On Sunday, in the Adirondacks, I left my dog with my friends at the campground and took myself for a swim in the adjoining lake. (No dogs were allowed on the beach or in the water.) I was set to drive back to Syracuse in a few hours, but Sunday was the first sunny day of my weekend trip, blue sky peeking through the trees like a returning loved one, and I didn’t want to end this trip without first taking a dip in the lake.

It wasn’t that hot; I wasn’t driven to cool down. It’s more that it was important for me, in judging whether the trip had been good or bad, “worth it,” to swim in that lake before I drove home. I didn’t take a towel to lie on, or a book to read on the shore, or even sunscreen. I just swam, feeling lightly self-conscious being there by myself, particularly in my trans body, surrounded by other families swimming with their children. I practiced floating on my back. I swam around the lake’s edge for a while, until I grew bored, which happened quickly. I enjoyed being in the water, but my desire to go swimming wasn’t solely a desire to spend a great length of time in water; it was also the desire to have gone in the lake, to say that I did it. I don’t know how long I was in the water–fifteen, twenty minutes? Then I toweled off and packed up my car and collected my dog and said goodbye to my friends, and drove four hours home.

When I journaled about the weekend, I wrote that this had been the fourth lake I’ve swam in this summer. I then wondered why I’d had the compulsion to count, as if I was notching my bedpost. Was I bragging? Competing against someone in a count of lake-swims? Proving something to myself? Back in May, when the summer stretched out without end in sight, I didn’t set any goals for myself for the number of times I wanted to swim in a lake. But of course I was thinking along those lines, even if I didn’t articulate it. When I conceptualized what I wanted out of my summer, I was thinking that I wanted to go swimming, because a good summer, to me, calls to mind images of bodies of water. I did not, consciously, set out to count the number of times I’d go swimming, but a count began running regardless. My mind sets metrics whether I tell it to or not.

On Saturday, as we raced to put all our camping chairs under a tarp as another wave of rain hit our heads, I was feeling resentful of the weather. Earlier in the day, while hiking, we’d been caught in a torrential thunderstorm, slogging down a trail that had become a muddy creek, our soaked clothes sticking to our skin, thunderclaps deafening us from directly overhead. After that, I thought surely we were owed sunlight, but the rain kept coming back. I struggled with my resentment, feeling that I was the only one whose positive attitude was hanging by a thread. Why had I signed up for this? Why had I wanted to expose myself to the elements? My friend, extending a previous conversation examining the appeal of camping—why did we like this when the experience removed so many creature comforts—said, “Maybe camping is about survival.”

Is camping about survival, something to be enjoyed as much after the fact–I did that, we did that–as it is a sensory pleasure in the moment? I get sensory pleasure out of watching a campfire burn in darkness, out of roasting s’mores, out of looking up at a night sky of stars framed by tree silhouettes. I get no sensory pleasure from trying to sleep in a tent or the struggle of trying to keep my stuff dry when it rains. Is gratitude for survival about feeling a sense of accomplishment? Is anything I do not about a sense of accomplishment? Am I incapable of enjoying one summer without metrics of accomplishment?

Every year I set a reading goal for myself, because I have learned from experience that when I don’t set a metric, I read fewer books. (And without Letterboxd to track my watches, I watch fewer movies.) But setting a metric alters the experience. When I know I’m working towards a goal, I can’t help but read less for pleasure and more for the sake of adding a number to my list. Reading becomes something I do for the sake of productivity. I worry that counting the number of times I’ve gone swimming turns what should be a pure Id-driven pleasure into yet one more activity undergone for the sake of my ego and organized by my superego.

Like every summer, this one has disappeared as swiftly as water flowing downstream, the time here and then gone in the space of an Instagram upload. I don’t have any talent for documenting my life for social media, yet my life still feels dominated by social media logic: if you can’t show off the fun you’re having, if no one else is impressed, then the fun you had didn’t matter. Fun is most fun when you can show it off, brag about it. Fun becomes one more thing to measure with a metric. I am almost never just “having fun” without the metacognition of quantifying how much fun I’m having and how I might compare my fun to others.

I knew, back in May, that I didn’t want to “waste” my summer. But with all this free time, months of it gifted to me like it never was when I worked 9-to-5, what would waste have looked like? To me, it would have looked like failing to meet my writing goals; but paradoxically, it would have also looked like failing to get properly outside, failing to do fun summery things, failing to have adventures. I wanted to find the perfect balance between productivity and fun, between accomplishment and enjoyment, and I knew I would feel a sense of accomplishment if I enjoyed myself to the fullest, and that I’d feel like a failure if I spent all my time sitting around both bored and unproductive.

The language of failure betrays the way I can’t approach anything without the intervention of capitalist logic. Even when I’m having fun, I must be working towards something, even if that “something” is just my mental health. There is an uncomfortable similarity between the logic of capitalism and the logic of self-care; the idea of “self-care” takes the pleasure of doing what feels good and turns it into another goal. Even when I manage to waste time, to do something for pure pleasure, pure distraction—hanging out with my friends, enjoying a TV show —I become pleased with myself because I know that relaxation is good for me, that it’s necessary, and therefore I’ve accomplished something even through accomplishing nothing. A double-bind.

One of the best things about fandom obsession is that it cuts through the double-bind. For me, genuine hyperfixations have a way of evaporating capitalist logic. Suddenly, I’m not wracked with indecision about how to spend my time, because the pull of obsession makes that decision for me. After the fact, I might still feel guilty about “wasting” my time on my new fandom interest, but that guilt isn’t enough to spoil my enjoyment, nor is it enough to pull me fully away from the obsession and force me into productivity. Hyperfixation is not something that can be forced, or at least, I do not know how to force it. It’s purely organic, it either happens or it doesn’t. If I could have induced myself to be obsessed with In Search of Lost Time, I would have; in that case I would’ve burned through the entire book by now, instead of taking two months to read just the first volume. I almost achieved a hyper-fixation with my novel back in May, when I raced to finish my first draft, but I couldn’t sustain that obsession when it came to revision.

As it always happens, I couldn’t have predicted the two hyperfixations that took my summer by storm: The World Cup, and a D&D actual play podcast called Dungeons and Daddies. While both of these obsessions burned hot, I didn’t have to make choices about how to fill my free time—the obsession chose for me. The freedom brought by obsession blew away any shame I might have felt upon being so unproductive.

When The World Cup was on, I spent as much time as I could watching soccer, and when there weren’t games on I watched YouTube videos about soccer or read about it online. Since the Cup ended, I’ve been entirely unmotivated to consume soccer content, the obsession blinked off almost immediately. I can hardly remember being the person I was when it was happening, that sports fan I’d never met before this summer.

Dungeons and Daddies became more than just a podcast I listened to while doing chores or walking my dog; as its season two kicked into high gear, I spent whole evenings listening to hours of it, sometimes while crocheting or smoking weed, sometimes while pacing the living room, sometimes simply while sitting. Sometimes I marveled at myself, at how much fun I was having listening to other people play a game. At least with the World Cup, I shared my fandom with much of the world, I could talk about the games with friends, show off what I was learning about the sport; when you’re obsessed with a podcast, there’s nothing to show off. There’s no Letterboxd for podcasts, no bragging rights. I spent hours and hours listening to it for nothing but my own enjoyment, and now that the obsession doesn’t burn so brightly, I miss it, as I miss the World Cup.

When I think about whether or not it’s been a good summer, I think about all the things I’m proud of, the things I did that come with bragging rights, but I also think about these hyperfixations that meant nothing to anyone save for myself. I think about how good it felt to simply enjoy myself without worrying about self-care, or my film and book goals, or competing with myself. It felt so good to get completely wrapped up in a geeky interest, to “waste” that time. Am I soiling the purity of that wasted time by writing about it, turning my enjoyment into content? Maybe I would be less susceptible to the double-bind if I wasn’t a writer, if my writing instincts didn’t constantly keep the fires of metacognition burning. Or maybe this tendency is universal, I have no idea. My own interiority is the only kind I can possibly experience; I don’t know what it’s like for you, if you might be more capable of enjoying something without simultaneously considering what it means for you to enjoy it.

Now I have these last precious two weeks before school resumes. I have two more weekend trips planned, incredibly fun adventures on the horizon, here I go again, bragging. Trying to prove something that no one has asked me to prove. Contorting the pleasure of being alive into the march of productivity. I can feel myself seeking around for another obsession, for an infatuation with something that might erase my competitive urges, my need to feel that summer is an enemy I’ve conquered, something that will let me be rather than urge me to strive.

When my classes start, the need to be productive will be externally commanded, capitalism logic demanding that I do the assigned reading, finish assignments, teach my class. Truthfully, I’m looking forward to it; it’s been a good summer, but I could use some more structured time.

I grew up watching the US Women’s soccer team dominate, back in the era of Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Brianna Scurry, Michelle Akers. In the late 90s these were household names to me, I revered them, I wanted to play like them. I was twelve in 1999, and for one of the final games, we went to a Brazilian restaurant in Salt Lake City to watch surrounded by other Brazilians, a party of collective joy that I still remember vividly. I played soccer and my dad was my coach; every Sunday we would gather with other families in the neighborhood to play a pickup game in the field across the street from my house, a tradition we creatively called “Sunday Soccer” and that my family kept up for a decade. Once in a Sunday Soccer match, I was playing on the opposite team from my father and we had a terrible collision that broke my dad’s ankle. Sorry, Dad.

As a child, I thought of soccer as more of a girl’s sport than anything for boys. I could never get into watching Men’s soccer with the same enthusiasm, maybe because the US Men’s team was never anything to write home about. I enjoyed rooting for Brasil on the national stage, but to me, the men playing the sport were always Also-Rans.

As an adult, I made sporadic attempts to get seriously into soccer fandom. In 2014, fresh off of studying abroad in Brasil, I enthusiastically tuned in to the Men’s World Cup to root for Brasil, the hosting nation. Earlier that year, I’d broken up with my long-term boyfriend and then gotten hospitalized during a psychotic episode, and the recovery from that breakdown would take me years. I was stuck in a call center job that was a terrible match for my mental state. I was already emotionally fragile, is my point, and then Germany beat Brasil 7-1 in a legendarily humiliating game. After that, I hardened my heart; I felt like I could never get into soccer again, let alone root for Brasil.

Fast-forward to now. My parents were begging me to watch some games, to take part in their fandom and joy. They always cared about soccer, but then my mom became obsessed with Ted Lasso, which generated the kind of soccer obsession that has her sending me reels of beautiful goals all day. Enthusiasm is infectious, and I got a trial subscription to YouTubeTV so that I could make my parents happy by watching a few games.

And then I’m not sure what happened. The stars aligned? Suddenly, I could watch more than five minutes of soccer without getting bored. It held my interest. I started having fun. It helped that this World Cup have been filled with drama–people have been joking about it feeling scripted. I watched Brasil beat Scotland and, hey, this Brasilian team actually seems like they’re pretty good. This Vini Jr. guy is electric to watch. Poland didn’t qualify for the World Cup this year, so my Polish wife has no country to actively root for, but she wanted to tune in order to root against Germany. She was rewarded with incredible schadenfreude: Ecuador beat Germany in the Group Stages, in an upset that shook Germany and allowed Ecuador to advance. My wife was thrilled at Germany falling apart, I was rooting against Germany because of that 7-1 in 2014, but beyond that, seeing so much Ecuadorian joy gave me joy. Brasil beat Japan on the same day that Germany got eliminated by another Latin American country, Paraguay, and we screamed about both matches. Vai mi gente Latino, I say as someone who’s been on this bandwagon for all of two weeks.

Soccer has become my obsession, my hyperfixation. It feels like I have a new fandom, the same kind of rush in my blood that I haven’t felt since my wife and I were both into K-pop at the same time. When games aren’t on, I’m listening to commentary or watching YouTube highlights. I’m rooting for the underdog countries, which keep rewarding my enthusiasm with incredible performances (that England/DR Congo match!). If this World Cup is scripted, it’s being written by someone who has my number.

And then last night I watched one of the most incredible sports stories the world has ever seen. I realize this sounds like meaningless hyperbole coming from me, someone who is not a real sports fan in any meaningful way. But I don’t think anyone who watched Cabo Verde stand up to Argentina would disagree. Argentina is one of the favorites to win the entire tournament, and Cabo Verde is a tiny island nation with a population of 500,000 people, less than the population of Columbus, OH. They were being called a Cinderella team just for making it to the Knockouts, and nobody thought they had a real chance against Argentina, no matter how beloved they were. Like most of the world, I was rooting for Cabo Verde, but I was hoping they’d put up a real fight and only lose by a few goals, I didn’t want Argentina and Messi to humiliate them.

Then Cabo Verde proved that no one needed to feel at all protective of them. Their goalkeeper, Vozinha, is a 40-year-old man who looks 65, and he saves goals like the gods have blessed his hands, he makes me proud to be an elder millennial. The entire game was a fierce battle, with Argentina scoring late in the first half and then Cabo Verde scoring an equalizer late in the second half. Every time I thought the story was over, Cabo Verde came back. The game went into Extra Time, and Argentina scored early, and it looked like they were toast. Then Sidney Lopes Cabral scored one of the most beautiful goals I have ever seen. Again, this might not sound like much from a bandwagon fan, but if you haven’t seen it, you have to watch this goal. It’s like something out of myth.

This was a game that pundits were predicting would go 6-0 for Argentina, and Argentina only won because they pulled out a third goal in extra time. Cabo Verde may have eventually lost, but they never stopped fighting. They never played like they felt lucky just to be there. They fought for so many chances, had so many shots on goal that almost went in. It was beautiful, electric soccer, exciting for every minute the game continued. Watching them play was so gripping that I truly can’t believe that a few weeks ago, I would’ve said this was a boring sport to watch.

I know I’m not the only American that has been soccer-pilled by this World Cup. Unfortunately I don’t live in a city where massive crowds are gathering for watch parties, but I’ve still felt connected to my country and to the world by all this collective joy. There are so many heartwarming stories coming out about North America hosting the world, and if you’ve been paying attention even slightly you’ve probably heard of them already. (But if you haven’t tuned in at all, look up Lawrence, KS and Algeria, and look up the Tartan Army in Boston, and look up Los Coreanos Hermanos, and look up the way Mexico adopted the Iranian team.)

Watching Americans embrace soccer fans from other nations has given me the most positive feelings about my country that I’ve felt since I watched Minneapolis protesters battle against ICE. For the past decade I’ve never been able to experience joy or pride in my fellow Americans without accompanying rage over what our government is doing to us, and this World Cup is no different, thanks to the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decided that it’s legal to discriminate against trans women in sports. It’s painful for this decision to come down at a moment when we’re all witnessing the joy that sports can bring, but it’s also a decision that reaches far beyond sports: it rules that trans women can’t be protected under Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause. And it included a footnote, saying that the ruling does not prohibit “biological females” from playing on male or co-ed sports teams. Hopefully this is obvious, but that footnote isn’t there because the Supreme Court believes the gender of trans men to be legitimate, but because we are not seen as a threat.

When I was a cis girl playing soccer, I loved the physicality of the sport. I loved shoving my body into other bodies and wrestling for the ball; I embraced the possibility of collision and injury, a youthful embrace that’s unimaginable to me today. I got so excited at any opportunity to play on a co-ed team, to try myself physically against boys. I never felt any fear about playing with or against boys, and I would have been furious at the idea that anyone thought I needed “protecting” from those with an XY chromosome. As an adult, I am enraged still. This ruling is not just transmisogynistic, it’s misogynistic, sprouting from this absurd paternalism that claims cis girls are fragile and in need of protection.

Right now I think a lot of trans men are wrestling with how clearly this ruling has exposed that transphobia, at the legislative level, is not really about us. The laws may affect us, but trans women are the real targets. They always have been. These days I don’t go looking for the political opinions of trans men online, because the internet seems to platform only the whiners and the players of Oppression Olympics, those who try to insist that our invisibility is somehow “as bad” as the active discrimination and violence aimed at trans women. But I’ve heard whispers of trans men trying to make this ruling about us–a truly asshole move. This isn’t the time to make it about us. This ruling has opened the door to further discrimination against trans girls and women, and we have to step up and fight alongside our sisters without forgetting that we are privileged.

It feels clumsy to write about my passion for the World Cup, an event which is so joyful because at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter, alongside this Supreme Court ruling, which matters horribly, which is going to allow further discrimination against trans women in colleges and elsewhere. But it feels wrong to write about my newfound sports fandom without acknowledging that my country wants to eliminate trans women from sports, as they want to eliminate trans women from the entire public sphere. The World Cup may make for the most delicious escapism, but we still have to live in the real world.

I’m thrilled for Cabo Verde. I’m deliriously hoping for Brasilian redemption. I’m even rooting for the USA, because they’re making this country care about soccer, and I’m thankful for that. I’m enjoying the feeling of being so connected to the world throughout this long summer party. But outside of all this joy, the walls are closing in. The owner of my favorite local bar, the place where I watched USA win their latest game, the place where I celebrated my birthday, has talked openly about his approval of states legislating against trans athletes. My government is claiming that sports are for cis people only. It’s painful and irreconcilable. Beyond rooting for my teams in the World Cup, I don’t know how to have hope for my country, and it feels so strange for joy and despair to coexist inside my body like this.

But maybe my joy can beat back my despair, just the tiniest bit. At the moment that feels like all I can ask for. That and my hope that other trans people, and especially trans women, can find some joy in the midst of this relentless attack. If you’re trans and you’re reading this and feeling hopeless, try getting into the World Cup. It doesn’t really matter and it won’t liberate you or any of us, but it might bring some joy. It feels good to get happy for other countries. Vida longa a Cabo Verde.

This isn’t that new a phenomenon, though I’ve found it newly annoying. I’ve always had a contentious relationship with sleep, and–again this might be the sneaky mania–it tends to get worse in the spring and summer, when I am excited about doing things during the day and my body therefore wants to start “the day” as soon as possible. Often I welcome this habit of mine, because early in the morning before the rest of the world has woken up is a great time to get writing done. When I had to wake up at 5 every day to drive my wife to her 6am shifts, I would complain, but secretly reveled in returning from the drive to sit down at my desk and bang out a few thousand words as the sun finished rising.

What feels different and bad, lately, is that I have not been reveling in writing. I am in avoidance mode: avoiding revising my last short story from spring workshop, and (this is the big one) avoiding revising my novel. I just haven’t felt much like a writer the past few weeks. The problems in my work feel bigger than my current abilities. When I try to get into the groove, I find the groove to be misshapen and awkward, my feet constantly stumbling out of it. I have writer’s block, or more like reviser’s block. I’ve tried to procrastinate revising by starting new projects, and everything comes out stilted. So it’s insult on top of injury that my body keeps waking me up during my prime writing hours. What the hell else am I supposed to do with this time? Read? You’ll be shocked to hear it, but I’ve been in a reading slump lately, too. I wonder if these two slumps could possibly be related. Maybe astrology has the answer, maybe something is in retrograde.

I’m told that hating my novel and feeling horrifically inadequate is a rite of passage for novelists. I hope so. In the meantime I will try to pour this disgruntled, frustrated semi-creative insomniac energy into some form of essay.

Right now I’m coming off of two weekends in a row of travel. The theme of both of these weekends was very little sleep. Could all this running around and messing with my sleep schedule be contributing to my body’s current discombobulation? Maybe nothing is ever that great a mystery. But anyway. Let’s try to write about raving.

On June 12th I drove to New Jersey for Dripping, a 3-day techno festival in the woods. Many of my New York raver friends attend every year, but this was my first time going. It felt like summer camp for adults, not least because the festival grounds appeared to be used for a summer camp when not in use by ravers. There was a lake at the festival, and shower facilities, and numerous cute little cabins scattered between the camp sites. One of the two main stages was in an adorably tiny barn (dubbed ‘The Barn’), the other was in this tavern-like structure (dubbed ‘The Inn’). I’m under the impression that most of the people at the festival had come from the NYC metro area–it felt much like someone simply picked up the NYC rave scene and deposited it in the woods a couple of hours away.

These three days reminded me why I did so little writing when I was living full-time in New York. Because my ideal day doesn’t involve much writing at all, it involves spending the day at the beach and the night in the club. It’s very hard for me to get sick of this magic combination. At Dripping, days were spent in the lake and nights were spent raving. I achieved my final form, always dripping, constantly wet from either lake water or sweat, more liquid than solid. The lake at Dripping was very much like being at Riis Beach, on one of that beach’s better days when the hetero families stay away and it’s truly full of queers, all smoking and drinking various substances. We bobbed around on the lake in pool floats, fish nibbling on our navels, branches of pine trees swirling around our ankles. When you looked down through the water, you could see the tops of trees down there.

I took my travel notebook with me, but forgot a pen, so wrote not a single word the whole weekend. I read a few pages of Proust while sunbathing. Proust, it turns out, is correct vibe-wise for a day at the lake (all those beautiful descriptions of flowers and meditations on time and memory), but formally a mismatch–I’m too stupid for sentences that beg to be read multiple times when I’m stoned on the beach. Not quite sure what I was thinking in my choice of reading material.

Friday night the music ended at around 5am. I don’t have much to say about Friday night–it was fun, and a friend took a bunch of photos of me shirtless in the woods. Saturday was the big festival night, when the dance music promised to start at 10pm and go for at least a full twelve hours. On Saturday, I left the beach at around dinner time and tried to nap, to no avail (see: summer insomnia). The evening hours featured no dance music, but rather sets of more experimental music, performance art, and drag shows. All this was fun enough, but to me, already dying to get my dancing shoes on, it felt like a way to kill time before the real fun began. I was impatient. I wanted music fast enough to dance to. Or perhaps I’m simply not cultured enough to experience the rest of what the festival had to offer.

I’ve moved away from many places in my life, but moving away from New York is the first time that I’ve moved but stayed close enough to regularly visit, and therefore the first time I’ve managed to keep regularly in touch with the friends I’ve left behind, to maintain something close to the same kind of intimacy I felt when we were local friends. This is, of course, a good thing, but it also means I witness the way my friends’ lives have moved on without me, I witness how the rave community has continued to fluctuate and expand and morph in my absence. I always worry about not finding a place in it for myself anymore, a worry that, thankfully, has so far proved unfounded. And if there’s an opportunity for me to hang out with my city friends, and I fumble that opportunity, it feels like a horrible failure even if I know rationally that I’ll be able to return to the city quite soon, that such an opportunity won’t be my last. The stakes of socialization feel weirdly high.

I have intense social anxiety, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that most of my personality is formed downstream of my social anxiety. So I went into the weekend anxious to get enough time with my city friends, with paranoid visions of always missing it when people gathered outside the dance floors to chat. Being anxious about something is a great way to turn whatever you’re anxious about into prophecy, and I did, in fact, often miss it when my friends gathered to hang out and talk on smoke breaks.

This means I spent a lot of time at Dripping sharing a dance floor with my friends, which was wonderful, but spent less time catching up with people in long conversations. I worried that if I didn’t use this time to properly catch up with people, if I didn’t get regular updates on their lives and share my updates in return, that this would say something negative about our relationship. Even though dancing beside someone for hours is its own kind of intimacy, even though you don’t always have to talk with someone and catch up to solidify a bond of friendship.

The Knicks won the series Saturday night, that was a thing that happened. Half the festival was crowded around a single laptop in the dining tent, watching the game, and we wandered through when the Knicks were a few seconds away from winning. Screaming pandemonium when they won. It was hard to tell if this event made the festival feel more celebratory, as it already felt plenty celebratory to me before, but I suppose it was one more thing cranking up the good vibes.

Once the dance floor really got going my anxiety took as much of a backseat as it ever does. One of the stages, The Barn, was renamed “Maricón” for Saturday night, with a lineup of Latin American DJs playing different varieties of Latin dance music all night long. I danced in there for most of the night and reveled in the feeling of my ethnic identity being pandered to. This stage was so popular that the party flowed out its doors, with as many people dancing outside on the steps as inside the stage proper. It felt like a street party, everyone smiling at each other and whooping and throwing ass.

Yet my favorite set of the night was gyrofield, who played at The Inn stage. We planted ourselves in front of the DJ booth for most of her 2-hour set. There was something so dark and mysterious about this set, hypnotic and liquid; I kept thinking that I felt like a water droplet, dripping and flowing as my body contorted into new shapes. It was drum n’ bass, but within this genre there was so much sonic variation, so many unexpected beat drops and weird songs that I might have found it difficult to dance to if gyrofield hadn’t held me in the palm of her hand. I kept catching my friend’s eye and both of us were grinning, ecstatic, given over.

The night gets a bit blurry after gyrofield finishes at 3am. I remember switching between the two stages frequently. Constantly misplacing my water bottle. Hungrily eating chips and salsa when a festival staffer passed them around the dance floor. Chatting up a new acquaintance who was in New York from Singapore, and who pleased me by telling me I looked like I was in my mid-twenties when I confessed I was turning 39 soon. A friend asking me if I was enjoying my first Dripping–I said yes, definitely. Somehow time sped up faster and faster, and the sun was rising, and the friends I was sharing a tent with were tired–they decided to pack their things, leave the festival early, and catch NJ Transit back to the city in order to sleep in their own beds. I was left alone for Juliana Huxtable’s closing set, drifting around The Inn’s back corners, wondering if I, too, should call it a night.

I wasn’t tired at all. And by some miracle, my body barely hurt–after two nights of raving, my toes were sore where they kept shoving into my shoes, and my lower back felt slightly stiff, but there was none of the brutal knee and hip pain that used to plague me after a few hours of dancing. This is a major coup, and I attribute it to Leg Day at the gym. I have long since accepted that my chronic pain will never drop down to zero, but weightlifting continues to be more helpful than anything else I’ve tried.

I could have gone for several more hours, is my point, but I couldn’t find anyone I knew on the dancefloor, and I wondered if all my friends had gone to bed. I went and found a hammock to lie down for a while, listening to birds and watching early light filter through the leaves, waiting for my last ketamine bump to wear off, hoping to get sleepy. This didn’t work, and it continued to not work when I returned to my tent and tried to sleep there. After a couple hours I gave up, and went to the Open Air stage, where Juliana Huxtable was closing out the festival. I watched for a little while, and thought about dancing again, but it was like once I’d made up my mind to be done dancing, I couldn’t get back into it again. Later, of course, I would see Instagram stories that informed me that many of my friends had returned to the dance floor for the last hours of Juliana’s closing set, and their videos of this time looked incredibly fun, and I regretted my decision to call it a night (during the day). But at the time it felt like I’d gotten what I needed out of the festival. I drove off several hours earlier than I’d originally planned, and arrived back in Syracuse in time to pick up my wife from work at 3pm.

And that was it, that was the weekend. I always struggle to put raves into words (it’s why I keep trying, the challenge makes it fun) but with something as intense as Dripping it’s especially impossible. It felt so huge, and also it was just a single weekend. It felt like I got to join a separate, distinct world for three days, but also that world was strikingly similar to Nowadays in Ridgewood. The trees all around me were beautiful, the lake was beautiful, the people were beautiful, I was on drugs, I was happy, everything (save for sleep) felt possible, none of this captures the whole.

You have an experience, the experience changes you, and time keeps happening. You can’t sleep. That thing you looked forward to for months is in the past now, but your body is stuck in a state of remembered anticipation. You can’t sleep, again. The world feels alive to possibility, and in your sleep-deprived state, this potential can’t transmute to actuality, to anything productive. You wonder how much your early-morning insomnia might be related to your constant drive to be productive. You wonder if this drive is the kind of thing that can be reduced in therapy, or if it must be accepted. You write a blog post about the experience you had that you’d told yourself you wouldn’t write about, because in theory, not every experience should be smushed into content–but if you don’t write about it you’d have to write about other things, or sit and stare at the wall. You curse the uselessness of language and wish you’d devoted yourself to a different art form instead.

You circle sleep like a restless predator. You give up and consume caffeine. You think about being thirteen years old and identifying hard with the part of Fight Club that articulates what chronic insomnia feels like. You wish you could go back in time to that thing you just experienced, that thing you looked forward to for months. You’re afraid to look forward to more things because then those things will happen, and the potential will no longer be potential. You accept having another sleep-deprived day to get through. You avoid working on your novel. You slip into the second-person. You can’t sleep, and you feel like a being composed of water and nostalgia, so you might as well write an essay.

Has Syracuse’s long winter finally run its course? This last winter was especially hard and endless-seeming, with snow and freezing rain following us to the beginning of May. But now, finally, there are signs of a spring that won’t quit. This means the occasional day in the 80s, with many temperate days still surrounding the swelter, with less of the torrential rain (and infrequent snow) than we got for all the past two months. As ready as I am for real summer, I’m still so happy to see blue skies that I can forgive the fact that I still, occasionally, need a light jacket to be outside. I can almost believe that soon it will be time to wear shorts every day.

I’ve been out of school for a month, and the time I have on my hands feels limitless, though this month has flown by and I know the next three months will pass in seconds. With all this free time, my brain has felt languid and elastic and a little empty. I’ve been spending a lot of time touching grass, taking the dog on long walks. I’ve been reading out on the porch. I’ve been going on hikes and planning trips. I’ve been writing, but I recently finished the first draft of my novel, so now my writing time is spent re-reading and revising.

I am planning a trip to Little Rock and the Ozarks in July to do research for my novel. This is terrifying, mostly because I have little confidence in my research abilities, so I’m terrified that I’ll get down there and not have the skills to find out what I need. It’s also scary because it’s an act of faith in my novel, of believing that this pile of words I’m sitting on is worth the expense of this trip. Revising this pile of words has me freshly unsatisfied with the existing draft, and it’s hard to see the good version of this draft somewhere in the future. Is it “worth it” to spend all this money on research, for a project that often still feels tenuous? I’ve decided on yes, but it does feel like a gamble.

I’ve been laser-focused on this novel, and it’s been tough to pull my head out of my novel and think about essay-writing. So I thought for this post I would do snapshots of media I’ve enjoyed lately.

Night Night Fawn

I recently finished Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg, a gorgeously spiteful head trip of a novel. Its protagonist is Barbara Rosenberg, a homophobic, transphobic, Zionist yenta in Manhattan, who’s writing her memoirs as she dies in the care of her trans son. She has been estranged from her son for decades prior, and still does not accept his gender, thinking of him as her daughter; she’s also estranged from her former best friend, Sugar, a writer and actress who has achieved the success in showbiz that Barbara once dreamed of. She’s subject to hallucinations from Oxyconton, and thus believes that her son has been transformed into a giant bird.

The delight of this novel lies in occupying Barbara’s villainous and psychedelic POV, as we’re invited into her noxious opinions on everything from plastic surgery to Israel to Marxism to transness and dykehood. Barbara seduces the reader like every good villain should, and though the reader empathizes with her, she’s unsympathetic and unlikable.

Through its unflinching examination of Barbara’s values, Night Night Fawn elucidates why such a value system is fascistic, without ever feeling didactic or preachy. The prose is lush and raunchy and funny, with Barbara’s unique voice guiding us through her Jewish milieu over many decades. Addressing her trans son, whom she previously envisioned as a bird: “You, meanwhile, were acting like everything was normal. Your nose looked more nose-like again. Maybe it had retracted like a flaccid penis back into your regular nose.”

Proust

I am in the middle of reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time–or rather, I’m in the middle of Swann’s Way, and I hope I’ll have the momentum to read the other volumes next. Reading Proust is transformative, as everyone always told me it would be, but I wasn’t prepared for the density of his sentences, the way they curve around each other and explode into newness. I’m having to read so many of these knotty sentences multiple times, but I love it.

Proust can get paragraphs out of the smallest detail, such as the smell of hawthorn flowers. He digs into these details with the kind of relish you can’t help but get swept up in, expounding with seemingly infinite clauses about the tiniest recollection. When I first started reading I found this level of attention to detail exasperating, but once you get into its groove Proust’s way with details acts as a kind of narrative momentum. So far, there’s not much in the way of “plot” in this book, so much as a slow meandering through this narrator’s memories. But the meandering is the point. Slowing down with these details is the point. What keeps me reading is not plot but a curiosity to see how he’ll describe the next small moment. I feel like I’ve never explored a literary world as thoroughly or as intimately as I’ve been exploring this narrator’s childhood in Combray.

100 pages in, and very little has happened so far, yet it feels like everything is happening all at once because of this novel’s strange relationship to time. The past overlies the present, the past mixes with the present like an oil spill glimmering into water. It’s impossible, reading this book, to not think about my own relationship to nostalgia, my longings to recapture past places even as I’m glad I left them. When you’re wallowing in nostalgia, your longing feels singular, but few feelings tie humans together more than our mutual nostalgia.

I don’t have intense longing for the scenes of my childhood, like Proust’s narrator does for his years in Combray, but I do have nostalgia for the setting of my twenties: Carrboro, North Carolina, a nostalgia which I’ve written about before. Every passing minute makes those years vaguer in my mind, my memory letting me down, and I fear the coming day when it all fades, when I don’t remember my youth in technicolor. I’ve always felt a bit embarrassed at the depth of my feeling for the place where I spent most of my twenties, as if it’s a character flaw, as if closure exists for this place and this time but I am too blind to find it. Surely if I were more mature, more okay with aging, then I wouldn’t feel anxious at the thought of time relentlessly taking me further from the 2010s.

But reading Proust makes me feel that it’s okay, that in fact it’s universal, to be nostalgic. Here is a narrator that can’t let go of a single moment from his past, a narrator who tastes a madeleine and invites the way it transports him back in time. In Proust, the past is accessible, not another country that can’t be visited but visceral and alive in our subsumed memories, available to us through the senses that lie in wait to take us back there.

“But, when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping on the ruins of all the rest, bearing without faltering, on the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of memory.”

Bojack Horseman

Another nostalgia trigger: I’ve been rewatching Bojack Horseman. I first binged this show in winter 2020, right before the pandemic, and it’s surreal to realize that it’s been long enough since that time that I can go back to media I watched then and experience it fresh. So it’s a double-whammy of nostalgia: it reminds me of early 2020 (Agata and I watched it together when she was still my fiancé, not yet my wife), and it reminds me of the 2010s, because it’s certainly a relic of that era.

The show centers the psychological troubles of a problematic man, a formula that’s reminiscent of the “Tortured Man” shows that defined the Golden Age of TV, on the decline when Bojack Horseman started airing in 2014. Although the show is a comedy starring a cartoon horse, its narrative shape would recall Breaking Bad even if Aaron Paul wasn’t involved. Like Breaking Bad, it’s about a selfish, fucked-up middle-aged man who sucks everyone around him into his drama, and though it never leaves humor far behind, the ramifications of Bojack’s depression and narcissism are taken seriously.

Bojack traverses the dividing line between the uncaring 00s and when our culture began taking identity politics and “wokeness” more seriously, and is thus an interesting time capsule back to the 2010s. It has anti-wokeness baked into it–characters of color are voiced by white actors, and the ethnicities of these characters, when they’re brought up at all, are played for humor in the first season–but the show was always interested in questions of gender and sexuality. A main storyline in the second season involves the repercussions of Diane speaking out about a talk show host’s allegations of sexual abuse. Airing in 2015, it’s an interesting precursor to #MeToo and the issues that would dominate our cultural landscape a few short years later. Watching it takes me back to Tumblr feminism and reading Roxane Gay, the years when it felt like feminism was bubbling up beneath our culture and the seeds of change were being planted. Yet the storyline concludes with Diane having a fight with her husband, Mr. Peanutbutter, a fight which centers his feelings and lays the blame for her unwanted publicity on Diane. The show was circling closer to the feminist ideology that it would embrace in later, post-#MeToo seasons, but it hadn’t quite gotten there yet.

Castration Movie Anthology I: Traps

This is a hard title to bring up in casual conversation, yet I’ve been trying to recommend it to everyone. Beyond the provocative title, it’s a hard sell to recommend a movie that’s 4 hours long. Nevertheless, I persist, because this movie is amazing and it should be more widely seen.

As the title suggests, it’s the first part of a longer project (Part 2 has been released, but I haven’t had the chance to see it yet) from trans indie filmmaker Louise Weard. It combines documentary and documentary-like footage with long and intimate scenes of arguments and group hangouts, all shot on a grainy Hi8 camcorder. Traps is split into two parts: the first part, “Incel Superman,” follows Turner, a down-on-his-luck production assistant in Vancouver, as he goes through a tortuous breakup and travels down the rabbit hole to inceldom. It asks the viewer to empathize with the kind of person from whom we’d usually retract our empathy. It’s hard to watch–Weard lets her scenes extend for what feels like too long, making these breakup fights agonizing to watch, and with the grainy footage it feels like you’re watching someone’s home video. The overall effect turns the characters painfully real, and it’s unpleasant to be invited into real people’s screaming fights and terrible decisions.

The second part, “Traps Swan Princess,” is three hours long and invites you into the world of Michaela (nicknamed Traps), a trans sex worker also in Vancouver. Michaela is, to put it mildly, not a likable protagonist. She bullies her friends and she’s locked into her own bullshit, and she pines for a man she calls her boyfriend who’s clearly not that into her. She has a right-wing past that the movie reveals slowly, as the parallels between her and Turner become evident. The movie shows a deep understanding of the internet generally and 4chan specifically, and the way these online spaces can be occasionally redemptive, but also addictive, radicalizing, and harmful.

Traps takes us close to its characters in a way that feels unprecedented. The camera candidly follows the daily lives of Michaela and her trans friends, showing unsimulated sex, unsimulated golden showers, and even, amazingly, documentary footage of a real top surgery and the patient’s real recovery from said top surgery. But despite the scenes that one could list off for shock value, where the movie really shines is its depiction of Michaela’s social world. There are so many scenes of trans people just hanging out, having conversations that are sometimes hilarious (there is an incredible argument over someone having not-read Dune), sometimes deeply painful, and often painfully sincere. We get to know these characters’ financial precarity, the transphobia that pricks them on a daily basis, but also their deep connections with one another and their loyalty. My deepest goal as a writer is to write the kind of trans dialogue that overflows from this movie. It’s real, and it’s funny, and it’s sweet. Despite the runtime, it rarely feels slow or overstuffed, and I wouldn’t wish it to be a second shorter.

In interviews, Weard has said that many of her influences were literary, from Gravity’s Rainbow to Casey Plett, and you can feel that literary influence in the movie–it’s literary in scope. (And I don’t know if this was an influence on Weard, but it reminds me of Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte in the best way.) It’s a masterclass in writing dialogue and it feels like a magnum opus, like a great 500-page novel. If you’re at all a fan of independent cinema or trans cinema or trans literature or, hell, just literature in general, you don’t want to miss this one.

In “On Style,” Susan Sontag writes, “To speak of style is one way of speaking about the totality of a work of art.” DeWitt’s style in this novel defines its totality, her style is singular, inimitable, it demands attention. And her style style is the book’s content, deepening the mystery of her narrative. DeWitt’s plot is appropriately simple for the story of one child’s quest to connect with his parents, but her style complicates this quest right to its end.

The section in which Ludo meets Red Devlin, his penultimate father figure, opens with spatial interruptions to the reader’s experience. DeWitt slows down her novel with four chapters which consist of only a paragraph each, an expansion of the technique she first used in the lead-up to Ludo meeting Hugh Carey. In these micro-chapters, Ludo approaches and stakes out Red Devlin’s house, witnessing him entering and leaving the house. The chapters are repetitive: The first paragraph of these chapters begins, “I have been going by the house every day for two weeks.” He observes Red Devlin and his family members coming to and fro. Then, “I went over to the house to watch for a while.” The next two chapters contain brief, unexciting observations of Devlin’s house, before the last chapter finally ends with, “It’s now or never.” This technique of repetitive, successive micro-chapters is only used here, raising our expectations for Ludo’s encounter with Devlin. The short chapters and blank space on the page build suspense and tension, setting up this meeting as distinct from Ludo’s encounters with his other potential fathers.

After the short chapters leading up to Red Devlin, DeWitt lets Ludo’s encounter with him unfold languidly across one 24-page chapter, with few extratextual quotations nor interruptions, as if she can’t risk distracting the reader from her subject matter with such formal flourishes. In this chapter, The Last Samurai directly confronts the question of whether suicide can be a rational choice. When Ludo meets Devlin, he is struggling to compose a suicide note to his family, mirroring the earlier letters that Sibylla and Ludo both struggled to write to Val Peters. This sets up Devlin as a foil for Sibylla and her depression, and as a character who can test Sibylla’s “rational” philosophy around suicide. Sibylla has always believed, and taught Ludo, that suicide might be the compassionate, rational option for a person who has no reason to believe their suffering will end, a philosophy demonstrated in her earlier conversation with a train passenger (“I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of maneating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank”).

While this long scene plays out with consistent, uninterrupted narration, DeWitt does weave in a few shorter interludes to Ludo and Red Devlin’s conversations. In particular, I want to look at the stories Ludo tells to a video store clerk. Here, Ludo has gone to the video rental to seek out The Importance of Being Earnest for the purpose of cheering Red Devlin (the movie reliably cheers up Sibylla when she is depressed), but he has to argue with the girl at the register in order to rent it. DeWitt lingers away from Red Devlin’s crisis to give us each of the three stories Ludo uses in order to persuade: he starts with the truth; when the register girl doesn’t believe him, he tells her a fairly ordinary lie about needing the movie for his sister who’s studying for her A-levels; when this too is not believed, he tells an outlandish lie (in it, he has two little brothers who are conjoined twins), and it’s this third tale that finally convinces the register girl to rent him the movie. These sidebar conversations, interrupting the main narrative, are included because they act as a microcosm for Red Devlin’s storyline: when someone is trapped by suicidal logic, the truth will not work to convince them, nor will anything close to the truth—you have to convince them of what might seem, from the suicidal person’s perspective, an outlandish lie (that life may yet turn happy and prove worth living) in order to save them. Yet while lying works to rent the movie in this lower-stakes aside, in Devlin’s real situation Ludo proves unsuccessful: ultimately, he stops arguing with Devlin’s suicidal logic, and decides that convincing Devlin to go on living would be tantamount to cruelty, a stance which agrees with Sibylla’s philosophy around suicide. After Devlin dies, Ludo thinks, “It was all right [to cry] now that it couldn’t make him feel he had to make an effort, maybe even that he had to go on being sick.”

After leaving Red Devlin’s corpse, Ludo goes home and confronts Sibylla about why she won’t simply get another job and try to be happier—he sees her situation reflected in Devlin’s death. She deflects and doesn’t directly answer his questions, instead replying with anecdotes about her parents’ misery. By this point, we understand the depth of Sibylla’s depression and how trapped she feels; we understand that in seeking out father figures, what Ludo has actually been searching for is a way to save his mother.

This brings us to the novel’s final chapter and climax, when Ludo meets Kenzo Yamamoto, who by this point has not performed publicly nor released any recordings for many years. As the scene begins, Ludo first hears Yamamoto’s playing from outside:

“Glenda the Good glided on a gleaming sea drawn by six snowy swans. The Grand Armée crossed Poland on pogo sticks… Six dogs tapdanced on tabletops… He played variations on the Variations and variations on the variations and he would play one variation next to another next to which it had not originally been juxtaposed.”

The intricacy of the final sentence preceded by such lunatic imagery disorients the reader, jolting us out of the thorny interpersonal dynamics of the preceding chapter and bringing us back into the novel’s impressionistic mode, within which all manner of creative experimentation is made possible by the life of the mind. DeWitt emphasizes this flight into the intellectually fantastic with another Seven Samurai reference: “Are you ready for another fight? No prospects. It could be dangerous.”

When Ludo meets Yamamoto, he greets him by reciting a scene from Seven Samurai in Japanese, rendered textually with Japanese characters, then the Japanese phonetic spelling, then the English translation, so that this climactic scene, only a few pages out from the novel’s end, gets interrupted for two full pages by Japanese quotations from a movie. Yet reading it, I felt not impatient but strangely emotional: after hearing about this movie and experiencing Ludo’s journey to learn Japanese for most of the book, it was exciting to read him finally reciting the movie out loud, embodying the characters and all that they mean to him, as if he was proving himself worthy of the eight role models Sibylla tried to give him.

Ludo’s display of language abilities (and movie fandom) proves consequential, persuading Yamamoto to hear him out. Yamamoto turns out to be yet another mirror for Sibylla, a depressed artist who has ceased seeing the point in sharing his art with the world, who feels trapped by circumstance:

“He said When you play a piece of music there are so many different ways you could play it. You keep asking yourself what if. You try this and you say but what if and you try that. When you buy a CD you get one answer to the question. You never get the what if.”

As Yamamoto and Ludo talk, they are continuously interrupted by the ‘ping ping ping’ of Yamamoto picking at strings on the piano.

“Ping

Hundreds of CDs with whole pieces played once for the thousands of people who want CDs with whole pieces played once.

Ping

So those thousands of people are doing OK and they’ll go on doing OK even if I don’t play my party pieces

Ping ping” (ibid.)

When Ludo starts explaining, in a waterfall of questions, why he needs Yamamoto to record a CD for Sibylla, DeWitt does not interrupt him with ‘pings’ but instead describes the sound the way any novelist would: “He was strumming the strings of the piano softly.” Rendering the sonics of piano strings with the word ‘ping’ is thus a deliberate choice, a device which DeWitt drops once it’s no longer useful. The rhythm of the pings emphasizes Yamamoto’s depression as he monologues, bringing us closer to his perspective even though the scene is told entirely from Ludo’s POV. (Further down the page, Yamamoto picks out the Seven Samurai theme on the strings.)

This conversation ends with a sweet paean to one of The Last Samurai’s major themes: the importance of teaching. For if the novel holds up the love of learning as paramount to a meaningful life, then teaching becomes a sacred gift. Boy genius Ludo offers to teach Yamamoto all of things he knows, if he’ll only make this one CD which might potentially jolt Sibylla out of her depression. But what convinces Yamamoto is the offer to teach him to play “Straight No Chaser” on piano.

This playful ending almost disguises the fact that the reader is left in suspense as to whether Sibylla can be saved: we have Ludo’s determination and his love for his mother, but he could very well fail to convince her out of her misery just as he failed to convince Red Devlin that life was worth living. Sibylla’s previous experience at Yamamoto’s concert was a glorious encounter with art, but it didn’t lift her out of her circumstances, so the reader might feel skeptical that a CD from Yamamoto, no matter how special, could be powerful enough to turn her life around.

If the novel fails to answer these questions within the text, this failure is a deliberate refusal. The questions surrounding Sibylla’s fate—whether a person can be saved from her past, her circumstances, or simply the traps laid by her own mind; whether a person can be saved by art and by love; whether it is even possible for a person living the life of the mind to live happily—remain open because her future, like that of any suicidal person deciding against suicide, is unknowable. But the novel’s formal devices—DeWitt’s techniques of interruption, narrative discontinuity, frequent interludes, and intertextual interpolation—motivate the reader to seek for answers beyond those offered by the novel’s final words. Early in the book, when Sibylla is explaining to Ludo how Seven Samurai differs from Kurosawa’s Rashomon, she says,

“in [Rashomon] he tells the s tory 4 times, & it’s different each time someone tells it, but in this one he did something more complicated, he only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.”

Here DeWitt teaches us how to read her novel: by bringing in so many outside sources and multiple languages, she turns these distractions into meaning, using the reader’s disorientation to open her novel into an entire world that is more complex and full of possibility than either Ludo or Sibylla can grasp from their limited perspectives. While Sibylla’s happiness is left in limbo, it is this possibility, this wide and distractable openness to the breadth of human curiosity and courage, that grants the novel its real and lasting hope.

In Sibylla’s POV chapters, we’ve looked at how the activities of child-rearing have disrupted her writing and her intellectual life. But Sibylla’s section of the novel also provides an interesting example of what happens when the intellect does not suffer interruption. While Ludo is still a toddler, Sibylla takes him to see a performance by Kenzo Yamamoto, a renowned pianist. At first, Ludo interrupts the performance to ask questions , but as Yamamoto plays for seven and a half hours (much of this taken up with playing one opus over and over), the interruptions cease and Sibylla loses herself in the music, having a transcendental experience with Yamamoto’s art.

Sibylla pays a price for this uninterrupted artistic/intellectual experience. Once Yamamoto has finished, she realizes the seat beside her is empty and that Ludo has walked home. She returns home herself and finds him sleeping in bed, but the experience has been terrifying. Sibylla’s extended encounter with art, free of all distraction, took her so far outside of herself that she neglected her child and risked his life, an unambiguously negative side effect of pure intellectual pursuit.

This chapter ends with Sibylla thinking about practical concerns, her finances and the work she has still to do: “… I realized that I had spent some £35 that I could not afford. I turned on the computer and I turned to page 27 of The Poodle Breeder[.]” The transcendence she experienced during Yamamoto’s concert does not offer any kind of permanent freedom, but rather a temporary—and risky—escape. Sibylla’s depression, manifested textually through her financial precarity and the job she loathes, recurs despite how Yamamoto’s performance moved her. Even when genius is given free reign, even when the self is “lost” in the appreciation of art or ideas, the material world ultimately holds sway, extracting a price. The Last Samurai does not advocate for banishing the material world through obsessive intellectual or artistic pursuit, but rather for a dialectic that balances both materiality and the intellect. For the self to be preserved, interruption to and distraction from the mind are necessary.

When we enter Ludo’s POV chapters, the formal techniques become more about interrupting the reading experience than about Ludo himself getting interrupted—as a child, he does not have to parent or work and is largely left free to pursue his own ideas and scholastic interests. So for him, references to Seven Samurai take on a subtly different meaning than they do in Sibylla’s narration. Like Sibylla, Ludo takes inspiration from the movie, but rather than representing his innermost (thwarted) desires, Seven Samurai provides his moral framework, and he refers to it when determining the right course of action.

When Seven Samurai is quoted or described, these interjections are mostly drawn from a few key scenes towards the beginning, those in which Kambei Shimada recruits other samurai to join his mission. Interpretation and summary of these scenes get repeated and interpolated both in dialogue and internal monologue. This occurs most often with the line, “If we fought with real swords I would have killed you,” which paraphrases the scene in which Kyuzo fights another samurai with a wooden sword, and “A good samurai will parry the blow,” which paraphrases the scene in which Kambei plans an ambush against the samurai he seeks to test and recruit (DeWitt uses both phrases for several chapter titles). Ludo thinks of these lines when he is testing his various father figures, determining their overall worthiness and how much of the truth they might withstand, as in the scene when he confronts his actual father:

“I thought again that I could say something and everything would be different…

Then I thought:

If we fought with real swords I would kill him.

I thought:

I can’t say I’m his son, because it’s true.”

The extensive references to Seven Samurai early in the novel charge all later references to it with meaning, so that when single lines are referenced, the reader feels their weight—in the above quote, a single line from the movie makes us understand that Ludo is comparing his current situation to the film which has become the basis of his sense of ethics and morality; in judging Val Peters as not a true samurai, Ludo has judged him unworthy to be his father.

Another type of interruption, DeWitt’s habit of mixing other languages into her novel, aligns closely with the Seven Samurai references, as the film motivates Ludo and Sibylla’s desire to learn Japanese. Interjections in Japanese and other languages serve to carry the reader along with Ludo’s language-learning process, and they’re frequently pedagogical in nature, as if DeWitt wants to teach the reader these languages (or at least, to spark an interest in them). In Ludo’s diary entries, he writes out the Japanese characters he’s learning in order to understand Seven Samurai and other Japanese source texts. When he gets to the point of being able to understand a scene in Seven Samurai without subtitles, he takes the reader through not only his translation of the scene but the process by which he managed to finally understand it. Always, when Japanese characters show up, their English phonetic spelling is included, allowing readers who don’t speak Japanese to sound out the characters. In a later chapter, as Ludo is learning Old Norse by reading Njal’s Saga, DeWitt quotes from the book extensively in Old Norse, and also gives us Ludo’s translations into English.

Why interrupt the novel’s flow to take the reader through these languages at such a granular level? Partly, this serves to align us more closely with Ludo’s POV; instead of being told that he is adept at learning languages, DeWitt shows us his process in depth. Instead of telling us that Ludo is surpassing his own mother and learning Japanese faster than she (with her adult responsibilities) is able to, DeWitt illustrates the disparity in what they can each understand. On a deeper level, these sections act not to exalt Ludo, but to bring him down to a human level—yes, he is a linguistic genius, but look, he is learning them using the same techniques you or I would. By turning parts of her novel into a How-To guide for learning Japanese and Old Norse, DeWitt invites the reader into the joy of language-learning. The Last Samurai does not fully embody the kind of futuristic novel that Sibylla dreams of, one which would call upon diverse languages as impressionistically as a painter might utilize a color palette, but it acts as a kind of meeting point between the standard English-language novel and this imagined multilingual novel, one which suggests the formal possibilities of the other. A crucial step for writers dreaming and writing in other languages is for writers and readers alike to first discover the subtle joys and shades of meaning held in languages we might not yet know, and for that discovery to happen, language-learning must become a joy, and an end, in and of itself. DeWitt, through showing her characters welcoming these knowledge rabbit holes, both demystifies and models this learning process for her readers. By tying this process to characters that the reader has become invested in, she models the kind of joy—learning for its own sake—that boosts the discipline required to learn another language. Like Sibylla, I am an adult with adult responsibilities, which makes it harder to pick up languages on a whim, but I can imagine that had I read this novel when I was a teenager, with a teenager’s free time and squishy, open brain, my obsession with The Last Samurai might have inspired in me a lifelong passion for languages.

Much like the Seven Samurai references, these extensive sequences devoted to language-learning charge words in other languages with meaning, so that when DeWitt calls upon these languages throughout the novel, the reader understands them to signify the joy and freedom found in learning for its own sake. This device comes in handy for how DeWitt choreographs her novel’s climax, a crescendo which calls forth both Seven Samurai and Ludo’s knowledge of Japanese. But before we reach the ending, two last modes of interruption and discontinuity require analysis.

Throughout the novel, DeWitt departs from our main characters of Sibylla and Ludo to go on long—often 20 pages or more—seeming tangents about other characters who have yet to intersect with our main plot. Some of these interludes are framed as Sibylla telling the story of some extraordinary person to Ludo, and some are Sibylla or Ludo sharing the story with the reader; with these framing devices, they are less disruptive to the reading experience than some of the other narrative techniques I’ve discussed. The chapter right before Hugh Carey’s extensive tale, for example, ends with Ludo asking Sibylla, “But who ARE these people?” The reader doesn’t wonder, ten pages into reading about the life and times of Hugh Carey, why the novel has suddenly become about this random other character, because after DeWitt gives Ludo’s actual father, Val Peters, this treatment, we’re primed to notice a pattern: when the narration pauses for an interlude about some new character, this signifies that Ludo will later search out this character as a potential father figure. So we understand the interludes’ purpose, but why make them so long and detailed, why not give us a concise summary of these characters’ accomplishments and characteristics rather than pulling us away from her protagonists for pages and pages? The interludes are fascinating, but still, the novel would be substantially more streamlined without them.

These interludes widen the scope of the novel, allowing DeWitt to bring up questions and themes that show up more hidden in her main storyline. Sibylla and Ludo may be geniuses, but their accomplishments are ordinary; for the most part, they achieve no great deeds. Bringing in the stories of these almost-mythical heroes, heroes who either achieve greatness in art or science while also committing courageous acts to save people, allows DeWitt to play out her moral and ethical questions on a larger scale. Each tale is meant to make the case for why this man might be potentially worthy to become Ludo’s father figure, allowing DeWitt to explore what qualities and ethics make a person exceptional; when Ludo eventually meets them in-person, the question of worthiness is debated within the scene. With Hugh Carey, Ludo decides that, despite the great lengths Carey went to for the sake of learning, his ethics are questionable: “He had not killed to learn those moodless verbs and uninflected nouns, but he had brought a slave into existence for their sake.” The stories that play out in these interludes, and then later when Ludo confronts the interludes’ subjects, emphasize that genius is not the only factor that determines whether a life has been well-lived, and that living ethically perhaps matters more.

DeWitt also plays with the overall structure she has established, such as when she shortens the chapter wherein Ludo decides to seek out Hugh Carey to a single page . And, as Ludo is preparing to introduce himself to his actual father, Val Peters, DeWitt halts her chapter mid-sentence (she uses the ❖ symbol as chapter headings):

“I could have written it in 15 minutes if I hadn’t had to worry about sounding obnoxious. Still, as Sibylla

❖

would say, it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people.”

This is the only chapter in the novel that ends mid-sentence. Why does this moment deserve a unique interruption?

In this chapter, Ludo is struggling to write a letter to Val Peters, one which might open a communication that would let him explain his parentage in person. Ludo decides that the most winning way to do this is to correct Peters:

“It was really just a matter of…. writing to correct the mistakes in an engaging, innocent, boyish way, signing the letter Steven aged 11—this would be bound to get a response, and with luck he would put his address on the letter.”

This logic mirrors Sibylla’s struggle, after she’s slept with Peters and wants to leave without saying goodbye, to compose a note charming enough not to offend him but strange enough to make him undesirous of contacting her again. Both Sibylla and Ludo are constrained by social niceties (Ludo knows he must write “in an engaging, innocent, boyish way”) and unable to voice their real purpose nor personality. For Sibylla, this is key to understanding not just her one note to Peters, but why she slept with him in the first place, a decision which Ludo strains to understand and which Sibylla seems unable to explain to him. By this point in the novel, we have left Sibylla’s perspective behind and are immersed in Ludo’s POV; Ludo’s incomprehension of Sibylla’s sex life risks extending that incomprehension to the reader—to put it bluntly, there is the risk that the reader might be prompted to slut-shame Sibylla for knowingly sleeping with a man she did not care for. Drawing an obvious parallel between Sibylla’s communicative logic after Ludo’s conception and Ludo’s communicative logic with his father doubles down on the novel’s empathy for Sibylla in sleeping with Peters; interrupting the chapter between “as Sibylla” and “would say” emphasizes Sibylla and Ludo’s mirroring and makes this parallel impossible to miss. In addition, seeing Ludo struggle amidst the traps of social niceties again extends our empathy towards Sibylla, who was motivated to sleep with Peters in large part to avoid coming off as rude.

In Part 3, I will delve into how form marries theme in the novel’s climactic chapters: Ludo’s engagement with his final two father figures, Red Devlin and Kenzo Yamamoto. Stay tuned!

I gather from the level of discourse surrounding her decision that some people might have been angered by it, though I have only seen an outpouring of support for her. I join that outpouring: it is increasingly intolerable how writers are expected to be influencers on top of their actual job, which is of course writing. I find it abhorrent that the organizers behind this prize could not bend the publicity rules in order to give it to her sans influencer-ship, abhorrent that the prize is contingent upon the writer becoming a dancing monkey in order to “earn” it. And though it’s difficult to read DeWitt’s blog post without becoming worried for her (“It’s true that [suicide] causes distress, so one tries to avoid it. But the best way is to avoid being driven to the edge in the first place. If you’re trying not to crack up, there are some things you can’t do; it’s hard to get people to accept that.”), I admire her resolve and her unwillingness to sacrifice her principles for monetary gain.

I had already been working on a long essay about DeWitt’s The Last Samurai when this news broke, so perhaps we can call this subject matter timely. At any rate, here is the first part of the essay, in which I attempt to explicate this novel’s extraordinary formal inventions. Impossible not to fall short of this task: The Last Samurai is about 500 pages long, and its stylistic innovations so layered, complex, and numerous that I would have to write for 100 pages to untangle them all. But I’ll dedicate this attempt to DeWitt, one of the last true Real Ones that we’re lucky to have.

Throughout The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt repeatedly asks the question: is the life of the mind worth it? If we could exercise our intellectual and artistic passions with complete freedom, never getting distracted by the material world, would the result be true happiness or ruminative despair? She explores this question through the novel’s subject matter, but the reader feels its greatest ramifications through DeWitt’s formal and stylistic techniques of interruption and narrative discontinuity. These serve both to emphasize her characters’ conditions, alternately deepening and questioning their perspectives, and to show us how her heroine’s relationship to her intellectual life results in depressive logic, making Sibylla’s thoughts circle around suicide.

In her essay On Style, which argues for the primacy of form over content in art, Susan Sontag writes:

“Every style is a means of insisting on something… stylistic decisions, by focusing our attention on some things, are also a narrowing of our attention, a refusal to allow us to see others. But the greater interestingness of one work of art over another does not rest on the greater number of things the stylistic decisions in that work allow us to intend to, but rather on the intensity and authority and wisdom of that attention, however narrow its focus.”

The nature of intellectual attention itself is what draws DeWitt’s stylistic attention, and she brings great intensity, authority, and wisdom to the practice of fragmenting both our attention and that of her characters in order to disrupt the reading experience and trouble both an optimistic and pessimistic read of the novel’s conclusion. Her formal techniques play with attention and distraction like the strings of a piano, showing through style distraction’s effects upon her protagonist’s mental experience. In this first part I will focus on the techniques used to illustrate Sibylla’s depression and her experience of single motherhood.

Sibylla is an intellectual, someone for whom ideas and art hold life’s greatest excitement, an autodidact who left the U.S. for Oxford because she yearned to live “the life of the mind.” A one-night-stand results in her giving birth to Ludo, whom she raises without notifying the father of his paternity (in part because she has no respect for the father’s aesthetic output); providing for them both on the meager salary of her transcriptionist job means their family’s finances are constantly precarious. Sibylla acquiesces to her son’s insatiable thirst for knowledge by teaching him other languages and a wide variety of subjects at a young age, and as Ludo grows older it seems she might have a prodigy on her hands. (He reads The Odyssey in its original Greek when he’s a toddler.) Much of the book is taken up with Ludo’s quest to find his father and to seek out possible father figures; as the novel develops and our understanding of Sibylla’s depression deepens, we understand that his journey is as much about saving his mother as finding his father.

In the novel’s first 175 pages, following Sibylla from before Ludo’s birth to Ludo aged six, her narration is frequently interrupted by the demands of motherhood, showing us Sibylla’s intellectual life troubled by her circumstances—the practical difficulties of raising a child as a single mother. Her philosophy, that which would guide the life she would prefer to live, is difficult to pin down; the reader is left hungry for a full intellectual manifesto. Sibylla’s passion for “the life of the mind” is instead shown through her characterization, priorities, and how she raises Ludo. We know she believes in living according to rational logic, though what this means is sometimes obscured. As she is explaining how she came to study at Oxford, we get this revealing bit of backstory:

“Why not apply [to Oxford]? I thought: I could leave Motelland and live among rational beings! I would never be bored again!”

This indicates her key motivations: to live rationally, and to never be bored. These twin desires carried her across the Atlantic to Oxford, where she struggled beneath the rules applied to scholars, dropped out of university, slept with Ludo’s father, and picked up a dreadfully monotonous job in order to raise her son.

When Sibylla thinks about learning and knowledge, her internal monologue often becomes distracted, veering into other thoughts or tangents. She rarely articulates her philosophy directly, though we do get something of a thesis statement about how she doesn’t believe in reading only for the purpose of doing something with that knowledge:

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark.”

The continued repetition of “dust” and “dark” gives this passage an almost hypnotic feel, as if DeWitt is casting a spell or reciting a hymn; her prose leans on repetition as much as it leans on interruption. We can infer that Sibylla disagrees that those who read books because they’re interesting are not serious people, but she doesn’t delve into her own motivations for reading.

The next sentence, ominously, reads, “There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.” This phrase gets interpolated throughout the novel, and later in the book, Ludo describes his mother as, “The type of person who thinks boredom a fate worse than death.” So coming back to Sibylla’s declaration, we can see it as an early indication of her death drive: she loves reading because it’s interesting, yes, but this passion is not redemptive—her depressed logic makes this rumination on learning circle around to death. But instead of exploring this idea, in the next sentence DeWitt shows Sibylla thinking about sweaters, giving us this juxtaposition:

“There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.

I saw several interesting sweaters in the Market but they seemed to be rather expensive.”

Sibylla cuts off her own thinking because she’s distracted by the material world, her intellectual life subject to interruption even before Ludo is born. This juxtaposition—her reflecting on death vs. boredom, and sweaters distracting her from philosophizing— introduces one of the novel’s major subject concerns (Sibylla’s glancing thought at her own desire for death), and one of its major formal devices: that of the “life of the mind” interrupted and distracted by the material concerns of ordinary life.

We see this interruption again when Sibylla is imagining an innovation to the English novel, thinking about how future novelists might utilize other languages for mood, atmosphere, tone, the way painters use colors.

“Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words… & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.”

She’s thrilled with, even consumed by this: “An idea has only to be something you have not thought of before to take over the mind[.]” So distracted, she does not want to stop contemplating this idea in order to go to a party that evening, but feels it would be rude not to go; social obligation disrupts her thinking. It is at this party that she meets Ludo’s father and sleeps with him—out of a sense of social obligation: “I was still drunk, and I was still trying to think of things I could do without being unpardonably rude. Well, I thought, I could sleep with him without being rude[.]” Social obligation takes her away from her ideas (acts as destruction) and ultimately sets in motion the largest and most significant interruption to Sibylla’s intellectual life: the birth of Ludo.

Once Ludo is born, the interruptions become more literal and less self-inflicted. Again we get close to a manifesto for Sibylla’s motivations and purpose: “I thought: Yes, to live the life of the mind is the truest form of happiness.” Here, she’s remembering reading Aristotle on a Circle Line train, and it’s not even that Aristotle on its own terms makes her happy, but she knows that “it is not possible to live the life of the mind without reading Aristotle.” We jump to the present, when she can no longer live the life of the mind because she has taken on the task of teaching her son: “This is absolutely not possible today, with L interrupting every minute or so to ask a word.”

Here we get the interruption described, but mostly the interruptions are literalized to a nearly absurd degree. We see the mother and son on the train, and Sibylla is trying to summarize for the reader the mostly-inane questions that other train passengers ask about her child. The prose degrades into near-insensibility as her conversations on the train, and her thinking about them, get interrupted by the train announcements:

“When able to resist temptation I say… that I never meant this to happen.

TEMPLE EMBANKMENT WESTMINSTER ST. JAMES’S PARK

Etymology so helpful for his spelling 2

How did you teach a child so young 3

VICTORIA SLOANE SQUARE SOUTH KENSINGTON

Etymology so helpful for spelling

GLOUCESTER ROAD HIGH STREET KENSINGTON NOTTING HILL GATE”

And so on. Why include the train announcements in this way, interrupting her prose with all-caps shouting? It roots the reader firmly in Sibylla’s perspective, making us feel both the inanity of the passengers’ repeated remarks as well as the relentless interruption of the train announcements. Sibylla and Ludo are repeatedly riding the Circle Line in the first place because their house is too cold in winter for them to live comfortably, and Sibylla can’t afford to heat it more (or get a different place). Her financial circumstances have placed her on this train, with all its inanity and constant interruptions, and taken her away from the “true happiness” of the life of the mind.

These early chapters are framed as Sibylla’s manuscript that Ludo has discovered; it seems that we are meant to take these interjections as interruptions to Sibylla writing, not just interruptions to her train of thought. The most frequent and intense interruptions to Sibylla’s writing come from Ludo himself. Here his grammar lesson interrupts:

“I was not looking forward to simplifying and explaining even the simplest points of grammar to a 4-year-old & I can’t say I am looking forward to going through it all again now but I said I would so I

HEKkaiHEXeKONtapus HEPtakaiHEXeKONtapus OKTOkaiHEXeKONtapus

will.”

With these interruptions, DeWitt makes the reader experience literally the harried nature of single motherhood, the way Sibylla can’t finish a thought or conversation or piece of writing without the needs of her child supplanting her own.

Back on the Circle Line, Sibylla starts to explain her interpretation of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai—an interpretation that seems key for the reader, in order to understand this particular film’s importance to the novel—but this explanation is interspersed with Ludo singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

“& I said politely Essentially the film is about the importance of rational thought… We should strive to see what we can see for ourselves rather than what we would like to see.

She said What?

And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

I said Also, we should remember that appearances can be deceptive. We may not have all the relevant evidence. Just because somebody is smiling doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better off dead.

She said I really don’t think

SEVEN GREEN BOTTLES, HANGING ON THE WALL”

After another interruption, Sibylla quits trying to explain the movie (the subject seems to have gotten away from her) and introduces a logical question which, when taken together with other discussions of suicide throughout the novel, implies a kind of suicidal logic:

“She said & isn’t this rather morbid—

I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank.”

Sibylla’s distraction from her intellectual ideas is depicted not as a picayune annoyance, but as something that leads her thinking directly to an existential quandary.

Another mode of interruption that gets introduced in Sibylla’s chapters, to then be used throughout the novel, is extensive description of and quotations from Seven Samurai. Sibylla leans on this movie in her child-rearing, thinking that repeated viewings will provide her son with eight (the seven samurai, plus the director Akira Kurosawa) positive male role models in place of a father; she also rewatches it compulsively when she feels depressed and frustrated by her circumstances. Whereas other interruptions signify external circumstances and child-rearing necessities impinging upon Sibylla’s passions and desires, Seven Samurai represents those very passions, the subjects to which she longs to devote herself. When the narration is interrupted by quotations from, text about, or summaries of Seven Samurai, from Sibylla’s perspective these interruptions represent her longing to leave behind her duties and focus on what she most cares about, her longing for intellectual (and thus, financial) freedom.

The importance of Seven Samurai to Sibylla’s intellectual life is illustrated formally by how often her viewing and analysis of the movie get interrupted: as Sontag says, stylistic decisions focus our attention on certain things, and the way DeWitt cuts up and interpolates Sybilla’s experience of Seven Samurai draws our attention to what this movie is doing in the text. In a specific early chapter, Ludo’s toddler questions frequently disrupt her viewing of the movie, and these interruptions are used to a degree that brings the prose to the brink of incomprehensibility. Summaries of the film’s scenes are interspersed with Sibylla’s narration; as she’s reflecting on the circumstances that led to Ludo’s conception (continuously interrupting herself, cutting off her own questions lest she textually render any kind of actual regret about his birth), her narration is interrupted mid-sentence by dialogue, Ludo’s childlike confusion about what’s happening onscreen:

“What difference does it make? What’s done is done.

By coincidence I had signed up to eat in college that night; by coincidence I sat by a former member who was visiting; it was no coincidence that I talked of intellectual monogamy & work permits since I could think of nothing else… & she said that if I could bear the shame of being known to

Why are they fighting?

WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?

WHY ARE THEY FIGHTING?”

On the next page, continuing to worry about how best to raise her son, Sibylla concludes that Seven Samurai will give him proper role models. Then the summary of Seven Samurai continues, and after a few paragraphs of this Sibylla picks up her narration mid-sentence—but this sentence fragment does not relate to any of the sentences of narration that came before the summary. Instead it completes the sentence (“the shame of being known to”) that was cut off on page 25:

“Mifune runs forward brandishing his sword. He jumps up and down on the body.

The samurai walks off without a backward look.

type (I had admitted to 100wpm) I could have a work permit & a job.”

Another sentence a page later reads in entirety, “If L is a Mozart or a Newton people 10 centuries from now will be interested in the fact that he so nearly never existed,” but “so nearly” is cut off by more questions from Ludo, following which Sibylla continues on with a separate train of thought, and “never existed” comes a page and a half after the first part of its sentence, so that the reader again has to make an educated guess about which cut-off thought preceded it. Sibylla’s thinking has the quality of newspaper clippings cut apart and then re-pasted together in fragments to form some entirely new piece of prose. This is one of the novel’s more confusing chapters, but the extensive quotation and summary of Seven Samurai act like a lodestar for the reader as well as Sibylla, a source text to return to no matter how disorganized her thinking becomes.

In terms of plot, it’s a significant chapter, a turning point in how Sibylla will raise her son–backstory is revealed as she thinks deeply about the circumstances of his birth and childhood, and she’s trying to make hard decisions about how to raise him–yet DeWitt’s stylistic decisions deliberately make her narration difficult to follow, which calls our attention to her difficulties in maintaining her own mental life (and mental health) while raising a child on her own. The way these interruptions multiply and loop back upon themselves is a literalization of Sibylla’s fraying mind as she tries to use rational logic to work out the question of how to raise her son.

Ultimately, the solution she ends with is a compromise, more a surrender to her son’s willpower than the best rational conclusion. Exasperated at his constant distraction from the movie, she tells Ludo, “You’re missing a masterpiece of modern cinema. Finish the Odyssey and I’ll teach you the hiragana, yes?” Decision made: she will teach her son at the voracious pace at which he desires to learn, even though this will place him at odds with his peers, because to do otherwise would prevent her from focusing (on her menial work, and on the movie, which represents her intellectual passions). The reader is swept into this course of action much like Sibylla, aligning us tightly with her perspective; we have been so overwhelmed by the large fonts and all-caps and sentence fragments and Greek grammar that our nerves have been frayed right alongside hers.

If this fraying indicates the consequences of intellectual life interrupted by material concerns–in Sibylla’s case, specifically illustrating how a mother’s intellectual life gets handicapped by child-rearing, a feminist argument–is DeWitt advocating for an unhindered life of the mind? Is the life of the mind “the truest form of happiness” per Sibylla, and everything else mere unwanted distraction? Stay tuned: I will explore this further in Part 2 of this essay.

And then I looked up the location of the rave we were going to that Saturday night, and more luxury: it was a fifteen minute walk from the apartment. I could buy the cheap before-midnight entry tickets, walk there to get my wristband, return to the apartment to nap, and arrive later in the night to see the DJs we most wanted to see. A friend had hyped up Ogazón to me, but she didn’t go on until 5.

I love it when a night’s plan goes off without a hitch. I arrived just before midnight, got my wristband, and walked back to the apartment. Napped until three, then returned to the venue a little after 3am. The walk was chilly, but thankfully short. And the venue, much to my delight, was the same warehouse I’d gone to for the last rave before I moved away, a former skatepark now turned music venue. (I took some better photos of it here.)

The friend I went with was less hyped for the party than I; they’d warned me that this particular party drew a strange crowd, and I immediately understood what they meant. The crowd was, well, bro-y and straight. There were masc-looking men everywhere, and few faces I recognized from previous raves. Everyone seemed to be wearing the same boring black outfit. Many people were drinking alcohol (never a good sign), and lighting cigarettes right by the DJ booth. (I can tolerate cig-smoking indoors, but it always seems rude to me to do it right in the middle of the crowd, where people can less easily escape secondhand smoke and where you risk burning someone with an arm flail.) This was not a crowd that respected personal space, and as we maneuvered close to the speakers and began dancing, I felt like I was constantly getting shoved.

But soon the music took me over and the crowd became a distant irritation. Deep creep was playing and there was a richness to her set, a sonic depth that carried each sonorous beat deep into my solar plexus. The music was fast and energetic, good for dancing, but full of pathos and texture; I didn’t pause to take notes at the time, so these are only impressions. In the four years (jesus) since I got into raving, I have only somewhat refined my musical taste–I used to be happy dancing to anything, now it is closer to almost anything–and I don’t know that I have in any way improved my descriptive capabilities when it comes to the music itself. I couldn’t tell you what subgenres deep creep played, only that it was techno, glorious techno at an injurious volume, the exact sensory experience I’d been longing for.

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I read an arc of this novel because Jules Wernersbach runs my favorite queer bookstore, Hive Mind Books in Brooklyn. Serious shout-out to Hive Mind—if you live around NYC and have never been, definitely check it out, because every time I visit I discover some new-to-me queer book that I’d never heard of before. And their event programming is top-notch, the last time I visited the city I went to one of their queer open-mics and it was such a life-affirming experience that made me feel warm and welcome despite no longer living in the city. Hive Mind is so dear to my heart that I figured its co-founder’s debut novel would have an interesting perspective on small-business work, and I was not disappointed.

Work To Do, out in April from University of Iowa Press, dumps the reader right in to the eponymous work: we accompany Roz, the middle-aged queer senior manager of the Guadalupe Street Co-Op in Austin, as she fulfills one task after another. Outside, a hurricane builds; water drips from the leaking roof in the back, ruining several heads of broccoli. The produce fridge is a mess, and a customer want kale but there’s none to be found. The aisles are filled with disgruntled customers, cramming into the store in a futile attempt to get their groceries before the big storm, swiftly baring the shelves of all necessities. They’re understaffed, and Roz has been called in on her day off. To the kale-desirous customer, she can offer only rainbow chard, and for her efforts the customer complains that chard is not the same. Roz, having worked at the co-op for a decade, knows this: “She knew the difference between chard and kale, turnips and parsnips, hippies and yuppies and boomers and hipsters and people like her: workers.”

Work To Do is a workplace novel, one in which the characters are driven first and foremost by their jobs. The novel takes grocery store retail work seriously, and for Roz, Eleanor, and Randy, the three perspectives we inhabit, their work is not simply one aspect of life–work is their life. This is a novel that believes in and advocates for the dignity of work, the kind of work that most of us usually take for granted. Roz’s relationship with Molly, a floor worker, is constantly threatened by how much time she must devote to the store; Randy is a floor worker and organizer facing such financial precarity that, when their roommates decide to move out and stick them with rising rent, they’re faced with the decision to move back into their old tent. Eleanor is the store’s co-founder and current owner (along with several shareholders), and the only worker who seems to have achieved financial prosperity, but when the novel opens she’s facing a serious health scare.

All three of our POV characters are middle-aged, and I found it both refreshing and, if I’m honest, a little scary, to read a novel whose middle-aged characters have not achieved the stability, happiness, or markers of achievement we generally associate with middle age. For myself, forty is right around the corner, and part of me still wants to believe that when I reach those middle decades, I’ll have “really” grown up, and financial stability and career success will fall into my lap as easily as chronic pain fell into it during my thirties. But these characters haven’t chosen (or lucked into) careers that guarantee them any kind of certainty. If anything, this novel points out that precarity is scarier when it happens to you at a more advanced age. “Their knees were not coming back,” Randy thinks to themself. “Middle age was the moment when your death would no longer be a tragedy of lost youth, when you had about fifteen years before an invisible scrim dropped between you and the interest of the world. Would there be such a thing as retirement for them?” This passage sent a shiver of foreboding down my spine. It’s not comfortable to inhabit the perspective of a middle-aged person potentially facing homelessness, with no windfall or deus-ex-machina coming their way, and Work To Do takes an approach to these characters’ precarity that is matter-of-fact and direct, asking the reader not to look away.

In the midst of the hurricane, the store loses power, and in her attempts to restore order, Roz unwittingly becomes responsible for an employee’s injury. The moment is caught on camera, adding fuel to the fire of the employees’ determination to advocate for themselves. Work To Do begins on the eve of the employees’ declaration of a union, and it swiftly becomes clear that the storm is only the outward manifestation of the co-op’s inward chaos and strife.

The stakes of unionization are abundantly clear, as none of the employees make a wage that can keep up with Austin’s rising costs of living, and even Roz, as the manager, doesn’t make enough money to grant her health insurance. Eleanor is adamant that she’ll close the store before she recognizes the union; the workers are determined to walk if the union’s demands aren’t met; but the co-op is barely turning a profit, and even Eleanor doesn’t have the power to make more money come from nothing. It’s a generational clash along with an ideological one, as Randy is among the oldest of the workers, and Eleanor dismisses most of the union-hopefuls as naive Gen Z idealists, taking organizing pointers from Instagram and expecting the world to conform to their notions of SJW utopia. The places are then set for a face-off that unfolds over the novel’s pages, as we get to know this place of work and the workers who keep it running.

Everyone involved in the Guadalupe Street Co-Op cares deeply about the store, from the workers to Roz all the way up to Eleanor. For Eleanor, the store is everything–we learn through intermittent flashbacks that she founded it with her ex-girlfriend Meg (whom she still burns a torch for), and that aside from Meg, the other co-founders are dead. It’s a link to her past with Meg and it’s also the great project of her life, and she believes that no one else in the store has sacrificed as much for its success. Roz’s life also revolves around the store, around the work that she’s made a cornerstone of her identity. Unlike Eleanor and Randy, Roz comes from money, and knowing that she’s disappointed the ambitions of her suburban mother–who wanted her to go to college and get a more impressive, white-collar job–makes her throw herself into work all the harder, and as a middle manager she’s somewhat caught in the middle, but she largely takes management’s side over the workers. And Randy, who’s worked at the co-op even longer than Roz, believes in the value that their work has for the world, and believes that they and their co-workers deserve to be compensated fairly. There is a kind of reverence for the store itself that comes across in all three perspectives, the store becoming intimate to the reader, a solace and friend to the novel’s characters.

“Randy felt a kinship with the industrial-size rolls of plastic wrap and aluminum foil, the dry-erase board with a running list of what needed to be ordered… The building was a coworker. The very walls were in solidarity.”

In addition to the overarching narrative of the union vs. management, relationship dramas play out among the main cast. Roz is still hung-up on her ex-wife Audrey, a meteorologist whose career, while they were married, granted Roz some of the white-collar sheen that her mother so wanted for her. Roz’s commitment to the store results in her taking her current girlfriend, Molly, somewhat for granted, with the result being that Molly might be falling in love with Randy, and–in possibly a worse betrayal–goes behind Roz’s back to help the union organizers in secret. Eleanor is hung up on her ex, haunted by her long list of past mistakes, and in denial about her failing health, instead laser-focused on keeping control of the store, determined not to give the union a single inch. The queer subplots are woven together with the unionization plot so that they feel one and the same, fitting for characters whose lives are defined by their work.

My wife has worked for a grocery store for many years, so I got a kick out of recognizing so much of the vocabulary she frequently refers to, and–since I’m always of the opinion that my wife deserves to be paid more and treated better by her workplace–I lived vicariously through the store employees’ activism. Naturally, I was rooting for the union, and the novel itself makes this easy–it comes down on the workers’ side, which would be hard not to do while giving the reader an honest portrayal of how hard these people work vs. their financial precarity.

Yet it’s a testament to this novel’s subtlety and thoughtfulness that it treats the management’s perspective with equal care and respect. Eleanor and Roz are well-realized, fleshed-out characters, and while reading their POV chapters we understand and sympathize with their motivations and concerns. Even Eleanor, with her big house in the country and her miserly ways, is always treated fairly by the narrative. It’s easy to understand why she behaves the way she does, and she’s never villainized. The novel portrays the conflict between the higher-ups in a barely-profitable small business and its low-paid workforce with great care, showing us each side of the conflict in measured detail.

Wernersbach’s prose style is clear-eyed and pointed, with characters’ motivations and emotions laid out sharply on the page. Lyricism is reserved for their feelings about work, for their longing towards the past, and for the city and natural environment surrounding them. When another hurricane breaches the walls of the store:

“The rain comes in as if invited, along with dirt and rocks and Styrofoam cups and all of the grit of Guadalupe Street. The wind grabs handfuls of merchandise, all of the foil-wrapped chocolates at the checkouts, the packages of gum and licorice, the magazines about living a better life, mugs and socks and tea strainers, and launches it deep into the store, spinning inventory above their heads that Eleanor cannot count or control.”

While its characters run around trying to control their work lives as much as possible, the environment steps in to demonstrate the ultimate folly of this control.

Queerness is everywhere in this novel, which makes sense, because you’ll also find queer people everywhere in retail environments. These are queers whose lives are neither glamorous nor urbane; mostly, they’re struggling to get by, finding salvation in the work there is to do. Wernersbach tells us about their love and sex lives with the same candor that she writes about their work lives, making the romantic subplots a blast to read. (There is a substantial aside about sex toys in Molly and Roz’s relationship that I particularly enjoyed.)

I loved reading a novel about people that remind me so much of my wife and her friends, the people that keep us all fed. Work To Do is keenly aware of the interstore politics that crop up in these retail environments. One of the underlying tensions in Work To Do is that Roz, coming as she does from money, has a safety net to fall back on that the other characters lack, but despite this safety net her desire to spend her life doing fulfilling, meaningful work rather than languishing behind a desk is always treated with respect–she’s not painted as a child of privilege goofing off before getting a “real” job, even if the other characters sometimes see her that way, but as someone whose decision to stay in this life deserves respect. It’s all relative, anyhow: in one of my favorite insightful passages, Eleanor, a white woman from a working-class background, recognizes that even in her lifetime of retail/food service labor, she’s been viewed as someone who has an out from The Life: “She had enjoyed her dining hall work… Eleanor had been white and young and [her coworkers] believed she was going places and it made her sad to realize they had seen her as just another version of the students all this time.”

For as much as this novel makes you feel the sweat, tears, and chaos of working at a grocery store, it also makes you feel the rewards. The pride its characters take in their work glows off the page, and it’s easy to understand why none of them can let go of the co-op. And they should be proud: they’re feeding people, preserving community, and with the union, standing in solidarity with each other. Through sticking close to its characters, the novel underlines the point that the people who work their asses off to feed us should be acknowledged, respected, and paid better, should be able to live with comfort and dignity. Work To Do is a love letter to such people, those who work jobs that keep the rest of our world running smoothly, who don’t get enough recognition or money for their labor. I’m glad this book exists, and if you like queer novels, labor novels, or simply love getting an expert view into idiosyncratic worlds, you won’t want to skip this one.

Lately, fiction has felt somewhat estranged from me. This is partly circumstantial: I am currently committed to three different long essay projects, and when I have free time I find myself poking at short stories, making small edits here and there, starting new stories in a flurry of activity only to find myself dissatisfied with them three pages in. When I started taking my criticism more seriously last year, a mentor warned me that he could rarely work on nonfiction and fiction at the same time, and I’m finding that to be true of myself, as well. These two practices seem to use two different parts of my brain, and switching back and forth doesn’t always come naturally.

How do we decide what genres to call our own? There was a time when I was seriously considering applying to MFA programs for nonfiction, rather than fiction; nonfiction has never felt like a distraction to me. Friends in my (fiction) MFA program have asked me how I keep up with writing this blog on top of the writing I have to do for school, and the plain answer is that, while there are times that keeping up with my Substack feels like a chore, at the end of the day I am terribly fond of writing for my blog. It’s a fun outlet, usually more akin to a release than a burden. I’ve never viewed writing nonfiction as something I have to do, but rather as an exhilarating act of self-expression.

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Plastic, Prism, Void by Violet Allen (out May 19, 2026 from LittlePuss Press) is a tremendously fun, funny and inventive novel that utilizes Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Anime pastiche to tell a sweeping T4T love story that spans multiple universes. Acrasia is a Black trans poet who hides her sensitivity and insecurity behind erudition (some might call it snobbishness); she is also a butterfly demi-goddess with magic shadow powers who’s trying to mend fences with her cousins/sisters/fellow butterflies after lowkey being a supervillain. Opus Zhao is a Chinese trans fuckboy with a smart mouth, charm that belies his misanthropic tendencies, and an allergy to romantic commitment; he is also the part-android pilot of a giant tiger robot, engaged in a war to save his world from alien invaders, and he lowkey used to help Acrasia in her attempts to wreak havoc.

Acrasia and Opus hail from different universes, and it’s only when their universes intersect that they can go on dates. The arc of their romance is not quite Enemies to Lovers: they start on rocky terms, more like reluctant allies and Co-Enemies (fighting the Good Guys in both their universes), to Frenemies (the barbed banter in this stage would fit right in with classic screwball comedies), to frustrated Lovers, and the romance unfolds nonlinearly as the story begins with them already in the Lovers stage.

When their universes intersect, it creates something like a Venn diagram, an overlap pocket universe in which they can interact. This alternate reality is unstable, resulting in gaps in the timestream that send them both back to various points in the past, and the narrative of their love story gets told through these jumps in spacetime. With the gaps between their universes’ collisions growing longer (according to Opus’s calculations, they might not meet again for twenty years), Acrasia is determined to get married, through a magic ritual that might allow them to permanently be together but which threatens to ruin both their worlds.

While the story unfolding in the novel’s present finds our characters at a moment of relative peace—Acrasia is no longer fighting with her cousins/sisters/fellow magical girls, and Opus’s days of fiercest combat seem to be behind him—the backstory is, putting it mildly, complex. Much of the plot’s action takes place in the past, allowing the novel’s present to concern itself with the question of whether or not these two lovers will end up together. The nonlinear storytelling makes for a timeline that is often mystifying, requiring patience of the reader, but Acrasia’s voice is so vital and endearing that this patience never felt like a chore, and I enjoyed the narrative complexity even when my answers about the worldbuilding or plot mechanics weren’t immediately answered.

This confusion is clearly the intended effect of a purposeful and precise author: Acrasia, who is a postmodern protagonist, aware that she’s a character in a novel and gently poking fun at the reader’s assumed confusion, frequently breaking the fourth wall to address us directly (including an extended and hilarious metatextual joke about Goodreads). The reader’s involvement turns out to be necessary to Acrasia’s spells, though I won’t spoil how.

I fell in love with Acrasia, who is by turns pretentious (with as many footnotes as this novel boasts, she stubbornly refuses to entirely explain all the literary references she drops) and disarmingly vulnerable, open with the reader about her emotional problems and how they once made her a villain. She’s sharp and insightful when she opines about identity issues (Black, trans, and otherwise) and the literary scene--she calls her most successful work her “mammy poem,” and though it’s not included in the text, we understand it to be the kind of identity-focused, overtly political work that you can picture going viral on Instagram. She jokes about this poem for most of the novel, and it’s not until we near the end that she gets honest with the reader about her real feelings regarding her work:

“It’s a good poem. It’s about how they kill people like me.

I like the work; I just don’t like that the only thing people seem to like about me is that they kill people like me… It was important for me to write it, I think, but why aren’t any of the other things I write important, too.”

This critique, of how identity trauma gets commodified and repackaged through the attention paid to marginalized artists’ work, shapes the novel’s priorities. Although Plastic, Prism, Void cheerfully swings at literature which takes a more po-faced approach to identity politics, it dismisses neither identity nor identity politics; this is not a novel in which the protagonist just happens to be Black and trans, but a novel in which marginalization affects, but does not define, its characters. The romantic stakes for Acrasia are higher than they are for her cis friends, and higher than they are for Opus: as a Black trans woman, she’s convinced that any other romantic prospects will require her to settle for mediocrity at best and diminishment at worst, that her world’s racism and transmisogyny will never bring her a man who loves her for her true self, the way that Opus does. Acrasia’s longing for a place where she might fully belong motivates her villain arc, and when she returns to the sisterly fold, she must also submit to the terrifying prospect of being vulnerable among and known by these cis women. But her reunion with the good guys only goes so far, as she’s willing to doom two universes for the chance to marry Opus.

Opus is not realized with quite the same depth as Acrasia (this novel is first and foremost her story), but we still learn about his relationship to transness and to his former lesbian identity, along with his Daddy Issues (fitting backstory for the anime pastiche that provides his universe). Opus feels like a recognizable Type of (Trans) Guy: the polyamorous fuckboy who got all the pussy when he was a lesbian, whose transition enables him to fully step into the role of Ladies’ Man. Like Acrasia, he’s not always likeable, instead allowed to be a full and messy character regardless of likeability/relatability. I’m particularly fond of the joke when he’s considering whether he’s allowed (as a trans man) to think of Acrasia as a bitch—is he grandfathered in? Does there exist a statute of limitations on his being allowed to use sexist slurs?

Acrasia and Opus’s imperiled universes are an excellent metaphor for the problems often found in heterosexual romantic combinations: Man and Woman are representatives of two different worlds, and their relationship must play out in the rocky Venn diagram between both worlds, perilous country consistently under attack from patriarchal duties and constraints. When the man and woman are both trans, this commonality might simplify some things (hence Acrasia and Opus starting out their romance as reluctant allies, facing off against their respective cisgender worlds), but it can’t fully protect them from the ways identity has shaped them into vastly different people—from different worlds.

When Acrasia plots to fuse their universes and thus allow them a permanent way to be together, it’s clear to the other characters that the result would be catastrophic, sacrificing innocent bystanders in order to get their romantic happy ending. This plays with a heteropessimistic view of heterosexual romance, in which love can only persist through the destruction of the lovers’ moral centers and their communities.

Of course, we generally apply heteropessimism as a concept to cisgender sexuality, not to relationships between trans people. T4T relationships, even heterosexual ones, are often imagined in an “Us Against the World” sort of way, as a relationship configuration that allows the lovers to protect each other from transphobic hurts. In this novel, the T4T relationship goes a step beyond providing solace, instead going on the offensive to threaten two universes. How far are these characters willing to go in order to preserve their love, and does being trans give a magical girl and a space-war hero the right to cast off their heroic responsibilities and damn the world(s) for the sake of true love? I won’t spoil the ending, but Allen doesn’t give her characters any easy outs.

Within trans literature, Plastic, Prism, Void is rare in its focus on the friendship between a trans woman and multiple cis women. Acrasia met her fellow magic butterfly sisters when they were friends and roommates in a “WOMENS ARTIST COLLECTIVE (POC AND QUEER+/TRANS* INCLUSIVE!!!)”, as the initial Craigslist ad puts it. Shortly after the women have moved in together and begun awkwardly bonding, their butterfly goddess mother provides the Call to Adventure, unlocking their magical abilities. From there, the five friends must navigate the sudden intimacy foisted upon them by the reveal of their magical sisterhood; when they are transformed into magical girls, they consider themselves sisters, but within their ordinary life, ‘sister’ feels falsely intimate—Acrasia suggests they call each other cousins when they’re not in magical girl mode.

The novel plays out Acrasia’s insecurities about belonging in this group through its fantastical plot. Her villain turn pits her against the other four, and they don’t understand why she can’t simply leave her wickedness behind and come back to the fold (which she does, eventually, but not before her actions have dire consequences for one of her sisters/cousins). Allen uses her magical girls to explore rocky sisterhood, with small moments that show the cracks in the bonds between Acrasia and the rest. When Acrasia complains to her sisters about the specific indignities suffered by a trans woman on Grindr, Marina wants to know why she’s on the app, considering she’s a girl; Acrasia privately believes that Marina and the others “could not understand the complexities of transgender dating, the various little misgenderings one accepts to get through the day.”

But not all the conflict between Acrasia and her sisters is due to misunderstandings between cis and trans women. Plenty of it comes down to the same faultlines that can form within any female friendship: “Acrasia and Marina would have Secret Pizza whenever they wanted pizza but did not wish… to share that pizza with the others. Unbeknownst to Marina at the time, Acrasia had shared secret meals with all the girls at one point or another… In Acrasia’s mind, this was very kind and fair of her, to give all her friends a taste of selfishness in equal portions. But when she eventually found out, Marina thought it was impossibly cruel.”

It’s refreshing to read a trans romance with so many carefully drawn relationships, epic scope, and this particular sharp-eyed perspective on identity politics, not to mention its literary ambition—I can’t resist a Romantasy protagonist who quotes Clarice Lispector, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Faulkner, to name a few. The novel never stops being witty and funny and deliciously metatextual, even in its more serious moments. Out of her anime and Sci-Fi pastiche, Allen has crafted something original, romantic, and sincere, despite Acrasia’s thorny layers. Personally, I’m already hoping for a sequel.

I also had an essay published with Electric Literature, “One Battle After Another” Reminds Me What I Want From White Art. I wanted to examine the Latinocore aspects of the film, why the Latinocore is so central to One Battle’s politics, and look at the critical discourse surrounding the movie to ask what we want from our white artists and auteurs. I’m quite proud of how the essay turned out, and it was wonderful to have the opportunity to publish with Electric Lit.

Part of this essay’s genesis came from reading criticism about this movie and finding that, while many critics praised Benicio del Toro’s performance and the movie’s middle act generally, few gave an in-depth exploration to that part of the film or analyzed it through the lens of Latine “representation” and the questions I raised in my piece. One Battle also made me think of Latina feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing, and it was exciting to analyze One Battle through that lens. I’m terrible at self-promotion, but: read the essay! In my humble opinion, it’s a banger.

Naturally, I have many thoughts about One Battle that didn’t make it into the final essay. The more I’ve thought about this movie, the more I see both its cynicism and its hopefulness as running parallel to our real-world national struggles, although you have to look beyond Leonardo DiCaprio to see the subtler ways in which this movie reflects the United States.

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I have hit a major milestone within my novel, Fortunate Son (working title). The current wordcount stands at roughly 80,000 words and 249 pages, which is far longer than I wanted the thing to be at this stage, and hitting this wordcount/pagecount is not what has me excited–at this point increasing that wordcount gives me a feeling of dread rather than accomplishment. I’d hoped to be at least 90% of the way there with this many words, and instead I have, optimistically, somewhere between a quarter and a third left to write; according to my loose structure, I have finished Parts One and Two, with Part Three an exciting and terrifying blank page before me.

The milestone is that I’ve reached the end of the narrative as I have loosely plotted it out, and onwards from Part Three is uncharted territory. This is a slight exaggeration–I know a few big events that have to happen from here on out–but I don’t know how the novel will end, or which specific scenes will take me there. This whole time I’ve been writing to get to the point where I could [redacted] a certain character, and now the chess pieces are in place to [redacted], and after that? We could be going anywhere.

This feels like a decent time to press pause and reflect on my process. I’m not sure that I’d consider anything in this essay to be advice, but I’m sharing it in case it’s useful/interesting to anyone else out there toiling on a first-time novel.

The Case Against Outlining

With Fortunate Son, it’s only half-true to say that I didn’t have an outline, because I’ve followed my mental map with surprising accuracy. And when I’ve gotten stuck–mostly in the middle parts, where it was hardest to keep up narrative momentum–I have outlined certain chapters. But I’ve resisted outlining the whole, because I didn’t want to ruin the story for myself. I’ve known how I wanted the characters to be positioned for whatever the climax ended up being, but I have yet to decide how everything should resolve. My gut is telling me that I shouldn’t come up with a resolution until it’s time to actually write it, that I don’t know yet how these characters will behave in the final act and that it’s not right for me to know until I get there.

I am not a very organized person, and I suspect that outlining is most effective for those of us who already know how to make plans for themselves and then actually stick to those plans. I can make plans, but I won’t stick to them; every planner I’ve ever been gifted now gathers dust; I’ve tried and abandoned bullet-journaling, which is supposed to be the planner method for people who can’t use planners. Me, I can barely stick to a to-do list on my best days. Also, each previous time I’ve tried to write a novel, if I outlined the whole thing from the beginning and figured out exactly how the narrative should end, working out the ending killed my enthusiasm for writing the thing. I no longer had sufficient motivation: once I’d told the story completely to myself, I no longer felt like doing the hard work of writing the story for anyone else.

So although I’m now entering uncharted territory, I still don’t want to create a firm outline. I want to put off figuring out the nitty-gritty until I absolutely have to, or until the ending comes to me in a dream, or something. I want to give my characters free rein until I know where they stand when the plot reaches its apex. And I’m really hoping that writing this post isn’t a ludicrous jinx, that I won’t look back on this months from now saying this is where it all started going wrong. Fingers crossed!

Everything Is Still Terrifying

Now that I’m approaching endgame, I have a new character to contend with, which means I have to flesh out his backstory, personality, voice, and relationships with the other characters. I have done exactly this with every other character I’ve written, yet somehow, now that I’ve passed this somewhat-arbitrary threshold I set for myself, that same process feels new and absurdly daunting. I have to get to know a whole character, he has to be, like, a real person with his own unique perspective on life? And I’m in charge of how he behaves and how bad his dialogue is, with no one else to blame? What the fuck? Whose idea was this?

Picture writing a novel like a train moving forward. For most of the past 80,000 words, I’ve felt like the train was on the tracks and those tracks were clearly visible before me, so I could focus on operating the train. Now, it’s like I have to lay the track first while simultaneously guiding the train. And looking back, I know that all the work I’ve done in the past year and a half required laying-down tracks, even with the mental vision I followed. I still had to do research, create characters, vaguely plan scenes, etc, in addition to the writing itself.

But of course now it feels like the work of a magician got me to this point, like some outside force stepped in and smartly considered structure and characterization and plot mechanics and all that, and now that outsider has abandoned me to do it all on my own. I know, rationally, that what I have to do now is the same work I’ve already been doing, but it feels entirely new, and as intimidating as it was before I’d written the first word. So that’s disappointing: back in 2024, when I pictured how it would feel to be 250 pages deep–well, I pictured the novel being complete at 250 pages. But aside from that, I thought I would feel like someone else by now: some smarter, more confident, more capable writer after doing all this work. Instead I am still me, still nervous about the same craft elements that I was when I started.

Embrace the ADHD

I’d picked up the idea somewhere that the best way to write a novel is for the writer to remain laser-focused on their singular project, making it not just their first priority but their only creative priority until they have a completed draft. Probably I received this notion from more than one interview with a novelist, and the advice stuck with me because it appealed to my common sense. Or maybe I decided to try and follow this practice because it seemed like the direct opposite of how I usually work, and I have a hard time trusting myself (after all, this is the same self that has tried and failed to write novels before), so any method alien to my natural habits seemed trustworthy.

Yet attempting to restrain my writing life to solely this novel has cemented my belief that no piece of advice can claim universal relevance, particularly when it comes to writing, a practice that shifts according to the person, their context, their habits, etc. I have proven completely hopeless at focusing on this novel to the exclusion of other projects (short stories, poetry, this blog), and by now I’ve stopped demanding singular focus of myself.

Whether you call this ADHD or something else, it appears that I’m not the kind of writer who can work on only one thing until it’s finished. Perhaps if I was that kind of writer, I could have produced 80,000 words in two months instead of a year and a half, but I don’t regret writing my short stories and essays and poems, all of which have proved fruitful. If some outside authority had taken away my other projects and forced me to write only this novel until it was finished, my enthusiasm for the project might have withered on the vine.

Instead, working on my other projects has continuously renewed my enthusiasm for Fortunate Son. I used to have this fear that if I stepped away from the novel for too long, I wouldn’t be able to step back into it, but this seems to not be the case. Instead, my other work has taught me lessons that I’ve taken back to the novel, and I believe that dividing my focus between multiple projects has served to enrich each one. Following my attention wherever it drifts possibly makes me an undisciplined writer, but it’s also helped turn my relationship with my novel into a long-term one.

What About All That Craft Stuff You Should Be Learning in Your MFA Program

Here on the internet and especially on Substack, debate continues as to the efficacy of MFA programs actually teaching writers how to write. I can’t speak to all MFA programs, only to mine, where I’ve been receiving lessons on voice, revision, style, and narrative structure, and I’ve been prompted to read more widely than I would have otherwise. It’s all been valuable, though I admit that the time and space to write has been the greatest gift of all; if I’d stayed in a 9-to-5 job I wouldn’t have 80k words, because I wouldn’t have had the time to write them. But say I magically had the time for writing without the MFA itself: I still don’t think I’d be as happy with the novel’s current shape, not without the feedback and lessons I’ve been getting from my program.

With Fortunate Son, the greatest gift from my MFA classes has been learning how to catch the reader’s attention. What I’ve found is that as the writer, it’s difficult to judge how your work captures and holds attention because you’re too much of an insider, your attention is already caught no matter what. What I’ve been learning is how to examine my work from the outside, how to identify those elements that will make the reader keep reading. Does the novel plant questions for the reader, questions that will motivate them to keep turning pages? Does the novel have a distinct voice that the reader wants to spend time with, a voice that shapes character and setting and creates a compelling atmosphere? My initial drafts frontloaded backstory, but I’ve learned that backstory tends to slow down the pacing, and that the reader needs less backstory than you might think in order to get invested in your characters’ fate.

Sometimes I worry that my best writing–the funniest, weirdest, most experimental, with the sharpest social commentary and boldest leaps into the absurd–finds its expression in short stories, as opposed to my earnest, sincere, plain-jane literary realist novel. Writing this novel, I am preoccupied by telling well the story of this one guy and what he gets up to, and literary flourishes get subsumed into the task of doing justice to his life, whereas with short stories–if we’re being honest–I can indulge my urge to show off. My novel is more sincere than quirked up; while I love reading funny and satirical novels, I appear to be writing one that’s alarmingly earnest. But novels play the long game, and most novels in the literary tradition I’m seeking to enter (plain-jane literary realism), that long game means prioritizing character, interiority, immersion, and emotional depth over experimentation, postmodern devices, and generalized showiness. Focusing on the craft elements in my writing, particularly structure and pacing and voice, helps ease some of my worry that the writing itself might be plain compared to my short stories. The job of these sentences is not to disappear, but style is only one tool in my toolbox, and every tool must be used to make the reader continue caring about the characters.

The Question of Feedback

I forget whether it was on Substack or BlueSky, but recently there was a fluttering of discourse about the relative wisdom of seeking feedback on in-progress manuscripts, with some claiming that it’s unwise to seek feedback too early, that it can jeopardize a project to bring in critique when the project is not yet finished. This discourse popped up just as I was preparing to send my novel draft (including the roughest, sketchiest bits) to a friend who’d offered to give feedback. Personally, I find it useful to seek feedback as I’m writing, even in a project’s early phases. If I write too many pages without getting attention for those pages, I wither and die, or at least that’s what it feels like. I am, ultimately, a people-person, and while I’ve written most of this novel without getting feedback–and it’s been good for me to learn that actually I won’t wither and die if I’m writing solely for my own eyes–nothing is more motivating than hearing another person’s reactions to the story.

If you have initial readers that know the exact level of cheerleading vs. critique that you thrive on, you are fortunate indeed; if you don’t have that, you might need to share your manuscript in a workshop setting. This comes with its own set of drawbacks. In an interview with Brad Listi on the Otherppl podcast, Emma Pattee (author of Tilt) cautioned writers against relying on workshop feedback:

“Through writing this book, I have become very anti-workshop… oftentimes people are bringing in work that’s way too early to come into a writing workshop, because they don’t really know what it is yet. So to go into a writing workshop and say, ‘Is this working?’ it’s like, well what is it? They’re totally missing an exploratory piece of things… I think also that writing workshops by nature will always bring a work into the middle. …That’s just because people have different tastes, and it’s because we often can’t really conceive of something we haven’t seen before …That type of groupthink doesn’t work great when you’re trying to do something different.”

The danger of inviting too many cooks into the kitchen is real. Writing according to workshop feedback–or simply to feedback from multiple sources, regardless of workshop context–can prompt authors to aim away from the bold, and towards the median opinion.

And yet I pursue feedback from multiple sources regardless, because I believe this tendency can be corrected by being sufficiently headstrong. The trick of it is to seek feedback with an open mind and heart, while keeping faith in your own creative authority above all else. There’s no law stating that you have to make every change suggested by every initial reader, or every member of your workshop. You’re the god of your manuscript, and you can–and often should–choose not to please everyone. Thinking through feedback and deciding you disagree with it can be a crucial part of the process and can strengthen your creative trust in yourself.

There’s a balance between trusting your gut, and trusting someone else’s gut by acquiescing to critique, and finding that balance requires some level of confidence in your own work (and in the taste of those offering feedback), so if you’re feeling completely 100% insecure about a project, maybe it’s not yet ready to be read. But if you have confidence in your overall vision, then soliciting feedback can be a good way to test your instincts: frequently I’ve found that the bits of my manuscript that get picked on in workshop are the bits that I too was dissatisfied with, even if I couldn’t articulate why, and getting help with that articulation has been invaluable. A classmate’s feedback on the first chapters I submitted to workshop prompted me to bring back to life a character I’d killed off, and I’ve never looked back on that decision.

Don’t Discount the Impact of a Solid Playlist

I enjoy making playlists for my writing projects. Most of the time this acts as an act of procrastination, but sometimes it’s genuinely helpful. Right now my playlist for this novel is composed of songs I think the main character would listen to; songs that evoke the setting; songs from trans artists; and songs that, to me anyway, capture the overall vibe of the novel’s plot or atmosphere. It’s 300+ songs and counting, with heavy representation from 60s and 70s rock (as you’d expect from a title like Fortunate Son, Creedence makes a strong showing), soul and funk and old-school R&B, country and alt-country, folk, and bleak 00s indie rock.

Most of what’s on there is not the kind of music that I gravitate to when I’m not writing this specific project (for other writing, I usually reach for lyric-less electronica), so I’ve created a Pavlovian response where, when this playlist is on, I want to write the novel. I’ve put so much effort into the playlist that it feels almost like its own project, and if I’m stalled out on writing, searching for new music to add can restart my engine, and I’ve taken plentiful inspiration, including the novel’s working title, from various song titles and lyrics. If you find that mood music is helpful to you when writing, I highly recommend having fun with playlists–finding the soul of the thing encapsulated in a song or several songs can help materialize your overall vision what the project wants to be.

Am I procrastinating writing the novel by writing this essay about the process? Well, yes. At this stage everything that isn’t drafting is procrastination, but I’d also like to think that there is such a thing as productive procrastination–which then should have a less derogatory term than “procrastination,” but I’m not sure what else to call it. Meta-work? (Too tech-bro-y.) Creative hibernation? Maybe. The point is, I’m pressing pause in order to raise a glass to my past efforts, and nudge my future self forward. The blank page beckons.

Favorite 2025 Books

I didn’t read as many newly released books this year as I’d hoped, but there are three books that I want to talk about and which I wholeheartedly recommend.

Read more

I don’t tend to write much about current events. My ability to be articulate is usually clouded by emotion, and I can think of few words to react with that aren’t expressions of rage; I don’t know how pundits and regular political posters do it. Generally I trust that people who care to know me will know that just because I’m not often ranting about the news, doesn’t mean I don’t care. It’s more that I don’t think my words add much to the larger discourse. To attempt to write about my government regularly snuffing out Latin American lives in extrajudicial murders, to the fact that no one seems able or willing to stop these serial killers, has felt, to me personally, like a sign of disrespect to the gravity of what’s been happening. What effect will my precious outrage have on this violence? What can I possibly say to counter the fact that these lives are being taken in my name?

I’ve read reactions to this particular throughline, the one where Latine lives are devalued, diminished, and destroyed both domestically and internationally, from many many commentators who don’t seem to share my hesitation to express themselves. One particular discursive trend has lately been driving me bonkers. It’s not unique to BlueSky, although you’ll find it all over BlueSky. I see it on every platform where people like to shout their opinions.

It goes like this: the Trump administration/ICE commit some horrifying act of violence against Latin Americans abroad or migrants within the United States. Something that can’t be immediately reacted to with any kind of articulation beyond wordless rage, because the injustice is too primal. You know: the kind of violence against nonwhite people that we now witness at least twice a week. This kind of violence, far from eliciting responses along the lines of “I have no words for how this makes me feel,” more frequently elicits a response along the lines of: “You should care about this, even if you never think beyond issues that affect you personally, because if our government has been emboldened to treat foreign people [and foreign-born residents] this way, soon they will become emboldened to treat white American citizens in this way.”

This response is usually framed as not something the speaker themself feels–surely not, that would be admitting that the speaker lacks empathy and can solely react to news of U.S. violence against the Other through the lens of how such violence might someday affect themselves. Instead this response is framed as a preachy warning to everyone else, all the other self-involved white Americans, a lecture on how to relate violence against Outsiders back to oneself, if basic empathy is not one of the tools at hand. You, the sanctimonious BlueSky leftist, are far too evolved to need this lecture for yourself, but you recognize the selfishness of other Americans, you know that many Americans just don’t care about these events–which is enraging, I agree, but then you assume that the oblivious Americans are all simultaneously evolved enough to read your evolved posts. And you’re addicted to posting, and you know that saying some variation of “this thing that just happened offends and horrifies me on a cellular level” won’t provide the level of witty commentary that your followers have come to expect. You therefore conjure a hypothetical American who’s too much of an asshole to care about dead Venezuelans in their own right, yet not enough of an asshole that your commentary won’t get through to them. Internal justification for your preaching secured, you hit post.

I call bullshit on this audience of hypothetical empathy-lacker. Whether you frame your intent as pedagogical, or simply as an exercise in imagining disaster-porn for comfortable white Americans like yourself, analyzing violence against the Other through the lens of how it affects you is self-involved, empathy-challenged, and serves to normalize a self-involved and empathy-challenged response to American fascism. It also makes you look unoriginal and dumb, because no one on BlueSky or any other vaguely-left corner of the internet needs to be told, at this point, that the tools of the imperial state will be turned inward once our government gets through turning them on the Other. We’ve heard it regularly since at least October of 2023, from a million posters just like yourself.

My objection to repetitive and insulting rhetoric aside, I’m skeptical of the claim being made that these tools will imminently be turned against comfy cozy regular-degular American gringos. When we’re talking about extrajudicial murders, undisclosed centers of infinite detention, or migrants being disappeared probably into slavery, this level of violence turning upon those of us who are currently safe still feels like disaster fantasia. It will be hard for the federal government to run out of Latin Americans to terrorize, meanwhile white Americans haven’t proven themselves in need of terrorizing in order to be controlled. Plus I have a hard time imagining the oligarchs who depend upon Americans being comfortable allowing that comfort to be seriously jeopardized. Or perhaps I should say, I can certainly conceive of this future, but it’s hardly around the corner for white American citizens. It remains purely hypothetical.

And is this constant exegesis of the hypothetical helpful, or redundant? Obviously, many United Statesians1 don’t automatically care about the things our government does to people outside our borders. We as a nation are profoundly isolationist and profoundly uninterested in other countries and cultures, and in this regard your average leftist does not much differ from your average MAGA type. If you think that you’re different, that being raised on a diet of American exceptionalism hasn’t programmed you to think of all other countries as at-best-secondary, you’ve probably never had to confront your beliefs by deeply getting to know a non-American. Certainly, I thought I’d successfully deprogrammed myself of American exceptionalism more than I had, until I married a Polish person. Hearing my wife’s perspective on American, Polish, and global news is a constant lesson on how my default state is to be much more oblivious to the world than her. Being this plugged in isn’t solely an EU-member country thing, either, because I get the same sense when talking to friends from non-EU countries. What’s particular to the United States, the way in which we are an exception in a negative way, is the isolationist and ignorant blinkers through which we see the rest of the world.

To my fellow United Statesians, people in most other countries are not like this. Even uninformed idiots elsewhere have more basic curiosity for and receive more news about other countries than most U.S. Good Politics Havers. Most people in other countries don’t have the luxury of believing that their state’s power will protect them from anything happening in the rest of the world; they know that events in the world will inevitably affect them, too, and therefore news outlets in other countries report on news outside their country’s borders, and sometimes people even pay attention to said news. Most citizens of other countries have at least a vague concept of being connected to the rest of the globe, rather than situating themselves above it. I’m not saying this to make a moral judgment: having an awareness that you’re part of the entire world doesn’t automatically make someone a good person. I’m saying that United Statesians are so nationalistic and isolationist that most of us can’t even conceive of how nationalistic and isolationist we are.

Reacting to news of imperial violence by immediately relating said news to how it might affect Real Americans2 in the hypothetical future does not just expose our national pastime of xenophobia, it perpetuates it. Even framed as a lesson for those other, less empathetic Americans, it reinforces the collective lack of empathy. It reinforces that there needs to be another reason to care about atrocities beyond the fact that this violence is happening to human beings. It reinforces the idea that non-Americans, and nonwhite Americans, and hell even white people who live here who happen not to have been born here, are fundamentally a different category of person, a lesser category. I’ve grown to loathe this discourse because every time I see it reiterated, I see the divide between Us and Them emphasized. No outreach to some hypothetical Bad Politics Haver is worth this constant voicing of the lack of empathy we suspect some (us) might be feeling.

I understand the impulse to say, “I can imagine this terrible thing that happened to Latin Americans happening to me, or happening to people I love.” That is a very human response, although sometimes voicing that response as your first thought (preceding compassion) when violence happens makes you look kind of like a jerk. I do not understand labeling yourself the Empathy Explainer and, in the process, further normalizing an unempathetic response to the really-impossible-to-explain-in-human-language level of horror we’re witnessing come down upon Latin Americans.

If I interpret these responses generously, I think they arise at least as much from the mechanics and logic of Posting than from the logic of American exceptionalism. Those addicted to Posting need to have a Take when something bad happens, and Takes that stop at expressing sadness or horror get less attention. Expressions of “simple” empathy offer the reader no catharsis, no fantasy, no hypothetical call to thought-action, no outrage. The Posting Addict needs engagement, so perhaps–again, being generous–subconsciously, they reach for that evergreen attention-getter, the fearmongering “Soon this will be happening to US, TOO!” And the implied Us never includes the Other: the Posting Addict posts their Takes for white American citizens, always, supposedly for white Americans citizens’ education and benefit.

It’s tired. It’s beyond tired, it’s trite, and that in and of itself should be enough to ratio these takes into oblivion. But perhaps I am the only one who finds it tired, perhaps the rest of the leftish internet still enjoys delightedly shivering in fear when they imagine how terrible, how really just unimaginably awful, it would be for the state to turn its weapons on people Just Like Them. Perhaps they find this an easier way to process the trauma of what we’ve enabled our government to do. I suspect this may be the case: after all, these takes keep circulating, screenshots of them end up on Instagram, I can’t even avoid them on Substack Notes. Someone out there must be getting something out of this drivel.

Do you really need me to say that United Statesians should care about our government murdering offshore boatloads of people because those murdered are also people? You probably don’t need me to tell you that, so I won’t turn this rant into How to Have Humanity 101. The Posting Addicts who proclaim these takes know that they, at least, shouldn’t need the 101 lesson: they think that the strident boldness of their take demonstrates how far they’ve surpassed the 101 level, instead of demonstrating its opposite.

You know how, at least for a while there, we could mostly agree that adopting racism ironically meant that you were still adopting racism? This is a little bit like that. Voicing the response that obviously, profoundly lacks empathy, with the justification that you’re lecturing those who don’t give a shit, still voices a lack of empathy. It still says that violence against Them means something different from violence against Us. At this point, I have little evidence that any of those who don’t give a shit are reading anyone’s posts on BlueSky. I have a lot more evidence of Posting Addicts who can so easily imagine the mindset of those who don’t give a shit that they’re conjuring that mindset in order to, supposedly, shoot it down.

You want to stop normalizing a blasé response to atrocity? Then stop making it about yourself, and all the other white American citizens who are the only ones you can imagine talking to, every time an atrocity is committed. You’re the one doing the normalizing! You’re normalizing United Statesians’ xenophobia and racism by voicing that same xenophobia and racism. It would be better to say nothing at all, if you feel it’s beneath you as a Poster to simply say that you are horrified and sad. Shutting the fuck up has always been and blessedly remains free.

But so obviously I was butthurt as a child by never ever finding my name on a toy license plate or on any other here-look-it’s-YOUR-name-this-was-made-just-for-YOU keychain, toy necklace, etc. My given name is my Brazilian grandmother’s name, Cléa, but it’s Greek in origin, and I’ve never met anyone in the United States who shared it; it’s slightly more common in Brazil, rare but not unheard of–people knew how to pronounce it and remarked on it less, and in Brazil there is a yarn company that shares my given name. The accent, there to let people know it’s pronounced CLAY-uh, did not clue most Utahns into the right pronunciation when I was a kid. I was used to seeing new teachers pause at my name in the rollbook, then nervously try variations on “Clee? Cleo? Clay? Claire?” one time somehow “Cled?,” and by far the most common mispronunciation, “Clee-uh?” It was a name I always had to clarify at least once with everyone, from memory formation age up until I changed my name, a process which is still ongoing, so that I still get “Clee-uh” from the occasional bureaucrat.

There were occasionally people who guessed right about the pronunciation on the first try. These people were almost always not white, and they’d either seen the name before or they spoke a language that made my name more instinctive to pronounce, or they knew what the accent signified because that accent was more common in their language. I always felt, and still feel, a prick of gratitude when someone gets my name right on the first try.

Like I assume most kids, I went through a phase of badly wanting to fit in with my peers, and during this phase I resented my name. I don’t remember the years it spanned but it must have included 7th-9th grade since those were the real misery hours, when any social interaction I had terrified me, the prospect of correcting anyone on my name a gloomy one. I mostly stopped correcting people, figuring maybe it wasn’t a big deal, maybe it was okay for people who thought they knew me to not even know my name. When my rebellious streak kicked in, the shame transfigured to defiance, and I determined to like my name even if it confused just about everyone.

And reactions to my name weren’t all, or even mostly, negative. Sure, there was occasional light bullying from other children, for a few recesses it was highly amusing to call me “Clay” since Clay was a boy’s name. Generic stuff, the way kids pounce on any difference, and it didn’t humiliate me as badly as other things I got bullied for. When adults fumbled my name, they tended to cover for their twinge of guilt or embarrassment by immediately saying my name was pretty. And then came the question: Your name is so pretty, where is it from?

This correction process and conversation cycle got tedious. But I didn’t reflect on any of this until I transitioned in my early thirties, and had to consider whether I wanted to change my name, and what I might change it to. I liked Cléa and didn’t think of it as my “deadname,” perhaps because I felt protective of it after so many years of laborious defense. But it didn’t feel right for the person I was becoming, and the only less feminine variant (‘Clay’ was out of the question, I had no desire to adopt my playground bullies’ nickname) I could think of was ‘Cee,’ which I used for a while as a stopgap until I figured out a permanent solution.

I liked the idea of a Brazilian name to maintain continuity with my maternal heritage, and I wanted a name that began with a hard C-, otherwise the adjustment felt too alien. But I struggled to find a Brazilian or Portuguese name that fit the criteria and felt right. I spent more than a year as Cee, searching unsuccessfully for a new name, and I’d almost given up the hope of a Brazilian/Portuguese name, moving on to consider more Anglo names. There might be an alternate universe where my name is Connor: I liked Connor more than anything else, but I found myself reluctant to be him. This was because I wouldn’t have to haggle over the pronunciation, spelling, or accent with Connor, Connor would be instantly legible to most everyone I’d encounter. I could have found Connor on a toy license plate, my childhood dream. Wasn’t that what I’d once wanted? A name that fit in, to not be marked as odd or othered from first introduction?

I don’t love correcting people over my name and then having to explain the name. It was and remains tedious at best, exoticizing at worst. And yet, this correction cycle had been such a constant that the thought of losing it made me feel unease, like not having to teach people about my name would mean something was missing from my identity. I decided against Connor and returned to Brazilian baby name websites, and this time found the name Caio. It was an instant decision: that was me, that was my name, as if it had been since birth. Caio had no accent, and I would be glad to leave that pain in the ass behind, but I knew I’d still have to tell people twice how to say it, and that it would prompt questions like Cléa always has. Keeping that routine inconvenience in my life felt more right than adopting Connor, a name that would prompt neither confusion nor curiosity.

Of course, what I did not realize when I chose ‘Caio’ was that many, many people would hear it as ‘Kyle.’ These names don’t sound similar to me, but in noisy spaces I understand the confusion. I admit, constantly having to half-shout “it’s actually Cai-OOO” has been more aggravating than “Clee-uh” ever was. But I wouldn’t trade my name. I identify with it.

Gender transitions likely instigate identity navel-gazing for most who partake. I had all these thoughts about my history with my given name years ago, but more recently I’ve begun thinking about naming and its effects on identity formation beyond gender, particularly for mixed-race people and other people of color. There is no singular mixed/biracial experience; in my opinion there’s not enough commonalities to paint the mixed race experience in broad strokes1, not even if you narrow that experience down to people who are half-white and half-something else. So you can’t really call mixed/biracial an identity, which makes it a confusing identity to sort-of have, and you find yourself lost in the ambiguous particulars of your own mixed life. And yet I frequently find commonalities with others of mixed backgrounds when we talk about this shit, so there’s at least something there, blurry and amorphous though it may be. Lately I’ve grown curious about whether my pet theories on how my name(s) shaped my self-understanding might resonate with others.

I talked to my brother about his identity first, since we share the same background and genetic combination. We think of our identities now in much the same way: we both identify as mixed-race and Latino, but with a big asterisk by Latino, because we were raised in a middle class, white, homogenous environment in a comfortably-suburban neighborhood in Salt Lake City. We weren’t raised speaking much Portuguese and had few connections to Brazilian culture explicitly instilled in us growing up. Neither of us speak fluent Spanish, either, and that’s another reason for the asterisk: even within the American Latine/Latinx identity, Brazil is something of a black sheep, because Portuguese is not Spanish and the Spanish language plays a huge role in the affinities between different ethnicities in the Latine/x umbrella. So while we both feel it’s important to self-identify as Latino, in part out of solidarity with people who’ve been under relentless political attack throughout our lifetimes, we are well aware that our experiences don’t map onto those who experience racialized oppression due to immigration status/Spanish as a first language/inability to pass for white/etc.

My brother and I look alike, but his name is Theodore and he goes by Ted. Ted is not a name that most Americans have trouble pronouncing, but it’s a relatively uncommon name (maybe he found it on a license plate once or twice, but probably not in most keychain displays) that comes with its own associations. Like Cléa, Theodore is also Greek in origin (this is coincidental, both of us were named after relatives). It means “gift of God” or “God-given.” Utah is a religious place and Ted often met religious people who knew the name’s meaning, who’d then bring it up to draw him into uncomfortable religious conversations. There is also, I think, a folksy warmth and charm to the name ‘Ted,’ and my theory is that this is partly why writers have chosen it for upbeat characters like Ted from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Ted from Ted Lasso, and Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother, though I do not claim this last entry as a positive one in the Ted canon.

But the name association my brother has encountered most–though not an association that occurred to me until we talked recently–is ‘Ted Bundy.’ This may be especially true in Utah, where Bundy’s actual history has mixed with local folklore to circulate stories of hauntings and rumored-and-real Bundy hideouts all over the Wasatch mountains. Ted explained to me that since his name is uncommon and Ted Bundy is infamous, people’s first thought upon hearing Ted is often Bundy: “I don’t think most Jeffreys out there get, oh, Jeffrey? Like Jeffrey Dauhmer?” Obviously, most people have negative associations with Bundy, which can translate to odd/unsettling reactions to the name ‘Ted;’ writers will reach for ‘Ted’ or ‘Teddy’ to give the name a creepy resonance, like Jesse Plemons’ character Ted/Teddy from the 2025 film Bugonia, an exceptionally disturbing entrance to the Ted canon and a character who may be meant to trigger the audience’s ‘Bundy’ association. And as far as any connection to our Brazilian roots, the name ‘Theodore’ doesn’t indicate that in and of itself.

In terms of my ability to pass as white rather than being interpreted as Latine, historically I’ve guessed that from appearance alone, white people usually assumed I was white and people of color tend to guess I had some non-whiteness in my ethnic background, often eventually asking me directly what kind of off-white I was. Latine people have approached me speaking in Spanish, assuming that I spoke it, though this doesn’t happen often. I get the sense that I look more Latino now than I used to, since my hair started growing in black after repeated bleaching, and the beard might have something to do with it too. But passing/not-passing for white can be hard to judge, because it varies widely in different contexts, and no one ever holds up a sign that says I THINK YOU’RE A WHITE/NOT-WHITE PERSON when they meet you. If your appearance is racially ambiguous, unless you find yourself in an obviously racialized situation, such as a shopkeeper following you around a store on suspicion of theft, deciding that any rude or unpleasant experience was a racist microaggression can feel like a large leap to make.

In addition to my appearance, my foreign-sounding name has made my ethnic identity sometimes more legible to outsiders. When people asked about the origins of Cléa, and now Caio, it usually leads to me explaining that I’m half-Brazilian, for that to be reacted to in whatever confusing/weird way white people might react to me being Latino, depending on where they fall on the liberal-and-guiltily-conscious-of-racial-bias scale. On one memorable occasion, I was going through this regular song and dance with an old white man, and when I told him I was Brazilian, without missing a beat he replied with a smoothly satisfied, “Ah! So that’s why you’re so beautiful.” I was thirteen, a little young to be confronted with Americans’ exoticization and sexualization of Brazilian women.

Reactions to my name were a factor that led me to start thinking through my own race and identity earlier than I might have otherwise. I developed an interest in my family’s roots and in Brazil in high school, which then motivated me to learn Portuguese in college, then study abroad in Fortaleza. Another factor in my early interest in identity/identity politics was growing up in Utah in the 90s, an environment so culturally Mormon that even if you ticked every other mainstream privileged identity box, if you weren’t Mormon that was enough to mark you as Other. Ted also grew up non-Mormon, so he experienced the same Othering, but he did not begin to think through questions related to his identity until he was in his early twenties.

I also spoke to another mixed-race friend, whom I will keep anonymous, about his name. He is half-Japanese, 4th-generation Canadian on his father’s side, and his mother is of mixed white and Vietnamese ancestry. His first name is Anglo and easy to pronounce for white people, but his last name is distinctly Japanese. In appearance, he thinks his face probably reads as Asian “at certain angles, in certain lights? Who ever knows,” phrases which neatly sum up my own bafflement re: ambiguous mixed-race appearance. Because his paternal side emigrated to Canada so long ago, he related to what I told him about feeling a weaker connection to ancestry, compared to other Asian-Canadians/Americans. His last name sounds like a Japanese brand that Canadians and Americans are familiar with, which prompted a lot of jokes when he was a child, and looking back now he believes that he suppressed a lot of his racial identity in order to fit in during that gotta-fit-in developmental phase.

In previous generations of his family, he’s gotten the impression that his father had a much harder time fitting into white society than my friend did, though this is not something they’ve talked much about since the Japanese side of his family does not like to dwell on personal hardship: his grandmother was interned in the Japanese American internment camps in WWII, but he says that she always emphasized the lack of hardship in this experience, determined not to turn it into a sob story. As my friend pursued music and eventually writing, he noticed his internal resistance to turning his Asian-Canadian identity into any kind of artistic project. I related to this, too, as I’ve been reticent to write about my own race and ethnicity, and it’s only recently that I’ve begun to question and push past my instinct to keep my Latino identity on the outskirts of my fiction writing.

My friend eventually adopted a different spelling of his first name, a difference that began as a nickname in online communities, then became a nickname in relationships, eventually feeling more like his real self than his given name. As his sense of himself evolved in terms of gender and sexuality, it felt right to keep the name he was born with, but change it at the same time.

I also talked to my friend Flose LaPierre for this piece (shout-out to her lyrical and poetic Substack). She is Haitian, not mixed-race, but because both her first and last name appear distinctly French in origin, I thought she might have an interesting perspective on the Names/Identity front. Flose brought up the Name-Not-On-Keychains anecdote before I could, confirming my theory that this was a common childhood “trauma” for 90s kids with uncommon names. Like me and our anonymous friend, she went through a phase of wishing her name were different in order to better fit in, but as she grew older she became proud of her name. She told me her unique name gives her a feeling of specialness and grandeur, and because “Flose” sounds like “Flows” it lends itself to wordplay, puns, and reminds her of the flow of poetry and prose. It became one aspect of her life that made her feel that she was meant to be a writer. She told me, “maybe I haven’t been conscious of how [my name] might affect my sense of identity, or how it might contribute to feeling unseen, misunderstood, or unknown.” She is used to misspellings and mispronunciations–at her high school graduation, she gave a speech on behalf of her class, and her last name was mispronounced as she was introduced–but she’s historically accepted the mispronunciations, rather than overthinking them to death like me. Because she is Black and her first and last name (both her current last name and her given last name, before marriage) sound French in origin, race plays a role in people’s assumptions: they’ll ask about her last name and whether or not the name is French, rather than assuming she is French because of her names.

Her first and last given name are Haitian, but people see the connection to France first, a connection to colonization rather than to being Haitian, despite the fact that her family name can be traced to the specific place in Haiti where those with her name originated and still live. From her family name alone, Haitians know exactly where on the island her people are from. When non-Haitians associate her name with France, the colonizing nation rather than Haiti itself, this act of erasure calls back to the history of colonization rather than her own pride in her country. I suspect that this association with the colonizer country, rather than the name’s diasporic origin, might be less the case for Americans’ associations with Latine names that recall Spanish or Portuguese, since most Americans will likely think of Latin America before they think of Spain or Portugal.

And yet the language still keeps the history of colonization, right there in our names, one example of there being no off-ramp to escape colonization’s ramifications for colonized countries and their diaspora. I am reluctant to say that names are minor in the grand scheme of these ramifications, because our names are important, otherwise it would not have taken me over a year to choose a new one. If any of this has you overthinking your given-or-chosen name’s impact on your life, leave a comment, I’m curious.

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If I let myself, I could write the thesis-length version of this essay and include interviews with many more people, family members and mixed-race friends and plenty of others whose names might cause confusion or ambiguously-welcome interest from the white majority. As it is, this post has already escaped me in length; I’m finding that names+identity is one of those topics that will expand to fill whatever container you put them in. There’s more to our names than the individual letters or the pronunciation, correct or not. Otherwise the subjects of this essay wouldn’t be ancient thirtysomethings with images of toy keychains and playground insults taking up valuable memory space in our brains. These may be minor memories, in the overall arc of our lives. Or maybe not. Maybe naming them as major or minor misses the point.

I have had some of the best conversations of my life while sitting just off of the dance floor, in a random dark room in a warehouse, waiting in line to pee, or sitting on the curb outside of the function. Last weekend, I showed up to a rave with one of my long-time raver friends and a newer friend, whom I’d recently introduced to raving. When we took breaks from dancing, we sat or hovered in one of the warehouse’s two sitting rooms, catching our breath and staying silent or talking about nothing in particular. One long conversation we had was about the relative merits of coming to a big event like this and feeling that you could be anonymous, vs. showing up and feeling discomfort because you can’t feel anonymous, you keep running into people who know you. Later on the dance floor, the three of us ended up flexing our biceps with pride (we have all been weightlifting this year), touching each other’s biceps and laughing, and I wonder if anyone outside of our circle noticed and if our biceps-exchange turned into someone else’s anecdote from the night.

In TRUST, Helen and Benjamin Rask are a wealthy, reserved, and socially stunted couple enjoying classical music in the early 20th century. Is it a testament to my specific brainworms that I immediately connected this paragraph to raving? It illustrates the experience of dancing beside a friend at a rave, regardless of whether or not we’ve engaged in conversation before or after our moments of silent musical appreciation. Diaz’s writing articulates the Why, that this experience is about “sharing emotions for which they were not responsible and which did not refer directly to the two of them.”

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I don’t see a contradiction between Morrison and Greenwell’s arguments, but my friend is right about the lopsided nature of what we’ve been reading in school–I’ve honestly lost track of the number of fictional suicides I have read in the past two months alone–and that this obsession with The Darkness (cue Contrapoints’ voice and acrylic nails) reflects the interests of the literary sphere more broadly. From Morrison’s lecture: “Evil has a blockbuster audience; Goodness lurks backstage.”

In this case my own interests, as a reader and a writer, are aligned with the mainstream: Call me Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, because I love all that dark shit, too. Outside of art, I seek happiness and try to avoid pain; I never miss my own depression when it’s gone. So why is it that I feel the opposite drive when it comes to fiction? Why is it so much harder to get it up–metaphorically, at least most of the time–for the good guys?

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If you need more than that to be convinced, I’ll try my best to articulate what I found so charming about this collection. The stories feel as vibrant as the book’s candy-colored cover, exploring the foibles and flails of trans men in Seattle. These guys smoke weed, eat mushrooms, listen to music that will have you reflecting on how damn the 2010s really was its own separate era that we have now left behind, have complicated relationships with their exes, have complicated relationships with other trans men, suck the wrong guy’s cock in a bathhouse. The prose lifted me up and carried me along, and I never sat down to read without finding myself late to whatever I should’ve been doing next–this book is hard to put down.

What I’ve thought most about since I finished reading is Delsohn’s depiction of queer community. Although CRAWL explores a variety of hapless situations, most of the protagonists are enmeshed in Seattle’s queer community: his transmasculine protagonists, in stories told from various points pre- and post-transition, have mostly arrived at manhood through dykehood, through involvement in the lesbian community. They go to the city’s queer hangout spots and run into scores of acquaintances; they’re in community with their laundry lists of exes; they’re even sufficiently involved in trans life to know multiple other trans men, a level which I struggled to unlock even while living in New York. Whether through fucking, dating, navigating a city of exes, mentorship and failed mentorship, friendship and failed friendship, or dealing with cis people, this collection gives us characters who are determinedly or reluctantly involved with, frustrated by, occasionally also supported by the community around them.

I don’t know if I think it’s “easier” to write a short story about characters who lack community, but I’ve certainly read more stories about alienated characters than ones who have significant ties to a broad network of people. Maybe because of this, it always takes me some adjustment to believe in an extroverted, socially adept character: a writer wrote this story, and I know what writers are like, so you’re telling me a maladjusted anxious loner is now going to show me what it’s like to be popular? I also have this problem specific to depictions of queer community, which is that they tend to remind me first of Instagram posts. You know the kind: they always pop up around, say, Pride month or sometimes TDOV, the kind where the poster might be sincerely conveying gratitude for their found family but which come off to grumpy old me as smug posturing, particularly if the accompanying photo is of a group of hot people performing fun on a beach or something, particularly if the beach is Fire Island. So like basically my own hangups and persistent feeling of outsiderness, even in communities comprised of other outsiders, have given me sour grapes, and since my own experience with “queer community” has been more complicated than joyful, it’s hard to believe in the joyful depictions that tend to get paraded around to boost morale.

In CRAWL, queer and trans community is never un-complicated, but sometimes it’s joyful, and the joy in these pages always feels earned; I believe in it fully. In The Bubble, our trans protagonist wanders around a crowded city park on a beautiful day, running into people he knows, getting sucked into trans drama (involving exes, and exes who transition, transsexual men taking it personally because non-binary people dare to exist alongside them, etc). By the end of the day, our narrator is sick of it all, wondering how enmeshment in his community could possibly be worth the pain and frustration of dealing with all these babies. The story doesn’t resolve these feelings, but it ends on an image that crystallizes why shared laughter between trans people is a survival strategy, that we don’t need to all “get along” in order to recognize the ties that connect us, both separating us from the cisgender world and providing the strength to live within that world.

Another story, Moon Over Denny-Blaine, takes us to Seattle’s unofficial, but longstanding, queer lakeside beach. On this particular Pride weekend, our narrator is dismayed to see how many straight people have also come to the beach, and we understand that, like many queer spaces, this one is in danger of being lost due to gentrification and colonization from the straights. A fight breaks out on the beach over–what else?--two queer exes running into each other, and I don’t want to spoil the story, but the fallout serves to illustrate the capacity of comedy and solidarity to reclaim space and forge connections of solidarity despite our differences. The discourse surrounding bisexual women bringing straight boyfriends to Pride was on my mind as I read this, and I wish that instead of having to suffer that discourse year after year, I could just make every gay person on the internet read this story.

Humor is an important throughline across this collection. Delsohn has a background in stand-up comedy, and you can tell, as jokes bubble up frequently, with excellent comic timing. In Sex is a Leisure Activity, the stand-up comedian protagonist is faced with the unexpected collision of two communities when his Grindr date turns out to be connected to one of the gatekeepers of Seattle’s stand-up world; the resulting situation is awkward and had me cringing, but not for the reasons I expected. Often Delsohn’s jokes read like they’re primarily for a trans audience, in-jokes left untranslated for cis readers. In All Time Low there’s an extended and hilarious-to-maybe-just-me reference to Homestuck, a 2010s webcomic with an extremely trans fanbase. And from the title story, Crawl:

“Should I top this guy? Jack thought. Just for the hell of it? The twink’s taut, swiveling ass was inches away from Jack’s little dick. It wouldn’t be love, but it could be hot, and, in a way–Jack shuddered–gender-affirming.” (p11)

Will cis readers get the joke here, that Jack is annoyed with himself for thinking of sex through the lens of gender affirmation, because doing so is embarrassing? Possibly, but I laughed extra hard as a trans person who’s intimately familiar with these mental loops and how the phrase ‘gender-affirming’ begins to trigger a self-effacing groan, making you feel almost like a stereotype of yourself.

Music plays an important role, too, as the songs and bands that characters reference tie this collection to the 2010s without trading on nostalgia; one story revolves around a character’s intensity of feeling about one specific The National song. Drug use is another throughline, often marijuana but also psychedelics and party drugs, and the last story in the collection takes flight through surreal prose as the protagonist must try to come to the aid of a suffering trans acquaintance while his acid trip peaks.

Multiple protagonists in CRAWL are trans men exploring sexual connection with other men for the first time, and I love the way Delsohn writes about sex and particularly sex with men, emphasizing the strangeness that lifelong lesbians might encounter when hooking up with men post-transition. The sexuality of trans men is explored thoughtfully and without preciousness, as Delsohn keeps up the jokes and keeps us laughing at his characters. Sex is one avenue used to explore how difficult and, sometimes, rewarding it can be to connect with other people; sex is part of what it means to live in this community, and just like communal encounters that require less intimacy, there are no easy answers.

I need to talk about my personal reactions to this book, which are related to the identity I share with its author and his protagonists, but I feel reluctant at the same time. I worry that if I present my recommendation along identity lines, the assumption will be that this is a collection best appreciated by other trans men, that it has a limited audience. I don’t think this is the case: I think this collection is universal. But yes, I did get particular meaning out of it as a trans man, though I dislike the frustratingly inadequate tools available to discuss this meaning.

Lately I have grown dissatisfied with the language used by our culture to discuss “representation.” All the rote phrases about feeling seen, being represented, whether this representation is good or bad or authentic, this language feels simultaneously insufficient and too sentimental, prescriptive and evaluative and utterly neutered when it comes to an experience that can feel almost physical, even mystical. I don’t really care about seeing aspects of my identity checked off in media, like a filled-out spreadsheet: Column A checking off my gender, Column B my ethnicity, Column C one or more of my disabilities. A character occupying one of these checked-off boxes does nothing for me, in and of itself. We might as well be talking about the adequate representation of certain punctuation marks or different sentence structures. And I dislike the way that “representation” must inevitably be foregrounded in critical discussions of work by marginalized authors, cutting off praise at the knees, as if the best these works can achieve is greatness in terms of representation for certain groups rather than greatness in terms of artistic achievement.

And yet: when a writer articulates an uncomfortable truth about some invisibilized part of my experience, I feel a tingle and then a pulling sensation from behind my sternum, like I’m a fish hooked on a line. Fireworks go off behind my eyeballs and my whole face grows hot, I’m meeting some lost blood relation for the first time, seeing my genetics reflected in a stranger’s face. The fireworks become racing thoughts as my self-conception alters to incorporate this new truth, some part of my life that I’d either never been able to put into words or never expected to encounter in fiction. The dizzying knowledge that this writer holds some private part of me within their hands, that we are connected by that invisible fishing line even if they have no idea who I am. And out of that feeling, the certainty that this part of me stands on firmer ground because it is shared.

I don’t experience the intensity of this connection through fiction often, and I definitely don’t get it from everything that “represents” some aspect of my identity. In CRAWL, I experienced it so often that it slowed my experience of reading the book; I kept having to put it down, overdosed on recognition. Take this bit from Maude, in which the narrator is caught in ruminative loops over whether or not to transition and live as a man:

“I’ve mostly ruled out ‘neither’ as an option. Of course there are people… who do not find androgyny a no-man’s-land or a stop on the way to somewhere else. Surely, it is the most accurate representation of my gender in words. But I’ve started to think the meat of gender transition–the stuff that determines one’s day-to-day experience–is not about words at all… Nothing feels certain; nothing feels truthful or inevitable or right. So it’s a decision after all, a choice, just like everything else, just like moving to a new city or leaving a relationship or staying right where you are.” (p167)

This is one of the few times I have seen my own experience of sorting out my gender, right before I transitioned, captured accurately. These pages made me gasp in recognition because I felt the narrator’s struggle so deeply, because I went through it myself. Sometimes transition does feel like this kind of choice: you choose to move forward even if your mind is serving you up mixed signals, even if you once imagined that a life change this big required certainty as a prerequisite.

Is it “validating,” to read part of my own story in print? I don’t think validity enters into it. I associate validity with reassurance, a pat on the back, a confirmation, all of which are sometimes necessary, but that’s not what I felt upon reading CRAWL. I felt an emotion more akin to mutuality, to a deepening understanding that is felt by both parties. A connection that carries the possibility of community along with it.

All of which is to say that I didn’t feel finished after writing just the one essay about it. In order to exorcise PoMo tennis mania and New Sincerity and nerdy-ass footnotes from my brain, I have to subject you to another. Although really, this one is less about the novel itself and more about my parasocial relationship with David Foster Wallace, which has clung to my psyche even as his reputation and legacy have shifted over the years.

DFW as both an artist and a person seems to embody a certain archetype. He did not invent being a writer who was also depressed, annoyingly booksmart, and a white dude, but it’s like he unveiled this archetype for the modern era, becoming the Ur-Depressed Writer White Guy for all those kinds of guys roughly adjacent to my generation.

The Depressed Writer White Guy archetype significantly overlaps the Tortured Genius Artist. We allow both archetypes much leeway in their treatment of others, perhaps because it is assumed that, being so depressed and tortured, they’ll punish themselves for any missteps more than anyone else could. I can’t help my fascination with both DFW and with what he represents, the tortured masculine artist with a big ole honker of a brain that pushed him to great heights and then destroyed him, this mystery that beckons to my insomniac ruminations (I’m always weakest to parasociality when I can’t sleep) with the promise that if I can understand the Ur-Depressed Writer White Guy, I’ll understand all the frustrating depressed guys I’ve known along with my own mental illness, my gender, my white half (my hangups around Boston!), myself.

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