At our house cookies were homemade, pop was for nausea, and restaurant meals were a rare treat. Dinner was at 6 and featured two vegetables.

My sister and I did enjoy the occasional Libbyland Dinner, the rare Kraft Macaroni and Cheese night. In the cereal aisle we begged for Sugar Corn Pops and were placated with Life Cereal. Mom’s standards, and tolerance for whining, were high.

Once I left home, I began to expand my junk food horizons. It took me more than a few decades to rediscover raw vegetables.

Eventually I became one of those people you can’t take anywhere because there’s nothing on the menu I want to put into my body. It’s a bit much.

And my standards could be so much higher!

I reserved Brain Food, The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power by Dr. Lisa Mosconi from the library, and by the time it was ready to pick up I had no idea why I wanted to read it. A clear sign that I need to bone up on brain nutrition. Trusting in divine order, I cracked it open.

As Dr. Mosconi described snacking on caviar (highest DHA concentration of any food)1 and dosing her toddler with noni juice (“off the charts” antioxidant profile),2 I felt incredulous. Then doomed.

Born in Italy and raised on an olive oil-soaked Mediterranean diet, Mosconi settled in the United States where she is routinely mortified by the Standard American Diet (SAD) which fails to support brain health. In fact, it undermines brain health. Sudoku and adequate sleep will not fix this, Mosconi assures us. We’d do well to focus on what we eat, how much, and how often.

With recipes, studies, and rate-yourself quizzes, she unpacks the intersection between cognitive decline and nutritional intake and pleads with us to eat better.

But is that enough to get us to eat better?

As I was digging into Brain Food, Kelefa Sanneh’s article about food deserts appeared in the August third issue of The New Yorker.3 A food desert being a neighborhood with two Circle Ks and no grocery store where people are compelled to eat hot dogs instead of salad. Turns out food deserts are a bit of a red herring.

Given grocery stores bursting with kale, people continue eat what’s tasty to them. And what’s tasty to many is Sugar Corn Pops. The problem isn’t access or lack of information—but both are easily remedied with a ground breaking and a photo op.

And this, my friends, is the context for Mosconi’s book. Brain Food was written for the choir—people like me who already scrutinize their diets because they fear death. She will struggle to reach Kris, the main character of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, who subsists on Raisinete-spiked popcorn and sour gummy candies.4

Have I wandered into the weeds?

When I decided to blog about memory I was thinking of my work in progress. A memoir that touches on magic and mentalism, two art forms that depend on patchy human recall to work their wonders on an audience.

I was thinking about how we remember things with our bodies. How members of the same family remember things differently. How each of us has a lens and a perspective that determines the meaning we make from what we recall.

This month, I’m thinking of my dad.

He didn’t wake to vitamins next to his plate and was oblivious to Mom’s efforts to hide extra nutrients (raw eggs and milk powder) in our food. He’s been in charge of feeding himself for decades now.

Is this the problem?

He’ll be 84 next month, and his short-term memory is vanishing. He’s confusing me with my sister. “No.” I want to shout into the phone, “I’m the one who could swallow a pile of vitamins without choking.”

I feel offended, and it’s not intentional.

On the plus side, he seems to have forgotten a number of the things he doesn’t like about me. Or, he’s forgetting to bring them up.

I’ll take it.

Here it is folks, the actual subconscious motivation for reserving Brain Food. My dad.

So, how we can support cognitive health as opposed to ushering in cognitive decline?

Since you read this far, I’ll tell you. Drink lots of water, eat lots of seeds and nuts and caviar (but don’t, because sturgeon are going extinct)5 and give up bacon and anything processed.

You’re off to a good start!

Nutritional advice has changed some since my mother was making her own ketchup and blending raw eggs into our milkshakes. What we have now, as Sanneh points out, is mountains of conflicting nutritional advice—and the belief that information access is the key to making good choices. The irony.

Dad still swears by a daily glass of pomegranate juice. What about noni juice? I won’t suggest it.

That half-finished bag of flax seeds I left in his refrigerator in 2009? Still there. He doesn’t find them compelling. Or tasty. He is not going to read Lisa Mosconi’s book. He is not going to eat something because I tell him it’s good for his brain. Witness his vitamin-free breakfasts. Someone else had already given up on telling him what to put into his body.

All this reading about diet maximization has convinced me to ease up and order the fried potatoes. I’ll continue taking my pile of vitamins, but while I’m here on earth I’d like to allow myself to enjoy really yummy things that are bad for my brain. Sometimes.

After all, whether we have good information or choose to implement it, some of us are going to lose our memories and all of us are going to die.

Oops. Spoiler alert!

Brain Food is an excellent resource. It’s also more information about something you’re not doing right now to make your life better.

When information is available, it’s tempting to blame people for not taking it on board.

When information is available, we’re lulled into believing everything is preventable.

Sometimes bad things just happen.

Or, to quote Dad, “Life’s like that.”

How I hated hearing these words when I was a kid grappling with some new-to-me injustice. I haven’t heard it in years.

Perhaps he’s forgotten that, too.

I’ll take it.

What is your theory of eating? Are you a nutritional maximizer or an everything-in-moderation type? Please tell us all about it in the comments!

It took years for me to figure this out—I use films to mood alter. As a result, I seek out predictability. Say I’m feeling nostalgic for my bad attitude. I’ll amplify it by watching Repo Man (1984). What if I want to pretend it’s not 109 degrees outside? I’ll reach for something black and white, set in winter. With rain. Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) leaps to mind.1

It takes a lot to get me to drive to a movie theater and watch a new-to-me film. I have a boatload of excuses. The theater is too cold,2 the film starts too late, only two friends, not three, have gushed about it. The truth? I don’t want to chance watching something that will make me feel something I’m not prepared to experience.

Do I sound like a control freak?

True, at some point, one must wash the favorite t-shirt. In fact, I’m grateful a quorum developed around I Love Boosters (2026) earlier this summer. The uplift I got from that bombastically colorful feel-good movie buoyed me for at least 48 hours.

Due to circumstances beyond my control (the weather, the climate, the news) things have been tough in choosing-a-movie land. My Olympic-sized pool of go-to films has been reduced to a finger bowl. A puddle of Palmolive.

Whereas even last year I might have been willing to watch films that left me sad or melancholy, these days I only want to feel much better. Amazing, even.

Plus there’s the perennial problem of stumbling upon animals in film.

Whether they’re protagonists or incidental, movie animals inevitably come to a bad end. What follows is the transcript of an actual exchange between me and a friend who is trying to recommend the movie, Flow (2024).

Her: You’d really like Flow.

Me: It has an animal in it?

Her: Well, yes. A cat.

Me: Does the cat suffer?

Pause

Her: The cat goes on a journey of self discovery during which she learns to tap into her innate resilience.

Me: The cat suffers.

Silence.

No, I did not see The Sheep Detectives (2026).

As a hapless elementary school student, I was destroyed by Charlotte’s Web and my sensitivity has been ratcheting up ever since.

Can you relate?

Does the Dog Die is a website that allows folks like us to vet the films recommended by normies who can’t empathize with spiders.

Can you watch anything? Consider doing me a favor and add to the crowd-sourced database which also tracks triggers like violence, discrimination, bodily harm, etc.

After this long aside about my delicate nature, I’m going to surprise the heck out of you and admit to something you may already know about me: I watch a lot of horror films.

Nothing in the home invasion or torture subgenres. And, with the exception of The Host (2006), I pass on monster movies.

That still leaves a lot to choose from. And, true to form, I tend to rewatch films I know I’ll enjoy.

Is enjoy the right word? In fact, does horror make me feel better? Provide catharsis? Help me mood alter?

I’ve thought a lot about why I watch scary movies, but never felt the need to apologize for it until I picked up Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. The author, Coltan Scrivner, PhD is a horror fan who, unlike most of us, has access to research facilities and knows how to design a study.3

In fact, he embarked on his research journey to save genre fans from their bad reputation. What, you say? Word on the street is scary movie fanatics are a pack of gore-loving grandma-haters who lack the ability to empathize. Believe me, I was just as shocked as you are.

What if horror fans, the morbidly curious in Scrivner’s telling, are simply curious about death, which, the book postulates, is a useful survival tool. For example, how might we recognize that a person has passed on in the absence of modern diagnostic tools. Stethoscopes. A mirror. Knowing something about dead bodies might help. Few of us see them on the regular anymore.

In fact, compared with our mammoth-hunting ancestors, many modern humans live relatively secure lives. For the lucky among us, there’s not much call to bolt in the face of danger. We’re out of practice.

Enter horror films.4 As we trash talk the protagonist who separates from the group, the teen who drops the car keys, trips, stops to scream instead of barreling past the axe murderer, we learn something. Each time we smugly insist we’d make better choices than the character who was killed off in the first 20 minutes, we’re rehearsing those choices in our minds. Or, if you’re my partner, out loud. Thanks to Morbidly Curious I know he’s saving own his life, as opposed to simply talking over a movie I’m trying to watch.

We’ve always been practicing.

Picture a group of young innocents organizing a rousing game of tag, playing hide-and-seek in the park. According to Scrivner, they’re running predator/prey scenarios. Finnish researcher Antti Revonsuo claims this is one of the key functions of dreaming.

Did you dream you slept through a flight, forgot a test, neglected to wear pants to work? You’re moving through threat simulations in your sleep.

Perhaps a horror movie habit is like doing the extra credit to bump up your grade.

So now you’re thinking, that’s all well and good, but I’m already way too nervous/anxious/freaked out. Watching Dolls (1987) will only make it worse. Scrivner has you covered. He claims that watching horror films can help the anxious among us learn to self-regulate. How, you ask? Well, it’s a bit like do-it-yourself exposure therapy.

Say you’re sitting down at home to re-watch Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), a subtle horror film I find particularly terrifying. Your task is to track the interoceptive cues your body provides. Hands clammy, heart pounding? What about your breath? Are you holding it?

When we notice our body feeding us these classic signs of dysregulation, we can stop the movie.

We can turn off the sound.

Leave the room to get snacks.

Snuggle with our cat/dog/parakeet.

Because we’re watching a movie on the couch, not facing down a crowd from a podium (a bad dream of mine), we can pause the experience of feeling anxious until we regain equilibrium. Think of it as learning to tolerate anxiety through titration, as opposed to simply suppressing it.

I know this is probably a hard sell.

But there’s more! As a bonus, the threat-focused plots of horror films can help break cycles of rumination by feeding us material that’s compelling enough to overwhelm our spiraling brain chatter. Which may be the reason I found myself reaching for horror this month.

The terror just comes to an end when the final girl walks off into the sunrise.

The Final Girls (2015), hard recommend!

When I feel stuck in an endlessly unspooling nightmare, a scary movie transports me to a world where even the worst case scenario ends at the ninety minute mark.

Franchise films like Halloween (1978) are even more healing.

In the closing moments when the monster dies—then disappears—I’m gifted with the setup for a run of sequels whose sweet predictability lacks the power to upend me.

And something to look forward to!

Scary entertainment, yeah or nay? How do you feel about engaging with horror-tainment to overcome anxiety? What’s your favorite scary movie? Drop your recommendations into the comments!

I recently stumbled upon a pre-pandemic photo of myself with Don Coscarelli, world famous director of one of my favorite horror movies of all time. Coscarelli is holding small metal orb outfitted with blades and a drill bit. We’re smiling.

As I stare at this photo, critique my outfit, it slowly dawns on me that, try as I might, I cannot recall the name of Coscarelli’s film, a film featuring murderous metal orbs (from a planet of Jawas) that terrorize anyone reckless enough to break into a sketchy funeral home run by a very Tall Man.

Even after describing the nonsensical plot to myself, I’m drawing a blank.

In the meantime, I have gained supernatural powers of recall.

From time to time, I’ll slip into mentally restaging a failed conversation. I’ll reach for a word, and it will come to me. In German. Or Turkish. Or, very rarely, Italian. Three languages I studied with focus and passion.

Anyone who has learned another language or was raised with many, knows that just because one language has a word/phrase that describes a particular concept doesn’t mean this word/phrase exists in another tongue. Which is one of the freaking amazing things about studying language.

But that’s not where I’m heading.

I’m not talking about sprinkling my rehash with the German equivalent of je ne sais quoi1 as I wave a cigarette about like someone in a Godard film.

I’m talking about spontaneous recall of foreign (to me) words that exist in English. Nouns I’ve been using since I started uttering sentences. For example, I’ll imagine someone has backed me into a rhetorical corner and my mind thinks Winkel. Corner, in German. Der Winkel. And yes, I had to look up the article. Sad.

Or, I’m staring out at the bird bath and spooning breakfast into my mouth when my mind whispers Ablaβhandel.2 The buying and selling of indulgences. Which is a word you might learn if you were reading about the Protestant Reformation in German.

It’s word that, decades on, has proven singularly useless and always conjures a particular classroom. A drawing on the page of a textbook, the too-small surface of my desk, sunlight streaming through the windows. Was it spring quarter when der Ablaβhandel first sent its tentacles into my cortex like an alien space pod bent on colonizing a human host?3

I’m certain there are infinite explanations for the holes in my memory, the plugging of other holes with long-forgotten words. What interests me at the moment is how I managed to memorize all the non-English words I learned as an adult.

In recent weeks I’ve been bombarded with alarming news articles, and stories from my own circles of acquaintance, that illustrate how we, the humans, are choosing to use AI like a Magic 8 Ball.

Remember those?

Perhaps we believe Claude, et al. differ from the 8 Ball because they’ve been built from vast a library of stolen writing plus everything on the Internet then smartened and honed by each successive inquiry posed by every person looking to hack their A1C. Or pack for a beach vacation.

The Magic 8 Ball can only field yes-or-no questions.

Yet, the person asking Claude if they should dump their partner and the sad teenager shaking the Magic 8 Ball on repeat until it tells her “Yes, definitely” or even, “Concentrate and ask again,” are both engaged in the same activity—not interacting with other humans.4

Now, don’t get me wrong. Learning how to have healthy relationships with people has been the hardest thing I’ve ever set out to do. If I hadn’t long since started motivating myself through trial and error and fire to turn to other people for help, support, love, and fun, I might be availing myself of the latest shortcuts to avoid them.

What does this have to do with language, Kirsten?

Well, I don’t remember acquiring my native language, but I’m certain I managed to learn a few others by being in life with people.

Often, when I think of a word I’ve learned, I’ll remember where I was, who I was with, and what I was feeling or doing when I finally got it.

Will I ever forget the word I learned in the days after the heartbreaking 1999 İzmit earthquake when, tearful and exhausted, I insisted on sleeping in my apartment instead of spending another night wandering the hot dusty streets of İstanbul and resting on park benches in the open where I would be safe, because everyone knew that both earthquakes and aftershocks only surprised you in bed at night?

I was too dysregulated to hear what my friends were muttering as they shook their heads, clicked their tongues, and deposited me at the door to my building. But I heard Ali.

“İnatçı,” he said.

I looked it up.5

And so I’ve been wondering how typing queries into a computer instead of talking to a friend or therapist, studying online as opposed to interacting with a teacher in a classroom, impacts learning. And not just learning languages because, as someone is bound to helpfully point out, we don’t have to learn languages anymore. We have Google translate.

Last month we considered the radical idea that human consciousness reaches beyond our individual minds and participates in the creation of reality. Similarly, the theory of embodied cognition frees us from our cerebral cortices by postulating that the brain alone isn’t in charge of human cognition.6 Instead, bodily experiences—smelling the rain, tasting donuts, paging through a dictionary—shape human cognition and play a role in cognition-based functions including memory formation and recall.

Perhaps we knew this already.

In a visceral memory from my nineteenth year, I’m staring at the list of German prepositions taped to my dorm room mirror and shaking my shoulders to a rhythm of my own invention as I recite the dative prepositions. It worked. This embarrassing little dance and the rhythm of the words still come to me a bazillion years later.

Numerous studies invoke the power of movement as an aid to learning. Strategies range from singing with hand gestures to performing skits—instead of sitting in one’s seat and reading one’s part, a la 8th grade Spanish.

Drawing, but not in art class, is also impactful.

As cartoonist Lynda Barry taught us, we can coax the unconscious mind to release its treasures through drawing and writing by hand. In fact, moving a pen across the page taps a different part of the brain than typing does. Gesture and movement may be the key.

As I skimmed the studies, I flashed on my short career as a teacher of adolescents. I could have invited a bit more chaos into my teaching. Created more lessons built around “Hello, my name is” stickers and rearranging the furniture.

“Hello, my name is” stickers transformed my ESL students into Greek gods. As they gamely inhaled the brisk air atop Mt Olympus, I tasked them with arranging themselves into a tableau that expressed their relationships with each other and to the humans below.

On another occasion I asked my bewildered civics students, now state legislators, to leave their seats, propose a bill and escort one of their fellows—said bill—out of committee and onto to the floor for a vote. Would the bill reach the governor’s desk? Would she veto it? The suspense was killing us!

We were talking to each other!

Perhaps I’ve failed to convince you to make yourself vulnerable by phoning that friend who has a bit more life experience to ask for help with something you may have once taken to humans.

Consider this. The high levels of loneliness and depression we’ve all heard so much about aren’t problems of information access. They’re problems of connection. Or, lack thereof. Connection helps us learn all sorts of things, not just how to retain the words and grammatical constructs we once needed to pass a test.

The real test is underway.

Every time someone says “I asked ChatGBT…” I feel a little less necessary.

And every time someone says “I asked ChatGBT…” the skills I worked so hard to acquire seem a lot more magical.

I dedicate the love and effort and spirit I put into this month’s newsletter to all those impacted by the recent heartbreaking earthquakes in Northern Venezuela.

Me? I think of manifestation mediums.

Medium, as in, someone who connects the living with the dead through writing, trance, spirit boards, drawing, and passes on messages the rest of us struggle to hear. Manifestation mediums go further. They manifest stuff. Indestructible flowers straight from Summerland. Ectoplasm, straight from their bodies. All of it sourced from beyond the land of the living, generally during a seance.

But that’s me.

When you hear the word manifestation, I’ll bet you think of the verb, to manifest. In other words, harnessing the power of your mind to bring something to (or something to pass in) your life.

The verb tends to get my hackles up. Perhaps it’s true that I can wield the power of positive thinking to influence outcomes, an idea mass popularized by American Minister Norman Vincent Peale in his 1952 book of the same name.

However, this concept and its children—look on the bright side, imagine the glass half full, happify—to name a few of the directives aimed at my younger self, are used to shame people. Unintentionally of course.

Who hasn’t had the experience of expressing a worry, concern, or God forbid, a negative thought, only to have someone helpfully announce that their pinched attitude is blocking financial abundance?

I imagine these are the same folks who, in the spirit of goodwill, might suggest to someone currently undergoing chemotherapy that their cancer is a bodily manifestation of unresolved childhood trauma they didn’t resolve.

Do I never get to have a bad day? If I have a bad day, is it always my fault?

I feel reluctant to post this. Not very positive, is it? As my dad liked to point out, I need an attitude adjustment.

All this hesitation can only mean one thing—I’ve been well trained.

I aspire to be like my pal who has books about string theory1 sitting on his coffee table and actually reads them. If only I’d I taken physics in high school instead of helping Mrs. Shigaki organize the book room for credit, I’d be smart enough to make it through his copy of The Elegant Universe. Instead, I get 20 pages in, add my book mark, and repeat the process with a new physics-for-lay-geeks read during my next visit.

Just when I thought I was finally ready to throw in the towel, physics found me.

I picked up The Science of Magic: How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality by Dean Radin, PhD, assuming that this would be another book about the science of magic, i.e., a rundown of common magic tricks and the science/psychology/brain activity undergirding our tendency to perceive magical illusions as real.

Surprise! The Science of Magic is about physics.

And magick, as practiced by people like the late British occultist Aleister Crowley, who restored the Old English spelling, adding the “k” to distinguish his esoteric rituals from magic tricks and illusions.

According to Radin, the opaque world of physics and the fantastical realm of magick operate on the same principles, adhere to the same laws. Makes sense, right? I was fully on board, until it dawned on me that Radin is saying magick is real.

Cue the title sequence for Charmed.

In his posthumous book, Magick Without Tears, Aleister Crowley defines magick as “The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.”

Which brings to mind the observer effect in physics.2 In this experimentally established phenomenon, the act of observing a particle changes the behavior of the particle. At the quantum level.3

According to Radin, the observer effect exemplifies the principal that human consciousness has a role in creating reality. Or, creates reality in partnership with a universal consciousness. This is known as idealism, for all you philosophers out there.4

Which begs the question: Aren’t Crowley and Radin talking about manifestation?

Dean Radin PhD knows what’s going to happen when I tell you that the scientific studies he cites in his book were conducted in the field of psi research. Psi, being short for psychic phenomenon.

Before you roll your eyes and skip to the end, consider that experiments in psi have been held to higher standards than those in other scientific disciplines. In fact, psi studies pioneered a number of previously unheard of practices that feel quite ho-hum today, like like double-blind testing.5

You may have been unaware that ESP, telekinesis, and telepathy, which fall under the umbrella of non-local consciousness,6 have been replicated in the lab. What’s more, the experimental results have been appearing in peer reviewed journals since the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) began publishing theirs in 1882.

And it’s not just psi researchers who believe in psi effects. Radin offers a long list of respected scientists and thinkers who, after countless years of equation solving—pipe stems between their teeth—have failed to find a way to talk themselves out of believing in things they experienced yet couldn’t explain. These men (they’re all men)7 include Alan Turing, British math whiz whose far-reaching accomplishments demand a detailed footnote I’m not going to write, and Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

The Nobel laureates gave me pause.

Work-in-progress update.

I’m deep into writing on early 20^th century psychical research. A period when it was possible to sit on a high-toned scientific committee investigating widely accepted claims of mediumship—with a PhD you found in a box of Cracker Jacks.8 And publish your results in Scientific American.

Who to believe? Psi researchers like Radin?

Or physicists like Dr. J. A. Wheeler, who is known for popularizing the idea that we live in a participatory universe—then distancing himself from any stray comments that may have implied he believed in a connection between separate consciousnesses.9

Physics, as a field, is loath to explain incongruous experimental results with anything psi researchers have uncovered. Who doesn’t need funding?

Fortunately, you can have it both ways.

“There’s valid evidence for psi,” Radin writes, “but because no one knows exactly what psi is, then it can’t be called psi.”

The logic of this argument is called the experimenters’ regress. Say you want to find out whether telepathy, or extrasensory mind-to-mind communication, is possible. You construct a double blind test and the results of your experiment produce evidence supporting telepathy. However, we don’t really know what telepathy is, so how can we determine whether the evidence produced by this experiment proves telepathy exists?10

Plausible deniability.

It’s been difficult to sit still and write this newsletter. I would rather binge Charmed, that frothy WB series about three sister witches saving the world out of their San Francisco mansion—to compare Shannon Doherty’s spell casting with Rose McGowan’s.

By the time you read this I’ll have rewatched the episode where Piper (Holly Marie Combs) travels back in time to fix the present—to watch for signs that Charmed was actually a message sent to the past from the future. To let us know what was coming (and I don’t mean the 2018 reboot). Unless I’m misapprehending The Science of Magic, all of this is totally within the realm of possibility.

The final section of Radin’s book about physics is a short magick primer. Binding spells. Sigils for when you need a quick $20. Lest you start to believe everyone in the world will soon be magicking willy-nilly, unleashing mass chaos, everyone in the world would have to be able to maintain unbroken concentration for at least three minutes at a time. No focus, no spell casting. So it seems unlikely.

I know I sound flip. Don’t believe it. I’ve incorporated one of Radin’s concentration exercises into my daily meditation practice.

Stay tuned!

And what of manifesting, the verb?

I’ve burned up a lot of life energy looking for the silver bullet. The one thing that might smooth out the rough edges of living and baste my turkey of a life with a bottomless sense of well being and safety. Plenty of $20s.

During challenging periods, I can still find myself itching to resume the hunt for a single unifying theory of everything. A string theory, if you will. Enter manifesting. I’m constitutionally primed to fall for its charms.

What if all I ever had to do was stop hunting? Shut down my computer and put on my roller skates? Perhaps giving myself sustained permission to “goof off” is the way to extinguish my longing for gurus. Today I’m ready to believe that doing what I want, most of the time, is the real secret to manifesting what I hope to bring into my life. I’ll even go out on a limb and claim it’s the key to manifesting something more valuable than financial abundance—joy.11

As for magick, I’m way too freaked out by the promise that it’s real to try anything.

What do you think? Is time linear? The past done with? Magick sci-fi? Chime in!

Then, there were The Who’s rock operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia.

I preferred Quadrophenia. Sting is in it. Swooning over him was the done thing.

When I sat down to revisit Quadrophenia this month, I discovered I’d completely forgotten the anti-hero of the film: Jimmy. A teenage mod who rides a G.S. scooter with his hair cut neat and wears his wartime coat in the wind and sleet, to paraphrase Pete Townsend.1

Jimmy eats a lot of amphetamines, wants a girlfriend, and wants YOU to know he’s definitely NOT a rocker. Whether it’s dress, music, motorized transport, it’s mods versus rockers. They can’t agree on anything, and the antipathy culminates in a brawl at the beach in Brighton. They’re Brits, don’t you know. I’ll tell you a secret, I had to turn on the closed captions to understand what the kids were saying.

Don’t judge me.

Weeks later, the soundtrack is still looping through my brain. Do I love The Who? No, but they write a catchy rock opera. Turns out, the music was all I remembered. But we’ll get to that.

As I sat in my living room, taking the lyrics into my bloodstream, I began to suspect the scenes I recalled most clearly, the images that appeared in my mind’s eye over the years whenever I thought of the Union Jack, Lambretta scooters, or porkpie hats, were not in the movie. By the time I’d reached the halfway point, kind of stoked to be watching what was turning into a new-to-me film, I began wondering how Quadrophenia would end.

I hadn’t seen Sting tooling around Brighton on his tricked out scooter since high school. Yet, instead of settling into the delighted floaty nostalgia I usually experience when revisiting a beloved film, I began to sense my teenage self. Which is the opposite of feeling floaty and delighted.

What’s more, she couldn’t care less about Sting.

Even as part of me labeled Jimmy sad and irritating, a loathsome show-off—part of me got him. The part that hid out at the movies, felt unsure of herself, invisible, too visible.

How I longed to be as loudly and authentically unhappy as Jimmy.

Instead, I sat in the dark and imagined I was reckless enough to climb onto a speaker suspended from a dance hall ceiling, shake it like the world’s best dancer, then swan dive into the crowd, trusting someone would catch me.

Banned from the dance hall! A legend!

Of course there was a stiff price to pay for all this authenticity. For Jimmy, the bill came due in the final scene of Quadrophenia—at least in my version of the final scene.

The actual ending to Quadrophenia, one shimmering with hope—if one recalls the opening scene of the film—is not the ending my memory composed.

Was I still scrunched into my seat at The Neptune, gnawing on smuggled-in bagel, when my teen brain began collaging with this film, taking liberties? Giving the story the ending I needed. One bleak enough to affirm my world view. Well, one of them. I was still trying world views on for size.

Perhaps the fake ending kept me from going off the rails. Put the fear of death in me, shook me when I finally became loudly unhappy and started breaking things.

“Sure you could do that,” my higher self may have whispered, “but don’t forget Jimmy.”

I’m choosing to believe I remembered Quadrophenia the way I was meant to remember it, that my personal spin on the source material served a higher purpose.

As opposed to, I’m starting to forget everything.

I don’t feel much affection for David Lynch’s Lost Highway character, Fred Madison.2 However, I resonate with Fred’s take on memory:

I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them. Not necessarily how they happened.

Perhaps you, dear reader, are interested in recovering more and better memories, as opposed to surfing Lynchian psychogenic fugue states. Good news! The mind/body connection can be used to enhance access to autobiographical episodic memory.3

I merely felt my teen self while watching Quadrophenia. What if you were brushing your teeth and locked eyes with teen-you in the mirror?

Certain regions of the brain produce a mental map of our bodies. As the map is forever updating itself in response to new inputs, it can be manipulated. Which brings me to a study that begins, Illusory ownership of one’s younger face….

Participants observed an altered image of themselves that moved in time with them. As they watched their new/old image on a screen, the illusion that the younger face was their current face took hold. Subsequently quizzed on their lives, “…people recalled significantly more details of childhood memories after viewing a younger face than they did after viewing their unaltered appearance.”

Cool, right?

I used to think I wanted to remember more about my childhood. Isn’t that where everything gets figured out and fixed? Plus, what if I don’t remember enough to heal? To write a memoir?

One of the things I’ve excelled at in life is therapy. As in, going to therapy. Digging and digging. And yet, watching Quadrophenia as a grownup and recognizing the stubborn hope that lay at the center of Jimmy’s every self-destructive act, brought me face to face with my unhappy fourteen-year-old self. And I didn’t even know we needed to talk.

If remembering in a particular, inaccurate, way can serve an unknown purpose, perhaps remembering certain things, and not others, is another form of mind/body wisdom.

I’m willing to be wrong about this.

Weeks after watching Quadrophenia, the feeling that I’ve walked through a door into my teen years remains. I’m still new to feeling entranced by images of faraway places I’ve never been, secretly hopeful that, despite this ongoing rough patch, my life contains the seeds of something I hardly dare imagine—possibility.

If someone could dream up this series of unforgettable ear worms, weave them into a film that leaves me teetering on the edge of a sheer cliff outside Brighton, inducing actual vertigo—if someone could get Sting to take a bit part in their movie—why couldn’t I imagine something just as improbable for myself?

Have you ever discovered that you remembered something incorrectly and decided it was for the best? Or not so much? What song is stuck in your head today? Tell me all about it in the comments.

“Do you floss?”

She could tell. Why else would she ask?

“You should aim for three days a week,” she said with a breeziness that suggested everyone simply knew semi-regular flossing was good enough.

Was she yanking my chain? Even I believed humans were meant to floss daily. Was I bewildered? Relieved that I only had to start flossing three times weekly to keep my teeth?

“I’m not supposed to floss every day?” I asked.

Perhaps this was the question that changed my life, because the gold filling, if you will, was in the dentist’s answer.

“Well,” she said, “If I tell people to floss every day, they start out with good intentions. Then they miss a day and decide to give up.”

In other words they mess up, feel defeated, and chuck the whole project.

I had just been hanging upside down in a dental chair. Still, I understood her observation extended beyond oral hygiene.

I called a friend to debrief.

“You don’t floss?!” he said, missing the point entirely. “God, Kirsten. It’s like breathing. You just do it.”

Not long after, I started flossing. For years now, I’ve flossed daily. It has not prevented age-related tooth deterioration or vanquished gum recession. But it taught me something about giving up. How easily I can do it.

I felt like giving up a few weeks ago. Back when it was still December, two friends who support my obsession with psychics, mind-readers, and divination purchased a fancy birth chart reading for me.

The perfect gift. One I would spend weeks anticipating before the astrologer was ready to meet with me. A gift, it turns out, I wasn’t quite equipped to receive.

Someone once told me that instead of reading the Free Will Astrology horoscope corresponding to her sun sign, she reads all 12 of Rob Brezsny’s predictions each week and chooses the one she likes best.

My off-and-on tarot habit is similarly relaxed. The cards I pull don’t point to the literal truth. I read them as portals into a new way of thinking. Perhaps the Queen of Swords jogs a memory. Maybe the reversed Five of Wands helps me see a roadblock. A reversed Two of Wands soothes a fear.1

My view when it comes to horoscopes, coffee ground reads, and most divination practices is pretty chill. It’s diverting to play with. Is it the truth? There might be some truth in it, but I’m not going to hang my hat on it.

Evidentially, I bring a whole other belief system to star chart readings.

Because I was pushed into the world at the exact moment the stars and planets were in particular and predictable spots, I’ve decided their arrangement has to mean something, about me. The starry sky, in other words, is a treasure map leading to information that lies hidden in a dragon-filled sea cave that floods at high tide. To retrieve the information, the key to where I’ve been, where I’m headed, to make sense of it, I need a professional dragon tamer to wade in and grab the gold bullion.

Frankly, in the run-up to the reading, I was worried. Over the years, I’d gleaned information about my birth chart from book-wielding woo friends who could do math. About my multiple retrograde planets, the lopsided visuals of my personal sky map. The gaps which, in my imaginings, corresponded to tough times. Or, proved I was set up at the moment of birth for a lifetime of challenges.

Before our call, the astrologer asked if there were any questions I hoped to explore. As in my dealings with psychics, I decided to keep my questions to myself.

According to my scientific thinking, if the astrologer conveys the answer to at least one of my unspoken worries without prompting, the answer is written, someplace.

Which means the answer is fixed. Or is it?

As our call commenced, the astrologer came out as an evolutionary astrologer. In this astrological ecosystem, a birth chart is not deterministic—its your path to spiritual growth. So, the information is still in my chart. But I’ll use it to make informed choices, to take action.

My mind was still grappling with this concept as my moon, my rising sign, and all the houses, came flying at me over Zoom. I could see myself building a memory of our interaction in real time, using my previous knowledge to scaffold, skimming the rest.

Ninety minutes later, the call ended with the astrologer rushing off to her day job with a promise to send notes. It ended with me in tears.

The sense I made of her words was grim. Seven planets in retrograde, chugging backwards through their orbits2 at the time of my birth—meaning everything will take longer for me. I will bloom late.

Life, the reading affirmed, has felt hard for me. Life, it promised, will continue to feel hard. However, because this is evolutionary astrology, I can change things—with more hard work.

In other words, there’s no gold in the sea cave. No triumphant denouement, no resolution, no rest.

Just more grind.

For 24 hours, I wanted to give up.

As I began writing this post, on lunar day 29, the new moon was at 1.9 percent. According to my moon app:

The 29^th day, fundamentally, is unhappy in everything and for everyone.…You cannot believe any promises, rumors, or forecasts. All around is sheer deception.

So you can take my fatalism with a grain of salt. And so can I.

The birth chart experience reminded me I still have a profound negative bias. It helped me reaffirm that if I had the opportunity to peer into a crystal ball and glimpse my future, I wouldn’t. Perhaps this is why I’m not out sampling psychics on the regular. Clearly, I’m too willing to believe everything I hear, if it sounds like what I want to believe.

More importantly, I’m reevaluating my longstanding contention that if you’re a grown adult living in this age of science, reason, and free choice, and you let a reading ruin your day, you need to snap out of it! I was surprised by how upset I felt. How shaky.

For the first time ever, I could imagine myself swooning at the foot of a cliff (in a negligee) after falling under the spell of a slick psychic fraud, a la The Amazing Mr. X.

The birth chart did offer up one gold doubloon. Apparently there are advantages to being born during a mercury retrograde. While everyone else is struggling with messed up travel, fraught communication, relationship breakdown, leaky emotions, tech issues—I’m not.

I am the mercury retrograde whisperer.

If you happen to believe in such things.

Tell me, do you?

Picking books just because I liked the look of them.

I was used to choosing books I thought someone of my age and educational attainment (fourth or fifth grade) should read. What would a random bystander think of me, I wondered, if they knew I was a person interested in reading such a book?

Was the choice of this novel correct, was the question I asked myself. Not, does this excite me, puzzle me, make me thrill to be alive and primed to search out even more amazing reading material?

Well that was a long time ago. I quickly fell back into the habit of reading things for school and edification, with brief, life-giving forays into fiction and trash—sometimes in foreign languages, lest I completely give up on self-improvement.

I kept all of it.

Eventually, overwhelmed by my collection, I decided to lose everything that didn’t fit on my modest bookshelves, which was most of it.

During the cull, I found myself clinging to books inscribed by dead loved ones, to science fiction novels with covers that freaked me out as a child, to my tattered copy of A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young—and tossing stuff that I thought made me look smart. Slowly, it became clear to me that books were more than the stories they contained.

The final stage in this evolution, accepting that it was right to keep particular books just because I wanted to keep them, was cemented in place by a pandemic-era subscription to Poets and Writers magazine. Or, an advertisement in Poets and Writers that led me to Siglio Press which had just reissued a book of photos by a French artist named Sophie Calle.

In 1981, the young Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a hotel in Venice, Italy and spent her time surreptitiously photographing the possessions of the holiday makers whose rooms she was assigned to clean. As she opened their closets, thumbed through their journals, snagged their chocolates, Calle described what she found, inviting the reader to draw their own conclusions about folks who travel with framed photos of themselves and leave ready-to-mail postcards and porn lying about for anyone to peruse.

The concept! The execution! As I read about Calle’s book, The Hotel, my insides turned to Jell-O.

I thought: you can do that?

It was 1984 all over again. I had just seen Jim Jarmusch’s bittersweet film Stranger Than Paradise and the questions were coming thick and fast.

You can do that, I thought?

You can end a movie like that?

What even happened?

Why black and white when color is available—and customary?

Perhaps I was too well versed in the rules. Could the rules be less rule-y than I imagined?

Contemplating these questions delighted me. I began to feel friendly towards the adult world I was poised to enter, a world where thought-provoking art was hidden in plain sight.

Who knew?

I bought The Hotel. And all of Sophie Calle’s similarly bewitching books.1

I added them to a shelf I cleared to hold the books that that aren’t like other books I read. Volumes that speak to me in new ways, that are beautifully bound, strangely illustrated. Books that recall a period of my life. Books that remind me that I, too, might one day come up with something breathtaking, if only because someone else did.

Some of these treasures include a guide to Moscow from 1960, my Lynda Barry collection, a Scholastic pamphlet on growing plants from vegetable trimmings, a shorthand primer, a novel in wood cuts. You get the picture. Anything can go on this shelf. What would you put here?

Here’s one idea to get you thinking.

Years ago I took a biblio-biography workshop with writer/artist Penelope Starr, who founded Southern Arizona’s longest running storytelling event and wrote a book about how she did it. Our assigned task was to create an autobiographical bibliography, writing our life stories through the lens of the reads that shaped us.

What about these particular books, we were asked, was impactful? Was it the cover art? An idea we hadn’t considered? A story that helped us view life in a new way? Or was it all about the person who placed the book in our hands?

Penelope was quite clear that we were choosing from our guts and hearts, not selecting books that every well-read gentleman should have on their life list. We were here to own what we liked and what had impact.

What long-forgotten, or oft consulted books might make up your biblio-biography? Do any of them belong on your shelf of inspiration?

The world is filled with opportunities to be awed and inspired by the creativity of others—if I allow space for it. Spending all my book time reading to fix a perceived flaw or add to my knowledge deprives me of the joy of discovering Asterix and Cleopatra for the 100^th time. It also ratchets up my anxiety such that I begin comparing myself (unfavorably) to other writers who become (unbeknownst to them) competition, not angels who are out there creating the kind of perplexing beauty that made me want to write in the first place.

I blame my parents. Had they simply let me loose in Jones’ Fantastic Museum, I might have gotten all of this out of my system.

Hidden away in the basement of the Seattle Center Armory, formerly and more charmingly known as the Food Circus, Jones’ Fantastic was just west of the thumping, glittering, teen-filled Fun Forest.

Circuses! Fun! There wasn’t much of that in my grade school day-to-day. No wonder I can’t forget the place. As Mom dragged me past a window to the inside that I swear to you did feature baffling shapes in jars, Jones’ Fantastic Museum called out to me in a silent ballyhoo.

The images decorating the facade promised the dead, the dusty, the risqué. Things my parents didn’t want me to see. Here, I would not be shushed and steered through a cold, echoing exhibit hall filled with things I wasn’t allowed to touch.

I’d step onto a fortune-telling scale, view the bones of Olaf the Giant, circumnavigate a fetus in a bottle. Here was a museum I could really get behind.

Perhaps when you think of museums, you think stolen antiquities or commonly admired paintings—not fake shrunken heads. We all like what we like. We all write about what we find interesting. Your tastes may be more Uffizi Gallery than The Thing! (Mystery of the Desert1), but I find it useful to think of memoir as a museum of sorts. One filled with memories selected and assembled with care by the chief curator. In my case, me.

Museums evolved from 17^th century cabinets of curiosity, rooms in the homes of European nobility filled with random items taken from places few Europeans had ever seen. Assemblages of shells and stuffed wildlife would grow into trophy rooms filled with art and artifacts plucked from their context and reassembled in the West where they would bear mute testament to imperialist expansion, colonial rule, racism, and a smug European2 sense of entitlement. Museums have historical baggage.

I have historical baggage. As a memoirist, I have to own it. Much as I like to imagine my words being received with near-universal sighs of awe, like a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, my readers, like me, may have Bart’s Pathology Museum on their bucket lists. That’s the vibe I’m working with. Owning it allows me to drop the idea that I’m here to decorate my dorm room with Mom-approved art. Like old Doc Jones, of Jones’ Fantastic, I have a vision. And I get to choose a container that is true to the material and my intent.

It used to disturb me that I could take one memory and make it fit any number of conclusions I was trying to draw. Now I think, the power! Just as the Elgin Marbles tell a different story in the British Museum than they would in situ, in modern Greece, my unmoored memories could lead to any number of mutually exclusive denouements. As chief curator, I get to decide which point I want to make.

Speaking of points, at this point, right about now, I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve taken this museum metaphor too far.

Orhan Pamuk has taken it even farther. The Turkish novelist and author of My Name Is Red created a brick and mortar museum from his 2008 novel Masumiyet Müzesi, or The Museum of Innocence, which is also what he named the museum.

The novel revolves around a class-transgressing sexual encounter that leads to a romantic fixation that will span decades, destroy relationships, and dominate the lives of both the protagonist and Füsun, the woman he can’t leave alone. Set among the upper classes in secular, late mid-century Istanbul, the milieu that produced Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence is, in part, about the storytelling power of objects, and collecting them. An obsession Pamuk shares with his protagonist.

For years, Pamuk had planned to create a museum to accompany an as-yet-amorphous written project. In the interim he wrote other novels, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and haunted the junk dealers in the neighborhood around his writing studio, filling multiple storage spaces with apartment house signage, taxi meters, matchbooks, orphaned photographs, national identity cards—with an eye to the future!

In the end, the book came first.

The Museum of Innocence is located on a quiet side street in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu neighborhood, and housed in the building Füsun once lived in, but not really—she’s fictional. Our protagonist, we are told, created the museum, lining the walls with shadow boxes that describe the evolution of his fixation through objects, including countless cigarette butts he pocketed because his beloved had touched them.

Its all very meta.

Walking through this museum that was curated by a fictional character while listening to the novelist3 narrate the bits of his work that contextualize the objects in the dioramas, I experience a kind of vertigo. Reality recedes. Hours pass.

I’ve written about connecting to story through objects. Orhan Pamuk produced a nearly 600 page novel4 that literally began as a collection of junk. That’s quite an achievement. It delights me. In fact, I’m unable to stop myself from telling you that The Museum of Innocence is the best museum I’ve ever been inside of.

The best museum ever is the one Mom wouldn’t let me into.

Because I had to fill it up with my own imagination.

Ripoff tourist traps? The National Portrait Gallery? Share your museum vibe in the comments!

Like the ocean. Only faster.

You add your chosen rocks to water and grit in a tumbler, place the tumbler in its housing, and plug it in. It rotates. For days and days. Then you switch the grit. Repeat. The starter grit is huge, the final grit silky. So many grits in between.

The wait would be long. But I loved colorful shiny rocks.

At the beach, I chose carefully, watching the waves dampen the shoreline pebbles, selecting the best colors. At home, I emptied my pockets of sand and rocks only to discover my treasures had been transformed into a pile of grayish stones that failed to revive. Enter the tumbler, which promised even the most humble of pebbles a fresh-out-of-the-water gleam.

But it was loud.

So loud, in fact, that even though we put it in a far corner of the basement, I could hear it. Even with a box over it, I couldn’t sleep. I have a very “Princess and the Pea” relationship with sound.

I conceived of this newsletter, in part at least, as an exploration of memory. We’ve talked about the myth of perfect recall, the malleability of memory, muscle memory.

Yes Kirsten, you may be saying to yourself, but how do you remember things?

On purpose and by accident.

Memories that become writing are rarely summoned. They surprise me. Real quality remembering happens when I can drop the self-conscious tending of my life, which is much like the self-conscious tending of words. I can start to believe I have all the answers and stop listening for them.

It’s easiest for me to remember when I’m not trying. For example, when I can spend three full days ignoring emails and texts. When I’m dancing, not talking.

A meditation friend introduced me to Open Floor Dance. A descendant of Five Rhythms, or what my sister might call crazy hippie dancing, Open Floor isn’t about losing yourself in the music, it’s about being present in your body. Which I find super uncomfortable, though not as uncomfortable as sitting in silent stillness on a meditation cushion waiting for the gong to release me.

As with seated meditation, stuff gets worked out when I dance. I remember things. I hate to write this, because I can turn any enjoyable activity into a something meant to fix a perceived shortcoming. Another job to do. So far, dance is immune.

In November Open Floor teachers, Lori Saltzman, Kathy Altman, and Joseph Machado gave a 3-day workshop in Tucson which means dancing from 4-8 hours a day, but not really, because lunch. Plus we wrote in the afternoon with Lori supplying the prompts.

I arrived at dance on Friday, tired, after a week spent editing my own writing, the writing of others, while simultaneously trying to ignore the voice that never stops nattering on about how everything I decide is good enough, isn’t. Now, at dance, I have to write more?

Screw it, I decided. It’s just going to have to suck.

Each night after the workshop I ate dinner and collapsed into bed. Had weirdly vivid dreams as promised. Little of my workshop writing makes sense as I read it now. I didn’t take good notes. Victory! I was in my body.

What I did note was my struggle to follow Lori’s directions, although they were aligned with my disinclination to write well. In a nutshell, we’d be sharing our words, but the focus was on getting the truth out—not polishing.

On the last day, I pulled Lori aside and copped to my poor attitude, my fear of sharing brain dump when everyone else seemed to be composing poetry (the voice again).

“But that was the point,” Lori said. Then, she broke my brain:

“If I said ‘let’s dance,’ would you polish yourself before stepping onto the dance floor?”

If you’ve gotten this far, dear reader, I’ll confess that dance is not just about remembering. It’s about surprise. Play. Going even when I feel terrible. Bringing it all. Whatever it is. Which is the opposite of obsessively grooming sentences, then paragraphs, agonizing over word choice.1 At dance, I’m a mess. Sometimes I fear it’s the only place I let that happen.

But that’s how every single newsletter begins—with no clear path through.

In 2026, I’m looking forward to trusting the lessons of dance. Embracing the humble gray pebble, never discounting the brain dump. I’ll keep sitting at this desk when I don’t feel like it. Ideas and memories will materialize as I brave the excruciating doubt part of writing, when things don’t seem to be coming together—until they do. I’ll save polishing for later. The fine grit after the big grit.

It takes a long time.

How do you let go of polishing and start something new when you’re not sure how it’ll hang together? Or is the mess your specialty? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

My 83-year-old dad remembers his mom kneading shortening with food coloring through a first-generation plastic bag, to create the look of butter for less. Margarine kits, a fear-based gambit devised by the dairy farmers of Washington State, had disappeared by the time I arrived. But my maternal grandma put Blue Bonnet in her grits, Mom baked snicker doodles with Imperial (“Crowned with Quality”), and I was in college before I realized other people put cow butter on everything.

Whether Mom’s concerns were financial or based on the trending belief that spread was healthier than modest amounts of it’s natural counterpart, I’ll never know. But in college, I started smearing real butter on everything.

In the years since, the fortunes of margarine (and trans fats) waning, my stomach told me to give up dairy. I switched to something called vegan butter.

Which confused me. Isn’t vegan butter just margarine?

Which brings me to séance.

Loosely defined as a ceremony devised to contact the spirits of the dead, séance has been around for longer than the commonly pictured dark-room, round-table variety presided over by a medium, who may or may not be a Spiritualist.

Modern séance corresponds with a era marked by a bewildering stream of new innovations like the harnessing of electricity and (now, quite ancient) forms of wireless communication. As railroads and the telegraph stitched the continent together, faith in the awesome power of science and human cleverness began to challenge the notion that humans needed to have faith in anything but themselves. Because look how great we are!

Spiritualist practitioners, already dabbling in science, were prepared.

Whether channeling messages to congregants or manifesting icy kisses from dead grandmas in darkened parlors, Spiritualist mediums considered themselves scientific investigators—providing evidence that the soul survives the death of the body.

Wait, you’re thinking, that’s proof? Where’s the microscope, the double-blind test conditions? Isn’t this like calling Blue Bonnet vegan butter?

Stick with me, people. Just as vegan butter did away with sketchy trans-fats, Spiritualists made it reasonable for a modern, scientifically-minded human to believe in the afterlife.

Religious faith of any kind can ease the trials of now by offering the hope that we persist in some form, someplace else, after death. The Spiritualists go even farther.

Instead of asking people to have faith in the continuation of life, they channel ancestors to prove the afterlife exists.

When I went to Lily Dale Spiritualist Camp last summer, I was itching to link hands around a candlelit table and hear messages from dead people (preferably my dead people).

Alas, psychics everywhere and nary a séance to be found. Perhaps it’s because séances are so widely associated with fraud and, nowadays, Halloween—not serious inquiries into or scientific proof of the nature of life after death.

Here in Southern Arizona, as Halloween became All Souls Day then fall, with temps still hovering in the mid 80s, I discovered there were no less than three local séance performances I might have attended this Halloween, thus magnifying my enjoyment of the season, had I been paying closer attention.

Soon after, I received a letter from a friend in California who wrote that she had participated in a séance. She folded the news into an aside, as though we habitually corresponded at length about the table tipping-mediums we frequented—in our veils, gloves, and crinkling crinoline widow’s weeds—so she didn’t need to go into it. Her dead, recently passed, didn’t show, in case you were wondering.

Suddenly, everyone was going to seances. Yes, okay, but do these spooky season experiences place the history and practice of séance into context?

Séance!, at The Scoundrel and Scamp Theatre in Tucson, Arizona did just that.

The new play by Wolfe Bowart and Zac Austin unfolded before a small audience under my dream séance conditions—two mediums, a round table populated by strangers, and no idea what to expect.

I did know there were only eight seats at the séance table, so I arrived fashionably early, and I do mean fashionable. Although I understood this would be a comedic deconstruction of séance, as opposed to a séance, I dressed in my funereal best, adding one item from each dead loved one I hoped to encounter. Just in case. Because I’m Special Agent Fox Mulder.

I followed our host down a candlelit corridor to a small performance space decorated to recall the heavily curtained, scholarly environs of Sherlock Holmes’s rooms, or the library from the board game, Clue. Or, how I imagined the library each time I aspirationally chose to embody Miss Scarlett, or pictured her cracking Mr. Mustard on the head with a candlestick.

I was expecting what most of the séance-as-entertainment trend offers—a simulation of a séance complete with slight-of-hand, creepy sound and light effects, some hot or cold reading. I got all of that. Plus a debunker crashing the party to offer a neat and clarifying history of the origins of modern séance plus attempts to demonstrate tricks of the fraud trade. Which were trumped by the mediums’ increasingly complex mystifications.

As audience members cut cards, checked math, choose from a mysterious array of ephemera that were laid out on the table and incorporated into a story that bloomed into a satisfying denouement, the séance had its effect.

In the manner of an excellent display of magic, or a spiritual experience, the play caught me off guard. Most of us, certainly the woman two seats down who kept saying “Oh my God!,” found our disbelief suspended. We relaxed into the mystery.

Séance! is meta. A simulation with a back story. It’s for everyone, including people who think they know everything about the modern genesis of séance and place a high value on feeling surprise and delight—because they’re rarely so sucked in by a performance that they’re caught with their guard down.

Did you attend a séance or mystification this Halloween? How do you channel surprise and delight? Butter or margarine? Let me know in the comments!

Even as I sipped from the communal jug of Gallo, mumbled my opaque poetry into the mic, I knew I’d have to develop some real eccentricity, or drink more heavily, if I ever hoped to develop truly compelling material.

I’d internalized the tortured artist trope.

Today, because it’s October and I want to write about horror movies, I’m perpetuating it. Sort of.

If the bulk of horror films about writers offered an accurate reflection of the writerly life, we’d all be Stephen King, before he got sober. A little mean on a good day, a little Shining-era Jack Nicholson on a bad one.

Yet, truths lurk beneath the tropes. What can writer horror teach us about managing reader expectations, mining relationships for material, the cost of working in isolation?

Plenty.

What follows is a spoiler-free look at four of my favorite writer horror classics, from The Shining to Shirley, plus points to ponder for writers looking to learn something as they quake in their boots.

Plus (bonus!) some exciting news.

Did I miss your go-to writer horror film? Add it in the comments.

The Shining (1980)

Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. Much of Stephen King’s writing concerns the horror of engaging with words for a living. Feel free to disagree (Stephen King would), but the best film adaptation in this Stephen King subgenre1 is Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining.

In it, Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a writer/recovering alcoholic who thinks he needs solitude to finish his novel. Despite pre-departure red flags delivered via his son Danny, Jack packs his family off to the isolated Overlook Hotel, the soon-to-be snowed-in site of a murder suicide committed by a past caretaker.

Folded into the hotel’s yawning interiors, silent but for the clacking of the typewriter, Jack’s wife (Shelly Duvall) fishes meals out of industrial-sized cans, Danny traverses the trippy carpeting on his Big Wheel, and Jack writes…something.

As Danny’s gift (the shining) attunes to the ambient paranormal juice, artistic frustration and a fully stocked bar erode Jack’s resolve until he is forced to confront the fine membrane separating imagination from madness.

To ponder:

During a one-night stay at Colorado’s Stanley Hotel over 50 years ago, Stephen King dreamed the idea for the book that would become the film that would forever pair Jack Nicholson with Johnny Carson in popular imagination.

Have I already failed as a writer if I refuse to drag myself out of bed whenever inspiration strikes?

And, do I really need to get snowed in to complete my project?

Misery (1990)

In another Stephen King adaptation, James Caan is Paul Sheldon, a bestselling, and unlikely, Victorian romance writer who has just retired his flagship character, Misery Chastain—and rolled his car off a snowy embankment.

He’s pulled from the wreck by an off-duty nurse, Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates in an Oscar-winning performance), who just happens to be Paul’s number-one fan. Or, more to the point, Misery Chastain’s number-one fan.

As Paul recovers from his injuries, Annie picks up her reading, only to discover that Paul has killed off Misery. Whereas other superfans might turn to fan fiction, Annie puts the screws on Paul who finds himself locked in a war of attrition with his increasingly menacing host, and collecting more than enough material to make the jump from romance to thriller writer.

Full disclosure: I didn’t rewatch this film before putting together the review, as I’m too squeamish to revisit certain choice scenes. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, there are only two types of horror movies: ones that rely on jump scares and ones that are actually scary—because they make me nauseous and/or lead to nightmares/paranoia. Misery makes me nauseous. Enjoy!

To ponder:

It’s always risky to switch professional gears. How much risk am I willing to take on in order to create a project that is personally meaningful versus one that will definitely sell?

Do I give too much weight to feedback from people who are clearly deranged?

Tenebrae (1982)

This giallo shocker centers on macho American thriller writer Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), who is called to Rome by his agent (John Saxon) to extend his 12 weeks on the Italian best seller list with talk-show appearances and tense meet-and-greets with liberated female journalists.

Kind of clueless, fully dependent on his assistant (Daria Nicolodi), this best-selling author of bloody potboilers steps off his TWA flight and right into one of his own plot lines.

First, his New York-based ex is spotted on the streets of Rome.

Anonymous threat letters arrive.

Strangers, then Neal’s associates, begin turning up dead, murdered in the trademark style of Neal’s latest fictional killer.

This Dario Argento film is fine example of the Italian giallo, a horror genre built around the crass hallmarks of American exploitation films. If you crave pitched techno soundtracks, bad effects, bright crimson blood, and plenty of it—Tenebrae delivers.

In addition to the usual gratuitous nudity and arterial spray, Tenebrae features a number of satisfying plot twists that kind of make sense.

Now that you’ve self-sorted into people who might actually watch this film and “other”….

To ponder:

Are writers responsible for how folks respond to their writing?

How fully must one inhabit a character in order to convincingly write said character? I mean, is writing like method acting?

And, note to self, if I use my words to decorate a room with a gigantic chrome statue bristling with stabby bits, someone must be impaled upon it before the final credits roll.

Shirley (2020)

In this gothic portrayal of the inner and outer lives of writer Shirley Jackson, Elizabeth Moss portrays the sometimes manipulative, often cutting writer as she gives birth to her 1951 novel, Hangsaman.

In a mostly fictionalized portrayal based on the 2014 novel Shirley by Susan Scarf Merrell, Shirley’s husband Stan (Michael Stuhlabarg) is a philandering professor at a small-town university where Shirley enjoys an unshakable reputation as a disturbed woman with a dark mind.

Into their messy marital détente float the newlyweds Fred and Rose Nemser, in love and eager to start their new lives, meaning Fred’s new job working alongside Stanley.

Before you can say Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, the young couple moves in with Shirley and Stan. Rose, charged with “keeping an eye on the missus” i.e., keeping her sober, abandons her studies.

As the relationship between their husbands deteriorates, the two women drift into a friendship mediated by Hangsaman’s fictional protagonist, a relationship that releases each of them from the fear of being who they truly are.

Shirley Jackson is remembered for dark and ghosty stories, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House, which became one of my all-time favorite horror movies, The Haunting (1963).

Technically, Shirley isn’t a horror film. It is about the horror of the creative process, whether that’s creating a work of fiction or shedding an identity. It’s also about the particular horror of being a faculty-wife trapped in Bennington, Vermont in the 1950s.

To ponder:

Am I accepting cruel behavior from someone I consider brilliant and misunderstood because I think they’re more brilliant than me?

Is it ethical to keep someone close merely because they remind me of a character I am trying to flesh out?

Am I behaving badly/needlessly upsetting people in order to divine the motives of my protagonist?

And here we are, the end.

You made it this far. I’ll bet you have a few choice words on writer horror to share. Clearly, we’ve got more in common than you thought.

And…speaking of me. My piece about memory, “Landscapes on Cardboard,” was nominated for Best of the Net by Zoetic Press this month!

Scroll down to see my story sporting the cool nomination badge here. If you’d like to actually read it, you’ll have to navigate here until they fix my link.

I feel very uncomfortable telling you about this, although secretly, I’m super happy. Thank you for your kind support!

She purchased this goo from a deli in the Pike Place Market. It was scooped from a jar by an auntie in a hair net and lived next to an identical jar filled with the bright orange club cheddar I always hoped Mom would buy instead. Mincemeat pie repulsed me. And, although it was a holiday tradition, like the also nasty and more commonly featured fruitcake, I didn’t have to eat it.

Was it because Dad didn’t have to eat cauliflower?

I have to give it to Mom, I wasn’t expected to participate in family foodways that turned my stomach. I was free to honor my gut, so to speak. And yet, for more years than I care to remember, I believed that in order to remain a card-carrying member of my family, I had to uphold the family narrative.

This narrative-tending was subconscious and invisible until I strayed from it, setting off alarm bells that signaled my wrongheadedness and lack of commitment to self monitoring. If I was doing right, i.e. agreeing that the emperor was clothed when the emperor was, in fact, naked, I evaded censure.

Like the emperor’s clothes, the family narrative was invisible to me. I didn’t know my own values, beliefs, and opinions had been subsumed by it. Until I knew.

If you’re writing a memoir or personal essays, if you’ve experienced a long night of the soul, you’ve probably revisited the truths you were raised on. In my case, it took a series of grave spiritual shocks before the fog lifted and I could make out the frail mortal moonlighting as the bombastic, untouchable Wizard of Oz.1

I was never shy about making rude gagging noises while refusing slices of mince pie. It’s taken more courage to agree that it’s okay to write about growing up in my family from my perspective, a perspective that contradicts other perspectives on its way to bypassing the family narrative which is, “we’re normal” and “everything is fine.” Or, “you’re fine” (i.e. stop complaining) and “life is hard, then its over.”

I can’t decide which.

Ironically, once I accepted the truth of my own perspective, I really was—finally—“fine.”

First, I had to believe I was qualified to have an opinion.

By the time my adult self was ready to ask new questions about old stories, questions that would upset people, everyone who could have answered them was dead.

I worried about relying on my own recall. As a depressed kid, I had a brain that didn’t file as many memories into long-term storage as it could have.

Out of necessity, I turned to imagination. I applied it to things I was told as a child. I used it to make the most of my memories. What follows are a few of the tools that help me stand outside the family narrative, instead of perpetuating it, in my writing.

1. Find the discomfort.

As a child, if something made me uncomfortable, I took a cue from my parents and decided I was mistaken. As an adult, I recognize my childhood discomforts as the fault lines dividing my experience of family from the family narrative. It’s where the story gets messy. It is the story. Digging around in here is both fruitful and disorienting. Enjoy.

2. Gently probe for feelings.

If you had asked me 20 years ago how my childhood was, I would have said “okay.” Now I read this as my inability to disengage from the family narrative. Was your childhood “okay” or, God forbid, “normal?” Do you have trouble feeling into your experience of being small and trapped in your family of origin? You are not alone! I recommend Sonya Ewan’s inspiring Brevity post about how learning to write about feelings helped her to feel them.

3. Harness the element of surprise.

Among her many talents, cartoonist Lynda Barry produces fun exercises for mining the subconscious which ask you to set aside your keyboard and write by hand, thus engaging with a different part of your brain, the part that remembers long-forgotten things. I think of this as sneaking up on myself.

4. Go on an excursion.

A few years back, I went trespassing in the woods with my cousins on the first day of bow hunting season. Standing where my grandma’s childhood home once was, with family, provoked unheard stories, a surge of feelings. A chapter was born. And no one got hurt, although only the women had the sense to don their orange safety vests.

5. Talk to more cousins.

Preferably a large group of them (or any mid-sized assemblage of people who share a relationship to the dynamic you’re probing).

Add beer.

I had no idea that one entire branch of my family would happily tell me things that would have made my mother frown.

Pro tip: If you can manage it, have cousins who, as a result of child-spacing decisions/mishaps, are one generation ahead and have stories that reach further back in time.

6. Engage with objects.

Some writers create collages to ground them in the world of the manuscript they’re writing. Some record soundtracks. I prefer to collect things, which is why my desk looks like it does. If you’re lucky enough to have dolls, jewelry, clothing, keepsakes that connect you to ancestors or the people you’re writing about, spend time holding them. What comes up? I’ll bet something does.

7. Interrogate tales of stoicism.

In my experience, the old chestnuts that shore up the family narrative are bland, drama-free tales. They leave me questioning the wisdom of spending one more year on my writing project when nothing seems interesting enough to commit to paper. However, instead of buying into these tame stories, I can interrogate them.

Yes, Grandpa turned out fine, for example. But if I try to imagine myself as he was, a newly motherless four-year-old who has just been sent across the ocean to live with strangers, I feel terror, grief. In other words, there’s usually a much better story hiding in plain sight.

The family narrative is a bumper sticker, a rallying call, bullpucky. It’s something to push against as I continue to discover who I am because of it and despite it. Learning to privilege my version of reality, even as it makes mincemeat of the family paradigm, helps me tell a better story. There’s the family narrative, my narrative. The good stuff lives in the tension between the two.

Quick, without thinking about it—What’s your family narrative?

Perhaps due in part to the Barbie ban, I got out under my own steam, but I never stopped moving. Eventually, moving lost its magic—Dodge wasn’t the problem.

Was therapy the solution? I spent years in therapy trying to figure out why, after years of therapy, I was still lonely, scared, and depressed.

As a research nerd, I bristled when people suggested that learning to manage my unskillful responses to life was a better use of time in therapy than trying to recall every single thing that happened to me. How can I feel better if I don’t know exactly what went down, I wondered.

After years of self study, I have to admit that, in my case, what happened doesn’t matter—because I’m finally more interested in managing my unskillful responses to life than explaining them to myself.

As I’m writing a memoir, it seems risky to admit that I’m not focused on recovering a blow-by-blow accounting of who did what to whom, but as far as my own healing goes, I’m not. I want to feel better so I can write.

My chosen vehicle? EMDR.

Conceived of by Francine Shapiro in the late 1980s as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, combines bilateral stimulation with touching in to distressing memories, which detractors will tell you is basically cognitive behavioral therapy,1 plus exposure therapy,2 plus a distracting overlay of bilateral stimulation—what a magician might label misdirection3.

I think of EMDR as mild hypnosis. I hold two buzzing paddles in my hands, lie on a yoga mat, notice my body, and let the target memory lead me where it will. Then, I get to rewrite the ending. I rescue myself. The memory loses its charge and becomes just another thing that happened, as opposed to a trigger that can turn me into a freaked out four-year-old.

EMDR asks me to do something hard—observe what I remember in my body instead of talking in circles or trying to dredge up exactly what happened. Which, added bonus, helps me feel emotions I may struggle to access which helps me write about them convincingly.

I used to think of EMDR as making things up so I could trick myself into feeling better. Which I considered cheating. I thought I owed it to myself to locate the original wound, the thing that, once discovered, would instantaneously cure me of my fear and ennui. It would require a lot of therapy. And a dedication to perfectionistic striving that I can no longer get behind because, there is no original wound. There are a lot of paper cuts, more than a few gashes, and the fading fantasy that therapy can fix everything I don’t like about being human. With EMDR, I’m putting a pin in it. Writing my own ending, instead of believing in some objective standard of verifiable truth that will remake me—once find it.

It turns out I can heal without full recall.

Memories inform the work of writers. But memoir readers, like all readers of non-fiction, have the expectation that what they’re reading is true. As in verifiable. Memoir writers may embellish, play with form, poetically recreate the past to evoke a feeling, but the deal is, a lot of it is supposed to be fact-checkable.

In the past, embellished memoir has been attacked with the same fervor certain parents directed at the recovered memory movement in the 1990s.4 Today, the habit of viewing memoir as all or nothing, true or not true, is listing towards an emphasis on emotional truth. Auto-fiction, mingling true with even more not-true bits, is bleeding into memoir.5 Which I applaud because, come on. Facts derived from historic weather data, census reports, land deeds, and vaudeville contracts, to name a few of the document types I’ve leaned on, must still pass through the potato ricer of my consciousness on their way to becoming writing.

I have an agenda.

As for memories, perfect recall is, as far as I can tell, a myth. Memory is that wad of Silly Putty you pressed onto the funny pages, then pulled and stretched until Snoopy danced like an image in a fun house mirror.

Yet people tend to assume that if recall is not perfect, or extracted through a therapeutic look backwards that fails to produce a complete picture, it’s made up.

Yes, but only partly. And, do we have a choice in the matter?

“Explanations,” a friend once said, as I grappled with getting dumped, then ghosted, “are gravy.” A great addition to mashed potatoes and stuffing, but by no means something you have any right to expect.

I’ve come to agree that humans, more often than not, have to learn to move on without the closure they think they need. People ghost us, die on us. In other words, we’re responsible for figuring out how to make meaning out of seemingly meaningless suffering—by telling ourselves things, i.e., making things up.

EMDR lays this bare, by asking me to take on crappy memories, one by one, and write my own closing paragraphs. Which is kind of like taking historic weather data, census reports, land deeds, and vaudeville contracts and weaving them into a compelling story that’s mostly true, or at least emotionally fact-checkable in the heart of a reader.

Because when you’re writing for other people, not simply lying on a yoga mat with buzzing paddles in your palms, you really have to nail the ending.

As its still indoor-activities season in the desert Southwest, I’m offering two ghost-y book recommendations this month. Please add yours in the comments. By the way, I’m coming to you from my secret hideout in a genuine haunted theater. More on that below….

The Ghost Hunters

In Neil Spring’s novel-within-a-novel, a young woman becomes the assistant to a mercurial spook hunter. It’s London, 1926, and the science of hunting ghosts and fraudulent mediums was the providence of men with suspect credentials, backgrounds in magic, and a confused understanding of their own biases. One of them was the psychical investigator Harry Price.

Through newspaper articles and private letters, Spring vividly brings the contentious friendship of Price and Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to life, creating an historical page turner filled with unrequited love, pious vicars, fake scientists, and the ghost of a murdered nun.

For anyone interested in table-tipping, manifestation mediums, or the religion that claimed to offer scientific proof of the continuity of life, this mystery/ghost story offers a fictional fleshing out of a major event in the history of psychical investigation, the haunting at Borley Rectory, and illuminates a long-forgotten obsession of the inter-war era—communicating with the departed.

Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories

This 14-story collection brings to mind damp castles, moonlit hedge mazes, and every Hammer horror film I ever loved; perhaps its because the editor, and many of the writers are from Europe—where the haunted castles are. Expect benighted estates and playrooms, one haunted curio shop, and a seaside village that upholds its ancient traditions a la The (original) Wicker Man.

A rescue book from my neighborhood’s prime Little Free Library, this anthology came out in 1983. If that seems like the deep past, the stories themselves are positively vintage, with publication dates ranging from 1902-1955. And so, it appears to be out of print, yet often available used.

The Dahl anthology reaffirmed my preference for ghost stories that play out in an unimaginably distant past. There’s something about our over-stimulated, overlit, over-explained era that makes it harder for me to believe in in ghosts. Where would they hide?

I have some ideas.

I spent many a high school weekend at The Neptune Theater, one of Seattle’s long-gone art house/revival cinemas, eating my outside food and watching a rotating menu of double features.1

From it’s ship-shaped snack bar to the Poseidon-themed decor, this cinema had everything I needed to help me forget I’d be back on the school bus Monday morning.

But it wasn’t haunted. That honor went to The Harvard Exit.

Nestled inside in The Woman’s Century Club building on Capital Hill, a two-story brick structure dating from 1925, The Exit boasted two movie screens, nearly 50 years of continuous operation—and a healthy collection of ghosts.

Friends I’d soon meet in college, minimum-wage workers performing the cinema grunt work that facilitated my movie-fueled fantasy life, told me about the ghosts. Then again, everyone seemed to know.

I have visceral memories of The Harvard Exit lobby. Of stiffly waiting for companions, popcorn in hand, giving the overstuffed chairs the side eye. I’m someone who watches the credits to the end, wondering what the “best boy” does, why it’s not the “best girl,” how people get these jobs (ad infinitum). At The Harvard Exit, I left the building ASAP to avoid passing through an empty lobby, and outside into the dark, alone.

At the request of The Woman’s Century Club, the lobby, complete with fireplace, puffy chairs, side tables, remained unchanged. Mostly. When cinema workers came in after closing the night before, they’d often find the lobby furniture had moved of its own accord, rearranged itself into a different configuration.

I’m certain I believed in these furniture-arranging ghosts, because although I gave The Harvard Exit’s lobby a wide berth, I planned to run across a semi-transparent woman in old tyme clothing reading a book by the fire.

I had completely forgotten ghosts love theaters when I invited myself to be unofficial writer-in-residence at The Lindhorn Angell Library, home to rare and limited edition books on the performing arts. Housed at The Scoundrel and Scamp Theater in Tucson, the library is an intermittently silent (think set building) cocoon in the womb of a theater—with no internet.

I write here, once a week.

Sometimes I’m the last to leave. On the night I received close up instructions, I learned I wouldn’t be as alone as I’d thought.

Certain unnamed folks have glimpsed her in the halls. A girl in white. White, I imagine, because she’s transparent. Would she rather be purple, I wonder.

Designed by architect Annie Rockfellow, the building that hosts the theater, the Historic Y, was built in 1929. Its older than Roald Dahl’s Ghost Stories. Vintage. Why wouldn’t it be haunted?

I claim to want a ghost encounter. Probably because I’ve never seen a spectral face reflected in a highly polished door knob. Or had a ghost shake me awake—by the toe—after I slept through my alarm. These two stories, in case you’re wondering, came to me direct from the person who lived them.

As I type these words, I’m still (nearly) alone in a haunted theater.

I’m ready, ghosts,

Where are you?

Perhaps Roger Corman can help….

True, this is the same route trod by solar panel hawkers, UPS drivers, and everyone who lives in this house. I’d chalk it up to floaties or a trick of the light. But my cat is obsessed with a spot by the front door. A spot he’ll fix on when no one is expected, no car doors are slamming.

“Cats sense energy,” a friend told me.

This friend, like a cat, senses energy. She has a talent Google might define as geomancy.

She calls herself a house whisperer.

Not a medium who confers with the dead, not a psychic, or feng shui practitioner. She senses house energy and tells you what the house is telling her. Like an interpreter. And she doesn’t move furniture.

Twice I’ve followed her around my space with a pad of paper writing down phrases like “this light wants to be on” and “these cabinets want to hold bills and house records, not bedding.”

On her second visit, I asked about the hallway, another area that has my cat on high alert. Even I can feel the hallway.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” she said. “It’s like a highway.”

“For ghosts?” I asked.

“For energy that’s on its way to someplace else,” was how she put it.

I wanted it to be ghosts.

Like the one that walks towards my house and either stops at the front door or comes inside. A ghost that could be in here RIGHT NOW, reading over my shoulder. How would I know?

What does any of this have to do with memory? This newsletter, as conceived of by me, was ostensibly about memory.

Maybe it’s more about mind. The parts of mind that have nothing to do with anatomy or function, as mapped out in ever increasing detail by scientists. Maybe it’s about consciousness.

And with that, I am officially in over my head. I’m neither a philosopher nor a brain mapping expert. Perhaps we share this. Perhaps you, like me, imagine consciousness as a black box. For some the box is filled with wood sprites, tree spirits, and UFOs. For others, the concept is a non starter: we are a set of processes and what some call consciousness is a byproduct. Like dryer lint. Only no one can explain where it comes from.

Imagine the brain.

According to a recent edition of Alice Cooper’s Freaky Facts, its the consistency of soft butter.

We also know something about how and where memories are formed. We know certain parts of the brain are involved in particular processes. Yet we have no real understanding of what it all adds up to.

Merriam-Webster defines consciousness as the quality of or state of being aware, especially of something within oneself.

Or: the totality of conscious states of an individual.

And: the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought.

I like this, from The Scientific American:

“Consciousness is everything you experience.”

It’s the self-doubt I feel as I dip an unqualified toe into the ocean of this vast topic. It’s trying to choose between words, the feel of my fingers on the keyboard.

In his book Believe, New York Times religious columnist Ross Douthat sums up the failure of science to explain consciousness through chemical pathways or brain scans by quoting philosopher Erik Hoel:

“…locating some aspect of a thing is not at all the same as explaining how it’s generated.”

Perhaps scientists will discover a brain slice responsible for seeing ghosts or communicating with trees, somewhere in the neighborhood of Broca’s area.

As of this writing, the parts of the brain responsible for fantastical visions, near death experiences, anticipating phone calls remain unmapped. Yet people have never stopped having these experiences. In fact, humans who are otherwise disinclined to believe in such things experience them. According to Douthat, this is proof that enchantment, miracles, and the types of encounters religions have been built on, are real. Evidence, he concludes, for the existence of God.

As someone who grew up without belief in God or self, I’ve been hiking a steep learning curve. It’s only just dawned on me that writing a book about belief in psychics means writing about faith. Hence, the Douthat. I’m mostly interested in his insistence that science has not eliminated enchantment. That enchantment, in fact, abounds.

I hope you won’t turn up your nose at my agnostic consideration of Douthat’s ideas. I’m far enough into his book to know he’d object to me high-grading his argument like a cafeteria Catholic. In my defense, I was raised by a lapsed Catholic and haven’t finished the book, although I’m aware of it’s conclusions. SPOILER ALERT!

The great religions of the world, and by that Douthat means the big three, plus, maybe Buddhism and Hinduism, offer what our modern do-it-yourself, pick-and-choose spirituality doesn’t: a proven track record and protection from encounters with evil. Among other things. Which is “why,” in his estimation, as his subtitle states, “everyone should be religious.” As opposed to spiritual—or making too much of psychics.

What, you might be wondering, did we do about the energy highway in my hall?

I bought a chime, planted two (imaginary) trees, and tried direct communication.

A chime to clear the passage when it feels clogged with energy.

Two imaginary trees outside the house on either end of the passage, to block the flow and encourage a detour.

When all else fails, I make a request.

I say: “I know you’re trying to get someplace but this is no longer the path. You’re scaring my cat. Thank you for understanding.”

Is it working?

I’m still ringing the chime and watching two imaginary trees grow. Call it an experiment in faith.

I just read the delightful Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One, Kristen Arnett’s bittersweet novel about a lesbian clown struggling with self-mastery. I watch the high-camp Killer Klowns from Outer Space annually.

And today I’m here to brag about my love for the spiritual and aesthetic opposite of that film, The WoBo Show, which is live, European-style clowning. Classy—like the people who enjoy it.

I was tittering to myself at a recent WoBo performance as Wolfe Bowart and Xochitl Martinez moved from glow-in-the-dark juggling, to slight-of-hand, to backwards ukulele playing.

Cue the laughter.

As we took a collective breath, a voice peeped:

“Why is that funny?”

Seated directly behind me, a child of uncertain age was silenced by a calm stream of whispered exposition that wrapped just as our vexed comedic foil tightened her braids, took out a pitch pipe, and glared at her hapless counterpart—unleashing a fresh wave of laughter.

Followed by a pause. And a question.

“Why is that funny?”

After each gag, each skit, each moment, the kid asked.

Why laugh?

Too cerebral for slapstick, too young for the grownup humor, the kid was adrift, looking to their whispering adult for guidance.

“Why is that funny?”

It went on for an hour.

I felt like it was aimed at me.

A long time ago, in a special corner of the Twitter-verse was a fertile and generous group-mind called writer Twitter—my first foray into social media. I found the character limit comforting. Plus, someone promised that churning out tweets would improve my writing on a sentence level.

Here, I would learn about the dogs/kids/politics of famous writers and pre-order books from up-and-comers while tweeting pithy responses to earnest writerly questions.

One day, a memoirist asked how writers care for themselves through the remembering, writing, polishing, packaging, and selling of their most excruciating trials.

I scrolled through the responses. Therapy, vacation, side projects, dogs. Yes, yes, yes.

My pithy response?

Peanut butter.

I typed it in, hit send, and thought, well, this wasn’t the funniest, but it was funny. To me. At the time, peanut butter was still making everything seem better.

Today, the disembodied child-voice from The WoBo Show rings in my ears.

Why is that funny? Because it’s kinda not.

At the time of the tweet (which no one responded to), my memoir outline was still coming together. I hadn’t yet surrendered chapter drafts to my writing partner and he hadn’t yet begun needling me to go deeper, draft after draft, to find what I really wanted to say, or what I was scared to write. In other words, I wasn’t suffering yet.

Was I even qualified to weigh in?

Well, writer Twitter is dead and I no longer eat peanut butter.

But I can’t stop thinking about my unfortunate tweet.

Now on draft two of my manuscript, I notice I’m slow to surrender certain chapters to my writing partner. I prefer to hang out in them, revise them, wake in the morning thinking about them, luxuriating in the tender feelings they stir up, the dead people they bring back.

Other chapters feel like being trapped in therapy. And some, well. Do I really need to include this, is the question they provoke.

How do I take care of myself when I’m writing about things that are painful to revisit?

European-style clown shows.

Why is that funny?

What if the kid seated behind me was simply trying to figure out when it’s okay to laugh at something? Or decide whether their laughter amounted to schadenfreude, which they actively despise?

What if knowing whether you’re laughing at a friend’s misfortune, using someone for a cheap laugh, or laughing because you’re delighted, exasperated, or pleased is just good breeding (i.e., European)?

Pro tip: if you’re at a clown show, it’s safe to laugh.

As I sat elbow-to-elbow with strangers, watching two people use facial expressions and body language to pull me out of my head and into the present, I realized I was raised by a comic foil, the “straight man.” Which explains why all I have ever really wanted to do was take out my glow-in-the-dark juggling balls and blow off work.

Living with high levels of uncertainty, writing about things that suck, I still need to feel the way I felt when I heard JP Patches read my name on television—delighted by the world around me and excited for the future.

When I can’t feel it? That’s when I try to turn everything into a joke.

Without effort, it rose from the ether.

Producing a Sharpie, the mentalist told me to write the name on a giant pad of paper that would remain center stage throughout the show. Then, he vanished.

Checking for spies and confederates, I wrote big: C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E. I don’t think I’d ever written her name. I could barely spell my own when I was five, the year she disappeared.

Hidden behind the easel, stage lights heating the top of my head, I hid my writing, as instructed, and returned to my seat.

I’d come to New York City to figure out whether the psychic my grandma consulted in the 1940s was genuine. In fact, I had long since made up my mind. I knew about cold reads and wax transfers. Billets and change bags. Audience plants, advance men, wired turbans, misdirection. Mentalism is, if not 100% fake, 100% fake-able.

Yet, more and more here in research land, the world seemed drained of fire and possibility. I was beginning to suspect I knew too much.

I wondered what it would be like feel more open. To see as a believer might. Like Grandma did.

So I took the postcard.

I was flying under the city on the subway when I spotted it tucked into the overhead advertising. An invitation to a display of mentalism.

That night, I found my way to an office building on a deserted Manhattan side street. Twenty minutes later, I was on stage. A reluctant volunteer.

During another summer, decades earlier, I stood on the curb. Looked both ways for cars and ran across the street and up the stairs to Charlotte’s. I knocked. Anticipation building, I rehearsed the things I’d tell her as I waited. Longer than usual.

No one came to the door.

Unsure what to do with the excitement that propelled me across the street, I dropped it. A tickle of worry crept in.

Standing at Charlotte’s door the next day, I sensed the damp rising from under the stairs. The house looked the same. But it wasn’t. Something was wrong.

She wasn’t there.

I knocked anyway, noticing how my knock sounded—as though I’d gone to a stranger’s door.

Eventually Mom saw I wasn’t outside playing and picked up the phone.

Through the receiver I heard the ring echoing through the empty house. Charlotte had vanished. A dove folded into a magician’s scarf.

The mentalist called me back on stage and asked me to concentrate on the name I’d written.

I tried to picture her. Dark blonde bowl cut, a girl who never seemed to be looking at the camera when the bulb flashed.

“Was it Charlotte?” he asked.

A light-headedness swamped me. Were my thoughts as solid and visible as the name on the paper?

“Yes,” I said, into a theater gone quiet. The mentalist flipped the easel around, revealing the name to admiring gasps and applause, as something lifted in my chest. It felt good to give Charlotte something of myself by remembering her.

Months later, I took out the show program. As promised, it explained everything. I had attended a display of mentalism, a demonstration about psychic performance and how it is faked and there is an explanation for everything mentalists (read psychics) do that seems magical and other worldly.

I knew this beforehand, but as I stepped onto the stage that night, part of me forgot. The rest of me decided to read the program after I flew home.

I’d be lost without the magical experiences humans are moved to create for each other by pulling doves from scarves, reading questions through sealed envelopes.

If mentalism is merely a hoax, I’d have to reject the possibility of feeling its inherent magic. I might begin to imagine that there really are just tricks and those who play them on the rest of us.

That’s not the world I want to live in.

Show over, I was standing at the tiny elevator, waiting to board when a man appeared in front of me and met my eyes. He held up a fork. He blew on it twice. And with a flick of his wrist, he began twirling it.

Not ten inches from me, the fork was warping. I held my breath, a smile breaking across my face, as my brain yelled: Uri Geller! Remember him? The Israeli spoon-melter? It’s a trick fork! You know how this is done.

No use. As the fork spun itself into a spiral, as the tines separated and splayed, joy surged through me.

With a bow the man handed me my new favorite conversation piece. I spun it around—without feeling for soft spots or heat.

Suspension of disbelief means opening to other ways of seeing. Awakening to the possibility that I have no idea how magical life really is.

This is the world I want to live in.

Yes, the fork, like the mind reading, was a trick. Feeling touched by it was real.

I found it lodged in the teenage detritus abandoned by my older cousins during an afternoon spent foraging in the mysterious third story of my aunt and uncle’s, where my uncle disappeared to smoke the cigarettes I never smelled on him and watch favorite football games he’d taped.

Sliced from a bright red fish-shaped slip of cellophane, the fortune bringer was small enough to fit in my young palm, and came in a paper envelope decorated with a key: all the possible movements the fish might make, if you dared hold it, and what they meant.

Since time immemorial, the questions people bring to prognosticators have fallen into two or three broad categories—love or money. Maybe health. All the fish cared about was love.

On some days, the fish found me “jealous” on others “in love.” I easily wedged the message du jour into whatever fantasy scenario I had created in my head, starring whichever boy I was afraid to talk to that day. It was clear, even in grade school, that this was another version of the Magic 8 Ball or the fortune in a cookie. It wasn’t real. Yet, I sincerely hoped there was some force out there so invested in me that it couldn’t wait to tell me about myself so when I made a choice or took a step, I could count on a particular outcome.

I never really grew out of this.

I recently picked up a second generation Fortune Teller Miracle Fish at one of those shops that skims the past for what the modern sophisticate in each of us might label kitsch.

And discovered that despite all the personal growth I’d experienced over the decades since I visited my aunt’s attic, I was “false.” All the time. No matter when I checked in with the fish.1

Why? Because I left the temperate sea-level port town of my childhood for Tucson, Arizona. And the fortune teller fish responds to skin temperature.

Sadly, the Miracle Fish can only tell me if I’m hot or cold.

But what if the state of being hot or cold, or the temperature of my hands, had some bearing on whether or not I could read minds or predict the future?

Sounds doubtful.

Yet early 20th-century scientists studying psychic phenomenon were, essentially, beginning with the idea that psychics at work produced something tangible and quantifiable. They put this theory to the test with clever machines starring the latest scientific discoveries that measured…something. And decided that correlation is causation.

Imagine it’s the early 1900s. You’re French parapsychologist Paul Joire and you’ve invented a sthenometer, a circular machine encased in glass consisting of a dial marked off by degrees. A sensitive needle at the center responds to what you term the “nervous force” emitted from the body. The subject places their hands alongside the dial, the arrow moves.

Could “nervous force” be a measure of psychic or mediumistic activity? According to Joire, it could measure residual psychic force in objects recently handled by any test subject whose hands set the needle in motion. In fact, the sthenometer responded to body heat, like the Fortune Teller Fish.

I’m at the point in my work-in-progress where I deep-dive into psychic investigation, untangling misconceptions. Even last week I was still conflating devices that measure skin temperature (the Fortune Teller Miracle Fish, the sthenometer) with devices that measure electrodermal activity (EDA).

EDA devices can register changes associated with emotional states—and make up part of the classic lie detector set up, biofeedback devices, and the auditing machine that helps Scientologists “get clear,” the E-Meter. And, while all of this fascinates me, I’ve wandered into the weeds.

What’s my point?

Did reading minds and talking to the dead generate electrical currents, auras, body heat flux, or ghostly apparitions that appeared on film?

Scientists thought so. Wireless communication, electricity, and pretty much ever other miraculous scientific discovery that appeared around the turn of the last century was pressed into service to develop new ways for ghost hunters, psychic investigators, and scientists with PhDs from Columbia and Yale—who ran in the same circles—to dig into psychic phenomenon and mediumship.

And scientists failed utterly to uncover a reliable way to prove or measure the mental power psychics and mediums harnessed, or generated, as they worked—because they didn’t know what they were looking for.

Magicians, a motley and under-educated lot, had better luck. They simply hunted for the illusions and tricks they themselves might use—and counted on finding them every single time.

A tough crowd.

Is everything always just a trick? I hope not. I appreciate a little low-stakes uncertainty in my life. I like to keep the words of Philip Shepherd, in mind. Stop me if you’ve already heard this:

“Pure science does more than exclude from reality what cannot be measured; it also excludes everything that cannot be measured yet.”

Where do you stand? Are you still waiting for the scientists to come through? Pulling for team magician? Let me know in the comments!

Why, she asked, didn’t I simply type the elements for a proposal I hadn’t yet written into ChatGBT and ask for formatting. It’s not like you’re going to use it ‘as is’, she said. In her view, ChatGBT is a time saver, a corner cutter. My view? It’s another way to squeeze more into already overstuffed days. To produce at a speed approaching the standard American rate.

Still haven’t written that proposal. Procrastination accounts for about 25 percent of my tendency to, say, wait until the last week of each month to send out this newsletter. Add to that ongoing challenges around editing down daily activities and prioritizing my own projects.

The rest is inbred. By nature, I’m quite slow.

Writing seems tailor made to my inner rhythms. Ideas beget more ideas until the only thing left to do is revise, which unleashes more fine thoughts. In the process of trying to convince myself that, all evidence to the contrary, slow is cool, I wrote about being pokey for Brevity.

Outing myself as more tugboat than hydroplane helped reduce my self-judgement—which flared again last month as banners for Copilot, Microsoft’s AI writing buddy, began appearing on my Word documents:

“Take your storytelling to the next level,” they promise.

In other words, get more done faster so you can get more done than ever.

The week Copilot offered to ‘next-level’ my writing, ChatGBT began decorating the sentences of friends and loved ones looking to hack everything from confronting authority to finding love. It was only a matter of time before someone suggested I was getting in my own way by not using ChatGBT to sidestep the hardest part of writing—the thinking.

Last month I wrote about cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry and her ideas for rescuing long-forgotten images from the subconscious. It’s a slow process. Much like producing a graphic novel and illustrating it, one panel at a time, by hand. Surely Lynda Barry has more to share about the gifts of slow.

The human hand, Barry notes in her Syllabus, Notes from an Accidental Professor, is the original digital device. And is there anything slower than scratching things out on paper? Ever wonder what might happen if you swapped out your trusty laptop for a pen?

One of my favorite Barry practices involves two pads of paper—one pad for writing whatever we’re working on and the other for doodles. The idea? We keep our pen moving as we work, never letting up on the movement of our hand, even when our thinking brain gets stuck.

Doodling when we can’t write, writing when the words come.

When I’m stumped, do I sit at my keyboard listening for my subconscious? No. I get more coffee, pick up my phone, do laundry, switch projects. Fret. What if I kept my seat, drew spirals or traced the alphabet and waited for my brain to spit out what’s next?

Although writing the old fashioned way still brings to mind the terrible suffering of grade three, the year I learned cursive and discovered who could and could not produce writing worthy of the ‘good penmanship’ board, I tried the Barry method.

Yes, it’s easier to move text with a word processor. But I realized something. I prefer to type, because I can type fast. Because I type fast, I can get more done.

That old trap.

What does doodling allow?

When I use pen and paper and keep my pen moving, I forget the laundry. I don’t lose interest as quickly. As my pen drops the story and turns to drawing and tracing, I begin to sense the fear that fuels all coffee breaks and bouts of cleaning. Ironically, it’s the fear that I’ll never finish—because I’m so slow.

My writing-by-hand practice is mostly reserved for working out new ideas, because I don’t want another Word document called “idea.” In the interest of full disclosure, I composed this newsletter on my ailing laptop, home to my manuscript and most everything else I’m working on. Except journals. Daily venting. And those ideas I mentioned.

Perhaps it’s finally time for me to stop calling myself slow, and just be whatever I am, as opposed to whatever I think everyone else is being—as I putter in the background.

If I’m worried about my rate of production, I’m not writing; I’m trapped with my sister in the back seat of the Nova on that interminable childhood road trip to Spokane, Washington. The summer I learned that if I’m staring out the window, we’ll never arrive—but if I decide to play license plate bingo, we’re practically there.

What do you think of composing long-hand? Have you tried Lynda Barry’s doodle method? Let me hear from you!

I judged her comics “weird,” even as they entranced my unconscious. I read them as a promise, that whatever came—post-teendom—would be messy, confusing, and delicious. It would evade literal sense, like getting paid to draw comics.

Back then, Lynda Barry was the creatrix of the world’s first meme, Poodle With a Mohawk, and a handful of comic books about just exactly how punk rock life was going to be once I escaped my second-tier high school and developed real issues. Ones that eclipsed the injustice of Seattle’s teen curfew law. I couldn’t wait to start having adult problems.

With 40 years of those under my belt, I can tell you that as an oracle of the inanity of adult concerns, behaviors, and habits, Lynda Barry has not let me down.

Today, the Eisner Award winning cartoonist teaches drawing for people who don’t think they can at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has distilled much of this wisdom into a number of beautifully illustrated books packed with inspiration and exercises to help creative types establish contact with the part of the mind that remembers in images and couldn’t care less about narrative.

When I first conceived of a newsletter that circles around themes of memory, I knew I’d be writing about Lynda Barry. Now is the perfect time, as I find myself particularly distracted by the inanity of adult concerns, behaviors, and habits. If you, like me, are looking to pull yourself out of a funk and get back to work, Lynda Barry has some ideas.

In fact, she inked her way to a MacArthur Fellowship by cartooning about cartooning her way through her own blocked creativity. What was blocking it? Over-concern with the same two questions I often find myself contemplating: Is this good? Does this suck?

Starting with a journaling technique she learned from her mentor, Marilyn Frasca at The Evergreen State College, Lynda Barry reignited her love of drawing by inviting her unconscious mind to take the lead, by capturing stray images and coaxing other long forgotten moments to the surface. I think of this as letting go of self-consciousness around creation.

I started exploring Barry’s work with What It Is. I chose an exercise that teaches you how to orient yourself inside images. I hadn’t finished reading the introduction before I realized how much I rely on certain memories. Memories which, as readers of my newsletter know, we alter each time we examine them.

What Lynda Barry offers is a way to bypass well-worn brain grooves. A process akin to interviewing distant family members and learning that, say, your blameless grandmother saved a family marriage by spreading lies. Clearly, what we don’t know is infinite. Significantly less infinite is what we’ve forgotten. But it’s still a ton of stuff.

“For most of us,” Barry writes on page 143 of What It Is, “just saying our first phone number gives us a kind of feeling we do not find in other phone numbers.”

Reflexively, I recited my phone number. Which felt like repeating my credit card number to a customer service agent after an eternity on hold.

First phone number? Dad still uses it. Saying it out loud, I felt myself deflating. This clearly wasn’t the right first number. So I dug in, dredged up the first number I chose to memorize: SU2-5305. Grandma and Grandpa. I had memorized it like Mom would have memorized it when she was a teen and it was hers: with the exchange (SUnset) standing in for digits.

As soon as I said it, I saw it. A beige rotary phone, owned, as all phones were, by the phone company. It lived on the edge of a writing desk, which didn’t quite fit in the nook it was wedged into.

The pink paint-by-numbers scene on the wall, the color of the phone, the close-cropped carpet, all the elements of the image rode in on a sadness that tasted like lemon juice on watermelon. Sweet and sour. I’d allowed myself to remember. And an image came.

The plan is to allow stories to flow from images, instead of training them, like espaliered pear trees, to adhere to a form from the get-go. The image leads, we follow.

In other words, starting from an image, not an outline. You could call this pantsing. What if pantsing is simply allowing yourself to proceed in a way your adult mind considers undisciplined? A state I sincerely hope your child-self was able to enjoy before caregivers worried about “time wasting” derailed you. How old were you when you stopped believing that the joy of doing something was reason enough to do it?

As someone who can’t decide whether her disinclination to outline is a virtue or a handicap (is it good/ does it suck), I’d like to trust that my subconscious understands a little something about putting stories together. It gives me the courage to write into ideas that don’t yet make sense. To stay with the dog that slipped his leash as he disappears into the dark—and my inner doubt screams for an outline.

What comes to the surface if you let go, even just a little, of the idea that you know what you’re doing, what you want, and what your current project is supposed to look like?