wresting my dreams out of the toaster
First: the next queer paperback giveaway will be three copies of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, by Andrea Lawlor. Paul is a shape-changer, who can make himself taller, shorter, more muscular or less, with any set of sex characteristics he desires, and he rampages through Iowa City, Provincetown, New York City, and San Francisco in the 90s. Lawlor is incredibly funny and insightful, and came up saturated in the intersectional praxis of ACT UP. Aside from Paul’s devastating commentary on the foibles of his friends, the book takes a very sharp look at exclusionary queer spaces, from the leather scene to the Womyn’s Music Festival. The book occasionally switches into a mythic tone, proposing various explanations for who Paul is and where he came from, all and none of which seem to be true.
If you’d like to enter a giveaway for the book, you can fill out the form HERE.
Second: you can still buy paperbacks of A Bloomy Head on my website for $14.74, including sales tax and shipping! You can also get paperbacks of The Changeling, Priest-Queen, and, now, Shipwrecked: Being a tale of true love, magic, and goats directly from my website! WE LOVE A PHYSICAL COPY OF A QUEER BOOK. Paperbacks of The Dragon Under the Hill will also be available very shortly from my website, and I am getting copies of Bewitched: Being a history of affection, enchantment, and housecleaning sorted out now.
Third: I am trying to get back on the cheesemaking train. I have successfully made poutine with fresh cheese curds, and I am eyeballing the recipe to try a gorgonzola dolce once more. Have a few process photos.
Fourth: Well, here’s where we come to the dreams jammed into the toaster.
The news is not so good! I encourage you to call your elected officials about Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a legal resident who was wrongly deported and is now being held in a megaprison in El Salvador, despite the Supreme Court ruling that the executive branch must facilitate his return as soon as possible, and Mohsen Mahdawi, another legal resident who was detained in retaliation for his pro-Palestinian activism. You can also throw in a call for Rumeysa Ozturk, a student who is still being detained in a deportation facility in Louisiana on the basis of a single op-ed she wrote a year ago.
I have been too tired and panicky to make more than tiny progress on my creative work — either the editing for The King in the Forest or the research for Regency Cheesemakers #2 — and I’m honestly angry with myself for not being able to head-down plow-through. There isn’t going to come a better, calmer, less terrifying day for me to work. There is now, and now, and now.
And yet! Knowing that does not equip me with the skills to bully myself into productivity, because the fact is that I have never been able to bully myself into working harder. I respond to sunlight and good sleep and long walks and good books and thoughtful art, which seems like a lot of work in these rotten and fearful times. But I went to see the exhibit of Edvard Munch’s prints at Harvard Art Museum; I dragged myself out to Trinity Rep’s production of La Tempestad, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest in Spanish and English; I started reading Riley Black’s When the Earth was Green, about the development of plants alongside the dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. I made rhubarb-raspberry shortbread bars and cake. This is the world I want, a multicultural world of queer science writers and tasty baked goods.
I have to convince myself every day to do my work, and every day I’m mad about it. I feel like I am both the mother and the children in Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”:
Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Best of luck in the upcoming days,
Sharon