I had started this blog with just my name, but it is not about me as a person, my writing here is meant to be me as a thinking, observing participant in our world. Collective failure was going to be my first entry, which seemed like a terribly depressing notion. I’d pondered, “will I simply…
Think of memoir’s first chapter as a suitcase
Originally posted on Monica Lee:
One way to judge a good memoir is by its first chapter. At a memoir writing workshop I attended before writing “The Percussionist’s Wife,” author Paulette Bates Alden (“Crossing the Moon”) maintained the first chapter was a reflection of all that was to follow. “The first chapter is like a…
Occupy Wall street aka when the middle class was snapped
The snap of Thanos has become a pop culture analogy for sudden and drastic change. Occupy Wall street was a moment when those who held supposed middle-class positions – lawyers, professors, middle-managers – discovered their exploitation. A fizzure occurred within their self-image that had been built on a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” as bell hooks so clearly…
The real problem with the Belichick texts
View at Medium.com
On Writing: An Abecedarian
A dedication to letters, words, sounds, silence and reading; interwoven with ancient history and what we still have to learn from it. Source: On Writing: An Abecedarian
a letter slipped under the door
I can empty my brain and thus my heart, I can examine it outside of me, clear my physical sensations to make space for what the emotions are.
Regrettable sex and other privileges
Regrettable sex is something that should be celebrated because it teaches us what kinds of sex we do really like and what kinds of sex leave us feeling nothing much.
poem from my anarchist youth
I wrote this sometime in late 1999. Wish I thought my writing was much improved, but I’m not so sure. this placeit sells everything.inspirationwords to describe itcolors once belonging to rainbowsnature itselfand insurance against nature.it can make you a souland mass market lore, euphoria, depression, any addiction.they want you to be on the marketlook like…
a sensual legacy of longing
My fetal memories, my introduction to language, my first physical relationship to the Earth’s magnetic pull, the air I first screamed to inhale, the food I tasted through my mother’s lactation, the sounds, scents, climate that first touched me was across an ocean from where I am now. It may not mean much, except that…
a plea to the moderate
The only question that now needs asking is the same one it has always been, which side are you on? There is no neutral, no return to normal, no “just respect the laws”, no voting our way out of this one.
facing the writing self
I haven’t been writing. at all. a few social media posts. a few well structured emails. mostly from a sense of obligation. Not from the instinct to write. because that voice is very small, and very easy to put on mute. it is a little voice that looks at me sideways when i’m spending my…
Why rage now
So yes this is the moment to get into the streets, to harness the power we gain by coming together and to understand that Black folks have always been fighting for all of our humanity, to save our souls now on this earth. The demands for basic respect is to save us all from participating in the dehumanizing impact of being a person who ignores the humanity of others.
Remedial Decency for white people
Okay white people here is our remedial course on being a decent person: We do not call the police because a Black person asks us to leash our dog. We do not call the police because a Black person is wearing a hoodie. We do not call the police because a Black person walks too…
collective failure 