My denial that summer will actually end is slowly but surely disintegrating. This week is back to the grind: I officially begin my 4th year teaching elementary library, start the fall semester of classes for my Library Media endorsement program, and am going to have to start packing lunches and wearing pants again. Boo. Though it’s a little painful to go back to the routine, this summer was a pretty perfect balance of adventure (wedding, Alaska, floating the river, etc.) and being a lazy dirtbag (not leaving the house, finishing an entire 24x36 diamond painting, watching every true crime documentary available on Netflix). I feel refreshed, if not a little unprepared, but am ultimately very grateful for the last three months of a slower, simpler life.

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I can’t say I fulfilled any major creative goals this summer, and I’m trying to say that without shame. I had big plans to finish a bunch of stories I’ve started and dive back into the novel I’ve been toying with for a couple years. I wrote enough new poems to perform a set at the Julia Louis Dreyfest, journaled most days, and jotted down a few new story ideas, but for the most part, my creative output has been creative input — reading and thinking. The last few days have actually been the most productive all summer writing-wise as I work on a story I’d like to have a draft of soon, but I don’t feel a ton of pressure or urgency around it. Looking down the barrel of a new school year and at least three more semesters of graduate classes, I am fully anticipating and accepting that I’ll likely be taking a complete break from writing creatively for a while longer. I know that there are ways to keep my creative muscles in shape in the meantime, and that’s what I will grip onto — making intentional observations, reading stories, experiencing the juiciness of a life lived. I feel like I have this conversation with myself at the start of every new school year, like I’m a broken record of softening the blow. It’s okay, right? I’m clearly still trying to convince myself.

With that being said, this Substack will go back to less frequent posting for a while. My goal is one post a month of new work (if any happens to occur!), prompts, and book review type shit.

Speaking of, here’s a lil recap of books I’ve read this summer to close us out:

• Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein, 5/5 stars - Might be my favorite novel so far this year.

• Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash, 3/5 stars - Trying to do too much and felt sloppy.

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, 4/5 stars - Hate when I like a thing the people like, but the hype was worth it here.

• Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson, 5/5 stars - Andrea was a master.

• Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much by Jen Winston, 4/5 stars - Nothing spectacularly revelatory, but fun.

• Lovers XXX by Allie Rowbottom, 4/5 stars - Really fascinating insider look at the porn industry.

• Homebound by Portia Elan, 4/5 stars - Liked it, but I still think I’m too dumb for science fiction.

• Woodworking by Emily St. James, 3/5 stars - Strung this out over several weeks on audiobook and can’t say it really stuck with me.

• Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, 5/5 stars - Fucking loved it. See my past post for more.

• Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne, 2/5 stars - Can say I have truly CTRL+A+deleted this from my memory.

• Fights! by Scott McClanahan, 5/5 stars - Fucking loved this too. See this post for more.

• The Third Beat by Lauren Lavín, 4/5 stars - Not my favorite thing from Autofocus, but decent prose.

• Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle, 3/5 stars - I think I’m more interested in the lore of Chuck Tingle than his actual writing, but maybe I just need to try more?

• Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses, 5/5 stars - Eye-opening as hell. Must-read for both readers and writers.

• Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg, 5/5 stars - Masterful short-story writing. Would 100% read again.

• Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, 4/5 stars - Hefty and swirling. Too close to home re: mental health and the college experience.

• Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell, 2/5 stars - Doing too much. Hard pass.

• The Trouble with Heroes by Kate Messner, 4/5 stars - Only middle-grade book I read all summer and I’m glad it was this one.

• Work by Bud Smith, 5/5 stars - I still don’t understand how oil refineries work, but I laughed a lot.

• The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue, currently reading

• End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America by Chris Jennings, currently reading

• Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, currently reading

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Thanks for reading, once again! It’s been a blast being able to post more often this summer. If you are in the school world, best of luck with the beginning of a new year. For the rest of you, keep on keeping on.

xoxo,

brit

This is sort of part 2 of my “summer books about death” post from last week (LINK), so this week I offer my thoughts on Fights! by Scott McClanahan, out now on Rose Books.

Fights! transcends genre, and as dramatic as that sounds, it’s not an exaggeration. It’s autofiction, for sure. It’s a memoir of sorts. It’s a memorial to an enormous loss in the literary world. It’s hilarious and wry while also being absolutely heart-breaking in the specific way that McClanahan has mastered, and it’s also stylish and subversive, austere and fourth-wall breaking. It makes sense if you know his work, and if you don’t yet, do yourself a favor and do so.

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On its most accessible surface, this book truly is about fights, a record of the sometimes knock-down drag-out arguments between McClanahan and his wife, Juliet, as well as between himself and his editor and dear friend, Giancarlo DiTrapano, the notorious publisher of Tyrant Books and a juggernaut of the indie lit world of the 2010’s. Though it’s not a love triangle by any means, these three create something like a love angle, with McClanahan as its unassuming vertex. The concept of fights in general makes me uneasy — as a diagnosed anxious overthinking person, I’m not very good at them. But the author does an effective job of balancing the discordance of his fights, especially the ones with his wife, with humor and a kind of self-deprecating ridiculousness. When Scott and Juliet fight, they match each others’ freak, riding the wave together. They make fighting as a married couple into a team sport, a love story through marital spats.

The story of Scott and Gian’s relationship through the book is darker and heavier, though the nature of both of these men as people guarantees a certain level of farcicality. What initially seems like a classic case of muddled boundaries is revealed to be far more layered, their specific fights far more nuanced. Reading this story with the knowledge that Gian’s death is coming, dramatic irony looming on the distant dark horizon, adds another layer of complication like a balloon of dread threatening to pop.

Much like reading Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves, this book’s intimate proximity with the immediate experience of death was what made it so moving and immersive for me. Too often authors skip over this part — they go from insinuating a death has occurred to the fact of the death having happened without exploring the play-by-play discovery of death, the hard phone calls and the language of “he’s dead” and all the little things that happen on the day you find out the person that you love is no longer alive (Blake Butler’s account of his wife’s death by suicide in Molly is probably the most effective version of this that I’ve read). I remember this part too from my experience when my boyfriend died of meningitis when I was 21 (see the post linked above for more information) — the frantic phone calls I had to make, the tortuous liminal state of planning his funeral, the way you still have to eat and blink and put on clothes and remember how to drive a car and keep your own body alive when nothing as stupidly human as existing could possibly matter anymore. I’m so grateful when an author includes these details. I think it is critically important that these experiences surrounding death are talked about, normalized, prepared for instead of hidden behind metaphor and time jumps. I think it pays more respect to both the dead and the people they leave behind. Maybe if I would have read or seen these experiences in such unflinching, honest detail in the stories I consumed when I was younger, it would have given me a framework for my own grief, would have dampened the useless shame I attached to it. Maybe it wouldn’t have had any effect at all. Who knows.

Other things to note with this book:

— McClanahan’s manipulation of structure, the “restarting” of the book halfway through, with a whole new title page and verso and dedication to boot. Clever and cheeky and hilarious.

— The little trip to the afterlife in the last few pages, including the unflattering passport-esque photos of both Scott and Gian.

— Its special attention to place — West Virginia, NYC, Naples. These settings are nearly characters in and of themselves.

The Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature & the Arts was founded in 2022 and is headquartered in Italy, where Gian lived with husband. Their mission includes “funding and hosting residencies for writers and artists, fostering communities of creativity through readings and other events, and maintaining an editorial archive.”

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Thanks for another week of reading. Hope you are enjoying these last few weeks of summer.

xoxo,

brit

This month I read two banger books back to back that are centered around the colossal and ever-looming concept of death: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves (Avid Reader Press) and Fights! by Scott McClanahan (Rose Books). These books aren’t just about death in the abstract sense, nor are they steeped in nihilism, but the narratives of both fully immerse the reader in the immediate experience of death from the perspective of those bearing witness to it. Maybe what I’m talking about is grief, the birth and brutal inception of dealing with the aftermath of what the dead leave behind. These novels ate me alive and unlocked memories of my own experience of grief in a way I wasn’t expecting.

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The main character of Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt is Travis, a man to whom we are given minimal internal access, despite most of the story being from his perspective. His feelings and dispositions are expressed, often obliquely, through his scant words and monumental actions. There is no physical description of him aside from the fact that he is tall. And together, these voids give us the reader a blank canvas, which I think works for a character that isn’t quite human, or is entirely something more than human. “Travis is Death in the real world,” the jacket describes, something of a modern day Grim Reaper. He visits people on the day of their death and guides them gently across the threshold. These visits to seemingly unconnected characters are peppered throughout the main through-narrative of the story, each one bookended by a fitting title (“A Picture Maker”, “A Very Old Woman”) and the dead’s name and age at death. Some of these visits are expected, if not entirely wished for, by these people while some are an unwanted and terrifying realization of their impending mortality. Interestingly, these perimortem characters recognize Travis when he shows up — they are aware of what he represents. He’s not a ghost or frightening paranormal entity. The reality of what is happening is not denied.

The main thread of the story weaves in and out of these vignettes and centers around Travis’ connection with Dalia and Layla, a mother and young daughter who live in the apartment across the hallway from him. The relationship, initiated by the child, Layla, grows steadily over the course of several months, remaining familial and mostly platonic (save for a couple instances of Dalia coming onto Travis, which he kindly declines). Travis develops, at times reluctantly, into a father figure of sorts, soaking up the sweet normalcy of being around Dalia and Layla, enveloped in their simple, wholesome love. Yet, his knowledge of the impending future keeps him at a tempered distance.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Mid-way through the book, Layla becomes lethargic and feverish after coming home from her school Halloween dance, and the story reaches a tipping point in which Travis’ knowledge diverges from Dalia’s, in which it is revealed in a single sentence the devastating truth of his presence in their lives:

Maybe I should have, but I didn’t see this coming. Maybe some sort of self-protective denial was preventing me from admitting what this story hinted at. But it hit me like a punch in the gut. I gasped out loud, and plowed on into the brilliant, gut-wrenching, play-by-play story of Layla’s death — her diagnosis of bacterial meningitis, her misleading fluctuations in prognosis, the swirling denial of her mother and her birth father, Nick, the excruciating drawn-out process of the life being leeched from her by this unforgiving illness. And ultimately her name and a time stamped on the page, representing a life cruelly cut short — “Layla Preston—8 years, 6 months, 13 days”.

Here’s the deal:

When I was 21 years old, living and going to school in Missoula, Montana, my boyfriend of three years suddenly and brutally died of bacterial meningitis. He was 24 years old. I was the one that drove him to the ER. I was there when he was sedated to receive a spinal tap. I was there when the doctor gave me, because he was unconscious, his diagnosis. I was there to watch the pressure in his brain spike and retreat and spike again as his cranium was cut away and a slew of medications were pumped into his body. I was there when they declared him dead and then he was matched with recipients for all of his major organs. I was there at his funeral and I returned home to our condo all alone. It was the most traumatic and life-altering experience of my life, one of those moments after which every single aspect of the universe is entirely different from what it was before. I still think about it nearly every day. I’ve yet to write the story of this experience, though I hope to someday do so. This piece that was part of March Xness 2023 is the closest I’ve come to sharing it publicly.

I’ve never read about an experience of bacterial meningitis, let alone one that aligns so closely with mine, and I didn’t know when I picked up this book that I would be. Dalia’s experience with grief, which is detailed with such realistic sensitivity here, also struck a chord of familiarity with me. I recall the directionless flailing, the catatonia, the simultaneous desires to both get entirely past the death and back to normalcy as soon as possible as well as stay in the throes of it forever because it’s all you have left of a person. I remember the desperation for connection and the sickness that followed when anyone you reach out to isn’t the person you lost. I remember feeling so fucking old, and all of it feeling so unfair.

I don’t know of Reeves’ closeness to the experience of a traumatic death like this, but as a person who knows it, I found so much that rings true here. So often we see the big, terrible death of a novel come at the very beginning, dictating the course of the story to come, or at the very end as a resolution of sorts. I respect the way that the author places the central death of this death-filled novel right in the middle so that we get to solidly immerse in the life beforehand as well as witness the aftermath of the “after”. I could dig in deeper to his treatment of symbols or conjecture about the connections between the other deaths throughout, but my lasting impression of this book is going to be its realistic treatment of death and the grieving. It’s ugly and unapologetic.

This was a hard read for me, one of those type-2 fun kinds of books where having read it is more enjoyable in the moment than the active process of reading it. Much like running, like writing, like therapy, like all those other things I associate with myself and my identity. But ultimately it was a potent catharsis. Maybe writing about it one day will be too.

5/5 stars. 10/10 recommend. Just be kind to yourself if you do.

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This post has already gone on long enough, so I’m going to save my review of Fights! for next week, where I’ll also share pics and poems from the Julia Louis-Dreyfest. Thanks as always for reading my words. Have a joyful week.

xoxo,

brit

If you happen to be in the Billings, Montana area next weekend, I’ll be reading at the Poetry Jam at the Julia Louis-Dreyfest on Saturday, August 8th at 7PM at Frae Collective in downtown Billings. Tix are $15 at the door (which supports the Young Poets Program that provides poetry education to Billings-area students) or free with a wristband for the whole festival weekend, which also gets you into some rad shows all over town. This will be my fourth or fifth time participating in Dreyfest and it is always an absolute delight. It’s great to connect with this group of ridiculously talented creative folks and support a great cause. Should be an awesome time!

Now on to regularly scheduled programming:

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What I’ve been consuming lately:

Alone

If you aren’t aware of the premise of this show, ten survivalists are dropped into the remote wilderness, usually somewhere cold as fuck, with limited supplies and a set of camera equipment (there’s no camera crew following them — they are responsible for capturing all of their own footage). Whoever survives the longest without tapping out wins a buttload of money. I would last all of four hours out there before I needed a snack and a blanket, but it’s fascinating to watch these people endure and manipulate the brutal elements for upwards of over a hundred days. The season I’m currently watching is set in northern Canada about 200 miles above the Arctic Circle and they are harvesting moose and accidentally shooting themselves with bows and it’s entertaining as hell.

Fridge cigarette

Diet Coke + cold brew coffee + splash of half-and-half + cold foam on top. Yes, I tried this stupid TikTok trend and I realize how gross it sounds, but believe me, it’s a delightful little mid-afternoon summer caffeine treat.

Fire From the Hip by Finn Wolfhard

I never watched Stranger Things, but the kid from that show just put out this banger album. It’s cheerful, summery, indie rock that makes me feel like I’m floating down the Clark Fork through the middle of Missoula in late summer. And lemonade, for some reason. Favorite song: “Nice to Meet You Again.”

Plant propagation

It’s taken me my entire adult life but my plant game is finally on point. I’ve cracked the code on propagating and right now have little jars of pothos and peperomia and spider plant babies in every spot of sunlight I can find. JOY.

Bren Lukens covering “Constant Headache” by Joyce Manor

Bren Lukens, formerly of 4th wave emo legend Modern Baseball, performed a solo acoustic set in Chicago last weekend, his first time on stage in eight years. Here is the full set, including a “Constant Headache” by Joyce Manor cover fake-out (this is a whole thing between these bands, I guess?).

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Thanks for reading! Happy August.

xoxo,

brit

If you haven’t heard Phoebe Bridger’s new song, “Lost Boys", watched the video, or caught her performance with a backing band composed entirely of kids on Jimmy Fallon, please do all three immediately. This has been my song of the summer and inspired the vibe of a set of characters that I’ve been tooling around with lately. No end game, no purpose, just having fun writing. Here’s a chunk:

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Cam made a list of the things he had to do today:

1. Find a place to piss. Ideally, in a toilet, but if it was one of the nights he was sleeping in the woods or on a park bench, anything he could duck behind would work, anywhere he could bury what he eliminated from his body.

2. Coffee. Coffee was non-negotiable. The caffeine, of course, was necessary, but it was more psychological than he tended to give it credit for, the act of coffee, like a bookmark or a kickstart or a connection back to a normal, settled life. It was one little way he could remind himself he was still a normal human, that he could still tether himself back to a semblance of what he used to be, the good parts, at least.

3. A meal. His stomach grumbled, a hollow, beastly sound, a frequency so low he could convince himself that it was just tinnitus, he was just hearing things. But Cam wasn’t stupid — he knew he had to keep himself alive. He knew he had to fuel his body. So whether it came by theft or charity or the last of his dwindling funds, he ate.

4. A shower. It had been days and he was starting to stink. He didn’t mind the smell, his own human scent, natural and sharp and solid. He remembered the smell of the drunks and addicts that he encountered during his missionary work, the way their stench reeked sour and chemical, the drugs and sorrow leeching out of their bodies. It smelled like pain. It frightened him. He knew he didn’t smell that way, but he knew the more rank he smelled, the less likely he was to hitch a reliable ride, so he kept his face shaved, his hair soft, and his armpits as clean as he could manage. Again, whether it came by theft or charity, he would find a shower.

5. His next ride. It was true Cam didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t have a destination in mind aside from away from home, away from Utah. This list was his destination. Wherever he could find the preceding items and keep in motion, that was where he wanted to go.

Toony make a list of things she had to do today:

1. Check on Lyle. Make sure he woke up, shook off the hangover, went to work. It wasn’t her responsibility, she knew that, but if he missed his alarm, slept through his shift, got fired yet again, it would become her problem. She also secretly savored the peace once he left the trailer. The moment of quiet and stillness between when he left for the motel and she went to bed to sleep away the day until her next shift was golden and precious.

2. Try to get some sleep. Though she’d been working the graveyard shift at the truck stop for almost a year now, her body still refused to cooperate with the nocturnal rhythm. It was against human nature, she decided, to close one’s eyes against the daylight, to waste away the time. She could manage 3 hours, maybe 4 or 5, before her body tossed and turned her away. But she would try. She had to.

3. Wake up, get ready for work, and leave the house before Lyle returned home. This meant she had a couple of hours to kill in town before her shift started, so she’d go to the local library and surf the internet or page through the magazines. Sometimes she’d pull a novel off the shelf and read in one of the stiff-backed chairs by the window, get lost in a Western or a science-fiction or a love story. She’d fallen asleep there more than once, the sweet old librarian jostling her awake at closing time. Sometimes she’d get a fifty-cent coffee at McDonald’s and walk around the park watching the squirrels get fatter and fatter every day. Sometimes she’d just sit in her car in a parking lot somewhere and smoke cigarettes and write in her notebook. She had dreams once of being a writer, of those hastily scribbled words becoming something, but those dreams had gone wherever it all went, evaporated just like her family and her talents and her ambition had, for whatever reason they had. She didn’t know and she didn’t wonder. She knew that would hurt.

4. Go to her shift at the truck stop. Relieve Stanley or Krystal or Sin-Yoo or Nick, whoever had worked the day shift. There were multiple attendants (that’s what corporate wanted them to call themselves — ‘attendants’, like they were attending something or attending to something) that worked the day shift, but Toony was the only graveyard attendant. Nine PM to 6 AM, 8 hours with an unpaid 1-hour lunch that she ended up working through anyway because she was the only one there — corporate didn’t seem to mind that: a 90-lb, 20-year-old female alone in a truck stop in rural Montana in the pitch of night who never took her mandated break. Whatever. It’s not like she could go anywhere or do anything in the middle of the night anyway. It was easier to just keep working.

5. While at work, her duties were simple: man the register. Ring up anyone who came in. Fresh coffee when she came in and when she left. Same with the slushy machine. Toss the day’s hot case. Restock anything that was glaringly low. Stay awake.

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Thanks for another week of reading. Stay cool!

xoxo,

brit

The last month has been a whirlwind of joy. My partner and I got married at the end of June in a small, intimate ceremony at a park along the Missouri River and had a backyard BBQ the following day with our closest friends and family. I wore a vintage dress I got for $18 and we had matching D&D-themed Chucks. We wrote our own vows that captured my earnest sentimentality and his wry sense of humor and my sister took the most beautiful photographs of everyone. The rain that had been predicted all week held out until literally the minute after we signed our papers, and as we were leaving the park, a colossal rainbow broke out across the entire horizon. It felt like the closest thing to a nod of approval from the universe. We ate Howard’s Pizza and smoked meat and cake pops and played yard games and watched the most spectacular sunset explode over the valley. Everything about the weekend was simple, perfect, and exactly us. We had no desire to spend a ton of money or follow any of the arbitrary wedding rituals or participate in the pomp and circumstance spectacle of it all (no shade to those who are into that — it’s just not for us). The most important thing was being able to have a good time and celebrate our love with our people, and we definitely did.

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Last week, we went on a 7-day cruise from Seattle to Southeast Alaska and had the most magical adventure. It was our first time on a cruise ship and we were in absolute awe of the level of indulgence and choice available to us in that environment. We aren’t fancy folks, but we took full advantage of the all-inclusive element of this trip. I had never eaten such delicious food in my life, nor have I drank as much Starbucks or taken as much pleasure in afternoon naps. Alaska itself, even just the tippy-tip of the southeast portion that we went to, is indescribably beautiful. I kept saying to my husband that everything in Alaska is so BIG. I could hardly fathom the scale of everything we were seeing — the glaciers, the mountains, the trees, the ocean. There are definitely similarities to the Montana landscape, but larger and richer and more intense. The part of Alaska we visited is a temperate rainforest, so temperatures are relatively mild compared to what we are used to at this time of year, but the amount of precipitation and proximity to the ocean makes everything lush and iridescent green. We took a helicopter to the top of Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, rode a train to the summit of White Pass near Skagway, watched glaciers calving and sea otters playing in the water in Glacier Bay, kayaked around the Tatoosh Islands in Ketchikan, and ate escargot and life-changing roquefort cheese in Victoria. It was an incredible adventure and an experience in which I felt completely present and alive.

As I was going through pictures from our wedding weekend, I came across a lovely photo of a friend and her husband that I immediately shared with her. Her response was, “All your friends are fat and happy!”, a line that has stuck in my mind throughout this month of joy. I wrote this poem one day on the cruise ship while staring out at the Pacific Ocean and thinking about her brilliant words:

for MCB

All my friends are fat & happy —

just the way I like them,

soft with safety and joy,

grip loosened, grinning with our teeth.

We let ourselves go

after all those starved years

as husks filled with fire and knowledge —

pointless facts overflowing hollow bones.

You have to quit trying at some point.

That’s when it comes to you.

I’m in my rock tumbler era,

battering away the magic shell of

who we thought we were.

Now we’re all a sigh,

a mouth stretched into a yawn,

a hand shading our eyes as we squint into the sun.

We are grass wet and between our toes.

We are the wind whipping our faces pink.

We are a worn-out jacket four sizes too big.

We are hairy legs.

We are early to bed, early to rise, easy to love —

not meant to be, but a product of hard work.

No one told us to forget about carving,

so we figured it out on our own.

No one told us that what used to eat away the hours was just pretend,

so we took one for the team.

I press my body against the bodies of my friends,

embracing all of you.

Your body is proof of life,

the unabashed joy of your hips and cheeks and belly rolls,

fat & happy & alive.

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Back to your regularly schedule writing shit next Sunday! Thanks for reading and hope you have a great week.

xoxo,

brit

Prompt: Start with the image of a date on a calendar.

It was a Friday again. Already. He wasn’t sure how time had passed so quickly yet so uneventfully, sneakily slipping past in the moments between blinks. In the corner of the little box representing today — a whole day somehow shrinking into a two-inch square — the number 4 in lime green marker. Yesterday, Thursday, the same green number, but a 5. Tomorrow, the Saturday box, had a 3, and on the next row, a jump into a new week, a new set of squares, a 2 became a 1 became a big green smiley face filling the entire box for Tuesday, the green letters spilling into the following days — ELIZA COMES HOME!!!

If he hadn’t been paralyzed by this feeling he’d been told was grief, shock, sadness, maybe he’d cross off the days, slash through each box with a thick red pen. Maybe he’d take the calendar down off the wall. Maybe he’d rip it apart, shred it with his fists until paper cuts wept blood onto the pages. Maybe he’d light them on fire or chew them up and spit them on the ground or use them to wipe up the tears that had yet to dry from where they streamed down his cheeks.

Because Eliza was not coming home, not on Tuesday, not ever, not to him or to anyone. And in four days that face would solidify into a cold, cruel reality and he didn’t know what he was going to do.

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I want to hold my heart in my hands

and feel every flagrant palpitation beat between my palms.

I want to feel my lungs expand

and demand the air that fills them.

I want to climb the tree of my bloodline

and wear salty blisters into my skin.

I want to subsist on the sounds of the morning

—beep of the garbage truck

—the little screams from each blade of grass reaching towards the sun

—birds splashing in the ocean of the sky.

I want every memory etched into concrete

and not blown away in the sand.

I want my body intact, not

—gathered from where I scattered it in the street

—strung back together with the sinew of regret

—glossed over with sweat and shame.

I want to feel it all.

I want scars instead of fresh, weeping wounds.

I want to translate the foreign language of my past.

I want the boredom of control.

I want ‘self’ tattooed onto my knuckles so I can remember that when it all burns down,

when every weapon is gone,

I still have these fists.

I want to grip instead of shrug.

I want to sob instead of swallow.

I want a bee sting instead of a snake bite.

I want a pain that will not kill me.

I want the potency of a fully-articulated life.

I want to feel it all.

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She felt like a fool, waiting like this. In her hotel room, she had put all her clothes in the dresser as if this were her own home. She had lined up her toiletries along the counter in the bathroom, smoothed the bedspread into an even plane, trying to impose some external order on her internally chaotic world, trying to pass the time until he showed up. When they texted earlier that day, he said he probably wouldn’t be available until around 8pm — he was meeting a student for dinner at a sake bar a few blocks away and then he would swing by. She’d typed her room number and hit send, something about it feeling monumental. He’d responded with a thumbs up emoji. She knew nothing about him beyond his profile, the sparse texts they’d sent, and what she could dredge up about him from the website of the university where he was an adjunct. He was, disappointingly, absent from social media, so she couldn’t get her fix of imagination from there. It was impossible to know whether punctuality was to be expected, or precision, or follow-through. She’d noticed a trend in these men, especially the Gen Z ones, the ones in big cities, that time was fluid, aloofness acceptable. She hated to admit she was irrationally drawn to it, the way they handled life like it was unlimited, like time wasn’t perpetually slipping through their fingers. She was envious of it, sure. But at the same time she just desperately wished any of them would show up when they said they would.

She checked her phone for the thousandth time. It was 9:13pm and she’d sent two follow-up texts: should i order champagne? and can’t wait to see you. The second one felt desperate, but she was fucking desperate. The agitation was becoming undeniable and starting to sour her mood. She hoped she could stifle it enough to prevent it from making her icy when he did finally materialize, but this kind of anxiety tended to resist compartmentalization.

The part she hated the most, the part that exhausted her, was maintaining the tableau. You see, she wanted to present the proper first impression when he walked in. She couldn’t be sitting there on the hotel bed, crouched over her phone in lingerie, her belly folding onto her thighs, when he decided to walk through the door. She couldn’t become the visual manifestation of her swirling desperation, let it make her ugly. No, she had to present as perpetually hot, sexy in the moments when no one was looking. She had to paint a picture that, in one glance, would fully articulate everything she wanted to be — confident, capable, smart, and most importantly, in control. She could never, ever let her impression of control slip. It was utterly draining.

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Thanks for reading. No posts for a couple weeks — I’m getting married and then fucking off to Alaska for a bit. Be back in mid-July! Love you!

xoxo,

brit

Recently read:

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe — A true-crime investigation into the suspicious death of a 19-year-old man whose con-artist naivety gets him entangled with some next-level grifters. An interesting look at the ways that law enforcement can royally fuck up and how the thirst for money and status (by MEN, mind you) is truly pure poison.

I Love You Don’t Die by Jade Song — Queer and heartfelt, a mix of an “unhinged woman” novel, a story of female friendship, and an honest portrayal of mental illness. A little drawn-out and dramatic at times, but really loved the characters here. Could have done without Kevin completely.

Gunk by Saba Sams — Read this one in 2 days. A divorced couple who own a grimy club hire a mysterious, sexy bartender who ends up pregnant with the ex-husband’s baby, which appears to be the miracle child the ex-wife has always wished for — just not in this convoluted manner. Again, unhinged woman + female friendship, as well as toxic relationships and complicated connections to motherhood. Super British. And incredible fucking cover art.

Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic — You might know him as the Etymology Nerd on TikTok, and this book is just as compulsively consumable his account. It examines how social media, particularly the behavior of algorithms and our reactions to them, is actively and rapidly influencing the development of language. Linguistics is incredibly fascinating to me and Aleksic’s darkly humorous and approachable style of talking about super of-the-moment culture reminds me of Jon Ronson.

Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno — I listened to this audiobook during my peak week of training for a half-marathon in May and it was the perfect book for dim, crispy morning miles. Sam leaves her partner and job in Brooklyn to fix up her family’s deteriorating cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin. Her sense of reality seems to slowly crumble, and she can’t decide whether to blame it on her alcoholism, her gender dysphoria, or the spirit of her missing (and presumably dead) mother. I wish some of the relationships in this story would have been a little more fleshed out, but I dug the moodiness.

A Good Person by Kirsten King — Read in one sitting on a sick day and had a good, easy time. Lillian’s subpar situationship unexpectedly dumps her, to which she reacts by performing a drunken hex on him. A joke, of course, but then he actually winds up dead. As Lillian tries to outrun the cops, she grows more and more (surprise!) unhinged. I loved how Lillian’s twisted logic grows increasingly bizarre and her narration tries to convince the reader to buy in.

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Currently reading:

Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses — I accidentally stole this from my old library (sorrynotsorry) and am “assigning” it to myself as my craft book for the summer. An examination of how what we consider “quality writing” and “good craft” is deeply informed by cultural values, which has inevitably silenced voices in an industry that is STILL dominated by white, cis, hetero, able, upper-middle class men.

Canon by Paige Lewis — Only about a quarter of the way in, but this is already one of the most unique stories I’ve ever read, and I’m predicting it will be in my top-10 books of the year. A quirky and bold take on an epic quest that I truly can’t describe. Take it from my mental-image casting: Eliot Page as Yara, Odessa A’zion as Adrena, and Danny McBride ala Eastbound and Down as God.

Plastic by Scott Guild — I just saw Backrooms and now everything looks like Backrooms, which is sort of unsettling but I’m not complaining. This book has definite Backrooms vibes. So far, it’s narrated by a plastic humanoid doll named Erin who is performing the voiceover of a TV show about her life and experiences a terrorist attack at her place of work. Post-apocalyptic? Alternative universe? A dystopian meta story-in-a-story? Entertaining regardless.

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Thank you for reading. Happy summer break!!

xoxo,

brit

From across the internet, I kind of feel like Adam Shaw and I are kindred spirits. We’re both parents, weird indie lit writers, former/current emo kids, reciprocal Instagram story likers, and we both hold an appreciation for the early 2000’s of our youth that seems to consistently weasel its way into our respective writing. His brand new piece in Farewell Transmission is, in fact, far from brand new, as Adam describes in a recent post on his Substack, “The Sad Dad Diaries”:

Yet, this is the sort of CNF about being young that can only be written after a heavy dose of growing up, perhaps after the emotional decimation of becoming a parent yourself clarifies the past and allows for a kind of retelling that retains the voice of a child but contains the symbolic astuteness of someone older, wiser, more understanding, and less naive.

The opening paragraph establishes the three main pillars of this piece: Dad, the McDonald’s Diner, and Sum 41. The latter two do the superb work of placing us squarely within the specific nostalgia of this time, lighting up every sense with the firmly distinct sights and sounds and tastes of a just-pre-9/11 world, arguably the best time to be a teenager, saccharine in its comfort and optimism. It feels good, it feels familiar, and the line “a girl I wanted to marry shaved her head in the middle of a halfpipe” tells us everything we need to know about who this kid is right now. Dad’s first action here — sweating and stomping into the house, tossing his lunch box towards the sink, announcing that they were going to the grand opening of the McDonald’s Diner — does something similar, painting a clear picture of this man through a series of potent descriptors and, importantly, omissions. Namely, the absence of a mention of a wife, of a mother. And if you’re still questioning how well this guy fits the stereotype of stolid blue-collar single dad, the comparisons drawn between him and his sons in the following paragraph solidify both of their respective characterizations: “He was the type of guy who could strip a house to its studs, rebuild it. I was the kind of kid who built a life in The Sims, locked myself in the family computer room and ate Doritos while it grew. Isaac and I wore gym shorts that draped past our knees, Hawaiian shirts baggy enough to cover the ballooning of our waists that had started when we’d quit football the year before. Dad returned from his shower in a polo tucked into slacks and told us to stand up, get into church clothes, so we did.”

Once they get to the eponymous McDonald’s Diner, we are met with a series of semi-unsettling incongruences, embodied by the repetition of the semi-sarcastic ‘slogan’, “Two classic restaurants in one great place.” There’s the incongruence between McDonald’s original, modest true self and the pretentious iteration (McDonald’s turducken, if you will) it is trying to be: “The place was empty except for a man in a bleached Appetite for Destruction shirt dipping McNuggets into a sauce cup,” or the juxtaposition of grease-soaked Big Mac boxes plated next to gravy-laden meatloaf. There’s the incongruence between the dad’s genuine reverence for this place and obvious joke that it all is to the sons: “Watch this, I told Isaac, and I picked up the phone, shouted whassuuuuuup? like the Budweiser commercials I’d seen on TV. Stuck my tongue out and everything. Dad grabbed the phone from my hand, muttered an apology into the receiver and hung up.” There’s the incongruence between the hope for what could be, in the eyes of both father and son, and the reality of what is.

When the friction of these oppositions reaches its most antagonistic, the narrator drops into a moment of hopeful imagining, a childlike daydream of a do-over full of nostalgic name-drops like Circuit City and Aladdin’s Castle. Father and sons enter a McDonald’s Diner in which they will laugh and connect over Battletoads and eat ice cream and be entirely on the same page, where the incongruences disappear, where everything feels harmonious and right. Gone are the Appetite for Destruction guy and his sad nuggets, the dried chunks of ketchup clinging to the bottles, the undeniable tension between the dad’s expectation of this experience and his sons’ disappointing lack of excitement. In this McDonald’s, the narrator is “telling him about bands, showing him made-up logos I’d sketched between class notes even though the only instrument I’d ever played was the trombone. I pictured him nodding, smiling ear-to-ear, asking how’d you come up with that?”. It’s a fantasy not of place or experience, of paternal connection.

The narrator comes out of this momentary fantasy, pulling part of it back to reality with him when he asks his dad, “can we get ice cream?”, and for a moment we think that hope and reality are going to intersect, that that point of connection is going to be established, but when the dad picks up the diner phone to potentially place a dessert order, when he unceremoniously asks for the check, when the son collapses back into his seat, the distance between hope and reality becomes seemingly insurmountable.

Honestly, I’m not sure how to understand the last paragraph — maybe I’m stupidly missing something or I’m reading too far into it — but when the dad “nodded toward the mall, said let’s go,” I refuse to believe that he made them get in the car and go home. I’m a reader and a person tending towards hope, and my hope is that his nod toward the mall meant that the Circuit City, Aladdin’s Castle do-over imagined just moments before manifests into reality, that the parental connection that was nearly severed by the awkward strain of the McDonald’s Diner a moment ago firmly establishes itself. And I think that’s what Adam is getting at in this gorgeous, heartfelt closing sentence:

Thanks for reading. Hope you have a lovely week. Happy Pride Month! 🏳️‍🌈

xoxo,

brit

Jules was small, shorter than me and thin in all the ways that I was voluptuous, boyish in a way that could best be described as scrappy. But despite her size, she possessed a freakish strength that I envied. On the day I moved in, as I struggled with my boxes and bags, dripping sweat made of both effort and nerves, Jules pulled my entire queen-sized mattress and solid oak writing desk from the back of the U-haul and into my room with no assistance at all. Her constant, unrequested help was welcomed, but also made me wither in shame.

It wasn’t a physical attraction to her that overwhelmed me, but an earnest fascination, an preoccupying intrigue, in the way that most things with Jules were neither one thing nor another. Her mousey brown hair was always in her face, unless it was greasy enough from several days of not showering to stay put when slicked back. Her smile was wide, buck teeth between thin lips, and with her buggy eyes and elf-like ears, she reminded me of a cartoon character. She wasn’t cute, and she wasn’t like the tanned and bleach-blonde varsity sports girls I pined for in high school, their bulging hamstrings and knobs of shoulder muscles always flexing and on full display, the ones I cast in lurid locker room shower fantasies. Yet, I ached to see the hidden parts of Jules, if nothing else, to understand her better — the backs of her knees and the spaces between her fingers, the crevices of her molars and the follicles of her armpit hair. I wanted to live in the scrapes behind her band-aids.

We initially were connected through our mutual employment by the local parks and recreation department. During summer break, I taught swimming lessons to rolly-polly toddlers at the public pool and she worked for the parks maintenance department that trimmed the trees and emptied the garbage cans and cleaned the pool filters diligently once a week. She drove around town in a shitty S10 weighed down with a bed full of branches and scrap metal, her elbow sticking out the open window.

I first glimpsed her as I was swimming laps before the pool opened, when Jules and her crew came by for their weekly pool cleaning duties. The image was striking, like a statue carved of marble, tiny-framed Jules dragging a gray hose over one shoulder, a cigarette hanging off of her lip, trucker hat pulled low over eyes. Her work boots left a trail of small but forceful footprints in the concrete of the pool desk behind her. As her presence flushed through my body, an attraction not unfamiliar in feeling but unexpected in source, I sunk deeper into the water to cover myself up. I was afraid not for her to see my body, but was terrified that my overwhelming intrigue would be somehow visible on me, like a glowing aura emanating from me, announcing, “She’s freakishly into you for some odd reason.” I watched her adeptly attend to the pool’s pressure gauges and crack jokes with the men on her crew and walk around with a swagger that defied gender, that made me shiver underneath the chlorine haze of the water. She has to be gay, I thought.

I showed up early every morning for the rest of the season to swim laps. I told my fellow swimming instructors that I was training for a triathlon that fall, but in actuality I was wracked with a sickening hope that I’d see Jules again. Of course, she wasn’t Jules yet. She was just this ethereal creature, a repository of undefinable draw, the source of the most agonizing, misplaced crush I’d ever experienced before. Those locker room girls didn’t even compare.

And of course, I saw her again. Every Friday morning to clean the pool of all the chlorinated pee built up from a week’s worth of toddler lessons in preparation for the weekend rush of families, and sometimes randomly throughout the week to attend to a variety of pool-related maintenance. And every time, it was a rush like being drunk, like a half dozen shots of bottom-shelf vodka at a frat party, that detached flush of pleasure. It was simultaneous desire to gain her attention, catch her watching my tanned arms slice through the water doing backstroke and likewise pull her in, as well as a paralyzing fear that she’d notice me. There was safety in having an impossible crush, the distance a comfort. Yet my curiosity swirled me up.

Thanks for reading! Have a lovely week.

xoxo,

brit

I’ve been a part of many writing groups. As participant and facilitator, virtual and online, with teens and with adults, with friends and with strangers, generative and workshop-style, successful and not. I’ve learned something valuable from every iteration, but the group that I’m currently a part of has been especially filling my cup recently. We meet 2-3 a month at a local coffee shop and spend a couple hours sharing our work, doing fun writing prompts together, discussing books, but mostly just talking. I met these folks through my work at the local LGBTQ center and the friendship that has blossomed through our shared connection with creativity brings me a spot of joy that I didn’t expect to find. I’ve come to treasure this time not just for its creative kindling but for the scheduled, non-negotiable way it brings us, a group of busy and admittedly socially fraught adults, together.

I usually bring a numbered list of prompts, one of us chooses a random number, and we spend anywhere from five to twenty minutes going with it. Sometimes we will just come up with a topic or starting point on the spot. Sometimes it’s a specific directive. Sometimes it’s a line or a word. Occasionally it will be an image. Sometimes we follow it to a tee, and sometimes we alter or abandon it completely. It doesn’t matter. The purpose is just to give a nudge and let ourselves go wherever we want to. The way we each interpret these prompts in such different ways and apply our individual voices to create something wholly unique is invigorating.

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Here are some of my recent favorites:

1. Write a story in the form of a voicemail.

2. A crack on the ceiling that resembles something distinct.

3. “I woke up with confidence woke with restlessness.” (from poem by Emily Perez)

4. Write about a character who is a superfan of someone or something.

5. A character who can’t do something very simple - wink, snap their fingers, etc.

6. Something painfully beautiful

7. A character is browsing at a thrift or antique store and sees an item that makes them feel a very strong emotion.

8. A plastic bag full of everything someone owns.

9. Write about someone who is losing feeling in their hands or fingers, whose ability to touch is gradually fading away.

10. Begin with two characters touching foreheads.

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Thanks for reading! Catch you next week.

xoxo,

brit

Earlier this year, I took a month-long virtual workshop through the Adirondack Center for Writing and taught by Devin Kelly titled “Rewriting Your Life”. The intention of this class was to explore the variation in writing different genres — fiction, memoir, CNF, poetry — and dissect what each genre is capable of containing. We discussed how by expanding and contracting the aperture on the scope and intention of our writing, we can stretch ourselves creatively and find new avenues of expression. Devin is an absolute sweetheart of a guy, not to mention an esteemed runner, a high school teacher, a new dad, and the writer of some of the most beautiful and honest words I’ve ever read (including his weekly newsletter Ordinary Plots). His novel Pilgrims came out last year and blew me away with the nuance of its characters and their winding, life-affirming journeys. It was so very cool to be able to participate in this workshop with him.

Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse

Welcome to Ordinary Plots: Meditations on Poems + Verse.

Every so often, I’ll post a poem on here, along with some brief thoughts on that poem. A lot of my thoughts revolve around the same things: wonder, ordinariness, light, and whatever exists in tangent to these things. Thank you for following along…

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6 years ago · 50 likes · Devin Kelly

In my notes from the class, I wrote down this brilliant little gem that Devin blessed us with:

It’s a thought-provoking claim. I’m just coming off of a months-long stretch of not writing, and while it was an expected break, it came with inevitable guilt, a fear of losing my momentum, my skill, my creative stamina. Finding the consistent time, space, and energy to “be a writer” is a privilege afforded by having the assets and lifestyle consistent with dedicating oneself to it. I’m a parent who works full-time and for the last three years has also been a student, which often makes my time, space, and energy limited to non-existent. It is during these busy periods of life when I can’t put my ass in the chair as often as I’d like that keeping the creative writing spirit alive can by necessity take another form, when more than just writing counts as writing. Reading? Counts as writing. Journaling? Counts as writing. Daydreaming, whether about story ideas or characters or just letting your mind freewheel at will? Totally counts as writing. Taking in stories, via film or television or audio or conversation with real humans? Let that count at writing!

I’ve told it to my writing groups over and over again — nearly anything you do can be in service of your writing if you shift your intention to make it so. And especially in those times when pen-to-paper isn’t possible, you can stay in the groove of a work-in-progress or flex your creative muscle completely through theater of the mind. The product has to come eventually, and it will, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be doing the work if you aren’t recording the words (or are only jotting them down in shorthand within your notes app *raised hand emoji*). While Devin may not have intentionally been referring to this oblique sort of practice when he said those words, that’s what they hold for me. “All of your writing connects with all of your writing,” — all of the ways of thinking that happen, all of the work that goes into writing that isn’t writing, connects with the actual practice of writing. It’s far from an excuse, but it is a comfort to know that writing can be constant even when it is not.

Here are a couple of resulting pieces from that workshop:

We are looking down the barrel of a life together, wed and cohabitating and inextricably tied, and the thing about a second marriage is that you’ve already accumulated all the things you’ll ever need. Even after splicing what you thought was your life with exacting, surgical precision — half the sofa set, the car but not the house, the shitty knife and 3 plates of the fine china — supposedly you’ve met some point of self-actualization where you realize you don’t actually need the rest.

What you have is an excess of convenience. Whenever something breaks or becomes obsolete, whenever you discover a small way in which your world could be easier, you grip onto it. Where I learn to live without, you solve the problems at hand, anticipate them before they even arrive. In this way, you’ve accumulated every iteration of kitchen appliance and a closet full of board games and a flower pot that is supposed to be smarter than I am, that dictates when to give it water and sunshine like I don’t know better.

I’ve raised children. And I worry that your excess of convenience means a lack of hardship, that you’ll look at my decisions as choices I’ve made to struggle. I worry that I’ll miss my salt-of-the-earthness, my scrappiness, my stripped-downedness. I don’t need another comfort item, I need the comfort of your nails on my back without having to ask for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I admire you. In the space between envy and aspiration, I find a place for you to teach me how to be. Maybe convenience is allowance, is throwing the door wide open onto joy. Our spoons caress each other in the drawer.

***

I have this pain in my foot, a tightness that wraps around my arch to where it sinks its teeth into my ankle. It moves around, sometimes slinking up my heel or reaching towards my toes, and intensifies without warning. I move my body a certain way, step without being exacting and deliberate, and it lights up, a feeling of nauseating heat.

I’ve been running on it anyway, built an entire routine out of icing and anti-inflammatories and lacing my shoes in a complicated configuration so that I can continue to participate in this practice I can’t live without. I apply a nearly religious devotion — to the running, to the foot routine — and without it, it’s like the cornerstone is kicked out of the brick wall of my life.

Don’t push it. Be smart. Let it heal. See a doctor. They don’t understand. I’ve tried walking, tried spinning away to nowhere on a stationary bicycle. I’ve tried staring at my own reflection in a grungy mirror and begging my muscles to still. I’ve tried sedentism, the worst of it. All for short periods with good intentions until my mind begins to whir and my nerves tingle with anticipation like a dog hearing the jangle of a leash.

I’ve had injuries that have ripped me away from running before but they’ve always been more dramatic — fractures and tears, pregnancy, death, things that happen all at once and forge a distinctive before and after, that render running not just impossible but egregious. This time is different. My foot is a frog being brought to a boil, a slow burn that makes me believe I can convince myself it’s not real, it’s not that bad.

I’ve already given up so much — my speed, my competitive drive, my unadulterated dedication to this sport — and looking down the barrel of another decade, I’m scared to give up the last scraps of running. That’s it — I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the void of who I’ll be if not a runner, how I’ll shape myself if not through this. I’m afraid of what will leak out of my brain without the walls of daily practice to fortify it. I’d rather stand on a shoddy foundation than not stand at all.

***

Some snails can sleep for three years straight in order to survive particularly harsh conditions. Which makes me wonder what harsh means to a snail. What is a harsh condition when you take life so slowly that three years might as well be death? How can we be so sure that during this self-protective slumber the snail isn’t actually dead, that the creature who wakes up three years later isn’t an entirely different being, their body vacated and reincarnated in an attempt to escape?

I tell my partner every day that I wish I didn’t have to sleep. That it feels like such a waste of time, six or seven or eight hours where nothing is moving and I make no contribution to the greater good. I could do so much more if I didn’t have to sleep — write a book and build a house and carve myself. I have FOMO for the darkest hours. I actively miss everything I love when I’m asleep.

But there were times when I couldn’t wait for it. When the spaces between responsibility — sleep, weekends, breaks — felt risky, opportunities for my heart to be chipped away, chances for my diluted judgement to let me lead myself astray. I was only safe when I was asleep. Only good. I could only wish to be a reincarnated snail, wake up and be someone and somewhere and somehow something else.

It’s all relative, I suppose. A snail’s harsh is not my harsh. The empty shell of time doesn’t have to be a death. Comfort isn’t just my head on the pillow. It’ll still be there when I wake up.

***

Amongst all the hand-woven baskets and hand-stitched dashikis and hand-carved flutes made of the tenderest of bamboo pieces, I spied a tiny bowl of worry dolls. They looked like cartoons, like a toddler’s frustrated rendering of what a person is supposed to look like — appendages truncated, limbs and lips lost to the physics of their miniscule size. Their bodies were built of paper wrapped tightly over a wire skeleton, wearing tiny, miniature versions of clothing, each individual stitch as big as a limb. Their hair was a map of dark grit, dirt or ash or crushed glass, unsettling in its defiance of identification. The faces confused me most of all, the features just little black slashes, three dots meant to stand in for the entire constellation of possibility in a human face. I didn’t understand what they were supposed to represent or what I was supposed to do with them, what ritual I could involve them in that would supposedly eliminate my worries, which, at thirteen years old, were so all-consuming. Worry was my entire world.

But what I did know was that they were small, entirely invisible when wrapped up in the palm of my hand. So I took some. Five, six, twelve, however many I could grasp in my fist and shove in the tight pocket of my jeans. I had no desire for them. They weren’t coveted. They were just confusing. But at thirteen everything is confusing, that world of worry, all the big, existential worries that I didn’t even know I should have yet and all the tiny, potent worries of right fucking now. When I steal them — steal so hard and metallic a word that it makes my teeth hurt — I don’t tell my friends. I don’t show them off, proof of my rebelliousness, my overblown facade of confidence. I’ll forget them in my pocket and they’ll get caught up in the lint trap of the dryer. Their gritty hair will fall off and their slashes of a face will disappear and their carefully handwoven clothes, their handwrapped bodies, will disintegrate under the heat.

But I do look right in the eye of the woman behind the counter, the old lady with curly white hair and a sweater with an elephant on it, and I smile.

Thanks for reading! Hope you have a light and sun-filled week.

xoxo,

brit

Hi. I’m back and alive, crawling out from the cave of endless obligation that this semester has been and into the sunshine and oxygen of almost-summer break. Since my last post, I’ve:

• finished student teaching 6th grade English while simultaneously teaching my full load of library classes.

• passed my Praxis exam to get my secondary English endorsement.

• finished my teaching credential program and (pending a few paper-worky things) am a fully-licensed educator.

• got accepted into a Library Media endorsement program to start in the summer, which will roll into a Master’s of Education after three semesters.

So school has been my life for the last several months. While there is still technically five weeks of the school year left, having the above tasks checked off the list feels monumentally relieving, the kind of academic satisfaction I haven’t felt since I finished grad school in 2016. Sure, I’ve got a couple more years until I’m, like, done done with school, but this is the life of the perpetual student. I’m not sure if I remember how to function in any other way.

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Some more life updates:

• Still sober. As of this post, I haven’t had alcohol in 121 days. At the 100 day mark, I posted a little celebratory photo on Instagram of a giant monstera leaf and announced this accomplishment, and it kind of turned into a whole thing. I had people to whom I haven’t spoken in years and random colleagues at work congratulating me, saying how they had no idea it was something I had been working on. Honestly, I didn’t really realize myself that it was something I had been working on. When I decided to give 100 days a shot back at the end of last year, I just wanted to clean my body up and focus on what I knew would be an extremely busy semester. But as the day approached and I thought about picking up drinking again, not-drinking no longer felt like this casual thing that it started out as, but something much more significant. Something to be proud of, and something I don’t think I want to give up. I like the fact that I can feel everything now, all the stress and anxiety and sadness and big hard feelings (and the soft nice ones too). I like the fact that I feel in control, that I can trust not only my actions and words but my perception of reality. I like that I don’t have to fear feeling hungover, that I don’t have to prepare my body for drinking or recover in agony from it. I like that bartenders let me have Diet Cokes for free and that I don’t have to swap my running schedule around to accommodate for nights spent drinking. I’ve realized I can still go do the things I did before — go to shows, go to bars, hang out with people that are drinking, etc. — and just not. I am aware that this is a privilege, that a lot of people who struggle with alcohol can’t do so with the same ease and that makes sobriety much more challenging, and thus more worthy of congratulations. But at this point, I think I’m going to keep going. I think this might be a life thing. I think I’m done.

• Aside from meeting with my writing group a couple times a month, I’ve done absolutely no writing since the semester started. This was expected — to scrounge up that kind of time or energy has just been impossible. But I have IDEAS! I want to write about a character who has an inexorable crush on her roommate and loses her geriatric dog in the woods. I want to write about a man who receives a terminal diagnosis and can’t find the right time to tell his wife. I want to write Survivor smut and call it “Love in the Form of Flint”. I want to write about that time my freshman year of college that I stayed up all night and had a panic attack upon seeing the sunrise over the Arizona foothills. I want to finish the story about the junior high girls and the story about the nosebleeds and maybe chip away at my novel. I want to write a series of essays about the ten most influential albums of my lifetime. And now that I have the time, maybe I just will. Keep your eyes open.

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• What I’ve been reading lately:

  • Brawler by Lauren Groff. The kind of impeccably effective writing that motivates me to write. 5 stars.

  • Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Reread for book club. Decent on the sentence level, but plot is lacking. 3.5 stars.

  • Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas. Gruesome but entertaining enough for 11 hours of running. 3 stars.

  • Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid. Loved the show. Book was mid. 3 stars.

  • A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Psalm for the Crown-Shy (Monk and Robot series) by Becky Chambers. Gorgeous, peaceful, and full of hope. 5 stars.

  • Superfan by Jenny Tinghui Zhang. So much fun, but also dark and thought-provoking. 4 stars.

  • A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck. THIS IS MY NIGHTMARE. What a mindfuck. 4 stars.

  • Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy. I know this one is polarizing, but I absolutely loved it. 5 stars.

  • Pilgrims by Devin Kelly. I love everything Devin does. Gorgeous. 5 stars.

• What I’ve been watching lately:

  • The Pitt

  • Survivor 50 (and Survivor 37: David vs. Goliath, and Survivor 3: Africa)

  • Reruns of The Great British Baking Show

  • DTF St. Louis (But I haven’t finished it so don’t spoil it!!)

• What I’ve been listening to lately:

  • Nine Inch Noize LP. Holy fuck.

  • Comfort Eagle by Cake. There will never be a time in my life where I don’t know every single word to this album.

  • Joyce Manor’s entire catalog to hype myself up to see them on 5/7

  • The Sims soundtrack. I’m not joking — best working music next to The Social Network score.

• Other things I’ve been loving lately:

  • My monsteras popping out fresh, delicate little leaves.

  • Cobb salad with lots of bleu cheese chunks.

  • Ramping up my running miles and seeing more and more sunlight every morning.

  • Being disgustingly in love with my partner.

  • Big pants, little shirts.

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I’m looking forward to more reading and writing time in the coming months, so you can expect weekly posts to once again resume. Thanks for sticking with me through multiple hiatuses (hiati?) and continuing to support my little musings. Have a lovely week.

xoxo,

brit

I posted the beginning of this story last June (you can read it here) and have been doing a little work on it lately. This is another chunk that begins right after the events in the post above.

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We piled into the car, bath towels pressed against faces, and I backed out of the garage, tires squealing behind me as I flew out of the neighborhood and towards the hospital. The streets were quiet and empty this early in the morning, though I wouldn’t have cared who saw. My panic had a nearly soothing effect, concentrating my attention into a laser focus, a singular, instinctual mission. If I wasn’t so centered, maybe I would have remembered all the action movies I’d watched, the thrillers where a brave, muscular man did whatever it took to save his family, always having the advantage of strength and impossible insight on his side. But I was just a mother. Just a woman. I had nothing but instinct and abject fear.

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on?” Garth yelled, desperate and squealing as my tires. He sat in the passenger seat, still shirtless and sweaty, clutching the baby to his chest with a receiving blanket pressed against her face. “Why aren’t you bleeding?”

I didn’t want to look at him, or to Ralphie whimpering in the backseat, wearing only a pair of Scooby Doo underwear. Only Garth was wearing shoes. This scene was incomprehensibly ridiculous.

“I don’t know, Garth. Take that blanket off her face, you’re going to suffocate her.” I reached across the seat and ripped the blanket out of his hands, which was so soaked that it splattered blood in an arc across the windshield. “Are you in any pain?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, moaning as though he was. I didn’t want to think about how he was crying, sobbing in fear. If he wasn’t bleeding with such profuse rapidity, he’d have streaks of tears down his cheeks.

I knew there would be alarm when we went into the ER, but we caused quite the scene. A nurse bolted up immediately and ran around from behind the desk, her face ghost-white and slacken with shock. You’d think a nurse would be used to seeing all sorts of gruesome injuries come through the door, but I guess an entire walking hemorrhage of a family was something different. I didn’t want Ralphie or Garth to be any more frightened than they already were by the nurses’ alarm, but there was nothing I could do.

They shuffled us through the heavy double-doors immediately, no waiting or paperwork necessary for the actively bleeding, and into a room. My heart crunched as the doctor peeled the baby out of Garth’s hands and handed her to me. The blood coming out of her nose had streamed down her face and wrapped around her neck like a collar, so bright red. Fire engines. Lipstick. Ketchup. A fresh, hot period.

A hubbub of excitement. Doctors and nurses streamed in, yelling incomprehensible medical terms and medication units in a language I didn’t understand, moving around me as if I wasn’t there. Bags of blood were brought in, so dark and thick they looked black, not like the screaming red all over my husband’s and children’s faces. Needles were drawn like guns, cocked and ready to shoot lifeforce back into them, when a doctor held up his white-coated arms and yelled, “Wait! Don’t give them blood!”

Everyone froze, the nurses mid-administration, Garth mid-sob. I was still clutching the baby, who was unfathomably calm, cooing against my chest as if I had just finished nursing her. I watched the gears turning in the doctor’s head, flipping through everything he’d learned in medical school, every case study, trying to map this situation onto prior experience and coming up short. He squinted at the monitors, reading the numbers over and over and waiting for them to change into something that made sense.

“Their blood pressure is fine,” he murmured. “Oxygenation, hemoglobin, iron levels — it’s all normal. Total fucking healthy. It’s like they haven’t lost any blood at all.”

There’s something about a doctor that swears at you. That level of casualness, or of nonchalance rendered by shock, didn’t sit well with me. You don’t want your doctor to be surprised.

The bags of blood were put away. The extraneous nurses left. The monitors stayed on, wires raining from Garth and the kids, that tracked the status of their perfectly fine bodies. Over the next few hours, the bleeding slowed from hemorrhagic to a calm trickle, and sometime in the night finally coagulated. As the three of them slept off the chaos of the day, I swallowed down my exhaustion the way a mother is taught to do. I found some washcloths in the bathroom sink, soaked them in warm water, and carefully wiped the blood from their bodies. The sun rose in slats of light between the curtains, pinks and lavenders like something soft and sugary, while the warm water dissolved the gel of blood from their skin, scrubbing away the stains. When I was done, I looked down at my own body, stained and splattered with a mixture of my family’s blood and felt sick with guilt. Why hadn’t I bled?

The next day was the awkward misery of getting back to normal, the unwieldy task of putting past traumas behind you and learning to laugh again, to eat again, to shower and watch trash TV. I couldn’t stop thinking about when my mother died last year, wracked by a merciless bout of cancer, and the discomfort I couldn’t shake off when we finally returned home, having to go through the motions. It was a similar incongruence.

I begged Garth to take a few days off work, just in case the bleeding started again, but he insisted he felt fine and the next day it was back to me and the kids and the repeating cycle of cartoons and Legos and boxed macaroni. We sat at the kitchen table, Henry gripping a marker and coloring in a coloring book, the baby latched onto my breast, nursing ferociously, me trying to keep my balance. As the mid-afternoon light streamed through the skylight, casting a brilliant beam of dusty light directly onto Henry’s hair, bleaching it white, I felt crazy. How could they be okay?, I asked myself. Not just physically, in the sense that they’d seemingly lost gallons of blood yet were perfectly healthy, but the fact that they were all fine, calm, back to normal with such an unfathomable ease. Why did I still feel like I was about to crawl out of my skin, explode with panic, and I hadn’t even bled?

“How do you feel, babe?” I asked Henry for the twentieth time that day. “Does your head hurt? Do you feel sleepy? Would you like a glass of water?”

He forcefully uncapped a red marker, blinking with concerted effort. “Good,” he answered, ignoring the rest of my question and bringing the marker forcefully to the paper, right onto Daniel Tiger’s eye, smashing the tip flat and drawing a well of ink like a blood droplet.

“Don’t do that to your markers, Henry. You’ll ruin them.” I reached forward, squishing the baby into my armpit, and gripped his tiny, breakable arm. “Soft hands, please.”

I had to solve it. I had to figure out what had happened to my family and why and prevent it from ever happening again, even if I had to move heaven and earth to make it happen. I cut out all sorts of foods from our diet, animal products, gluten, soy, imported produce, food dyes. I bought a water filter and an air purifier and a new carbon monoxide detector, and made sure our toiletries and cleaning projects were free of phthalates and sulfates and heavy metals and microplastics. While Garth was at work, I hired inspectors to test for asbestos and radium and lead. I tried a smudging kit I bought from a head shop downtown, an aromatherapy kit I bought from a PTA mom on Facebook, and a set of crystals I ordered online that claimed to reset the energy resonance in our home. But as I expected, nothing changed besides my credit card balance. We were just as we were before, functioning and healthy, apt to forget.

I made Garth wake up the kids each morning, too afraid of the vivid memory of their bloodied faces. I found myself constantly pressing my fingers onto their necks and groins and ankles, feeling for the faint thump of a pulse. The chorus of my incessant checking — “How do you feel? Are you lightheaded? What’s today’s date?” — became grating, a worry that wedged itself between us, driving Garth mad. “You need to relax,” he insisted. “Everyone is okay. It’s not going to happen again.”

We didn’t tell anyone. For some reason, the incident and my lingering alarm over it felt shameful, even suspect, especially for me. After all, I was the only one who hadn’t bled. Why them and not me? If I couldn’t keep my family safe, what kind of mother was I?

So like anything, the trauma of the nosebleed incident slowly faded into the rearview of our lives, losing potency the way you forget the trauma of birth or the sting when your child tells you they hate you for the first time or you catch your husband masturbating in the shower. Unpleasant to think about, but without the same sting. Yet, even as we began to slowly forget about it, it loomed in the back of my mind in a way I knew would never go away. Irrevocable.

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Thanks for reading! Hope you have a lovely week.

xoxo,

brit

I Used to Go to This Bar by Joyce Manor.

This latest release from Joyce Manor rips, but subtly, in a balanced, intentional, extremely respectable way. Their music has always nestled in the homey and honest space between punk, pop-punk, Midwest-via-Southern-California emo that feels accessible and genuine, yet also rocks, and I Used to Go to This Bar is a gorgeous display of this. There is absolutely no fluff — this record is nine songs and 19 minutes long. But its brevity gives the songs an immediacy that their sound doesn’t necessarily demand. We get the whole gamut of their style from this short little album. The pop-punk vibes from “I Know Where Mark Chen Lives” and “Well, Whatever It Was”, an Americana sound from “All My Friends Are So Depressed”, even some synth action in “Falling Into It”. But my favorite are the more punk-aligned bangers like “The Opossum”, “Grey Guitar”, and the titular track. I’ve listened to a few recent interviews with Barry Johnson (this one with Vanessa and Jonnah Bayer and this one with Bandsplain queen, Yasi Salek) and he seems like a goddamn doll of a dude and gave some interesting insights on the band’s history and the simple serendipity of some of his lyrics. AND I get to see them on tour in May! A bucket list show for sure.

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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You directed by Mary Bronstein

The overriding emotion I felt when I watched this film was unsettled, a product of its inability to be categorized, its refusal to settle into any sort of emotional tract. It’s marketed as a drama-comedy, and it’s so close to yet so far away from both of these genres. Rose Byrne’s performance as a harried, teetering mother precariously trying to balance the responsibilities of her psychotherapy clients, her child’s mysterious illness, and her husband’s absence in the midst of her own deteriorating mental health was masterful. We watch as she grasps onto her own ballsy advocacy for her daughter’s care and her clients’ best interests, masking and code-switching to hide her crumbling strength as everything all goes to shit. It’s a confusing yet realistic mix of poor judgement, systematic ignorance, and desperate love that results in each escalating struggle for Linda, each problem she must solve and mess she must immediately clean up. There are dips into hallucination that almost feel like magical realism, and danger that almost feels like horror. It’s without a doubt a commentary on the patriarchal pressure put onto mothers, and Linda’s interactions with all the very different kinds of men within this film — A$AP Rocky, Conan O’Brian, and Christian Slater are all incredible in their roles — shed light on this tenuous issue. It’s an anxious watch, but a film I’m still thinking about.

Blueberry Streusel Cinnamon Rolls

Recently my kid and I decided to undertake the day-long project of making cinnamon rolls from scratch and holy hell, was it worth every rise and knead and sink full of dirty dishes. Pillowy dough, buttery-rich filling, thick-ass cream cheese icing, crunchy little streusel cookies all over the top, the tartness from the blueberries peppered throughout — these puppies were a sugar bomb in the best possible way. I give us a Hollywood Handshake and a Star Baker.

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Thanks for reading. Go eat a sweet treat and listen to a banger, whatever that means for you.

xoxo,

brit

Kyle Seibel is one of my favorite short-fiction writers in the world, a critical component of my dream blunt rotation of weird-lit folks (along with Aaron Burch and Emily Costa). His collection Hey You Assholes from Clash Books is banger after banger from a genuine sweetheart of a dude. Kyle writes with a voice that is wholly unique, masterfully riding the razor’s edge between heartbreaking and hilarious and distilling maximum meaning into just a few words, much the way a poet would. My own writing is completely different in this way — I’m often superfluously wordy and weigh heavily toward devastation over humor — but I think that’s why I am so drawn to his work. Little Engines put out this story — another banger, obvi — in November.

Little Engines

The Trees of Ketron Island

It’s day one of Little Blanksgiving, our week of fiction, poetry, and essays co-published with Blank, a Dirtyverse newsletter about books and the culture around them. We start with Kyle Seibel’s latest story below. You might recognize the setting, but it’s from a different angle…

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9 months ago · 11 likes · 2 comments · Little Engines and kyle r seibel

The piece opens with a reunification of a father and son, Paul and, of course, Paul Jr. Everything we see about these two in this initial encounter displays their diametric opposition and sets up an instant tension between them. From the visual fragments around him, we get a clear and immediate idea of who Paul Jr. is, a very prodigal son vibe:

As their icy conversation in the driveway continues, “Paul pulls off his ballcap and works the bill into a more aggressive arc.” I absolutely love his line, the way that it, like the stretched-out t-shirt does for Junior, embodies who we supposed to see Paul as — the no-bullshit, play-by-the-rules guy who not only wears a ballcap but works the bill into an arc, molds it to better fit its utilitarian purpose. ‘Aggressive’ is the perfect descriptor of this, and the ‘more’ is doing a lot of work here to establish that this quality is engrained in Paul, and by extension, foundational to Junior. That single action is perfect Siebel-esque poetry.

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A technique that Kyle also is a master of in his short fiction is the way he layers multiple things happening at one, braiding them into a kind of subtle (or not so subtle) chaos that more accurately depicts real life (check out Kyle’s The World’s Biggest Moron Stops Laughing, one of my favorite short stories of all time and a perfect example of what I’m talking about). Here, just as the conversation is gaining purchase, “a plane roars overhead”. The introduction of the plane serves multiple key purposes. It places us geographically (“From Whidbey, probably.”). It glimpses into Paul’s past (“That the kind you flew?”). It chops up the conversation in a way that continues to build the tension between these men, giving Paul just enough of a distraction to steer himself away from the direction in which Paul Jr. wants to take the interaction.

Just then, another plane appears in violent — aggressive? — fashion, and whatever trajectory either of these characters thought they were following is instantly obliterated. Kyle gives us this event from two different perspectives. First, we jump ahead to the ‘later’ that lays out all the evening-news details — the real-ass story of Richard Russell, a baggage handler who hijacked a plane from Sea-Tac, cat-and-moused with air traffic controllers for over an hour, and ultimately crashed on Ketron Island, killing himself but miraculously no one else. The placement of these details is smart because it allows the reader to fully engage with Paul and Paul Jr.’s experience of witnessing this event with the proper context so that we can focus on their cord of the story’s braid.

I’ve had dreams about this kind of thing — seeing some kind of mysterious explosion in the distance that’s so unbelievably big it seems cosmic. I don’t know if I’m using that term correctly or if I’m just substituting it for the feeling of incomprehensibility that one just knows in their gut is paradigm-shifting. And that’s what the plane crash gives us here, albeit temporarily — a paradigm shift in this conversation, in the connection between father son:

It allows Paul to soften towards Junior, having witnessed death together. Possibly, it allows him to think that whatever mess his son has gotten himself into, however much of a failure he may seem to his father to be, at least he’s not that off the rails. At least he’s not hijacking planes and crashing them into the PNW wilderness.

Kyle is back on his Siebel-poetry bullshit in the closing sentence, an absolutely heartbreaking ending that makes total, devastating sense. It’s completely expected — we could have predicted this from the start, the vibe consistent from the get-go despite us not wanting to say it, not wanting to jump to conclusions. As readers, there are so many chances in this story to give the benefit of the doubt. Yet, there’s no escaping the cruel reality of “the black daemon within him throbbing with hunger”. All the way to the final period, every single word is imbued with heavy fucking meaning, even in isolation — “father promised”, “the last time.” Like the inclusion of the Richard Russell story, it’s a truth that makes this fiction potent and engrossing. You can’t escape it.

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Thank you for reading! Go check out all of Kyle’s work. He’s the shit. Have a lovely week.

xoxo,

brit

At the bottom of the mountain, I grit my teeth. My stomach is in knots of nausea, my eyes pressed shut against the blinding sunlight reflecting off the snow, turning my vision blood red. With my eyes closed, I transport myself up there to where she stands regally at the start gate, the course rolling down before her like a carpet to twist and bend, ascend and descend, in all its gut-flipping, knee-tearing ways. I can’t believe she is actually going to do what she is about to do. My tears are hot as they carve ski runs down my cheeks.

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“Please,” I begged her that morning in our room at the Olympic village, where I was still tangled in bedsheets and blinking sleeplessness from my eyes. “You don’t have to do this. You can still back out. No one will judge you. Think about the future.”

I wanted to tell her I’d been up all night sick with worry, thinking about her purple, swollen knee and roiling with anger at the immensity of her ego. She walked over from the bathroom to sit next to me, the mattress sinking as she lowered onto it. I snuck a glance at the bare skin of her knee, at the puckered zipper of a previous surgery crawling up the side of her leg. It had been hidden beneath the black elastic of a brace for the last two weeks and I wanted to cry at the sight of it, its fragility, its vulnerability. I set the tip of my finger on the rough skin of her kneecap. She flinched, not at the pain but at my touch, and turned her legs away from me.

Her wet hair was slicked back and the expanse of her shoulders made me think of Atlas, holding up the entire world with the prospect of this one harrowing run. She’d done this so many times, seemingly millions, and never had I asked her to reconsider. The risk had always been the same, yet I’d never felt this scared.

She wouldn’t look at me. It had been days since she had. Every interaction between us since we touched down in Italy had been electrified with this tense opposing energy, all centered on her fucking knee, the tear in her ligament like a rip in our collective reality.

“Why would you say that?” she whispered. “Don’t you want me to win?”

All around me, patriotism and sportsmanship dressed up in expensive fleece, a crowd buzzing with anticipation while I desperately held back the overwhelming urge to throw up. She is blown up enormous on a screen just a few yards away, but that delicate, determinant knee is a mile above us, encased in the sweaty grip of a brace that bulges beneath her skin-tight suit. Her thick, blonde braid whipping out behind her, she bangs her poles together and screams in silence, all that energy explosive and dangerous. I hear the beeping of the start signal counting down her fate and watch as she propels herself from the gate.

From there reality splits. Infinite dimensions, every conceivable outcome becomes possible, yet I can only comprehend two trajectories. In one, the run is flawless. She slices through the course like a hot knife, the way she always used to. The flags whip as she passes each one, defying physics and her competition and the limits of the human body, her skis floating, flying, shooting over the blinding snow. My heart stops each time she catches air but resumes its steady beat once she touches earth again. I watch her in pixels as she grits her teeth on the big screen while the tiny American flag of her comes into view, growing bigger and bigger with each microsecond, until she flies over the orange line and the crowd around me erupts. The ground shakes like an earthquake with their excitement and my snowblind vision is flooded with tears. In this trajectory, it’s the fairy tale everyone expected. In this trajectory, she’s always known joy.

In the other trajectory, the dimension that is heavy and tarnished with the weight of reality, the fallibility of the human body, everything starts in identical fashion — the hot knife, the gritted teeth. But in this dimension, I close my eyes. I can’t watch because I know what is going to happen, and I can’t bear to witness the betrayal. I hear the siren call of that suffocated knee, the doomed hum she’s been trying to ignore, for just a few seconds before it’s drowned out by the shocked gasp of the crowd, the whoosh of hundreds of hands moving through the air to cover mouths as her crash is heard around the world. The denial of the fairy tale is deafening.

I lean over and vomit.

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Thanks for reading! Have a joyful week.

xoxo,

brit

At the start of 2026, I decided to do something radical but a long time coming — giving sobriety a try. For 100 days, between January 1 and April 11, I’m forgoing both alcohol consumption and social media. I’m a little over a month into this experiment, so I thought I’d check in.

Why, and why now? The short of it is that in the months of November and December, I drank nearly every day. Not to excess every time, but a couple glasses of wine most nights. I relied on it as a way to wind down after a stressful day at school or to motivate me to sit down to study or to accompany me as I made dinner. There were no intense emotions I was trying to bury as I had used drinking to do in the past, but it was nonetheless habit-forming. Over winter break, this stretch continued, and I began to feel the subtle physical effects — general sluggishness, poor sleep, the mess of my guts. Getting out of bed at 5am to run was more of a struggle. I sustained a running injury at the beginning of December that forced me to cut down on daily exercise, and suddenly my body really started to feel like shit.

I’ve been sober-curious off and on in my life, nearly as many times as I’ve wondered if I have a problem with alcohol. The influences are stacked — I have a family history of alcoholism. Alcohol played an enormous role in my divorce. I’m on medication that makes me easily black out. I’m just a notoriously bad drinker, despite never taking any actionable steps to avoid it. The longest stretch I’ve been sober since high school (aside from pregnancy) has been maybe two weeks, and I’ve always dove back into it with a vengeance. An extended break has been a long time coming.

Why 100 days? Honestly, this episode of NPR’s Life Kit podcast with sobriety coach Casey Davidson was really the tipping point. While seemingly arbitrary, the 100-day mark is physically and psychologically intentional, long enough to solidly break the habit of any behavior you desire to change, but less intimidating than a lifetime commitment. It’s long enough to feel the benefits of sobriety in one’s body and to shift that energy elsewhere. For me, I want to be able to drink at my wedding in June and on our cruise in July. Otherwise, I can’t think of a reason between now and April that I would need to drink. This is the perfect time to try it out.

And that’s the operative word here — try. I’m not committing to giving up alcohol permanently. I may or may not change my mind about that. But it feels really good to know I haven’t drank in over a month. I feel more tuned-in to my body, noticing sensations and symptoms (namely with this running injury and some hormonal stuff) that were being masked by being just a little bit buzzed every day. I can more directly deal with those now. My brain is more clear. I can trust my reality. I’m recognizing that a lot of the time I drink out of boredom, convinced that any menial task can be spiced up if I’ve got a drink in my hand. The tract of that thought is still greased, but now I’m finding other ways to approach that feeling.

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100 days without social media has honestly been a lot more difficult and rife with relapses already. Scrolling is truly and absolutely an addiction, one that is so deeply entrenched and subconscious, not just on the individual-level, but culturally and societally as well (If you haven’t, read this article by Zoe Keziah Mendelson). ‘Normalized’ doesn’t even begin to encompass it. Picking up my phone and opening the apps and scrolling and tapping and swiping — I do all of this without a lick of cerebral intervention. I truly don’t even notice I’m doing it. At least with something like drinking, the act is slower. There are a myriad of opportunities to shut down the behavior before it happens, and a delay before the benefit is felt. Scrolling is an immediate, instant serotonin blast before you even realize what you are doing. It’s hijacking, a psychic manipulation. I haven’t been ‘sober’ from this shit for longer than 5 days since social media was born. In that way, it’s a much deeper habit than even drinking.

I’m a relentlessly busy person and am constantly complaining about lack of time. Yet, I can easily throw away an hour watching back-cracking videos or something just as asinine. There’s all this time, shiny and available, that I’m truly wasting. There are absolutely positives and benefits and healthy things to be seen on social media — community building, resistance and activism, cozy things like recipes and book recommendations, My Chemical Romance tour updates (lol, but for real) — but between all of that is a thickly woven mess of useless bullshit, and my little human brain is too easily manipulated by the mess to scroll past, and before I even realize it, all the precious, limited time is just gone with nothing to show for it. So in December as I was looking down the barrel of an extremely busy season (work, student teaching, my last post-bacc class, the rest of my life), I needed to gather up all of the time I could find and protect it at all costs.

And yes, I truly do have more time, but there are other extremely interesting (scary?) things I’ve noticed. My attention span is shot, and though I’m slowly trying to repair it through this process, the muscle memory is still there, and maybe that damage is permanent. The involuntary urge to check my phone is constant. I pick it up, I swipe through my home screen, I open up my texts and the weather and my email over and over in lieu of opening up social media, and even though the payoff of novelty isn’t there in the same way, the compulsion is. Sitting in boredom is extremely uncomfortable. At a red light, in line at the pharmacy, brushing my teeth — I want something to look at, something to occupy me. Or when I’m working and my brain is moving towards something hard, I have the urge to just give up and scroll instead of push through the mental challenge. It’s wild. And while the compulsion is far from gone, bypassing it before it becomes behavior brings a ton of awareness. At this point, maybe that’s the best I can do, but it’s worth a shot, I think.

I’m not trying to speak with any sort of elitism or judgement, or offer some kind of prescriptive wisdom by any stretch of the imagination. I just want to be more present. I want to feel it all, and feel it in real time. I just want to try. I want my days to feel rich and full, and this is my attempt to move towards that.

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Thanks for reading. Have a rich and full week.

xoxo,

brit

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On the last day of seventh grade, Quinn, Becca, and Lily were granted permission by their mothers to wander the streets of downtown Billings after school let out at noon. The plan, according to their mothers, was to eat lunch at Wendy’s, browse the independent bookstore, visit the art gallery, and end the day with a treat at Brockel’s Chocolate Shoppe, where Becca’s mom would pick them all up to have a sleepover, the first of summer vacation. The plan, according to the girls and reality, was to do whatever the fuck they wanted.

It used to be just Lily and Becca. From second grade forward, since Becca pushed Lily down a snowhill and their teacher made them stand on the fence together for the remainder of recess, the two had been inseparable. There had been others, girls that flowed in and out of their circle of friendship throughout the years, but they knew that those girls were always temporary, that Lily and Becca were the foundation. But when Quinn, a popular, decided for whatever reason in the sixth grade that Becca and Lily, who had never been very popular but who also had never really cared, were suddenly worth associating with, they knew better than to turn down such a gift.

Quinn injected a flavor of curious trouble into their friend group that was both tantalizing and just a little bit scary. More outgoing than either Lily or Becca ever hoped to be, Quinn was the one to suggest lying to their mothers about where they were going, what they were doing. Quinn was the one to talk to boys, say things that gave them the same feeling of scare and intrigue that they gave Becca and Lilly. Quinn was the one who was always scheming a plan to steal her brother’s pot so they could smoke it in the cemetery behind their middle school (this plan never came to fruition, much to Quinn’s disappointment). Quinn was the one that taught them what a blowjob was, though neither girl believed that someone would ever actually do such a thing.

The three girls stripped out of their uniforms in the school bathrooms after school and put on the outfits they’d stuffed hopefully in their backpacks that morning, hiphugger jeans and babydoll tees that left a strip of white, vulnerable stomach visible between them. Quinn dropped a ziplock bag full of makeup into the sink and they lined up in front of the dingy mirror to apply silver gel eyeshadow and thick black eyeliner and mascara that inevitably clumped against their eyelids. It didn’t matter if it was perfect though. What mattered is that it showed they had access to makeup, even if it was stolen from Quinn’s mother’s bathroom that morning, access to a hint of womanhood.

At Wendy’s, they each ordered Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, curly fries, and Cokes. “Make sure they are diet though!” Quinn told the crinkly old woman working the register. “Never drink your calories.” Quinn was full of adages like this, little life hack tips for losing weight that she picked up from Vogues and Cosmos and Seventeens that her mom let her buy at the grocery store. When you’re hungry, drink hot water to make the cravings go away. When a guy catches you staring, bite your lip so he knows you like him. Don’t eat peanut butter if you are going to be kissed in the next 24 hours.

They took a booth by a window overlooking downtown.

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“So Becca,” said Quinn through a mouthful of fries, “are you going to keep dating Anthony this summer?”

Becca felt a spark of pride in her chest. She’d been dating Anthony now for three weeks. He went to the junior high on the other side of town, closer to where Quinn and Lilly both lived, so she had only met up with him twice, but they talked every day on AIM and sometimes on the phone. One of those times had been at a movie, where they made out in the back of the theater for the entirety of The Matrix: Reloaded. It was her first kiss, and she was surprised by the amount of spit and the ground his wet, sloppy tongue could cover, roaming across her cheeks and even into her nostrils. Becca had to hastily apply more face powder in the bathroom and lie to her mom about the movie’s plot when she picked her up afterwards.

“Yeah, but he’s going to be at music camp for like a month so we will have to do long-distance for a while.”

“Hopefully he doesn’t find some other girl while he’s there,” said Quinn as she pulled a strip of floppy bacon out with her fingers. “Like, could you imagine if he came back and was like, ‘Sorry, we have to break up because some flute player is my girlfriend now.’”

“It’s not that kind of camp,” Becca shot back. “Not like that kind of band camp. It’s not nerdy. Anthony plays the guitar. He’s into, like, blink and stuff. He’s in a band with some high schoolers.”

Quinn raised her eyebrows. “Actually, that’s super hot.”

I sipped my Diet Coke, another surge of pride flowing through me as I pictured his swoopy black hair, his sleepy eyes, his thin, sunken cheeks, stretched out by the early years of puberty. He had all the requisite features of hot, but somehow when they were all put together on a single teenage body, there was something awkward and embarrassing about how he looked, something undeniably boyish.

Quinn turned to Lilly who was sitting next to her in the booth. “Did Becca tell you about the handjob?”

Lilly’s eyes grew big. Her mouth froze mid-chew. My stomach tightened.

Quinn, sensing the excitement she’d brought to the conversation, lit up. “Tell her about the handjob, Bec! Tell her what you told me!”

What I’d told Quinn after I met up with Anthony at a high school football game and kissed him chastely on the lips behind the snack shack was that I had given him a handjob, another term that Quinn had introduced me to. However, I had done no such thing, and definitely hadn’t said anything to Lilly.

“What?” Lilly mumbled through masticated burger.

I shrugged. “I mean, I touched it but that’s it.”

“Was it big?” Quinn asked.

I had never seen a penis, aside from the illustrations in my human body atlas and my baby brother’s tiny little penis when I’d help change his diapers. I had no context for big.

“It was okay, I guess.”

“Was it circumcised?”

I had no idea what the right answer to that question could possibly be.

“Yes?”

Quinn giggled and leaned in to whisper.

“Did he cum?”

My stomach turned even thinking about the white, sticky mess that Quinn had taught us shoots out of a guy when you rub on his dick, or when he has sex. It’s supposed to be a good thing, an indicator that he feels good, but it made me nauseous.

“I…I don’t know…”

Quinn laughed.

“Oh my god, so you just gave him blue balls? What a tease!”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I laughed along anyway. Across from me, Lilly was staring at the insides of her burger like she was looking at a ghost. I felt a stab of guilt, sensing the exclusion she was probably feeling, but the sense of fear that Quinn would find out I was full of shit was stronger. I changed the subject.

“So should we go to the gallery first or the bookstore?” I said. “I think the bookstore is closer, but the gallery could take longer so maybe we should start there.”

Quinn snorted. “Are you serious?”

“What?”

“We’re not going to some lame art gallery. We’ve got the whole afternoon and no parents. We can go wherever we want.”

“Like where?” Lilly piped up. I hoped her participation in the conversation meant she was game.

“Who cares? There’s way cooler shit to do, and I seriously couldn’t care less about the stupid art gallery,” said Quinn.

I refused to meet Lilly’s eyes, to sense her ready to put up a fight against Quinn’s clear defiance of our mothers’ expectations.

“You don’t think your mom will find out?” she asked Becca without looking at her.

“As long as you don’t narc she won’t.”

Hurt flashed across Lilly’s eyes.

“No one’s gonna narc,” I assured her. “Let’s fucking go.”

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Thanks for reading! Have a joyful week.

xoxo,

brit

There’s a moment just before Mineral’s final — like, final final — performance of “Parking Lot” at the Best Friends Forever Fest in Las Vegas in October of 2025 where lead singer Chris Simpson mumbles something barely intelligible, possibly something about a whale, before laughing it off and correcting himself. “This song’s about being happy,” he says before launching the song’s initial lamenting notes, the last time they will ever be played on stage. Behind him, his band’s name is projected in huge bright green letters against the backdrop of the enormous mainstage, a crowd of thousands of elder emo apologists screaming in anticipation. The lead up to this iconic riff and all the finality it holds is expected, the same kind of prepared sadness one feels when you have to put your dog down or sign divorce papers — you know it’s coming, and you can brace yourself for the grief. But on the surface, right here on the stage as it’s happening, the dissolution of Mineral — for the second time around — is smooth. It has the calm of muscle memory, of something engrained. It’s an undoubtedly loaded moment, as the band looks out over all they’ve done, all they’ve gathered, in their short yet impactful career. But perhaps it’s just another iteration, another “Parking Lot” closing out the show.

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“This wouldn’t be a Mineral concert if we didn’t end it with ‘Parking Lot’,” Simpson tells an audience twenty-eight years earlier at a show at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Orlando. It’s September 1997. The video is grainy and discolored, the fluorescent overhead lights reflecting harshly off of Simpson’s blond, middle-parted hair. The group of kids encircling the drumset is focused and still. It’s hard at first to tell who is the band, where the calm, whispering croon is emanating from when the song begins, but eventually the environment settles and the source reveals itself in Simpson. He’s tall and gangly, craning down over a mic stand he refuses to raise, his eyes downcast, his voice warbly and unsure, almost Oberst-esque. He turns away from the direct gaze of the crowd at every opportunity, maintaining his calm murmur even after the breakdown around ninety seconds into the song, after the agonizing sob of Scott McCarver’s guitar takes over and an overwhelm of feedback envelopes the room like a weighted blanket. Even after this energy is injected into the song, swallowing the open rafters and janky ceiling fan and droplets of sweat dripping down the concrete walls, the band remains molasses-y slow and deliberate, the crowd giving up little more than a head bob in response. The guitars are off-tune and the tempo is all over the place, as if they haven’t really decided how they want to play this song, as if the distant punk influence can’t help but eek through.

This tableau repeats itself in every tinny, blurred video of Mineral you can dredge up from the depths of YouTube, from basement shows and DIY festivals and VFW halls, these holy crystalized performances from the mid-90s. In this way, it’s a sacred relic — you don’t see a cell phone held aloft or skinny jeans or copious amounts of eyeliner, just kids completely present and dressed for the discomfort of a sweaty basement. This was back when emo was purely linguistic, a truncation of the word ‘emotional’, characterized by little more than bleary-eyed despondency and an anguish so potent it transcended image and theatrics.

When emo emerged in the mid-eighties as an outgrowth of DC and California hardcore punk, it was a reaction to the growing aggression within these scenes. While hardcore, punk, and various combinations of the two targeted the sources of its listeners’ despair — politics, bigotry, societal conformity, etc. —, emo zeroed in on the despair itself. Lyrically, it was introspective, confessional, and deeply personal. It dealt heavily with relationships, particularly the thwarted and dissolving, and subsequently skewed toward the emotional. Musically, emo shifted away from the hard, fast spewing of punk toward more melodic elements that let the content of the lyrics shine through, including longer song structures and dynamic shifts in sound, volume, and pace. As emo spread inward from the coasts, it continued to soften, moving further from its punk roots of self-righteous violence and activist anger towards themes of breaking up, growing up, and feeling it all.

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As the overall genre evolved over several decades into 2nd, 3rd, and some would argue 4th waves, some bands embraced the label while many, including Mineral, eschewed it, finding the categorization limiting and derogatory. Admittedly, seeing what the term ‘emo’ would come to encompass and be associated with in the later years, perhaps this rejection was more prophetic than anything. Emo would continue to splinter and speciate, drawing on not just musical influences as varied as pop, indie, prog rock, and metal, but cultural. The mass migration of music and society in general to the internet, namely social media, turned the lens (literally) toward the aesthetic. Emo is far from the only subculture, let alone musical genre, to atrophy within the grips of commercialization — cue Hot Topic, Warped Tour, and Emo Nite — but such a hard fall, a blatant squandering of potential, fucking hurts. Bastardization seems like a fitting term.

But if anything about emo’s birth can be considered intentional, its initial intention was to expose internal pain to external light, to create a space for expressing deep, personal emotions and witnessing the reality and universality of heartache. While Mineral’s short-lived, two-breakup career was arguably overshadowed by those of contemporaries like Jimmy Eat World, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Promise Ring, and American Football, they were subtle masters of the craft. What sets Mineral apart lyrically and thematically is that their expression of emotional pain is always accompanied by aspiration. Their biggest release, 1997’s The Power of Failing, as well as “Parking Lot” specifically, bypass direct focus on love and grapple with other inherently vulnerable themes including crises of faith, embrace of personal imperfection, the search for identity, and the delicate intertwining of hope and despair. There’s no wallowing for wallowing’s sake. These songs aren’t just “about being happy.” They are about getting happy.

Be sure to check out this essay in full, as well as those of all the other competitors (this year’s list is STACKED), when March Sadness kicks off in March and, if you are so inclined, vote for “Parking Lot”!

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Thanks for reading and hope you have an awesome week.

xoxo,

brit