“Places and those who inhabit them are indeed fictions.”
— Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return
(Before I lose myself in Dionne Brand’s work — very easy to do — I’d like to actually *plug* something. smoke and mold, the lit mag I started in 2019, is running a fundraiser to raise our contributor fees to $100, pay our assistant editors a per-issue stipend, start an editorial fellowship, and more. If you are passionate about supporting trans writers — and if you’re here, I assume that you are — please consider donating and/or sharing. Thank you!)
I love reading Brand. Her sentences cut through the academic bullshit to arrive at more impactful conclusions than many other writers. Whenever I open one of her books, I have the sense that I’ve been asleep without realizing it. As a friend who lives in Toronto — Brand’s adopted city — recently put it: “Toronto in her words is like a salve that has repaired my relationship with this city many times.”
It’s what we lay down overtop of the land to make it make sense to us, to force it recognize us (‘us’ is of speculative use here). One of the big questions I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is: does it matter where you learn a thing? Does place matter anymore? If a fossil came out of the ground in Montana, does it mean something different if transported to Seattle? How do those who touch it and love the rock of it learn to situate themselves in an extractive history? How do people learn to touch and love and leave, instead of accumulate?
I sometimes wish I could write without asking so many questions. Take more conviction in my own thoughts, state them as fact or opinion. I know I’ve said before that story doesn’t matter to me, but I also want to make clear that facts don’t particularly impress me either. Maybe all I care about is feeling, how certain kinds of clouds make me (s)cry, an obsession with the material and the emotions they inspire. Something that can be held in the hand cannot disappoint, even in the instance of its failure. Stories and facts disappoint all the time. A fact is just a story held in the hand.
Yesterday I sat longer at lunch than I should have so as not to disturb the young sparrow by my feet who had grown a whole life in the shadow of spoiled diners, subsisting on their croissants and grilled cheese crumbs. Our world is a fiction to the sparrow, my problems barely a blip on its radar. It has no radar, just magnetic poles with a weakened force in the face of a 1pm lunch special.
I’ve forgotten about the cow pattie. Left it till last and the spark of the idea is gone. Something about the concentric circles of shit radiating from a common center. Something about the flies and how its all they’ve ever wanted in one pile. Something about how there are hundreds of expanding cow patties scattered around the field I was walking in, each its own distinct fictional world.
What (else) I’m reading
Rajiv Mohabir’s Antiman, out now from Restless Books. In an author’s note at the beginning of the book, he writes:
Those who are not familiar with the Caribbean slur may hear it as “anti-man”: against man, which could be its own title. Another mishearing of the word, “ante-man”: before man, is also apt. To my niblings I am very much an auntie-man, be I Chacha, Uncle, or Mamu.
Yes to prefaces that reframe a title and situate me in an author’s lexicon!
Publishing Opportunities
Triple Canopy is hiring a new Deputy Editor in NYC. $50k, benefits, 4 days a week. You read that right. Apply ASAP.
Pleiades is accepting submissions for a folio of Latinx LGBTQIA+ Poets until Sept 30.
My book A Natural History of Transition, published by Metonymy Press, is available now.
First time here? Subscribe below. You can find more of my work at calangus.com.
The universe is an expanding cow pattie.
I like this so much. Story isn't matter, but it does matter -- but the urge to possess and dominate something so often occurs via the need to translate it into story. I just today read this line in a poem by Natalie Diaz and dog-eared the bottom corner of the page so I wouldn't forget to come back and write it down: "To read a body is to break that body a little." How can we touch something and love it without trying to keep it, either literally, in our hand, or by breaking it into comprehensibility? ("Keeping" is about possessing, and caring for, and it's also about disciplining, right? You keep house. You keep livestock.) Is love-making, in this case, the alternative to story-making? But what about when story is how we access love? I have been seduced by Annie Dillard's suggestion that humans could live like weasels (the single line: "We could, you know.") for 20 years now. I love and aspire to the storylessness of a weasel because of Annie Dillard's story about weasels (and maybe I'll fall in love with a cow pattie now too). Maybe story-making, at its best, is love-making rather than body-breaking. It could be, you know. Thank you, Cal!