Write a story about a Lil manic depressive Whiteboy.

"I'm very sweet and pleasant."

going backward in pleasure
is like kissing someone through a shower curtain.

My Bible is
a forty-sever-year-old baby.

You Can Learn to Be Normal--
Not Neurotic

Yet living leaves scars that distract us from these goals. 

childhood = playing something you don’t know is completely rigged.

I dream so much when I'm awake.

being locked in a room together by scientists
make soul mates of strangers.

“I’ve paid my dues to be who I am today. Have you?”

And here’s a love poem from the radio that I mis-typed bad:

If I were president,

I'd give out Pulitzer prizes for wrinkles
and Nobel prizes for cystic acne

I'd propose a marriage bureau
for temporary, twelve hour marriages

I'd propose to you with a Ring Pop
in a parking lot

I'd take you to McDonald's
and give you a gold sticker star

ASH:

I’m painting portraits of my friends’ sex organs.

MOM:

Why do you have to be like that! Why can’t you just paint something people might actually like, like a landscape! What am I supposed to show my coworkers when I tell them my daughter is an artist? You are so selfish—

I hang up on…

Read more

flipping through old journals as part of my pact to keep on nodding terms with the person I used to be, whether I like her or not.

—

—“We’ll never find happiness!”
—“I guess we just have to be happy without it!”

—

“How did I get from fantasies of being the STAR OF THE ART WORLD to being a grocery store clerk?” —"Have faith in your detours," says Marina.

—

Plants are the hairs of planets, and stars are the dandruff of flaky skulls.

—

If love is an art form, what is its masterpiece?

—

Ash: "Am I making you cringe?"
Jaydra: "Talk of love is always cringe." 

—

“It’s impossible to blackmail you because everything is already online.”

—

I was in awe of the grocery bagger—
a woman in line exclaimed, 
“He’s the best bagger in the universe! 
I’ve seen him do it before!”

Anything done well is a form of art.

—

Get back to people who have reached out to you. Take care of the people who have taken care of you. (haven’t been the best at doing this)

—

Don't run away. Return to the place you have fled.

—

I feel like I’m on a road trip and I’m asking my parents, “Are we there yet?” except I’m with God.

—

I haven’t watched porn in several years. Despite this, my spam folder is filled with emails from sex bots. Today’s subject line: “She imagines her fingers in your hair,” which I misread as “She imagines fingers in your hair.”

—

I imagine pulling fingers out of my hair.

—

Art is an excuse to love that which we are encouraged to neglect: the people, places and things that we encounter every day, who lack novelty and don’t redound to our glory.

—

Re-reading an old email correspondence with Vince:

I don’t know where my former, competitive ambition went… I shed it like a snake skin, and now I don’t know what to do with this new self, who can’t even bother to try to be the best at something.

—

So quiet she could hear her blood speak.

—

I dream that I’m at my dad’s old home on Barkley Meadows Circle. I try to use the bathroom but there are several enormous, football-sized turds in the bowl. I flush the toilet and it overflows. The whole downstairs is flooded with fecal water. I am disgusted. Later, I discover that the pooper was an old coworker from Powell’s.

—

Let the boredom resume.

The deepest plot of the meta-novel is the struggle of how the book came into being.

Your art will reflect the putrescence you consume.

Genre is a useless distinction.

When art ceases to be a fixed thing, one’s entire existence becomes a work of art.

This comic will appear in print in Issue 3 of Initial.

You are invited to the Initial 3 Launch Party at Word Virus Bookstore on July 31st!

about the author

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s first book of poems made no impact whatsoever. Critics were not pleased by it saying we have no knowledge or record of her whatsoever. Kiik usually is a man. Unless no record exists in which case he is a woman. She was winner of the Haemophiliacs Hospital Raffle. Kiik lives here in this room. When you switch off the lights he comes in through the window and eats out of the garbage. Because he’s eaten the garbage seven years it is molecularly accurate if you say Kiik is mostly water garbage. When the lights come on Kiik deflates and he crawls inside this tiny box. A pupa wraps its mitten of fur around the word. The mouth of flour rubs its ghost over the flute. The angel of steam raises its palm flush to the barrel.1

I’ll be reading from an entirely fictional manuscript about my life. Here’s an excerpt:

Cringe: Falling in and out of love with someone you meet on Tinder over the course of two weeks and presenting a gigantic poster of his cock for your grad school critique with a quote attributed to Virginia Woolf that you found inside a Hallmark card:

I am never not thinking of you.

You come to your senses, you attempt to delete the dick pic forever, but because your computer is old, or because you left it charging all night too many times, the shadow of your ex’s genitals is permanently burned into the screen. Years later, when you live in a zen training home, nobody can ever see or borrow your computer—a turgid phallus haunts this desktop.

See you at Word Virus Bookstore tonight (July 6th) at 7pm

I re-read this quote when I find myself craving the attention of worldly and bourgeois people/publications/institutions that only respect famous people.

Here’s Montaigne: “Let your public be just one person or indeed let it be your own self. It is a poor sort of ambition that in your private retreat leads you to conceive hopes of a crown of laurels as a reward for your idleness... You should stop caring about how people talk about you, and care only about how you should talk to yourself.”

There seems to be a persistent and widespread belief that glory (kleos) and wealth (nostos) lead to happiness, but consider the public contumely famous people are routinely exposed to: an off-color joke or awkward interaction could result in lasting social annihilation. I recently wrote to a super-famous correspondent that I was lucky enough to “write terrible poems and blow up my life in obscurity.”

Or remember Ishmael’s warning in Moby-Dick, “Oh young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease.” Melville himself, despite his prominent posthumous position in the Western Literary Canon, died with the reputation of being a failed author of boy’s adventure yarns/ a general psychotic.

Tolstoy defined fame as “being proud of one’s crimes.”

I surprised myself by developing an obsession with tarot and astrology, which I superciliously derided until about two months ago. After paying for a professional astrology reading, I had to ban myself from Psychic Sister, lest I go broke in a manic quest for clarity in the form of energy work, crystals, and aura photographs. The astrologer told me that I’d spend the next seven years making the “work that outlives me.” She advised me to rely on my community and paid subscribers. When I told her that I was anathema to self-promotion, she said, “Promote your writing, not yourself.”

I haven’t always been happy when friends of mine went on to achieve their dreams while I continued to flounder in obscurity with no prospects, no career, no car, no shower curtain, and no dad. There’s no shortage of self-pity to be found in such invidious comparisons. Envy is the only sin that isn’t any fun.

(A few years ago, I dated a nice person. In an effort to appear normal and put together, I rapidly bought a dining table, a shower curtain, a set of plates, and utensils (I only had small spoons).

Last week, I bought a car.

I’m becoming.)

There is no such thing as a famous poet; in order for poets to be famous, people would have to read poetry.

People read headlines, emails, and social media posts.

There are a few famous artists. Their visage can be found on novelty votive candles, dusty mugs, and socks. My socks, for example, have Yayoi Kusama’s face on the toes.

I used to fantasize that I, too, would be famous enough to be on a sock.

Here’s Warhol: “Being famous isn’t all that important. If I weren’t famous, I wouldn’t have been shot for being Andy Warhol. Maybe I would have been shot for being in the army.”

Or Emily Dickinson: “How dreary – to be – Somebody!/ How public – like a Frog –/ To tell your name – the livelong June –/ To an admiring Bog!”

Emily Dickinson is famous (to poets and poetasters) for not being famous. Despite being the subject of biopics, tv shows, and numerous biographies, she published almost nothing in her lifetime. Without readers and heartwarming words of encouragement, what motivated her to keep writing?

What’s bigger than fame?

“This will help you understand your mother,” said an arthritic gentleman prior to having his gallstones removed.

As a congenital contrarian, this adjuration ensured that I would develop an allergy to The Joy Luck Club and the whole concept of Asian American Literature.

I never read The Joy Luck Club, but I did dip my toes into various Asian affinity groups which I then read about in academic texts some years later in grad school.

My quest for belonging through identity politics failed. I still felt awkward at “BIPOC centered” parties, and I felt even more awkward in “safe spaces” where I lived in terror of unintentionally offending someone with my caustic humor. My half-whiteness hovered over me like original sin. And of course my mother who is undeniably “other” in name, appearance, and demeanor would never further expose her otherness by attending an affinity group or standing in solidarity. She just wants to masticate duck carcasses over a large aluminum bowl in peace.

For the past three years, I’ve read War and Peace every year. (”Is that what you say to all the girls?” said a woman in a plunging halter top at an art show.) The experience of reading War and Peace is total and consoling. Though it was written by a male Russian aristocrat in the 19th century, it speaks to my inner experience of the self’s conflictual, dialectical relation to itself. Pierre’s bumpy trajectory from debauched bastard son with mystical tendencies to religious fanatic who performs virtue to prisoner-of-war who has his first experience of satiety when starving to being a true believer with commitment penetrating every cell of his body is a more compelling itinerary than anything marketed to me on the basis of my race.

Tolstoy was influenced by great philosophers of all times and all people. In his diary, he wrote, “I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament.” All of literature is my lucky inheritance, and I have no interest in divesting myself of any good book based on the author’s identity or psychospiritual blemishes. The work has its own life and takes on its own meaning in the mind of each reader.

The best books say more about the reader than the author. War and Peace’s content is heavily autobiographical, but of whom? My friend Nate and I concur that we see ourselves in every character.

For the convenience of the modern glutted, exhausted, overwhelmed, and neurodivergent human being, I have taken the liberty of writing an abridged version of War and Peace, altering the pronouns to emphasize the experience of this “wasian” reader.

WAR AND PEACE (abridged)

“Why?”

“Why live?”

“What’s the point?”

A wound in the soul, like a physical wound, can be healed only by the force of life pushing up from the inside.

She carefully protected her open wound from any offensive, painful touch.

The solitude exhausted her, tormented her; but it was necessary for her.

She thought her life was over. But suddenly her love for her mother showed her that the essence of life—love—was still alive in her.

Love awoke, and life awoke.

Gradually she learned, not with her mind, but with her whole being.

The bed bugs that ate her warmed her body pleasantly.

She learned to love the rats that infested her apartment, and named each rat after the characters in Ratatouille.

There is no situation in the world where one can be perfectly happy and free,

so there is no situation where one can be perfectly unhappy and unfree.

She was almost unchanged in external ways. As a Virgo Rising “wasian,” she was destined to look thirteen until she shrivelled like a raisin. She was just as spaced-out as before, and seemed to be taken up not with what was in front of her eyes, but with something special of her own.

“My ruin has made me much richer.”

“Well, and what then? What am I going to do?”

“Nothing. I’ll live. Ah, how nice!”

TOP FIVE

Secret Phones

1. Since I never delete my contacts and was formerly incapable of saying “no” if someone asked for my number, my iphone has 574 contacts. That’s 564 contacts too many. So I got a second, extremely dumb phone with no texting or contacts. My secret phone affords me the privilege of tuning out everybody except my nonagenarian grandmother who might die any day now. Whose phone number do you know from memory? That might be my new definition of love.

Mark Leidner

2. “Mark chews the fuck out of a premise,” said my friend Mikko Harvey over the phone, “and he discovers the sublime in that chewing.” In his poem Turning Forty (from Elegy for Pangaea, preorder it here), Mark Leidner pushes Scream masks to their ecstatic, holy extreme. What I love about Mark Leidner’s poems is that I don’t have to try to like them, nor do I have to read his poems ten times in order to comprehend them. I laugh and feel things right away, and then end up reading the poems ten times over because I want to make my friends laugh and feel things too.

Flashcards

3. Nabokov said something like, “one must form a habit of searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought.” If I look up a word, I will forget its definition before the end of the hour. Flashcards are my commitment to maintaining a variegated vocabulary and a nimble mind ripe with adjectival resourcefulness.

Geoffrey Young

4. When I lived in Great Barrington, MA, Geoffrey Young invited me to read my poems at his 75th (?) birthday party. (I made the unfortunate sartorial decision to dress like a raving extraterrestrial.) Geoff is a brilliant poet, artist, and curator; every month or so, he handed out a new chapbook to his friends (using a different pseudonym for his press each time—”WORLD WIDE SUICIDE,” “JOB LOSS,” etc). I never actually read his freely disseminated booklets until now, and I feel like a COMPLETE FOOL. These are some of the best poems I’ve ever read; yesterday, I sent Geoff a letter requesting the complete catalog. Hopefully he’s still alive.

Kissing Booth Social Club

5. “Did you know that you can pay $20 to kiss someone and have them rate your kissing abilities?” said Nia to me over strawberry shortcake. Sarah Ruby Armstrong, a Portland-based social practice artist, provides charts that assess “Teeth Presence,” “Lip Tensility,” “Tongue Tensility,” et cetera in between make-out sessions. Wormslut will be hosting a free, non-graded, sober hugging event across the street for closeted conservatives.

For nearly two years, I made one issue of Worm House per week. Uncle Fingers’ mom gave me a stipend of $35 dollars which was enough to print 20 copies of each 4-page zine. My sobriquet “Miss Expanding Universe” refers to a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, which was inspired by the dance choreographer Ruth Page. Even though both Noguchi and Page died before I was born, I was jealous of their l’amour fou, and sought to inherit the electricity which momentarily fused their lives.

Most issues featured photorealistic depictions of myself and Uncle Fingers. While residing in his mother’s basement which at all times reeked of feline fecal matter, we became ad hoc supervisors of the void.

Like your standard literary publication run by equal opportunity satirists, Worm House shed new light on well-known works—

and took on an array of topics including fame, money, gum, ugliness, bad art, patriarchy, snacks, uncle, incest, artist’s block, manic depression, fear, habits, sobriety, psychosexual frankness, god, feces, lobsters, unrequited love and more…

Good art, if there is such a thing, embarrasses the artist. Worm House’s lodestar was a willingness to remain aggressively, even repellently vulnerable and overexposed. If you start saying to yourself, “I’m really on to something” or “Is this going to get me cancelled?” you’ve already taken yourself out of the flow.

In creating Worm House, I learned this: everything one encounters, without exception, is metabolized into an infinitely expanding blob of significance.

P.S. Approximately 60% of Worm House is compiled in How To Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Most Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World EVER, sold by Bateau Press. If you live in Portland, you can get a copy at Powell’s, Selected Stories or my next event.

Ash: What was your first experience of art?

Jaydra: I remember my godmother showing me a Bosch and pointing out all the little demons and torture victims because she thought I would love it.

I did think it was pretty great.

Ash: As your friend, collaborator, and a fellow addict-in-recovery, I am drawn to your dynamic, protean point of view. I’d like to focus on the tessellation of god, art, writing and sex; how did these emerge and interact for you?

Jaydra: I thought about god a lot as a child because I attended church, mostly Baptist and Pentecostal Evangelical. I was curious about the lore in the Bible—was Jesus a real guy?—and to what extent the adults believed the hyperbolic, mythic tales. I had what felt like spiritual experiences, usually while singing, but ultimately I was a skeptic.

In my 20s, I found god again because I had to. I was so obviously lost and weak that I was willing to entertain the possibility that there could be a power greater than myself. This was in the recovery community.

I spent two and a half years celibate in my mid 30s—voluntary in that I didn’t want to sleep with anyone unless I felt safe and right, involuntary in that I could not, for the life of me, find anyone who fit this bill. I experienced no other sensory deprivation to speak of, and yet I was in agony.

As I rounded year two, I slept once with a guy from a dating app who ultimately really sucked. He fucked me like he was flipping through a playbook, as if I could have been anyone, and I was.

After that, I bought a weighted blanket, started my newsletter, got a book deal for my first manuscript (Low, Fonograf Editions), made my first body of visual artwork, and started exhibiting.

Sex and art are acts of god. Neither should be rushed, forced, or exploited for personal gain. That takes the god out of them. I try to make work and have sex in ways that are honest. I hear a lot from people that they admire the authenticity of what I do. That is really satisfying.

Ash: I admire the way you eat burritos.

Jaydra: It’s punk to be a woman with an appetite.

Ash: In Low and the Rothko essay you wrote for Initial (a Portland-specific art criticism magazine that Jaydra and Martha launched in January 2026), you collage your childhood memories and sex life and contemporary art and academic research and spit it back out as an essay. Can you talk about your allegiance to this form? What function does “Jaydra” serve as a literary device?

Jaydra: My essays are an honest expression of how I think: in constellations and crazy person maps strung end to end with red string. People say the personal is political (I have probably said that), but I only think a story about my life is political if it’s made explicitly so. To be true to what I want to express, I need history, art, theory, and my experience. Maybe this form is a form of god to me, a power greater than myself, a sum that’s more than its parts.

As a literary device, I (“Jaydra”) hope to lead readers through my crazy red string map. I’ve found that stories about me also keep the reader on board for more difficult, information-heavy, or ugly parts of the essay. My experience illustrates important things about how the conceptual or political material bears down on the individual, which I hope encourages the reader to notice something they hadn’t before, to give attention to something I think is worthy of time.

Ash: “An artist’s chief material is himself,” writes David Shields in Reality Hunger. Is this statement a pejorative when applied to women? I’m thinking of the oxymoron “literary memoir” and the knowing cynic that pulls away from books like Eat Pray Love.

Jaydra: There’s a prejudice in the literary world against memoir, and a dismissal of women’s personal experience as serious artistic material in general. People think we are dumb fucking babies—it’s crazy. So some of the resistance to these types of books is warranted if you want to be taken seriously as a woman writer.

Ash: It is humiliating to admit that there are some appetites within me that resist taming. The largeness of your ambition has challenged my stubborn belief that commercial success is impure. Did you always feel comfortable wanting sex, success, expensive clothes and adult-sized burritos?

Jaydra: Not really.

I was raised to want less, need less, and expect nothing. That included food, shelter, and clothing. Growing up in an economically depressed and depressing place meant that everything required toil. Sex was another matter. Probably because poor people can have it whenever they want—it doesn’t cost money.

I always had ambition with respect to academic achievement, but I couldn’t really imagine the end game. Like what would success in that look like exactly? My imagination stopped inside the university. My dad told me to get a job with insurance and a union. That was the ultimate working class dream.

On clothes: The only magazines around my house growing up were Auto Trader, Cosmopolitan, and clothing catalogs for down-market department stores. Cars never held my interest, but I loved looking at the clothes in the magazines. I didn’t think I could have those clothes either, but I daydreamed about them and then looked for their simulacra on sale racks and in thrift stores (I still do this). I have trouble spending real money on expensive clothes, but I have no problem wanting them.

You are cordially invited to Jaydra and Torey’s upcoming show Terroir at Well Well Projects. Hang out with us in person!

Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 6, 2026
5:00 - 8:00pm
8371 N Interstate Ave #1
Portland, OR 97217

On Race

My mother tells me, with pride, that I am “completely white.” She doesn’t think anybody who is born in the U.S. is a “real” Chinese. She can’t stand the Chinese, she says. I wonder if she is including herself. She claims her outbursts of rage are inevitable because “that’s just how Cantonese people are.”

On Art

On the phone, my mom asks me what I’m doing with my life.

ASH: I’m painting portraits of my friends’ sex organs.

MOM: Why do you have to be like that! Why can’t you just paint something people might actually like, like a landscape! What am I supposed to show my coworkers when I tell them my daughter is an artist? You are so selfish—

I call my sponsor to grouse about the incident, but instead she says, “it’s hard to be a mom.”

On Precociousness

My mother texts me a home video. I’m about two years old, talking to the camera as my mom films me brushing my teeth in the bathtub. “You used to be so smart—I mean, my God! Your Cantonese was perfect.”

After repeatedly struggling to pronounce “scissors” in the first grade, my principal called my mother and suggested that she stop speaking Chinese at home, alleging that it was stunting my English. My mother began defaulting to English, and while my desire to read the Western Canon flourished, my motivation to study Chinese floundered without the academic validation I lived for.

On Pumba

I send my mother a link to an interview of me. After a minute she says, "This is so boring!" and resumes watching reels of her favorite youtube cat celebrity, Pumba.

On Love

My mother says never to marry unless my husband signs, not one, but two houses in my name.

On Memory

When I was born, my father bought my mom a VHS camcorder, and for the next three years my mother documented my childhood with the frenetic energy of a one woman paparazzi. Revisiting this footage 30 years later, I am touched by the happy, chunky asian baby that lights up for the camera, playing her part in my mother’s fabulation of a perfect American childhood.

My mother has forgotten what she was once like. Perhaps I should too. “You had the best childhood ever,” she says, and maybe it’s true.

As one might expect, I was rejected.

Next month, I am beginning a fully-funded low-residency program in creative writing at Pacific Northwest College of the Arts. No longer thinking of suicide, I have trained myself to eagerly anticipate collecting 800 consecutive rejections from publishers, residencies, and fellowships, as well as friends, mentors, and lovers: “Yay! Another rejection! I did it!”

1.

i feel terror, dread, uncertainty, insecurity, pain.

a sad song is enough to make me burst at the seams.

the only thing that’s keeping me together is Jane Fonda’s Original Workout.

i am a shackle to anyone who loves me.

my brain is a soup of radioactive liquid.

plants die in my presence.

2.

this is taking so much effort to write, i can hardly keep my eyes open.

i would say that my friends are significantly more intelligent and accomplished than i am, but that thats what makes me a great artist. if you’re too smart, you’re too good at mastering what’s already been done.

and there is no one quite like you. even though all of your ideas are unoriginal, they are original because they were specifically highlighted by your mind. all of life is your material, and your mind is a blender.

i am nostalgic for a time when art made me feel alive and energized.

i can’t think the way i want to, i can’t create the way i want to, and that’s the point.

3.

i think that if i don’t make art i’ll kill myself, but making art is killing me.

i am nostalgic for a time when i would lose myself in art, when every thought felt like an epiphany, and i would forget to eat. now i almost exclusively think about eating.

a child sees the world accurately: tasteless landscape rocks are a caché of diamonds. every dewdrop contains a fairy.

i have nothing to say.
i have nothing to say.
i have nothing to say.
i have nothing to say.
i have nothing to say.

that being said, I think I’d make a fine candidate for your program.

4.

i am literally surrounded by pugs that are not potty trained and eat poop.

5.

If all of literature is a body of water, and Tolstoy is a lake, I’d be happy to contribute a trickle of urine.

6.

7.

8.

Seven years ago, I stumbled upon Mark Leidner’s writing during a studio visit with the abstract painter Alexander Ross. Flipping through Beauty Is the Case that They Gave Me, I stumbled upon this stanza from the poem Gossip:

Talent is to honesty what love
is to gossip, if we are poetry.
Or is it, talent is to honesty in poetry
what gossip in poetry is to love in life?
I don’t even care. Okay, really,
this is going to be over soon. I want a million dollars,
and you, but I would take either.
But I would rather have you,
And if gossip moves through love
like money through time,
I basically do.

Reading Leidner’s poems for the first time was like realizing I’ve spent my whole life living in a foreign country where I don’t speak the native tongue, and after years of resigning myself to being the village idiot, I unexpectedly encounter a language that fits snugly into the boot of my thought, which in turn leads to the epiphany that I might belong to this earth after all.

Even though Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me was out of print and I was unsuccessful in manipulating/browbeating Alex Ross into giving me his copy, Leidner’s poems lingered like the imprint of Scooby Doo on my face after being hit really, really hard with a Scooby Doo bouncy ball in a vicious game of dodgeball.

Upon moving to Portland, I met the venerable Jeff Alessandrelli, founder of Fonograf Editions, who published Leidner’s latest book of poems, Returning the Sword to the Stone. My friend Derek Hunter Wilson and I loved this collection so much that, without consulting the author or publisher, we decided to create a musical adaptation of the poem Being With You:

This is the concatenation of events leading to my interview with one of the greatest contemporary poets, Mark Leidner. If you are searching for a reason to be proud to be an American, look no further than Returning the Sword to the Stone, written on American soil.

I’m reading Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami. In the essay, “When I Became a Novelist,” he tells the story of how, during a baseball game, he had the epiphany that he could write a novel. “I can still recall that exact sensation. It was as if something had come fluttering down from the sky and I had caught it cleanly in my hands.” Prior to this spontaneous insight he had never seriously considered being a writer.

I’m astonished that civilization hasn’t been obliterated by a meteor shower—there’s no reason for meteors to swerve for Planet Earth, after all. How and when did you become a writer? Was it something impersonal and out of your control, like getting struck by a meteor?

I was in college and didn’t know what to do with myself after graduation. I didn’t want to be a lawyer, and I was applying to law school anyway. That was how aimless I was — when I took a random creative writing class for the A. The workshop aspect completely fascinated me. I had always wanted to change things about myself, but I had no courage to change in real life. But in writing, I was able to become all kinds of different people. Taking that class was maybe similar to a meathead participating in a school play as an assignment only to realize they love acting. Receiving feedback about poems and stories from regular people, as opposed to the formal feedback you get from teachers on essays and such, answered some deep-seated need of mine for self-expression and self-recognition. I also was in awe of my teacher, Calaya Reid, not only her skills at inspiring us and dealing with the blistering humanity that resulted in our fledgling poems and stories, but also her position. It had never occurred to me that you could get a job reading and discussing the writing of living people who had written it. I didn’t know then that such jobs are hard to get and pay almost nothing, and if I would have known, I probably wouldn’t have cared. It was a revelation that this was a form of employment. So I happily abandoned law school and took more writing classes.

I’ve been floundering in my writing practice and fixated on the idea that having a teacher is elemental to my growth. Did you have a mentor that challenged you to become the writer that you are?

One time Mark Levine spent half an hour of our workshop detailing why my poem was one-dimensional and uninteresting. He said the poem was a one-trick pony — could only be glibly ironic and had nothing else to offer — but he showed how this was true one word, one line at a time, specifically analyzing every choice, punctuation mark, line break, sentence, and syntactical element that I had made. It was the first “close reading” I’d ever received or witnessed, and it eventually became the way I would critically read all poems, my own and others’.

Afterward, a few students asked me if I was okay. Although I had been a little uncomfortable, the critique seemed sincere, and afterward I came to respect Mark Levine for the risk he took in being that direct, risking being disliked by me or the other students. Throughout the workshop, he argued that poetic images could transcend our conscious intentions for what we wanted our poems to communicate, and so we should embrace them.

After that workshop, I became determined to write “imagery,” whatever that meant, and weave it with whatever else I was already doing. That led me to Chelsey Minnis and other writers who wove striking imagery and striking irony.

This morning I flipped through Returning the Sword to the Stone in search of a bio, which is curiously elided. Instead, I settled for the Acknowledgements, where I noticed that you include Dean Young—my spiritual uncle. I encountered Uncle Dean’s work at the Iowa Young Writers Workshop sixteen years ago, when I was 17, and have been more or less reading his work constantly ever since.

Like your poems, Uncle Dean’s writing gave me permission to be myself to the utmost in my art, but his words also function like koans, offering wisdom which cannot be arrived at directly or through reason but unfurls over time as life gets simultaneously more goofy and more horrible and more unbearably beautiful. To put it simply, his poetry kicks my heart in the crotch. What is your relationship to Uncle Dean, and what maxim of his has stuck with you always? I am going to use this moment as an opportunity to vaunt how my first published poem was printed alongside this poem by Dean Young:

Magnetic Fields
by Dean Young

I feel like I'm inside life
instead of poking it with a stick
down the gutter to a grate
when I'm inside you.
Even though my soul leaks out
during the committee meeting, sometimes
a falcon-headed dream-lion
hoists me to the tower window
for a kiss between the bars
and bells, bells. For what reason?
Go ahead, ask. Ask dew,
ask the flash buzzing you. 
You can even ask yourself
but don't expect an answer
that isn't inside out
like a shucked dress on a chair.
It's always summer at the lake house
and your parents are away,
darkness coming up from the wharf
on stilts.

[This interview was conducted via email. On February 17th, after not hearing from Mark for weeks, I sent the following email:

“Dear Mark,

On behalf of the beings who will benefit from this interview, I am here to harass you for a response.”]1

When I was Dean’s student, I read his books to try to mimic his voice, but I never succeeded. Dean’s imagery, similes, and thought development, for lack of a better term, are more nimble and lyrical than anything I could write. Failing to write a good Dean Young poem, while frustrating for years, eventually led me to something closer to my own voice: less nimble and lyrical, more high-concept and narrative.

As a student in his workshop, one time I turned in a poem that made fun of something that people take seriously. The opening lines were the only funny part, and the middle of the poem was just spinning wheels in the same schtick without any new good lines, and the ending was a callback to the “good” beginning. Dean was sympathetic to the satirical intention of the poem, but he passionately scolded me that circling back at the end to recycle a previously used punchline. He said something like: “Don’t go backward, go forward! And don’t stop! Keep going! Until you find something new! Take us somewhere new! Somewhere sincere! Beyond irony!”

It was something I was probably already doing in my best poems, but I think this outburst made it rise to the surface of conscious awareness and stay there for a long time.

I read an interview in Bookforum this morning where this film critic barfed on substack, saying “social media has no standards.” So if you feel more inspired to talk about your substack and why you publish there, feel free...

One time I used to follow this person who really upset me because I hated everything they said. Then I realized that if I never read them, they would never upset me. Then I was happy after that, except for all the other things that made unhappy.

I use social media because it makes me more likely to begin and finish writing. I hate being rejected by magazines, which is what happens 99% of the time I submit, and sometimes it takes months or years for them to get back to you. Even people who solicit writing from me often reject what I send them. It makes me never want to start or finish anything. But on my blog I only have to satisfy my own internal editor and I don’t have to wait months for publication that may never come.

I may also be drawn to writing things that might not fit anywhere else. A lot of my stories are too long for magazines, and many of my poems benefit from a layer of context that would be lost if they appeared anywhere other than on my blog or in a book of mine.

Do you listen to music while you write?

This and this and this.

I was looking through old zines and found several where I referenced your poetry. Your work has really seeped beneath the skin.

In The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover, you wrote, “Early on in his career, the poet sold his soul; he then spent the rest of his life trying to redeem it; as a result, he was highly motivated, and his ambition was sincere.”

I xeroxed this aphorism and typed “True Story” above it. Do I dare say that I am interested in what it means to make universal art? Without ever having met me, your work has expressed feelings that dwell in the core of my being.

Thank you for your contribution to American Arts & Letters,

Ash

You were wearing a golden cowboy hat with an enormous wooden cross. Your eyebrows were painted on. You were shamelessly singing country songs at top volume in a quiet neighborhood with a portable voice box and laptop. I said, “I’ve been waiting to meet you.” You said, “I’m Steve.” I asked you to sing a Johnny Cash song. You asked for my number. I said you could write your number in my notebook.

Well, I put the notebook in the back pocket of my overalls which I threw into the laundry and now there is an explosion of pulverized crumbs of paper instead of Steve’s number.

We made eye contact under the fluorescent lights of the church basement. You were ridiculously good-looking and I had a Mt. Everest-sized blemish between my brows. Any attempt to salvage my dignity would have been futile, so I hid in the bathroom and stuffed my purse with free tampons.

I’ve acknowledged the need that all whites have for constant, never-ending improvement, which is why I’m seeking a BIPOC to help me hunt down every last microaggression. However, I’m well aware that I’ll never be completely free of racism, and that I’m always committing unconscious acts of colonialism. As a proud member of the White Guilt Scene (W.G.S.), I am committed to facing the pain I cause BIPOCs simply by existing. This is the kind of obloquy a guilty white wants in her life.

I don’t need a white ally, what I actually need is a volunteer chauffeur with a Costco membership so I can buy my toilet paper in bulk.

You would make an amazing satanic sacrifice.

I just want you to be a stranger every time we meet, so that you’re never trapped by some stale label or molted persona. Every time you walk through the door, you’ll be a complete mystery, never a bore, never a reliquary for my resentments. Our depraved history doesn’t matter and we have no future. And when you inevitably drive me crazy, I’ll say to myself, “I am being driven crazy. Now where, in me, is that coming from?”

Description: a refuge from the cultural imperative to be normal: tasting the roots of who we are: developing a high tolerance for uncertainty and emetic aphrodisiacs: unconditional love and devotion to outshine the sick, shame-wounded animal in us: an abrogation of our superpolished selves: being awkward is not wrong: being ordinary is not wrong: staring at wall while anxiously perspiring is not wrong. We will misquote Blake often: if a loserbitch would persist in her folly she would become wise.

Note: always be ready to cram in as many lame messages about the human spirit as possible, and cool people will avoid you.

Upcoming events

TONIGHT!

Bloomer’s Poetry Club

March 27th, 7pm at Fans Only (not to be confused with OnlyFans, mom)

RSVP here

THIS SUNDAY!

Bad Art Workshop (virtual)

March 29th, 11am - 12pm PST

Register here

Kiik flings down the ego and smashes it with a stentorian laughtrack. In “About the Author”, Kiik writes, “He makes you guard his books and sell them to yourself. Instead of reading aloud he stares right at you for an hour and reads silently in his mind.”

My first chapbook, “How to be the Worst Laziest Fattest Most Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World EVER,” also features an “about the author” pastiche: “Please address all fanmail to Miss Expanding Universe; light-of-my-life; fire-of-my-loins; good-sucking genius…” and so on.

I noticed not a few parallels like these between Kiik’s writing and my own, and did 108 full prostrations to the indifferent multiverse, praying that one day we might do a reading together.

This interview is part of the manifestation process.

(1) Do you have a mentor?

I’ve had some phenomenal mentors in my life. K. Wayne Yang (aka la paperson) who wrote A THIRD UNIVERSITY IS POSSIBLE. And C. Ree the visual artist, writer and film programmer. The poets Sandra and Ben Doller. These folks have been critical for me as a writer and teacher and a person. Some of the most important opportunities I’ve had are owed to them.

(2) What is the single greatest bit of advice on writing that you’ve ever heard?

I might be butchering or misremembering this; I think it comes from a George Saunders essay. But it’s the idea that we can / should come to the page ready to improvise. There doesn’t need to be much of a plan. Maybe just a setting, a few props. Maybe just a voice with a desire. But just sit down and see what you sound like on that day.

Also, my friend Aaron Fai told me about the Pomodoro Technique, which has been key for short focused writing sessions.

(3) What are you reading?

CLUTCH by Emily Nemens. And THE WEIRD edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

(4) What do you eat for breakfast?

Oatmeal, chia seeds, hemp hearts, honey, almonds, soy milk.

Why is this breakfast my life? All the most unsexy things have happened to my body, gout, shingles, high cholesterol, diabetes, ulcers.

(5) What is the worst poem you’ve ever written (bonus if you’re willing to share it)?

I’ve written so many embarrassing poems. Hundreds. For a while there, I was writing a love poem every week for my partner. Looking at them now is sort of like looking into a high school diary. I’ll try to find the first poem I ever published. I was nonstop reading Pablo Neruda. And even today, I still write a ton of clunkers.

(6) Can you please provide a bullet point list of Kiik’s indispensable wisdom?

I’m not a wise person at all, but some things that have been so key for me:

• Find 1-2 writer friends you love and keep them around you as much as you can. They’ll remind you to take yourself and your practice seriously.

• A rigorous exercise routine is critical for balancing a rigorous art practice.

• Start playing badminton. You don’t have to get any good. I’m not any good. It’s fun and energizing even if you don’t know what you’re doing out there.

• Experience literature in whatever way works best for you. If I waited for a moment of quiet and calm in my life, I’d almost never read. But audiobooks have kept me reading in a different way; I can experience literature while commuting, washing dishes and folding laundry.

• Go to therapy, prioritize your mental health.

• Seriously, try badminton. It’s the best game, and you’ll be around so many cool and kind people if you play. The game draws them in like a magnet.

(7) Who do you read again and again?

Anne Sexton. George Saunders. Aimee Bender. Haruki Murakami. Octavia Butler. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Kazuo Ishiguro. Lee Child. Roald Dahl. Laura Knetzger. Lynda Barry. Dav Pilkey. Raina Telgemeier.

(8) What sustains you?

Standup comedy. Beth Stelling. Hannibal Burress. Tig Notaro. Maria Bamford. Kyle Kinnane. Gary Gulman. Chelsea Peretti. Nikki Glasser. Pete Holmes. Erica Rhodes.

And badminton. Seriously, go play some badminton. You’ll love it.

And here’s the first poem I ever published. Oh my gosh, I even called it “untitled.”

(9) As I was finalizing the interview, I realized that I still have more questions for you. “hapas are so much hotter than anything” is one of the funniest poems I’ve ever read. When a poem induces a huge laugh, I intuitively feel that it is a success. And after reading your poem, I was inspired to return to and revise a poem I wrote over a decade ago.

It’s called “Mixed race girls are the most attractive breed of women.”

But I am also practicing Buddhism, which discourages introducing separation and disharmony, so I feel some hesitancy around making jokes that treat whiteness as a pejorative.

Do you consider the feelings of white people when you are writing about whiteness? What are your thoughts on the roles of irony and morality in poetry? I’ve also attached my mixed race poem which I have mixed feelings about.

Firstly, I love your poem, “MIXED RACE GIRLS ARE THE MOST ATTRACTIVE BREED OF WOMEN.” I feel like our work is on similar wavelengths. One of my favorite moments in the poem is where the speaker, getting some attention from “the guy fixing the electrical socket,” feels “special, like a new and exciting breed of human, / a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, or an X-Man, perhaps.”

I find that moment to be so interesting and honest and vulnerable. And for me, in my life, I’ve found that attention of any kind can be intoxicating. Especially when it has to do with physical attraction, which is something I’ve always been starved for. I’ve found myself thrilled by any compliment, even when there’s something weird, unsettling, maybe objectifying at the core.

I’d say in my work, that poem “hapas are so much hotter than anything,” I’m conscious that I’m trafficking in subjects that some readers may find to be sensitive, taboo, offensive. If I’m being honest, I care about everyone’s feelings, white people, people of color, even the celebrities I reference who will never set eyes on these poems.

But I don’t think that poem works, I don’t think the voice channeled in that poem works, without attempting to produce some discomfort in a reader. White reader. Reader of color. That discomfort is necessary. The discomfort is the occasion for the poem. I suppose I think that discomfort is ethical. The Asian speaker of the poem is working through their discomfort at having been offered an unsettling compliment. As they untangle the compliment, all sorts of nasty things pop out.

Something I do think about for a poem like this, is I feel if there’s a punch to be punched, I shouldn’t punch down. The speaker wants to punch out at the structures of racism around them. Those structures, institutions, are bullies, reserve power and judgement for themselves, and therefore the speaker is punching up. But speaker is also aware that white people protected and privileged by structural racism are made uncomfortable anytime this is addressed. The speaker has to be worried about this. Speaker is thinking, as I investigate, I must say these things aloud, but also I have to find a job. The person who says yes or no to hiring me will be white. I need to rent an apartment. My landlord will be white. In some ways the poem is about a speaker needing to walk back comments that could be offensive to a white person. They need to do this to be safe.

Once, while teaching an Ethnic Studies course, my mentor said, “Let’s be clear, this is not an I-hate-white-people class.” And I’ve often thought, I’m not interested in writing I-hate-white-people poems. I’m not totally sure why, but I think there’s a bigger, stranger and more unsettling boss beyond the white person. I suppose it’s an aggregation of laws, systems, norms.

These things are up to interpretation, but I feel pleased and honored that you like the poem. That it is a cousin and a support to your poem now. And so I get the feeling the punches are pointed in the right directions.

Thank you for your contribution to American Arts and Letters,

Ash

When frustrated by my creative practice, I find it useful to make “bad” art (or failure) the goal. If my work sucks, then I’ve achieved my goal. If the work doesn’t suck, then I’ve made “good” art. This lowers the stakes. By felicitating failure one facilitates flow states.

Humbly ask yourself, “Who cares?” Even canonical poets aren’t widely read; less than 1% of the world’s population reads poetry (unverified). If you have written for any length of time, it is likely that you’ve forgotten that writing is FUN. What if play is the point? The more painful and disturbing life is, the more poignant play becomes. It takes real ingenuity and imagination to thrive. Thriving is a refusal to harden in the face of hardship.

For two years, I made a 4 page zine every week. My method was simple: setting aside all aesthetic standards, I filled four 8.5” by 11” pages no matter what. “As long as it sucks” and “share what you don’t want to share” became my mantras. After more than two years of inching along in this method, I spontaneously collated the pages and submitted it to Bateau Press. My first chapbook, How to be the worst..., was published soon after.

“Perfection is the disease of the nation,” said Beyonce (unironically). I invite you to celebrate failure with me at the following events.

Constellation Reading Series

• Thursday, March 12, 7pm

• Bishop & Wilde/ Tin House Books- NW 26th and Thurman

Bad Art / Poetry Workshop with Creative Momentum (online)

• Sunday, March 29, 11am PST

• If you cannot afford the workshop, please message me for a promo code!

P.S. If you don’t think this video is funny, you are COMPLETELY missing the point.

In November, my friend Jaydra and I gave a performance-talk on Abject Expressionism. We had so much fun working together and sharing our work that we came up with a sequel: CRINGE.

Cringe is a defensive behavior. When we cringe, we separate ourselves from that which makes us cringe. It’s like how when someone farts in an aerobics class, everyone starts scrunching up their faces or pinching their noses to signal that they aren’t the kind of person… who farts?

It is important to become curious about what makes us cringe, rather than come to conclusions based on a knee-jerk reaction.

What is it about Disney adults that is so off-putting, and how might one engage with these feelings more strategically than condemning an entire group of people for their enduring love of Mickey Mouse?

What is it about white activists earnestly wearing “FUCK RACISM” t-shirts that I find so disturbing? What is about the desire to fight other peoples’ battles that irks me?

How does one learn not to recoil from Disney adults or white activists?

How can we use cringe as a tool to resist the urge to flatten other human beings? How can we use cringe to break the habit of exoticizing the foreign and turning the familiar into a cliché?

As Jaydra would say, “I believe everyone deserves to find love, even if they have bad taste and suspect hobbies.”

I adjure you to come to this event. See some of my worst art (and my best art!). Play “cringe or crush” with Jaydra and talk to strangers against your will. This could be a good weird-first date test as well. It will make you seem really interesting.

You are cordially invited.

CRINGE @ PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater

3530 SE Division St, Portland, OR 97202

Use code CRINGE-5 for a $5 ticket

I’m starting to feel low because my friends are anticipating their weekend dates: skiing, an AirBnb on the coast, a film festival in Seattle. It’s Friday night, and I’m testing myself: can I stay put and be calm? Can I summon the courage to “miss out” so that I can write?

My bathrobe is close enough to my space heater to …

Read more

What began as a profile of the artist Pipilotti Rist, whose '‘4th Floor to Mildness” is currently on display at the Portland Art Museum, devolved into a peripatetic discourse re: the strangeness of identity politics in NYC during Trump’s inauguration, experiencing art as a life-altering drug, and falling in love with a kaleidoscopic, Whitman-esque vision of the world.

What follows is an excerpt of my essay, Crazed Fan Letter:

“THIS is contemporary art,” I thought upon entering Rist’s Pixel Forest, her first retrospective in the United States, which showed at the New Museum in early 2017. I was 22, living and painting and partying in the basement of a gallery in New York City’s Chinatown. The owner, Michelle, gave me free rein of the basement, free of charge. Despite the prime real estate on the heavily foottrafficked/gentrified Orchard Street, I was too proud and arrogant to feel lucky. I was thoroughly invested in the belief that white people inherently owed me free stuff. With less than a thousand dollars in my bank account (and more often less than 100), it was a convenient belief to have. Michelle was white, so giving me the keys to her gallery was the least she could do to compensate for her whiteness, her innate privilege. (Michelle, to her credit, refused to think of white as a pejorative and wasn’t afraid to point out my hypocrisy. “You know you’re half-white, right?” she asked. My blood boiled.)

Less than two months prior to encountering Rist’s work, Trump had been elected. Having come of age with the impeccably professional veneer of the Obama presidency, I didn’t take Trump seriously. I believed that politics obeyed rules and standards: eloquence, tact, a record of pristine behavior (remember the shit Obama got for smoking cigarettes?), experience in the field, an Ivy League education, a Rhode Scholarship, et cetera.

Basically, with Trump in office, I could no longer function as if there was a safe boundary between reality and fiction. I adopted the rules of the children’s game “Opposite Day.” I stopped thinking of myself in terms of race and gender (according to Opposite Day, if race is real it is also not real). Previously bound to a myopic methodology that demanded perfection, mastery, and a rigorous research process that left nothing to chance, Trump—whose undisguised vulgarity and utter lack of qualifications did not prevent him from landing the most impressive job one could possibly put on a resume—inspired me to abandon what was in retrospect (and only in retrospect) a conventional artistic practice. A week before my first solo show (a series of respectably edgy representational paintings exploring themes of identity and ancestral trauma), I decided to build a multimedia installation from scratch entitled:

“TIME ISN’T REAL

WHITENESS IS A LIE

& YOUR MONEY DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING”

It was in this unhinged spirit of anomie that I first encountered Rist’s protest against the unassailable sterility of the museum.

If you’re curious to read the rest of Crazed Fan Letter, or if you want to dive into a 10-page survey of Rothko, or if you just want to come hang out with a bunch of writers / art lovers in the bombed-out cathedral of literature that is Mother Foucault’s, you are invited to Initial’s launch party on Jan 30. Hope to see you there!

Prior to breaking my foot, my morning ritual was to practice zazen and then briskly walk to Case Study Coffee on Alberta. One morning I ran into my friend Yusra, and told her I was reading Marion Woodman’s The Pregnant Virgin. Carey instantly turned around and said, “This is the first time I’ve heard Marion Woodman’s name mentioned out loud since my therapist recommended her work to me!” I responded by asking her if she had an eating disorder.

(Woodman is the only writer I’ve come across who addresses the topic in a rigorously literate and compelling way—as a matter of spiritual warfare.)

And so we got to know each other as Case Study regulars / Jungian fanatics. She began attending my readings and events and I became equally interested in this millennial woman dressed in beautifully baggy clothes, who drinks miraLAX with her morning coffee and purportedly became a lesbian after reading Woodman’s Addiction to Perfection.

A MICRO REVIEW OF “YELLOW PAGES”

The title is, of course, a nod to nostalgia—to the encyclopedia of phone numbers dumped on one’s doorstep and the romance of landlines and phone booths. Do you remember anyone’s phone number?

Yellow Pages is a bricolage of autofiction, philosophical reflection and sardonic observation, told in a variety of forms (poetry, fiction, zodiac wheel, doodles). Typically this sort of slapdash storytelling loses me as a reader, but I was riveted by Carey’s writing from beginning to end thanks to her mordant, psychological humor and unmistakable sincerity:

“I was terribly jealous that she and her siblings got to take Flintstones vitamins but years later, I saw her mom hit her little brother and I wasn’t jealous of her at all after that. I also watched as her hair became more brittle and her teeth began to erode as we went through high school and she got smaller and smaller, only subsisting on apples. She also slept with a guy I told her I liked. But before that, her boyfriend IM-ed me and told me how she had shaved her pubic hair for him as a gift for Valentine’s Day.”

Inconsolable, funny as hell, part-testimony, part-confession. (I personally am inspired to collect the humble fragments of my pubic hair in honey jars and donate it to paramours and/or The Museum of Modern Art.) The story continues to darken while evoking merciful laughter:

“She was like an HPV wart that just keeps returning whenever you thought it was finally gone for good. I found out later she was telling everyone I was a lesbian. I wish she would have told me instead so I could have saved some time.”

Earlier on in Yellow Pages, the poem Tom has a creepy, incantatory quality reminiscent of another favorite lesbian, Gertrude Stein. The effect achieved by recycling “Tom” in slightly varied phrasing mirrors the unreliable narrative of memory itself; the lover’s image becomes distorted like a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, and the doomed relationship echoes into the present, insisting on being re-membered and re-assembled against the erosion of time.

Yellow Pages, like the eponymous directory, is already out of print. I think Carey made 13 copies. She is a lawyer, and much to my astonishment, this self-published zine is the only outward manifestation of her innermost poetic reality. Let us pray that Carey continues sharing her writing with the world, for it is surely a worse place without her wry, unpolished contributions.