Greetings from Portland, OR where the rain has returned and there's a bite in the air. It's my 20th autumn in the Pacific Northwest and I spent the better part of Sunday helping a friend move to an apartment less than a mile from the office building where I had a job nineteen years ago. I was around her age then. I've grown used to living a life out of order, but it's still strange when new paths overlap with the old ones.

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IMPORTANT DATES: November 9th I will tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium for the first time! Please come say hello and tell your friends to do the same. Details at: https://www.portlandzinesymposium.org/

December 14th I will be the featured reader at Humble Poets Open Mic at that Stacks Coffee House. That's a Sunday, 4:00pm - 6:00pm, with the feature reading after eight-ish poets go. Details at: https://www.instagram.com/humblepoets_openmic/

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I've been working on a different sort of essay for the past few months. I read a book, Trouble Sleep, written by a trans woman in the mid-aughties. Released as zine then, and then posthumously published in 2017 by a friend. Whatever triggers my special interest/sicko mode was triggered and I started digging into the book's publishing history and the author's life. Usually my research is confined to what the internet and interlibrary loan will surface, but there's not a lot about her out there. She was not terminally online, and most of her zines were not digitized. The ephemeral nature of punk culture.

Instead I've been crawling box and folder listings of the rare and manuscript rooms of college library archives, learning the variety of policies they have on scanning, and most surprising to me: talking to people who knew her.

It's not quite journalism -- I still don't know what I want to say about both her and my reaction to discovering a woman two weeks older than me and sixteen years passed -- but it's been an interesting muscle to flex.

It's also a bit of a waiting game so y'all get a quick newsletter.

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