Soft and Dangerous
Soft and Dangerous
Each night I go extinct. Each morning I wake and evolve again.
Before getting into it, a few things:
Portland Monthly Magazine approached me a few months ago and asked me to write a story set in Portland during summer 2022. I wrote “City Beautiful” fully intending it to be sent back, except to my surprised they loved it and did up a beautiful spread for it with art. It’s also online to read for free.
I’ve begun offering more classes, all via Zoom for now. Last week I announced the second round of *sigh*ence class and a new workshop I’m calling sci-fi for birds. There are only a few spots left (thank you everyone who’s signed up so far!). I plan to offer more in the future, and I’ll be better about sending out new class notices here before posting on social.
If I could, I’d press syringes and needles and hormones into the hand of every teen who wanted them. Trans teens have saved my life in the past. I’d like to do the same for them.
As a writer, its been a long time since I felt compelled to write directly about the struggles facing trans youth in straightforward nonfiction. There are others who write and tweet to counter the terrible op eds. But I have always felt an aversion to writing directly about it, as if by the very act of writing about the misinformation, I invite engagement with anyone who might argue the “opposite” position in ill faith.
In her essay "Europe and the Art of Seeing", from her excellent collection Out of The Sun: On Race and Storytelling, Canadian author Esi Edugyan writes about her experiences observing Black subjects in European portraiture alongside seeing Kehinde Wiley’s portraits for the first time. On Wiley’s claiming of an apolitical stance, she writes: “An artist has to feel they have the latitude to explore the issues and themes closest to their lives without feeling forced to take up the mantle of the spokesperson." I see myself inside this quote. Spokespeople are important, I think, but so is art, not divorced from the spokes, but as a mode operating outside of it that, hopefully, will push the conversation toward an unseen edge.
The truth is that I resent being stuck inside the same argument for 20+ years. There is nothing left to say that hasn’t been said. There are only those left who want to extinguish us. If I were to believe news reports, the NYT, and fear mongering, it seems true that this number is growing, But it does not seem true that any amount of arguing and persuasion will change their minds. To treat it as an argument implies two sides, when really there is only life or death. To quote from Sam Hamill’s introduction to his translation of The Art of Writing: Lu Chi's Wen Fu: “the poet’s art is both a gift to the writer and from the writer who understands that no great gift can be truly given or received in an emotional and intellectual void.” I cannot give my writing to an audience who has no interest in receiving it.
Every time I come back to this question, the only acceptable answer I can come up with is to continue writing my stories. Stories about trans women becoming mountains; about swarms of insects being misgendered and remembering trauma; about the many-eyed white monsters taking over your small town. Maybe they seem beside the point, but they continue to be the most vital thing I feel I can do. Though even this, occasionally, is not enough to contain the overflowing of rage and beauty I feel when confronted with these questions, and then I’ll turn to other art forms that don’t rely on the fealty of words, like the quilt into which I wove 5 years worth of used needle tips from injections, in an attempt both to soften the needle’s image as a bringer of positive change and healing, and to make quilt art seem more dangerous when in trans hands, among other aims. Though really, to write about it makes no sense to me; to me, it just exists as another expression of how it feels to live and be trans now.
This isn’t a credo, exactly, unless you define a credo like Bolaño does as a piece of writing meant “to give a vague sense of the unexplored territory into which one is heading.” In that sense, this is indeed a vague, directionless piece, trying to give shape to the vague direction I’m groping towards in my work. I like that. Each night I go extinct. Each morning I rise and evolve again. These are both hidden processes. The shape of this constant becoming and unbecoming is the shape of my work. According to Hamill, the “wen” in Lu Chi’s Wen Fu is a 3,000-year-old Chinese word meaning art, or “a pattern wherein meaning and form become inseparably united, become one, indistinguishable.” That feels as close as any definition of what it is I try to do.
What I’m Reading
I recently finished Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, which was incredible, having a nuanced attention sentence and paragraph structure on almost every page, in addition to the most lovable father I’ve ever seen in a book. I took Dr. Sullivan’s graduate seminar on African Diaspora Feminist Poetics a number of years ago, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for this book because I knew her intellect, insight, and generosity would make it great. I just didn’t know I’d like it so so much. Highly recommend for those looking for an emotional yet uplifting coming of age narrative and/or a novel unafraid to take its time and play (in a riotous, rigorous way) with language.
Publishing Opportunities
Salt Hill Journal’s 2022 Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize will accept submissions up to 1,000 words from BIPOC writers from Sept 5 - Oct 9. $500 prize plus publication.
smoke and mold is looking for readers to join our team!
Canthius is open for submissions up to 3,500 words until Sept 1. Pays $50 CAD per printed page.
AAWW’s The Margins is open for submissions and pitches on Black and Asian Feminist Solidarities. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Paid.
Electric Literature is open for pitches to Both/And, an essay series focused on personal narratives from trans and gender non-conforming writers of color. Pays $500.
Diode Editions is open for submissions to both its full length poetry book contest ($1,500 prize plus publication) and its chapbook contest ($750 prize plus publication). Both close Sept 30.
Don't know why I'm only just seeing this Aug 8 newsletter now, but thank you so much as always, Cal. I've been thinking a lot lately about faith and how it determines where and how we direct our efforts towards making (change, meaning, material things...). I don't have faith in a religion and I was raised to have no faith in political systems; I have a lot of faith in art and I have a lot of faith in education, even as I acknowledge the limitations and deep systemic problems with how people access, experience, and create both, so that's where I tend to direct the bulk of my efforts: in teaching and learning about/from art. (While also voting + joining and donating to activist movements, but honestly, I don't feel the same degree of faith that those efforts will make as much difference. I want to have that faith and I think it's important to act as though I do, but I lack the driving conviction I admire in the activists whose work I try hard to support.) Anyway -- without real faith none of our efforts can be sustained, and we make nothing. I love what you make.