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When we were kids, the subdivision where my bff now lives was a field of scotchbroom. We called all vacant lots fields. We keep asking, where did it go? The seeds remain viable for 80 years, underground. A Scotsman planted it to remind him of home + now it reminds us of home. This neighborhood was once part of the first settler homestead in the area, Chambers Prairie.

Many people are allergic to scotchbroom’s little yellow flowers.

Across the train tracks was a sod farm, my whole childhood. I once rode through it in the back of my dad’s truck, with my cousin Alycia, while someone hopped out and scavenged remnants of sod, the grass I walked through in our backyard for the rest of my childhood.

There is still scotchbroom between the train tracks and the fence that borders the neighborhood. It grows taller than we are. This neighborhood was built 17 years ago. Now it feels established. The fences are gray and covered in lichen and graffiti and rot. As they should be.

There was a lavender farm here in the 1950s. Was it a spider breeding ground, as an impossibly young pest control salesman once said at the front door? There were so many spiders when we came here, late September of second grade, to dig up lavender with my mom’s bff. A good time of year for spiders.

This neighborhood was a field of scotchbroom when we were kids. We try not to say “invasive species.” It was introduced by a Scotsman to remind him of home + now it reminds us of home.

Where did it all go? There must have been a concentrated effort to eradicate it.

Seeds remain viable for 80 yrs underground.

On the phone, I describe the field that was once here, and tell Jordan scotchbroom is hard and prickly but not thorny. I imagine how it would remain, I mean, how it would hold its shape, if you fell into it.

Thank you to and at The Scrap Heap for their Accounts of Wonder workshop tonight, where I had the blessed opportunity to process how Kaden and I crawled through a hole in the fence (a portal) and found the missing scotchbroom next to the train tracks. The invitation, which I accepted, was to draw from memory with no visual reference. The scotchbroom was done with eyes (mostly) closed.

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I will be taking a summer break from this weekly publication schedule, and from disciplined writing practice more generally.

I’ll be spending July working my day job remotely from kitchen tables of loved ones, and August settling back into Spokane. Expect to hear from me here and there, but maybe not every Saturday. In the meantime, I’ve linked a few greatest hits below.

Stay sexxxxxxy!!!!!!

All love,
Liina

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The first time was at The Brotherhood in Olympia, one New Year’s Eve. We’d left my parents’ house and decided to hit it up on a whim, on our way home. It was the year I’d been unable to taste for 10 weeks, and I hadn’t had a drink since Halloween, on a self-imposed allergen elimination regimen. We were 29 or 301. We drank Stella, they served it in the special goblets, I’m sure that was the only time we drank Stella at The Brotherhood. DJ Dead Air played “West End Girls” by Pet Shop Boys, and “Girls & Boys” by Blur, and “Wannabe” by Spice Girls. We danced so hard, I remember kicking up my heels, spinning, dancing with strangers.

This was the second time, at the lesbian bar in Spokane. I was ready to tear up the dance floor. The DJ was playing Top 40, nothing special. A European man propositioned Kaden. They were both wearing the exact same shoes, white Pumas with a black stripe. A little goth girl complimented my dancing, after she slammed into a half-wall and grimaced in pain, she’d just had her nipples pierced. Our friends were like, dang, you guys. On my way out, I told a young queer who I’d been watching that I liked their look (very rumpled orphan boy). Kaden and Emily were running through the lawn sprinklers at the train station across the street. The young person followed me! Outside, they smoked a joint with Alex. I had to say I was 41, probably the oldest person in the place, and, to be transparent, I was with Kaden.

They asked me what my special interests were.

I was so tickled! No one has ever asked me what my special interests are, before or since. Granted, I don’t have hyperfocused special interests, it’s just not how I roll. But I have a few abiding interests. Third wave queer punk feminism and its precursors. Lineages of music, especially of the Pacific Northwest, leading to so-called “grunge.” And, the one I answered with:

The History of LSD in American Counterculture!

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I’d just finished reading Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science by Benjamin Breen, a historian of science and medicine. A must-read for anyone who shares my abiding interest, this intricately woven narrative brings together a whole generation of players—academics, scientists, artists, and government agents, with primary focus on Margaret Mead and her third husband, Gregory Bateson. The section about John Lilly’s experiments with dolphin communication was a fucked up highlight2.

I started reading about psychedelics when I was 18. Someone gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card, maybe for my high school graduation, and I got the classic Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion. Where did I hear about this? Did I just pick it up and go, wow? Albert Hoffman in his laboratory and on his bicycle, Timothy Leary in his corner office at Harvard, Ken Kesey, an orderly at a Veteran’s hospital and unwitting volunteer in the MK Ultra experiments. Spiked drinks at government sponsored parties. These stories have been with me so long, they have become comfortable places I can go in my mind.

I used to listen to the podcast Church of Chill. If you know me, you know ‘I don’t listen to podcasts,’ but I loved listening to Sean and Cass get high and talk about drugs and Juggalos and sex and family histories. I listened throughout the first year+ of the pandemic, every 45-minute walk to and from work after I stopped riding the bus. I trailed off when they got into cryptocurrency. But I have indelible memories of their talks. I often recall Cass monologuing on the value of the Dark Carnival aspect of a “bad trip,” and how it allowed her to understand what Juggalos were celebrating.

Ranking #4 of my all-time favorite books is Chris Rush’s memoir The Light Years, his story of falling in with his sister’s cohort of Christian drug dealers as a gay kid in the late 60s, selling acid at New England boarding schools, hitchhiking across the southwest, and becoming a mountain hermit, back when you could send acid through the mail. Ranking #2 is Lynda Barry’s Cruddy, the whole story unspooling from a stash of supposed mescaline that is, in fact, “that mental-house shit…that psycho shit you guys stole from the nuthouse, right?” (The preferred term, says the supply guy, is pharmaceutical shit.)

That TC Boyle novel about Leary sucked. It was like, “Hi guys, what if the story of LSD in American counterculture was—get this—a novel?” I had high hopes, and instead it was the first book that made me question the very construct/concept of a novel.

At the time I am writing this post, I’m reading True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna. I thought I knew a lot about McKenna, from my psychedelic reading, in particular ’s Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change. But somehow I didn’t clock that his account of seeking the psychedelic sacred in the Amazon as a young person was a book you could just, uh, pick up and read. I came across True Hallucinations on the New Arrivals table at The Montague Bookmill. “What’s that?” Kaden asked. I mumbled about “The OG psychedelics guy, South America, in the like, 1950s…” I could tell the clerk was listening to how I was describing the book, and I soon realized I had the dates very wrong. McKenna went to the Amazon in 1971, at the age of 24. It was Burroughs who was there, seeking ayahuasca, in the 1950s.

True Hallucinations, written in the early 1990s looking back twenty years, is a tantalizing narrative, lucid, precise, technical. It has me thinking about the plot vs. character argument, genre vs. literary fiction. Although this is non-fiction, memoir, it’s really all plot, missing the intimacies of developing relationships (“I deliberately do not say much about any of us,” he writes, and stays true to that), and there isn’t much in the way of why McKenna or his party, which includes his younger brother Dennis, are seeking what they are seeking. It is clearly more than drugs.

They connected early European alchemical studies to shamanistic practices in the global south. Roughly 1/3 of the way through the text, McKenna writes, “There, persistent rumors circulate of a magical material, generated out of one’s body by master shamans, that allows one to cure, work magic, and obtain information unavailable by any normal means…Our task was to create a credible model of how such a phenomenon could operate without leaving the known or suspected laws of physics and chemistry far behind.”

How did they come into the preliminary information, the alchemy texts, the rumors of Amazonian shamanism? I want the whole personal history! There is an earlier book co-written by the brothers McKenna, and a more recent memoir by Dennis McKenna. The latter describes the same incidents as True Hallucinations, and seems to offer the missing context3. But like I said, I don’t really hyperfocus, so it might be years before I get to these additional volumes.

Something I LOVE about True Hallucinations is how each chapter is subtitled “In which…” Such as:

In which Dennis begins to outline his approach to the Alchemical Opus and a psychofluid that may or may not be translinguistic matter is debated.

I love that structure so much, it was used in one of my favorite childhood books, Harris and Me by Gary Paulson, and in another book from adolescence, but all I remember of that one is the subheading, “In which my sister’s eyes roll back in her head.” Of course I remember that one.

To my occasional regret, I, personally, am not a psychonaut. Between 2001 and 2006 I tripped on mushrooms maybe a half-dozen times, at non-heroic doses, and twice took ecstasy that was mostly speed. For years, I felt mournful that LSD and DMT never crossed my path. Reading Sheila Heti’s recent essay in Granta, Good Medicine, on psychedelic therapeutics, made me only vaguely envious that I’m not someone who gets offered such experiences. But consider my reading list over the past 25 years. All history, how psychedelics shaped counterculture that bled into mainstream culture, the way the story is told and re-told, how different people in different places and different cultural and socioeconomic conditions experienced various hallucinogenic substances. The Merry Pranksters showing up at Millbrook, west coast hippies vs. east coast academics. Ram Dass dosing a holy man in North India who never gets high. Roky Erickson, institutionalized and receiving electroconvulsive therapy in a Texas state hospital, at the very same time the brothers McKenna were trekking and tripping through the Amazonian jungles, themselves expressing schizophrenic-like states.

I’m like. Maybe I’m a fan of drugs more than a user! My primary interest is in the writing, the literature—and, as with my other abiding interests, the music. I care so much about the history of psychedelic music. Back in the day, some boys were smoking weed with us at our house, and I was playing The Psychedelic Sounds of the Thirteenth Floor Elevators on LP. One of the boys asked me to turn it off, it was giving him bad vibes. But I only like music with bad vibes4, so here’s a playlist of favorites, old tracks only, which I’ve been collecting since around 2004: Psychedelic Sounds for Creepy People. Some are more shambling garage rock than psychedelic freak out—it’s a continuum. Turn on and tune in to the good old days of garage and psych reissues via Olympia’s Rainy Day Records and Portland’s Jackpot Records.

Postscript

The first week I worked at UMass, in November, I had a mammogram revealing a spot. Couple days earlier, I low-key saw a UFO. My cousin A. was in her last days of life. In December, when I went in for additional imaging, I was reading Jung’s Flying Saucers in the waiting room.

Roughly six months later, it’s now my last week of working in the office at UMass, before I move across the country and work remotely. In the mammography waiting room, for another imaging follow-up, I finish reading True Hallucinations, which draws heavily on Jung’s examination of flying saucers. The day before, my cousin J., A.’s sister’s husband, passed. The two of them had been outliving their cancer diagnoses for years.

There is an eerie tidiness to the symmetry.

(My calcifications are in fact getting smaller, and nothing to be concerned about yet).

The whole thing has me feeling pretty woo-woo. Jupiter enters Leo, my rising sign, the same day we leave Massachusetts for Washington. When Jupiter was in Leo in 2002-2003, I was 19, 20, and my life changed immensely. Jupiter was also in Leo 2014-2015, when I began allowing myself to write fiction, as an adult. I can’t believe all that was packed into each of those years, summer to summer. Post mushroom trip(s?) in spring 2003, I felt the residual peace and rightness McKenna describes experiencing at La Chorrera. I have always associated it with practicing Progoff’s depth-psychology journaling method in Marilyn Frasca’s Drawing a Life program at Evergreen, and learning to express myself through drawing. I knew something was happening, my life becoming knowable to me, everything falling into place. During this time, Kaden and I fell in love—we first said I love you and shared a bed 48 hours before Jupiter transited my ascendant. Until reading True Hallucinations, it had never occurred to me that my peaceful magnetism could’ve been related to my mushroom usage. And Jupiter transiting my first house, calm, full of hope and confidence.

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On this walk, my eyeballs weren’t vibrating in green, because I was fully inside a mental map of Spokane, Washington, while we discussed what neighborhoods we might want to live in. Kaden will have to commute five days a week. He was telling me about a back way to EWU, over South Hill. What were our mental maps like before we used GPS on our phones? The Mill River rolled on, and I was traveling not by foot or in a car, but across a digital map, across the country. Talking fast, loud, declarative. Breathing through my mouth.

I have left Olympia, Bellingham, Olympia, Albuquerque, Olympia, Vancouver, Spokane, and now Northampton. I’m not sure why the mental process seems so acute upon this leaving. Acutely aware of the impossibility of being fully present with anything I want to experience here “for the last time,” anything I want to remember, because I’m immersed in imagining a future, elsewhere.

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Things I will miss about Western Mass

• Iggy’s sandwich bread, the bread that most suits me, out of every bread of my life.

• Stacey’s flour tortillas. Why are flour tortillas SO BAD in the PNW?1

• We almost never go out to eat, but I’ll miss Paul and Elizabeth’s, an old-school upscale ‘healthy’ restaurant we’ve gone to a couple times. Herrell’s Ice Cream, flavors: banana, almond.

• Deals & Steals, the best surplus grocery store everrrrrrr.

• Beers on the rooftop bar at Northampton Brewing in the summer, Abandoned Building Brewery in the winter, Packard’s and The Dirty Truth on shoulder seasons.

• Oat milk matcha lattes at Tunic, best in town.

• Unnameable Books in Turner’s Falls, the finest book store in the region.

• Biking through the dirt roads in The Meadows. Biking on the rail trails.

• CARDINALS! What is more delightful than seeing a bright red bird?

• The possibility of weekend vacations in Maine, or Cape Cod.

• My bus ride commute to UMass, my office on campus. I am keeping my job and working fully remotely, which is the best news ever, one less unknown. But the thing is, I’m the asshole who likes coming into the office.

More than anything

…my writing group, Morning Shift on Saturday mornings at in Greenfield. Nothing has impacted my life in Western Mass more. How do I always find the best people, wherever I go? There is so much value in doing our writing work, together. It is a free, open-door meet up. We share our names, pronouns if we want, something new and good. A prompt is offered, but it is optional. We write for 45 minutes to an hour. We share our names again, how the session went, and something we are looking forward to. We may read aloud what we wrote, but it is optional. We do not workshop. For the most part, we do not know each other outside of the group, we do not know each other’s last names. Many people show up only once, or for only a few weeks. The people who show up frickin’ radiate light. We are all so glad to be together, writing.

Things I am dreaming of in the Northwest

• Loved ones, so many loved ones!

• Baked goods from Blue Heron Bakery and San Francisco Street Bakery.

• Ninevah’s feta wrap (falafel for Kaden).

• Comparing Tunic’s oat milk matcha latte to the one at Oly Coffee Roasters.

• The smell of the lake where I grew up.

• Talking with Kaden’s parents, hearing their old stories.

• A date with Kaden at The Brotherhood. Beers with my family at the Oyster House, Oly Tap House, Tumwater’s Craft District. Scherler Sundays at 3 Mags. All the beer spots in Spokane.

• Rainy Day Records, Orca Books.

• Getting Dead Moon tattoos, finally.

• Being part of the literary community and overlapping friend groups in Spokane. Going to everything.

• Volunteering with Spokane River Keeper and EWU’s Prairie Restoration Project.

• Biking the Centennial Trail on my Cannondale, with the bike pals.

• Camping. Joining a CSA.

• Maybe eventually owning a home, with a yard, where I can paint our bedroom peach, plant irises and see them bloom every year, and build a lean-to bar-shed.

Threshold, Portal

It’ll be a whole summer of the liminal in-between, before we settle down in Spokane. Lingering, wallowing, luxuriating at the threshold.

writes, in we honor the power of the threshold:

My life has been marked by returns. Returning to Olympia, returning to the same job or type of job (printing), returning to school, returning to the US, to Washington state, to Spokane. Sometimes it’s only a stepping stone, but it’s never a backwards motion. When the portal returns you to where you have been, everything is slightly different.

Olympia is the threshold, the space of power and transformation. Sometimes, it is so hard to be there, gathering everything I love into my greedy heart, weepy that it won’t always be like this, won’t always be summer, my parents won’t always be visiting from Texas.

“I don’t think you like summer as much as you think you do,” Kaden said to me, last winter. “You’re always so angsty.”

“That’s because there is always some massive life overhaul going on, every summer for the past five years,” I argued.

A part of my heart thinks I’m moving back to Olympia, not Spokane, I texted my BFF. She said, Yeah, I realized I keep thinking that too!!

Who’s gonna tell my heart that in Spokane, we can hop on the Flix bus and go back to Olympia, like, whenever?

Don’t buy a house, my BFF texted. I want you to eventually end up over here.

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“Honestly, I don’t even like going to concerts anymore,” I said to my supervisor at work, a few days before this show. “I feel like I’m just standing around waiting for it to be over.”

TAGABOW proved me wrong.

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We picked up Molly in Turner’s Falls and headed for the state line. Molly and I went to massage school together in Albuquerque 12 years ago. It’s a beautiful coincidence that we ended up in Western Mass together for a few years. Picked up right where we left off, as if 10 years hadn’t gone by.

It was 7:30, 8:00, still light in the sky, the trees on the hills in Vermont all puffy and round and bright green. We glided into Brattleboro and exclaimed about how cute it was. Parked in a spot that closed at midnight. I kept saying we might have to move the car, not understanding there were really only 2 bands, no one was going to jump on the bill, and the show would start on time. Neither of those things would ever happen in the PNW.

Inside, we ran into the gentleman who took the photo above, on Molly’s phone because he is a foot taller. “Do you know this band?” we all asked each other. He didn’t, but this show was important to his friends. I didn’t, but I’d listened to some of their shows on NTS. Kaden didn’t, but he’d gotten an Instagram ad and found they were exactly what he wanted to hear. I’d texted Molly because she’s big on live music and they were also exactly what she wanted to hear. I overheard another guy say he’d come to the show with no prior knowledge of TAGABOW (They Are Gutting a Body of Water), he liked to go to shows with no spoilers.

We were all in for a treat.

Molly told us on the drive that she’d read the band doesn’t play on stage, they play on the floor, facing each other. She’d been to Sound Church before and couldn’t imagine it. “I’ve never seen it this crowded in here,” she said. I’m only barely taller than Molly, but I let her know a few minutes later that the reason it seemed so crowded was because there was a small riser set up in the middle. The opening band played on the regular stage. We got beers between sets, lights came up and we could see the magnificent decor of the old church space.

TAGABOW came on and we were about 6 people back but couldn’t really see anything. But maaaan could we hear it! Much of the audience seemed to anticipate the song turns: we weren’t all here from an Instagram ad. The headbanging action was strong.

“Everyone here looks exactly like they did at shows when I was 20,” Kaden said.

“When you were 20?”

“When we were 20.”

“Except better!”

“Of course they look better, everything looks better recycled, reconfigured.” Now.

THE SOUND WAS SO GOOD. I don’t know if it was the acoustics of the old church, advancements in live sound engineering, playing from the center of the floor, or the band just being really fucking good. But I swear to god I’ve never heard live music sound that good.

It makes me wonder about what we might actually have missed, coming up in the late 90s/early 00s in the PNW where DIY reigned, the spaces were makeshift, the equipment was old and blown out, the sound people were self-trained. Did Sleater-Kinney sound better in NYC?

We’ve been going to shows since we were teenagers, rock bands, indie bands, metal bands, country bands. But we’d somehow never been to a face-melting shoegaze show before.1

“This sounds like I imagine Unwound would’ve sounded live, on a good sound system,” one of us said.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” said the other.

Neither of us had seen Unwound, not even in Olympia.

I never got tired at the TAGABOW show. I wasn’t waiting for it to be over. Every moment was worth it.

“Well,” Kaden said, when it became clear they weren’t going to do an encore. Maybe it’s an outdated ritual, the crowd didn’t even demand one. “That was life affirming.”

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A year or two later, a month before my 14th birthday, something incredible happened, the best thing that had happened in my life so far. And something really cool had just happened a month before that, which is what created the conditions for the thing (and everything that came after). The first thing that happened was: I switched middle schools, to the middle school where my BFF went, for the last 3 months of 8th grade, and we were allowed to have all of the same classes. Like, I can’t even deny I have lived a charmed life! So, I was home alone watching MTV after school, when the second thing happened: I saw Hanson for the first time. It was stunned, head-over-heels, possessive, obsessive love from the first note, the first image. I’ve never been embarrassed to admit to this. It was a very important event in my life.2

Fan-fiction followed immediately and spontaneously, as well as simultaneously with hundreds of other young internet users. I swear to god I came to the idea independently. It was 1997. So many of us had the exact same thought at the same time! But we were all writing different stories!

Many of them gay. Many of them creepy and fucked up, what we’d now call fabulism or speculative fiction. We had an online series called The Taylight Zone. This is, in fact, the first place I was published. You guys, I didn’t remember any of this until I was stoned in the shower trying to coax/confront my shadow self, and apparently this is…fuck, is this somewhere I abandoned myself as a kid?? I’m processing this in real time. As and I say during sprawling phone conversations…put a pin in that.

I liked to write stuff about teenagers having surreal experiences while being separated from their parents. I took writing classes in community college (which I failed), and at Evergreen (my first program, Fiction/Nonfiction, where I met Amber!). I was still writing the same stories, but now they were trans. I am still writing variations on these stories, the same interpersonal dynamics. Sometimes I will write many drafts of a story before I remember the teenage version that came before it.

I didn’t write fiction3 from the time I was 20 until I was 30, except in my head. I had one story line I played on long drives, or for comfort falling asleep. It’s the first thing I wrote in words when I gave myself permission to start writing again, at 30, on the carpeted floor of our apartment at The Diamonds in Albuquerque. It holds so much of what I write now, in a sketched form.

The first story I ever completed was in 2017, when I was 33. Queer spec fic for the Writers 4 Utopia Collective’s first zine. It was over 7,000 words, which is wild. I didn’t know how to kill darlings yet. I put everything into it. We went on to do 2 more zines together, and I wrote 2 more bizarre stories. Kaden told me the other day, he remembers me figuring out how to craft a story, asking questions about what makes stories work. And then I got to the end of what I figure out on my own, and sought training.

It’s funny that I came into writing with spec fic. I don’t write it at all anymore and I rarely read it. My story collection does include a deal with the Devil4 and a UFO encounter, but they’re just ordinary human experiences.

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“Mazzy Star is a one-trick pony.”

“But it’s a really good trick.”

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The Saturday before my birthday, we were a little drunk and stoned (as one might expect of us). An NTS selector had played “Blue Light” a few days earlier. Kaden put on So Tonight That I Might See, which we hadn’t listened to front to back in years, decades. I’d never even owned a copy, just a burned CD.

Sometime between the ages of 17 and 30—I used to be so good with years, but that’s slipping with middle age—I had downloaded a live track of Mazzy Star covering The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin,” and I remember being surprised by it, surprised that they would cover that song, something about it being somehow too ugly for Hope Sandoval. I couldn’t hear then what I could absolutely hear a few weeks ago: that Mazzy Star are a total Velvet Underground ripoff band! I mean that in the best way possible. Complimentary.

“But west coast, west coast, west coast,” Kaden added.

While we were listening to So Tonight That I Might See, I recalled a scene I hadn’t thought about in years, decades. The spring I was 19, this girl who was friends with some of my friends, tried to date me. I’d been single, with no prospects and no sex life for nearly a year, after breaking up with my (butch, boyish) high school girlfriend the summer before. I want to say that this friend-of-friends had only dated boys prior? I hadn’t dated boys yet. We went out for Thai food, and back to the apartment she shared with someone I had gone to middle school with in Chehalis.

I think this happened twice: once with Hedwig, and maybe once with Billy Elliot1 We’d watch a whole movie, sitting on her couch, not touching2. I didn’t drink and she didn’t smoke weed, so we were sober. Bored out of my mind, I’d move to leave when the movie ended, and then she’d move to make out. On the couch, because she shared a bedroom. So we’d make out for a few minutes, but I was so over it by then. All I wanted to do was get stoned.

Once, and only once, I had her over to the apartment I shared with my BFF and her partner. I had carefully cultivated my stoner bedroom: green Christmas lights, green lava lamp, green glitter lamp. I put on So Tonight That I Might See. It was the most romantic, sexiest setting I could imagine. We sat on my bed and this girl goes, “It’s really relaxing in here. It’s making me tired.”

I don’t think we even made out. She just went home. I would love to say this was when I realized I was the other kind of gay, but I would go on to attempt a (long-distance) relationship with one more girl, a femme, who had the same first name.

My BFF said, “Sometimes nice rhymes with boring,” and I left this girl a phone message saying I didn’t want to do whatever we were doing anymore. I believe that is the exact language I used. When we almost ran into each other at a show, some time later, her roommates glared and physically blocked her from my view. I was surprised they were taking it so hard.

I never had sex in my green-lit bedroom listening to So Tonight That I Might See. Except with myself!

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Even before that, I had been thinking about what punk is and what punk does, reading Jeff Miller’s new novel Temporary Palaces and going back to his old Ghost Pine zines. My friend Sean’s partner says, “All punk is about is just walking down the street with your mates.” Taking up space. I’m thinking of Viv Albertine’s memoir, the first time I understood that punks in England were actually violently harassed, because of the way they dressed. And Jeff Miller describes that, in nineties Ottawa, too.

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How different it was in the Northwest, at the turn of the millennium. If the so-called “Seattle grunge” look came from shopping thrift store flannel castoff from local logging communities, and long dirty hair blended in with the hippies, there was nothing to target. Olympia always felt safe when I started going to shows as a teenager. My girlfriend and I could make out on the sidewalk and be ignored entirely. The Evergreen State College, “home of ecoterrorists and homos,” had made it so no one was bothered by anything they saw taking up space downtown.

Olympia punk music was punk in attitude, in seizing the means of production, yet could rarely, barely be called punk, in terms of a traditional punk sound. I just recorded a fake radio show on the theme Coming of Age and described it thusly:

Pacific Northwest queer youth at the turn of the millennium wanted strange music we could sink into and drift on, shimmering, off-kilter, haunted, made by girls.

I tried so hard to put the word “punk” in there but there was nothing even close to punk in the actual sounds of the 15 tracks. I tagged the genres indie rock, dream pop, post punk.

Jeff Miller’s zines, the sweetest relics from a bygone analog era where you could still hitchhike around Canada and meet friends by showing up where you thought they’d be, prove beyond a doubt that punk culture is all about love. Jeff and I are acquainted online, so I knew his debut novel was going to be published far in advance, and was hyped for it. It delivers with all the sweetness of his zines, swirled around the bitter conflict and tension necessary for a novel. Temporary Palaces elucidates the push-pull of activism and art that defines punk communities. These characters work hard (no slackers here), play hard (if they’re not in a band, they’re in the audience and collecting records), and love hard (it’s sexxxy). I recommend Temporary Palaces as a great starting place to read about punk subculture’s impact in a specific place, tracing the lives of those who answer its siren song and submit to its gravitational pull.

Here are my further recommendations to anyone who shares Sean’s question. If you, like me, have been waiting your whole life to answer this question, drop your recs in the comments baybeeeeeeeeee. My recs, like my fake radio show, skew PNW and feminine.

1. War Boy by Kief Hillsbery1 is in my top 3 favorite novels, top 5 books of all time. My zine It’s All Right is essentially a War Boy fanzine.

2. When I asked Kaden this question, he said Cruddy by Lynda Barry, also in my top 3 favorite novels and top 5 books of all time, was pretty punk. I had to agree, although it isn’t what first came to mind. It takes place before punk occurred chronologically, but it’s unflinching, bordering on gruesome, and the sweetness and survival amid utter depravity in the old Pacific Northwest is very punk.

3. I’m currently reading Killed (of Kids) the scrambled oral history and collected zines of the three-years-only Brighton riot grrrl band Huggy Bear. We always read their name in the Kill Rock Stars catalog and their story, like their ramshackle chapter in Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas, is truly a delight to read in their own words. What they were trying to evade and what they were trying to run headlong into is told mostly by the charming and poetic Chris Rawley.

4. Nobody’s Empire by Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian is, technically, a novel and not a memoir. But Stuart Murdoch is a songwriter and meditation guide, not a novelist, which makes this book so fucking fresh to read, with its lists of bands and catalogs of the assemblages people wore to shows. The main character, like Murdoch, lives with ME/CFS, which necessarily impedes the traditional momentum of a novel, in a wonderful way.

5. Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. this memoir by Viv Albertine of the Slits was HOTT when it came out in 2014! Like I said: reading this book was the first time I understood that punks in England were actually violently harassed, because of the way they dressed.

6. The oral histories Everybody Loves Our Town and Girls to the Front, about grunge and riot grrrl, respectively, are essential reading for the history of punk in the Pacific Northwest.

7. But if you want to go to the source, read Loser by Clark Humphrey, “The Real Seattle Music Story,” with the receipts (teeny tiny reprints of show posters, some drawn by Lynda Barry!) to prove it.

8. Everything I know about punk/alternative/Olympia music I learned from ’s Route 666: The Route to Nirvana which I checked out from the library constantly as a kid.

9. Girl by , come on this is a classic, the OG.

10. Just Kids by Patti Smith is a full immersion into the romance and the artistry and the poverty and the queerness of punk.

11. My favorite book I’ve read this year is Sara Jaffe’s Hurricane Envy. Jaffe is a musician who writes fiction about musicians exactly the way I want to read it. Every time I so much as think of the ending of “Arthur Why,” my heart plummets and expands and I’m breathless for a moment. Check out Hurricane Envy’s Book Notes Playlist and Earth to You: Guitar Players Respond to a Short Story About a Guitar Player.

12. My own linked short story collection, with several stories already published, revolves around a fictional band in Olympia. It’s all slam dancing and slam romancing.2 Or, you can read my top 2 Substack posts which are, ostensibly, about punk rock. And, as always, love.

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Some of you know that Kaden’s contract was not renewed in the American Studies department at Smith College. He was on borrowed time, anyway: his one year contract turned into two, then three. But now, the person he filled in for is officially coming back, for real.

Some of you know how brutal and disappointing and time consuming academic job searches are. Kaden has basically had second full-time work applying for academic jobs these past months. When a posting appeared for Eastern Washington University, the school in Spokane (Cheney) where I earned my MFA in Creative Writing in 2023, he jumped on it. It was possibly a stretch: in the education department, teaching future K-12 teachers how to teach Social Studies. But, with a focus on his specific areas of expertise, Indigenous, environmental, and Pacific Northwest history. He was delighted when he got a first interview. Surprised to hear he was a finalist. If nothing else, we said to each other, you get a paid vacation to Spokane, the home of our hearts! The city we wished we never had to leave! You can see all the pals!

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We tried to keep our hardest hopes and dreams at arm’s length. He’d been a finalist for a position at Westminster University in Salt Lake City—took a paid vacation to SLC—but came in second place, which means absolutely nothing on the academic job market. And we’d woven a pretty good fantasy about living in SLC, even as queers.

But could the universe dangle something like this in front of us if it wasn’t going to deliver? As I said to myself when I got the UMass office gig last fall: How dare I not trust the universe. I walked around with my palms open, to receive whatever we had coming. I found so many four leaf clovers. I even found a five leaf clover. I closed my eyes and said, the first word I see is going to tell me whether or not Kaden gets the job. I opened them and the first thing I saw was a fire hydrant, name brand Kennedy.

EWU’s campus library is named Kennedy.

Friends and freaks, Kaden got the gig at Eastern Washington University. We are moving back to Spokane, a city with a strong and weird literary scene, a city where the streets are carved through basalt, a city of arrowleaf balsamroot and bitterroot flowers and Ponderosa pines. A city where so many of our loved ones are. This is a permanent gig. We get to settle down.

Who ever gets what they want? I ask over and over. It seems too good to be true. You’re fucking shitting me, I said, over and over, in the doorway of Kaden’s campus office building when he told me, feeling my face contort into a grotesque grin. For a moment, I had the stupid fear: if something good happens, something bad must happen in equal measure. But we’ve kept our dreams modest. Who else dreams of getting stuck in Spokane?

I am always pining for home. I’m not sure anymore whether home is Olympia, or Spokane. Both. Scrambled in my mind, I keep thinking we’re going back to the people and places of Olympia, too. We’re kind of rough and Spokane’s unofficial slogan is “Keep Spokane Kind of Gross.” I scrawled it on the back of my Sasquatch key chain (plastic legs broken off), while Kaden was out west. When we moved there in 2021, Spokane felt like home immediately. Let’s be real. Olympia is kind of gross, too.

My heart moves so much slower than my body in space. It only just caught up with me here in Western Mass, the moment I knew we were leaving. Things seem to go that way. My life has been so full of leaving, arriving, leaving, returning, beginning when I was 12, constant since I was 25 and Kaden started grad school. It’s not just the transition of arriving in a new place that is hard, I said to Kaden, driving out to the Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshires. It’s the leaving. Because I did, ultimately, make a life for myself here, with the two main things I need: a good writing group, a good job.

My heart is not quite ready to leave these good works behind, 8 of Cups style. I have left my good works behind so many times. May this be the last time.

We came to New England for Kaden’s career, and now his career is taking us home to the west, to Washington. The week before his interview, I screamed at him, I can’t contort my life around your career anymore. I said I was going to move back to Spokane whether he got the job or not and he finally relented, okay, it would be good to have a home base.

I took it back. If you’ve been following along, you know I vacillate wildly on whether or not I like it here in Western Mass. I think I could say, I like it here, but I never loved it. Until now, until I knew I was leaving. Things seem to go that way. I think you could say, I texted Kaden, riding the bus through Hadley on my way to work, that this region has everything we need culturally and materially, but not spiritually. He agreed.

We entertained a fantasy of what we would do if we stayed here another year. Move to Greenfield or Turner’s Falls. I’d keep working at UMass, going to Morning Shift Saturday mornings at , my good job, my good writing group. We took a gamble and bought tickets to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play mid-July, knowing our Smith faculty housing lease ends June 30. Kaden had been accepted to a Feminist Studies research cohort for next year at the Five College Consortium, unpaid but with office space, library access, and a workshop group. He was going to complete another book manuscript. Take GIS classes so he could do more with maps in his work. It was going to be okay. He would try again next year for something permanent, somewhere, anywhere in the west.

Now he doesn’t have to, praise the lord.

But it’s so strange, the way the sense of urgency in the desire fades immediately.

We make plans to pack all our worldly goods, again, and drive the Little Yaris across the country, again. Heading west, this time, thank god. To help with river cleanup and prairie restoration. To become first time homeowners in our mid-40s. To build my own lean-to shack by hand, to ride my good bike all across the Centennial Trail. To be actively involved in specific academic and literary communities where we already have connections, go to Broken Mic and Voiceover and Foray for the Arts. To drink local beers and eat local food. Maybe care for guinea pigs? Guinea pigs, we’ll see.

Before that, Morgan and Stephen are coming out from Ohio and we’re going to Cape Cod, and seeing the Edward Gorey House, the only other place I really wanted to see in New England, besides the Wilhelm Reich Museum.

We may never see New England again!

But it’s gonna be all love from here on out!

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Coachmen, Winnebagos, Jaycos, Fleetwoods, a couple of Airstreams, license plates from Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, all gathered in the muddy parking lot behind the VFW Hall in Centralia, Washington. Centralia, Washington, incorporated in 1886 by freed slave George Washington, no relation to our nation’s first president. Centralia, Washington, famous for the 1919 massacre where pro-union members of the Industrial Workers of the World fended off four attacking Legionnaires. Centralia, Washington, the hometown I reluctantly returned to more than twenty years ago, now full of angry rednecks, unemployed by the recent closure of the state’s last open pit coal mine. Centralia, Washington, whose VFW Hall could be razed in a few short years, but this night, hunters from all over the region have cut their November trips short to see the Star Spangled Outlaw sing another pretty country song.

When I asked my husband, Clay, to come see the Star Spangled Outlaw with me, he refused. Too many rednecks, Charlotte, Clay said. The kind of man who wears utili-kilts with hiking boots, Clay wasn’t afraid rednecks would kick his ass. He was afraid he’d start a fight. He fell in love with me while I gave a demonstration on recycling in the Expo Hall at the Lewis County Fair in the early nineties. My energy was, in his words, equal parts earth mama and motorcycle mama. I’d never ridden a motorcycle before I met Clay, and I’m nobody’s mama.

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Of the hundreds of songs the Outlaw recorded, a few with Linda, Lizzie, and me on backing vocals, he is controversially remembered for his self-released X-Rated albums, sold by mail order in the back of biker magazines. One of those dirty records features a rollicking anthem celebrating homosexual relations in prison. The Outlaw stated, matter of fact, that he preferred women with small, flat breasts, because his formative sexual experiences had taken place with other men. He never screwed a woman until he was twenty-seven. This explained his choice of Linda, Lizzie, and myself, freshly eighteen and scarcely a knocker between us. He may have preferred women, but he preferred them all at once, eventually converting to Mormonism to accommodate his polygamy. This never bothered us girls. We were all in bed with him, whenever he wanted.

The summer we sang at county fairs and honkytonk bars, the Outlaw was in his prime, mid-thirties, baby-faced and mutton-chopped, biceps as big as Linda’s skinny thighs. Eyes not hardened by his time in prison but wary, confused, afraid of being tricked.

When I arrived in Nashville, I hung around Centennial Park with the other runaways trying to sell a song or join a studio session. We lined up in the afternoons as if a foreman might select us for a construction crew. Sharing cigarettes, joints, a bottle in a bag, practicing guitar picking and harmonies, making up songs and killing time until dark when we could prowl the bars. Maybe someone would buy us a drink or a chicken fried steak and invite us to join them on the low stage at the back. I was the one with a couple sheets of blotter. I shared or sold hits sparingly, making it last. I had incredible self control.

I’d stolen it from my high school boyfriend, back home in Centralia, along with the stack of bills he and his brother made selling LSD. The night before I skipped town, a week after high school graduation, I drugged Eddie. I can admit that now. In his basement after his parents went to bed, he was distracted. His younger brother and business partner, Bradley, had confessed that he was gay. Did you not…I said slowly, trying not to laugh…know that already? I put a sleeping pill in Eddie’s beer while he was letting the cat outside. Just one, I wasn’t trying to kill him. We slipped up to his room and he never complained of being tired, but his eyes began to close. With some effort, he said, just come up here and kiss me for a minute. By the time I’d crawled from the foot of the bed to his pillow, he was out. I knew where he hid everything. He sometimes sent me to pick up an order while he was at track practice.

Sneaking out the back door, cash rolled in one of Eddie’s striped tube socks at the bottom of my leather fringe purse, I ran into his brother Bradley, sneaking in. We had passed in the night like this many times. Bradley was tripping, ecstatic. In the backyard, he put both palms out for a double high-five and I tapped back, quiet. He entwined his fingers with mine and swung our arms in an arc. He said, Charlotte, I am out of here. Don’t tell Eddie. He’s home? He’s asleep, I said, my guts tensing. Bradley intended to run away with the stash I’d already pilfered. A car idled in the back alley. Did you hear my parents kicked me out? Brad blew his hair out of his face. What? No. He squeezed my fingers. His were sweaty. They caught me with Salton. Keith Salton? Bradley’s smile stretched wide and he swung our hands over our heads. We’re out of here. California or bust. He dropped my hands and gave me a stick of Big Red gum, adding another piece to the wad in his mouth. I almost gave him the money. Maybe he needed it more than I did. But I had a dream of making it as a country singer, and he was just a burnout. A sweet kid, but a bum. He kissed me on the cheek, all spicy and sticky. Love ya.

I couldn’t go to the Centralia bus station. My bus didn’t leave until morning, and that was the first place Brad and Eddie would look when they realized the money and the drugs and the girl were all missing. Salton waited behind the garage. He was as high as Bradley. Salton, I said, Eddie caught Brad with the cash. Their dad woke up. They’re in deep shit. Salton said, oh no, oh no, I told him to be careful. I said, you better clear out for awhile. His trip turned on itself, giddy flight to wretched tragedy. Where should I go? I said, let me drive. He shoved over, pulling at his hair, beginning to weep.

Salton, the baseball star. Who knew.

I said, look, let’s go to Portland. Call Brad in a couple days, he can meet you. I’ll take the bus back, no big deal. I’d meant to go home and grab the suitcase I’d packed, but I could make do. Salton covered his face with his hands. Thanks, Charlotte. He apologized for crying and told me he had dropped LSD. I said, no way. He didn’t stop until we hit the Oregon border. Poor Salton. Poor Eddie. Most of all, poor Brad, no cash, no stash, no boyfriend in a getaway car.

I boarded the Greyhound only two hours later than planned.

On July third, the Star Spangled Outlaw pulled up to the park in his hearse, airbrushed with his name and the spangled stars he so loved. Linda, Lizzie, and I were used to being passed by, by then, for prettier women with acoustic guitars fit snug between their ample thighs and big breasts. We had only our voices. I was a willowy dishwater blonde with a loud laugh who wore trendy wire-framed glasses that looked like they were meant for a man. Linda was as tall as me, permanently stoned, with yellow feathered hair and modest buck teeth. She looked much older than eighteen. Twenty-five, at least. Hell, maybe she was. Lizzie was eight inches shorter than us, thick chestnut hair, angular face, long straight nose. She wanted to know everything about everyone. We made an odd trio, to say the least, but our harmonies were sweet, and what we had in common was the main thing the Outlaw was looking for: itty bitty titties.

The Star Spangled Outlaw bought us ice cream cones and Boone’s and took us right to the studio. He was recording and he’d just fired three other girls. By early morning of Independence Day, when the session ended, he told us he liked us, he thought we’d get along just fine. By the end of the week, he’d hired us to back him on tour.

The Star Spangled Outlaw drove his own bus, using his stage name as his CB handle. He was a steady, alert driver. No one was allowed past the yellow line on the floor, like in city transit. That was his zone. We felt safe to get lost in a book, to catch up on sleep, to take a relaxing morning shit in the tiny bathroom. It was the same size as the toilet on the Greyhound, but the Outlaw drove so smooth, you might have thought you were at home.

Lizzie stretched out on the long bus bench with her head in my lap. I played with her hair. She asked me to tell her about my boyfriend.

Well, I don’t think he’s my boyfriend anymore, after I robbed him.

Before that.

I thought I might marry Eddie. I mean, I would’ve said yes, if he asked.

What did you do together?

Mostly got high. Sometimes we went on hikes. We lived near the mountains.

Lizzie didn’t care about mountains. She was from Corpus Christi, on the Gulf of Mexico.

Was he a football player? she asked.

Ha. No. Track and field. Long runs. Boring.

Did he look good in the little shorts?

I guess so.

What’d you like about him?

He treated me like I could do anything. He didn’t have to encourage me, or tell me he believed in me, he just knew I was good for it, no matter what.

He knew you’d make it as a singer. Lizzie said this like a fact, satisfied.

I shut my mouth. Eddie didn’t know I was going to be a singer. He didn’t know because I didn’t tell him. He changed the station when I put on country music. I told him the Grateful Dead were practically country. He said he didn’t really like the Dead. That was Bradley’s thing.

I’d pictured it, Eddie falling asleep in front of the TV while I made rounds at the bars. Or chaperoning me, hovering when I needed to flirt to get what I wanted. Worse yet, I’d be trailing after him while he sold drugs. I didn’t want to meet people that way. I wanted to impress Nashville with my talent, my wit, my guts.

When Eddie arrived at my parents’ house to take me to prom, I could tell he was on the come up, even though we’d agreed not to do acid that night. Brad brought this good shit from Eugene, he said. We got into his car. Sure you don’t want any? I folded my arms across my chest, my dress tight and scratchy. I’m getting drunk, I said. Under the passenger seat was the vodka I’d stashed earlier when we took my pregnant cousin Jenny to buy us booze. I bent forward and froze when I heard a seam begin to rip. Eddie reached between my legs and passed me the bottle.

I was an angry drunk. I ripped the back out of my dress trying to kick Bonnie Hoffman’s ass. Eddie had to hold me back. He couldn’t stop laughing, which made me more mad. We were forcibly removed from prom. In no condition to drive, we walked in the spitting rain. At least with my dress torn, I could move my upper body, but I wished we had jeans on. Eddie looked so stupid in his powder blue tuxedo. I surely looked worse.

We traded a joint and a cigarette back and forth until Eddie got contemplative and my rage gave way to urgency: I had to get out of town. What’s next? I asked him. Maybe he’d heard about a party we could crash. I wanted another drink.

Well, my grandpa said I could help out around the clinic…make follow up appointments, send out the molds, call the patients when their dentures are ready…

That’s your dream?

He just got a contract with the prison. He’s going to be busy. You got a better idea, Char?

We stopped and he took my glasses off my face, pulled out a shirttail and wiped them dry for me. It was futile. They’d just get wet again.

Anything else is a better idea!

Great! Tell me! Maybe I’ll be into it!

I meant what’s next tonight, not after graduation.

The only party I know of is at Bonnie’s, so…

It’s not like I didn’t know about his job offer. It’s not like I thought he’d secretly applied to college. But that was when I understood he wasn’t going to take me anywhere. I was going into the world by myself.

We were at the edge of my neighborhood. I told Eddie I was going home. My parents looked up from the TV, surprised I was so early, squinting at my ruined dress in the darkened hallway. I said I didn’t want to talk about it. They let me be. I played nice for the next month and Eddie was either too stoned to notice something had changed, or he figured it would pass.

Nashville was funny. There were bright lights and shiny cars, women with big hair and men who looked made of wax, reeking of aftershave. Polyester everything. And then there were the people I hung around with, not so different from the burnouts at high school.

But the Star Spangled Outlaw, he was different. He was an outsider who wanted something bad, like I did. He never spoke to Linda, Lizzie, and me individually, we were always the girls, you girls. He had a dirty mouth, but we did too. The Star Spangled Outlaw grew up in Akron, Ohio, but claimed to be from Dallas, Texas. As a child, his stepmother had him sent to Starr Commonwealth Boys’ Reform School after finding a playing card with a dirty picture in his pocket. Imagine a time when possessing a risqué photo was a crime, before Grove Press, before Larry Flynt. The Outlaw was in and out of carceral institutions for the next two decades. He learned to write songs from his cellmate Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and toured with B.B. King and the Staples Singers. After King told him “Nobody wants to hear a white boy sing the blues,” he moved on to country music.

At the VFW hall, the line to the merch table is much shorter than the line to the bar, which winds around the labyrinthine space while a mediocre cover band plays the opening set. You could select a copy of the Outlaw’s self-published memoir or pastel thong underwear with his face silkscreened on the crotch. I’m not spending an exorbitant amount on Bud Light, so I buy both the book and the panties, although they look terribly uncomfortable and I’ve long moved on to full-bottomed briefs. Maybe Clay would like to see me in them for a minute. For a lark.

The cover band plays forgotten country singles and the crowd thickens in anticipation. A man taps me on the shoulder to offer an aluminum bottle. No glass, they know this audience is going to get rowdy. For a second, I think it’s Randy, the Outlaw’s old mandolin player with the long black hair, the one Lizzie ran off with, ruining everything. But it’s just some well-meaning redneck, a few years younger than me, trying to flirt. I give him a severe look, shake my head, and yell, I haven’t had a drink in seven years!

Not-Randy shrugs and he isn’t going to take no for an answer. I take the beer as if I’m just holding it for him. Aluminum bottles, a stupid invention. You want the weight of a glass bottle, or the chhhsshhh of an can’s effervescent pop-top release. The unfamiliar format triggers no desire. But Not-Randy raises his bottle for a toast, and I mirror him without thinking, as the opening band plays their final chords and thanks us. I’m swallowing Bud Light when they announce that the Star Spangled Outlaw is up next. The men around me holler. I don’t want Bud effing Light. I want a Deschutes Obsidian Stout, a Pyramid Apricot Ale, a McMenamin’s Rubinator, a half-pour of Ruby Ale and a half-pour of Terminator Stout, like a chocolate covered raspberry. Not-Randy gives me a shy grin and my face copies his, failing to convey the depth of my displeasure.

If I’m turning fifty, the Outlaw must be pushing seventy. When I see him ascend the tiny stage, barely a foot off the ground, big Santa Claus beard dyed pink and orange like cotton candy and strung through with beads, my heart hitches. I take a gulp of my stupid beer. The throng tightens and swells forward. When he starts to play, my internal temperature rises to meet the fast breath and body heat on the outside. My pulse plummets to the center between my legs, and I didn’t expect this energetic exchange, the Outlaw and me and all the wild men between us. I look around for the one who gave me the Bud Light. He’s stuck a half-dozen people behind, and I reach into the surge, dragging him to me. He wraps his arms around my shoulders and I press into his sweaty chest, Old Spice and onions, his thigh against mine. We roil in the turbulence and he hoots with glee. I finish the beer and drop the aluminum bottle. I’m not drunk, but I could get there.

Linda, Lizzie, and I got supremely drunk the night the Star Spangled Outlaw did his television special. The producers didn’t want us girls. We lazed around his hotel room all afternoon, watching as he stuffed himself into tight black trousers decorated with thousands of rhinestones. His knee-length cowboy boots were high heeled, the crown of his hat comically tall. Lizzie chewed her cuticles and the Outlaw gently removed her hand from her mouth. He recognized it as a bad habit, not a nervous habit. After they recorded the live performance for a studio audience, Randy, the mandolin player, was going to sweep her off her feet and whisk her away.

Lizzie hadn’t run from home like me. She’d been left with nowhere to go after her grandmother died. Linda thought the whole thing was terribly romantic, Randy offering her a stability she had never known, but I was suspicious of any man who wanted to tie a woman down. I mean that in the figurative sense. The Outlaw tied us up on occasion, but that was all fun and games. He gloated about being good at eating pussy, and he was, though nowhere as good as Lizzie. Clay is better at it than the both of them. Clay’s better at tying me up, too, an expert in Shibari.

Aren’t you happy for me, Charlotte? We three sat in a line at some sticky bar near the television studio. Lizzie gazed into the diamond of the pawnshop ring Randy had given her a few weeks ago, which she never wore in front of the Outlaw.

Neither of you are going to be able to show your faces in Nashville, once he finds out. I was sullen, looking at my own bare hands.

That’s why they’re going to California, Linda said, elbowing me in the ribs. I’m excited for you, sweetheart. Lizzie and Linda clinked glasses. Char’s just jealous.

Why would I be jealous? My voice rose. I’m living my dream. Randy’s got nothing to offer compared to the Outlaw. I think Lizzie’s throwing it all away to get barefoot and pregnant in some fleabag slum. You know why LA has nice sunsets? Because the pollution is so bad.

We’re not going to LA, Lizzie sniffed. We’re going to live in the Redwoods.

Linda later told me I kept the Outlaw occupied that night, first sexually and then by picking a fight, making him tell me he loved me most. That provided the cover Lizzie needed to get away. I remembered none of it. I spent most of the next day on the cool bathroom tile of the hotel room, while the Outlaw ranted and raved over having to find a new backup singer who’d sound as sweet with us as Lizzie did, livid at the idea of auditioning a new mandolin player to match Randy’s exquisite touch. He might’ve been more upset over losing Randy than Lizzie. I pictured Randy’s slim hips and tight butt, and wondered if there was something there related to the Outlaw’s history in prison.

As an old man, the Star Spangled Outlaw’s eyes are sunken, but I catch a glimpse through the jerking limbs around me and can tell they’re different. No longer frightened, he’s hardened, or maybe he’s softened. Maybe it’s cataracts. I’m moving with the writhing horde, flannel shirts and bare arms flapping in my face, Romeos and cowboy boots kicking my ankles, while the Outlaw plays lame covers of popular radio fare and insists he is the real Slim Shady. My lip curls in disgust. Clay’s teenage daughter, with us every other weekend, is always blasting that bullshit. Some young fans nearby boo loudly at his claim, and I join them. This is below the Outlaw, makes a joke of his talent. We want to see and hear the country star he once was, could still be if he had any self respect, not this sagging, bragging, tattooed biker. His charisma, crackling at the opening moments of the show, is being siphoned away. I’m deep in my frustrated analysis when Not-Randy yanks me out of the way of a kid flailing over our heads in a crazed attempt to crowd surf. The kid’s mud-encrusted, steel-toed work boot cracks another redneck’s skull. They go down hard.

The audience roars and scatters, swooping in to help, backing off to avoid what might be a fight, surging and demanding the Star Spangled Outlaw continue his set. The house lights are thrown on, illuminating the chaos. He’s played for less than fifteen minutes, but he’s done. It’s over.

And I’m shaky, shaken, overstimulation demanding more, you can’t just cut me off, marooned in bottomless disappointment, I don’t want to go home feeling this way. Here’s Not-Randy, squeezing my arm with one warm hand, the other cupped around my butt, almost between my thighs, inviting me back to his fifth wheel parked behind the VFW hall, where he has a bottle of Jack Daniels, if you please. I’ll say yes, to the fading itch deep in my guts I’ve neglected so long, and wake up cold and hungover in a mildewed hunting trailer.

Clay, if you were here you’d have kicked his ass by now.

Pre-dawn, Independence Day 1975, Nashville. Linda and Lizzie, arms linked, skip down the street waving sparklers, sandals flapping like little girls. They fall out of sync and double over, laughing. I’m against the brick façade of the recording studio, smoking. The band’s packing up equipment, then we’re all going for breakfast. Pancakes with butter and syrup, coffee with sugar and cream. The Outlaw’s extra-long boot holds the door open while he says something to the receptionist in his whiny baritone.

Then he says, Charlotte, and takes the joint from my fingers. The first and only time he ever even called me by my name. He exhales smoke and says, so, what do you think?

I think my life is coming into focus. I think my dreams are coming true.

I think, I can’t believe it’s going to be this easy.

in memory of David Allan Coe, September 6, 1939 – April 29, 2026

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My most gratifying learning experiences from late elementary and middle school were when we were given blank map outlines and asked to color in the topography, copied from the text book, and later, drawing a diagram of a cell, copied from the text book. Something too big to see and something too small to see. The takeaway was not scale, not geography, or even cartography, and I did not retain the parts and functions of a cell beyond the week’s test. It was all about the sense of overwhelm, the impossibility of recreating the image, picking a spot to start, and moving outwards from there, to something that, when finished, felt impressive. Satisfying.

At my office gig last month, I jumped up when I heard someone down the hall lamenting the state of the storage room. “Is this a job for Liina?” I asked, like the corny fuck I am. Everyone was amused and grateful that I was so excited to organize the boxes of promotional swag and alumni memorabilia. The overwhelm, the impossibility of making this room make sense. Starting slow, moving one piece at a time, not necessarily to its final spot, but to see what’s there.

This is the same approach I take in my writing practice.

How hard it can be to remember, at the start or stall of a project, at a crossroads of the unknown in lived life, that everything will shake down eventually, and it will feel inevitable. When we forget, we call it fate. When we remember, we call it faith.

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In September, lodged between a few exxxtreme life changes, I spoke with my first reader about the first draft of my manuscript, completed in June. He told me to kick out the first piece, write a new opener. Kick out the ones that don’t directly connect to the cosmic center of the book, this fictional queer punk band. Kick out the last piece.

He said, “I know you like this one, but…” And I was like ohhh. I wrote that one just for me, not for an audience. Which is so totally valid. I was working out something personal, and it was valuable to me. But I didn’t need to keep fucking with it, trying to make it work. It had already done its job. There was some liberation in letting it go.

I’ve spent the last seven months mostly dedicated to the the madcap opener and the resonant closer. In the middle, in the depths of winter, I had a truly psychedelic experience in writing: the piece that connects those two opened itself up to me, with a whole different story hidden inside, spilling its guts.

May we all be so blessed!

I asked my first reader for clarification on the story that would become the closer. “I know you said you suspect it’ll get a rewrite…do you think it needs to hold more? Work harder?”

We work well together because his feedback operates like a mystery school, and I love a puzzle.

“I think the new first story will change that story,” was all he would say. Of course, he was right.

The closing story hardcore evaded me. I wrote myself pages of questions, I wrote myself pages of all-caps reminders of the tools I had at my disposal. I wrote at least 4000 words of scenes and fragments I kicked out. Shit wasn’t coming together. The frustration was itchy and delicious. What a blessing to be in that spot.

I used every generative and revision trick I could find or invent.

every generative and revision trick I could find or invent

1. Brainstorm 10 things that can complicate this narrative.

2. Practice based on Emily Stoddard’s More than Vibes: Revising for Mood and Muchness.

3. Practice based on “Juggling” from Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction.

4. Variation on “X-Page Exercise” from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus.

5. From Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies: “Give way to your worst impulses.”

6. Celtic Cross reading using Penny Slinger’s Tantric Dakini Oracle.

   1. This is where it got weird, because I spent ten days rewriting the entire story in ten 500-word passages, one each day, based on each card in the ten-card spread.

7. I killed darlings. I didn’t bail on my most dramatic scenes.

8. I needed to spread out. Make a bigger mess. I went to Kaden’s office on campus, the empty desk of his colleague (a novelist and writing professor!) who never showed up to use the space.

   1. I asked Kaden to pull me one card—he uses the classic Colman Smith deck—and it was Death. Like every tarot card he has ever pulled for me, totally obvious. This piece is explicitly about Death.

   2. I pulled a card from Oblique Strategies: “Decorate, decorate.”

   3. Inspired by ’s post on , I cut open a paper bag and tried to get big and messy with themes and questions. It was so hard for me not to tape them in a line. You can see in the photo above how hard it was!

   4. This is the key that unlocked the story:

Writing by hand, I described the imagery on the Death tarot card, as seen, with words. This flowed immediately into a new scene that felt, after steps a, b, c, effortless. It went into the story almost exactly as drafted.

That led to a whole new structure, guided by strict, STRICT word count constraint. 500 word backstory sections, one for each season, alternating with 1000 word top story.

When finished, it felt impressive. Satisfying. A piece where everything connected, a story that felt intentional, a story that did something. My second manuscript draft was complete.

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He gave me Trash & Burn, a 20011 album by Dead Moon. I liked it. I loved it. The CD wasn’t even his, it was Brent Lee’s23. I’d seen Dead Moon in Hype!, the exquisitely-edited 1996 documentary about the Pacific Northwest music scene, with my last girlfriend. There is a certain gauziness to the film stock that perfectly evokes the bright overcast skies of the Northwest. Dead Moon’s heavy motorcycle boots dangle from their front porch, overgrown with vines.

No, I’ve misremembered. The porch was where the Monomen were interviewed, it wasn’t even overgrown with vines. The dangling motorcycle boots belonged to 7 Year Bitch, perched on a building shaped like a pair of cowboy boots.

Dead Moon sit on the roof of their house/record shop, and talk about cutting their own records on the same lathe that cut “Louie, Louie.”

The real deal.

Fred and Toody Cole were the same age as our parents. Their drummer, Andrew Loomis, a half-generation younger—the age of our mothers’ youngest brothers, a little older than our oldest cousins. Born in Tacoma, Fred Cole got his start as a teenage soul singer in Las Vegas, and went on to front the proto-punk psych band The Weeds/The Lollipop Shoppe. “You Must Be a Witch” was part of the Nuggets compilation, and I think I figured that out on my own: reading liner notes word for word, seeing Fred Cole’s name. On their way up from San Francisco to wait out the draft in Canada, the band’s tour van ran out of gas in Portland, and Fred fell in love with a seventeen year old waitress, Toody, a “sweet Catholic girl,”4 and they semi-secretly married.

They were together for 50 years, until Fred’s death in 2017.

Homesteading in the Yukon, building a sprawling house by hand, running a rural guitar repair shop and record label outside of Portland, and playing in Dead Moon, the band that never slowed down, never cleaned up, never gave in, never sold out. Dead Moon may be the only band—correct me if I am wrong!—to maintain that teenage garage rock energy from the late sixties, the raucous sounds that promised rebellion, and carry it forward into the actual future of punk rock, without ever needing to compromise. This is the freedom that DIY culture gestures towards, put into practice over a lifetime. Dead Moon are the example par excellence. Maybe the only example.5

When their three kids were adolescents, in the early 1980s, Toody took up bass. She and Fred played together in a couple of cowpunk bands. In 1988, while Nirvana6 were recording Bleach, Dead Moon released In the Graveyard on their own Tombstone Records. Most, if not all, of their albums have been re-released on Mississippi Records over the past decade, but original pressings, with Fred’s poetry scrawled into the smooth black vinyl between the grooves and the label, are sold for disheartening, decisively not punk rock prices.

Fred Cole wrote all Dead Moon’s lyrics. Both consummate storyteller and a sucker for dark, dramatic imagery, themes vacillate from sweet verses of lasting love to cartoonish tales of horror. Fred’s biography, as a stubborn misfit forging a path the shape of his body—tallish, skinny in youth and solid in middle age, witchy black cowboy hat—as he moved through the world, is revealed over the course of many tracks. Trash & Burn starts like this: “I’ve been dragged through the mud, been told I ain’t enough, done a lot of hard living in a world that’s sometimes cold.”

Resonates with every weirdo who ever heard it.

Trash & Burn, from 2001, is thirteen years into their career as a band, their ninth and penultimate studio offering. Fred and Toody were in their 50s, and it sounds no less vital or true to their vision than any Dead Moon record before it, expansion and continuation, never monotonous, though all their albums are recorded in mono. In “Diamonds in the Rough,” the opener to 1996’s Nervous Sooner Changes, Fred Cole sings, “I’m not ready for stereo.”

Once I would’ve been able to tell you every month and year we saw Dead Moon play, but I can’t anymore. We should’ve seen them more; they were still playing all the time in Portland, Olympia, and Seattle. The first time we saw them play was at the China Clipper. I don’t remember much about that show except for noticing a couple who had been in my community college botany class a few years back, rocking out. I never saw them at the grrrl and twee punk shows we frequented. I was thinking, Olympia really is a small town.

The show I remember more was at the 4th Ave Tav, another bar, like the Clipper, we never ever drank at. We were there with Kerry. We’d once borrowed CD copies of both Nervous Sooner Changes and Strange Pray Tell from the Olympia Timberland Library for many, many months, maybe a year, maybe longer—the library had no late fees. Kerry was working the circulation desk when we finally returned them, so we could use my library card again, and she was like “Oh, you guys have all the Dead Moon CDs!” She didn’t shelve them. She checked them out to herself.

Dead Moon always played with a lit candle, embedded in years of accumulated wax drippings on the bottom of an upside-down Jack Daniel’s bottle affixed to Andrew’s drum set. At the 4th Ave Tav, Kaden, I guess he was still smoking back then, lit the candle when it went out mid-set. He still tells the story, ecstatic, reverent.

In this really great excerpt from Dead Moon: Off The Grid, I learned that Fred and Toody are both earth signs, like Kaden and me. We didn’t exactly get semi-secretly married at 18, like Fred and Toody, but we were both 19 when Kaden handed me Brent’s copy of Trash & Burn. We’ve been together ever since. Engaged after three months, we didn’t tell anyone (or actually get married) for years. Fact-checking dates for this piece, I figured Fred and Toody would’ve been about 40 when Dead Moon’s first album was made. Kaden and I were both 40 when we finished grad school, and set off to do what we are doing now. I hope we can offer the world even a fraction of what Dead Moon have.

Writing this, I kept thinking, Liina, everyone already knows this. But that is probably not true. I’m sure it is not true that everyone who reads this Substack is an expert on Dead Moon.

So, if you are an old head, I wish you a Dead Moon Night. If you’ve heard of them but never checked them out, give them a listen next time you’re drinking a beer or riding the bus. If you’ve never heard of them, may their story activate you to be a little weirder, to teach yourself to do something.

Forge a path in the shape of your self. Muscle out a little freedom.

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1. I decided my death was imminent, due to minor abdominal pain, and spent several days in a mid-level panic. Which is not great for abdominal pain.

2. I tried to blow up my life, again, by threatening to move back to the northwest (I told my spouse he was welcome to follow me).

I know finishing a project—granted, this is not yet “finished”—can fuck you up. Before I’d ever even completed a single whole story, I’d read writers and musicians describe this part of the process. I tried to be consciously aware of it. I didn’t even get too drunk when I finished! But something resembling depression crept up, all sneaky.

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Because yeah. I’ve had this tactile thing to grapple with since September (the last time I tried to blow up my life in the same manner). The distraction, the measure of satisfaction, the puzzle, the comfort. Telling myself stories. Working them out on the page. Asking myself questions, journaling my own feedback loops, practicing every generative and revision trick I could find or invent. Falling asleep and waking up with my characters. Being given the gift of a scene or a turn of phrase or a background motivation over and over and over, in perpetual renewal.

For that to just. Stop. And find myself here, in New England. I was trying to finish this draft while it still felt like winter. Two days later, it was eighty degrees.

I’d been laboring, most heavily, for months, on a piece about a dude who has been told by a psychic that he is going to die within a year. The whole story is him vacillating between evading and surrendering to death. Another story, referencing the fallout of that, on those around him.

I did not know I was writing about myself.

Over pancakes at a Western Mass maple syrup outfit, an acquaintance who is an 8 or 9 year old kid asked, “Do you daydream?”

“Yeah, I have these men in my head, and they do things, and I write them down.”

I don’t know why I had to be so creepy about it. I’m not used to being around young people. And I admit, many of my stories don’t pass the Bechdel test1, especially the three I’ve been working most closely on.

“What do you daydream about?” I asked.

“Dragons…but they’re not in my head. They’re in my imagination.”

And I was like, omg, you’re right! Thank you for reminding me, imagination is diffuse!

That makes completing a draft a full-body experience of loss.

Sean recommended watching a long, intense movie. Kaden was like, write something totally weird. That’s what I did last time I finished a draft. I have two totally weird partial stories. They’re pretty far out. I did wake up one morning with a whole new story, but didn’t get it off the ground yet. He asked, weren’t you going to go back to your novel?

I wouldn’t be the first person to grow so fond of my short story characters that they end up in their own novel. I spent one #1000wordsofsummer writing sexy garbage about the fictional punk band’s first tour. But these characters gave me a kind of a hard no. The rest of their lives exist off the page.

Is my old-timey story about running away to ride the rails with the farm hand actually a novel? I thought it might be when I was deep into my historical research on traveling yoga lecturers, wheat farming on the Palouse, and Seattle’s Denny Regrade.

Or am I going to go back to my Vietnam era draft dodging drug dealing gay Deadhead novel? ’s mind-blowing post on The Erotic No, Conscientious Objection, and Why Aries is the Archetype of Desertion was deeply inspiring, realizing that an embodied no was missing from my narrative.

I know the advice, once a novel (in this case, 1/3 to 1/2 of a novel) has been “in a drawer” for a year, is to rewrite it from memory.

Maybe I will.

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That made me think of the old chestnut, from when I was a queer teen seeking queer fiction in the late 90s/early 00s, where readers and authors yearned for a future where gay stories could take other narratives besides Coming Out.

We’re here! We’re queer!

We’re over it.

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In my fictional world, there is no straight world, so there can be no coming out narrative. I don’t mean there’s no hetero world. I have some sexy unpublished hetero stories. But there’s no straight world, no one’s going for credit in the straight world, no one is keeping up with the Joneses (maybe the Werewolf Joneses!), no one is striving for success in corporate America. No one is leaving the rat race, because they never entered. They have freedom, they have nothing to lose.

I remember a show in the early days of HGTV, when I was a kid, maybe it was called The Good Life, profiling couples who quit their corporate jobs to run vineyards, or managed their debt by selling everything and becoming a long haul trucker team. The way out of that bind seemed glaringly obvious to me as a pre-punk youth: just don’t climb the corporate ladder or go into debt in the first place.

So punk culture made perfect sense to me, when I discovered it.

Those years of my life were also filled by long, drawn out, late night lectures by my drunk dad, which usually ended with me crying hysterically. My mom hissing from across the room, come here, me crying no, it was OK, I wanted to finish this conversation, her saying come here, and then whispering you’re bleeding through your pants. My dad was trying to impress upon me the importance of “not getting too far out,” and “playing the game.” He knew a certain type of frivolous anarchy appealed to me, and in hindsight, I see how he might have been concerned by the directions that could take. As a child, I identified strongly with my dad—or he convinced me that we were the same in this way—as an unpopular smart kid, like he had been.

By “playing the game,” my dad essentially meant, code switching. His favorite story to tell about himself was a time, as a Marine in Vietnam, when his superior told him, “You have no respect for authority.” He always told me, “I’m going to get it tattooed on my ass.” He has not. Sometimes I consider doing so, for him. Those were the two things he impressed upon me the hardest: no respect for authority b/w, you have to play the game. Talk about code switching. And those are the two forces that inform my every decision. Not in opposition but in harmony. I get my needs met. Getting your needs met can feel like freedom.

I don’t know how clearly class comes across in my fiction. My own background is working class to lowest middle class. I was just talking to my dad about how he and my mom lost everything in their late-forties, buying and sinking two small businesses, closing one and selling the other. I remember them laughing after they filed taxes. “No wonder money felt tight! Our income last year was below the poverty level!” By the time they retired twenty years later, they were doing all right, between a city pension, a VA settlement for my dad’s Agent Orange exposure and prostate cancer, and a rental property. My dad grew up in abject poverty, and even when they “lost everything,” my sister and I never really felt that stress in a material way. Shopping discount racks was already our way of life.

In my fictional world, characters work in fast food restaurants and grocery stores and libraries, they tend bar, they do freelance graphic design, they play in bands, they’re in grad school, they’re unemployed. They’re of the precariat class.

They aren’t mad about it, and I’m not either. There isn’t something more they aspire to. They aren’t putting themselves in positions where coming out as gay or even trans would raise the stakes of the story. Myself, I found a little release valve from working for the man, by working office jobs in higher ed.

I see a lot of (surely justified) complaints from working class writers who were othered or unsupported in their Creative Writing MFA programs. I want to put a different experience out there. In my cohort of 13 fiction students, roughly half of us came from working class-ish backgrounds. It never felt like a division, to me. We all hung out, and it never felt like anyone was faking or slumming. We were all pretty close right away, despite our age range (22 to 48). Maybe because we started in the fall of 2021, around the time things started to “go back to normal” during the pandemic. Not everyone felt like they received the faculty, institutional, or even peer support they needed or expected, but I know for sure there was no favoritism based on a higher class background, and no exotification based on a lower class background.

Our writing styles and goals were diverse. More of us were funded by graduate service appointments than were not, although even that was not a free ride. I really want to impress upon the general public, especially those who have bad feelings about Creative Writing MFA programs, that they are not all elite, or full of people with no life experience, or in unaffordable cities, or brutally competitive. Some MFA programs are in weird places, like Eastern Washington University in Cheney/Spokane, and run by kind, competent professors. Don’t let anyone’s bad experiences keep you from applying to an MFA, at any time of life, if it is something that calls you.

The publishing industry is supposedly run by rich white women who only want to see shoutouts to their New York City neighborhood haunts, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for rural, queer, working class fiction. There is possibly more room for it than ever before. The year after I graduated, our MFA program’s small press began publishing a series of rural short story collections. That’s what is valued, at EWU. If I’d gone to an MFA ten years earlier, maybe there wouldn’t have been room for my hella gay work. I’ve even heard that some of my professors said weird things to queer students in the past. Either they learned better, or their words were taken out of context.

Obviously, my MFA holds a lot of significance for me. I don’t ever mean to use it as a status symbol, although it did help me feel more of an equal in my life-partnership, ngl. It took me a long, long time to allow myself to give that time and energy to my work. But I wouldn’t have done it if Kaden hadn’t won a significant financial award for his History PhD work. The first time we ever felt remotely financially all right, we were over 35. I don’t think an MFA is necessary for all writers and I absolutely advocate for writers without MFAs. I went in knowing I had come as far as I could on my own in my writing practice, with the intention of improving my storytelling mechanics, taking experimental risks, creating more beauty.

It wasn’t a way to put off my “real life,” but an essential part of my real life.

In my admissions essay, I wrote something I want to continue to hold.

“I witness my peers failing and/or refusing to meet goal-markers of American adulthood, even as we approach middle-age, but there is a lack of literature that reflects our aging honestly and without a sense of decay or regret. I aim to fill this gap while contributing queer literature that continues to pivot away from transcendent coming out narratives. I want to read, write, and publish queer stories both more mundane and more bizarre, while revealing relationships through ambivalence, ambiguity, and possibility.”

One of my friend’s students wrote, in response to “Wisdom Teeth”:

“The sense of normalcy and even frivolous moments are what made me want to continue reading.”

Sounds like, at least for some readers, I’ve met that goal.

I want to press on the bruises where people are rotten and show how we love them anyway.

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There are so many reasons not to use Instagram. For one, this stat in Harper’s Magazine “Findings”: A metareview of 98,299 subjects across seventy-one studies concluded that consumption of short-form videos degrades cognitive and psychological health.

But mostly the fact that Meta materially supports forces that wish to kill us, and the cross dangers of surveillance. I’ve posted enough selfies alongside queer and trans and far left and anti-fascist, anti-capitalist content to be fucked on that front, should it come to pass. Years ago, I went into these things with the assumption that there was too much to sift through and no one gave a shit. Well. I, of course, did not anticipate the surveillance technologies now operating. If I’m being absurdly generous to myself, I’d say something like, it’s important for me to represent the middle-aged punk-adjacent queer-nonbinary artist-academic pink-collar precariat class, and promote myself as a writer.

Is it?

Anyway. Those aren’t the reasons most people talk about “going analog.” Most people claim their lives are substantially improved, which, frankly, was not my experience.

The analog world did not open verdant and sparkling before me during the weeks I was using Instagram a lot less. My “boredom” did not result in a nature-abhors-a-vacuum style unfurling of creativity. There was an unfortunate coincidence with a lull in my writing work, a lull in my wage work, the draggingest dregs of winter, and the low spot in my menstrual cycle. Even though I’m deeply familiar with how my cycle impacts my writing, it still feels really bad, every time. My only measure of satisfaction is how my writing is going. The highs are worth it, though, bayyybeee…

“I miss COLORS!” I said to Kaden. “I miss pretty things!” Funny stuff, cat stuff. I don’t watch TV. I wasn’t even mad about the socks and underwear ads. Of course I want to see nice asses and sexy feet looking cozy, colorful, and comfortable.

The ads, the aspirational posts, the interior design and “dopamine dressing” accounts, are like catalogs we used to get in the mail, right? My childhood and adolescence was all about fantasies of toys and clothes I knew I’d never have. Remember how fun it was to pore over dELiA*s? Or later, magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, Martha Stewart. I don’t remember ever feeling salty about it.1 I don’t feel empty when I look at or imagine other people having nice things. I’ve been denying myself nice things since I was a child. It’s a way of life. Whenever my spouse or I buy something nice for ourselves, these days, we are so proud of each other. I spent weeks contemplating buying a classic black and white Kit-Cat Clock (which I saw advertised on Instagram). Our household really needed one. It’s so nice to have something kinetic on the wall.

I know there’s no healthy relationship with Instagram. There’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.

Back in community college Sociology class, I remember learning about high suicide rates among lottery winners. I might be mangling the actual reasons behind this, but it led me to think about delayed gratification. Because yeah, what would you have to live for if you could just have anything you wanted, whenever you wanted it? Delayed gratification, sometimes delayed forever, is the best feeling. The dreaming and scheming and planning and saving. Dangling a carrot in front of your own damn self. Is our current collective obsession with yearning a reflection of, slash, backlash against, the instant gratification of online shopping and expedited delivery?

I did get a bit of a reset. When I brought Instagram back, I seemed to have dampened the impulse to hit the pink and purple button every time I touched my phone. My screen time did not change substantially, it stayed in the same range. What I hate is how my body believes that low screen time = moral high ground. Like, whatever dude.

Now, several weeks later, my screen time actually is getting lower, but I think that’s because my group chat has been kinda quiet. I load Instagram for a short period every few days, then delete it again, partly because my phone is out of space. I get bored with it a lot quicker, maybe the system forgot what draws me in? All I see is bigdawgsocialism and democracynow, get my hit of righteous indignation and terror then log off.

I still pick up my phone for comfort and pleasure, but it no longer provides.

There is one man I follow on Instagram who mostly re-posts pics of women in classic high heels and seamed stockings, but occasionally I catch one of his stories where he posts his own beautiful bare feet and hairy ankles, wet and propped on either side of a mildewed bathtub faucet. I’d seriously pay for these pics, but there’s something about the element of surprise. The ephemeral nature of the Instagram story. I’ve probably only seen them three times in the last year. But every time I do. God. What a thrill!

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One morning last week I felt inclined to listen to The Gits. The cusp of spring is the time of year they are for. Twenty-three years and four weeks ago, Kaden and I moved in together, as housemates, and his massive CD collection became part of my life. “Frenching the Bully” by The Gits was one of the first CDs I took with me in the car for my commute to McDonald’s in the next town over—it was a tough time to enter the workforce in the Olympia area. Another was “The X Anthology,” which has the best version of “Nausea,” with this delightful bit where Exene tells a story about Debbie Harry being “real snotty.”

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Later in the day, I listened to X. “Is there a word for that driving force that creates circle pits?” I asked Kaden, and Jordan, but neither of them had one. The Gits and X both use that propulsion as an underlying mechanism, but there is so much more—sound, and feeling, and poetics—layered over top and stuffed in the cracks. It’s so much weirder.

“Punk is for spring,” Kaden and I agreed, walking giddy to the bookstore. He was looking for the Auf der Mar memoir and I needed the new Andrew Martin novel. I came into 2026 with an aspirational conviction to not read anything that takes place in New York City this year, to stick it to the publishing industry. But Andrew Martin’s short story collection, “Cool for America,” is what convinced me I could write and publish fiction, period, and I love his work, so, whatever. My convictions are not that strong. We didn’t find either volume at either downtown Northampton bookseller.

“Punk is for spring, like, newborn babies squalling,” Kaden and I agreed. “They don’t know how to do anything.” (in a good way). Jordan and I were talking about “fuck yeah beginner’s mind or whatever they call it.” There was so much variation in early(ish) punk music. It didn’t mean just one thing. No one knew exactly what they were doing. I think this when I listen to oldies radio, too. “Waterloo Sunset”? It’s a weird song! I’m always trying to put a finger on the last moment of rock and roll (You Are Cat Power Free?), or, the last moment before every single song was the same pop song, structurally, the last moment before everyone sounded like they knew what they were doing. I wanted to write, maybe it was Grimes guilelessly channeling Mariah Carey that ruined everything. But then I thought, Visions was probably the last time a musician sounded like she stumbled upon something new because she didn’t know what she was doing (in a good way). After Grimes went to that, songwriting camp or whatever, and wrote “Go,”1 her music was no longer appealing.

There may not be a word for the propulsive grind that inspires circle pits, but if you want to read some words about the feeling of music ALLOW ME TO RECOMMEND THE PHENOMENAL SHORT STORY COLLECTION Hurricane Envy, by Sara Jaffe. Jaffe, who once played in the band Erase Errata—Other Animals was another CD I borrowed from Kaden’s shelf in 2003!—writes about (among other things) musicians who long to hear and to create a certain sound, to find the tools to transmit a feeling they may not have even felt yet.

Leni Zumas, one of the best writers of fictional punk musicians, in her introduction to “My Sleep” on Electric Lit, endorses Jaffe’s work better than I can fanboy about it:

“Like Perec and O’Hara, Sara Jaffe is an artist of the infra-ordinary. She assembles minor details into taut, poignant, uncanny tapestries. Her fictions happen in bedrooms, classrooms, bars, punk house parties, coffee shops; in these familiar spaces, she collects what is furtive and ever-so-slightly strange.”

The stories in Hurricane Envy are so deliciously quiet and subtle and so interior, it makes me realize my stories are bombastic and outside-action-based, even as I criticize myself that “nothing happens.” Hurricane Envy makes me want to learn to be subtle. I haven’t learned to write how people make room for each other’s orbits through gentle, brushing compromise. My characters are always only slam dancing and slam romancing. I haven’t learned how to raise tension from the interior, I haven’t learned how to put a thought process into words, I haven’t learned how to let my characters grow through their yearning, to find themselves blinking in silent wonder on the other side. Jaffe does all of this. Sometimes, reading, you slow way down to deeply savor what comes next. You know it’s going to be that good.

I read the story “Earth to You” about a year ago. I love it so much, it remains my favorite in Hurricane Envy. I have sent it to everyone I know who loves short stories, I talked about it in my interview on Feign (I talked about The Listeners by Leni Zumas too), I put it on Susie Bright’s reader survey. I emailed Sara Jaffe to tell her how much I loved it. Her 2014 novel Dryland is the sweetest pacific northwest queer teenage quiet rage family drama athletic transformation story ever told. One of the supporting characters is my biggest literary crush of maybe my whole adult life. I mean, there’s August in Women Talking, but he’s not gay and he doesn’t put on My Bloody Valentine.

Please, please find and read Hurricane Envy. It is even a fun size and shape, with excellent typesetting. And oh my god, there is also this, which I haven’t even delved into yet, Earth to You: Guitar Players Respond to a Short Story About a Guitar Player.

Every time I finish something big in my writing, which I did last week—not the big one, not my book draft, but a side project—I get a little too drunk. I have one rule about drinking, in my 40s, which is that I can have two 16oz beers or three 12oz beers (and this is usually only once a week). The problem is, drinking beers by its very nature makes you want to bend the rules.

Kaden was on Spring Break, so the fantasy was I would get off the bus after work and go out for a beer and he would meet me. It was supposed to be spontaneous, but I had to make a plan to bring an extra snack to work. I keep forgetting that I can make a plan, and it can still feel spontaneous to Kaden, if he doesn’t know about it. “Do you want me to surprise you with location?” I asked. “Yes!” he texted. “Love that idea!”

Packards, the townie-student-dive bar. We always drink the same beers there. I get the Fat Orange Cat Baby Kittens IPA. I’m not always seeking a juicy IPA, but that one is perfect. Kaden always gets Abandoned Building’s Dirty Girl IPA. He also gets it at Hadley Quarters, the queer arcade bar, and at the brewery, itself, and in cans from State Street Fruit Mart. I only wanted to drink at Packards if we could sit at the bar. Sitting at the bar is the new date night! some headline read, idk, last year. I had already figured that out. Why would you prefer to sit across the table from one another? It’s so formal. It’s sexier to angle towards one another, knock knees. Easier to drape your arm over your date’s shoulders or squeeze the back of their neck. You can still look them in the eye. It’s sexy to know that others might hear your conversation, especially as you (I) get louder. To eavesdrop and observe how the bartenders treat each other. I am both voyeur and exhibitionist.

So I ordered three 16oz beers, in the end, although we “shared” the third one (another drinking rule I have tried in the past is do not share beers with Kaden). At home, I ate half a 50/50 gummy right away, to ensure I would not keep drinking. I barely remember taking a shower. The last thing I googled: sebadoh song about j mascis. I started to get crabby when Kaden put on Steve Earle, and he placated me by asking if I wanted to watch “Licorice Pizza,” selling it as a coming of age film. I was halfway through the review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s œuvre in The New Yorker, and I thought Kaden had read it too, but I found out later he hadn’t, complete coincidence.

I wasn’t buying it in the first few scenes. I had to sink into the stylization before I could appreciate what it was doing. I did hit pause at one point to yell (sarcastic), “You know what I think would make this movie a whole lot better? If Paul Thomas Anderson had included A LITTLE MORE THIGH GAP. There just isn’t QUITE ENOUGH THIGH GAP.” Kaden said, “shhhhhhh.”

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Please enjoy this interview I did with for her Creative Access series, exploring the astrological charts of artists. Creative Access #6: Liina Koivula (Leo Rising, Taurus Sun and Moon) — Fiction writing, and slow is smooth and smooth is fast. You can watch or listen to the video or you can just read KP’s write-up.

Me, a Taurus: Maybe I should move the region my story takes place in. Apple orchards are so much more romantic than fields of wheat.

Him, a Virgo, with horror: No! They’re not!

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I hate when historical fiction doesn’t challenge what we think we know about the past, so I welcomed the complication.

This piece takes place in both eastern and western Washington, between 1905 and 1928. I spent the week in historical research, delighting my partner, Dr. Jelsing, a well-regarded up and coming scholar of environmental history in the West. “You’re asking the right research questions!” he said. “And using both primary and secondary sources!”

Originally inspired by queer histories by John D’Emilio and Peter Boag, this week, I reviewed work by Philip Deslippe, a historian of American religion. He writes about Punjabi Sikh laborers who became traveling yoga lecturers in the 1920s. I re-read Yogi Wassan’s 1924 publication, Hindu System of Health Development. Yogi Wassan often taught in Olympia, and resuscitated two victims of drowning there! I read Whitman County Historical Society’s newsletter, Bunchgrass Historian, from the 1970s, with original settler reminiscences. I searched for photos of Seattle’s Denny Regrade (circa 1906) and photos and descriptions of Seattle’s most opulent historic hotels.

I began reading Plowed Under: Agriculture and Environment in the Palouse by Andrew Duffin. The Palouse is a wheat growing region in southeast Washington state, on the Idaho border. Kaden and Allegra commuted through it twice a week when they worked together at Spokane Falls Community College, Pullman extension. My classmates and I drove through on the way back from the Community of Writers conference. Before Kaden got the gig at Smith, and thought he was going to continue working at SFCC Pullman, we talked about buying some land out there. Obviously, we did not. Yet!

Falling asleep a few nights ago, I asked Kaden about WWI conscription. He said he wasn’t sure. WWI occurs during the scope of my story, in the years that aren’t part of the written narrative, and the characters would’ve been of draft age.

Plowed Under is an environmental and agricultural history, straight up. It’s incredibly well written, like, I can’t put it down, but I find myself itching for labor history, social history. I read a great article in (note: link is a PDF download) Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History about community surveillance and coerced volunteer labor to increase wheat production during WWI and eliminate IWW union worker positions. Another delicious narrative complication for my story, but I don’t have the space to go there. I was like, fuck, is this a novel? This might be a novel.

If the farm owners on the Palouse (or, as Duffin calls them, the farmers) were wealthy and had to employ 14-20 hands to run an 18-horse plow, it changes the socioeconomic basis of my story, originally conceived of as a family farm where only one hand was hired. If my main character stands to inherit a massively productive farm, running away to ride the rails with the farm hand is slumming, is so much more of a fuck you, makes him a punk in both senses of the word.

I’d been ready to let this short story go. We’d decided it didn’t fit in my linked collection, and it felt finished but not quite satisfying. I am so, so glad I had a [super secret] reason to revisit it. There was so much more it could do! I had no idea. Kaden read a draft yesterday and he pointed out that the last two scenes were tonally different from the rest. We thought it might be because they were written at another time, and wondered how to get them to match. But then it came to me that it was because I use dialogue very, very sparingly in the first 3/4, but had full conversational exchanges in the last two scenes. Paring down dialogue did the necessary work to pull those scenes in line with the rest of the narrative.

Coincidentally, my mom mailed me some photocopied information about the genealogy and family history of her dad’s side of the family. Kaden has traced the paths of some of his ancestors into extremely compelling places. He has an ancestor who was the first woman to earn a PhD in zoology at the University of Chicago and became a prominent eugenicist; an ancestor who was a famous landscape painter of the American west. Lesbians on both sides of the family in the very early twentieth century! Last summer his mom, trying to be kind, said, “Liina, I’m sure your family has the same kinds of records,” and I was like, “No, they don’t, my family were farmers, laborers, factory workers. They didn’t keep records.” So it was a real kick in the pants to read that two brothers of my great-great-grandmother were accused of murder!! Separate incidents!! I ended up fitting a description of the family farm on the other side of my grandpa’s family into my story.

It’s Sunday morning, Kaden’s at the desk and I’m on the couch, we’re listening to house and garage on Sunday Club w/ Finn on NTS, doing our historical research. No one is happier than we are.

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TMR’s online-only prose anthology, BLAST features prose too vibrant to be confined between the covers of a print journal.

“Thanksgiving, 2001” was one of three runners up for TMR’s 2025 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. When we saw the list posted, we were like, oh, how weird is it that my location is Northampton, MA, and another runner-up is in Bothell, WA (it’s weird because I’m from western Washington). Turns out, the runner up from Bothell also graduated from the Eastern Washington University Creative Writing MFA! How weird is that!!

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This is what TMR wrote about my piece, and I could not be more honored:

“Thanksgiving, 2001” is a black comedy set in a “pentagram” of punk houses in Olympia, Washington, in the months after 9/11. Never flinching, Liina Koivula’s short story explores queer community, human connection, and the decision to define oneself on one’s own terms.

NEVER FLINCHING!!! The best thing anyone could say about my work. This is the biggest and most gratifying publication of my two-year publishing career. I’ll be retiring now. Jkjkjk.

Back in the fall of 2021, shortly after I began my MFA at EWU, I got a ‘good rejection’ from The Missouri Review, for the story that became my novel-in-progress. I felt from the beginning like TMR was a good fit, and kept submitting to their contest every year, along with a few regular submissions. “Thanksgiving, 2001” was my sixth total submission to TMR, my fourth to their annual contest. I almost didn’t submit! They sent me a freakin’ postcard in the mail, advertising the deadline extension. On the last day, I went to ’s Submit to Lit Mags meetup. I debated which piece to send. Submitted this one with good vibes. Then ran off to Greenfield’s No Kings rally.

Obviously it would’ve been cooler to win $5,000, but I do get paid $100 for this contribution! The bottom line is, keep submitting when you know the publication is a good fit for your work.

“Thanksgiving, 2001,” takes place exactly as titled, in a fictionalized version of Olympia’s black houses and queer punk scene. I admit I’ve never lived in one of the black houses, although I did view one, once, when we were looking for a new place. I’ve never been in a band. I did live in shared housing in other parts of Olympia, and I did go to queer punk shows every week for several years.

Go read the story first, before I start demystifying it.

This story’s premise is purely fiction, and the characters are in no way based on real people, but it does have more bits of my real life in it than any other piece. The very first scene did happen to my bff, but it happened in the parking lot of the 1970s faux-Mediterranean apartment complex on the west side where we lived when we first moved out. The part about the childhood neighbor’s house getting wrecked by drunk classmates is real, and is the real reason I avoided boys in high school. Someone I loved did say, “My big butch daddy, let me schlob your knob!” after I said I didn’t want to be treated as fragile and feminine, but we broke up a week or two before Yoyo A Gogo, not during. I was the opening manager of a fast food restaurant. My drunk and stoned co-worker, when asked what he really thought of me, did say, “Liina, I think, what the fuck,” and I took it as the highest compliment. Another stoned co-worker did once beg me to make him mac and cheese. I do get brutal period cramps.

On 9/11, my housemate did knock on my bedroom door and say, “They’re blowing up the Pentagon,” and my first reaction was, “Fuck yeah.” I didn’t know about the Twin Towers or the workers in the Twin Towers, I probably didn’t even know people worked in the Twin Towers. We did proceed to smoke pot at 7:30 on a weekday morning.

BUT EVERYTHING ELSE IS FICTION!

This story used to be called “Criminals,” and it is, in fact, based on the Atlas Sound song, “Criminals.”

This criminal
Walked into my room
He asked me
Why do you live this way?
Think of all you could have
What I would take

The first draft of this piece I wrote for PNBA Book Award winner Leyna Krow’s workshop. It had a similar premise but different details and a totally different ending. I remember someone complaining that the original narrator was too much of an edgelord, which was probably accurate. She softened in subsequent drafts. Someone else didn’t know what a ‘punk house’ was. In a later draft, my advisor, Sam Ligon, didn’t buy an alternate ending. It wasn’t true for the story. OK. All right.

I knew for a long time that this story would require a complete rewrite, from zero. I did NOT WANT TO. Finally, a year ago, I sat down to do it.

I made the premise a little easier, and I saw how it connected to other stories in my collection. I stripped it way down. Then added sprinkles. I operated under the principle from Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction: “if your character is cold and wet, keep your reader cold and wet.” My character is exhausted, with period cramps, and has to get up for work in a few hours. I split the story into quarters, word-count wise, and made sure to mention the ticking clock and the physical discomfort in each segment. It worked!

It is heart-expanding that a funny story about queer stoners in the Pacific Northwest was a runner up for The Missouri Review’s contest. Max Delsohn paved the way! Kaden has been hypothesizing that we are going to see a resurgence of funny fiction, which I am so here for. Kevin Yeoman and I used to commiserate, during the MFA, about how most stuff getting published by lit mags was Grave and Serious™. Those were the last days of the trauma plot.

I have been taking a break from heavy submissions, to finish the second draft manuscript of my linked story collection. In “Thanksgiving, 2001,” you’ll find cameos by characters from “Breeders” and “Wisdom Teeth,” and “Inheritance.” I’m so stoked for you all to see how they all fit together in a book. Eventually.

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Here’s the long version! Happy Valentine’s Day, Lovers!

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My spouse is a man I do not call my husband, and I was once a girl but I did not grow up to be a woman. This was weird and vexing for many years, but ultimately liberating. Before I had a word and framework for nonbinary, around 2014, and began to understand myself as such, 2016, I was mad all the time. This was compounded by the fact that my spouse transitioned in the early oh-ohs when there was only one way to do it and a certain script you could not deviate from to get your needs met, whether resonant with your experience or not.

I described myself, at the time, as a contortionist to categories of woman and wife, which is almost too painful a memory to write down. My real life was on hold. I did stuff like yoga, and running, and dance classes, and learned how to cook and clean from instructional books because I really didn’t know how, and practiced “clutter clearing” and “minimalism.” These practices had long-reaching positive impacts, like, I use them today, but at the time, I was only doing them because I was scared I would never know myself well enough to feel like a whole person (of course, I didn’t know that at the time).

I’d been tossing around the idea of transitioning since I was 17 and first learned it was possible. I have writing going back a couple years earlier, frustrated longing to “be a gay man,” which I did not think possible. At 42, still vacillating. But like a whole person.

Which is all to say, we aren’t even hetero. We get both the advantages (safety) and disadvantages (everything else). Which sounds pretty heteropessimistic. Wait, this is against heteropessimism!

We aren’t even pessimistic. For the first 13+ years of our relationship, we were both inconsolable, unable to offer one another comfort, but we stuck together. I don’t know what other couples fight about. I can’t even remember what exactly we fought about. In hindsight, now, I think the main problem was that neither of us yet had the skills to do our lives’ work1, and we couldn’t imagine a way to commit to developing those skills under late capitalism. We hadn’t found our lines of flight. We sought whole systems to operate within (an impossibility), causing us to contradict one another in ways that hurt. Like, maybe I suddenly found that the only way out of the sun-moon/yin-yang gender dichotomy in the yoga teachings was to consider myself an atheist, while he was coincidentally researching secularism and statehood and the harm done by atheist thinkers. All I could hear was you’re wrong, which was the dig from my (otherwise cool) dad that still makes me want to curl my shoulders and neck to protect my heart. I am still liable to say, fuck, I love being right! even though I have worked really hard, some seasons, to stop needing to be right.

At the very same time I began to understand myself as nonbinary, I read the Emotional Labor MetaFilter Thread (google it), which materially changed my life. I found it researching whether anyone was writing about the problem of partners of trans men self-inducing feminine performance as a bolster to their partners’ passing cred. I mean, I still haven’t found anyone writing about that. I can’t be the only person to have had this experience. Our relationship improved almost overnight, now that we could point to where feminized labor was happening. The most specific examples I can remember are that he took over responsibility for coordinating plans with his immediate family for get-togethers, and I never sent a Christmas card to anyone in his extended family ever again.

The third thing that happened simultaneously, is that I read Fair Play by Tove Jansson. In this short novel (novella?) that could just as easily be called a linked short story collection, and should probably be understood as autofiction, two women artists in Finland live, love, work, and travel together. This is so silly, but before I read Fair Play, I assumed that only one partner in a relationship could be an artist/have a career/live their dreams, and the other partner had to support them. There was no evidence of this in my life: neither of my parents were artists, had careers, or lived their dreams. Yet I had, voluntarily or not, put myself in the support role, while Kaden trained as a historian: his calling, his spiritual practice, his expressive art. I genuinely did not know that two people could support each other’s callings. I thought my calling had to be ignored, or my relationship had to end.

(my essay on Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, originally published in Local Smoke Press’s Work + Leisure)

By the time we moved to Canada for Kaden’s PhD in History program at the University of British Columbia, almost ten years ago now, I was able to think of myself as a nonbinary writer in an equitable queer relationship. Being part of Writers 4 Utopia, and the community there and in the Elements of Magic intensive, advanced these projects. I wrote a complete short story for the first time. I published zines. When Kaden won a major award through UBC, I took six months off work to focus on writing. We shared a bank account and my expressive work was now as important as his. When I went back to wage work, at the fun gay gift shop with the custom printing department, I used they/them pronouns in a workplace for the first time.

It took me a couple more years (and, you know, a global pandemic) to really honor my work in fiction, take it seriously and do the thing I’d always wanted to do but never allowed myself to do: an MFA in Creative Writing. I don’t mean to say that anyone else needs to do an MFA to take their fiction seriously. It was my deal. I didn’t think I’d get in, and I didn’t think I’d get funded, but I did, and I did. I admittedly aimed kinda low. I admittedly chose locations I knew Kaden was enamored by: eastern BC, eastern Washington, the southwest. I did not even consider applying to Iowa. We moved to Spokane and the MFA at EWU is the second best thing that ever happened to me, coming in hot behind understanding myself as nonbinary.

But the rhetoric around pitfalls of heterosexual relationships is insidious. It enters my queer relationship, unbidden, again and again. Twenty-plus years of misunderstandings, sub energy mistaken for disinterest, differences in spatial reasoning mistaken for weaponized incompetence. Anyone who wants power, shouldn’t have it. Neither of us want power. We understand there are no relationships free from power. Our long-time astrologer tells us, we have to get very clear about our power dynamic to navigate what’s ahead. At our favorite bar in Northampton, a little drunk, I say, you know you hold all the power because of your career. We go wherever his work is. I don’t have any say. He doesn’t want this to be true. You do have a say, he insists. This is what he wants to be true, but it isn’t true.

It’s only coincidence that he’s a man and I’m something else. He doesn’t hold the power because he’s a man, he holds the power because he has an academic career and all of our conjoined life-decisions have to be made around that. Our paths, our art, our expressive work may be of equal value, but his has a stronger gravitational pull (and either a much higher or much lower income, depending on the position). It was not what I bargained for. He worked part-time at Starbucks and I worked full-time at McDonald’s when we got together. We were working class to lower middle class ‘smart’ kids who had fucked off in favor of being queer punks and never expected living wages, let alone some measure of success.

Since I did an MFA when I was 38, a lot of my friends are younger, now in their late twenties and early thirties. They came into their nominally straight, long-term relationships with an awareness of emotional labor and mental load, into partnerships with men who already had, or were open to, some awareness of the same. I hear such horrible things about men from so many angles, but none of it comes from the current relationships of my younger friends.

Maybe we can loosen our grips on heteropessimism, especially on a case by case basis, especially in our own loving relationships. By all means, hold men accountable. But maybe—I’m saying this to myself—a few stray beard hairs in the sink are not a sign of disrespect, are not a sign that my independence has been sacrificed for a dead end. Maybe—I’m saying this to myself—there are strands of my hair gathered at the corner of the bathmat, too, and my beloved doesn’t mention it, because he doesn’t care, because we’re mammals.

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But I’ve felt personally satisfied and pretty happy, this winter. I’ve had a lot of capacity. I substitute-hosted Morning Shift, the Saturday morning writing group at Looky Here. I’ve been facilitating my Luxuriate in Your Work revision skill-share. Learning a little about teaching, by doing it. I washed and folded three loads of laundry and vacuumed the entire back stairwell of our building in a single evening. Had long phone conversations with a loved one. I cooked many meals but none of them turned out quite how I wanted. I’ve spent a ton of time on two stories whose hearts are not revealing themselves to me. For the time being.

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It snowed 18 inches almost two weeks ago and it hasn’t been above freezing since. Single digits, negative digits, negative double-digit wind chill. Last Saturday it was 18°F and sunny and it felt good! I walked across the grocery store parking lot without a coat and put air in the tires of the Little Yaris without gloves.

Who even am I.

Dreaming of the mountain west, a fantasy of dirtbag culture, of shocking topographies. We haven’t gone out for a beer since January 10^th. Kaden was home in Washington for ten days, then it was too cold to walk around, then he had a sinus thing. We haven’t seen the Mother Ann Lee movie, yet. We got into this hilarious YouTube show Interior Motives where 3 weirdos guess the gender, sexuality, age, and location of contestants based on 2 photos of their bedrooms and 1 of inside their fridge. We liked The Mastermind. Kelly Reichardt is probably our favorite filmmaker.

We read Jon Raymond’s God and Sex and I was amazed that a book with such incredible writing, an absolute joy to read on a sentence level, with such shocking turns of events, and really good portrayal of attraction, which is so hard to do, could stay so distant from the characters that I feel as if I never finished it. As if there must’ve been more. I have read Jon Raymond for almost two decades. Reichardt’s Old Joy is my favorite movie! I fell in love with the character Cookie in The Half Life (the book Reichardt’s First Cow is based on) so hard I thought about him for months like a swoony teenager! Raymond writes the Pacific Northwest, which is the only thing I really care about. But somehow his books never quite reach my emotional core the way I want them to. Which isn’t his problem. I still think you should read God and Sex, totally. Even though the title is too embarrassing to read on the bus.

Couple days ago, I was on the stationary bike, watching house videos1 like I always do. I hopped off to show Kaden something cool and he was like, don’t worry babe, we’ll own a home like that someday. And I was like, don’t fuck with me man, we’re never going to have a place like that (some bright apartment in some European city with skylights and a wall of bookshelves). I said, I don’t mind if we keep living in weird apartments. He was all, that’s a change of tune, and I felt defensive about him pointing it out, like I was being inconsistent, fickle. Or, like I was being untrue to myself, that I’d accidentally given something up, this desire that has kind of made me miserable for the past few years. But like, I just don’t care anymore.

For one, I think the best we can hope for is to stay alive until things shift politically.

Secondly, my longing for a house-yard-property had a lot to do with instability in other aspects of my life. Right now, ever since my OK breast imaging mid-December, life has been comfortingly stable, to the point of almost-boring. I love my job, I love my daily and weekly routines.

Wake up, get dressed in the dark. Start the kettle. I’m a genius because I realized if I didn’t close the cap, it wouldn’t scream and I wouldn’t have to run to the kitchen in the middle of brushing my teeth. Scrape my tongue and splash water on my face. Pour hot water on a teabag. Turn on a show on NTS, or a record if I’m not touching my phone for the first hour I’m awake. Half-assed lymph massage and stretches. One sun salutation. Light a candle. Morning pages. Cereal (always Nature’s Path) with apples or raisins and dairy yogurt and oat milk, reading The New Yorker or Harper’s. Brisk walk to the bus. Bus ride through Northampton and Hadley, brisk walk to my cute office at UMass. A granola bar and a walk around 10:30, lunch around 12:30, a walk around 3:00. Brisk walk to the bus stop. Bus ride. Brisk walk home. Cheese and crackers and vegenaise and pickles and olives. Ride the stationary bike or fuck around. Shower. Cook dinner or fuck around. A little writing. Do the dishes or the cat box. Get my stuff together for the next day. A little reading in bed. Wake up to the classical radio station at 5:51. Hit the snooze button once, or twice, occasionally 3x.

Get stoned on Friday nights. Carafe coffee at Greenfield Food Coop and Morning Shift writing group at Looky Here on Saturdays, then groceries at the Northampton Food Coop. A couple beers on Saturday nights. On Sundays I have instant coffee in the cat mug my sister gave me, followed, lately, by my revisions skill share class. Maybe laundry. Wash my hair. Change the bedsheets.

One day this week I mixed it up and cut my bangs at 6:05 in the morning, immediately after waking up, before doing anything else except taking a piss. They turned out perfect. A lucky fluke, or that thing that happens when you go in with no clue what yr doing, but complete confidence.

I love my hoodies and my overalls, my bandanas and my wool blend socks. I finally broke in my winter boots, for awhile they were sucking my will to live. My ankles are still hairless where they rubbed it all off, but the cuts have healed. Inspired by Heidi, I’ve greatly reduced my Instagram usage. This week, I only loaded it on my phone during my lunch breaks. Then deleted it again.

I’ve loved every apartment we’ve lived in. I especially love this one, in Smith faculty housing, it’s actually really cool. The toilet and bathtub and sink are blue! Obviously the flooring and countertops suck, but whatever. Ignore them. It was the houses we rented in Olympia, the one on Milroy and the one on Legion Way, even the duplex on Percival, that were trouble. And by trouble I mean, damp.

Someone I care about became a homeowner last week, and I searched my heart quite thoroughly and there was not a fiber of jealousy, only happiness for her, and being stoked that I’ll get to read about her experience.