Letters from Meg— April

April isn't always the cruelest month, right? It felt slightly better than January and quite a bit more hopeful than November to me. I hope it was a good month for you, as well.

​I sold a story to Catapult about a giant pumpkin, and performed it at UC Berkeley. 

There was a symposium on Queering Science Fiction at Stanford, where I got to meet and hang out with Samuel R. Delany. There were panels with Alyssa Wong, Charlie Jane Anders, and Annalee Newitz. I wrote about the whole thing here. 

I got to see Hamilton at the Orpheum in San Francisco. I'm late to this party, but I have so many friends who want to see it and are working on it, or know that it'll be a long time before they have the pleasure. I have raved about it endlessly; both the original work (as if it needed my stamp of approval on top of Tony, Pulitzer, etc) and as a local production. The SF cast is so brilliant and so original in their interpretation that I am doubly glad to have seen it here rather than anywhere else. Also, my bff and I just happened to pass Daveed Diggs out on the street in front of the theater, so it felt like a charmed outing. 

There is a moment in Hamilton that is the best 30 seconds of theater I have ever experienced. I struggle even now to describe it in words that do it any sort of justice. In the song "Hurricane," which is my favorite in the show and gave me a mantra for life (I wrote my way out) the staging was beyond breathtaking. It literally made me question my physical reality. The props are minimal and the stage has a rotating circle in the middle of it, which is used to great effect to show the passage of time, as well as the way one person takes the place of another in our lives. In this number, I expected yellow storm-lighting, aligning with the lyric "a yellow sky." Instead, Hamilton is lit in shades of blue: blue-white at the center of the circle, mid-blue, then dark blue at the edges. There's an overlay in the lighting that shimmers like water. 

Hamilton is in turmoil; evaluating his choices based on his personal history and what has always worked for him. He is also about to ruin his life. 

To illustrate this turmoil, the chorus picks up the spare furnishings of his room: his desk, chair, papers, etc, and moves them outward in a rippling spiral, showing us the cyclone within. They move like mermaids, but no wires lift them. He holds his pen in the center, and everything eventually settles back down when he makes the call. 

The cyclone was so real that I lost my sense of time and place. I couldn't figure out if what I was seeing was real. I couldn't ground myself in my body; I was literally transported. I couldn't look away. If someone had told me the sea had swallowed San Francisco and I was watching an underwater performance of the greatest musical of the century, I'd have believed it. 

I walked out of that performance changed. I've been obsessed with the soundtrack as a work of genius for over a year. If you've been obsessed, too, I encourage you to get into this series of video essays by Howard Ho on how Hamilton works. It's a brilliant dissection of the chord progressions in Hamilton; how each theme weaves into another, and how the composition itself tells the story. 

That change in me is mostly felt in how badly I want to make art: good art, complex art, art that is contains the universal in the painfully specific. Some works of genius just make me rage that they are so good and I didn't make them. Hamilton is so divinely beyond that that I find it benevolently inspirational, like the Sistine Chapel. 

So I've been making art. I finished my horror novel (HUZZAH) and am going into rewrites and the early parts of the process to move toward publication. 

I won Shipwreck at the Booksmith last night, which is the most fun that you can have in San Francisco for $10. I'll be defending my title next month, with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid test. Join us there! 

I'll be performing on May 13th at Writers with Drinks with Lindy West, Zahra Noorbaksh, Julia Vinograd, and George Higgins. I'm going to be bragging about this for literally years, so you should show up to the real thing. 

Really looking forward to BayCon at the end of the month. It's a wonderful fan-con, not too crowded, with lots of great panels. I'll be speaking on women in fiction, queer utopias, dystopian themes, and signing books. 

It's going to be a jam-packed summer. This is the best life I've ever had. Thanks for helping to make it that way, and for reading. 

I have the honor to be your cordial correspondent, 

M.E