When I announced to my readers here that I would be taking a sabbatical from my work at Into Account for the month of July, I actually did believe that I’d be up for maintaining a schedule of weekly newsletter posts. As it happens, the more accurate part of that announcement was my mildly screed-ish discussion of how badly I needed a break from forming coherent sentences. Because, shit. Did I ever need that.
My writing output for the month of July consisted of many messy journal entries, fit for no one’s eyes but my own. Not even my own, really. I don’t want to know what percentage of my prose was dedicated to complaining about bug bites and humidity, although there was markedly less on the “OMG I am so overwhelmed” theme than there was in June. Also, I got covid, but my symptoms were mild enough that it mostly functioned as extra justification for not leaving the couch.
For the duration of my couch-lolling, I read Louise Erdrich novels, one after another, and reread some of the ones I’d read before. I had a read fair amount of her work in the past—I even taught The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse to a bunch of unsuspecting 100-level American Studies students at KU one semester when I was feeling adventurous, and they’ve probably never forgiven me for it—but it had been awhile, and Erdrich is ferociously prolific. I read The Sentence, The Round House, and The Mighty Red, and then I went back and reread Tracks, which I probably first read in college, based on the worn state of my copy.
I could have kept going on my Erdrich kick, but I got distracted by my many big feelings about the media coverage of the Trump-Epstein troubles and the psychologically complicated obsession that white MAGA evangelicals have with a particular set of ideas about sex trafficking. I thought I was on an indefinite hiatus from trying to understand MAGA, but instead the red string corkboard in my brain fell down the Satanic Panic rabbit hole and I mainlined Rick Emerson’s Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries, which explores what I would call some pretty vital historical antecedents to MAGA’s disinformation-fueled fervor. It was fascinating, but I’ll save further thoughts for a later post. There’s a whole rabbit hole there, with all the metaphorical riches that implies. (And if you know anything about the history of the sham diary Go Ask Alice, you’ll know why I haven’t been able to get Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” out of my head for weeks.)
I took a sharp detour for The Woman In Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware, which was propulsive and un-put-downable but also left me vaguely queasy, more or less the same way I felt after every episode of Luther that I watched back in its heyday. They’re too lurid and violent for me, impeccably crafted though they are. It makes me nostalgic for those old “The Cat Who…” mysteries, even though their plotting is so bad that every mystery is solved by means of deus ex machina in the form of a clairvoyant cat. Seriously, take me back to the cozy shitty cat mysteries. Real life is lurid enough.
I’ll keep it short today, so I can focus my writing attention on the five or six incomplete essays that I’d like to finish and share with you all in the not-terribly-distant future. To wrap up, here are a few links involving my friends and me:
• Andre Swartley, a writer and indie publisher, wrote a book of haunted poetry and short plays with themes of generational trauma, spiritual violence, and general creep, called The Ballad of Moon Bog. It is viscerally awesome. I’m biased because he’s my friend, but I’ve reread the poems at least three times, and that’s not counting the original draft he showed me. Andre decided to make it a free download, because, in his words, “fuck capitalism.” He told me this past Sunday that he just wants people who need them to read them. Some of you almost certainly need them. I did. Show them to your religiously traumatized friends with goth sensibilities, please! (And if you like them, check out his horror novel The Wretched Afterlife of Odetta Koop, and then see if you can sleep.)
• Hilary Jerome Scarsella, our Director of Theological Integrity at Into Account, has a fantastic new website for her freelance work, and if you know my work through Into Account, chances are that you’ll appreciate her offerings. Clergy and faith-based organizational leaders who aspire to be trauma-informed should be reading everything she writes. Again, I’m biased, but I’m also right.
• I’m quoted a few times in this Religion News Service piece about the Peruvian clergy sexual abuse survivor, Ana María Quispe Díaz, who is speaking about her experience with institutional betrayal in response to the appointment of Pope Leo. From what I can tell, Aleja Hartzler-McCain, the thankfully bilingual reporter who covered this, is the only journalist to catch the significant translation errors in the July press conference that Quispe Diaz did with SNAP in Chicago. (I don’t have anything to do with this case; I’m just quoted as an outside content expert.)