver a letter after their town is destroyed. It’s lyric and luscious and totally possible to read in one sitting.

Forgive the Animal by Sarah Pape

This poetry collection is as luminous as it is gritty, covering themes of connection and disconnection through class and how specific and striking hurts can reverberate through a life.

Python With a Dog Inside It by Max McDonough

Brutal and gorgeous, this poetry collection offers cinematic hinges for its lyrical beats, documenting two young brothers contending with a rural life and complex caregivers.

Stay safe yall. My spring craft newsletter is coming later this week. If you’re looking for new ways to stay as calm as possible in the middle of this storm, check out my recent article on Washington Post about using your voice to calm down.

xo

• If you’re in the Seattle area, my play, which I wrote in 2018 - about the unlikely circumstance of a global pandemic that is largely ignored at first and inordinately impacts individuals who live in rural lower economic areas - is going to be LIVE (with animations and free lollipops for everyone!) on MONDAY FEBRUARY 24TH at 7pm at WEST OF LENIN. Watch some fun promos I made for it HERE and HERE.
  Tickets are pay what you can, HERE.

• I’ve had some wonderful folks on my literary interview podcast, Totally Biased Reviews. I feel so lucky to host this podcast and have the chance to chat with really incredible writers, every week.

  • I talked to Mark J Williams about his really beautiful LGBTQIA+ travel guide, Out in the World.

  • Dale Bridges and I discussed his fun noir novel, The Mean Reds and the importance of journalists.

  • And Alyssa Ages talked about her book, Secrets of Giants, processing grief and transitions through heavy lifting, and strength training for everyone as we age, and specifically women.

  • Soon, I’ll be posting more from our next season, including interviews with Ronit Plank, Em J Parsley, Gina Frangello, and many more. If you know someone with a book, a play, a music album, or a made thing, pitch me at parleylit@gmail.com

• My incredible mentor, Lidia Yuknavitch, published another stunning memoir, Reading the Waves. I love it. Read it. It’s a balm and an opportunity and a beautiful story.

• I had the opportunity to chat with truly incredible people for an article I’m working on, including Amethysta Herrick who writes and produces podcasts for Gender Identity Today, Ashley Brundage, who is the Founder and CEO of Empowering Differences, and BeBe Deluxe, a phenomenal musician in Jacksonville, Florida. I love the work they’re doing, and I bet you will, too.

Now, to the increased relentless crises we are facing as humans since January…

I don’t think I’m alone in whomping between feeling choked and stunned into stillness then totally lit on fire and zooming into action. It’s a minute by minute swing. It’s hard not to catastrophize sometimes. I’m at risk. My kids are at risk. My friends and loved ones are at risk. You’re probably at risk. Thousands of super smart people have offered advice, analyses, and hot takes on this profoundly shitty moment in history. I don’t have much to add except: I often feel like the only thing in the world I can handle is the totally soothing but LOUD snores of the pug my family recently adopted from a Texas rescue. When that happens, I’m trying to give myself permission to make incremental moves that actually cause me to experience joy. Like doing more art. Like pitching articles that will give really cool people a good reason to spend a half hour chatting with me about their lives and work. Or interviewing authors. Or learning how to pitch my memoir and graphic novel. Or lifting really heavy weights. Or taking videos of my dogs howling at ambulance sirens while feeling like, yeah, I get it yall, I’m howling on the inside, too.

Give yourself permission, when you can, for the small, bright leans in your day.

xo

The fall issue just came out withe a website redesign. Check it out HERE or watch the YouTube playlist below, starting with Ira Sukrungruang’s “Your Thai Life Begins Here”:

I also host Totally Biased Reviews.

Next week, I’ll post a “books in review, review” on insta [ @ adjsbb and @ parleylit ], but for now, check out the conversations with incredible authors:

Susan Shapiro interviews thirteen people about how they forgave - or never forgave - major harms.

Joshua Mohr writes the most heartfelt, edgy punk hero in the first of three voicey, super compelling novels.

Hyeseung Song writes about her journey from childhood to art in this lush and deeply insightful memoir.

Jane Wong’s memoir about growing up in restaurants, food, and art full of depth and delicious language.

We also interview publishers, starting with Josh Dale from !

We have dozens of interviews scheduled next year with publishers and authors.

So subscribe on YouTube or Apple Podcasts!

I’ve also had articles out in Slate, Business Insider, and a NYT Tiny Love Story.

This year, I’ve had some literary essays out, too:

Electric Literature

MUTHA Magazine (illustrated! by me!)

Gulf Coast (print!)

Heavy Feather Review

and Parley Lit

Here’s the Tiny Love Story…in print! (If you’ve got a paywall, it’s below in full):

That picture was taken on January 10th, 2012 when I was exactly forty weeks pregnant (which means an inflated, desperately achy waddler). I wasn’t my best self. I was terrified and super annoyed that the beach in Virginia was piss yellow and freezing which felt nothing like the quartz fluff sand at my hometown beach. I simultaneously leaned allll the way into feeling resentful of…the trap of all sensations…while trying to have fun (sooo slowly) chasing my toddler around the beach.

When I showed the (physical! newspaper!) article to my kid and described that day, he just said, “Cool.”

I said, “Your face is in the New York Times. You are fifteen. Do you know where I was when I was fifteen?”

“Yep.”

“…Working at McDonalds! And that day on the beach was so pretty but I was crawling out of my skin! And you really wanted Kraft mac n cheese not decent mac n cheese at this seafood restaurant and threw a fit. That’s why we were running on the beach!”

“I know.”

Later, my husband reminded my kid that it was a big deal to have something in the New York Times. “Obama probably read that,” he said. “And other world leaders!”

“Uh huh.”

“And, like, Robert Smith!” I said.

“Ok.”

“Martha Stewart!”

"Who?”

“Beyonce!”

“Jon Stewart!”

“David Chase!”

“Madonna!”

And it went on like that for three days. I told my kid, “I’ll be excited for you until you’re ready to step into the glory of having your BABY FACE ON PAGE TWO OF THE NEW YORK TIMES.” I’ve stopped trying to elicit some degree of thrill from my kid, though every once in a while I’ll pull his eternal headphones off his ear a little and squeak, “NEW YORK TIMES!” or, “PAGE TWO!”

Sixteen years of pregnancy and/or parenting has confirmed, in spades, that it is absolutely impossible for me to be cool about stuff like this. It only took me eleven stops to find a physical copy, and it is indeed already framed in my hallway. #nochill

Anyway!

In the next newsletter (coming soon!), I’ll talk about artist/writer identities, how to define them, and the collision of circumstance and choice inside of an artist’s life.

xo

I didn’t want to go.

My very first pregnancy had resulted in a stillbirth. The following pregnancies were a raw space of profound fear (are they like that for everyone?). I wanted to hide. I wanted to punch time into passing faster. This, my fourth pregnancy, was harder than the others, too. At the almost-geriatric age of 29, my hips ached, and the spinal deformity I was born with shot numbness and pain down my legs where it ricocheted off the soles of my feet and back up to my hips when I walked. Because I had a five-year-old and three-year-old at home, and I was working and going to graduate school…I walked a lot.

I wanted to do anything but sling my giant belly around a tiny restaurant that I could barely afford in front of a literary celebrity.

The night of the dinner, I waddled - epically. Like, I’m convinced Colin Farrell found a secret video of me from that time and used it to prepare for his gait in The Penguin. So, I composed an email to gently decline the offer to embarrass myself in front of one of my heroines, but at the last minute, I watched my ex-husband lay on the floor clicking through his phone, our two young children crawling around him, and I thought, fuck it.

I didn’t recognize Dorothy at first. Everyone looks different from their picture on a book jacket, but she talked just like she wrote, just like my family and all the people I grew up loving. She told my my dress was real pretty and sat across from me. I looked down at my huge belly and tried to find a way to shove it under the table so I didn’t use it - and my dress - like a second plate. I wanted to tell everyone that I was freezing, miserable, nervous, hungry without enough room in my stomach to ever feel full before my baby kicked up toward my throat. I wanted to overshare about my life, to tell them that none of my underwear fit, so I was wearing pajama shorts and tall socks under my dress to approximate underwear. I wondered if Dorothy was one of those southern women comfortable using the word panties - something I could never bring myself to say about a garment that covers the most hardcore parts of my body. I decided I wouldn’t judge her if she used the word panties because she’d written some of the most important books in my life.

Someone asked me if this was my first pregnancy. I resisted the urge to explain my stillbirth, the two successful pregnancies, how I didn’t really love my husband, how I just wanted to have a family and a home to prove that I was worthy of a family and a home but really to prove to the new humans I’d built that they, among a half dozen generations of Deep South addicts, were inherently worthy of a family and a home.

Dorothy ordered trout, so I ordered trout, even though I didn’t know how to eat it. I ended up with a mouth full of bones. She used the edge of her knife to pull perfect little chunks of white meat out, then scooped them up with her fork. I tried to copy her. She asked, “What do you write about?”

I told her I was writing a memoir that reads like a novel about my wild, generationally poor family to show readers exactly how a promising young person turns into a “Florida Man.”

“Now that’s a book I’d read tomorrow,” she said.

“I might need a week or two,” I said.

It has been nine years.

If you tell me someone you love passed, I will probably blurt out the only truth I actually know (for sure): Death is fucking horrible.

The capacity to be gentle about death was burned out of me when I watched my dad die when I was fifteen. Then my grandma. My cousin. Some friends. My baby. And on and on.

I believe most of us spend our lives trying to control and/or rebel against loss. People who find their way to mega power positions seem to understand this mechanism to a scary degree - and they use it to keep us busy, distracted, and scared. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know what to do about the apocalyptic futures we’re grappling with in the slow crawl toward January. I just know that loss sucks. I believe a lot of folks in the US have a real hard time sitting with the potential for loss until it knocks us on our asses. I don’t think the dismal political atmosphere we’re experiencing is a necessary ass kicking or a purge or that we deserved it. I don’t think we live in a just world. I don’t believe we have much control at all.

I do believe that the surrender to chaos is one of the most extraordinarily beautiful parts of being human. I believe that awe is everywhere and always available to us. Loss, to me, is how we crack our whole hearts open for awe.

I was in Kauai recently, and a rooster that my cousin and I unofficially named Mayhew woke me up at 5am every morning. On one such morning, I walked to the beach, and like twenty roosters (Tayhew, Bayhew, Dayhew, Rayhew, etc) spread out over a few miles of shoreline took turns screaming at the sunrise/the universe/each other. A few years ago, I stayed in a town where the dogs howled a chorus at the coming moon. I love these riots of nature, how they slam me out of loss and into the moment I’m actually experiencing.

I didn’t publish my book before Dorothy died.

I stopped sending my work out entirely for about five years. I didn’t want to admit my divorce or the fact that even before the divorce, my ex husband was almost never in the same room/home/mindset as me and our kids.

I didn’t want to admit that I’d failed to provide my kids with an unbroken home. I wanted to control my white trash narrative, wanted to make everyone believe that I believed in some kind of irregular bootstraps bullshit, like the American Dream doesn’t have to be a knock down drag out come apart over money and fame, that you don’t have to be special to feel whole, but your labor can mean something if you make your labor mean something to the people you love.

My oldest kid is the same age I was when I lost the only real parent I ever knew. I’ve spent the last nine years trying to control and/or rebel against my position as the only real parent my three kids might ever know.

I keep forgetting and remembering and forgetting to surrender to the chaos and awe. I believe that this particular texture of surrender is the only path to figuring out exactly how to never surrender about what matters.

My three dogs howl together when an ambulance passes, not the moon. Mayhew and all his rooster pals holler with their whole bodies, all day and sometimes at night, over and over and over. After I returned to Seattle, a “bomb cyclone” dropped freezing water and wind through the city. I woke up the next morning to a surprise day off work and a surprise (bucket list!) acceptance to Tiny Love Stories in the New York Times, about gender fluidity and me and my kid, something I sent to them before the first week of November, before I remembered to be so deeply afraid to be a body in the world. The title story is “Humor to Counter Despair,” but mine is, “The Awe of Unknowing.”

It’s easier to soothe ourselves if we can rest in knowing or planning or controlling. It’s tough to face that the only things we really know are how much we don’t know and how temporary all this is. Temporary can also mean precious.

I have no craft to offer this round, except for maybe something about roosters and howls, the collective holler, how despair and joy can happen at the exact same time, especially if we’re singing about it with someone else right beside us.

I feel sad that Dorothy Allison passed. I feel real lucky to have hung with her long enough to learn to eat a fancy fish, to hear her say nice things about my writing and my poor, weird family. The baby was born a few days after that dinner, but I felt too attached to the dress to give it away. I kind of hated the pattern, the style, but having that one thing to wear, a dress almost everyone complimented even though it cost $7 at the goodwill - it made me feel safe in the most unsafe time. So, I cut the dress into napkins. Over the last nine years, I’ve thrown them away, one by one, tattered and soiled.

Nostalgia is a haunting, and everyone and everything we’ve lost is a space cut out of our world that we can hold onto or scream at with our whole body.

Wherever you’re at with it, I hope you find your pretty red dress, too.

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