That Last Step Was a Doozy
Hi there!
In the last newsletter, I wrote about my fears that AI would replace a lot of writers relatively quickly. Within a week of sending that email, I heard from two different readers of this very newsletter who had, in fact, recently been laid off from their writing gigs and (in one case, presumably) replaced by artificial intelligence. The corporate shift away from human writing and toward AI writing is real, and it’s happening right now.
Wow, That’s a Dark Way to Open a Newsletter. Let’s Start Over.
Hi there!
Hope this finds you well, and that you haven’t heard any terrifying news about technological advances recently.
I have some exciting news! Last week, AHOY Comics announced a new anthology miniseries coming this September, and I’ve contributed a comic to it! The book is called Project: Cryptid, and it’s a five-issue miniseries collecting stories about mythical creatures like Bigfoot, the Jersey Devil, and the Loch Ness Monster.
I can’t share too much about my story except to say that the artist is the amazing Peter Krause, I shared some of Peter’s gorgeous preview art last month, and it’s a weirdly personal story set in the Pacific Northwest.
I’m not yet sure which issue our story will be in, but you’ll want to read this whole miniseries because it’s packed with stories from some of the best comics writers in the world today including Mark Russell, Paul Cornell, Alex Segura, and Alisa Kwitney, and the stories are illustrated by some amazing artists including Gene Ha, Zander Cannon, Jamal Igle, and Richard Pace. The first issue’s cover looks like this:
So if you’re the kind of person who buys monthly comic books at your local comic shop, I’d appreciate it if you subscribed to this one. I’ll also let you know when the issue with my story is set to be released, and hopefully there’ll be a collected edition to buy sometime down the line. I’m excited to read everyone else’s stories in this series, and I’m thrilled to be a part of this weird, wonderful comic that was written, drawn, colored, and lettered 100% by human beings.
I’ve Been Writing
For almost 20 years now, I’ve been a fan of autobiographical cartoonist Julia Wertz. Her online comic strip, Fart Party, was an early viral sensation and she now publishes regular strips with The New Yorker. She’s since expanded into full-length books about her life, and her newest one, Impossible People, is her most ambitious yet: A big book about awful relationships, recovery from alcoholism, and the awkwardness of becoming an adult. For the Comics Journal, I interviewed Wertz about her whole life and career. It is thousands of words long—we talked on the phone for two hours, with both of us walking around our respective neighborhoods—and I’m very happy with how it turned out. We discussed earnestness, regrets, and the idea of whether you ever feel like you’ve earned your life accomplishments. (It’s extremely weird talking to someone at length about their life when you’ve never spoken before.) I used to read the Comics Journal as a kid and their long interviews with comics professionals were always the epitome of cool to me, so I’m thrilled to be published by the Journal.
I’ve been reading Josh Feit’s writing, I think, for about two decades now. As the news editor at The Stranger and as a founder of Publicola, Josh has helped shaped my understanding of urbanism and what it means to live in a city. Over the past five years or so, Josh has gotten into reading and writing poetry, and he’s published two books of urban-planning-themed poems in the last year. I interviewed him about his poetic education and his poetry practice for Poetry NW. His enthusiasm for poetry is so enviable, and a reminder that it’s never too late to stretch your writing in new ways, which I find really inspiring.
For the Seattle Times, I profiled used bookstore Ophelia’s Books, which has been a steady presence in Fremont for 25 years. This story actually breaks some news: Ophelia’s has just recently brought on a new co-owner, and among other improvements the shop is going to carry a small selection of new books for the first time in its history. It’s always exciting to see booksellers adapt and try new things, and I have great faith that Ophelia’s will be even stronger for these changes.
I’ve Been Reading
Friends, I was absolutely charmed by Bea Wolf. It’s a comic book adaptation of Beowulf for and about kids, written by Zach Weinersmith and drawn by Boulet, who only has one name. The title character is a fearsome warrior in a suburban neighborhood full of children who are terrorized by a boring old man who hates youth. And it’s written in a riff on the old English of Beowulf. Here’s the first few lines: “Hey, wait! Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters, the parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof, the unbowed bully-crushers, the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers, fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.” Yes, it’s all written like this and it is glorious. I have no idea if kids would enjoy this book or if they’d find it impenetrable and frustrating. But for me, it’s the most joyous reading experience I’ve had in a long while.
Lone Women is not my favorite Victor LaValle novel, but “not my favorite Victor LaValle novel” is a category that still ranks above most other novels. It’s about a woman who moves to Montana as a homesteader. She’s got a mysterious past and she’s carrying a weird secret in a large locked trunk—and bad things happen when that secret gets loose. This one paired well with the book I read immediately after—Noah Van Sciver’s Joseph Smith and the Mormons, which is one of the best long nonfiction narratives I’ve ever read in comic book form. It takes a somewhat dispassionate, objective look at Smith’s life and the earliest days of the Mormon faith, and Van Sciver’s handling of the subject matter is nothing short of masterful.
I came across two titles on the staff recommendation wall at Third Place Books Ravenna that immediately spoke to me. The first, Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited, is a comic-book history about the history and importance of labor unions. I really dug the way Wallman presented information in comics form (with the unfortunate exception of two early chapters in the book that took a more abstract turn and which were for whatever reason incredibly difficult for me to follow) and it’s a stirring argument for organized labor. The second staff recommendation was Hourglass, a novel by Keiran Goddard about a maladjusted man who completely falls apart when a romantic relationship ends. I didn’t enjoy this one as much, but that might be because it was an incredibly dark book and I didn’t want to spend that much time in the dark this month. It’s well-written, but it’s a rough trip.
So naturally, I accidentally read another incredibly dark book almost immediately after: Hanna Bervoet’s novel We Had to Remove This Post. Bervoet is a Dutch author and this is her first book to be translated to English. It’s easy to understand why: It’s a novel about a young woman working as a content moderator at a social media company, and it’s based on journalism about the hellish duties of a content moderator. Basically, the narrator and her coworkers are exposed to horrendous filth posted online all day, every day, and they have to apply the social network’s esoteric and always-evolving moderation rules to determine what should be deleted and what should stay. It’s a dark novel about the junction between technology and despair, and I enjoyed it more than Your Driver Is Waiting, which I read last month and which is kind of in the same lane. But don’t read it if you’re in a sensitive place. I mean, yeesh.
Hernes is a real change of pace for Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a collection of very short stories about the residents of a coastal Oregon town—kind of like a more ambitious prose version of Spoon River Anthology. Hernes is a very airy, experimental read—it’s easy to understand why this one is published in a limited edition by a small press rather than one of the big publishers that puts out Le Guin’s sci-fi novels—but I’m glad to meet this side of Le Guin and to know there’s more like it out there in the world.
From the delightfully named Portland publisher University of Hell Press, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk is a collection of personal essays written in and about the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s fascinating to me now that those first lockdowns already feel like history, like a thing that happened, and reading this book marked the first time I really thought of the moment as history, as opposed to something that happened a while back.
After a whole bunch of false starts in which I’d wildly pick up and abandon books, I encountered a cheesy 1970s mystery paperback called The Running of Beasts in a local Little Free Library at exactly the right moment. Bill Pronzini and Barry Malzberg’s novel is a multi-perspective thriller about a community that’s terrorized by a serial killer, and I tore through it. Not groundbreaking, but a lot of fun.
The Longest Walk
On Sunday, May 28th, I decided to make an attempt at my fourth annual walk around Lake Washington. I usually try to circumnavigate the lake at the beginning of summer, when the days are long but before the weather starts to get too hot (and/or smoky, PNW summers being what they are in the age of climate change.) I wrote about last year’s hike for the Seattle Times, and I mentioned then that after walking for 103,000 steps, I felt like I had another hour or two in me.
This year, I put that hypothesis to the test. After leaving the house at 4:28 am I followed the same route as last year for most of the way—north to the Burke Gilman Trail, over the top of the lake, south through Kirkland, Bellevue, and Factoria—but then I cut over to Newcastle and down through Renton before circling back north to home. It added a little less than two hours to the trip—so, roughly six miles.
In the end, I walked 112,004 steps, arriving home at 11 pm sharp. I barely sat down or stopped walking for the entire day, except for bathroom breaks, picking up food to walk on the trail, or changing my shoes and socks halfway through the walk.
It was the most I’ve ever walked in a single day, and it will probably be the most I’ll ever walk in a single day. I can’t recall ever feeling quite as tired—mentally and physically—as I was by the time I walked in the door to my house that night. If I kept going for much longer, I think that I would have collapsed. But those ill effects weren’t long-lasting. Remarkably, I had no blisters (I credit this Foot Glide anti-blister balm that you spread on your feet like deodorant) and I wasn’t really sore the next day, just a little stiff in the hips when I woke up.
I’ve always been the kind of person who tends to extremes. I smoked a lot of cigarettes, until I quit cold turkey. I liked to drink beer a lot, until I stopped drinking entirely. I’m curious to see what happens now that I’ve hit this physical extreme. Now that I’ve done the most walking I can do in a day, does that mean my relationship to walking will change? Will my weekly long walks feel a little less compulsive than they have in the past, knowing exactly what I’m capable of doing? Maybe! But it’s honestly kind of fun to be at this point—to hit a milestone in a long-running obsession, and to find out what’s on the other side.
I hope this finds you well, and in the process of meeting some longstanding goals.
Paul