“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.” —Virginia Woolf
Sunday, December 8, 2024
Dec 8: Cameron Carr, On Terminals and Turning Pages
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Dec 7: Leah Mensch, Hard Evidence Had Nothing to Do with My Life
- Harper and Row’s archives (Columbia University)
- The Los Angeles novelist John Rechy’s archive (Texas Tech University)
- Joan Didion’s archive (New York Public Library)
Friday, December 6, 2024
Dec 6: Maddie Norris, The Slap
Thursday, December 5, 2024
Dec 5: Geramee Hensley, I Want to Live (A Timed and Unrevised Life)
1. I only have an hour to write this, so I’ll make it quick.
In my final year of grad school, I began taking lithium because I wanted to die more than I wanted to write a book. Well, I wanted to die before that, but I couldn’t tell you exactly when I started to want to die except maybe it had to do with the moment air inflated my child-lungs like two swollen metaphors dragging the wreckage of language past my lips. I am going to say a lot of heavy-handed things like “the wreckage of language.” I am going to ask silly questions like “How much is my concept of home tied up in various “special sauces” that slather unrecognizable meat pucks in a handful of regional restaurants?” Above all, I am going to live.
2. You awaken in a spaceship with a tadpole in your brain.
This is not the latest RFK Jr. headline, but the premise for Baldur’s Gate 3, a 2023 role-playing game released by Larian Studios based on Dungeons & Dragons. After escaping the spaceship (originally, I wrote friendship) and making some sexy new friends/enemies, your first major quest is to alleviate yourself of the brain worm altering your physiology. The worm conducts a process known as ceremorphosis, transforming its host into a mindflayer (to the uninitiated, think purple Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean only with psychic powers and way hotter).
In my first playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, I believed the urgency the game sold to me. I went without rest (in and out of game) to delay my transformation. Resting, a gameplay mechanic carried over from DnD, crucially restores in-game resources increasing your odds of success against bugbears, cutlist goblins, gnolls, trolls, and the like. By not resting, I made the game way more difficult. I died a lot. I disappointed Lae’zel (my hot, pushy Githyanki girlfriend) with my inability to lead us to her crèche where her people could possibly help. I disappointed Shadowheart (my hot, goth religious fanatic girlfriend) with all my prying. I disappointed Astarian (my hot, twink Vampire boyfriend) every time I went a little too far out of my own way to aid another’s troubles.
And I went out of my way a lot. Yes, I understand I need to get this worm out of my brain, but first I must make fun of this bugbear’s penis size while I barge into the barn where he’s having sex with a troll. I need to launch this deep gnome off the windmill just for fun before save scumming (saving just before an action or decision only to reload as needed to “fix” the outcome). Oh, and Shadowheart wants to share a bottle of wine with me tonight. Astarion wants to get lost and naked in the forest. Lae’zel describes how my battle-hardened scent stirs her desire. After much meandering, it became apparent to my party of adventurers that the ceremorphosis, for some reason, was not taking hold. I am not doing an adequate job of detailing just how many outcomes Baldur's Gate 3 contains, what with its over 17,000 endings. Every time I have played the game, it has been a different experience. But no matter the differences, there is no danger in transforming into a mindflayer in Act One. So rest away, adventurers. Meander. Do not make your life harder than it needs to be.
3. You awaken in the desert with a book in your brain.
In Dungeons & Dragons, you roll dice and pretend to be someone else. If you have not role-played—well, you have. You just have! Look at you, reading this on your phone or laptop, in a house or on a bridge, while driving, with a lover laying next to you, totally alone (except, I’m here, hi). I’m saying you did not come this far without playing a role. And maybe in that role-playing, if you’re like me, you seriously wanted to not wake up inside your own body anymore or not wake up at all for that matter. We in the business call that a critical fail, my kindred sibling. In the video game Final Fantasy Tactics, a character named Delita tells a princess to “blame yourself or God” when it comes to her being wrapped up in a wild political plot, and I choose to blame both.
I have been Golgotha Vanukekali, the Goliath Barbarian, for nearly eight years now. After a series of bad dice rolls by Golgotha and comrades mid-grueling combat, Golgotha recently lost an arm. He seeks redemptive vengeance against his older brother who cut it off to use in some kind blood ritual. Golgotha has motivations. Convictions. A sense of justice. Golgotha has vision.
Does Geramee?
4. "But loneliness that deep gets into the marrow, Now that I'm here—among friends—I can feel it burning out of me. Little by little, step by step" —Karlach (Baldur’s Gate 3)
Something about being somebody else imparts into me a will to live. Paradoxically, when I roll a die, I want to live. My years as Golgotha, and perhaps my years as Geramee, too have inspired me to start my own DnD campaign, and I’ve had the pleasure of watching another group of misfits slowly form bonds. Friendships. I don’t think I’ll ever write about how role-playing personally feels to me a fundamentally trans activity. I meander. Or how in the invention of characters, I feel as though I am reinventing myself—that this impulse is not how everyone experiences fictional or “fantasy” products. I meander. Or how our need for constant remakes of older media highlights our indulgence in nostalgia not simply as a “return” to something but a re-understanding of what that something is. A remake of ourselves. It’s all too on the nose. Besides, I meander. So maybe I’ll never finish the book-length projects I’m actually working on. Maybe I’ll die too early like my mother or keep on moseying no matter the urgency I feel rising over me like a moon-sized water balloon reaching capacity. Maybe someday I’ll write about friends (not the show) as those who remember you when you don’t recognize yourself. That it’s OK to not recognize yourself. That there’s more to yourself than just yourself. Baldur’s Gate 3 captures this perfectly in all of its sprawling outcomes—the disjointed intersection of personal histories, the element of chance in many social interactions: the (mis)fortune our hearts delight in with one another.
If it has taught me anything, it’s that not even the ambition of would-be gods and the might of actual gods can stop gay people who have trauma bonded.
5. “I lost my real briefcase. My whole life was in it.” —Tony Soprano (The Sopranos)
So the quest that was so urgent (getting the worm out of my brain) turned out to be not so urgent. I meandered. Regretfully, I meandered here, too. I’ve been having gruesome nightmares lately (that are being treated). I don’t Rest so well. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you learn you have a dream guardian who protects you from ceremorphosis. Hence, all the meandering. The initial conflict in Baldur’s Gate 3 is not whether you will become a mindflayer but whether or not you want to continue to live under the threat of becoming one. It is a literary device that deletes all of one’s conviction, heart, and spirit and replaces it with monstrosity.
In The Sopranos, dreams are used to convey core conflict in non-narrative, mostly aesthetic manners. Tony Soprano says, “there’s no geographical solutions to emotional problems,” but (spoilers) Tony gets a lot wrong. Like how emotional problems do have geography, and if that landscape resembles say New Jersey, (see metonym: America) your emotional problem is likely pretty violent. Most notably, in a coma dream, Tony refuses to give up his “business” symbolized in a briefcase. This refusal, because of Tony’s line of work, resolves to violence but also affirms his will to live.
I’ll be the first to admit that I am not the boss of the New Jersey Mafia family, but I do feel a deep connection to my work. And if my own refusal to give it up bound me to violence, would I have the conviction of Tony Soprano? Don’t I already pledge myself to some level of violence? I meander. It’s not a great comparison, considering the refusal is resistance to imperialism which has more in common with Tony’s line of work than mine. Still, resistance is often violence, and I hope to have the strength to choose it (at least more often than I choose to blame myself or god). So if my nightmares were a guardian, or a warning, or an emotional geography, what would they say about my own conflicts?
Let me try to convince myself of something obvious by simply stating it, but also for you, the other consciousness in the room: there are things more important than writing, being “relevant,” that opportunity, your big break, the right time, the right place, the hunger & its feeding, your ego & its needing, your incorrect and correct perception of yourself (get over thyself said Socartes before the hemlock made him a memory), are we having fun yet asked Nickelback over & over again two months before 9/11, besides I am just getting started—
There is this second and the next second: the steady, tangible, permanent hands on the imaginary clock rounding up a big swing—I mean hour. I mean uppercut. I mean watchout. Put your head on this pillow. Take a rest. It’s going to be a long dream.
*
Golgotha Vanukekali the Storm Herald Barbarian is Geramee, a writer, Social Media Manager for The Kenyon Review, and Poetry Editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Visit geramee.com for more moseying and meandering.
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Dec 4, 2024: Kristine Langley Mahler, Joyful Girl
Joyful Girl
after Ani DiFranco
I have cultivated a life that gives me pleasure every day! My astrological chart ruler is Venus—the planet of beauty and pleasure—which might be one reason why I am the way I am, but I have been relying on astrology a little too long as an explanation. I guess it just does not feel radical to give myself pleasure, to go in search of joy. I think we all deserve pleasure, even when we have to throw up horse blinders to focus on the carrot instead of the world around us.
The world is all around me, but because I am an American, I was born believing I deserve joy and pleasure, even if it comes at someone else’s expense. My family has had many years of grifted pleasure: two of my immigrant ancestors were born in 1620 at Kebec and Patuxet, and then their parents moved ashore and announced that North America was their land now. The repetitive use of horse blinders to see only what we want to see has been encoded into twelve and thirteen generations of my family DNA. That’s right: I said thirteen. I don’t know if it is lucky or a curse to be me, so I try to find joy where I can, because after four hundred years of my family claiming home on someone else’s home, I am certain that the world owes me nothing.
Sixteen years ago, I bought a house with all the space I will ever need. My house is filled with windows that harness and pull light inside to illuminate most of my day, because my house is located in a part of the United States that gets 214 days of sunlight a year. Yes, we get snow in the winter, but it is still sunny, blinding light reflecting off the crust and obscuring the ice beneath. That’s all right. I like my life. I wake up as my spouse and kids are leaving the house for the day. I roll out of bed and take my dissolvable acid reflux medication and, if it pleases me, I take out my journal and light a candle in the dark to write before I look at my phone. That way, I can tell myself I did something productive today, no matter what.
But I am always productive! Before I write, I start the water for my tea, I feed my guinea pig, I let my dog outdoors for the first of many times. I stack the dishes from breakfast, I wipe down the counters, I start a load of laundry, and then I sit down to write. If I do it all right, everything comes out even and I’m ready to write just as my tea is done steeping. I like to write until it gets light outside, but I also like to write down only one page’s worth of thoughts. Sometimes I transcribe my dreams, another practice I should stop relying upon. I have been using astrology and my own dreams as guideposts for many years, but I do not want to look inside myself much longer because I like myself more when I am a joyful girl, and the bathroom mirror has not budged. The woman who lives there can tell the truth.
I do my Duolingo French lessons because it gives me a lot of pleasure to see the number click over every day—evidence of my dedication to completion. My streak is up to 857 days in a row, and Duo never has a chance to get mad at me because I do my lessons early. I studied Latin in high school because I was going to be an archaeologist, but then I changed my mind and the dead language rusted inside me. So for my fortieth birthday, I decided to learn a new language—the language of my ancestor who was born at Kebec. J’étudiais le français pour plus de deux ans et je ne veux pas arrêter!
I sit in front of the computer in my office, which is probably the prettiest room in my house with the eastern morning light streaming under cherry built-in bookshelves over the windows. Yes, I have an office, and I have a job that barely pays me anything. Sometimes I think I am mostly a stay-at-home parent, but my daughters are all adolescents now and they have not needed me to stay at home for at least ten years. Sometimes I think I am mostly a stay-at-home wife, but when I said I was stacking the breakfast dishes earlier, I meant I was stacking them for either my spouse or my children to do when they get home, because I have a list of chores I do to contribute to the running of our house, and I only do my share. This is just the way it goes.
The job that I do is directing a small press, and I pay myself a laughable amount of money per month because it is more important to me that the press remain sustainable and keep our books in print than that I pay myself something reasonable. I did the numbers once; I don’t want to do them again, but I think it worked out to something like two dollars an hour. That’s all right, because I love my life! I do it for the joy it brings to see our authors’ joy as their dreams are bound between two matte softcovers; we owe each other the world, if we can manage to give it. And I can manage to give it to them because my spouse is able to keep our household’s expenses covered.
So I check the emails that have come into my work inbox, and then I check the emails that have come into my personal inbox, and then I go to both of my social medias and check them, and then I go to both of the press’s social medias and check them. There are always likes and hearts and comments! It is nice to feel loved!
Then I read other people’s social media posts so that I know what’s going on in the world, because while my life brings me joy, it is pretty isolated. I can spend a whole day speaking aloud only to my family, and that doesn’t happen until they come home. So I read my emails, and I check social media, and I print and mail book orders for the press, and I keep the other books in production still in production, and then it is 10 o’clock, and it is time for me to do something that brings me only a little joy, which is trying to stay in shape.
I am still in my pajamas at 10 o’clock because I know I am going to sweat, so I go downstairs and I turn on whatever Netflix series I’ve been watching as a carrot to keep me on the treadmill—recently it’s been the latest season of Outer Banks, because I still love archaeological treasure hunts—and I begin walking at the 3.7 mph speed, which is just enough to make me start sweating after eight minutes. I walk at that speed for two miles and when I am done, I take off my shirt and I wipe down my body and my face and then I come upstairs and I weigh myself, even though I cannot believe that I have to sweat five times a week simply to not gain weight—that I don’t lose any weight after all that work—but that is called being 42 years old. Would I prefer the easy way? Well, okay, then.
Then I get dressed, and I have a hard-clad rule with myself that I have to wear hard pants for eight hours, just like everyone else who works. I am starving by this point so I have a snack, like a protein bar from the Nature Valley box I get at Costco, and I pour myself another glass of water. Then I sit down and I write again, but usually I check social media instead. Sometimes I wonder if everything I do I do instead of something I want to do more. That keeps me occupied until it is 11:30, and that sounds like close enough to lunch time for me. So I head into the kitchen and get myself two snacks this time, because I don’t eat a real lunch, I just eat snacks all day! If I did not have a spouse to make me dinners, I would never eat a real meal.
I eat my lunch snacks, and then I top them off with a package of fruit snacks because I like to be left with a sweet taste in my mouth; that brings me joy. Then I sit down and I read a book. Sometimes I can’t believe that part of my daily routine is sitting and reading during a time of day when I think everyone else is working. It seems like something I would judge in another person. Everything I do is judged and mostly gotten wrong, but oh well—reading keeps me joyful.
I read for an hour, and then I go back to my laptop, check social media for twenty minutes, and I write again. Or I check social media for a full hour, see that it is 2 o’clock, and realize that my day is winding down. Then I grab a seltzer from the fridge, the packages I need to mail for the press, and I leave the house to start picking up my children. I drive around my city for an hour and a half on weekdays, picking up one, then two, then three daughters. Sometimes, they have after-school activities and that complicates the pick-up schedule and I end up driving for more like two and a half hours, killing time in parking lots by checking social media on my phone, but the world owes me nothing: I chose this life and I love it!
I come home and preside over my adolescent daughters’ practice of immediately going into their bedrooms and checking their phones. Sometimes, if I want them to feel joyful, I have made cookies during that earlier 1 o’clock to 2 o’clock hour instead of checking social media. Sometimes. For the rest of the afternoon, I sit in the living room and am present, kind of, on my phone a lot but when my kids pass through, I ask them questions about their day. It seems to give them pleasure.
When my spouse gets home, if it is a weekend, it is cocktail time! We drink varying types of cocktails: my favorite Friday night cocktail is called a Blue Moon, and it is made of gin and crème de violette and lemon juice. My spouse likes olive martinis. I shake us up cocktails and we get a little buzzed while he makes dough for homemade pizza, and by the time the pizza is complete, I am ravenous and I would eat anything. Then he and I will often go out for a walk. My favorite walks are the ones we take in the winter because it is fully dark out. When everything else seems unclear, it is nice to be out in the dark with somebody who gives me pleasure.
We get home, we hang out in the living room for another couple of hours as our daughters pass in and out, and then my spouse and I go downstairs and watch a movie or part of a show. We do not watch movies as a family very often because every time we have tried, we realize how stupid the movies of our childhood and adolescence were, or the kids are bored, or they want us to watch some inane cartoon that means nothing to us, so it’s easiest to keep our TV viewings separate. I know there’s no grand plan here but I think, sometimes, about how we are all seeing only what we want to see.
Then it’s time for a shower, one of my favorite parts of the day, one I never miss. Standing in hot water always gives me a lot of pleasure. It feels good to be warm and alone, even though I am warm and alone most of the day. Sometimes my spouse joins me in the shower, and we take turns scrubbing each other’s backs. It feels good to know someone is getting all the grime I cannot reach off a part of me I cannot reach. I wonder, again, if everything I do I do instead of something I should do more. I get dressed into my pajamas, and then I climb into bed beside my spouse. The best nights to climb into bed are Sunday nights because that’s clean sheets night, especially if I dried the sheets outside on the clothesline so they smell like home. I turn on my side and spoon into my spouse, putting my hand on his hip because it’s the least I can do, because of the joy it brings. I pull the comforter up to eye-level like a horse blinder, blocking out any ghosts that might have slipped into the room, in case I wake up before I want to.
*
Kristine Langley Mahler seeks joy on the suburban prairie outside Omaha, Nebraska. The author of three nonfiction books, A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022), and Teen Queen Training (forthcoming with Autofocus, 2026), Kristine is also the director of Split/Lip Press. Her work may be found at kristinelangleymahler.com or @suburbanprairie (ON BLUESKY!)
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Dec 3, 2024: Nicole Walker, No Authority, Just Thanks
A year ago, I submitted a book proposal to Bloomsbury Academic called “How to Write the Hard Stuff.” Because it is the academic arm of the press, based in London, the proposal was sent to leaders in the field. British field leaders, who I find daunting and foreign. The leaders in their field had concerns that I was not an expert in trauma, so where did my authority lie? I revised the proposal clarifying that I wasn’t writing a book about how writing is cathartic or therapeutic, but that writing is important and empowering because it allows you to take control of your narrative. I wasn’t planning on being the authority. I am just one writer who has chosen various and sundry techniques of telling my story that might help others shape their own. My authority is usually only in the personal narrative, which is why I write creative nonfiction and why I’m not a politician. I resubmitted the proposal, promising that I was no authority indeed.
The second version passed muster. Unfortunately, I learned this in May. The book would be due in September. My editor, Lucy, was sorry it took so long to get the contract together. She gave me a little extra time—September 30th instead of September 1st.
I had been writing all winter and spring anyway. I had been on sabbatical and worked on a few books—How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the story upon which Writing the Hard Stuff is based. Also, I revised a novel which I’m revising again as we speak. Perhaps with the 15th revision, I’ll get this where it needs to be! But that is beside the point because I did indeed have to put the novel aside to work on this Writing the Hard Stuff book. I thought I just needed to revise some older essays, but as I dug in, I realized I had to write a whole new book.
So I typed. And revised. And read the book aloud. I was almost done when the semester started. I had the big thread and the tiny threads woven throughout. I had calls forward and responses back. I had little jokes littered throughout. But I also had to start teaching my nonfiction class. Do you know what a group of nonfiction students needs? They need to know how to write the hard stuff. They also need to know how to analyze a text critically. So I asked them to bring something from the text for class discussion. If I was the kind of teacher that lorded authority over my students’ heads, this might be an imposing request. But because my main mode of teaching is beginning each day with the foibles of Nicole—from telling them stories about how I got the heel of my boot in caught in the hem of my pants, making me slip down the stairs, to how, right before I was to speak at an event, I spilled wine down my shirt, the fact that in each of my novels, at least one character is named Zach, or the time I had a typo in my Essay Daily essay, my students don’t have a problem telling me what they really think.
The students read with devotion and care. I had never met these particular students before, but I have been teaching at NAU for 15 years. I know NAU students to be intelligent, kind, and wise. I don’t know exactly why I’m so lucky to have such students, but it has never been not true. I’ve had different kinds of studiers—all nighters, right before classers, never studiers—but the attitude they bring is one of openness and generosity. I do teach creative writing, which might explain it. Creative writing is a class students elect to take. It counts as a general education course and, if they follow the track, the classes count as an emphasis toward an English Major. But even if the course is generally made of folks who definitely want to be there, I’m not sure why they are so collectively smart and thoughtful. They didn’t have to exert themselves. The only graded part of this assignment was to offer a discussion question for the class. But exert themselves they did.
Some responded a lot. Some, a little. But as we spent the semester studying what I meant by hard stuff (everything) and what I meant by writing (so much), we had a document from which to work in which everyone had a little invested. From there, the students wrote 5 essays over the next 5 weeks. To these essays I gave extensive feedback, as did their fellow students. We responded to essays about eyeglasses and seashells, bike riding and growing up near the ocean, the green bottles of Rolling Rock and stories about what a pain in the ass other people are and our own bodies can be.
*
I’m not allowed to talk about politics in the classroom although I am allowed to encourage students to register and vote. But they know the personal is political. I can nod with them when they feel disaffected or nihilistic. I can receive commiserating glances when the end of the world seems to be knocking at our door. Perhaps that is what makes these students so great—it’s not that they’re all the same or that they all care about politics or that they all trust me to be their teacher. It’s that they’re willing, to read each other’s work, and mine. They know everyone has a story and it is often a hard one. They’re here to listen to that story and help shape it and to listen to it again. There is as much reading and listening in the class as there is writing and talking. It’s a trust circle. A partnership. A committee. A collective. A community. Every semester I go in expecting it. I’m surprised I’ve never been disappointed. And I am grateful to each of my students every single day. Also. They read Essay Daily. Which is another generosity and another way to build on what we’ve begun.
*
NICOLE WALKER is the author of several books, plus one forthcoming, Writing the Hard Stuff, from Bloomsbury Books. She has written several essays for The New York Times and is a noted author in several editions of Best American Essays. She edits the Crux series of nonfiction at the University of Georgia press. She teaches creative writing and serves as Writer-in-Residence for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.
Monday, December 2, 2024
Dec 2, 2024: Kathleen Rooney, Perfect Days in Imperfect Times
- a desire for a sustained period of peaceful stability, and
- an attraction to a structured rhythm,