February 29, 2024

Continued Migrations

Hi everyone,

You are receiving this email because at some point you signed up for Christina Tran's newsletter updates between now and May 12, 2015 when I first started a TinyLetter. Many of you are friends. Many of you are here because you handwrote your email address into a little spiral notebook at a zine fest. Many of you follow me for Dear Daughter updates or for news of new comics. Special hello if I know you from IRL communities a la Popup Potlucks or Mt Caz.

TinyLetter shut down this year. I was hoping to write you all one last time from that platform, but apparently when they said "On February 29, you’ll no longer be able to access your TinyLetter account or letter archive," they really meant like from the very beginning of the first minute of February 29th.

When I logged in this morning to write to you, this is what I saw.

Luckily, I did have enough wherewithal (and choppy internet access) to go in last night and hastily save a bunch of my archives for myself as janky PDFs alongside the CSV file which is useless to my visual brain.

I was most surprised to see that I had been tagging early comic updates "Wandering Grace"?! I thought this name was a more recent 2020's development.

I dunno that I knew what [Wandering Grace] meant back then in 2016, and obviously didn't care that it might have been confusing. Maybe it was an intuition that while "So Delightful" is a wonderful URL, it is not necessarily a good umbrella name for my comics, as they are mostly about me figuring out how to be with loss, but/and some are also about me trying to figure out some systemic f*ckery that is making me feel feelings. (You can read a bunch of the comics here.)

"Figuring out" is what essayists do. I mostly write essays...whether in comics form or prose form or Tinyletter 'oops I meant to write an update and it turned into an essay' form. I mostly write essays because they allow me to hyperlink my brain via the juxtaposition of ideas and lots and lots of footnotes. <3

Now, in 2024, Wandering Grace is a series of essays over on Substack about place, (be)longing, migration, and race in America. Wandering Grace tracks my movement up and down the Pacific Coast of the so-called United States, on what I dubbed a 'Healing Pilgrimage' trying to figure out from my mind-body and my soma-body and my community-body and my intergenerational-soma where to root and how. And, apparently, as I am coming to find, Wandering Grace is also a series of essays about what it means to build community and live communally as a highly-sensitive autistic introvert. (You can see an archives here.)

I was on the move a lot in 2023, and I am unexpectedly still on the move in 2024. I've been trying to move cities — and failing. I'm feeling uprooted in ways that make me grimace because wandering only feels good in my bones when I know where home is and to whom I can return (even if that return is only to myself and to my practices).

When I told a friend about Tinyletter shutting down alongside 2024 plans to move my online shop from Storenvy to Artisans.coop and also potentially moving my Patreon, she was like: so you're also migrating all your internet homes!

Everything changes.

Everything moves.

Beginnings and endings, already written, as a practice in living.

I don't know how many of you will be lost in this migration. I may languish in some spam folders. This writing may no longer fit your current inbox brainspace. I hope and trust that you'll find me or my work again if need-be.

There are many spiderwebs, weaves, and redundancies.

Onward,
Christina <3