"Closets" epilogue
Hello friends, on this last day of June. (I thought this had gone out on 6/30! Let’s try this again...)
In honor of Pride month and Father’s Day, and my dad’s 72nd birthday, and the 21st anniversary of his passing…I’m re-releasing a story I wrote in 2015 called Closets.
Closets is a lyric essay comic about my dad, the mysteries he left behind, and me trying to make sense of my own identity in relation to his absences. All June, I’ve been sharing a few sections a week alongside updated commentary, and today we conclude with part 8, the epilogue.
Read Closets in full
Epilogue
Director’s Commentary, 10 years on
I really do wonder what my relationship with my dad would be like if he had survived. I don’t know that we would have been able to cross the language barrier to actually discuss any of it in depth, but I see the echoes in how we’re both drawn to spirituality, creativity, community spaces, marching to the beat of our own drums. As a kid, as a teen, as a new adult in my 20’s, I couldn’t see any of this…he was just the ‘bad guy’ in my personal family narrative. As I grow older, I see the foundations of all the ways in which I am my father’s daughter.
This epilogue is one small gesture at seeing more the whole of him.
I’m working on a longer essay about my relationship to that “mix of Buddhist and Taoist” lineage that I grew up around. It’s one of the final essays in the Wandering Grace series about place and (be)longing that I’ve been sharing over on Substack, tracing the stops of the Healing Pilgrimage that I took down the Pacific Coast flyway in 2023.
A big challenge is writing about something so embodied and so piecemeal (seemingly on purpose…turns out Taoism is as syncretic as I am). I’m afraid of my logical-puzzle-loving-brain overriding the wisdoms and memories of my body — especially when it seems as if the Western framework of text-based deity-based religions distorts my attempts to explain the lineage I was around as a kid.
The medium of Substack is words, and the medium of this spirituality is incense and prostrations, and somehow I have to dance them into weave.
In the meantime, you can read an essay that I previously published on Wandering Grace called “Not NOT Intact” about broken and healing lineages.
In the footnotes, I invoke myself as “something akin to (speculative) archivist, (time-traveling) storyteller, (zine) librarian.” How do I become more those versions of me? Or as Closets asks: Who am I not to become that version of myself?
I hope you have enjoyed reading along with the full story of “Closets”. If the story resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a friend. You can also purchase a PDF of “Closets” alongside other digital comics at my gumroad shop. A portion of these digital zine sales will benefit the Trans Justice Funding Project.
Other Offerings
📚 Buy my zines: print books here, digital books here.
🔔 Subscribe to my Substack, Wandering Grace. Subscribe to support the (un)learning and the (re)writing.
💕 Support via Patreon. I’ll be doing a pledge drive in July for my birthday! Be an early bird!
🍃 Order a copy of Utterly Compelled: A Fernland Studios Anthology. An excerpt of my visual poem “The Body of Water That Is You” is included in this anthology, featuring 16 contributors, edited by Zoë Gamell Brown and MaKshya Tolbert, and published by Loam.
Related & Resonant Work
💖 Grief Studies Zine is a 126-page compendium moving through six stages of mourning and decolonization. It compiles the writing, poetry, and art of over two-dozen global artists and writers. Pre-order here.
🌙 Death Project Manager shares a mortality workbook and digital toolkit, and often hosts workshops and events including Silent Book Clubs of Death.
💧 I’ve been reading (inhaling really) Written in the Waters by Tara Roberts. I was enchanted by the 6-episode NatGeo podcast called “Into the Depths” on Black scuba divers working to document and study slave ship wreck sites as a way to honor, grieve, and somatically moving through the intensity of this history that is so entrenched in our present. This memoir is a powerful expanded version of her/this/our journey.