pain+Almanac of the Dead+Lady Gaga+Perfection
Whoa! Hey! Did you notice…it’s Thursday? I missed Sunday. As the pattern emerges more clearly, Sunday is a day that I now mostly reserve for rest. Because...
under the hood
A list of things I’ve wanted to write about in this newsletter: —my kid introducing me to songs by Björk I’d never heard before and how she knows that both...
micro-doses of pleasure and hope
I’m in the middle of the slowest reading cycle I’ve ever been in, maybe in my life? Rereading a book that has deep meaning for me, noting all the parallels...
against the stealers of hope
Sitting in my mother’s living room yesterday, it hit me that her design aesthetic could be interpreted as her take on a 1970s cocktail room. It is not an...
the inflamed
It’s incredible what you, but really I mean I, can do when not in physical pain. Like, chronic, often excruciating physical pain. For the last…I’m always...
books to film + falling outside the mainstream (PLEASE)
I’m thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water, the new film directed by Kristen Stewart, based on the book by Lidia Yuknavitch. There’s a chance we may go...
how to embody this tree?
How could one steal if the government itself was the worst thief?—The Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko In this ugly beginning of 2026, I’ve been...
a breath
Happy? New! Year. What a year it was, what a year it is. I write this to you on Sunday morning. It’s the end of two weeks I carved out for myself for time...
my year in reading
January-June I bring doom into the conversation to show that it is a place to begin, not to end. —Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die What If the...
the week in review
Sorry to anyone looking for this newsletter on Sunday. It’s been a rough week. Month. Year. cheer in the form of dog It’s my last week of work (meaning, my...
deep in the project
In the last two days I’ve spent four hours in 1995. My journals from then, that is. Sitting for this long with the 21/22-year-old me has been amusing,...
the invisible projects
fruits of invisible project The energy came from somewhere, I don’t know where, but I decided to use it. The bookshelves have needed weeding and rearranging....
process notes
a panoramic scene from my mood tracking app 1 — reading through the journals, marking pages of note to transcribe Transcribing journals, beginning this time...
mile marker 15
We’ve been celebrating the kid’s birthday for the past week. I’m now the parent of a fifteen-year-old. Late in the year that I was fifteen, I remember...
syllabi
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino. The following is a reformatted and rearranged collage of fragments from different syllabi and teaching notes that I’ve...
the villains we know
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino. don’t mind if I do On Friday I ventured into my office cupboards where I recently relocated all my journals. There was a...
gentle disruption of autumn patterns
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino. just living wherever it feels like September 28th was the date of the last official event I did this year to support the April...
my little media ecosystem
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino. she’s everywhere You might recognize the image above. It’s from The New York Times’ game Wordle. I haven’t been a subscriber...
cook, concoct, conjure
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino. Learning more about ancestors. Making strides in the reading of three tomes. Singing to the garlic, undressing them, taking off...
evil
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino. I missed you last week. In September, Lexi Kent-Monning, author of Burden of Joy, and I talked about my books, journaling, Apt....
