artifacts 2
Keys are essential, because locks are essential. My mother lived in fear of many things, including losing her keys, and some of her fears were transmitted to...
artifacts 1
Found in my mother’s kitchen junk drawer: a matchbook from the 1990s, when she came to visit me in Olympia and stayed at the Golden Gavel, which wasn’t far...
emerging from the depths: with music
click to listen Two of my favorite mixtapes, both made by my friend Carrie in the early 1990s, emerged from the boxes brought home from my mother’s house....
cmao
It’s hard to know where to begin, though in the days after my mother’s death, I've felt, and I feel, a beginning. Everything I’ve written in the last few...
passing by
Dolores aka Lola aka Dee This is probably my favorite photo of my mother. I can only guess what the backstory is. Her facial expression in the photo is very...
death spring
Books mentioned: Is Mother Dead, Will and Testament, and If Only, all by Vigdis Hjorth After a particularly rough week—adjusting to real life after spending...
rest/return
Waikiki We had booked a trip last year, in the months when my mother was still living independently, a trip that she paid for. This trip, our first to...
pushing through
Books briefly discussed: Emergency by Kathleen Alcott; Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy; Mega Milk by Megan Milks I marked the 12th Saturday in a row emptying...
coping bad
How are you coping? I’ve identified two of my own recent coping mechanisms (assuming there are ways I also cope that I might not even be aware of yet)....
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,...
