8 Aug // we're all born screaming
Aug 8 2024
weather: gray and cool
mood: you know, pretty good!
music: St. Vincent, “All Born Screaming”
Hi,
I think last we spoke I said I’d next be in your inbox when things turned green again, but it seems I’ve missed that by a country mile. Perhaps we could blame it on the spongy moth caterpillars that defoliated the yard before it could fully leaf out? Or perhaps it has just been, you guessed it, one of those years. Hot, strange, dangerous, confusing…
But! Things feel different this month, don’t they? I know I’m not the only one thinking this way or feeling this way: there is a sense of possibility in the air that seemed laughably optimistic just a few weeks ago. And so here we are, with a bit of promo updates and some musings on book-things.
First, the promo.
It has been, despite the year socio-politically often feeling tense and strange and bad, a truly great year for Stardust House art-making. We’ve got jobs, we’ve got stories, we’ve got a hold-it-in-your-hands vinyl record…
I had the great pleasure and privilege of playing on some of Dani’s debut LP, Someday We Will Eat a Feast of Light, out under her Evelyn moniker—but even if I hadn’t touched a second of it, I’d be so damn proud of it. It has been an honor to watch Dani grow as a musician and songwriter, and this record is a snapshot of her process and of our relationship. It’s a record about growth and partnership and finding your way in the world, with friends and lovers and even just yourself. It’s fun, it’s moving, it is danceable and it is dreamy. It would mean the world if you gave it a listen.
also, related, we just played a truly triumphant NYC show at C’mon Everybody, our old stomping grounds. Six years since the last time we played there! Six years since the last time we played together with a full band! My, how the time flies. And tonight, we’re playing at Tubby’s in Kingston—first time we’ve played a hometown show in six years too, I suppose you could say. New hometown, new room, same joy.
I’m on the masthead at Literary Hub! Finally turned this nebulous sorta-gig into a real thing (or at least real for a certain value of real, in the modern age): I’m a contributing editor there now, running the Lit Hub Radio podcast network. We are slowly turning it into something new or at least just more robust and connected, all the while bringing in more partnership shows and trying to figure out what a sustainable literary podcast network should look like. This work also includes a ~new~ podcast, to launch in the early fall, that I can’t tell you about just yet but I think it’s going to be fun.
A good year for fiction, too: the birthday project is ongoing (if you have a September-December birthday, still time to sign up! if you missed it, watch this space in January for something related / a chance to catch up) but also I placed a story in midsummer magazine that is my second ‘sold’ story, but the first that’s been available to read widely. I also just found out that I’ll have at least one more story out online later this year and another in a cool print project slated for the beginning of the new year. It’s starting to feel like I’m actually a writer?
Okay, some musings—on books and hope.
It deserves saying again (and again and again, I imagine) that the sudden change of fortunes for the Democratic Party has been downright intoxicating. Yes, we know there is still work to be done and, yes, we know the election will likely still come down to a few votes in a few states and that’s closer than it ought to be… but also, do we know anything now? I mean, can we really be said to ‘know’ anything about politics these days or are we in truly uncharted territory where we must boldly step into possibility instead of relying on the way it has always been?
You could argue (and I have) that we’ve been in uncharted territory for a long time now: certainly eight years, realistically twelve, arguably twenty-four. I could pontificate on that stuff forever, and if you’d like to come to Kingston and buy me a drink, we can make a night of it—but that’s not (exactly) why I’m here today.
I’m here today because the good mood I’m in about politics—the effervescent optimism brought on by Harris, who is seizing this moment with a passion and grace almost unknown in American politics, and her campaign—has had an interesting knock-on effect with my reading. Namely, I’ve been in something that looks kind of like a rut.
It started about two weeks ago, making this a long stretch for me. I came out of my reading for the Tor podcast (oh! Voyage into Genre is back! pls leave a review, it would really make my day) and was eager to jump into some literary fiction that has been waiting patiently on my TBR—including some big books from this year! James, Tehrangeles, Bear… all of them left me wanting. (Yes, including James, which is certainly a great novel and I’ll be glad to see Everett win a boatload of late-career awards for it, but it isn’t the best book he’s written, I’m not even sure it’s top five.)
So then I thought, okay, I’ll go to my comfort zone: genre! But even there, I found myself struggling. I’ve snuck through the last few weeks with a galley of the new Sara Gran story collection as the only thing I could reliably fall back upon, but that has now concluded and so this morning I stood in front of my TBR shelves and went through a few books and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I’m in a good mood, why can’t I read?
And then I realized: it’s because so much of what’s come out recently has been… well, it’s been a product of its time! A dark, depressing, scary time! The new James S. A. Corey, for example: it’s a pretty intense alien invasion story, bleak to the point of grimdark at times. I loved The Expanse books and their ability to not shirk the darkness inherent in human conflict… but something about this new book just felt, suddenly, too much. I started a galley of an October release I’d been very excited about called How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster and while I totally enjoyed the writing, the bleakness of a post-climate/post-political collapse New York just… I don’t know, suddenly I didn’t want that, where a few weeks ago I found those stories a helpful balm.
I saw this quote on Bluesky the other day, reportedly from a Southern plumber in response to a writer telling him they write romance novels: “we need people to write stories to ease the heart.” And that’s really stuck with me. Our fiction has been focused, over the last little while, on processing some collective grief around climate change, the theocratic attempts to roll back civil and women’s rights—and that’s to its credit. Art should help us grapple with these things and lord knows we need to work it out ourselves through our artistic practices, just to be able to make it through the next wave of insane awfulness. But the burgeoning boom in romance makes me think that we’ve starved ourselves of something in the process. We have made ourselves harder than we needed to in the interests of protection, in an effort to avoid getting caught again by the forces of darkness arriving just as we thought maybe we could have one nice thing. “Can I have a little treat” energy, as though a little treat is all we can expect and maybe not even that.
If the last few weeks politically have shown me anything, it’s that we actually deeply need to be shown that we can not just hope but even maybe expect positive change. Harris picking Gov. Walz for her running mate is a perfect example: all the punditry and all of my still-in-politics friends were on about how it had to be Shapiro, he’s the only one who could confidently deliver Pennsylvania, the honeymoon is going to be over soon anyway and we have to do this like we’ve always done it. I myself got caught up in that feeling, that this is How It Works and so it must ever be. What joy, then, to see Harris pick someone who doesn’t have presidential aspirations of his own, who lives a model for how different a politician can be (doesn’t own stocks, former public school teacher, veteran, kind not because he has to be but because he genuinely wants to be)—and what does this moment and how good we feel about it tell us about how we live our lives more generally?
It has been very easy to feel like shit about the world of late, and it’s true that a new Presidential ticket doesn’t change the fundamental awfulness of so much: the continued US-backed genocide of the Palestinian people, the gun violence epidemic, the increasing likelihood that we’ve passed several major climate-collapse benchmarks, the fact that a solid 40% of Americans would rather elect a fascist theocrat than allow their neighbors to live the lives they’d like to. We will have to continue to work hard in order to effect change, and that work will be the work of all of our lives!
But here’s the secret, here’s the thing: we’re allowed to have a little treat. I daresay we’re even allowed to have more than that. There will always be a time for the darkness, for the lessons to be drawn from stories of oppression and resilience and fear and heartache… but one must have balance. It took me until the last few weeks to realize that I was out of it, that I had been out of it for a long time. We deserve to feel the joy of this moment, to reach for play instead of pain, to pull our shoulders back and stand up straight and laugh a little bit. Do it because you think it would be amazing, not because you think it is what you have to do or even what you’ve been told is the thing that everybody’s going to do.
That’s all for now, I think. See you probably with the October Country list in… golly, just a few short weeks, really. My, how the time flies. But for the first time in a while, I don’t fear this fall.
xo,
D