We arrived in Ireland on a Friday and by 7:00 Monday morning, we were boarding a Wild Rover tour bus for the Cliffs of Insanity, which is what the Cliffs of Moher were called in The Princess Bride. Our tour guide was a real character, which is Appalachian for exasperating but not entirely charmless. The bus ride was around two hours one way, and near the end of the ride back to our rooms at Trinity, he was playing all his favorite clips for us, which included quite a bit of Riverdance.

I really do love a thistle. Sometimes I imagine the post-human earth, and thistles are always part of that imagining. Thistles and turtles. More than a million people visit the Cliffs, and you have to work hard to get pictures sans throng.

We loved the Ennis Friary, or Ennis Abbey, as it’s also called, founded in the 13th century by the O’Brien Dynasty (which dates back to the 10th century). The walls, Gothic bell tower, and transept chapel (the arms of the cross) are still standing.

In Ennis, we also visited the Clare Museum, a deceptively small but significant trove of treasures as old as 6000 years. It’s built over an deep stone well, and they put glass over the well so visitors can still see that too. I love librarians, archivists, and curators with my whole heart.

So many of you have been reaching out to check on me. I’m okay! I’m sad, not depressed, I swear. Disappointed, but determined. Like everyone I know, I feel like I’m hanging by a thread, but I’m also writing, so the thread is still strong.

The novella is coming along. I shared the first chapter for the first time with trusted and beloved colleagues who aren’t my immediate family. I think of the story I’m telling as my own Sanctuary, in the tradition of Faulkner, an attempt to create a real page-turner with some degree of artistic integrity. (In the thick of a full-blown literacy crisis, accessibility seems like a moral imperative.) I also think of this book as a sort of Appalachian Gothic response to Olga Ravn’s The Wax Child, which is one of my favorite books of the past few years. This week I’m writing about giants having sex, Victorian beauty regimens, and moonshine. I’m also hoping to make some elderberry cordial.

When I inevitably get stuck again, I’ll return to the nursing/caregiving memoir, which is always percolating. I think the next chapter of that book will probably center around or at least begin with my Mamaw Mae’s leaving school in the sixth or seventh grade to tend the patients her mother kept in the sanitorium that was their home. By 1930, mining companies had permanently altered the financial landscape of eastern Kentucky, taking possession of communities that had existed in the region for 130 years or more. Within the span of a single generation, most Letcher County men were bound and beholden to the mines, which is why many women, my maternal grandmothers included, started businesses without ever really saying they were. They recognized needs in the community and met them, traded labor for labor, knowledge for knowledge, surplus for surplus. They tended resources like Vestal Virgins, creating a closed but sustainable economy.

“Grandma Collier kept people,” is how my mom used to say it, meaning the elderly, the disabled and mentally ill, “and then your Mamaw Mae did.” Three decades after Mae, who loved to write poetry, was forced to give up her education, she started another “hospital” (for the patients she inherited when Grandma Collier died) with infamous Letcher County doctor, Roscoe Acker, who had a reputation for liberal narcotic administration, and who later, in 1985, made national headlines when three burglars posing as FBI agents (he was definitely committing tax evasion) showed up at his home (which was also his clinic) in Fleming-Neon, forced him to open his safe, stole almost two million dollars, stabbed his daughter, Tammy, at least ten times with a kitchen knife, and strangled him. His daughter did not survive the attack, but he did.

This is a tangential story, of course, unlikely to find its way into the memoir, but I do think about it often. I was twelve when Tammy was killed, and the event was equivalent, at least in terms of childhood tragedies, to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Mom always wanted to be a nurse, but going back to college intimidated her, so instead, she worked for a couple decades as a receptionist at an OB/GYN clinic in Whitesburg, and I became a nurse. But, it’s so much easier for me to write about the caregiving my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers did. I feel more romantically about their lives than I do about my own. I cut my teeth on horror stories about the care they provided, the things they saw, the rituals they practiced, though they would not have referred to them as such. I’ve always been enchanted by those stories.

And then there’s the essay I’m writing for The Believer about this guy, which I’m not entirely convinced I’ll ever finish. I think I’m on Draft Seven. It’s never taken me this long to write anything.

For vibes, I’ve been watching/rewatching a series called Chillers (1995, free on Tubi and Fawesome) which is evidently Britain’s “answer to The X-Files.” I’ve been sort of following the rabbit hole of this grainy but well-written television genre—next up is Gray Clay Dolls, which evidently inspired the series.

Music-wise, I’m in deep mourning for Ethel Cain (iykyk) and listening on repeat to a playlist I started in Ireland called saigon banger. I made it public on Tidal. It’s still a work in progress, but tasty, I think.

I’ll share what I’m reading soon.

Other potential topics of upcoming posts:

Travels in Ireland (the next installment)

Travels in Door County, Wisconsin (upcoming)

How I’m Solving the Impossible Riddle of Menopause

The Delicious Device of Makeovers and GRWMs in Fiction

When Trad-Wives Knew Stuff/The Blogger Era and How I Miss It (see podcast info below)

The Album Dave and I Are Rehearsing/Recording (a soundtrack for the novella)

Why I Don’t Write More about Politics

The Bombshell and Beauty Books (my earliest influences)

Misogyny Is Actually Very Practical

AI Could Never

Also, Clara and I are doing a podcast together called Smarter than You Think (lol). Our first episode is all about Yesteryear and Vigil, but we’re kind of gloves-off in our commentary. Should I share it?

More soon…

XOXO

SK

We had a rough re-entry. More on that later. All that matters is that our final day in Dublin was spent at the botanical gardens, which are in the Northside village of Glasnevin on the banks of the River Tolka, where an abbey was founded by Saint Mobhi (“the Flat-faced”) in the 5th or 6th century, and where the Battle of Clontarf was fought in 1014 between Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, and an unholy Norse-Irish axis formed by Sigtrygg Silkbeard, King of Dublin, Mael Morda mac Murchada (I’ll add the accents later, I just can’t bear to do it right now), King of Leinster, Sigurd the Stout of Orkney, and Brodir of Mann (from Njal’s Saga—iykyk). Brian won.

I’ve developed travel habits. Like Grimes with her spaghetti.

First, I like to find a patisserie. Not croissants and muffins, an actual pastry chef. I like to consume confections that look like art. Most of the food I consumed in Dublin was incredible, but I did not find a pastry chef.

I did find this thistle though, and these Jurassic flowers, which were nearly as large as my head.

Botanical gardens are my other travel habit. Graveyards, too. Glasnevin has both.

Michael Collins is buried in this cemetery. So is Brendan Behan, who wrote this poem for Michael Collins:

The Laughing Boy

T’was on an August morning, all in the dawning hours,
I went to take the warming air, all in the Mouth of Flowers,
And there I saw a maiden, and mournful was her cry,
‘Ah what will mend my broken heart, I’ve lost my Laughing Boy.
So strong, so wild, and brave he was, I’ll mourn his loss too sore,
When thinking that I’ll hear the laugh or springing step no more.
Ah, curse the times and sad the loss my heart to crucify,
That an Irish son with a rebel gun shot down my Laughing Boy.
Oh had he died by Pearse’s side or in the GPO,
Killed by an English bullet from the rifle of the foe,
Or forcibly fed with Ashe lay dead in the dungeons of Mountjoy,
I’d have cried with pride for the way he died, my own dear Laughing Boy.
My princely love, can ageless love do more than tell to you,
Go raibh mile maith agat for all you tried to do,
For all you did, and would have done, my enemies to destroy,
I’ll mourn your name and praise your fame, forever, my Laughing Boy.

I loved the orchids and ladyslippers and scented geraniums. I loved the roses and waterfalls and footbridges. The front gateman was an audacious American named Sean, and I almost asked how he’d landed the gig, but I thought better of it. The on-site cafe was impeccable—sandwiches made from local bread, local cheese, local meats, local veggies. No plastic anywhere. Maddy and I shared a lavender-lemon sponge and an apple cinnamon roll I’m still thinking about.

Maude Gonne, lover and muse of Yeats himself, is also buried in the cemetery. One of the first poems I ever loved was written by him for her. Someone read it aloud on a soap opera my mother was watching, Another World, I think it was, though I’ve never been able to find it again. Regardless, after hearing it, I was never the same:

Brown Penny

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

This is Potter’s Fork, the homestead of Isaac Potter (1801-1874), who was born in Rowan County, North Carolina, and died in Letcher County, Kentucky. Isaac and his wife, Mary Houston, moved to Letcher County before its formation and naming in 1842, when it was still all virgin forest and undisturbed mountains, which I know because his firstborn, John Boone Potter, was born there in 1828.

John Boone, who would become an Old Regular Baptist minister, was named for Daniel Boone, and an ancient beech tree on Isaac’s property bore Boone’s initials until it died in 1928 and was cut down and a section sent to the Kentucky Historical Society for safekeeping. Daniel Boone is specter and cradle, curse and conception in Eastern Kentucky. Growing up in the mountains, everybody wanted to be related to him, or at least to have some tangible connection, and I do.

Once, in high school, we were told to create a family tree, and I asked my mother to help me. Her mother’s parents were Bertha Viola Rose and Merida Monroe Baker. Her father’s parents, she said, were named Mammy and Pappy Potter.

“What were their real names?” I asked, which immediately exasperated her.

“Mammy and Pappy Potter,” she said, this time through clenched teeth, and reminded me that even when they could read or write, country people (that was what she called what we were) rarely had the time or inclination to write things down, especially back then, and I sensed somehow that the moment was humiliating her. My dad’s mother, whose family immigrated in the 19^th century from Germany, Norway, and Sweden, had been able to fill out his branches on my paper tree going back several generations. My mom didn’t even know her great-grandparents’ names.

Before we came to Ireland, I wasn’t sure which part of this country the Potter family came from. I felt like it was Northern Ireland, though I couldn’t say why. I’d read Anna Burns brilliant novel Milkman years prior on another airplane, which is (sort of) set in Belfast, and I’d been astonished at how much it felt like she was describing Letcher County. The way her family functioned and didn’t. The paranoia and surveillance. The grit demanded of everyone, but especially of girls. The imminent promise of violence ordinary as air. I was asked which place I’d most like to see while I was here, and I chose the Giant’s Causeway, a national nature reserve at the northernmost portion of Northern Ireland made up of some 40,000 hexagonal basalt columns rising from the sea. I didn’t know why I wanted so badly to see it. The pictures online were sublime, fantastical, a fairytale. We decided it was too far to make the journey, at least this time. I would try again next year when my whole family could travel with me.

According to James Baldwin, “One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. And that’s why you think I’m a problem,” he says, “I am not the problem. Your history is.”

I know now that Mammy and Pappy Potter, my great-great-grandparents, were Abraham Potter (1837-1913) and Sarah Wright (1847-1925), whose favorite uncle was Martin Van Buren Bates, the Kentucky Giant, who fought for the Confederacy in the 5^th Kentucky Infantry. Her brother was “Devil John” or “Bad John” Wright, a notorious feudist, outlaw, and lawman.

Abraham Potter was Isaac Potter’s fifth child and second son, and he also fought for the Confederacy in the 37^th Virginia Infantry Regiment. His younger brother, Isaac, fought for the Union in the 39^th Kentucky Volunteer Infantry, and both regiments were present at the First Battle of Saltville, just over the Kentucky-Virginia border, which also included two Black cavalry units. Saltville was important because of the saltworks located there, which produced most of the salt used in Confederate war efforts (for preserving meat). Confederates won the Battle of Saltville, but the victory did not apparently satisfy them, because soon afterward they entered a nearby field hospital where wounded Black soldiers were being treated and murdered around fifty men. I do not yet know in what capacity my great-great-grandfather or his younger brother were involved, but I know that both survived the war and returned home.

I also know that in Letcher County on an election night in 1898, a group of around 15 men, which included several of Abraham’s sons, formed a band of the Ku Klux Klan. They called themselves Women-Whippers, and their primary objective was to discipline the “lewd women” of Letcher and other surrounding counties in Eastern Kentucky. Abraham’s youngest son, Creed Flannery Potter, was second-in-command. First in command was Morgan Reynolds, a schoolteacher who’d recently graduated from Kentucky Wesleyan in Winchester and used his education to write the bloodcurdling oath to which members were required to swear.

A couple nights ago, I discovered that Creed’s great-great-grandfather, John Alexander Potter (1669-1765) was born in Megheracross, near Foyle River, Lower Strabine, in County Tyrone, Ireland, less than four miles from the Giant’s Causeway.

I don’t know how to reconcile who I am with who and where I come from. I take Baldwin to heart. I know without a doubt that he is right about what white people must do in order for America to become what it claims to be.

The Women-Whippers terrorized the women of Letcher County from 1898-1901, pulling them from their houses, publicly flogging them, and “abusing them in the worst way.” I’m sure they were doing the same to the extant Black communities for decades prior, though the names of even their white victims are rarely reported in newspapers of the time. One of the women they flogged was a great-great-aunt of mine, Infidelia Bates Craft, thus named because she was illegitimate, though I hate that terminology.

Creed Flannery Potter was seventeen when he robbed and finally killed a relatively wealthy white woman, a widow named Jemimah Hall, along with two of her sons. Jemimah had already survived one encounter with the Women-Whippers six months prior during which she was dragged and probably raped. It was Creed’s uncle, his mother’s brother, Devil John Wright, who finally caught and arrested him. Creed was eighteen when he went to prison and twenty when he escaped. He dressed in women’s clothing to do this. Prisoners at the Kentucky State Penitentiary were tasked with making brooms, and he slipped out in a wagonload of broom straw. He was never seen again.

“I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,” Frederick Douglass wrote in his Life of an American Slave, “I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.”

Creed’s other brothers who were Klan became police, became U.S. Marshals and thugs for mining companies, became crooked businessmen and judges. They were also arrested for and complicit in the murder of Jemimah Hall but acquitted of all their crimes.

This is the beginning of my novel, which I’m (for the moment) calling Creed, but it is not about these men at all. It’s about the women they whipped, many of whom were related to me, and the women who helped them escape, who were complicit in their crimes, who were also related to me. Creed’s younger sister was my great-grandmother Rebecca Jane Potter Addington, who was present in my first book, Kin, and she’s the main character of the story I’m telling, which is written in my dialect, in Appalachian English. She has a lot to tell me. I’m listening and writing it all down.

Ireland is wild and green and blue. The people here are funny as hell, and sound like Appalachia. Seabirds wake me every morning, even in the center of Dublin. Convenience stores carry organic nettle tea, and unhoused people sleep and pee on the sidewalks, and anti-colonial sentiment pops up in every conversation. A year’s tuition at Trinity, if you are not a scholarship student, is around €3K annually (about $3440). One reservoir high in the mountains supplies the entire city of Dublin with water, and it hasn’t rained for weeks, so there’s a hose ban (limited garden watering). It’s been warm, around 80 degrees most days, so the locals are sweltering, but it feels downright cool compared to the Ohio River Valley, even in our apartment, which is not air-conditioned. Howth was dreamy— a walkable causeway, a small open-air market, rows upon rows of pastel houses, seals swimming in the harbor.

Pride of Head

by Laura Riding

If it were set anywhere else but so,

Rolling in its private exact socket

Like the sun set in a joint on a mountain..

But here nodding and blowing on my neck,

Of no precedent in nature

Or the beauties of architecture,

Flying my hair like a field of corn

Chance-sown on the neglected side of a hill,

My head is at the top of me

Where I live mostly and most of the time,

Where my face turns an inner look

On what’s outside of me

And meets the challenge of other things

Haughtily, by being what it is.

From this place of pride,

Gem of the larger, lazy continent just under it,

I, the idol of the head,

An autocrat sitting with my purposes crossed under me,

Watch and worry benignly over the rest,

Send all the streams of sense running down

To explore the savage, half-awakened land,

Tremendous continent of this tiny isle,

And civilize it as well as they can.

I’m trying to purge my email accounts of tens of thousands of emails.

I spend hours every day searching the internet for traces of information about people, mostly women, who came before me, specifically domestic, mundane information, quotidian beauty, extant records of ordinary lives.

I started to delete my old Instacart emails, then realized that they serve as a Covid timeline, a record of what we ate during those years and what food cost (so much less!) and always, when I remember the pandemic, two memories pop into my mind.

One is of Ezra’s birthday in mid-March of 2020, when we were trying to celebrate while keeping our household and my eldest daughter’s household separate. We ordered Campirana (the best Mexican food in Evansville) and Clara’s little family came over, and Ezra was living with them at the time, and they ate on the porch while we ate in the kitchen and talked to them through the screens. It was the saddest birthday party ever.

My other first Covid memory is of a pop-up potty tent we bought for a vacation we took later that fall to Grand Marais, Minnesota, where we stayed in Cabin 7 on Clearwater Lake. We went in mid-October, off-season, so we had the lake to ourselves, and it was not very expensive, and to avoid going into gas station restrooms along the way, we stopped by the side of the road; the tent made privacy possible wherever we were. I remember giggling with my grown children and one-year-old grandson in the cool sunshine at the edge of a rural Burger King parking lot while we took turns using the tent. I remember a happy but heartsick feeling in my chest, not unlike the feeling I have when another milestone has been accomplished by one of my kids—first steps, first grad school application. First pandemic, I remember thinking. Baby’s first end of the world.

So, you can see why I’m reluctant to delete my Instacart history, though I suppose I can now that I’ve recorded a few of the memories elicited by those particular bread crumbs of information.

I leave for Ireland on Wednesday. Dave will drive Maddy and me to Indy where we’ll spend the night and fly out the next day. I’ve only ever been out of the country once (I don’t count Canada), to Vienna, where Dave and I did a university-funded research project together on the presence of Sigmund Freud in popular Viennese culture. We went for ten days in December/January of 2008, and our flights were nightmarish, so we also had a one-night layover in Paris, a happy if unsatisfying accident. Dave asked what I would do in Paris if I could only choose one thing, and I chose Notre Dame, and there was a Christmas mass happening with lace-veiled Parisian grandmothers lighting candles and a giant swinging censer, and after we had hot chocolate under heated lamps. We were so worried about money on that trip, and it was very hard for me to be away from the children for ten days—the first time I’d ever gone anywhere. When I couldn’t sleep, David would walk with me in the middle of the night to the Mozart Stüberl which was next door to our cute little apartment at the Hostel Ruthensteiner, and I would order the Kaiserschmarrn and black currant juice. I’ll have memories of Ireland soon. I’m hoping to take the whole family next year.

I’ve been reading Edna O’Brien’s memoir, Country Girl, which is just what I need right now. Gorgeous language. Melancholy as medium. Feeling intimate familiarity in unfamiliar circumstances, blissfully spirited away from this burning world to another. All the worlds have always been burning, and matriarchy is the only answer. I’m more convinced of this now than I’ve ever been.

I’ve been listening to my playlist sheila heti loves me, thus named because a fancy writer friend told me so during June residency at Bennington, where Sheila was a visiting writer and commencement speaker. I’m such a fan of her work and her mind that I had to focus hard during our conversations just to sound sane. “Sheila loves you,” my friend said after, which seemed utterly fantastical, both the love and the use of her first name in a conversation he was having with little old me, so I made a melodramatic metallish playlist about it—lots of Chelsea Wolfe, etc. And, I made a second one, dancier, called remember to be a little dumb, based on something she said during her Life of Letters conversation with Mark Wunderlich, about how the best writing is a little dumb, how it doesn’t know too much, which is true, I think.

This week Clara and I split the cost of a dumpster, so that was what I did yesterday to celebrate the 4th—got rid of a bunch of trash from our porches and yard, old appliances, etc. I love clear spaces and clean surfaces, maybe a little too much. I also made a chocolate cake that I’m going to have for breakfast this morning. I’ll write more soon, I think. I’m starting to like it here.

And, when the book came out, and it was not a NYT bestseller, I could tell right away that I had disappointed them. It was a terrible, deeply familiar feeling, and I was not prepared for it. My six-figure Powerball-esque advance, which had seemed like enough to sustain me (emotionally) for the duration of my writing life, became a millstone around my neck, a debt I could not repay. The New York City literary set had seen something in me and bet on it and lost their money. Upon publication, I was asked to write three essays to promote the book, but I only managed to eke out two (here and here). I was mitigating the aftermath of my own truth-telling in my freshly complicated, newly authentic life. I was terrified and exhausted. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Suddenly, the third elusive promotional essay was a load-bearing wall, holding up the whole house of the future of the book, or at least that was how it seemed. I spent nearly eight hours with Bloomsbury’s lawyer, wringing my pages for potential lawsuits, creating a master list of everyone in Kin who was dead (the dead cannot be libeled). I did four passes with Bloomsbury’s copyeditor, though the final pass I handed off to my husband, because I was that tired of myself. I couldn’t stand my pages. I couldn’t produce another word.

Unwittingly, my vision of success, to finish and publish a book that mattered, which had seemed like a pipe dream for most of my life, was replaced by the publishing industry’s vision. Disappointing them devastated me, and that devastation was amplified by my own naivete, which, for the record, is not an act. “You move through the world like people are going to love you, and they do,” a friend once told me, baffled, and I knew when she said it that it was true. I built an entire life, my dream life, on that gamble, that I was lovable, that I could win them over. I am always crushed when love is conditional, superficial, and ordinary.

Publication also meant the end of my reputation, such as it was, and thus the end of my relationship to my family—not just my immediate or extended family, but my greater Appalachian family, too. In writing for public consumption the parts of my story that I was supposed to carry to my grave, in using them to complicate traditional hillbilly narratives, I positioned myself as a traitor to the task of keeping up appearances, which meant losing the support and friendship of every woman in my life who was committed to that work, to maintaining a blameless, whitewashed image of abused country people who did not want to admit to the abuse they’d experienced and perpetrated, women who were committed to preserving an unassailable archetype of Appalachia that was meant to replace the humiliating stereotypes we’d lived with for so long.

For five years now, I have reckoned with these outcomes, and all the others too. In the first month after Kin was published, I received a generous and heartfelt letter from the first female foreman of an East Kentucky coal mine, and at least once every week I hear from another person, usually a woman, sometimes from Appalachia, sometimes not, sometimes working class, sometimes not, sometimes a deconstructing Christian, sometimes not, sometimes a hopeful writer, occasionally a writer I’ve admired for decades. During one of our first conversations, my agent told me this would be true, and thank heavens he was right.

And yes, publishing my book meant the death of one version of myself, but countless others have sprung from the cut, regenerated selves that could never have existed otherwise. My life is all about writing now, which was, until Kin, an unutterable dream. I teach students—undergrad, grad, non-trad— from all over the country (my recent roster includes folks from Kentucky, Washington, New York, California, Michigan, Arizona, Guatemala, and Japan. I help usher meaningful books into being. I edit and blurb and recommend. I travel further and further from home, figuratively and literally. Next month, I’ll be in Dublin, following the ghost of James Joyce around the city and kneeling at Blake’s mottled feet in the National Gallery. In August, I’ll be at a residency in Door County, Wisconsin, on Lake Michigan and Green Bay. I’m currently writing two books, so I’ll work on them in both places. I’m also writing an essay on commission for The Believer, another dream come true, and even that came to pass because a potential editor discovered Kin and tracked me down, which is another kind of milestone, just as important as the Washington Post review, and Oprah Daily, and the Stanford University Libraries (Kin made runner-up for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing).

In fact, milestones that exist beyond the world of commerce and capitalism can be enough to sustain a writer. The first time a writer you love messages to say that your book is displayed in no less than three places in a tiny boutique bookstore in Los Angeles. The first time someone sends you a link to the Minnesota Public Library which has several copies of your book and a waitlist of more than a hundred people. Your first FaceTime with a bookclub. Your first FaceTime with a bookclub made of folks you went to high school with. Your first affirming message from an extended family member you never would have guessed would believe you. The first time someone who doesn’t know any better, someone who’s at the beginning of the writer’s life asks you how it feels to be famous, and suddenly your mother is standing beside you dressed in her best clothes, makeup and hair done just for the occasion, and she’s beaming. She’s squeezing your arm and leaning into your ear. She’s saying, You did it, Shawna Kay. You really did it. I knew all along that you would.

Last night I set an intention for myself, which was to embrace my own success and enjoy the fruits of my many labors. I lit an old IKEA candle which is supposed to smell like moss, I think, and wrote my intention on a sticky note. I lit a stick of incense labeled “intentions” from a dollar bin and waved the jasmine-scented smoke toward my nose with cupped hands. I held a calcite orb given to me by Erin Jean, a beloved Bennington student at the end of our term together (after I described my creative process as perpetually, hopelessly circling a glowing, impenetrable orb), while I let my mind empty, and waited for an answer about what embodied action might be needed to fulfill my intention. Another writer friend named Sunny had given me a small envelope of black salt last summer after a retreat, and I add it to the ritual, sprinkling the crystals onto the sticky note, calling on the wisdom of any ancestors who had embodied the necessary action for my intention, which I had also done when unexpectedly midwifing my granddaughter Alice into the world, and she and my daughter survived, and that felt like confirmation of some kind. I realized the action I would need to embody was self-love, running toward what makes me happy instead of away from it.

I felt forlorn and foolish, which I often do when I ritualize my life. I’m not convinced that any of my ancestors, even the most recent, were ever capable of self-love. So much of Appalachian culture is about extreme humility and self-denial, especially for women. The ideal Appalachian woman would never love herself, because she does not have a self to love; she is utterly selfless. And yes, I know this belief is paradoxical (Truman Capote was also right when he observed in The Grass Harp that Kentucky women are “highborn and hellion-hearted”) and that it extends to all American women. Still, the mountains have always been, ironically, a kind of canary in the coalmine for the rest of the country, and our past, our plundered coalfields and decapitated landscapes, have represented, for more than a hundred years now, the future of the rest of the nation—and ultimately, the world. We have been screaming from the mountaintops that the dystopic dream these powerful men are bent on manifesting is horrifying and exploitative and bleak. We are the embodied aftermath of unchecked industry. Appalachia is Cassandra, and nobody wants to believe her. It’s easier instead to point and laugh.

Five years ago, I published my first book, which I began writing in 2015—or, in 2010, if you count the poems I wrote as a graduate student at Bennington, which I do. My poems, which were mostly about religious trauma and problematic family history were good, but they were not great, and my friend and mentor, Mark Wunderlich, advised me to write a memoir, which I did not want to do. I knew such a book would blow my life apart. I also knew I wanted to try. “Write it for your children,” he told me, “They have a right to know who their mother is.”

After a year and a half of writing in circles around myself, I had a handful of pages, essentially what would be the prologue of the book. That same summer, I received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in nonfiction ($30K, which was exactly what I was making teaching full-time community college in Pikeville, Kentucky). The following month, I was taken under the wing of Benjamin Anastas, whose books had changed my mind about what nonfiction could do, and by Christmas, I found myself in conversation with a celebrated Fifth Avenue-ensconced literary agent. All of these moments felt like signs, though my inner (culty Christian) child worried from day one that they might be signs I was losing my way, flitting headlong like a doomed moth into Darkness, mistaking it for Light.

Writing Kin killed me. By which I mean that the me that existed before the book is gone. Even the world she inhabited is gone. My mother died while I was writing it, which felt like the most ominous sign. “I want you to be a big New York City writer,” she told me from her deathbed. “I want you to be rich and famous.”

I did not understand that the relationships I was forming with my publisher and agent were ultimately capitalist. It’s embarrassing to write, but it’s true. I did not protect my heart, because that’s not how I move through the world. Honestly, even if I’d understood my situation better, I’m not sure it would have made any difference. Survival for me has always depended upon radical acceptance and openhearted curiosity about EVERYTHING I experience— the good, the bad, and the ugly. When Tennessee Williams via his mess of a mother via Blanche DuBois admits that she’s always depended upon the kindness of strangers, I know exactly what he/she means, how loaded that statement is. I have no regrets about how completely I love people.

…To be continued soon!

I used to think of my writing routine as an anti-routine, my process as anti-process. I’m always thinking about writing, but I’m feral and hyper. I don’t make outlines, but I do create running lists of scenes I know I need to write, which are usually memories that baffle and revisit me on the regs. Sometimes I’ll remember something for years before I realize that’s what’s happening, and that I need to write it, almost like a hallucination I don’t recognize as such until the story of the memory feels as real to me as my daily life.

I feel about TV like some folks feel about the babysitters who raised them; unlike Tartt, I nearly always have a television going. (I’ve been thinking a lot about Zadie Smith in this interview, in which she talks about how social media, statistically, has stolen four years of her child’s life, and how she misses the simplicity of a basic television addiction.) I watch shows and movies repeatedly and VERY neurotypically—until I know them by heart.

The Outcasts is my latest obsession.

Atmosphere is where story begins, and I love the atmosphere of this film, which was completed in 1982 and broadcast in 1984, the first Irish feature film in fifty years. It revived Irish cinema, though it was directed by Robert Wynne-Simmons, a posh British fellow who wrote the screenplay for The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The story is set just before the Irish Potato Famine and influenced by William Blake’s The Book of Thel (have I shown you my tattoo?) and the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

Maura O’Donnell is an outcast, bullied by her family, bullied by her village. “I don’t know” is her answer for nearly every question. A fiddler-shaman known as Scarf Michael becomes her lover and her teacher. The villagers decide to kill her. Scarf Michael may or may not save her. The ambiguous, protracted ending tears my heart out every time.

Maura: Do you always sleep in graveyards?

Scarf Michael: Only now and then.

The daughters of The Seraphim led round their sunny flocks.
All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air.
To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day:
Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard:
And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew.

— The Book of Thel, Part 1, lines 1-5

Henry Clay Moore’s daughter was named Susannah, or Susie, and she was from his first marriage, which I believe ended when her mother died in childbirth. Her father had lent all their guns out to other people who were being terrorized and was trying to hold off the band of twenty-five armed klansmen with an axe. And, he wasn’t a prosperous farmer, he was a carpenter who lived in town—thus the axe. Susie leapt from a second-story window, landed on a klansman, wrestled his gun away, and opened fire on the band of 25 men, who had broken into their house and were trying to burn it down. The commotion she created alerted the other townspeople, who then came to the family’s rescue; this all took place on Main Street in Hindman, Kentucky, in 1898. Henry had fought for the Confederacy, and he was a prisoner of war until 1865 (though the Yankees gave him at least one parole so he could go home and tend to his family), but he must have had some kind of a change of heart, because the Ku-Klux targeted him on this particular night for speaking out against their women-whipping raids. There were several other children in the house with Susie, who was clearly familiar with conflict and men and guns. I detest the way these stories are always framed as women defending the very important lives of the men they lived with, as if they weren’t fighting tooth and nail for their own freedom and survival.

I just finished Mazzaroth: On the Constellations by Frances Rolleston, and I’m obsessed. Considering its potential as underpinning for my novella, which is about the Women-Whippers of Eastern Kentucky, or rather, about a handful of the hundreds of women they whipped. I’m combining the Mazzaroth conceptually with the short-lived No-Hellers, or Primitive Baptist Universalists (another obsession of mine) to create a utopic secret religion for my characters. The term (Mazzaroth) is a hapax legomenon, a word appearing only once in a text, which means nobody knows exactly what it means, which makes it perfect for fiction.

Eating:

Our chickens are going crazy right now, so I’m eating so many eggs—jammy eggs on toast, egg salad with lots of dill, deviled eggs. I might pickle some eggs today. There’s still a nip in the air (so grateful we’re having a real bit of spring), so I’m making vegetable beef soup. We eat mostly vegetarian these days, but I found some ground beef on bigtime sale and put it in the freezer, and we’re having some in our soup today. I eat like a medieval peasant most days, and happily.

Playing:

Can’t get enough of Slayyyter’s WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, especially YES GODDD and $T. LOSER. Jesus. I made two playlists public on Tidal this month: Every Spring Is Sad and Go to a Quiet Place (neither of which contains any Slayyter). The playlists are still works in progress, but if you’re looking for newish music, you might enjoy. The Magnificent Moon by Mildlife is my current favorite song (released in 2018).

Obsessions:

May-kover, where I get my shit together at least briefly before summer travel/work runs away with me, which entails reading, writing, exercising, eating well, meditating, one house project, and one garden project every day-- and no spending. Cancelling subscriptions, eating from my pantry.

Jean Ritchie (always). Mazzaroth. Cataloguing forgotten Appalachian people. Contrary to popular belief (and to what I was taught in school) people lived in Letcher County, Kentucky, long before the mining companies appeared, long before it was Letcher County—and, of course, for thousands of years before the settler-colonizers (my ancestors) arrived. I’ve been working hard to track down which Native populations were actually living (for half the year, it seems, in summer and fall) on the Millstone, Boone’s Fork, and Rockhouse Creek sections of the Kentucky River which is much more difficult than one would think, but I believe I’ve identified them as the Fort Ancients (a separate but “sister” culture of the Mississippians). The Fort Ancients and my ancestors just missed each other, since my people arrived in the first decade of the 1800s and the Fort Ancients were gone by 1750, likely killed by the spread of disease from earlier settler-colonizers over the Pound Gap/border in Southwest Virginia (also my ancestors).

I also had no idea how many free Black people lived and owned property in Eastern Kentucky long before the Civil War, or how many were killed by the Klan in Letcher County around the turn of the century, or how few of those deaths were acknowledged and/or recorded as wrongful. James Baldwin said, “One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don’t know who they are or where they come from. And that’s why you think I’m a problem. I am not the problem. Your history is.” I take this admonition seriously. I want to know the truth about who I am and the people I come from.

Also, I’m obsessed with Heidegger’s poem-essays in Poetry, Language, Thought, especially this one:

When the mountain brook in night’s

stillness tells of its plunging

over the boulders…

The oldest of the old follows behind

us in our thinking and yet it

comes to meet us.

That is why thinking holds to the

coming of what has been, and

is remembrance.

Wouldn’t that make a beautiful epigraph?

Recommending:

Baskets is a perennial favorite (though it’s on Disney, but you can get it from the library, too). In the Company of Wolves and Kurosawa’s Dreams (both on Tubi). Anything with Shelly Duval—just rewatched The Shining. I rewatch so many movies and shows downright chronically. I have two beautiful writer friends with brand new books: Beth Howard’s Song for a Hard-Hit People is available now and Hugh Ryan’s My Bad: A Personal History of the Queer Nineties and Beyond will be out at the end of this month.

Trying:

Not to be anxious every moment of every day, and that’s a full-time job.

One of Everything by Diane Gilliam Fisher (poems)

The Slicks by Maggie Nelson (essay)

A Fig and a Fither by D.F. Daves Smith (poems)

Words for Dr. Y by Anne Sexton (poems)

Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Marcia Marquez (stories)

In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) by Marcel Proust (novel)

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (novel)

Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders (stories)

February:

Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch (micro-essays)

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (novella)

The Gold Cell by Sharon Olds (poems)

The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (poems)

The Mountain Feuds of Eastern Kentucky by Noah M. Reynolds (short nonfiction)

Solidarity with Children: An Essay Against Adult Supremacy by Madeline Lane-McKinley

(plus two theses for Bennington)

March:

P.E.A.C.E. by Chariot Wish (poems)

August, September, October by Craig Morgan Teicher (poems)

The Owl Invites Your Silence by Richard Parisio (poems)

Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart (nonfiction, reread)

The Old Regular Baptists of Central Appalachia by Howard Dorgan (nonfiction, reread)

In the Hands of a Happy God: The No-Hellers of Central Appalachia by Howard Dorgan (nonfiction, reread)

April:

Moonshine: Its History and Folklore by Esther Kellner (nonfiction)

Poetry, Language, Thought by Martin Heidegger (philosophy)

The Mystery of Ghostly Vera and Other Haunting Tales of Southwest Virginia by Charles Edwin Price (stories)

Claire MacDonald’s Scotland: The Best of Scottish Food and Drink (cookbook/nonfiction)

Mazzaroth: On the Constellations by Frances Rolleston (philosophy, kind of)

I’m realizing only now that I chose both books for their geography. Diane Gilliam Fisher is native to and still lives in Ohio. I took a poetry class with her in 2011 in Hindman, Kentucky, at the Appalachian Writers Workshop, and spent a good portion of the class trying to think of something meaningful to say in her presence. I’d pored over her collection, Kettle Bottom, which was set in a West Virginia mining town during the 1920s, and I was floored by the way each poem seemed to fling itself from a treacherous precipice of personal and collective memory. Maurice Manning, one of the early champions of my own work, led the class.

How I Came to the Table

By Diane Gilliam Fisher

It could be any table: our round formica maple,

With its newborn calf legs spindly and splayed,

Maybe Aunt Mae’s pearly linoleum top, gray,

with little red waves marking each place,

or Grandma Novi’s oak table, leaves that dangle,

pedestal with mangled claws.

What matters is, there are always women

around it, and not enough chairs for girls.

Mama doesn’t want me there, perched

stiff-armed on the counter, heels knocking

at the cupboard doors, when the talk turns

to what matters: unexpected bleeding,

broken water, strange growth my aunts measure

by pinching their thumbnails down

from the tip of a finger.

The night no one sees me, I am fourteen,

Standing at the refrigerator door, listening

to Aunt Juanita tell how my cousin Debby

ran away with her skinny friend Lisa, something

about three men in a car. “Hopie,”

she says to Mama, “they molested those girls.”

I go blind there. I have no memory

of getting back to my room, or of everyone leaving.

Mama checks on me later, stands in my door

With the light behind her, asks if I’m alright.

I say yes.

We wait a week, then go see how they’re doing.

Back in her room, Debby tells me, “They made us

do everything.” I don’t even know what everything is.

But she has to talk, I have to let her:

They said they’d take us to McDonalds, then give us

a ride home, all the way to Bellefontaine.

They were nice. They had kid sisters themselves, they said,

they wouldn’t hurt us, it would be OK. But we stopped

at this empty trailer, one of them said they might

murder us, bury us under that old trailer

and our Mom and Dad would never know where we were.

I had two of them on my

and Lisa couldn’t stop screaming.

A month later, I’m trying to squeeze through

to Mama, through my aunts around the long,

narrow table in Grandma Novi’s lean-to kitchen.

I hear Debby has got her period. Good.

Grandma sees me, looks away, nudges Mama’s knee.

“She knows,” Mama tells her, slantways. I turn

Away, but Grandma leans forward across her table,

says, “Move over, Mae. The girl’s coming.”

As I remember, Manning urged us that day to collect old anthologies of poetry and to track down the lesser-known contributors of any poems that stayed with us. He’d brought a stack from his own collection to share, and he’s still one of the best readers I’ve encountered, even now, so I took his advice, compelled by the idea that there might be a whole world of brilliant writers out there who will never publish or will only publish a little, that their work might be especially revelatory, a good reminder that any audience is a luxury, that so much of publishing is luck (though, granted, it’s hard to get lucky if you’re not actually writing). He also demonstrated a technique that actors might use to make themselves weep, then connected it to the sonic properties of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

A Woman Is the Heart of a Home

By Diane Gilliam Fisher

Some days, the heart wonders how

she ended up in such a responsible position,

moving the blood along and never

going anywhere herself,

never visiting the elbows or going

to see what the toes are doing.

The heart gets a hankering, some days,

for a new sentence to sing,

but an old rhythm thrums

and drums through her rooms,

a bass line, a syntax whose momentum

the heart is hard-pressed to overcome.

The hardest part is, the heart can’t stop

even for a minute, wait for a second wind—

Someone will come running, counting

the seconds, pound on her like a door.

And the heart almost always relents,

beats, believes she should, accepts

what she’s been told: That of all

the muscles, she is the strongest,

and most involuntary.

One of my students asked me this week what I liked most about being a writer, and I told her that it was an easy justification for and validation of obsession. I’ve been an obsessive for as long as I can remember, but it wasn’t until I began writing seriously that I could see the value of my obsessiveness, the way I become temporarily, ecstatically consumed by the flashes of the world around me.

And, one of my cyclical obsessions is genealogy, though oddly not just my own. I like researching other people’s families, too, and when I began reading A Fig and a Fither, I became obsessed with its author, D.F. Daves Smith, or Daisy Frances Daves Smith, who was born to a reverend father in Atlanta in 1902 and adopted by her uncle, a locally famous judge, when she was six years old, soon after her mother died. Smith attended Agnes Scott College, one of the Seven Sisters of the South, and while she was there, she campaigned for on-campus housing so that female day students could safely and conveniently attend events after dark. After she finished her graduate degree in history at UPenn, she returned to teach at Agnes Scott, and in 1932, when she was only thirty years old, Smith organized an all-girls’ high school in Decatur, Georgia, where she served as principal for eleven years, until WWII compelled her to join the Women’s Army Corps as a private.

Whosoever Will (an excerpt)

By D.F. Daves Smith

…The nineteenth century men’s hopes revive:

Inventions promise a world in unison.

This brilliant hundred years’ phenomenon

Brings changes more than all past years derive.

Yet brawn of old and brains of new connive

To make the First World War a paragon

Of brute atrocity, a skeleton

Of the Second War; and then Appeasements thrive:

Grim tanks and planes and submarines, and gas

And mines and bombs keep Might, not Man, supreme;

Flamethrowers sear, and radar points war’s sting,

And atom bombs prevail; jet planes surpass,

Man’s value plummets down, brainwashers scheme;

Now guided missiles, H-bombs wait to spring…

When the war ended, she left the service as a second lieutenant, but by then the boys and girls high schools had been combined, and she was told no work was available for her, so she accepted a job as a mechanic at Esco’s Garage and began wearing men’s clothing and driving pick-up trucks. When the garage closed, she returned to teaching, but she never married, and census records from 1940 and 1950 list her as living in Atlanta with her lifelong partner, Willa Barrett, “the most treasured person in her life,” who was also a principal.

The Waiting Dancer

By D.F. Daves Smith

Slender and dainty and dressed exquisitely

In soft shades that fascinate the eye;

Waiting, poised, without hostility,

Indeed with gaiety and never a sigh:

How can it be that I should keep her standing,

Clearly a lady, that I should put her off?

It looks as if I myself a churl am branding,

An awkward lad that should country manners doff.

Well, it takes steady money to keep us two

And she must wait until my job is through.

Then I’ll hasten her needs and fears to rout,

Reach my hands to her, and turn her quick about,

Note her fractured arm, and deft and sure

Cement it at the break—figurine demure.

Sadly, Smith was also a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and her first collection of poems (which I have not read) was titled Half-Breed. And, isn’t that always the way? Our history is and has always been littered with dissonances and denials, with the same grotesque and unearned exceptionalism that might just be the end of us if we don’t figure our shit out.

I am currently writing a novella about the KKK in Eastern Kentucky, in Letcher County, who called themselves, among other things, the Women-Whippers. I’m mapping and cataloguing their victims, which included “lewd” white women, disabled people, and, of course, free Black landowners, all of whom were far more plentiful in antebellum Eastern Kentucky than one might think.

If I could go back and tell my young self that someday she’d be a writer, that she’d teach at beautiful colleges in Vermont and Indiana, that she’d have the cutest little office right across the hallway from her daughter, who would also be a writer, that they’d sit and talk about students and agents and book deals and poems, that another elegant writer friend who loves beauty as much as she does would send her a bouquet of ribbons from a shop in London, just because he heard her say she liked ribbons...she’d totally believe me. She’d say something like, “I knew it!” and she’d put her head down, and she’d work even harder, because she was always smart like that.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

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This past weekend, I saw Willie Nelson, who is ninety-two years old (sixteen in the pic above), perform in St. Louis as part of his Outlaw Festival Tour. The show opened with his video for Living in the Promiseland, because Willie stays to the left of things and always has, even in 1986 when it seemed the whole of country music had gone Republican:

Give us your tired and weak
And we will make them strong
Bring us your foreign songs
And we will sing along
Leave us your broken dreams
We’ll give them time to mend
There’s still a lot of love
Living in the promiseland

Living in the promiseland
Our dreams are made of steel
The prayer of every man
Is to know how freedom feels
There is a winding road
‘Cross the shifting sands
And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland

So they came from a distant isle
Aimless woman, faithless child
Like a bad dream
Until there was no room at all
No place to run and no place to fall

Give us your daily bread
We have no shoes to wear
No place to call our own
Only this cross to bear
We are the multitudes
Lend us a helping hand
Is there no love anymore?
Living in the promiseland

Living in the promiseland
Our dreams are made of steel
The prayer of every man
Is to know how freedom feels
There is a winding road
‘Cross the shifting sands
And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland

And room for everyone
Living in the promiseland

Halfway through his performance, which was epic and barefaced and at times uncomfortably vulnerable, I turned to David and said, “It’s like watching a supernova happen in real time, the active death of a massive star.”

The first Willie Nelson song I ever loved was Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys, which I heard on the radio in 1980, when I was only seven, lying across the speakers beneath the rear windshield of my grandpa’s green-gold Chrysler as I waited for Lakeside Elementary School to open its doors. Kentucky was so far away, and we were still part of the Body, still living in community, but it was an urban community in Duluth, and for the first time I was in public school, and secular music and television and movies were everywhere, and when Mom dropped me off for school, sometimes she let me listen to the radio. (Thanks to Kin, some of you are already familiar with this recollection.) In my memory, Mammas is often conflated with Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, which was much closer to a traditional ballad, but both songs were narrative, both had autobiographical bones, and both songs delighted me--Dolly’s because it centered the experiences of mothers with their children, and because it was a triumphant subversion of the tedious, pervasive hillbilly stereotypes that were already hurting my feelings on a regular basis. Willie’s because it was also about mother-love but it was ironic, right? After all, it’s confirmed cowboys who sing the warning, who ain’t easy to love and harder to hold, who never stay home and are always alone, even with someone they love. “He ain’t wrong, he’s just different/but his pride won’t let him/do things to make you think he’s right.” My Grandpa Roy was like that. Back then, I thought all men were either businessmen (doctors and lawyers and such) or cowboys, and I didn’t know any businessmen.

The second Willie Nelson song I loved was Pancho and Lefty (yet another ballad), which I listened to with my grandpa when we returned to Kentucky, and the third was Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain (remember Morgan Fairchild?), which I listened to dozens of times alone in my dorm room when I was a freshman at Berea College. I was dating a drug dealer named Jimmy, I think. I had worked for months and saved up enough money for a fancy stereo that had a remote control and a multi-disc changer and a double cassette deck, and my favorite tape was a collection of country favorites (I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called) that again reminded me of my grandpa. Willie and Merle singing Kern River and Dan Seals singing Everything That Glitters (Is Not Gold). I was so homesick for the mountains and for belonging, for the Appalachia that was disappearing right in front of my eyes. I knew somehow that my heart was about to be shattered. I think it already was. I was beginning to understand that an easy life/love/story was not in the cards, that I might be doomed to roam the earth like one of those men who were always alone, even with someone they love.

But, Willie’s very best song, I think, and perhaps the best country song ever written, is Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground, which is not about love, not really, or even about lost love, but about letting go when you’re not ready, because of course, nobody ever is. Of course, Angel is not the heart of the story, the narrator is with his labors of love which are completed with total devotion and without attachment, which are both conditions necessary to love-- or else it’s not really love, but control, right?

If you had not a-fallen, then I would not have found you
Angel flying too close to the ground
And I patched up your broken wing
And hung around a while
Trying to keep your spirits up
And your fever down

I knew someday that you would fly away
For love’s the greatest healer to be found

So leave me if you need to, I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground

Fly on, fly on past the speed of sound
I’d rather see you up than see you down

So leave me if you need to, I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground

Leave me if you need to, I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground

I love the place I’m from and the people who live here, even those who don’t love me back, and I’ll never give up on them or on us, not because I think America is the best country, or even that one country could be better than another country, but because it’s my country. This is the patch of earth I sprang from, that my babies sprang from, and their babies, too, the patch to which I’m tethered, the patch I’ve been tasked with tending. Don’t give up on it, y’all. Like every corner of the globe, it’s still beautiful and still worth your love and care, even in its doomedness--especially in its doomedness. If you had not a-fallen, then I would not have found you. Perfection is not part nor parcel of love, not real love anyway. It’s okay to love and celebrate our patch. It doesn’t belong to those businessmen anyway, no matter what they think.

Grandpa Roy at the beach, which he loved better than anything.

XOXO,

Shawna Kay

Hugh has written a couple (soon to be three!) deliciously brilliant books you should read. His first, When Brooklyn Was Queer won the 2019 New York City Book Award. His second, The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison, won the 2023 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association. He read from his forthcoming book at Bennington in June (not sure if I can leak the title yet) and brought the house down.

He’s exactly the kind of friend I hoped to have since I was a girl, a writer obsessed with writing, eternally interested in the strangeness of humanity and all its gorgeously complicated variations, an eccentric, singular mind that could not be dull or stagnant if it tried. He’s a gentle, cerebral anarchist who practices what he preaches, and we have so much fun together! We’ve shared maple creamees at The Maple Reserve in Manchester, Vermont. He can keep a secret as well as I can, and we’ve gossiped everywhere--on porches and in courtyards and on walks in the woods and (by making eye contact) right in front of people. We’ve crashed so many dreamy (read occasionally nightmarish lol) parties filled with writers we loved and admired and chattered about them for days. He talked me down from a pretty gnarly panic attack last summer, and only a handful of folks have ever seen me like that. I tend to nurse my wounds in private. I don’t like to be too much trouble, and I can’t stand to feel like a burden. Like, REALLY can’t stand it. I mean to say that I feel safe with Hugh. I think the whole world is safe with him. I’ve only ever seen him hot-tempered when someone he loved was being treated poorly. We are both tragically loyal people.

Sometimes I convince myself that I’m nothing. Or rather, I go back to feeling that way, as if my brain periodically reverts to its original settings. I’m not blaming that feeling on anyone, because for all I know, it’s my natural default, or maybe it’s about my culture or geography or gender. Honestly, I don’t think why I feel it matters nearly as much as that I do, and it has taken me years to figure out that if I’m going to be happy at all during this life, I need to be around people who don’t have to work hard to enjoy or appreciate or celebrate who and what I am. I think we all deserve loved ones who find us easy to love. I think Hugh and I will be friends until we’re wizened, dessicated, stenchy old bog hags. I will relish our time in the bog. I find him so easy to love!

(The afghan below was made by Hugh’s partner and brilliant textile artist and fellow redneck, Jason A. Bishop, whom I’ve never met, though I feel like I’ve known him for years. He knew instinctively what colors and tones I would love. Can you imagine? I’ll treasure it always. I’m planning to repaint my living room in one of these colors..)

XOXO,

Shawna Kay