I wrote this before the murder of Renee Good and the escalations in Minnesota. Before Alex Pretti was murdered defending his neighbors. I am, and have been, responding to living through American facism through these questions. I am connecting with people in my community, staying linked to my most important folks, continuing to learn from teachers of all kinds. I read this today from J.P. Hill and think it is true. I always read Margaret Killjoy and come away moved toward the world in powerful ways and her reporting from Minneapolis is no different.

I also published this piece in Xtra Magazine this week about my experience as a trans therapist with trans clients in this time of anti-trans assault. (The Lemkin Institute for Genocide prevention recently warned us that the United States is in the early stages of genocide for trans people.) 

This is the first of what will be a twice-monthly (that’s the plan) newsletter. I hope you will join me.

Subscribe to How Do We Live Together

This is the question I am asking in 2026: How do we live together? It is a question that has bubbled up often since it guided the first play I made with my ensemble theater company mates in The Syndicate over ten years ago. Our source material was The Bacchae by Euripides; we took the story of the god Dionysus punishing Thebes for its refusal to honor him as a story of conflict between ways of building a world together. Authoritarian Pentheus wielding power over the people challenged by Dionysus, who appeared to be offering freedom and pleasure - of course, that also came with a cost and Dionysus was wielding power too. But the women at the center of the story wanted to live differently, with more freedom and autonomy. I hear the refrain from the opening choral text of this play when I try to understand how we might survive together now: We live. We live, How do we live? 

My world now is rooted in a rural college town in western Pennsylvania, where being a spouse and a parent ground my daily living. I see psychotherapy clients across the state via telehealth and am trying to rebuild my artistic practice. I have also joined a large organizing project to prevent a fracked gas power plant and promised data center from being built in my wider community. And that question, How do we live together, is threaded through it all. 

If  I am going to let this question guide me now, I thought I could create a place where I can examine how that is happening, how all these parts of myself and my world are coming together. Reading Celine Nguyen’s newsletter from the end of 2025,  writing is an inherently dignified human activity, I was drawn to her discussion of writing toward knowing and the reminder that you become capable of writing the thing you want to write in the process of writing. I have always been a writer, filling notebooks with reflections and ideas across my life. Previously, much of my writing has been toward making performance, with two pieces about trans life and being a psychotherapist being my only publications. I want to share more of my thinking with other people. I want to learn how to be a better writer. I want to make connections with other people through this kind of work.

I imagine having an audience, however small, and a commitment to publishing a newsletter every two weeks, could provide the container I need to explore how I am building a life amidst the grief and fear of this time. I am interested in what I may discover about the web of my life as well as what I could learn about writing. I am hopeful for what the devotion to a practice could provoke. 

I am treating it as an experiment, alongside the experiment of living this year. For now, I will plan on sending a newsletter twice a month, approximately every two weeks. The topics will range but be connected to this question of living together and be rooted in the desire to explore and discover. I hope to have some readers and I hope to create another point of connection with people in my life and perhaps people I do not yet know. 

Subscribe to How Do We Live Together