On Living Wrong
Fire & ice
My chapbook CATARACT is out today from Fonograf Editions. I’ll be reading from it twice in Portland: 3/1 at Bishop & Wilde, and 3/21 as part of the t4t Art Collective pop-up show at Parallax Gallery in a rare collaboration with my husband, the musician and artist known as Ruune. On 3/13 on Zoom I’ll be joined by Steffan Triplett, whose chapbook Constraints is also out this month (no link for this yet, you’ll just have to trust me.) More new classes and smoke and mold after the jump.
On a recent morning I woke at 5am because two streams had suddenly diverged in my conscious thought. One stream was having the thoughts, while the other watched from a distance; both streams ran the same course as if on one of the last winter days before proper spring when the ice has started to loosen from the stream bed but is still a thin, transparent clinging molded by the static waves, allowing air and current to move beneath. This ice is watching, but not monitoring, not even observing; just occupying the same stream. Until it melts, and it will melt, has already started to now that the sky is blue and the interstate hums a few blocks away. I read for awhile from the perfect dreamy 5am book—Red Earth by Michael Salu (some books work best when read at particular times of day, and reading them then is like finding the skeleton key). But the promise of ice is that it will come back. Perhaps in a different form, maybe not even shaped like a stream.
Ice is always leaving impressions. Its shapes make the invisible visible: the tapering trickle of gravity that keeps us pressed to the cheek of the earth; the feathered wind, revealing its birdshape in delicately veined plates growing like plumage from the lawn; the hoarfrost clouding our windows, reminder of the membrane we erect around ourselves outside our homes, the tombs of our cars; the slick coating after a storm making a treacherous sheet of glass out of the public park—so easy to slide off, so willing to shake us around and hurt us, so unyielding, the land we have denied and therefore it denies us back. In labs and out in space there are nineteen kinds of ice, nineteen ways water grows hard, nineteen different crystal shapes the water stuff inside us can form given the right conditions of temperature and pressure, each unlocking further atomic symmetries the more pressed they become.
The glacier is the contradiction/exception. Because it has seemingly always been there, at least longer than our arbitrary separation of invisible/visible into categories; because they shaped us into social animals, carving moraines and valleys into our plastic animal minds which we filled with towns and stories, leaving erratic vestiges of kindness, compassion, cooperation, which might not make it in a world without glaciers. The glacier, then, is neither visible nor invisible—it’s that from which we come, part parent, part frozen ancestor, part cosmic unknown found throughout the universe, so big we cannot see it unless we get really really far away.
The Victorians feared the heat death of the universe, the exploding sun—as their thermodynamic understanding increased it obsessed them more and more, even though it is millions of years away (I recommend the wonderful Barri J. Gold’s book Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies, specifically the chapter about Great Expectations.) Today we fear the loss of the glacier, a totemic representation of the loss of ice and all that goes with it. I don’t want to sound like I’m mourning ice prematurely. For one, I don’t think it’s possible to mourn prematurely. Mourn often and always. At least it means you’re giving flowers while the subject is still around. I like knowing that I’ve thought enough about something or someone while they were still sharing this world with me. I’m just telling you about ice, ice and me. Like the words Brecht puts in Galileo’s mouth: “I sometimes feel that I would be willing to live in a dungeon 200 feet down without light, in absolute darkness, if it meant I would then know what light really is. And then I would have to tell someone.”
On that subject, mourning: I will try to be direct. I am not of the mind that I’m living right. No, wait, start over: there are moments when I am convinced that I’m doing exactly what I should be doing. That life is right. That I’ve made the right choices, chosen the right partner, live in the right place, spend my time doing things that are worthwhile. And then there are moments when I think I am living wrong. For example: I keep logging in and out. I keep thinking ‘if I just ground more here in this moment, I’ll be better.’ Then I’m reminded that this moment is not bearable, and if I could just connect with someone else struggling to connect in the same way as me then maybe things would be okay. Except no one is really looking to connect. We’re working and hustling and promoting (I’ve got a book coming out!) and so so busy, but we’re not connecting. Connection must be something that happens in the real world then, but if so, where is it? What is it we’re doing all the time? I can’t conceive of it. It is ungraspable, this living.
I am used to living wrong. Trans people are confronted with this accusation constantly—from parents, peers, administrators, clergy, well-meaning friends until they’re no longer friends or well or meaning; teachers, colleagues, politicians and those who take them seriously; the idea of a family. Even, I think, the most hardened individual, the most supported trans person held by their chosen community, their supportive therapist, finds this doubt creeping in about living wrong. Not in the wrong gender, mind you. It’s more amorphous than that. Because after all, who among us is living right?
I am not of the mind that I am living right. I’m not good. And even though Mary Oliver tells us we don’t have to be, I do think we ought to at least try for some kind of principled values that support life even if it isn’t ‘good’ by institutionalized notions of religion or propriety. All the propaganda about gay people being good and right and full of sunshine is, largely, horseshit. Do I like us more than straight cis people? Yes. But not because we’re good. Because we’re fucked and we know it. Because we see the world for what it is, for what it’s done to us, and we love it anyway by trying to change it. But this sort of fatalism doesn’t read well on a pride t-shirt.
I’m supposed to be writing about my new book. My books are important, at least to me. The books are how I communicate. All the writing I do around the books is, therefore, secondary, and a little confusing. What do I have to say here that I haven’t already put into CATARACT or STREAM, the longer manuscript from which the chapbook is excerpted, and which is still looking for a home? The chapbook, the third act from the longer work, is a venting of ecological rage, a huge channeling of rage, from the time I ran away from fires and smoke to the turtles who couldn’t to the vineyard workers who died in the fields unable to give a precise location to the ambulance drivers. Fire and ice—an overabundance of one consumes us, and the other shows us where we’ve been.
Other Updates
I’m teaching a new class called Starting Over, a workshop aimed at those seeking a stylistic renewal by concentrating on the smallest units of prose: words, sentences, paragraphs. I’m excited to be partnering with Threshold Academy for Starting Over (and for the next section of Short Story Multiverse), the online school started by poet & pedagogue Zoe Tuck to provide literature and creative writing education outside of academia.
And for all you poets out there, check out Sara Larsen’s new offering at Threshold Writing Poems all the Time, which sounds so dreamy!
smoke and mold submissions for issue 10 will open March 3-17. This is a slightly shorter period than past submissions, but we’re working on onboarding a new crop of readers at the same time as we’re migrating to a new website. It’s a lot! And we want to make sure we have capacity to give every submission equal attention and care.
I started seeds for the first time. They live in my laundry room, and sometimes I’ll go in there and just stare at them for a really long time, with added benefit of sunlamp. It’s nice. I’m supposed to wait to transplant them until they have one or two pairs of ‘true leaves.’ May you be on the lookout for true leaves as well.