Swift Change in Small Groups
On finding smaller chimneys.
If you’re in Seattle, I’m reading October 4 at Charlie’s Queer Books as part of the Transplants Reading Series. More on them below!
It’s important to state plainly the current desertions: Portland’s chimney swifts have left their communal roost of thirty years. A 100+ year old chimney atop a yellow brick elementary school in the most gentrified part of Portland has hosted nightly roosts of upwards of 10,000 birds on September evenings for the last 30 years. Their swirling cyclones of feathers funneling toward the stack has, in recent years, attracted crowds of 4,000 and more to a tiny hillside on the south side of the school. When we first moved here in 2018, this was a chief ornithological site I wanted to take in. So we took our edibles and dutifully staked out a spot on the overcrowded grass. The screaming children and the ongoing soccer game and the entitled white parents didn’t even matter so much then—we were gawking up at the sky, which had taken on a new dimension in the presence of so many birds moving as one—some close, some farther away—a milky way of birds in the fading daylight. That was a time when I felt close to strangers around me on a hill, and I felt closer to the birds who congregated en masse and sacrificed a few to the corvids and the raptors on their migration.
This year, the swifts have abandoned their chimney and Portland wonders why. But the birds are still in the city. They’ve just had enough of the bougie neighborhood. They’ve decamped in smaller groups to chimneys spread out across north and northeast Portland. Nobody really knows why. More space. Renovations. Too many people. Perhaps they just grew tired of the scenery. All are possibilities.
The swifts have spread out. They’re being tactical. They’re finding their kin. They’re cozying up in new chimneys resting up for the long journey. The birds know when to scatter and when to regroup along new faultlines.
I’m hoping we can take the hint. I’m hoping we’re paying attention to who is continuing with business as usual as multiple genocides unfold across the globe with the blessing of our country. If you’re still on Instagram, you may have seen me posting about Literary Arts and the Bank of America/Wells Fargo Portland Book Festival. Both banks profit from the sale and purchase of weapons via Raytheon, Elbit, Palantir and other tools of war currently being used by Israel to indiscriminately kill Palestinians. Big bombs don’t drop without big finance; Literary Arts would like us to believe that the same goes for books. They have delivered no public response to an open letter from hundreds of writers and community members asking Literary Arts to drop their big bank sponsors. Around the world, writers of conscience have been withdrawing from prizes and revolting against money laundering schemes posing as literary festivals. When we take money from the funders of genocide to fund our culture, we tacitly approve their actions. Even Microsoft workers, as part of No Tech for Apartheid, were able to notch a win this past week when the company announced they would withhold technology from Israel that it uses to spy on Palestinians. Certainly the mechanism of a regional book fair can’t be so hard to course correct as one of the world’s biggest tech companies.
I won’t be attending the book festival. This is business as usual for me, as I haven’t attended the last several years for the reasons stated above. Okay, maybe I snuck into a reading here and there without paying. But this year, I think it will be difficult to take seriously the grave and high-minded warnings about our freedoms and democracy from the writers ignoring who is lining their pockets, but what do I know.
So, if the big chimney is out, where can we gather? Where can we go to feel the warmth of our community at a time when it’s sorely needed? A few suggestions for smaller chimneys, and where to find them:
smoke and mold has a new issue out. It includes Canadian writer Chris Fash’s “Heroine,” a story told in a nonlinear fractured perspective about isolation, disability, old friends and who gets to transition. Chris and I worked on this story over the course of the last year, after they submitted it to our 11th issue, Disability Justice. I love working with writers to help a story find its final form and voice, and subsequently, find its readers. I hope you’ll spend some time with it.
I’m also hoping you’ll read the intro to issue 12. It’s a good example of why I think smoke and mold is particularly vital right now. A teaser:
We are independent of any national or university endowment, and so we can be full-throated in our support of transgender people, in our support of Palestinians, in our antizionism, and in our disdain of big banks laundering their blood money through the arts. These days, we do not take any of this for granted. While in the past we might have felt small and insignificant, backwards and obsessed with a narrow range of literary production, today all of this makes smoke and mold more vital than ever as a bastion of independent, globally-focused, trans-centered art.
At the same time, the fractal network of literary journals to which smoke and mold belongs keeps growing in exciting ways. Lilac Peril’s new issue TABOO recently dropped, and it is packed full of interesting writing by trans writers considering the question “When the fact of our existence is taboo, what do trans people still not want to talk about, even amongst ourselves?” Who wouldn’t want to dive into this collection??
Another small-batch trans publisher I’ve mentioned here before, Aster Olsen of Transplants zine, hosts a monthly trans reading series & salon of the same name at Charlie’s Queer Books in Seattle. I’m looking forward to reading there Saturday, October 4 at 7pm. If you’re in the area, come say hello and maybe read something?
Speaking of small trans publishers, Metonymy Press (based in Montreal) just celebrated their 10-year anniversary! Wow! I continue to be honored to have had my story collection published through them, a new printing of which just dropped. You can support them (and me) and buy it here.
ALOCASIA, a journal of queer plant-based writing run by the indefatigable Sarah Clark, just announced the recipients of their Microgrant for Queer Nature Writers. They are always open for subimssions.
I used to include more extensive lists of “opportunities” in earlier iterations of this newsletter, but the quickly became too exhausting. I would discourage anyone from thinking of these as opportunities for career advancement, and instead reframe what it is you’re looking for. If you’re seeking portals for protection, connection, solidarity and community, I can offer that to you in spades. Don’t expect to find the same in the big chimney.
Free Palestine, take back your labor. We keep each other free <3
i love the idea of being inspired by the birds’ example, and i would also just like to say that my brain somehow read “chimney swifts” as “chimney sweepers”, leaving me SO CONFUSED. “they roost?!?”