"...enough personal exposure. I want to talk to you about this next time we see each other IRL."
a mini-interview with K. Huntress Inskeep
I know K. from way back in my Olympia days (1993-2001). This mini-interview is a little different from previous ones because K. restated the questions in her own voice and I liked it so I decided not to edit.
K. is a Sagittarius but I don’t think this registered for me until the last several years when I started connecting my own Sagittarius rising with the Sagittarians of my past and present.
When we first met, I remember feeling a little intimidated. In fact, I think the way I felt about K. is how a lot of people who have gotten to know me have described feeling upon first meeting me! K. may say she is not as badass as I may have first perceived her but: She is. I have fond memories of writing together outside of a coffee shop in Seattle, and also of eating homemade spice cake in her Olympia kitchen. I love that K. holds grudges as strongly as I do. There are a couple of books on my bookshelf that I still have, because she told me to, long ago. I am forever in awe of K. and her spirit.
*If you’re reading this in your email app, click on "View entire message" so you’ll be able to view the entire post!*
What’s a type of art-making you haven’t yet done that you’d like to do?
I’ve dabbled in a lot of things. Including music when I was younger, but not to any real end, and I thought that I couldn’t sing. It took me a long time to understand that you can train your voice and that, actually, I probably can sing, with some training. So learning to sing with more — not exactly control, but learning how to use it my voice the way I have been able to use the rest of my body, for dance or martial arts or running or cycling, to limber it up, to work out feelings. I think the singing itself is art-making, right? But maybe I’d also try composing some songs around that. Probably in a style that mashes up folksy bluesy R&B old jazz standards because that would probably come most naturally.
Who or what am I most recently obsessed with?
I get obsessed with things pretty easily and then move on. But it’s fair to say that visible mending and mending in general has become an obsession to the point where I sometimes have to ask my partner to hide my mending kit, which is in a little blue metal tool box. This is an obsession that has lasted. I suspect that it’s because it plays to so many of my predilections. I think I wrote this to you in a letter. It appeals to my very thrifty and practical side, making clothing last longer, extending its useful life. And although it’s quite practical it can be quite creative, there’s an opportunity to play with design and color and different techniques using different stitches and different approaches to addressing problems. How do you treat a worn area versus a hole? It’s practical. It’s creative. It’s thrifty. It‘s crafty. It’s also indulgent because it requires a certain amount of time, though I don’t think it takes as much time as people might assume. But can also feel indulgent because I always have an excuse to buy another ball of sumptuous yarn or another colorway of embroidery floss. The indulgence is offset by how deeply therapeutic and relaxing the act is. Once I have decided how I’m going to do a mend, how I’m going to solve the problem, the act of darning, of stitching calms my brain when it is — as it so often is — overly active or anxious.
Some of the mending I do is for my partner. I’m constantly demanding more of his threadbare, damaged clothing to mend. It’s become a way to connect to and care for people in my life. I mended a sweater last year for friend who, on getting the repaired garment back, wrote that she was surprised to find how much more personal it made the sweater feel. A big current project is embarking on the repair of an entire quilted blanket, which I initially bought for myself. I adopted a cat, Lenny, who adopted this blanket and when I adopted his companion, Oz, the blanket also became his favorite blanket. Those cats have passed and I don’t know what it is — if it smells like me or if it’s the quilted texture or both — but the blanket is a cat magnet and our new cats love it, too. It’s at least 20 years old and the fold lines have started to fray and develop holes, some of the batting is coming out. So I’m patching it and reinforcing it a little every week. Yeah, I could buy a new blanket, but I don’t want to. Lenny was the most constant presence of any other creature in my entire life, he lived with me for 18 years and I’ve never lived with any other animal, human or otherwise, that closely for that long. I want to keep this blanket. And that’s a lot of hours of meditation and therapy for my brain, anyway. Another reason I think I’m obsessed with mending and will continue to be is because at this time, I think we’re doing our collective selves a disservice in thinking about our environment — natural and built — primarily in terms of climate catastrophe. There are actual real limits — as much as I want to embrace the politics of abundance I think those of us with a certain baseline affluence need to embrace the politics of abundance more with experiences and much less with physical goods. Especially living in a nation that is probably most responsible for so much of the degradation and exploitation of our world — again, both the so-called natural environment and the built environment. I think mending helps me value my belongings. I was already predisposed to that, but the act of mending helps me ask whether I really need another t-shirt dress or whatever. So mending lets me engage in all these tendencies I have, and it’s a creative and therapeutic outlet. Is that an obsession or a compulsion?
Dreamlife.
It’s really changed over the years, so you’re going to get a short history of my dream life.
As a very little kid, I had a recurring nightmare that involved my chasing after my grandparent’s RV and trying to jump on board as it was driving off with my family inside. Yes, this foreshadowed later events. Another recurring nightmare would involve me in large swimming tanks with orcas, being trapped with them and fearing them and trying to get away. Which is always interesting to me because I have a deep appreciation for those mammals now, and I grew up going to Sea World in Mission Bay when I was a kid, and they were a marvel, but not a source of fear. Except in my dreams.
In my late teens and early 20s, I barely remembered my dreams. If I did, they would often be profoundly anodyne — scenes of vacuuming or dishwashing against a white background. Which I find curious because at that time in my life I was arguably — maybe it speaks to the resilience of youth or something, but I had been kicked out of my home in high school and was on my own and struggling to just get by and one would think that the stress and anxiety of that might disturb your sleep and your dreams. But it did not. I guess I just did not experience that as super stressful. Which honestly, makes sense because my quality of life improved so much even though I was financially just truly scraping by. When I did remember dreams it was because they verged on nightmares that, if they didn’t feature being trapped in tanks with orcas, were related to my late younger sister. Karin had a lot of struggles with drugs and alcohol, and was a chronic runaway and just had a very hard time, she had a personality that was always going to be prone to that and then she had a home life that was not going to offset her impulsivity and other traits or offer the stability that she so obviously, at least to me, needed. So well into adulthood she was in and out of jail for various things, rooted in that early instability. And these dreams would often be her in danger and me defending her and they were often quite violent. One I recall where we were under siege in a remote house and being set upon by groups of people with knives and other weapons, coming at us from every direction, trying to break in. It was my job to protect her and of course that was impossible. I always thought and feared she’d end up ODing or go missing but about a year ago she developed an incredibly aggressive inoperable brain tumor and died within a few weeks of diagnosis.
And then for a long time, in my 30s and into my 40s, I had really bad sleep and I didn’t really remember dreams. Finally, I started actively trying to improve my sleep and subsequently started taking medication that was ostensibly for hot flashes but then it turned out treats an autoimmune condition that I have. I started having much more vivid dreams more often, almost immediately, and I could remember them. And the dreams became quite comforting and affirmative, and I would wake up remembering them. And then the pandemic started and they remained comforting and affirmative, if anything they became more so. Very often these dreams are about mutual desire, sometimes featuring my partner, sometimes random people, very occasionally exes.
And I do take that to reflect that in my home and work life I’m in a place where long last where it is mutually comfortable and supportive and I’m rather cash poor but have high quality of life, I have a supportive partner and stable housing and very importantly, because it was the source of a lot of anxiety and toxicity over the years, I am able to be doing work that is meaningful and where I have a lot of autonomy.
I think those dreams about washing dishes were very much designed to buffer me from, you know, the full impact of why I was having the nightmares. And now I’m having dreams that are designed to reinforce that I’m in a good place. I do still have disturbing dreams once in a while. About six months into the pandemic, I began having dreams in which I would have these tiny pets or be responsible for tiny animals that were hard to keep track of and I would lose them, they would go missing, and it was hard to find them because they were so tiny. And then my cats — who were both getting to be old — turned out to be sick, and died, within months of each other.
The middle of the ocean question.
I wanted to try to answer this question but answering the dream question was enough personal exposure. I want to talk to you about this next time we see each other IRL.
The project I am most excited about?
I’m writing *The Transit Trekker Manual," which is a travel guide for transit-based recreation. There are a whole lot of people out there who can’t drive, like me, and there are almost no comprehensive recreation resources for us. There are also a lot of people who would love to not have to drive to access outdoor recreation. And part of what I’m trying to do is incorporate an advocacy angle, to encourage my readers to support the expansion of rural mobility, including but not limited to transit service, so that both communities and visitors are better served by our transportation system. So I'm thinking of it as part manual but also part manifesto for mobility.
The first edition will feature Washington state, where I live, and the plan is to produce future editions for other states and regions. I am excited about it, but I’m also in a place where I just need to get it done and stop talking about it, so can I link to a few places that better explain what I’m trying to do in creating it?
This explains why the manual will be more than just another travel guide. People who want to get notified when the book is for sale can sign up here. And anyone who wants to support the production of the book can do that here.
I will add that my plan is to self-publish, which, honestly, is a whole pain in the ass and a half. I did have a publisher invite me to submit an abbreviated proposal. There are advantages and disadvantages to both paths, of course. I keep procrastinating on finishing that proposal, it would probably take me a couple hours at most. But I don’t know if I can do what I want to do in a traditional publishing context.
Bonus question: how did we meet?
I was in my last year of college at Evergreen and had moved in to a house where one of my roommates was your then-boyfriend. I think you had finished school and were working at a dry cleaner (a carpet cleaner—Ed.) to pay off your student loans. We must’ve hit it off pretty quickly because I remember asking you to drive me to my taekwondo meet where I tested for my greenbelt, just a few months later? Or maybe it was at the end of the academic year. And by the way, I think that taekwondo meet gave you an inaccurate impression of my being more badass than I was. I think at some point you started working at the college library, so I would run in to you there, too, so I got to know you independent of that boyfriend. I moved from that house after I got my degree that June, but stayed in Olympia and did an AmeriCorps year, which would have been 1996-97. I think you remained in Oly during that time and we continued to hang out? Also of note: that ex-boyfriend of yours is dead to me. He behaved inexcusably when you broke up with him and he was old enough to know better. Yeah, I remember his name but I’m not going to say it. I hold a lot of petty grudges, but that grudge is not a petty one.