Other People's Art

Yesterday, after four and a quarter years of writing and revising, I began sending my book out to agents. I have been feeling great about the whole project for the last few months, but wow, sending out queries is one of the most disquieting and quietly destabilizing things I've ever done. You pour your heart and soul into a project, and then you need to package it up perfectly and send it out to what, in most cases, you know will be a vast and silent void. Most agents never even respond to let you know they're not interested. So you just send, and immediately on sending out that first query you find yourself in a new space—you now exist within the waiting, suspended in a liminal space that feels so discordant compared to the eros of the making of the thing. So it's been a strange twenty-four hours, and I'm already thinking about other writing projects on the backburner and how to pour some juice into them, channel my energies in new directions while I play this game of thumb-twiddling and nail-biting. But also, it's summer, and maybe what I need is just a bunch of waterfalls and mountains.

Anyway, I wanted to share some Other People's Art with you.

Something to Read: A Poem by Bazeed

I met Bazeed at the Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Writers Retreat in 2017. They are a brilliant nonbinary Egyptian artist working in multiple mediums, and I wish I could shrink down tiny and run around inside the labyrinth of their brain. Recently I went out of town and Bazeed stayed in my apartment. When I came home, many of the books on what I call my "pantheon" bookshelves were rearranged and Bazeed left me a note apologizing for the disarray.

Then, months later, they let me know the reason. They are embarking on a new project, a moirologia-from-found-text, and wanted to honor my mom, Ella, in the poetic form called the cento. In their words: "back in March, i kept Danny's feline companion, Terence, company in their apartment in Portland. i spent the days there selecting 28 books from Danny's prodigious library [...] flipping to 3 or so pages at random in each one, i wrote down lines that got my attention to form the line bank i'd draw from. because Danny is himself a brilliant writer, I was able to use some of his words as well. I spent the next three months working on this cento remembering Ella, in Texas and New York and Chicago and Cairo, referencing my memory of conversations we'd had about the contours of her loss in Danny's life. [...] working on this cento I appreciated getting to engage with the true story of a death that, while devastating, opened up new modes of living for the mourner left behind. because isn't it always a little like that? [...]"

Bazeed's poem untitled cento for Ella, Danny’s mom, from books in his library was published at the literary magazine KHÔRA (curated by the brilliant Leigh Hopkins) yesterday alongside incredible visual art by Theano Giannezi. You can read it (or listen to it read by Bazeed themself) at that link. To say I bawled would be an understatement.

Something to Listen To: Clawfoot Slumber

I spend a staggering amount of time at Fly Awake Tea House. Over the last two years I've nourished friendships with a magnetic array of artists there. Alex Callenberger and Erin LaCerra are two such artists and I am a huge fan of their dream-rock band Clawfoot Slumber. Their latest album, Crushing Reality, was released exclusively to vinyl a few months ago but as of today is on all yer streaming platforms. When I got my hands on the record I described it as "psychedelic musings and urgent eruptions transmitted from glimmering pockets here within the endtimes."

This album was heavily influenced by Portland's September 2020 smoke event, when nearby ravaging wildfires blanketed our city in red skies, thick smoke, and the occasional dusting of ash for a week straight—all in the middle of pre-vaccine lockdown. I don't know that I've ever felt more sad and isolated than during those seven infernal days. Somehow this album puts its finger on the pulse of all the emotion that carried over from that time—from the sweet soft longing for human connection to rage at feeling helpless in the face of multiple toxic forces to the sheer weirdness of the present. I fucking love this album.

Stream it at all the usual suspects: Spotify // Apple Music // Bandcamp

If you're in Portland, Clawfoot Slumber plays a record release show at Show Bar on Sunday, June 5th at 8pm.

Something to Watch: The Janes

The last thing I want to recommend is the documentary The Janes, co-directed by my friend Emma Pildes, which comes to HBOMax next Wednesday, June 8th. "The Janes tells the story of a group of unlikely outlaws. Defying the state legislature that outlawed abortion, the Catholic Church that condemned it, and the Chicago Mob that was profiting from it, the members of Jane risked their personal and professional lives to help women in need. In the pre-Roe v. Wade era –– a time when abortion was a crime in most states and even circulating information about abortion was a felony in Illinois –– the Janes provided low-cost and free abortions to an estimated 11,000 women."

I don't usually recommend something I haven't seen yet, but a) Emma rules and you just know it's gonna rule as well and b) my sister Miriam confirmed my gut feelings when she attended an early screening in NYC last week and said the documentary was tremendous. I only wish—and I think (hope) we all agree—that this documentary didn't feel so tragically fucking timely. Again, it's out a week from today, June 8th. (Which is my birthday. So watch it as a gift to me.)

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If there's something I should check out, let me know. And if your sister's a literary agent, put my book in her hands. Ha. Well, hopefully someone goes wild for my queer little grief memoir before too long and I can write to you with lots of exclamation points about that. And hopefully one day you can buy it in a bookstore. Until then, or until the next time I send one of these increasingly infrequent missives—

I remain,

Daniel Isaiah Elder