I’m sitting here thinking about the suburbs today, and it’s bringing up some feelings. I’ve been reading an essay on Criterion about the wonderful punk films of Penelope Spheeris, in which author Nick Pinkerton discusses Suburbia, Spheeris’ feature film that chronicles the lives of lost teenagers and young adults from chaotic households who have come together to live on the street and in punk houses and form a kind of family. He writes that the film’s themes are “child neglect, child endangerment, [and] the hostility of the suburban environment,” and the phrase snags at my heart.
My upbringing was safer, more carefully arranged, and more often affectionate than the ones suffered by Spheeris’ punks, but the idea of suburban hostility is true to my own experience. I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, not the kind that’s a development of just houses, but an old town that sat alongside the city limit. It was well served by public transit and somewhat diverse, so—urban by suburban standards, but socially stunted, competitive, and lonely, the way suburbs so often are. Constructed around the ideas of “safety” and privacy, they create an unnatural psychic distance between the people who live there that can only be upheld by certain kinds of hostility. The fenced-in yards reinforced this distance; so did the ideas of social acceptability and rejection that were constantly being reinforced. These days people also have spooky shit like front-door cameras and smart home devices that talk to you in a robot voice, things I can’t get used to and don’t want to. I find myself wondering where all this is leading to, just how extreme our feeling of alienation from each other will become.
As a kid I was always measuring the distance between myself and other people, trying to understand it. Why did it seem like I could understand people when they spoke, hearing even the things they didn’t say out loud, but they couldn’t properly understand me? What was it that separated us all from each other in such brutal ways? How could I solve the problem of my never-ending loneliness? I knew I loved to read because of the way books placed another person’s consciousness inside my own, like having two minds, two sets of thoughts at once, and I think the reason I first started writing stories myself was so that I could live inside another person’s mind in that same way. It’s certainly one of the reasons I continued doing it. To bridge that gap, close up that space. To create a community I could live in, even if it was only in my imagination.
When I got a little older, I discovered that music had the same powers of connection and was in some ways even more vivid. In the sixth grade I begged my parents to buy me a copy of Ramones Mania even though I didn’t have a CD player to listen to it on because I had the hazy idea that they were punk, and that punk was cool. When the silly movie The Crow came out I bought the soundtrack on tape because there was a Nine Inch Nails song on it. I loved, loved, loved that song (“Dead Souls”) but it was some years before I learned that it was a cover of a Joy Division song, which led me down new paths of discovery, new kinds of angry music that spoke to the devastation of feeling disconnected. Dead Kennedys? That sounded tough, so I got a copy of Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death and found that Jello Biafra was hilarious and angry, and for good reason.
By the time I was in my 20s I started meeting people who called themselves punks. I found the idea fascinating, the many different ways people define the concept of punk and find an identity for themselves within it, even 20, 30, 40 years after the movement was started. When I started publishing zines and attending zine fairs, making friends with artists who were sharing their work outside of galleries and writers who were sharing theirs outside of traditional publishing, I started to think that there was a way in which I was a punk too. I still think this, though my understanding of what punk means changes day to day. At the very least, the ideals I learned through lyrics and zines have stood by me throughout my adult life, and have served as a guide for how to (try to) be: angry but kind, passionate and strong, ethical and upstanding, and prioritizing a certain kind of fuck-you fun.
All these years later, I still idolize the punks of the 80s and their radical world-building, the way they created a space for themselves where they could belong within the larger structures that had rejected them. I still fear the psychic death of the psychic suburbs that seem to be growing up around us more and more each day. I’m still telling my stories, building my own worlds, trying to understand and be understood. It happens in small moments, little flashes of what’s possible, and even on the hard days I trust that it’s worth working for.
The gayest road in Reykjavík, where I’m currently doing a writer’s residency
Last June I tabled at a Pride event with my husband. This might sound strange to hear, but he and I are both queer. Gay, if you like, though we’re gay for each other too.
The event was hosted by the South Street Art Mart, a shop that carries my books and zines. For a few years now the owners of the store, Nicole and Nicole, have been kind, supportive friends to me, and being a part of the community they’ve created went a long way in helping me feel safe to finally, after all these years, come out—first to myself, and then to other people. It meant a great deal to me to be included in their Pride festivities: my books in the front window alongside work by other queer artists, me and my table out in front of the shop one Friday afternoon in June.
Things meaning a lot to me usually manifests as getting really nervous and putting a lot of thought into my outfit, and this occasion was no different. If you’re curious, I wore my dark denim A-line skirt with a little bitty black crop top and chunky black shoes, which is a summer outfit I consider makes me look both cute and tough. I also wore my beloved dragon pendant, privately referred to as DT or Dragon Tits because of where it lands on my chest, because I always wear it when I need extra protection. The dragon is curled around on herself in a circle, sleeping and looking pretty, but ready to leap to my defense at the first sign of trouble.
There was no trouble, though. Tabling at Pride—for it is a verb, to table—was life affirming and sweet. Joe and I arranged our books, tapes, and zines on the table, two perpetual kids with a lemonade stand, and friendly people from the shops nearby came out to smoke cigarettes, shoot the breeze, and buy our stuff. A good number of our friends surprised us by stopping by too. One adorable human from the daycare up the street chatted with us for awhile, making us laugh with charming and somewhat horrifying childcare stories, and bought some zines. When I looked at Venmo later that day, I saw the note they’d left to indicate what the money was for: “gay junk.” In some not-so-small way, it made me feel like a part of the club.
That was my first Pride as an out queer-bisexual-whatever person, and here it is, a whole year later, Pride Month again. I find anniversaries to be useful, and this one has helped me see how much my understanding of myself has deepened over the past year. I mean, I was happy and relieved and proud to come out last June, but it didn’t necessarily feel that good to do. I was scared and uncertain about what, if anything, it might mean to ask people to start thinking about me differently, especially since doing so came with the assumption that they bothered to think of me at all, which is something I’ve never been entirely willing to believe. Talking about my sex life, however obliquely, felt weird too. The whole thing has taken some getting used to, but as I now see, coming out isn’t something you do just once anyway. It’s a process, baby, and I am letting it unfold.
For instance, at some point last year—even before I “officially” came out—I got brave and changed the bio on my website to add gender and queer stuff to the list of topics I most often write about because, well, it’s true. It’s always been true. There’s a certain power in pointing it out, though. In claiming it. All year long I’ve carried my little backpack purse with a beautiful pride flag pinned near the top, the one I bought at the Art Mart, wondering if people noticed it as I walked away, hoping they did.
It turns out that the people I’ve needed to see me, have. Chosen family is a big deal for queer people, and it always seemed so wonderful to me, the idea of belonging to people that way, not by chance or obligation but by intention. I thought I didn’t deserve to claim this kind of community, to go looking for it, but when I started feeling brave enough to tell my people, one at a time, that I’m queer, actually, I looked around and saw that I already have it. I’ve already chosen the people who matter to me, and for the first time I can see, with a feeling of deep gratitude that does not come easily to me, that they choose me, too. My friends, most of whom are gay and queer, have so easily accepted this thing about me that we’ve hardly needed to talk about it at all. Unless, you know, I wanted to. I can’t tell you what a big deal it not being that big of a deal is. It turns out that “taking up space,” to use one of my therapist’s favorite turns of phrase—to finally accept that however I am right now is honestly just fine—makes me feel a kind of safe that I’ve never felt before. I can feel it in my body right now, that safeness, in my arms and across my chest, a warmth and a sensation of light constriction, almost like being held.
So yeah. I’ve only been out for a short time, but of course I’ve been queer all this time down deep in my gay little heart, and I’ve always read a lot of queer writing of different kinds. I thought I’d tell you about the most recent gay junk I’ve read since it’s helped me on my path, which I’m happy to say has been long and winding and full of surprises.
Mylxine #20. Erica Dawn Lyle is a musician and writer who, as the creator of Scam zine, I’ve admired for a long time. Now she’s more famous for playing guitar in Bikini Kill (!), and she’s an out transwoman. Scott, who’s been doing Mylxine since 1995, interviewed Erica at length for issue number 20, and she talked with a ton of insight and sensitivity about her early life and the things that led her to a deeper understanding of her queerness. She also talks about childhood trauma and addiction. I’ve read the interview a few times and I find it so instructive and deep. The idea that stands out to me as being the most useful is something Erica said about questioning being central to the experience of queerness. This opened up for me the possibility that I might never stop feeling uncertain about who I am and what I want, and that this is okay … and might even be something to enjoy.
Bi All Means is a stylish and posi anthology of art and writing by bisexual people that I found on Instagram. Its creator, Julia, runs the Munich Zine Library, a queer feminist zine library out of Germany, and a few of the pieces in this zine are in German. The rest are in English. They all bravely claim an identity that has often been minimized and maligned, and share stories of both triumph and disappointment. I recommend it, especially to people who are newly exploring their sexual identities.
Pretend I’m Dead and Vacuum in the Dark, by Jen Beagin. These two dark, funny novels both feature the same protagonist, Mona, a cleaning lady with a truckload of a trauma. We’re happy to follow along on her misadventures because she’s smart, unusual, and on her way to becoming a serious artist whether she realizes it or not. She’s also into both guys and girls, which we know because we’re privy to her pervy imagination, and because she addresses it directly, just once, in a conversation with a housecleaning client who she’s joined for a cigarette break:
“Can I ask you a personal questions?” Lena said.
“Sure,” Mona said.
“Are you straight or gay?” Lena asked.
Mona blew smoke toward the sky. “Neither. Or both.”
“Ah,” Lena said.
“Why do you ask?”
“A few years ago, my daughter left her fiancé for a woman,” Lena said. “An older woman she met at a coffee shop. They ran away together. I never knew she had it in her to do something like that. She’d always been so boy-crazy.”
“There’s a place between straight and gay,” Mona said, “and it’s a very real place, but most people think it’s an imaginary place. Some fake, slutty island or amusement park.”
Lena smiled. “I don’t think that.”
“Right,” Mona said. “But there’s a stigma. I’ve never liked being labeled bisexual—in fact, I can barely bring myself to say the word.”
“Maybe you should give it your own name,” Lena said.
“Sometimes I tell people I’m part fruit,” Mona said. “I mean, if it comes up. It’s like being part Spanish or whatever.”
There was a silence.
“Which fruit?” Lena asked, and smiled.
“Lime,” Mona said flatly. “I’m part lime.”
“You sound bitter,” Lena said. “Which I love.”
Healing Your Magical Body: Crystal Quartz, by Jo-Jo Sherrow. This one isn’t gay, but it is queer, if you feel me. Author Jo-Jo, a longtime zine buddy of mine, includes in this zine a section on what she calls Wrong Planet Syndrome. She shares that she has often felt lonely and even like she doesn’t belong on this planet, and she lists a few kinds of people who might have experienced the same feeling, including those who are queer in their gender or sexual orientation. It resonated with me deeply. Jo-Jo’s conclusion, after doing lots of spiritual work and self-reflection, is that we all have a place; we belong here, right where we are. We’re all called to a specific purpose. I think I’ll hold onto that idea and try to remember it the next time I need it, which should be any minute now.
Queering Your Craft, by Cassandra Snow. I’ve read a lot of books on witchcraft, but rarely—if ever—have I sat down to read one of them with a highlighter in my hand. This book inspired me to do that. There are just so many ways in which I feel seen by this writer. She refers frequently to healing from different kinds of trauma, and she doesn’t assume she knows how her readers feel about anything (though she’s sensitive enough to make some darn good guesses), and in so doing she makes this book a place I can return to and feel safe. With great warmth and tenderness for her queer audience, Snow affirms that a practice of witchcraft is really a practice of love, for ourselves and each other:
“Proper self-care is also important for your craft and is especially important for queer people, disabled people, trauma survivors, and people of color trying to survive the systems that drove us to the margins in the first place. Pleasure is resistance. Self-care is resistance. Period. It feels like it’s not important, but what you’re doing when you’re taking care of yourself is telling those that do not love or support you that you are fine without them.”
She also acknowledges that many amongst us may have been harmed by religion in the past, which can make connecting to the divine feel very difficult, even for people who hear a call to a spiritual path. She coaxes us along gently: “If you try a prayer to the Earth, a god, your ancestors, the Universe, love, and it doesn’t work, if your inner critic comes out or your trauma screams “wrong,” that’s okay. Step away for a few minutes. You’ll get there. Try easing into it slowly. A quick prayer that is literately just “thank you” when you get unexpected luck or a despairing “please help” when you’re feeling your absolute worst is enough. The intention is clear. The Divine is listening. You’ll grow slowly from there.”
Please enjoy this introduction I wrote to my zine Cat Party #7, which I put out in late December 2020. This issue of the zine, like most of the others in the series, is an anthology of work by a handful of people introduced with an essay by me. If you’d like to read more about the zine and/or order a copy, please visit my online shop over here.
During these last seven months of the pandemic, going for walks in my neighborhood has been a lifeline for me. I’ve always loved to go for long walks in the city (and the suburbs and the woods sometimes, too)—moving my body through space and taking in some new sights always, always makes me feel good, or at least better than I felt before I started.
This year, however, going for walks has meant way more to me than usual. All these months into the crisis, it is still one of the only things I feel safe doing outside of my house, and I have leaned all the way in. Bored? Go for a walk. Taking a break from work? Go for a walk. Need to talk something out with Joe? Go for a walk—with Joe. Though actually, all of these walks have been with Joe. Everything I’ve done in all this time, I’ve done with him. I’m not tired of his company, I’m very happy to say, and I haven’t gotten bored of our walks, either.
However, quarantine fatigue is a real phenomenon, and some days the stress of it all feels like it’s pressing down on us more heavily than others. We’ve found it useful to mix things up now and again. A couple months ago, while we were on one of our walks—talking about how much we hoped we’d see Steven, the indoor-outdoor tabby who lives up the block and who we call the Mayor because he’s such a badass, and then feeling victorious when we did see him, sitting there looking all stripey on the sidewalk in front of his house—the thought occurred to us to start keeping track of every cat we see when we go out.
These little cat finding missions have really invigorated our neighborhood walks, let me tell you. For one thing, they encourage me to pay a kind of attention to the visual details around me that I tend to miss when I’m looking down at my feet or lost in my thoughts or conversation with J. There’s also something comical about this project, which brings a note of joy to the day that we sometimes really need. The cats are funny, and coming upon them in the middle of their activities is funny, too.
There was the cat that was lying so sound asleep in the grass of a front yard that I swore was a large rock until we crossed the street toward it to get a better look and it stood up, stretched, and yawned. There’s the big orange tabby we sometimes see through his door, sitting happily on a cat tower that his humans have placed there. As we pass by we watch him, and he watches us.
In this whole neighborhood, there is just one person who walks his cat on a leash, and we love coming upon the two of them, especially since they’re like celebrities to us because we’ve read the heated debates on the neighborhood’s amazingly petty Facebook group about whether or not this dude lets his cat poop on people’s lawns and doesn’t clean up after him.
And it’s still a treat whenever we bump into Steven, all lean and muscular and beautiful. He rolls and squirms around on the sidewalk so that we’ll want to pat him, and the moment he’s had enough of our attention he hops up and swaggers away, cuz he’s just that cool.
We’ve even made a few new cat friends recently, like the beautiful little female calico who sits or sleeps on her front porch and comes running when we pass by. Her porch is set up high from the sidewalk, and when she see us—sometimes before we see her—she jumps up from her cushion and runs across the porch and straight down a stone wall to the bottom post, where she perches to snuggle and butt us with her head. I love that cat.
When we get home from our walks we tally up our results in a spreadsheet. Date, time of day, number of cats spotted indoors, number of cats spotted outdoors, and useful notes. (“Saw Steven chilling on his back patio”; “Three black cats on this October day!”) We don’t know yet who will find the information we’re compiling most useful (urban planners? cat behavioral scientists?) but we take our responsibility in collecting it seriously.
At this point we’ve got about 7 weeks’ worth of data, and as far as I’m concerned we’ve just gotten started. I mean, just the other day a house across the street got kittens, and the last time we went for a walk we spotted them sitting side by side, framed by two different windows, looking out at us with matching looks of wonderment on their faces. Things in the neighborhood are just gonna keep changing, cat-wise. Our work may never be finished!
J, my cat-walk partner and partner in most other things as well, has helpfully arranged some of this data into charts and graphs.
My writing practice has always been there for me, whether I’ve needed to sort something out for myself, or tell the world something that needed telling, or just to keep myself company. It’s always been a place I could go. But in the terrifying early days of the pandemic I couldn’t write. Didn’t even know what I’d write about, since the things I’d been working on before seemed irrelevant and the thing that had made them irrelevant felt too big to look at.
I did, however, receive invitations to contribute to other people’s projects, and this was a kind of rope to hold onto as I pulled myself back up the mountain. One of those calls for submissions came in the form of a questionnaire called Quarantine Musings from some lovely people I briefly a few years ago at a small zine fest in Newark, Delaware. They do a zine called Red Tent, a collection of visual art and writing that the creators make during the time they’re menstruating, the idea being that this can be a time of increased, or maybe temporarily altered, creativity. When they described the zine to me I had a strong emotional response to the idea, so I created a visual poem about menopause looming on the horizon and submitted it to an issue that came out in 2019. This time around, I contributed answers to questions the zine’s editors posed about the pandemic. Anyone could respond to the questionnaire, not just people who menstruate.
The issue came out a few days ago and I thought I’d share it with you since it’s free to read and really beautiful looking. It’s called “Escape From Middle School Bedroom.” The editors have packed a lot into these 76 pages, and you can feel the love and care they put into the project. Below is my answer to one of the questions; if you’d like to read my full interview and enjoy the other contributors’ photography, collage art, mixtape song lists, and clever pop culture references, you can read the whole issue here.
9. Exceptional or unusual interactions with friends/family/roommates/neighbors (positive or negative):
Tonight we ordered take-out from a pub in the neighborhood that we really love. They threw together a website for online ordering during quarantine and are doing curbside pick-up. Getting take-out could never replace sitting in that cozy place and listening to music while we eat or drink, but their food is great and we miss them. Today is Easter, and when we got back home and unpacked our food we saw that they’d put a big handful of foil-wrapped Easter chocolates inside a rubber glove and tossed that in with the stuff we’d ordered. The sweet gesture, together with the scary visual of the surgical gloves everyone’s been wearing, almost made me cry.
Content warning on this one, pals: mention of sexual assault, lots of F bombs
A long time ago now, I wrote a zine and published it under a fake name. It was an obviously fake name, a bit rude, and I picked it because it made me laugh. I won’t tell you what it was because that zine is still out there in the world, and if you knew—if anybody knew—that I was the one who wrote it, it wouldn’t feel the same to me anymore. To tell those stories properly I needed to pretend to be someone else.
On the surface, the stories were not that big of a deal. Just some childhood memories of a spooky religion and adults who weren’t very nice to kids, turned into funny stories by someone who was still mad about it. Since the writer of that zine had an obviously fake name, the stories could have been written by anybody, which had a way of making them larger than themselves. This was fitting, because I am not the only person these kinds of things have happened to.
I made an email address for that pseudonym, and she got letters from people who read the zine and wanted to share their own stories. Those stories were pitiful, too, but they were also always a bit funny. We weren’t talking about abuse or terror, after all—just the daily grind of boredom, befuddlement, and shame, the little indignities of life that we all suffer to some extent or other. I’d say that reading, writing, and talking about this stuff was cathartic for everyone involved.
Some months after I put the zine out I went searching for it online. I don’t remember why now; I think I was trying to see if any of the shops that carried it had listed it on their websites. What I came across instead, to my surprise, was a review of the zine on someone’s blog. I don’t remember most of what the review said anymore, just that the writer related to the stories and enjoyed reading them—and that they thought I was a fuck-up. The way they said it was something like, “this is where a fuck-up comes from” or “this zine is like the fuck-up’s origin story.” I will tell you right now that the moment I read this was one of the most satisfying in my entire life as a writer, or the public aspect of that life, anyway. I am not even kidding. It meant that something I had written had been a success in the realest meaning of the word: I’d set out to be completely honest, and someone had recognized it—they’d felt the “cut of truth,” as Natalie Goldberg calls it in Writing Down the Bones, her classic book about learning to write.
The truth cuts, and it heals. Since I had made up that ridiculous name I could say anything I wanted, the way you can in a diary. It happened that the things I wanted to say were insulting, a bit immature, and very angry. And wow did it feel good. I was surprised by how freeing it felt to write this zine, in fact, since I write about my life all the time and I’m always trying hard to be truthful; I mean, that’s the whole point of doing writing like that. But this little experiment of mine taught me that I can always dig deeper.
I have thought about this many times over the years, this idea of me as a secret fuck-up. By secret I mean that I probably don’t seem like a fuck-up to most people. In fact I might even seem like the opposite: Hard-working, stable, fortunate, my middle class background written all over my face. I’m polite and my house is tidy. I did well during those years I wrote about in the zine, even—I was the fucking valedictorian of my high school class! But I hated the way I felt sitting in those classrooms, humiliated and trapped. I hated most of my teachers, thought they were stupid, and felt suffocated and insulted by the oppressive religion I was subjected to every day. I hated the kids who believed in it, their prissy smugness, and the adults who let themselves be bullied by these weird authoritarians who’d convinced them they had heaven to offer. I hated it all until it made me sick to my stomach, but I balled up my bad feeling and used it for the energy I needed to study hard and get good grades. I did this because I understood that being angry all the time would somehow mark me as a fuck-up—the fuck-up I thought I was, even though I had so much going for me.
When I read that review of my writing I felt seen, and I know you know what a glorious feeling that is. It’s so rare, so precious, that when it happens you’re usually about a minute away from falling in love. I’m sure it helped that the writer of the review was using the term fuck-up affectionately—or, I guess, knowingly: From one fuck-up to another was the general feeling I got. But I would have treasured that comment even if they’d said it to be mean. I had shown my real self—one of my real selves, I should say—and someone has seen it. A split inside myself was healed. Or if not quite healed, at least patched up a little.
***
I’ve been going through some personal turmoil over the last few months, something very hard. It’s brought new ideas to the forefront of my mind, ideas about family and belonging, safety, secrets, and shame. About what it means to tell the truth, and how hard it is to actually do that. I’ve been thinking a lot about what honesty is and where it is, where in the body. When something feels too painful for you to look at, where do you put it? And if it’s been tucked down in there for a long time, how do you dig it out?
I don’t know much about the various schools of psychoanalysis and have tended not to be very interested in them as a subject, like intellectually, but as I say, I’ve been doing some searching. I read an essay recently about the Shadow Self, Jung’s idea of the Id. It’s the part of ourselves we keep hidden from ourselves but is there anyway, motivating some of our behaviors. Those hidden aspects of our personalities are usually things we consider negative, but positive stuff can get tangled up in the Id too. It’s a jungle in there.
I warmed to the idea of the Shadow Self instantly. It reminded me of my inner fuck-up, that poor, pissed-off girl who thinks no one can see her. The one who was so split from the rest of me, I had to give her her own name. She’s been tagging along behind me all this time, and I really do love her after all. She tells the truth and makes me laugh. I need to recognize her, integrate her more—I need to do some shadow work—and even though I’m not quite sure how, I’m on a path, and I’ve been seeing signs to guide me as I go.
Like: In the car last week I passed a street called Moonshadow Lane. Later that afternoon I found a jigsaw puzzle at a thrift store that had the word moonshadow in it, too. Like: “Dark Morph,” the new song by Jonsi and Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who made an album out of sounds they collected on a research vessel: whale song, the sound of bats flying, gorgeous and terrifying. It conjures half-seen things moving elegantly, slowly, deep beneath the ocean’s surface, where the light barely reaches. It’s as if everything in the world has a dark side, a shadow self, but I’m only able to see that now for the first time.
One of the things that has always drawn me to Wicca, though I don’t practice it as a religion, is the idea of embracing the darkness, or at least accepting it as the balance of the lighter aspects of life. Wicca is a nature-based religion, and with nature as a framework for understanding ourselves these ideas are easier to conceptualize. Life is a cycle, the year is a wheel, and every season is necessary. The seed of death inside the heart of every summer day—you can feel it there. The green life tucked underneath the frozen ground in winter—you can feel it there. Everything is everything.
Poking around the library the other day, I found a small book called Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison, a writer who I have loved for her brainy and fearless truth-telling. This book is too short to be a proper memoir—less than 100 pages long—but it is about her life. Allison, who grew up very poor in rural South Carolina, always writes about her own life in some way—and because of some of the details of her life, she also writes about secrets, shame, stories, and truth. In this book she writes that her stepfather raped her, beginning when she was five. She writes here, and has written in other essays and books, that she refuses to feel ashamed of who she is and where she comes from. But reading her writing, something more powerful even than that proclamation comes through: She very clearly just isn’t ashamed. Her honesty and love—love for her mother and sisters, her partners and queer community, as well as for herself—make that apparent.
Allison also writes that she didn’t tell the story of her abuse for a long time because stories like that have a way of defining their teller. She didn’t want to wear the coat of many colors, the one in the Bible that’s so brilliant no one can see the person wearing it—they can only see the coat.
She says:
“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.
Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”
I think this is excellent, this image of stories like matryoshka dolls, one inside the other. In a sense this is the hardest part of writing, figuring out when the story begins. You have to strip away so many layers to get to the truth, but how do you when to stop? Do you need to tell them all for the picture to be complete? I don’t know yet. What I do know is that, one way or another, we need to find a way to integrate all of our stories if we want to become whole.
Everyone who knows me knows how devoted I am to secondhand shopping. Even a few people who don’t know me personally might know this about me, since I’ve written about it so darn much. I wrote a book about visiting yard sales with my mother, I wrote a zine that lists and describes all the cat-themed objects in my home and one about my favorite thrift store mugs, and I’ve written many essays on a variety of other old objects I own and the complicated mix of feelings and ideas they stoke in me.
For Christmas this year Joe gave me the entire back catalog of a zine we discovered a couple years ago, then forgot about: Thrifty Times. What an awesome gift. The editor, Sarah B. MacDonald, puts out an issue every month and has done so for at about 5 years. Each issue has the same recurring features and a letter from the editor, in the style of a magazine (or, more accurately, of a magazine-like zine from a certain era, the 80s and 90s I suppose). MacDonald writes most of the pieces herself, though she also has a regular crew of witty, cheerful contributors: Sarah Spence, who frequently writes the romance novel review (“Isn’t It Romantic”) and Nick Burgess, who does the monthly thrift-themed comics on the back cover and sometimes writes about video games. All of these folks have an excellent sense of irony and a sincere love of kitsch, nostalgia, and inexplicable tschotschkes. MacDonald’s favorite decade is the 70s and the avocado-green throw pillows and mushroom motifs produced in that era; she’s a funny writer and it is a pleasure to join her on her trips to local thrift shops and feel her excitement at finding something good. I think she must be around my age because she often writes about the 90s music CDs she finds (Live, Marcy Playground, Soul Asylum) in the way that you might if you’d been a teenager back then. It’s all such fun to read about. I worked my way through the large stack of zines slowly, enjoying every article and reading a number of them out loud to Joe.
I have thought about, and written about, the pleasure of pawing through other people’s old stuff so many times by now that I ought to understand, on a deep level, what precisely it means to me, but I’m not there yet. It’s just that somehow, when I’m digging, everything is a gem. Everything is something I’m glad to have seen. Even when I don’t buy anything (well, I almost always buy something); even on days when all I’ve got is the grubby Salvation Army, where nobody ever sweeps the floor and grim announcements come over the p.a. about the anger management group about to commence next door. When I’m staring down the length of a boring afternoon, the thrift store—some thrift store, somewhere—promises to fire up my imagination. It’s like visiting a museum, only you’re allowed to buy the stuff and bring it home if you want. And thrift store people are my people, whether I’m in the mood to claim them or not.
One day this winter, while I was still happily working my way through my stack of Thrifty Times, I suggested that we go check out the little shop in Germantown, an old neighborhood in Philadelphia. The shop is charming and small and has bona fide vintage stuff, not just recent castoffs. We decided to walk the few miles there since the weather was mild and it’s interesting looking over there; you can take your time looking at the old brick buildings and tiny churchyards and viney stone walls.
It ended up being a quintessential thrift store visit. By this I mean that I (a) found something I’d been actively searching for, (b) found something hilarious, and (c) had an interesting interaction with another person. The thing I found that I had been looking for was a small wooden spice rack, which I have since altered by prying off the tin eagle (??) that originally adorned it and painting it with pale green craft paint. Then I hung it on my kitchen wall and put my collection of essential oils in it. While Joe and I were paying for this and a few other things, a lady who’d been having a kind of in-depth conversation with the woman at the register gave Joe a long once-over.
“Young man, will you look at this computer for me please?” she asked him. I was amused and touched that she assumed he’d be able to figure out whether or not a laptop she’d found could be made to work again because he was both a lot younger than her and also a guy—and of course by looking at it for a few minutes he was able to figure this out. The lady was disappointed by his assessment: that she probably wouldn’t be able to get into the password-protected machine and use it the way she wanted.
As she led poor Joe back into the store toward the electronics section, I occupied myself by looking at the books. There I spotted a shining jewel that I now wish I had bought, if only so that I could tell you more about it. It was a late-80s how-to guide called Garage Sale Mania! that opened with the chapter “Garage Sales: What Are They?” and ended with the wonderfully titled “Count Your Cabbage and Smile.” Count your cabbage and smile! This is the sort of phrase that will stay with me for years and bring me pure joy every time I think of it. It’s the linguistic equivalent of a secondhand knick-knack that I can put on my bookshelf to look at whenever I want, and feel the warmth of connection across decades and styles of expression.
I see that the author of Garage Sale Mania! has continued writing and publishing books since the 80s—an impressive number of them, most novels in a few different genres. There are just so many books out there, oddball things I never would have known about if it wasn’t for the thrift shop, which in my opinion can be just as good a place to look for a book, if not better, than a used bookstore. I’m not alone in holding this opinion, for whatever that’s worth. Weird books are the best books, and zines are the weirdest books of all.
Hello, friends! I’m excited to announce a new issue in my Cat Party zine series: “Lost & Found.” This one anthologizes the writing and visual art of 5 contributors, all of whom reflected on cats who have come into their lives by surprise, or disappeared unexpectedly. It includes comics, drawings, and essays by visual artist and performer Julia S. Owens, musician Marina Murayama Nir, comics artist Ashley Punt, writer Alexis Campbell, and writer, baker, and activist Ailbhe Pascal.
Please allow me to share the introduction I wrote for the zine with you here, beneath the photos. If it sparks your interest, why not pick up a copy of the zine for $4, either from me or from Microcosm Publishing?
Welcome to the cat party! If you’ve been here before, welcome back.
My name is Katie, and I wrote a book about cats that was published by Microcosm Publishing near the end of 2017. Microcosm and I go way back. They’ve sold zines of mine for many years, and now that they’re a real-deal publisher, they’ve published three books I wrote, too. The first one was called White Elephants, and it was a memoir I wrote about palling around with my mother after my father died. The second one was Slip of the Tongue, a collection of essays about language. Last year, Cats I’ve Known came out. I set out to tell stories about all the cats in my life, and ended up sort of writing about my whole entire life, like I always do. But to at least some degree the book really is about the cats: family pets I had growing up, beloved cats I’ve shared my home with as an adult, strays I keep bumping into on the street, and the friendly bookstore cats I look forward to seeing whenever I stop in to browse. Each story was illustrated by a talented artist named Trista Vercher. When the book came out, I had a cake made by a local bakery that was based on one of their drawings; in both the drawing and the frosting, the cat’s fur was a lovely shade of grey that was actually quite purple. It tasted delicious.
In the months since the book was published, I have had many good conversations with people about the cats that they know and love. Each time I set up shop at a book fair or sign copies of my book at a bookstore, I meet people who want to tell me stories about a special cat they know who loves to pose for photos, or the adorable way their two cats curl up under the covers with them at night—and only occasionally growl at each other. Our cat friends are very dear to us cat people, and none of us can resist sharing our stories. Microcosm and I decided that a zine series would be a good way to keep on telling them, both mine and other people’s.
For this issue, I invited writers and artists to tell stories about cats that were lost or found—a cat who came into their life by accident, perhaps, or one that took off unexpectedly. The theme must have struck a chord, because I received many, many submissions. I couldn’t accept them all, but the ones I’ve chosen will make up two issues, this one and a Lost & Found #2, to come out in the spring of 2019.I am very proud to present this issue of Cat Party, with its collection of beautiful and touching stories. Thanks to the contributors for doing this with me, and thanks to you, readers, for joining the party.
Hello, all, and happy new year. I love this time of year, even though I’m usually sick with a cold. I had one last year when I wrote my year-in-review, and I’m coming down with one now. Thanks, holiday get-togethers, public transportation, and germy old civilization in general. Thanks a lot.
I dislike Christmas hugely, for a number of reasons, only one of which is potentially worth discussing in public (capitalism; oh yeah also the forced cheer and heteronormativity of “family” get-togethers), but I’ll spare you. I do love the week between Christmas and New Year’s, though. It’s like the heart of winter: the perfect time to draw in, rest, and reflect. It’s dark outside but it’s warm and bright in here, and I’m calming my shattered Christmas nerves by misting frankincense in my diffuser and wearing my fat cozy socks, both of which I did, admittedly, get as gifts for fucking Christmas, so whatever. All griping and kidding aside, I am grateful for all of this. Every bit of my life, even the parts I don’t like.
I do an accounting of my year every year, and make plans in the form of resolutions for the year to come. I did my accounting publicly on this blog at the end of 2016 and it was a nice way for me to organize my thoughts and express my gratefulness, so I thought I’d do that again. If you’re still reading after that irritable—and some may say childish, but I say those people are sticking their heads in the sand—outburst, why don’t you come along with me?
A lot happened this year, and though I tried to make my writing life a focus when I selected the photos above, I had to represent a few other things too, including the hurt and outrage and righteous anger caused by the miserable Trump administration, and the fact that J & I bought a house and moved into it. (That’s why all those houseplants are sitting in a cardboard box up there.) That was nine months or so ago, and I still love the feeling of settling in here, decorating and making small changes one at a time. Today I painted one “accent wall” in my “home office” a shade of “millennial pink,” so how’s THAT for having your shit together? I love that room and now I really love that wall.
In October, Cats I’ve Known, the book of illustrated memoir stories I spent last year writing, came out. I asked the famous internet cat Lil BUB to write a blurb for the back cover and she did. Joy! I did a number of readings and other events to promote the book this fall, and I’ll continue to do so in 2018. If I can swing it I’ll do a tour of the Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado) in the spring, and I plan to do in-store events in bookshops along the Delaware coast this summer. Look me up if you live in those places, would you?
I find it hard to do, to give readings from something I wrote, or to promote my work in any way, really. I have to push through a lot of self-consciousness, guilt, and anxiety to get to the place where I remember that I am proud of my writing and want to share it with other people. But share it I did. I launched Cats I’ve Known at a day-long show at a basement show space in West Philly called the Waiting Room, where I read a selection of the book’s lighter, funnier stories. (That’s me doing this in the second-to-last photo.) I felt very warmly welcomed, as I have at the other shows and events I’ve participated in there. Thanx, punx! I also forced myself to read the longest, saddest story in the book at a show I organized with J called SadFest. We did SadFest for the first time last year—his idea—and people responded really well to it. I kind of thought it was a weird idea, to be honest, but people loved it, I guess because everyone has sad stories, poems, or songs that they’re too embarrassed to trot out at a group reading for fear of bringing everyone else down or being seen as adolescently emo or whatever. I practiced my sad cat story several times before I performed it to keep from crying in front of everyone, but I did cry a little at the end.
So far the book has been reviewed warmly by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Broken Pencil, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. I sold it at several fairs throughout the year, including the cheerful and well attended Lehigh Valley Zine Fest in Easton, Pennsylvania and the Philly Zine Fest, which has always been my favorite zine event and this year was packed to the gills: very gratifying. I threw myself a party (!) and got a fancy cake from a bakery that was decorated to look like one of the cats Trista Vercher drew for the book. I gave more readings, almost always with J, who can be seen in the second row of photos getting ready to perform at Coffee House Without Limits in Allentown. I signed and sold copies of the book at other events, too, including ones in Portland, Oregon, where my publisher, Microcosm, is located. One of those was, drumroll, a women-only cannabis party with a DJ and vendors, who were selling things like cannabis tinctures and sex lube infused with cannabis and … books. Since Microcosm has a few weed titles, we went and set up a pop-up shop of zines and books there. I accompanied a very capable and impressive young employee of the publisher, who incidentally could smoke any of you under the table, and we spent a pleasant, if unusual, evening slinging books to friendly, intelligent women who were all kind of high. (I’m a lightweight myself, and just tried a few drops of the tincture. It was nice.)
So—go me. Seriously. None of this was easy for me, all of this performing and traveling and meeting new people, but I did it anyway, and lo and behold it was fun and rewarding. Thanks, world, for your kind reception of my cat book. As for the portion of the world that has not read it yet, what the heck?
In other categories of stuff, I made music with my experimental noise band A$$HOLEKNIFE, taught zine workshops to children, college students, and adults, and gave interviews about my work to the podcasts Collecting Culture and Design Conversations and a Japanese art and culture magazine called HEAPS. (The second two are forthcoming.)
The music thing has been interesting for me. I am not a musician, though I studied the flute as a kid and some classical guitar as an adult. I don’t know that I have much of a knack for it. But some friends and I started fiddling around together on a regular basis, using whatever instruments we could put our hands on to make a tremendous amount of noise that somehow becomes musical as we go. This is largely because a couple of the people involved are real musicians, I think, but also because that might be what happens when people communicate in this, or any other, way. Someone makes some sort of sound and someone else answers it, and it goes on like that, becoming a noisy and cathartic conversation. Forget catharsis: It’s an exorcism. It’s so engrossing and relaxing to lose yourself in making music, and it’s a wonderful release to make it that LOUD. I had no idea. We recorded our sessions and J edited them into distinct songs, and we even put out a tape! Does this mean I’m a rock star now? or just a slightly more well-rounded weirdo than I was before?
Let’s see, what else. J and I continued organizing and hosting shows at the East Falls Zine Reading Room (the band Rabbits to Riches is shown playing the space in the top right corner) and we collaborated with a beautiful new performance space called Hauska that’s run by our friend Julia. The show at Hauska, which means funny in Finnish, was a comedy show in answer to SadFest, and both shows were lovely and lively and well attended. I have also undertaken the huge job of properly cataloging the EFZRR’s zine collection so that people can access it more easily. As I have in the past, I am enjoying being a hobbyist librarian. I love playing at things until they become real, or at least as real as I want them to be.
And last, I’m excited to announce that I edited a zine anthology of other people’s cat stories called Cat Party #2, which Microcosm will publish in the first month or two of 2018. It features both essays and comics and includes the artists Dame Darcy and Noelle Geniza, among others. It’s gonna be a beauty and I can’t wait to unveil it.
***
In the last week or so I’ve asked a few friends whether they make new year’s resolutions. One of them said she does an accounting for the year that includes the good AND bad things that happened, and another told me that she doesn’t do resolutions, exactly, but instead creates a mantra that she’ll try to live by in the coming year. I liked both of these variations and have incorporated them into my own practice. I probably shouldn’t share the bad things on my list (which I have named “bullshit and pointless stuff”) since I don’t want to make anyone feel bad, but for the most part they have to do with jobs. Quelle surprise. And as for a mantra, I don’t know yet. The words simplify and let it go come to mind, but maybe I’ll go with thank you instead. Just a simple thank you, for every good and lucky thing in my life.
Last week, I had the pleasure of showing some fourth grade students—lots of and lots of fourth grade students, actually—how to use a letterpress machine. As part of a daylong event called Science in the National Parks, several area artists and scientists put on demonstrations for the students who visited with their families and on class trips. Since, in Philadelphia, much of the national park is comprised of urban historical sites, the event took place right downtown, in the courtyard behind the building where Benjamin Franklin had his print shop. (They call it Franklin Court, but I can’t help but think of it as Ben Franklin’s backyard.) This is the place where he published The Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack, and it’s a block away from Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed. These two things are connected; without the printing presses of Philadelphia, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense wouldn’t have found its readers—and without his ideas, we might not have had a revolution. The Soapbox Community Print Shop & Zine Library was invited to teach the students something about printmaking, so we carved a linoleum block with a charming design, packed up our tabletop Signmaker press, and spent a sunshiny day in late April helping hundreds of kids pull prints in bright-colored ink.
Growing up in Philadelphia, you hear a lot about Ben Franklin. He was one of our country’s founding fathers, of course, but he also started a lot of important stuff right here in Philly, like the University of Pennsylvania, where I went to school, and The Library Company of Philadelphia. His name is on everything—like the Ben Franklin Bridge and the beautiful Ben Franklin Parkway—and his image is everywhere, from commissioned statues (including this one, which commemorates his work as a printer) to the sign attached to a disused water tower advertising the Electric Factory, a concert venue where I’ve spent many hours of my life having my hearing damaged by bands I loved. Several years ago, I visited a friend who lives on the West Coast, and we made a road trip down the coast of Oregon. When we stopped in the small, picturesque town of McMinnville for breakfast, I was startled to see a bronze statue of Ben Franklin sitting on a park bench—a lot like the one on Penn’s campus—and I joked that I couldn’t get away from the guy.
Even still, this know-it-all Philadelphian found spending time in the space where he once worked surprisingly stirring. All day long we told the students a very abbreviated version of the story of what went on inside Franklin’s print shop, and showed them how to use a printing press that operates using the same principles as the one he used. We asked them to consider how difficult and time-consuming it would have been to place every letter of a sentence—and paragraph, page, newspaper, or book—one at a time in order to print it … and not only that, but you had to spell them backward! We helped each kid ink up the block and pull the metal bar across the press bed, applying the pressure that would print the image onto the page. They smiled brightly each time we peeled the paper back to reveal the picture they had made. Mechanical reproduction of this kind produces results that are reliably consistent, of course, and yet no two prints are ever exactly the same. Most of the kids kept a close watch on the prints as they dried on the table because they wanted to be sure they took home the one they themselves had printed. In the 15th century, the invention of the printing press took written communication a step away from the intimacy of handwriting, but today, these old-fashioned printing technologies show the artist’s hand in a way that digital communications can’t. (Not yet, at least.)
The Soapbox is proud to participate in a long tradition of printing in the city where Ben Franklin worked, a city with a rich and colorful—and incendiary—publishing history. If you get the chance to use a letterpress printer, take it. There’s a power in printing your work with your own hands—in pulling that heavy metal contraption over the words and images you placed there—that you can really feel.
Happy New Year, everyone! This might be my favorite time of the year to be alive, this week right here. True, being cold (and getting colds) is kind of a drag, but I like taking stock and I like making plans, and I feel that the week between Christmas and New Year’s is the right time to do both. I’ve spent the last few days working on my year-end review, and yesterday, by happenstance, I discovered the writer Ksenia Anske and her beautiful website. I was inspired by her year-in-review blog post—and its accompanying photo grid!—to share my own, so here goes: a list of things I did and learned in 2016.
I wrote and completed edits on my book Cats I’ve Known, to be published in 2017. Completing this work was my biggest accomplishment of the year—that and surviving the appendicitis that tried to strike me down just a few weeks after I finished the first draft. Nice try, body! I’m still winning, for now.
I completed Magical Thinking, the zine my pal Mardou and I made by emailing back and forth with each other on topics including gemstones, herbal healing, and dreams. We then published our dialogue, accompanied by the illustrations Mardou drew. (She is a talented comics artist whose work I really enjoy.) I brought the zine with me to the NYC Feminist Zine Fest at Barnard College, an annual event that I tabled at for the first time. It was a long, hectic day, but I had a few interesting and memorable conversations with visitors to my table, which is the measure I use to judge all zine fests. Frequency and quality of chats.
I also tabled with my zines at the Scranton Zine Fest, the Philly Zine Fest, and a Winter Market at the Germantown Kitchen Garden, and all three events were fun and very rewarding.
I continued to benefit from keeping this blog. Having a place where I can explore my thoughts about the things I’m reading has been good for me. I like writing about books, but I don’t always like books-writing jobs, if ya feel me. In this space, I can write what I want, at whatever length suits me. So thank you for taking an interest in my blog, gang; it means a lot to me.
I finally visited Haegele’s Bakery in the Mayfair section of Philadelphia. As far as I know these folks are not my relations, but they have operated a German bakery in the same city that I’m from for nearly 90 years—and I never got around to visiting it until last month. Whatta jerk! Joe and I went there with friends on the damp, chilly Saturday after Thanksgiving, and it made me so happy to see how pretty and old-fashioned the shop is, sitting right there on the corner of a residential street just a few blocks away from the one where my mother lived when she was a teenager. I ate a Stollen AND a Bienenstich, and they were both gorgeous. Planning on getting myself a Grosse Neujahrsbrezel on New Year’s Eve, too.
I got two new jobs this year, contract gigs doing editing work, which is just a mundane thing that I needed to do to make more money and wouldn’t ordinarily mention. But my job slog has had an unexpected and happy result (besides the more—but still not enough!—money): I discovered that I love editing other people’s writing. What’s more, I’m not bad at it. There is something deeply satisfying about taking a piece of writing and making it tighter, cleaner, smoother, and better all around, while preserving its original spirit and without imposing my own voice or attitude onto it. It’s like being a tailor, an invisible mender: I leave things looking better than I found them, and if I do my work really well, you won’t be able to tell I was ever there.
I raised a black swallowtail butterfly, which was an incredibly beautiful experience that happened half by accident. In September I attended a meeting of the garden club I used to belong to, and a friend there gave me a bunch of cuttings from her herb garden. I put them in a vase on the kitchen table and enjoyed them for a week or two before Joe noticed two minuscule caterpillars on their leaves. We watched them both get bigger fairly rapidly, then put them inside a small aquarium to keep them safe. Over the next week one of the caterpillars kept escaping, so we released it into the wilds of our backyard and wished it well. The other we kept, feeding it carrot greens from our garden because we read that’s what they like to eat. This guy went to TOWN eating them and got bigger and fatter by the day, until he made his chrysalis. Then that gnarly looking thing lived in our kitchen for 2 more weeks before it burst open, behind us on the kitchen counter while we sat at the table one morning, talking and drinking coffee. We were lucky to see the creature’s black wings when they were still all wet and soft and crumpled; the whole event happened so fast, if we’d been in another room for even an hour we would have missed it. We brought the new butterfly outside, and Joe went into work late that day so that we could sit in our yard and watch it spread and flap and dry out its wings in the sun and fresh air, carefully but quickly, before it flew away.
My good friend Nadine Schneider and I made a zine together, and I’ve been selling it at the Wooden Shoe. She wrote about making and using herbal body care products, and I wrote about how you can clean your house without nasty neurotoxins. We called it Kytchyn Witche and spelled it that way because that’s the way it’s spelled in an account we read about the good luck “poppet” that English people kept in their homes during the Tudor period. And because it looks cool.
I street-protested the Trump presidency and the appointment of Stephen Bannon as Trump’s chief strategist, and I plan to keep on doing so because these people are really bad news, and protesting is democracy in action.
I saw a fuckton of bands play. I celebrated a significant birthday this year and while I don’t really want to tell you my age, I will tell you that in honor of it, I set a goal to see 40 live shows this year. I achieved the goal and had a lot of fun doing it. Highlights include: discovering the industrial/punk band Uniform when they opened for somebody else, then seeing them again later in the year (are you familiar with the phrase WALL OF SOUND); seeing another act on the Sacred Bones label, Blanck Mass, who turned the tiny space at Johnny Brenda’s into a cathedral with his majestic noise; enjoying the heck out of ourselves at RuPaul’s Drag Race Battle of the Seasons, which had about 100 clever acts packed into one show (plus Sharon Needles and Jinkx Monsoon LIVE AND IN PERSON!); watching Philly band Remote Control (pictured above) channel Peter Murphy; being transfixed by the sight of weirdo genius Jenny Hval bopping around the room; and Shopping. We got right up in front of the stage and danced at them, and they danced back. Such a good-natured, high-energy band, and those post-punk melodies do something really nice to my brain chemistry. If they don’t get big I’ll be a little surprised.
Joe and I hosted three shows at the East Falls Zine Reading Room this year, which wasn’t as many as last year. They were good shows though, featuring the chiptune musician Sloopygoop, folk singers Potential Gospel, video artist Cory Kram, postpunk band Rabbits to Riches, loony tunesters Yoga Dad, and memoirist Ashton Yount.
Joe and I also toured twice, up north during the summer and down south in the fall. In New England we did readings at the Papercut Zine Library in Boston, a bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island, and one in Woodstock, New York. On our Southern tour, I was pleased and frankly really proud to perform with our friends Kishibashi, his wife Mocha, and their daughter Sola (all three of them on violin) at a wonderful bookstore called Avid in Athens, Georgia. The artist and adorable human Missy Kulik read from her comics at that show, too. We also performed with the one-man band who is Tall Tall Trees, at a fine bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina called Downtown Books & News. Then we went to Savannah and did a show at Starlandia, a charming creative reuse shop, with the inimitable Dame Darcy, a comics artist whose work I have admired for a long time. (She read from her books and, accompanied by her friend Skippy on guitar, she played sea shanties on the banjo. It was a special night.)
I participated in Fun-a-Day last January, and even though I was lazy about it I managed to write a little something almost every day that month, which was an undertaking I took to treating like a diary. At the end of the project I made a handmade book collecting the month’s meditations and exhibited it in the group show. I plan to participate again this year—just one more day till it starts!—and I’ve got my idea ready and my pencils sharpened. They are metaphorical pencils.
I hosted a Pop-Up Zine Reading Room at Amalgam Comics in the Kensington neighborhood Philadelphia, which means that I took a bunch of zines and books from the collection at The Soapbox and sat at the bookstore with a sign inviting people to join me and read them. It was sweet. I also ran a zine workshop for the high school students in the after-school program at the Lutheran Settlement House, also in Kenzo, and in November I cohosted a letterpress printing and book-binding workshop for some undergraduate writing students. Those events were sweet, too.
I started a zine about Christmas, which I have historically hated, with my friend, the talented artist Nicholas Beckett. His witty, warm, and sweetly grouchy drawings helped me hate Christmas just a little bit less.
I started a new writing collaboration with Eliza, a lovely new friend I met at the Philly Zine Fest. I look forward to seeing where this project takes us in the new year.
Indicative Mood 