Hi! Welcome to the first newsletter I’ve written in, oh, three years.

I’m rebooting this (kinda) to document my time at the John S. Knight Fellowships at Stanford. Mostly, I’ll share what I’m reading. Occasionally, I’ll share what I’m thinking. (There’s a post rattling around in drafts about the role of documentation in the world around us.)

For now, let’s start with books.

What I’ve read so far: three queer horror visions of the future, and one hybrid nonfiction design book

• The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed. A provocative, troubling piece of political and ecological sci-fi with a disturbing queer love story haunting a core about groupthink and autocratic control. Stars a journalist investigating an under-covered modern Holocaust. Said journalist operates in a world where “Cameras” broadcast not just what they see, but what they feel. Originally published under a nom-de-plume deadname in the 1990s, this piece of queer cyberpunk sits at a really weird juncture in the genre. Cyberpunk has historically suffered from accusations of gender essentialism/anti-trans sentiment woven into its theses on body modification. More often, I think it just suffers from trite politics, and the gender-body connection just one among many underdeveloped areas of thought. Anyway, that sentiment has led to a recent resurgence in short fiction collections that seek to re-envision the genre through a queer lens, so I can’t complain. (Neon Hemlock’s Embodied Exegesis is still hanging out on my TBR.) That also includes a recent reissue of The Fortunate Fall. I read an abandoned library copy of the first edition, so I’ve got no clue if anything changed between now and then. Anyway — a unique piece of fiction I’m still thinking about.

• F4 by Larissa Glasser. Jesus Christ. OK. Well. This is gruesome body horror, trans nightmare fuel, and kaiju silliness all in one. It fits — not quite neatly — into the iconoclastic splatterpunk niche occupied by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Alison Rumfitt, and the circle of collaborators for Seize the Press magazine. But, it’s weirder, more interested in transfemininity as a worldbuilding element than as a philosophical character experience, grosser, hornier, nastier, less marketable, and all-around more batshit than anything I’ve read from that group. Part of that’s the lack of polish — it’s a bit scattered and too much of the plot is driven by coincidental, bizarro logic. But, honestly, it’s as a byproduct… very fun.

• My Body Unspooling by Leo Fox. Short queer horror fiction. Allegory for gender dysphoria. There’s not a lot there; it’s just a 20-page-ish allegory. But, it’s visually evocative, and the style is fun. I’m looking forward to reading longer works from the author.

• Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford d.school by Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter. Coming into this one after reading three provocative works of queer sci-fi really underscored how trite most of the fiction interludes are. This book is an interesting piece of hybrid genre work: one part design theory manual, one part sci-fi envisionings of the consequences of potential design. The authors used AI as a collaborator on at least a few of the sci-fi shorts; they’re all a little allegorical and a little formulaic, but a few were neat little pieces of horror. I found the nonfiction portions — as well as the visual illustrations of design theories and the overall heft and printing of the book — much more compelling than the intermittent short fiction. Overall, a fun read, and a thoughtful gift from a workshop facilitator at the JSK Fellowship.

• +1/cheat: I read Samuel R. Delany’s Bread & Wine prior to my move, but I loved this short graphic memoir and wanted to mention it. Largely a romance about how Delany met his life partner, with some beautiful musings on the streets of NYC, creativity, and other topics.

What I’m reading currently

• Listening to the audiobook of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I think this book is too smart for my brain to have it read to me, so I’ll probably have to revisit in print. But, the rhythm is beautiful and the narrator is an adept reader.

• Query: a novel by Zilla Novikov. The increasingly erratic novel queries of a writer trying to sell a cross-genre piece of climate disaster fiction, as an epistolary. Fun.

• Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. A journalistic history of water management in the western U.S.A. Been working on this slowly all year.

What’s next

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Yeah, I’m late on this one. So late.

• Documenting Rebellions by Rebecka Taves Sheffield. Relevant to my interest in the role of journalists as documenters, by bringing in the lens of archival work of LGBTQ+ activism.