Olympia folks! I will be signing books at Barnes and Noble on April 18th from noon-4. Say hi ✨👋

This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

• The Work of Art Part 4: I Could Have Been a Contender!

• The Work of Art Part 5: The Myth of Pure Action

• The Work of Art Part 6: The Artist and Instagram, a Love Story

I consider myself an adult child, which means I am part of a twelve-step recovery program for the Adult Children of Alcoholics. You know how, when your friend joins AA, and then they can’t stop talking about it, and it’s almost like a cult has abducted them? I’m that friend with ACA, so bear with me #sorrynotsorry. Being an adult child means that I can fall prey to addictive tendencies—codependence being one, Instagram being another. I didn’t quite understand that I was addicted to Instagram or social media (and the compulsions it incited, like compulsive spending) for a long time. I knew that there was something very unhealthy in my dynamic with Instagram, but it took reading Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, a book my partner recommended, and listening to this interview with Andrew Huberman and Anna Lembke for me to actually categorize that relationship as an addiction.

Let’s consider what addiction is. To oversimplify it, your brain is filled with neurons, and they communicate through electric signals and neurotransmitters. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. Dopamine is connected to how we process rewards, which, if you think about our caveman selves, was very important for survival. Hunting was dangerous. It could get you killed. So you needed motivation to get up off the cave floor and go hunt. This is why dopamine is perhaps more powerful when it comes to the motivation for a reward rather than the reward itself. Dopamine powers the want.

Contrary to popular belief, getting high doesn’t actually produce dopamine; it triggers it. You generate the high yourself. Substances that are more addictive trigger the release of more dopamine, which is what makes them more addictive.

Another important thing to know about our brains is that pleasure and pain coexist. Read any Greek poet or any play throughout the centuries, and you’ll see lyrical illusions to this scientific fact. Thousands of lines of poetry can be summed up in one sentence: “I want you so bad it hurts.”

Dr. Lembke writes:

”Imagine our brains contain a balance—a scale with a fulcrum in the center. When nothing is on the balance, it’s level with the ground. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway, and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. The more our balance tips, and the faster it tips, the more pleasure we feel.

But here’s the important thing about the balance: It wants to remain level, that is, in equilibrium. It does not want to be tipped for very long to one side or another. Hence, every time the balance tips toward pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will. They just happen, like a reflex…We’ve all experienced craving in the aftermath of pleasure. Whether it’s reaching for a second potato chip or clicking the link for another round of video games, it’s natural to want to re-create those good feelings or try not to let them fade away. The simple solution is to keep eating, or playing, or watching, or reading. But there’s a problem with that. With repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus, the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer, a process scientists call neuroadaptation. That is, with repetition, our gremlins get bigger, faster, and more numerous, and we need more of our drug of choice to get the same effect.”

It is human nature to seek pleasure, but we are biologically programmed to seek balance. Our drive for constant and never-ending pleasure, then, is also a drive towards pain, the very thing we’re trying to avoid.

So let me put all of this together with a little hunting analogy!

Your little caveman ancestor went hunting one day and brought down a mamoth with her buddies. They ate a lot of really good food and felt REALLY REALLY GOOD. Her brain learned that if she goes hunting, she gets food, and therefor experiences pleasure. But all that really good food, resulted in her getting hungry again and she started to feel pain. So she needed more food and needed to go hunting again. The dopamine gets triggered not when she actually kills the mammoth, but when she grabs her spear. It doesn’t wait for the meat that’s been roasting on the fire, it’s what gets her out the cave door and out on the hunt. It’s the drive. It’s the wanting.

The prevailing image in popular culture is that addicts are all hedons, running around like Greek gods seeking wine-soaked orgies. “Addict” evokes imagery of gluttony, excess, and grotesque consumption. And given the science, this makes sense. After you get hooked on the dopamine release triggered by a good thing, you need more and more of it to get the same high. But I don’t think that what we’re seeking when we go to our substances of choice is an uncontrollable urge for pleasure.

Instead, I think we’re desperate to avoid pain. And pain and pleasure live together. They’re an ouroboros, each ending where the other begins.

Anna Lembke says in her interview with Andrew Huberman:

“When I talk to people about their addiction, sometimes their initial foray into using a drug is to get pleasure, but very often it’s a way to escape their suffering…” She goes on to say in her book, “Beyond extreme examples of running from pain, we’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained. As Aldous Huxley said in Brave New World Revisited, ‘the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant . . . failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’”

But why would we be trying to distract ourselves from the present moment? The present moment for most people in the developed world is pretty great. We have enough to eat, we have a roof over our heads, and we have generally enough disposable income that we can go to dinner with a friend occasionally. In America, you can drink water straight from a faucet pretty much everywhere (except Detroit or Native American Reservations), and sure, our health care system is cost-prohibitive and broken, but a hospital is not allowed to turn you away. I am not trying to dismiss the massive inequality rampant in our country, only to point out that, relative to our ancestors, we live a life of relative comfort. So why are we all behaving as if we’re in extreme suffering?

I think it’s because we’re not distracted with the work of survival, and we can now turn our attention to our deeper, more existential wounds. Or rather, run headlong in the other direction.

Life Is Maintenance

(I know this song is about AIDS, but it might as well be about all of us who are existentially lonely and use drugs - social media, weed, alcohol, shopping, porn - to escape the prison of our aloneness)

In Sarah Polley’s film Take This Waltz, the main character, Margo, leaves her husband, who is portrayed as a really good guy. They’ve been together for a decade or so, but she’s young! She’s curious! And her husband is old news. Their life is just life. There’s no real drama or problems, but it doesn’t have any mystery. So when she runs into a charming, handsome bike messenger, she develops a fascination with him, then a longing, and finally a full-blown affair. She leaves her husband for the new guy, and then a year later, you see in a montage that her new life mirrors her previous one. They’re not having as much sex, and they both seem a little bored. Gone are the sexy days of sneaking around! Life has a way of sneaking its way back in. Then, Margo gets a call saying that her ex-sister in-law, Geraldine, a recovering alcoholic, has gone on a bender, and her ex-niece has asked for her. When Margo returns to her old house, her old family, Geraldine, in her drunk wisdom, says, “In the big picture, life just has a gap, it just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it.”

Last year, I traveled with my partner and friends Henry and Kaisa and their two-year-old daughter to Portugal. I was really struggling with work and the fact that we’re expected to have these jobs that take up our whole lives! We were sitting around drinking wine, and I complained that in the time we have left after work, we must do our laundry, go grocery shopping, or get the oil changed. Was this life? Had I been duped? Where was the glorious adventure I was promised?

These friends of mine are humans and deal with the facts of being a human in the world: sorrow, grief, love, frustration, but they are, on the whole, pretty content people, and I admire that about them. So I asked my friend Henry how he handled having a job and the daily duties of being a husband and a father. How did he find meaning? How did he manage to live?

He said that he’d been watching the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith show, and there was a line that struck him.

“Life is maintenance,” he said.

This hit me like a punch to the gut. I want life to be a thrill! A tremendous explosion of light. But in the end, Henry is right: a lot of it is maintenance. To survive, we must maintain our health by eating well and cooking; we must move our bodies so they don’t fail us in old age; we must keep our friendships so we remain in community; and we must maintain our jobs so we can navigate our capitalist society. It’s a lot of fucking maintenance.

Anna Lembke says in her book:

“My patient Sophie, a Stanford undergraduate from South Korea, came in seeking help for depression and anxiety. Among the many things we talked about, she told me she spends most of her waking hours plugged into some kind of device: Instagramming, YouTubing, listening to podcasts and playlists.

In session with her I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface.

She looked at me both incredulous and afraid.

“Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed.

“Well,” I ventured, “it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself. Of letting your experience unfold without trying to control it or run away from it. All that distracting yourself with devices may be contributing to your depression and anxiety. It’s pretty exhausting avoiding yourself all the time. I wonder if experiencing yourself in a different way might give you access to new thoughts and feelings, and help you feel more connected to yourself, to others, and to the world.”

She thought about that for a moment. “But it’s so boring,” she said.

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”

Addicted to Fear

In ACA, there’s a list of traits the adult child has acquired because of their history. Number 8 is that we’ve become addicted to excitement. Initially, it said “We’ve become addicted to fear,” but the words have since been changed. This always makes me think about my dad and how I think he, too, was addicted to fear.

How many times have you heard someone say that a person is unhoused because they are lazy? Probably a lot. But anyone who thinks our houseless population is lazy is very misinformed. My dad probably worked harder during the twenty years he spent houseless than he ever did in his cubicle in the Denver Tech Center. But it was a different kind of work. He was working to feed himself. For survival. He had to walk miles in all types of weather for food, a bed, a computer, and his mail. Simple things like getting a driver’s license were a months long endeavor. You can’t get a driver’s license without an address. It might have changed, but one of the few places to get a mailing address if you were houseless in Denver was the St. Francis Center, and you had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get your mail there and keep getting it.

Daily tasks that, for you and me, are an annoyance, were a herculean effort for him. In a weird way, I think that was what he wanted. I think it was comforting for him. He had to work so hard for everything you and I take for granted that he had no time to worry about anything else. No time to feel empty or to consider the existential questions that plague me: what if I love the wrong person, what if I will never be forgiven, what happens when I die here, who’ll be my role model after my role model is gone? There was no time! There was only the next thing. He experienced fear-induced presence. A kind of avoidant enlightenment. An addiction to fear (and addictions to other things). Which is just another way of saying: terror of emptiness. Because it was when he felt empty that my father often used. It’s when I feel empty that I use, too. Scrolling the internet in mindless fear and insecurity is not all that different in essence from what he did. It just doesn’t hurt other people so much.

In Dopamine Nation, Lembke states, “Thirty-four percent of Americans said they felt pain ‘often’ or ‘very often…The question is: Why, in a time of unprecedented wealth, freedom, technological progress, and medical advancement, do we appear to be unhappier and in more pain than ever? The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.”

What is it about the present moment that’s so miserable? And why do we fight it so much?

Don’t let me be lonely!

I know I’ve already talked about Erich Fromm before, but honestly, his book The Art of Loving so perfectly describes everything I’ve felt in my life that I can’t stop evangelizing him. In his book, he argues that we’re all so miserable because we’re alone.

We are distraught because we’re existentially separate and there’s nothing we can do to bridge the gap.

We’re alone because I have a body and you have a body, and there is no way for me to belong to your body or you to mine. We can get close, but we will never inhabit each other’s souls.

Fromm states:

“The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness…The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence, to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety.”

Fromm believes that we seek union in either a passive or an active way: through masochism or sadism. Fromm writes, “The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel of another person who directs him, guides him, protects him; who is his life and his oxygen, as it were. I am nothing, except inasmuch as I am part of him.” I’d argue that the vast majority of us fall into the masochism camp, and we attempt to seek union through sex, drugs, capitalism, or the desire to fit into the dominant culture.

While writing this, I am on a plane. I like to watch action movies on planes because I don’t want to do a disservice to a cinematographer or the director by watching a highly crafted film. Marvel movies are inelegant and made to make money, so it’s okay if I am only half paying attention. I randomly decided to watch Thunderbolts because I think Florence Pugh is a goddess and her character is fun.

I kid you not, these are the opening lines of the film:

There’s something wrong with me.

An emptiness.

I thought it started when my sister died, but now it feels like something bigger.

Just a void.

Or maybe I’m just bored.

They send me a job. I clock in, clock out…

I thought throwing myself into work was the answer.

But I’m not focused and I’m not happy, and I don’t have purpose.

And without purpose, I’m just drifting like a river.

Say what you want about Marvel movies, but they are both a product and a symptom of our time. They speak to the anxiety we feel and cater to our changing brains. The scenes cut every ninety seconds because that’s how long we can focus. This movie is creating the malaise that Pugh’s character complains about. We need constant change and stimulation. We need action and distraction; otherwise, we succumb to boredom or the void. And the void is suffering.

We seek to ease our suffering through pleasure, which only increases our pain and drives us to despair.

Lembke attests to this. She writes,

“Global deaths from addiction have risen in all age groups between 1990 and 2017, with more than half the deaths occurring in people younger than fifty years of age. The poor and undereducated, especially those living in rich nations, are most susceptible to the problem of compulsive overconsumption. They have easy access to high-reward, high-potency, high-novelty drugs at the same time that they lack access to meaningful work, safe housing, quality education, affordable health care, and race and class equality before the law. This creates a dangerous nexus of addiction risk. Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have shown that middle-aged white Americans without a college degree are dying younger than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. The top three leading causes of death in this group are drug overdoses, alcohol-related liver disease, and suicides. Case and Deaton have aptly called this phenomenon ‘deaths of despair.’”

Social media exacerbates our despair. Humans have always sought belonging in order to survive. When we’re born, we’re not fully cooked. The first three months of an infant’s life are often described as the “fourth trimester.” We deeply depend on our community for survival. Some of our first smiles are really just attempts to please and appease. Love me and feed me, don’t leave me! But historically, our drive for belonging was mitigated to the realm of the material. We had to physically enter society to gauge whether or not we belonged to it. Now we can measure our sense of belonging in likes and follows without leaving our house.

Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts states,

“When we are afraid that we might not be considered cool, attractive, or high-status, we don’t feel good. That fear is a profound emotion. It hurts. Everybody suffers from social anxiety from time to time, and every child has encountered a bully who used social anxiety as a weapon of torture, probably because behaving like a bully lessened the chances that the bully might become a target. That’s why people, even those who would normally be decent, tend to pile on to a victim of social anxiety torture. They’re so afraid of the very real pain that social anxiety brings that they can lose sight of their better natures for a moment.”

And now, thousands of very smart, very capable people from all over the world are paid a lot of money to learn precisely how to measure your responses to certain stimuli, and ensure that you’re delivered a curated set of inputs designed to trigger the desired response. And the desired response is something that makes Meta, TikTok, or Google money. This could be something more benign, like buying a Procter and Gamble product, or it could be more insidious, like supporting a specific politician. And, more often than not, the stimuli that create the best response are things that trigger a negative emotion.

Lanier explains:

“The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. …If someone gets a reward—whether it’s positive social regard or a piece of candy—whenever they do a particular thing, then they’ll tend to do more of that thing. When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society… It’s not that positive and negative feedback work, but that somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback. If you get a piece of candy immediately every time you say please as a child, you’ll probably start saying please more often. But suppose once in a while the candy doesn’t come. You might guess that you’d start saying please less often. After all, it’s not generating the reward as reliably as it used to. But sometimes the opposite thing happens. It’s as if your brain, a born pattern finder, can’t resist the challenge. ‘There must be some additional trick to it,’ murmurs your obsessive brain. You keep on pleasing, hoping that a deeper pattern will reveal itself, even though there’s nothing but bottomless randomness.”

Similarly, Lembke says that gamblers have increased levels of dopamine when they lose. “My patients with gambling addiction have told me that while playing, a part of them wants to lose. The more they lose, the stronger the urge to continue gambling, and the stronger the rush when they win—a phenomenon described as ‘loss chasing.’ I suspect something similar is going on with social media apps, where the response of others is so capricious and unpredictable that the uncertainty of getting a ‘like’ or some equivalent is as reinforcing as the ‘like’ itself.”

Social media plays on our natural response: uncertainty. And the likelihood that we might lose, lose money, lose friends, lose social status, keeps us playing the game. And it’s not just the uncertainty and the randomness, it’s also fear, sadness, rage.

Lanier says:

“Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement. Yet, the result is an unnatural global amplification of the ‘easy’ emotions, which happen to be the negative ones. If it turns out that certain kinds of posts make you sad, and an algorithm is trying to make you sad, then there will be more such posts. No one will necessarily ever know why those particular posts had an effect on you, and you will probably not even notice that a particular post made you a little sad, or that you were being manipulated. The effect is subtle, but cumulative. While scientists sometimes dive in to try to glean insights, for the most part the process takes place in darkness, running on automatic; it’s a new kind of sinister shadow cosmos.”

But we’re hooked! We can’t stop. I said this last week but it bears repeating: the average young person will spend 25 years of their life on screens. In the words of Thom Yorke, we’re not living, we’re just wasting time.

So, what’s happening is doubly dark.

TL:DR:

1. When we’re scrolling through social media, we are manipulated into seeing posts that negatively impact us.

2. The uncertainty and randomness of rewards keep us coming back. “Maybe this time my post will acquire x number of likes!” Or, “Maybe this time I will see something that makes me laugh!”

3. The uncertainty and randomness of rewards trigger both pleasure and pain.

4. Each time we reach for our phone to check social media, we get a hit of dopamine. But the more we use social media, the higher our dopamine baseline rises, meaning we need to use more to get the same high.

5. When we’re not using social media, we’re in withdrawal, meaning we’re experiencing pain. This makes us anxious and discontent. Which then triggers us to relieve that pain by seeking pleasure, and we return to the apps.

6. White, cis, male, billionaire bros with hair implants actively invest in keeping us trapped in this cycle.

7. If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying (images of planes crashing, people with different political opinions destroying our earth, or potentially making it unsafe to be “us,” is what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means amplifying bad actors.

8. If we want something different to happen, then the way money is earned has to change.

This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

• The Work of Art Part 4: I Could Have Been a Contender!

• The Work of Art Part 6: The Myth of Pure Action

The Work of Art Part 6: The Artist and Instagram, a love story, i.e., an unrequited co-dependent relationship that ends with you on the bathroom floor, a husk of a human, having given all of yourself to be loved, respected, or seen, and Mark Zuckerberg, happy, satisfied, gorging on the fat profits he made from your obsessive desire.

In 2026, the world would have you believe that if you want to promote your art, there is only one way. New poem published? Link to it in a story! We’re told that if you post a photo of your face, Instagram’s mysterious algorithms will pick it up and show it more on people’s feeds. Let that word sink in: feeds. It’s funny, that’s the word my dad, who was houseless for nearly twenty years, used to describe the meals served at churches for the unhoused population. He’d say, “I run into so and so sometimes, at the feeds,” or “I can’t be late for the feed.” Feed is also what we call the food we give to livestock. Chicken feed. There’s something in that term that implies excessive starvation finally satiated. To feed another human is primal and nurturing. What does a mother do for her crying child? She feeds him with her body. What do you do when you seek absolution at church? You are fed with the body and blood of Christ.

But what does it mean to offer your body, your art, to a feed? And what does it mean to manically seek a feed compulsively, in the bathroom, at the table, on the couch with your lover as you watch a movie, before you go to bed, until your eyes glow blue long after they’ve closed? It’s like that scene in Spirited Away when Chihiro’s parents see a buffet of free food and start gorging themselves on it, not realizing that as they stuff their faces, they’re transformed into pigs until they forget their own names.

To help offset the upfront costs of When Darcy Met Lizzy, I decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign. With Kickstarters, you must meet the entire fundraising goal or you don’t get any money. My first Kickstarter failed. I wanted to raise eight thousand dollars (which was less than the book ended up costing, more on that later), but it didn’t get enough supporters. So, I created another Kickstarter with a much more modest goal of $3,000. I promoted my Kickstarter on Instagram relentlessly. I even made a TikTok! I also paid Instagram and TikTok to promote my book posts. Not much, but in the end, I spent around 200 dollars on ads. According to TikTok, my promoted videos were getting thousands of views.

Because I was constantly posting, commenting, responding, and sharing, I was on my phone all the time. When I had alone time at the house, I was trying to record videos that I thought might be funny, or, because I am not very funny, at least a little informative. The more time I spent on my phone, the more I couldn’t put it down. My girlfriend and I were moving at the time, and I spent so much of that month on my phone, and we got into more than one scuffle about my inattention to our move and my devotion to my phone.

Queue the Empire Strikes Back, Yoda’s Hut “never his mind on where he was, what he was doing.”

The more time I spent on Instagram, the more I started to compare myself to other writers who were more talented, more successful, prettier, and cooler. And the worse I felt, the more I started to get sucked into strange compulsive purchases. I bought a Pura air diffuser because I wanted our house to smell like you were actually in a mystical cedar forest and not a cul-de-sac in Olympia! I bought art on various cheap sites to make our house feel like “home,” and in the end, they weren’t that cheap, but they looked cheap. I bought a lot of books by people I thought I was supposed to read. The more time I spent on Instagram to raise money, the more money I mindlessly spent.

In the end, my Kickstarter raised $4,500 dollars, more than my goal. I sold over 100 copies of my book. This is not a jaw-dropping amount, but it felt good. At least my project hadn’t failed a second time!

At the end of the campaign, I checked the stats that Kickstarter provided and was astonished to discover that fewer than 15 of the people who bought the book were people I personally knew or am connected to through Instagram. At first, I was devastated. Aside from a few distant acquaintances, the only people I knew who bought my book were my closest family members and a tiny number of my dearest, lifelong friends. This means that not even good friends bought the book. Like people I saw daily during different times in my life. I felt humiliated and embarrassed. All that posting on Instagram and people who I knew from my hometown of Denver, from my new home in Olympia, friends from Portland, friends I thought would support me, hadn’t. In the end, posting every few days on Instagram hadn’t resulted in real friends, let alone my Instagram “friends” buying my book. All that time, energy, and effort had resulted in absolutely nothing.

So how had I made so much money and sold so many books? Kickstarter chose this project as a Project We Love, and it was featured in a newsletter sent to its subscribers (I didn’t realize it at the time). This newsletter generated a lot of sales. Of the 104 backers, 2 came from Instagram, 2 from Substack, a few from a direct link, and the rest from a combination of the Kickstarter App, the Kickstarter homepage, the Kickstarter discovery tool, and the newsletter. So basically, Kickstarter saved the day.

When I complained to my friend about this, she said I should be flattered that it was complete strangers who supported me because it meant that people didn’t buy the book out of obligation. But I still had this sensation that I was standing in front of an audience without clothes, butt naked. I couldn’t shake the feeling of shame.

Posting on Instagram is a humiliating endeavor. Some people manage to remain authentic, and more power to them, but I definitely didn’t. I was 100% performative; recording videos when I felt I looked particularly pretty, or when I liked my outfit, or the light through the window. The Kickstarter stats made me feel like all my stories and selfies were not only vain but ineffective. It’s like a bad ’80s movie where the girl gets all dressed up, but nobody shows up to take her to the prom. I also had this intense feeling that I’d sacrificed something to Instagram, that I’d given something of myself to a digital beast, and I’d been devoured, marrow and all, and I was less of a person now because of the exchange.

This sensation of powerlessness and shame I felt is not dissimilar to what an addict feels. The first step in any twelve-step program is “We admitted we were powerless over the effects of (insert addiction here) and that our lives had become unmanageable.”

And that’s precisely what I felt, that my life had become unmanageable. That I was powerless. And this is no accident.

Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, said:

“We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.… The inventors, creators—it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously. And we did it anyway … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other.… It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

p.s. I wrote this last October, but since then, there have been more and more interviews, books, and research that agree.

Here’s one of many:

It’s not an anomaly that we feel anxious and unsettled and can’t be in a different room than our phone, or that our homes are filled with stuff we’re not entirely sure why we bought in the first place. It’s no coincidence that when I sit down for dinner with some of my best friends, they check their phones every 3 to 5 minutes, as if there’s an Amber Alert. It’s compulsive and distracting. This is not an accident. They did this on purpose. We’ve been the subjects of mass behavior modification.

My Kickstarter is a microscopic case study and not nearly extensive enough to be considered applicable to the general masses. I’m sure there are people out there, famous people, who post on Instagram and see a dramatic uptick in sales, or podcasts downloads, or spotify pre-sales, but if you’re just a regular, everyday person like me, I think my experience will probably apply. I doubt anything you do on social media makes much difference in how many people actually engage with your art. Of course, there are exceptions. But sometimes those exceptions aren’t very fun either.

So why does it feel wrong not to be on Instagram sharing your latest Substack with the world? How will anybody hear your voice?! If a tree falls in the woods, will anyone listen?

I’d argue that:

1. Even if people are standing in the woods with you, not very many people listen anyway, even if you’re famous.

2. Promoting your work on Instagram actively detracts from what you’re trying to gain from the promotion in the first place, like time and attention.

3. We’ve become a world of addicts who shame and judge fentanyl addicts on the street corner, but partake in our own drug with witless abandon, to our own undoing. We have created a shame cycle of judgment and lack of personal accountability that feeds into a system that is oppressing us.

The War for Your Attention

My sister recently started dating someone, and she’s super excited about them, and I am super happy for her. She sent me a YouTube interview with her sweetie and asked me to watch. If you know me, you know that there is probably one person on planet earth that I would do literally anything for, and that’s my baby sister. Also, I am super nosy and judgmental, so of course, I couldn’t wait to see if her sweetie was deserving of my sister. And yet, days went by. Weeks went by. Over a month and a half elapsed between when my sister sent me the interview and when I actually watched it. To be clear, this interview had the secret sauce for attention:

• Motivation: I wanted to see if my sister was dating someone worthy of her.

• Devotion: I love my sister and want her to feel supported.

• Interest: the subject matter of the interview was something I studied in school, so I was actually super intrigued.

So why did I only watch the video after months of procrastination and only out of a deep sense of moral obligation?

I’ll give you another example. I subscribe to the literary magazine Brick. I think it’s a cool magazine. I love the work they publish. They published an essay by the writer Anne de Marcken. She lives in Olympia, and I did a reading with her in Port Townsend a while ago. I think she’s amazing. I was intrigued by the subject matter. Again, this piece has all the magic to garner my attention—access, desire, and interest. And yet, it took me 7 months, yes, you read that right, 7 months, to read that essay.

BRICK MAGAZINE

The point of all this is: I don’t even give my attention to the work that most interests me and that I have the strongest motivation to observe.

So where the fuck is my attention going?

As someone who works in tech, I straddle two worlds, so I am fortunate enough to at least understand the massive forces designed to steal our attention.

To sum up Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Right Now (written by someone much smarter than me about work I personally know a lot about):

• Meta and Google, and Amazon (not AWS, although, yes, AWS indirectly if you think about the fact that it’s where a lot of these apps are built, but I digress) make money from YOU.

• They make their profits from your attention.

• YOUR TIME is making Mark Zuckerberg rich.
  

Let me break it down for you:

Whenever you use Instagram, the app logs your attention. It’s trying to keep you engaged long enough for you to view advertisements, because it’s those companies that pay Meta for your time. Meta gets rich off Babaa, who keeps promoting you that super cute sweater. Ideally, Meta wants you to see an advertisement 7 times because that’s when you’re most likely to pull the trigger and buy the product. So, how does Meta keep you on Instagram so that the company that purchased the ad gets a conversion (a conversion means that a view is converted to a purchase)? Meta appeals to your dopamine. I’ll get into this more next week, but the things that tend to keep you engaged longer are the ones that make you feel bad. But not bad all the time. Just bad enough. And sporadically bad, so you never know what to expect. The key is that they must keep you laughing with those silly reels about golden retrievers, and then bam! Post something that gets under your skin when you least expect it. And then, you don’t want that bad feeling in your body anymore, so you keep scrolling, hoping for more dog reels.

If I went up to you and said, “In exchange for approximately 5–6 hours a day feeling shitty, you will spend $50,” would anyone in their right mind take that deal? No one would. Because it’s not a deal. It’s a loss.

According to James Marriott, a recent article in The Times found that, on average, modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens. 25 years! That’s almost as much time as Andy Dufresne spent in Shawshank! But we’re doing this to ourselves!

I am already giving at least 40 hours a week of my attention to a boss; why in the world would I willingly give my spare attention to companies that are going to steal that attention and try to get me to waste my hard-earned labor time?

Lanier says it more strongly than I:

“Yes, being able to quit is a privilege; many genuinely can’t. But if you have the latitude to quit and don’t, you are not supporting the less fortunate; you are only reinforcing the system in which many people are trapped. I am living proof that you can have a public life in media without social media accounts. Those of us with options must explore those options or they will remain only theoretical. Business follows money, so we who have options have power and responsibility. You, you, you have the affirmative responsibility to invent and demonstrate ways to live without the crap that is destroying society. Quitting is the only way, for now, to learn what can replace our grand mistake.”

How we need to remake the internet | Jaron Lanier

And if Lanier didn’t persuade you, let me put it another way.

As artists, we are told we must go to Instagram to promote our pride and joy, our creation, our little art baby. We want to promote our art for either money or attention. But money is really nothing; it’s just a piece of paper or an imaginary number in your bank account. Money’s true self is time. The more money you have, the more time you have. And isn’t that why we’re promoting our work in the first place? So that we can exchange the piece of work we loved making, that took so much fucking time and energy, for more time, and the possibility to continue giving our energy and attention to what we love?

So why trade your time, your attention, these precious and limited treasures, away in a gamble for something that will ultimately rob you of both?

TL:DR :

1. Time is, for the working class, our economic power.

2. Corporations are trying to buy our “leisure time” and our attention so we enrich them.

3. Time spent on Instagram bankrupts us of our real time in the present, our working time (our labor), and the love that is available for us in our attention.

p.s. I haven’t read Cody Cook-Parrot’s book, The Practice of Attention, yet, but I am sure it says everything you need to know about art and attention and more!

The Practice of Attention

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This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor. It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

• The Work of Art Part 4: I Could Have Been a Contender!

As I mentioned in a previous essay, I’m Holding Out for a Hero, in capitalism, everything is connected, and there’s really no pure action we can take. If you’re not interested in reading that essay, totally fine! Grace Blakely says it really well in her book Vulture Capitalism. This is an extended excerpt, so feel free to skim, but I think it’s worthwhile:

“When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you probably do is pick up your phone. That phone is made of rare earth metals, which were likely extracted from a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebel groups use the revenues from mining these minerals to purchase weapons. But that fact will be far from your mind as you check social media, eking out a little ‘you time’ before the day begins. In doing so, you are surrendering information about the most intimate parts of your life to companies like Facebook, which has been accused of promoting far-right extremism, facilitating child sexual exploitation and interfering with the outcomes of democratic elections, or Twitter (now X), which was recently purchased by an egomaniacal, union-busting billionaire who fires the platform’s employees when his tweets don’t receive enough likes.

You roll out of bed, and pull on some clothes manufactured by a multinational corporation that outsources production to Bangladesh. After thousands of their peers were crushed to death when a garment factory collapsed in Dhaka, the workers who made those clothes organised themselves into a union, but they’re still paid poverty wages. You see an old piece of clothing on the floor that doesn’t spark joy, so you remind yourself to take it to a charity recycling bin. The item of clothing may then continue its journey to a huge dump in Kenya, where impoverished children pick through the waste to find a few items of re-saleable quality. You rush out into the brisk cold air, which is mercifully slightly warmer than the air in your house. Just as they have utterly failed to deal with the housing crisis that forces you to pay two-thirds of your income in rent, your government has failed to insulate people from rising energy costs too.

You jump guiltily into your car, knowing that your decision to drive yourself to work is part of a problem that’s causing global temperatures to rise at an unprecedented rate. But you might console yourself with the knowledge that your car runs on petrol, given Volkswagen’s record of lying to the world about the impact of its diesel engines on the environment and your lungs. By the time the day ends, you’re exhausted – physically and emotionally. You open a food delivery app and, when the delivery driver arrives, you give him a small tip. He’s very grateful for the extra cash because his motorcycle is on its last legs and he’s been faced with a choice between taking out a high-interest payday loan to fix it, or using his bicycle instead, which will mean more work and far fewer deliveries. As you drift off to sleep, you plug in that mobile phone, which was manufactured in a warehouse in China where nets have been installed to catch workers who have tried to throw themselves out of the window.

This may or may not be an accurate depiction of your life. Perhaps you’re reading this book in a home that is now entirely your own, having left your days of drudgery and toil behind you. But you may also be aware that your children seem pathologically incapable of saving the amount of money required to purchase their own homes, let alone enough to retire as comfortably as you have. Or perhaps you are one of those lucky people who really, genuinely enjoys their job, loves their co-workers and believes they’re really contributing something to society. But maybe you also struggle to escape the sense that something isn’t quite right in the world around you, even though you feel entirely unable to do anything about it – other than purchase products marketed to you as ‘green’ and ‘ethical’. Elements of this story will resonate with everyone because it describes what it is like to interact with the systems that govern the societies in which we all live and over which most of us have little control. The luckiest among us might be able to insulate ourselves from some of them, but no one can extricate themselves from the webs of labour, production and consumption that underpin modern capitalism entirely. And, as a result, most of us at some point in our lives will feel a little powerless. Many people will spend nearly every waking moment being controlled by these systems. And for some, that feeling of alienation drives them into a deep sense of despair.”

As I explored earlier, there is something really appealing in thinking that if you’re an artist, if you’re working for a non-profit, if you’re doing paid labor that you love, then you’re somehow above the system. There’s a slight moral superiority there. Like, “I don’t work a 9–5, or I’m not devoted to the man, I am an artist.” And this individualist line of thinking (thank you, existentialists, for this emphasis on the individual and our personal choices) further divorces us from collective progress. At least I’m not one of the bad guys, is not the same as, We’re all in this together.

But, even if you’re getting paid the big bucks as a writer and getting really juicy advances, is it really possible to avoid the man? And is it really possible in this system to “sell out”?

In Jessica Knoll’s op-ed for The New York Times, she says:

“I decided I could not consider myself successful unless I was somebody powerful, somebody nobody could hurt. Success became a means to wrest back control, literally to increase my value.

There is a metonym for that: money.

Success, for me, is synonymous with making money. I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie studios to pay me for option rights and I want the screenwriting comp to boot.

To accomplish this, I spent months researching the publishing marketplace before sitting down to write my first book. I pushed to be the one to adapt it for the studio. Now I am working toward producing, directing or running my own show. TV is where the money is, and to be perfectly blunt about it, I want to be rich.”

As much as it feels kind of icky to hear a writer talk about wanting to get rich, she’s at least being honest about her goals of aiming for financial independence (or in terms of my argument, more time) through her writing. (I just want to note that Jessica Knoll is a blonde, white woman. See Tressie McMillan Cottom on The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blonde.)

But how possible is it for most of us to reach Knoll’s goal of being rich? In his Substack “Making a living as a book author is as rare as being a billionaire,” Erik Hoel says:

“The economics of publishing are a lot like venture capital investment: most books, the overwhelming majority, don’t sell. Companies make many mini-bets. Very occasionally, a bet in their portfolios goes absolutely wild, and they finally make a profit entirely on the success of just a handful, or at most a couple dozen, books a year, despite officially publishing hundreds or even thousands. To publish a book (which is hard enough as it is, and requires a good deal of luck) is merely to enter this further grand lottery.

To truly understand the bleak reality requires a comparison. The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. And I think it’s arguable that becoming a cultural billionaire is just as rare as becoming an actual billionaire (under an admittedly broad calculation of equivalency).”

Then he does a bunch of math that you should read. But he’s able to conclude that 585 non-celebrity authors are making a living from their books. A living he defines as starting around $50,000 a year (with most people hovering around this mark). Think back to what I said about the minimum living wage for a city like Denver and Olympia, and see how $50,000 before taxes measures up.

Hoel concludes:

“[This is] roughly in line with the semi-annual surveys from the Author’s Guild, which finds statistics like:

When looking at full-time authors whose books are in commercial markets (i.e., excluding academic, scholarly, and educational books), the median book income was $15,000...

This reveals that even among authors who identify as “full-time,” they are mostly supported by parents or spouses and bring in only supplemental or partial income. Overall, I think we can indeed conclude that the group size of self-made billionaires and non-celebrity authors making a living (enough to decently support their family or at least themselves) are surprisingly close in number; basically, each looks like a pool of just hundreds of people across the nation.”

This means that even if you are INCREDIBLY LUCKY and you’re able to sell a book with a $250,000 advance every 5 years, you will still only make around $50,000 a year, and this doesn’t incorporate taxes into the equation. And these are the best of the best! These are the ones who have made it. And, whether you like it or not, if you’re not going the indie publishing route, to get one of those fat advances, you must play into the market.

I subscribe to a great Substack called Sub Club, and they often give workshops about finding an agent. In one workshop about why comps matter (comps are books that are similar to your book that you include in a query letter that you send to agents), the host, Kailey Brennan Dellorusso, says:

“[Comps] show agents that you understand the market. Unfortunately, we’re writers, we want to just love our art and care about that, but if you want to be traditionally published, you have to think about your book as a product and you have to understand your product’s market.”

Caro Claire Burke, author of the forthcoming book Yesteryear, who got a big advance for her book and screen rights (who, I should note, until very recently, was blonde), says in her podcast Diabolical Lies with Katie Gattie Tassin (also blonde):

But I think the important thing to note in this conversation is that anyone who is a musician or a podcaster or a writer or a director... You have to be so nakedly ambitious to succeed in these industries. Every single day, all of the momentum is taking you in the opposite direction to not continue to do what you want to do. To become a staff writer at The New Yorker, or to sell a book that allows you to write more books, or to run a financial platform, or to write and direct your own movie that appears in Cannes, that is so hard. It is so competitive. And you have to make decisions constantly that set you up for financial viability. And so you are always opting in. And I think the game is that part of opting in is that most people have to also pretend or feel they have to pretend that that is not a part of it. And that there is like a sort of purity at play. And I think that that is part of the performance of being an artist in the same way that politicians get into the game and go... ‘I never thought I’d be president or like, I’m just in it to change people’s lives. I never thought that I would be in this position.’ It’s like, dude, you’ve been positioning yourself for three decades. What are we talking about? But it’s part of the contract because people don’t actually like when you are honest. I should add that. Like Jessica Knoll’s op-ed was not received well by writers. People don’t like being honest about what’s taking place here, even if they’re also a part of it. And I think that those are just like the point-counterpoint rough waters of trying to be heard is that you have to be unbelievably cutthroat and frank about what it means. And then you have to kind of like sweep up the path behind you and pretend that it was effortless.”

I think Caro is spot on. We shouldn’t impose on artists this belief that you’re only a real artist if your work and your work alone pays the bills, and you’re a failure if you haven’t traditionally succeeded and make your money doing taxes for H&R Block.

Because doesn’t it kind of play into the system to internalize the belief that you can’t save for retirement and have a comfortable life and be an artist at the same time?

Self-publishing as Guerrilla Warfare

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, if you get a book deal, you are considered a “real writer,” but if you self-publish, you are often ostracized by the cultural literary elite. It’s considered taboo to self-publish, and if you’re a serious writer, self-publishing can come with an element of shame, like “I guess I just couldn’t hack it, I guess I am not good enough.” But if we consider traditional publishing through the lens of labor-time, if you get published by a big publishing house, you’re given special, fancy privileges like book launches and cool parties, but based on how much money you’re actually making in exchange for your time, you’re still a member of the working class.

If you self-publish, even if you have to use one of the dreaded platform industry tools (looking at you, KDP), you won’t fully be a member of the capitalist class because you still don’t own the means of production, but at least you own your own labor.

Self-publishing is one of the most powerful things you can do as an artist in a capitalist system. It’s also pretty badass.

Not only are you not being exploited for anyone else’s financial gain, but you’re not exploiting anyone else’s labor—Queue Princess Leia #rebel.

Obviously, you still have to face issues with the platform industry, and it would take A LOT to actually generate any meaningful income, but at least you’re a little more free. Also, you can make different choices, like your distributor and the cost, for example.

When I published When Darcy Met Lizzy, I chose Ingram Sparks because I didn’t want to be a part of the Amazon hellscape, and I wanted to make sure my book could be sold in indie stores, and most indie bookstores won’t sell your book if it’s not available on Ingram.

I thought self-publishing would make me feel like a sellout, but instead it’s been one of the most powerful and self-affirming experiences of my life because:

• I believe in what I wrote.

• I like what I wrote, and I genuinely think it’s good.

• I worked with super-talented people who are way smarter than I am to edit the book (thanks again to Evelyn Hampton! And Alyse Knorr, you are a gift to humanity).

• Even though I have made negative money off of it, I have been able to interact with readers more directly through this book than The Family. I’ve done readings at local bookstores in both Denver and Olympia, and I managed a Kickstarter, which allowed me to connect with people all over the world.

• I get to decide the price; I can give my book away for free to little free libraries if I want to, or donate it to queer organizations. I have the power of what I created.
  

Given everything I said about the publishing market and the list I provided above, is it any wonder then that the capitalist class tries to discourage self-publishing through cultural expectations of what makes a real writer?

But don’t get me wrong, I am still seeking a traditional publisher for my memoir. I still want a fancy hotel room on a book tour in Paris like the one Miranda July describes in All Fours. I recognize the extreme hypocrisy in this desire.

But I no longer feel that traditional publishing is the only viable option or that self-publishing makes someone a failure. I feel empowered and in control of what I create, and I know I can choose which avenue I want to pursue for each project.

I know that all my choices are valid and all I have to do is decide what is important to me.

I feel free and I hope you do too.

I want to have my cake and eat it too

When I was younger and I got my first job in tech, I met the writer Jerry McGill. He and I had similar jobs and we often took afternoon tea and coffee breaks together. He drank English Breakfast tea and I drank coffee. From the moment I met Jerry I admired him. Not only is he funny and playful and always caught me off guard with his candor, he is a Writer. Writer with a capital W. Like a real writer.

In his life, Jerry’s written three novels and published two; he’s also written and published a beautiful memoir. When I found out he was a writer I quickly bought and read his memoir. His writing moved me with its vulnerability and ability to be both beautiful and sharp.

Jerry’s worked in tech now for twelve years. He writes every weekend. He’s now working on trying to get his screenplay turned into a film. He’s devoted to his craft and he doesn’t let his day job get in the way. Working a 9–5 has never made him less of a writer. If anything, it’s shown that he is absolute and unshakable in his devotion to his craft.

The truth is, I am not sure anyone ever thought I wasn’t an artist because I don’t make money as a writer. This dichotomy between artist and sellout that I’ve spent the last few weeks discussing is most likely self-imposed.

I was the one who was afraid that admitting I wanted to be good in my career, that I wanted to take pride in my work, be promoted, and make more money, made me less of an artist.

But the result of this insecurity was that I was living a sham of a life. I didn’t want to own up to my actual real-life choices: to take a well-paying job with benefits, to write in my non-work hours and not try to make my creative life pay the bills. I wanted to pretend I didn’t want the really nice things capitalism has to offer, like European vacations, or facials.

The pressure I put on myself to be a ‘real’ writer in the eyes of others degraded my integrity and my sense of self. I allowed my insecurities to overtake my daily decisions. I am writing now from a place of clarity, but it has taken years for me to come to this understanding and, for those closest to me, it hasn’t been an easy road. When we don’t have faith in ourselves or our choices, we can inadvertently harm the people we love the most.

The truth is, like Jessica Knoll, I care about making money. I want to live a comfortable life. I don’t want to die the way my father did, vulnerable to a system that does not care about us. I want to do well at my tech job because my job has given me stability and security like I have never known, and I am so grateful for the opportunities it has provided.

But the choice, sellout or artist, was a false choice. I never had to choose between being an artist and taking pride in my day job. Just because I don’t like the system we’re subjugated to, just because I know that capitalism is an unfair and dirty game, doesn’t mean that I can’t do my very best because it makes me feel good to do work I am proud of.

Still, even with a strong understanding of capitalism and art and how generating content just to feed the beast is a lose-lose situation, it’s still easy to fall prey to the trance of the platform industry. In the next three newsletters, we will talk about social media and the artist. Stay tuned!

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This is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor. It’s best to start at the beginning:

• The Work of Art: Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

• The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make You Notice!

This series isn’t necessarily anti-trying to make money as an artist. It’s about investigating why we want to make money as artists and why we care so much. Obviously, if you wanna make money as an artist, more power to you. I fully support it. Go do it. Well done! But if you’re kind of disturbed by having to make that choice, if there’s something that feels icky to you about it, if you feel confused about relating to money and art and value, this is the podcast for you.

But! If you want an alternative perspective, and if you want the hero to my anti-hero, I would recommend two podcasts or two newsletters:

• Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum.

• The Bleeders: About book writing and publishing by Courtney Kosack.

And, they’re both really good and they actually both came together for a really thought-provoking, episode on February 17th. I think it’s just important to hear people realistically talking about what it means to be a writer in this day and age and what it means to try to make money from it.

If you asked me why I wanted to get published by one of the big publishing houses (and I was being honest), a huge reason is that I want to go on a book tour. I love the idea of going to different places around the country, or perhaps the world, and talking about art. I love the idea of going to dinner with other famous writers and drinking fancy wine and eating fancy food, all paid for by Simon and Schuster. I want to have a fancy book launch in New York where very fancy people are in attendance, and I can wear a really cute pant suit. I’m not as interested in the distribution or the audience and the reach (which, of course, would be great) but rather the cultural experience of being able to call myself “a real writer.” What I am looking for is social capital.

In an interview, Sally Rooney, one of my favorite writers and a Marxist, says,

“There’s a scene in the novel where Connell, one of the protagonists, goes to a literary reading, and he feels incredibly alienated from what he sees. He feels that writers turn up to events full of people from a particular class, from a particular educational background, and essentially the writer sells them the product of cultured existence in the form of a commodity, and the commodity is a book, and people can purchase this book and purchase their way into a seemingly cultured class. And all the money that is exchanged in the book industry is just people paying to belong to a class of people who read books. And that is something that I definitely worry about and feel implicated in. Because I do think a huge amount of the cultural world, first of all, there’s a large extent that it involves sealing off the appointed cultural producers from life by festivals and events, like dinner parties and book launches. That this world, the economic and cultural backing of this world, is a way of taking writers from their background, whatever it might be, and making them part of a special class. And I am very skeptical of that process. And I am very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities. Almost like accessories that people can fill their homes with, like beautiful items.”

A few years ago, I attended a party at the home of the editor of a prestigious literary magazine. Everyone at the party was either an editor at a publishing house or literary magazine, published by a big publishing house, or employed by a prestigious university. Their home was a rowhouse in Queens (I think? Honestly can’t totally remember if it was Brooklyn or Queens) and it was surprisingly normal. I thought it would look like something out of a Bridgerton set with leather sofas, cognac decanters, and wall-to-wall bookshelves. Instead, it felt like the home a friend of mine might have. I genuinely liked everyone in attendance except the people close to my own age. Nearly everyone I talked to was unassuming, thoughtful, a good listener, interesting! I met another writer who I have kept in touch with who is kind, sweet, genuine, and I hope to be real friends with one day.

At the party, the two people closer to my own age got too drunk and one of them, a young blonde woman from Colorado in grad school, kept trying to tell me how poor she was and how she’d grown up in poverty and she did it all on her own. She was very fashionable, about the age of my younger sister, and in what appeared to be a tumultuous relationship with a man who was kind of having a “literary moment.” The way she brandished stories of her poverty felt like a combination of insecurity and superiority. I wanted to shake her and tell her—who cares how poor you are or where you grew up, look at where you are now! Look at all the smart, creative people who want to get to know you! I am sure she irritated me because she probably reminded me of me, who was also a young blonde woman from Colorado, or I was worried in some subterranean part of myself that I came across the way she did—waving my traumatic childhood like a flag for attention and reverence.

Despite my annoyance, I hypocritically went with the young couple to another party at the editor of a well-known small press. Another male party-goer in his mid-to-early fifties went with us. Before long I was sitting on the couch with this fairly well-known writer telling me how beautiful I was and that I had a beauty that was “of the mountains, of the wild!” It wouldn’t be a party with the literarti if an older man didn’t hit on a younger woman, am I right?

I am painting a funny picture of it, but it truly wasn’t something from the beatnik era or even the 70s. It was pretty tame and lovely, and I would like to tell you that I embraced this experience with grace and kindness. But in reality, this whole night made me feel incredibly insecure. The way I handled this experience is still a source of shame. What I did after meeting the literati was tear them down and build myself up with my rhetoric. When I described the night to friends, I said things like, “I realized that everyone is just insecure and unhappy, no matter their credentials,” and “I realized I really like my life! I am so glad I didn’t get an MFA, I think it would have ruined me.”

I was envious of the writers and professors. I wanted their lives, or the fantasy I had of their lives. I wanted their New York brownstones, their days spent thinking and reading and discussing. It felt so much richer and more powerful than my life. The one where I spend at least 40 hours a week, sometimes more, in front of a computer trying to understand complex technical concepts that hurt my brain, trying to ingest and then translate that information into something legible for an engineer, and then writing it all in a (very basic) programming language and publishing it on the internet. At times, my life feels joyless. It feels rote.

And so, I left this party not only feeling dissatisfied with my own life, but also feeling less than. So I tried to stem the pain of this feeling by belittling the choices and lives of others. By making myself superior.

I’m not trying to defend such behavior, and I’d like to think that now I have a stronger sense of self and confidence in my life direction, but I want to make it clear that it’s not just me who tries to bolster my identity by tearing down others. It’s common to want to improve our status by trying to be better than.

But better than who?

Better than somebody! Anybody!

Many of us have a small, bitter, rotten gremlin in the corner of our hearts that is crying out, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: ‘I could have been a contender! I could have been somebody!’

In an interview, Andrew Hartman, author of Karl Marx in America, discusses. W.E.B. Du Bois’s assessment of capitalism and race in America. He says,

“So when W.E.B Du Bois, who’s one of my favorite thinkers in the 20th century, wrote this book, Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, to my mind, still one of the greatest books about U.S. history ever written, he analyzes the Civil War and reconstruction through a very Marxist lens, but sort of extends the Marxism to include the experience of racism in the American South at the time, and why it was that white workers came to be more concerned with staying above black workers than challenging the ruling class in the South.

And that’s when he uses the term the psychological wages of whiteness. It felt better to them to at least be above somebody than to think about them as aligned with the working class as a whole against this ruling class.”

Obviously, W.E.B. Du Bois is talking about whiteness in particular. Still, I think he’s touching on something distinctly American—the desire to be above somebody rather than accept you’re a member of the working class. I believe this is what’s happening with the war against immigrants in the United States. A white member of the working class doesn’t want to feel the pain and despair of her exploitation, so instead she targets another group. At least she’s not a lazy, criminal immigrant, she tells herself. She has a right to be here; she has a right to seek the status and value that was promised to her! This way of thinking and living is an attempt to gain social value and capital by aligning oneself with the ruling (billionaire) class. Not only is this thinking anti-community and prevents collective change, but this othering to protect our own fears and vulnerability is also bad for our souls.

The same principle can be applied to artists. Like my friend who quit a job she’d trained for months to get and said to me, Oh, that? I quit. I’m just not built for a desk job. I’d rather make art. As if some of us were born for the soul-sucking exchange of our time for value, and there are those of us, in her words, artists, who are somehow above this drudgery. Implicit in this statement is a kind of superiority.

Not to mention that the perceived status of making it as a writer often goes hand-in-hand with a check signed by Knopf or Simon and Schuster, and publishing has been, and remains, a white space. The financial and social legitimacy granted by a fancy publication is the same as acceptance into a historic club. But it’s important to remember that the club has maintained its elite status, its exclusivity, by excluding writers of color, and, for a long time, women, not to mention queer folk. The word covet comes to mind. We covet what feels exclusive, the special and the rare. It’s why Nike only sells a certain amount of their special shoes—by preventing everyone from having the shiny thing, makes the thing more shiny. The word covet came to be in the mid-13th century. It meant, “to desire or wish for inordinately or without regard for the rights of others,” and it has its roots in the Latin word cupiditas “passionate desire, eagerness, ambition.” When I say I want a book deal, or when I walk in a room and want everyone to say—look, there she goes, a real writer! I am displaying an ambition, a passion, to possess something specifically at the cost of others. It’s the exclusivity of making it as a writer that creates its value.

In her book, Salvage, Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand discusses the fact that the literary canon, a group of “great” books written by writers who have made it over the long haul, is damaging on two levels: writers of color were not published, and they were only ever represented from a colonial and violent perspective. Brand says of books like Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert and Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, “Mine is not an argument about being ‘absent’ from literary texts; we were not absent. We were in the texts. Potent as life. But we (and others) were trained to remove or skirt our presence, or to observe that presence as something like background, immutable, not subject to the action of the text…” She continues, “I propose that the colonial event is the aesthetic—that its pleasures, tastes, manners, consist of this juxtaposition. What is pleasing, what is beautiful is the violence.”

I want literary recognition because it makes me feel special and eases my social paranoia, but that feeling of specialness stems from the genuine and real violence against other voices. And that truth certainly erodes the joy of attaining recognition.

Beyond the social capital granted by a byline in The New Yorker, what makes you a “real” musician, or a “real” writer, is not the act of making music or writing, but the exchange of cultural value, which is money, for your labor.

Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses this in her book Thick. While pursuing her PhD, she got pushback from another academic for the attention she was getting from writing. Other academics were upset that she was getting so much notoriety because that’s not what you’re supposed to do in grad school. You’re not a person she says, you’re a unit of labor. You’re there to serve your mentors and the institution and not your own ends. Since then, Cottom says:

“I have come very far. I had come so far that I could be considered a problem. It is an honor of sorts. I was writing, and I was doing so without express permission from gatekeepers… I am now an academic, an official one. I have the title and the letters after my name that black people are fond of calling our educational credentials.”

The point McMillan Cottom is making is that only an anointed few are allowed to speak in society. You are considered an intellectual only if you have paid for the title through either tuition or your labor for an institution. You are considered a real writer only if you’ve been anointed by the capitalist institution that owns the means of production. If Penguin wants your book, you are real.

This is because what has value, or what is made real, must be funneled through the system that grants legitimacy.

As James Baldwin states, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.” Writers help make the interior lives of readers real, but society hasn’t deemed that labor as worthy of reward. It’s taken for granted.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that more and more people are choosing to get MFAs and that it’s in those programs that you’re more likely to get an agent or a book deal. It’s a pay-to-play type of system. Programs like The Iowa Writers’ Workshop grant your work legitimacy not only because money has been exchanged, but because a system of exclusivity bolsters its perceived status, so you become legitimate in the eyes of the system if you are permitted to partake. And, as we become lonelier and more disembodied as a culture, MFA programs become some of the only places where we can gain connection and intimacy with other writers.

So, even though I am intensely critical of the MFA industrial complex, I just applied to a program because I am so fucking lonely. I am starving for artist conversation and connection, and I will do anything, even go $40000 into debt, to get it.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that leading a creative life is one of the things that makes us most human and most real. I don’t think there is anything wrong with calling yourself an artist. I believe life is art, and therefore every human is an artist. But I also think there are those of us drawn to creative expression with a particular fervor, and we have a deep desire to be seen as creative.

But clinging to the title artist or intellectual as some sort of performative identity is kind of classist and snobby.

It bolsters the systems that make it so hard to be an artist in the first place.

The person you’re harming the most with anointing a special distinction to the identity of an artist is you.

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Without further ado….

The Work of Art Part 3: Gonna Make you Notice

A reminder that this is a series of essays about the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

• The Work of Art: An Introduction

• The Work of Art Part 1: A Brief Intro to Capitalism for Artists (Who Want to Kill Themselves)

• The Work of Art Part 2: Money Comes in Handy Down Here, Bub

As I said in the Work of Art Part 1: I think there are two main reasons a writer seeks publication:

• Financial gain

• Validation/attention

We’ve already talked about money. Now let’s talk about validation and/or attention. This is a pretty negative way to talk about this desire. I could use more optimistic and favorable language to suggest that there is a more altruistic reason for wanting to expand the world with your art: the desire to connect with people through your stories in a way that benefits and deepens our understanding of this life we live. But altruistic reasons will probably always contain shades of self-interest.

I can only speak for myself, but for me, I want to publish for attention and validation. I wrote When Darcy Met Lizzy as a fun project, something I wrote for my partner, because I wanted her to relate to a book that I deeply admired and loved. As a queer, Brazilian woman, 19th-century British literature felt completely beyond her frame of reference, and so I made it into a kind of game. Could I make Darcy and Lizzy transcend the confines of a novel of manners and speak to modern fears and desires? Could I make Regency England fun for a woman who thinks monarchy and colonialism should stay a thing of the past (rightly so)?

It could have been a private book I shared only with my partner and a few friends. Instead, not even a few months after finishing the book, I was already seeking agents and publishers for the book. I quickly came to my senses and realized that such a close retelling of Pride and Prejudice would never find a home at any traditional publishing house. So I decided to self-publish the book.

What made me want to publish something that I’d created for fun in the first place? Why turn something private into something public?

Because writing is a lot of work. It’s enjoyable sometimes, yes, but it takes hours, months, years of your life to create a finished product. And while you’re working, there are countless hours of self-doubt, frustration, and struggle. And the time I spent writing was time I was not going on hikes, not sailing, not seeing friends, not spending time with my partner or our dog. There’s an opportunity cost to writing. When you are devoted to writing you miss out on a lot of life.

Once, someone tried to tell me that they had worked harder in their life than I had because they spent more time working at their day job and had devoted their life to their work, while I hadn’t been as dedicated to my career. The implication was that because I have had an inconsistent job history and have worked in lodges and restaurants longer than most of my peers in tech, I am lazy or less hardworking. I bristled at the statement. I felt deeply unseen.

Because I love to write and because it feels like a calling from a higher power (be it art itself, the universe, God, who knows?), I think there’s a tendency for people on the outside looking in to view it as a hobby, as something I do on the side, the way people watch birds or fly fish on the weekends. On a flight to Greece this summer, I sat next to a woman who asked me why I was traveling. I told her I was going for an artist residency. She asked me what art I practiced, and I said writing.

“Oh!” she said, excited. “What have you written? Where can I buy your book?”

Eventually, we got around to the truth that my art does not generate money; in fact, it has only generated debt.

This well-intentioned woman sipped her prosecco and said, “Well, it’s nice that you have a hobby.”

Work, Value, and Time

Why do we reserve the term artist for people who make money from their work? Why is a musician only entitled to call themselves a musician if they make their money from concerts and album sales? Why is a writer only a writer if they have a job teaching at an MFA program or cobble together an income from freelance articles and book sales?

This is because of the Labor Theory of Value, which can be boiled down to the sentiment that time is money. And if we spend our time working on something that does not generate money, it inherently lacks value. We value lawyers and doctors who work long hours, but our culture does not value individuals who dedicate their time to unpaid work. This comes up a lot with mothers. Our capitalist system would not run without the unpaid labor of women. And yet mothers who stay at home to care for their children, performing an essential element of the capitalist system, often struggle with feeling invisible, worthless, or like they’ve lost their identity. Because, even though their work is essential, it’s invisible and, more importantly, unpaid. Their time is not exchanged for value. (For more in-depth discussion of this, read Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe or Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici).

Not to get all Malcom Gladwell on you, but I have definitely put 10,000 hours of effort into my writing. When I was in the first grade, I did a little project on how I wanted to be an author when I grew up. For middle and high school, I attended an arts magnet school in Denver, where I spent an hour and a half each day surrounded by other young writers. I wrote in college, where I was a creative writing major, and I have taken numerous workshops over the last fifteen years since graduating, not to mention the countless hours I spent writing alone in coffee shops, on my mother’s couch, and alone in my apartment.

This probably all comes across as a little defensive and bitter to you. It should! I am being defensive and bitter!

If I were truly secure in my own worth, I don’t think it would have bothered me so much to hear someone else claim that they worked harder in their life than I did. I cannot deny that this person worked harder at their paid job than I did, but when it comes to writing, the work of my life, I know I have given it, if not my all, quite a lot.

But what happens when all that work is invisible? What happens when, every day, people dismiss something that you strive to be the very best at as insignificant, or as a way to pass free time or to stave off boredom? As I said, if I were a confident, self-assured person, it wouldn’t bother me so much! I would be able to write and be satisfied with my own progress. I can look at the short stories I wrote ten years ago and compare them to my writing now, and see significant improvements in craft, so why should I care if anyone else notices it too?

I care for a few reasons. One reason is I want to feel loved and safe. I think Chloe Zhao, director of Nomadland and Hamnet, says it best in her interview with David Marchese:

So many of us started telling stories because we didn’t have the easiest childhood. So when your work, which is the only way that you can seek connection and validation since you were a child, is being compared and judged, you could go as far as feeling that a rejection of that work is a rejection of who you are and your ability to be safe or loved.

The other reason I care is because we live in a society where what we produce, and how much, determines not only our financial value, but something else just as important. By day, I work in the tech industry, and in tech, working 15 hours a day and not having work-life balance is not only encouraged, but glorified. If you’re only getting five hours of sleep at night but still producing features, code, products, etc… you’re a hero. But it’s not just tech–it’s the way our capitalist system is designed.

• You are your time.

• Your time is what you give to work. This labor time is exchanged for money.

• This money generates value.

So what to do with all this work of writing? Does it have any value?

Writing When Darcy Met Lizzy, I spent hours every night working. It was a solitary endeavour. It was for me and me alone. But if I didn’t share my writing, all that work, all that effort, it had no value in society. And we are programmed to think that our effort is only worthwhile if it has value.

I wanted to put the book out there to prove to anyone who might listen that I am a hard worker, I am devoted, I am masochistic in the service of labor. You might not see me, reader, but here I am, a workaholic, just like the rest of you! I have worked my whole life to get better at one thing! Validate me! The more people who bought or read my book, the more value I would accrue. The more people would see me for who I really am.

I wasn’t looking for financial value but social value.

Status, Identity, and Value

Once, I asked a Canadian artist friend if she ever felt it was hard to be in relationships with people who didn’t share her views on capitalism. She laughed as if I were absurd. She said, “I think that is a distinctly American problem.”

“We must consider a rather serious paradox: though American society is more mobile than Europe’s, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American life. Where everyone has status, it is also perfectly possible, after all, that one has. It seems inevitable, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what status is.

But Europeans have lived with the idea of status for a long time. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as of being a good actor, and, in neither case, feel threatened. And this means that the actor and the waiter can have a freer and more genuinely friendly relationship in Europe than they are likely to have here. The waiter does not feel, with obscure resentment, that the actor has ‘made-it,’ and the actor is not tormented by the fear that he may find himself, tomorrow, once again a waiter.

This lack of what may roughly be called social paranoia causes the American writer in Europe to feel, almost certainly for the first time in his life, that he can reach out to everyone, that he is accessible to everyone and open to everything. This is an extraordinary feeling. He feels, so to speak, his own weight, his own value.”

Because we live in a society predicated on the idea that any man can “pull himself up by his bootstraps and make something of himself,” we live, as Baldwin suggests, in a state of social paranoia.

To be continued next week…

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Previously in The Work of Art:

• Beyond validation or attention, writers seek publication for more time. The true desire is to exchange creative work for the financial freedom to live, read, and think.

• Using Marx’s theory of Socially Necessary Labor Time, art’s market value is determined not by how long you spent on it, or how much of your heart you poured into it, but by the average time it takes to produce a similar product.

• In 2026, the value of art is dictated by the platform industry. To remain relevant to the algorithm, producing work fast and releasing often is the only way you can survive

• Because platforms like Amazon and Netflix spend billions of dollars trying to keep you consuming content, art is now content generation.

• Even with a publishing deal, most artists don’t own the means of production.

• Even if you sell your novel, you are STILL right where you started: exchanging your labor time for survival.

  

In his book What Is Art?, Leo Tolstoy describes a world that is so foreign to us it’s hard to believe it was only around 170 years ago. He says:

"For the support of art in Russia, where only one-hundredth part of what is necessary for furnishing instruction to the whole people is expended on public education, the government offers millions as subsidies to academies, conservatories, and theatres. In France, eight millions are set aside for the arts; the same is true of Germany and of England. In every large city, they build enormous structures for museums, academies, conservatories, dramatic schools, for performances and concerts. Hundreds of thousands of workmen — carpenters, masons, painters, joiners, paper-hangers, tailors, wigmakers, jewellers, bronzers, compositors — pass their whole lives at hard work for the satisfaction of the demands of art, so that there is hardly any other human activity, except the military, which absorbs so many forces as this.”

Tolstoy is talking about a massive social investment in the arts. He claims that the arts are second only to the military.

Can you imagine?! He goes on to say,

It would be well if the artists did all their work themselves, but as it is, they need the aid of workmen, not only for the production of the art, but also for their for the most part luxurious existence, and in one way or another they receive it either in the form of pay from rich people, or in the form of subsidies from the government, which are given them by the million for theatres, conservatories, academies. This money is collected from the masses, whose cows are sold for this purpose and who never enjoy these Esthetic pleasures which art gives them.

Tolstoy is being pretty salty here, and his whole argument is that artists are depraved hedonists and must get a little more Christian, but I was stuck on the phrase luxurious existence. Tolstoy is painting a picture of a world where one could be an artist and live a luxurious existence because the world was showing up for art—they were building opera houses, buying books, and adorning their salons with really nice paintings.

Harpers recently published a letter from Richard Wagner to Ludwig II, the king of Bavaria, who had paid off the composer’s debts, in which Wagner basically says that the king saved art itself. He says: My sole reason for living is the wondrous love that descends upon me like drops of dew from the heart of my royal friend—as though from the lap of God—fructifying new seeds of life within me!”

This would be like Trump deciding to fund an independent movie and paying off the filmmaker’s debts. Or like Jeff Bezos deciding he wanted to fund a visual artist for a few years while she completed her Magnum Opus. To be fair, The Atlantic, one of the few places writers can still publish essays and make money, is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But that feels more like a tax write off and not like patronage.

So, since we don’t live in Germany or Russia in the 1860s, how do we solve a problem like money? (Read that last bit in the sing-songy voice of nuns in The Sound of Music.) I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the culture of MFAs is almost exclusively American. Some of the most innovative writers today do not have MFAs. But, more often than not, they’re international. Samantha Schweblin is from Argentina but lives in Berlin. Sheila Heti is Canadian. Roberto Bolano is Chilean. Olga Tokarczuk is Polish. Miriam Toews is Canadian. None of these writers has an MFA.

Canada has a universal, publicly funded healthcare system. Instead of 401ks, they have a pension plan. Is it any wonder that there are so many wonderful artists coming out of Canada right now?

But, in America, where there is no universal healthcare and very limited social services, little to no affordable housing, and a dependence on the stock market if you’re privileged enough to have a 401k, time is not only money; it is the key to health and safety. Where are you going to get the time to write if you must devote your time to safety?

Higher education allows you to get student loans, offering what’s essentially the ability to buy time now and pay later. Because, let’s face it, even at a fully-funded MFA, you’re not going to get enough money to survive so you’re going to either take out loans, which you eventually must pay back (or like my neighbor, who is living under the weight of two PhDs, know you can never pay back and will have thousands of dollars of debt looming over you for the rest of your life, which can be a major boner killer), or work a job in addition to the program, thereby defeating the whole point, which is to garner extra time.

But let’s say you’re fully funded. You can spend three years in a program like the one at Syracuse and earn $24,000 a year (which is a lot, actually, for an MFA). For context, according to the MIT minimum living wage calculator (using conservative estimates), a single person in Onondaga County needs $47,150 before taxes. Where I live in Olympia, Washington, the living wage is $51,720. In my hometown of Denver, Colorado, the living wage is $54,490. Even the highest-paying MFAs offer only a fraction of the cost of living. And while the plight of the starving artist sounds really romantic on paper, it’s a lot less glamorous in real life.

I was humbled by Alice Notley’s interview in The Paris Review. She’s what I’d describe as a voice of a generation, a true genius, a gift to our world. But she and her husband, Ted Barrigan, spent much of their life in abject poverty, and he died an agonizing death from hepatitis C in their apartment. Notley says:

He was, in a way, always sick during [his last] years. The illness went untreated, because there was no treatment really; we couldn’t afford doctors anyway, he didn’t want to change his lifestyle that much, and he didn’t want his illness named and charted by doctors.

Patti Smith’s Just Kids is an empowering story that makes you feel like if only you were braver, stronger, and more creative, you too could have suffered the way she did and become a world-famous musician and writer. But, in reality, you’re reading a memoir that says much more about luck than it does about talent (although I am not disregarding her talent).

These stories of the starving artist who made it present us with a pretty terrible and aggressive dichotomy: art and physical death and suffering, or selling out and existential death and suffering. I think this is a false choice.

I once ran into someone who’d just gotten a 9–5 job that she’d spent months training for. I asked her how the job was, and she said, Oh, that? I quit. I’m just not built for a desk job. I’d rather make art.

I found myself getting angry. I don’t think any human being was built for a desk job. I think desk jobs are anti-human. I just think there are those of us who are better at squashing our desires for freedom and autonomy in exchange for the security of healthcare and a steady paycheck. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this friend is someone who, while she is self-sufficient, comes from a stable family that contributed to her housing. I also probably took this extra personally because I am one of those people who has a desk job. I make my money sitting at my desk all day Monday-Friday working for a tech company even though I, too, would rather make art. So I am sure I heard her comment with a chip on my shoulder and reacted defensively as a result.

But, even if your parents didn’t help you with the down payment for your house like this friend, it is undeniable that not having someone to call on to bail you out in America will change your relationship to work. If you’re someone who can’t call your dad if your car is towed and you only have $5 in your checking account, you can feel like a failure. But if you’re someone who can’t call your aunt to help you with rent, so you decide to get a job with good healthcare and high pay, you can feel like a traitor to art. It’s a lose-lose situation. Either way, you can get to feeling like all your other artist friends are somehow better than you, that somehow there’s a big game being played, and you’re losing.

(Careful, my dear, that savors strongly of bitterness)

A piece in New York Magazine speaks to this feeling of failure. “How Many New Yorkers Are Secretly Subsidized By Their Parents?” discusses the flood of baby-boomer money that’s changing the social fabric of New York:

When the job is nonprofit and the trips European, when the work is too freelance and their kids’ school too private, when they close on a co-op before they finish their dissertation, sure, it could be crypto. It could be sex work. Maybe you missed that time they were hit by a city bus. But if you know someone under 50 who’s living like it’s the ’90s — who owns their apartment, who’s out every night, or who sends their kid to private nursery school and still has money left for vacation — it’s safe to assume there’s a baby-boomer behind them.

One of my dad’s favorite lines was from the film It’s a Wonderful Life. After George Bailey jumps into the water to save his guardian angel, Clarence, he asks him if he has eight thousand bucks. Clarence responds, We don’t use money in heaven. To which George Bailey responds, It comes in pretty handy down here, bub.

That’s how I feel about money; it comes in pretty handy down here, bub. And if you’re not one of the lucky ones in the article above, or even one of the regular privileged people whose parents can help subsidize a trip back home for Thanksgiving or give you an extra hundred dollars here and there when you’re behind on your phone bill, you must make that money somehow because the world is not a friendly place for the poor; in fact, it’s more expensive. So having a 9-5 job when you’d rather be making art shouldn’t make you feel like a traitor to art, it shouldn’t carry any sort of extra emotional weight. It’s literally just doing what you have to do to be safe.

My father, who was unhoused for twenty years, died with only what he had in his pockets. Throughout his life, I saw firsthand how awful it is to get sick and die if you don’t have any money. It’s not glamorous. It’s painful and dehumanizing. And if you get sick without health insurance, there are some options for postponing the debt with things like payment plans or predatory credit cards with 0% APR that you must pay within a select timeframe. In 2024, 36% of U.S. households had medical debt, 21% had a past-due medical bill, and 23% were paying a medical bill over time to a provider. I myself had a surgery in 2021 that would have cost over $60,000 if I didn’t have health insurance.

If you live in America and you don’t have a safety net, this should scare the shit out of you. So, if you’re like me, and not willing to make like Alice Notley and literally almost die for your art, how is an artist to get this money then? How are you going to generate, at a minimum, the $54,000 in Denver, Colorado, or the $51k in Olympia, Washington?

You have to go about it the way everyone else does. You must exchange your time for money.

So, let’s say you’re an artist, and even if you can’t write and read all day, every day, you still want to work for something you believe in.

It’s very taboo to talk about money and art but I think it’s important because we live in a real world that costs real money. And I’ve spent so much of my life feeling like a failure working in tech and not finding a way to make my art pay the bills. I used to google famous writers and try to figure out if they were a) married and b) what their spouses did for a living. So many writers, if you dig into their lives enough, have lawyer/doctor partners, inheritance, or parents who invested in property and let them live for cheap. I definitely had a secret fantasy that I would have a sugar mama who would let me write in the attic into the wee hours of the morning. Because I wanted to figure out how everyone was making their lives work, I did a ton of research, and realized that the system is so rigged we should all just be proud of ourselves for getting by and no one is a failure. That probably seems obvious to y’all but this was a hard won reality check for me!

Also, on a personal note, while I have been interested in the economy and capitalism for a few years and have been conducting research for fun and as an intellectual thought exercise, I didn’t begin to think about the real world implications in earnest until two years ago when my mom was diagnosed with cancer. She spent a few years as a school librarian and then, due to budget cuts in Denver Public Schools, lost her position as a librarian and became a 3rd grade teacher. had to retire early and even though she’s lucky enough to have a pension, her economic reality is sobering. Watching my mom retire was like being thrown into an alpine lake. I woke the fuck up. I didn’t have a pension. And I hadn’t really saved for retirement because of a combination of delusion and a belief that I might die before then anyway. I realized that no one is going to take care of me but me. And the likelihood of selling a book that becomes a bestseller is very unlikely at this point (and, as you will see in part 8, really doesn’t guarantee financial stability anyway, and as you will see in the conclusion, defies the whole point of art, but I digress) so I need to make money to live a dignified life as an older person in some way! Because, money comes in handy down here, bub.

So, on to the real heart of the essay: if you are alive in America, you need money. And let’s say you’re an artist, and even if you can’t write and read all day, every day, you still want to work for something you believe in. So let’s explore some options for how you’re gonna get that money.

1. You could be a teacher, educating the next generation and reading literature with high school students, and living out the fantasy of Dead Poets Society. In Colorado, the average teacher’s salary is mid-to-low $60,000s. So you’re barely scraping by the minimum living wage. But, at least you’ll have a pension, which is not truly enough to retire on, but at least you won’t have absolutely nothing when you’re 65.

2. Let’s say you want to work for a lit mag and get exposed to new voices and help shepherd the new generation? You could be a full-time managing editor at N+1 and make 59-64,000 dollars! And in case you’re wondering, the minimum living wage for Brooklyn is $60,833. So sure, it’s doable, like you won’t die. But you won’t thrive. And you certainly won’t be able to save for a healthy future as an older adult in the United States.

3. You could be a professor, but to do so, you must obtain a PhD, which can lead to significant debt, and higher education is under immense pressure right now due to declining population and shifting demographics, resulting in enrollment drops and closures. In other words, there’s a lot of risk with little reward. And humanities professors don’t make very much until they get tenure, which is a very cutthroat process. A humanities professor at DU, my local school growing up, probably only makes $60,000 dollars a year.

To be clear, these aren’t unlivable wages. But do they provide a life of dignity? I don’t think so. You could be one of those naysayers who is thinking to themselves, “These Millennials and Gen Z think they can have it all! Who do they think they are?”

Yes, it’s true that back in the day, my grandma owned three dresses that she wore to the law office where she worked, which meant she wore the same dress twice a week. The concept that one day her granddaughter would own enough clothes to fill two closets and go out to buy coffee multiple times a week would have astounded her. Family vacations were taken once or twice during my mom’s entire childhood, and they traveled to places like Nebraska, where the rest of my family lived. And my grandma was one of the privileged ones who had a college education.

In the age of Instagram, we see so many of our friends on trips to Europe (I myself have contributed to this with my recent trips to Greece), with really lovely nails, in new cars or houses with gorgeous decorations. It can be easy to want those things. It can be easy to feel like you deserve those things. Why should you be denied the beautiful life of your dreams when everyone else seems to have it all? Especially when, for women, especially Black women, beauty can be the only means for gaining respectability, promotions, and wealth. And who are we kidding? Even in the publishing industry, it pays off big to be white, blonde, and “hot.” I spend a lot of money to dye my hair blonde so I can reap the benefits in the workplace and among my peers.

I think the reality is that people are either getting support from invisible places, are in a lot of debt, or are among the few who make $54,000 a year and live lives that accurately reflect that income. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make you one of the 38 million Americans living below the poverty line, but it does mean that you will be one of the many Americans who will retire in poverty (studies say that you must make at least $150,000 a year if you’re under 50 to not retire in abject poverty).

It also means we won’t have access to the many luxuries Instagram peddles, encouraging us to indulge in self-care. And if you can’t afford that massage when your neck is killing you from a double shift at the restaurant where you work, that Instagram is telling you that you need to feel grounded and embodied and deal with the trauma stored in your body; or if you can’t afford the out-of-pocket cost for a therapist that will help you navigate the turmoil that is American life, you can start to feel resentful.

Michael Green, who is for sure one of those capitalist folks (Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager), wrote a viral piece suggesting that the minimum living wage an American with a family of 4 needs to just participate in the system is $140,000 a year. As economist Kathryn Edwards says, our lives aren’t becoming unmanageable because we’re in a recession; it’s because social policies over the last fifty years have left us without the foundation to live dignified lives.

Dear reader, you might be thinking, “Why do you need a job that provides you with meaning and satisfaction? Life is pain; anyone who says otherwise is selling something! Nobody was guaranteed a happy life or even a safe one; we were just given the right to pursue it. You get weekends and holidays! You only must work 40 hours a week, so buckle up crybaby! Pull up your bootstraps! Make like Octavia Butler and wake up at 2 am before your shitty day job! Or like Toni Morrison before your work at a publishing house.”

Or you could be saying, “Yes, it is hell to work a job I don’t enjoy. Yes, it feels like death to trade my precious time to sit at a desk for 40 hours a week. No way do I want to do this for the rest of my life, let alone until the end of the week!”

In an interview, Andrew Hartman, the author of Karl Marx in America, describes the anxiety of exchanging our time for money well when he says, of the switch from a feudal system to a capitalist one:

“[I] was trying to convey… how radically foreign it was to have to go into a factory every day and work in very regimented conditions, not only foreign but miserable, right? And so it’s, again, to repeat myself, it’s not as if like being a peasant in Sicily in the 19th century was like some utopian existence but when these people were sort of pushed off the land and immigrated to the United States and were thrown into factories, it seemed much worse to them. Same for example, with like these people who had moved out west in search of, you know, whether they were immigrants or not, in search of just independence of the ability, they would hope to sort of have a little chunk of land and grow their own food and maybe make a little profit on the side when that was increasingly foreclosed upon in the late 19th century as increasingly corporations and the rich monopolized the land and people were, again, in order to survive, they had to sell their labor, which often meant going into some sort of factory-like conditions that was an extremely foreign existence for them, an unpleasant existence for them…”

We’re taught that with the advent of capitalism and industrialism, we acquired more freedom and autonomy, and everyone was happy about it. Still, the truth is, this transition was met with intense resistance. It is a very unnatural and inhuman way to spend our days, being “yoked to the time clock,” and it’s perfectly reasonable to want to fight back or at least be unhappy about it. Our modern understanding of time is very new. Like 200 years new.

As Oliver Burkeman describes in his book Four Thousand Weeks:

“On balance, you should definitely be grateful you weren’t born a peasant in early medieval England. For one thing, you’d have been much less likely to make it to adulthood; but even if you had, the life that stretched ahead of you would have been one definition by servitude. You’d have spent your backbreaking days farming the land on which the local lord permitted you to live, in exchange for giving him a crippling proportion of what you produced for the income you could generate from it…. But there’s one set of problems you most certainly wouldn’t have experienced: problems of time. Even on your most exhausting days, it probably wouldn’t have occurred to you that you had “too much to do,” that you needed to hurry, or that your life was moving too fast, let alone that you’d gotten your work-life balance wrong. By the same token, on quieter days, you would never have felt bored. And though death was a constant presence, with lives cut short more frequently than they are today, time wouldn’t have felt in limited supply. You wouldn’t have felt any pressure to find ways to ‘save’ it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the village green, it wouldn’t have felt like you were shirking during ‘work time.’”

So yes, it’s very true, it is possible to write even when you’re working multiple jobs to support yourself, or freelance enough to cobble together an income, but does it help facilitate a safe and prosperous future? For many who don’t achieve commercial success, it doesn’t.

Finally, what if you’re someone like me, someone who doesn’t want to live in Brooklyn on $64,000 a year, because you’re either not brave enough (I really don’t have the grit to be broke anymore, it really stresses me out and it terrifies me to relinquish security) or, also like me, you could have a mixture of bougie tastes (I love an expensive candle and a good facial, blame it on my Virgo sun sign) combined with a childhood history of economic insecurity? If you’re this type of artist, you could just abandon values and passion and get a job you hate that at least pays you the money you need without requiring too much time.

Does this make you/me a sellout? Does this mean I have relinquished the true soul of art for security?

But since when have security and art become mutually exclusive?

Continued next week….

When I decided to self-publish When Darcy Met Lizzy last December, I believed I wanted to accomplish two things:

1. Avoid debt from the high costs of self-publishing.

2. Find an audience.

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But, if I were being honest with myself, the reasons were a little more complicated.

There are many reasons why writers write. Some writers write to answer questions that consume them; some write for joy; others write for therapy (I disagree with Alice Notley’s statement that writing is not therapy), or as a release or spiritual practice. But, while I am not prepared to make any universal, grand statements about what motivates people to write, I feel confident in claiming that there are only a few reasons writers seek publication:

1. Financial gain

2. Validation/attention

This is not to say that writers are sitting around at home submitting to agents and editors so they can get rich and buy New York penthouses (although this may be the case for some). Instead, I think writers engage in the masochistic shitshow that is the submission process because they want more time. More time to write, more time to read, and ultimately more time to live and thereby acquire the depth of experience required for writing.

For example, I spend a lot of time daydreaming about different concepts and stories, and researching random and niche pieces of history, like 19th-century British naval warfare. Wouldn’t it be so much more pleasurable to exchange this creative work, this beautiful and transcendent time of thinking and dreaming, for money? Because if I did exchange this work for money, it would mean that the time I give to work is also the time I give my soul and desire.

A short (I promise!) explanation of capitalism:

It took me a long time to understand how capitalism works. I intuitively knew it was behind most (but not all) of my existential depression, but I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it because the only class I dropped out of in college was Economics. Also, I was tired of getting into arguments with capitalists and socialists without truly understanding the subject matter. After years of reading and discussing economics with my partner, I genuinely have my own opinion about capitalism. An opinion I am about to share with you all.

So, what follows is “the brief guide to capitalism for artists who want to understand why work makes them want to kill themselves”:

1. First, you must understand value. Everything–from this newsletter (if I charged for it) to the laptop I am using–has a value based on the time it took to produce it. Marx referred to this as Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT).

2. SNLT is the average amount of time required to create a product.

3. Let’s pretend I get super into building computers and decide to make my own. It takes me 400 hours to build a computer myself. Is my homemade computer worth 400 hours of labor time? No, because Apple can make a MacBook in three hours. If I tried to sell my computer based on my 400 hours, no one would buy it because they can just go out and buy a MacBook for much cheaper.

4. Money is how we measure and trade time across companies and borders.

5. So, in a capitalist society, we’re not selling our physical and intellectual labor; we’re selling our labor time. This means we’re selling our ability to work for a set amount of time. In the U.S., if you’re privileged enough to work a 9–5, this is 8 hours a day, five days a week. This is your labor time.

6. This creates a class divide:

   1. Working class: You must sell your time to survive.

   2. Capitalist class: You own the means of production (like the tools or the office), which allows you to buy other people’s time.

7. If the capitalist class directly paid for your time, there would be a direct exchange of value, and there would be no profit. So, if it takes you 3 hours to build a computer, and the company sells the laptop for the cost of paying you for your 3 hours, it would be an even trade from the consumer to the capitalist to the worker.

8. Companies make their profits in the gap between two types of time:

   1. Necessary Labor Time: The hours you work to produce enough value to cover your own wage (the 3 hours to make the computer)

   2. Surplus Labor Time: Every hour you work after you’ve paid for yourself (the remaining 5 hours of the workday)

9. To sum up, if a computer has a value of 3 hours, a capitalist will only make money if you, the worker, can build the computer in 3 hours and then continue to work for free for five more hours.

In a world of declining literacy rates, where the average book sells only 12 copies (more on this coming in a few weeks), the only books that are really making money right now are romances and mysteries. Consider HBO’s latest queer project, Heated Rivalry.

It’s based on a book by Rachel Reid in a series that has sold 650,000 copies since 2018. While publishing houses rarely publish data on how much literary fiction sells, the romance market is growing. According to Publishers Marketplace, “year-to-date print sales [are] up 24 percent from the same period last year. A total of 51 million units have been sold in the past 12 months, nearly doubling sales from four years ago. While some of this growth can be attributed to Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm, which sold 1,288,300 hardcovers across deluxe and standard editions in its first week, the category shows double-digit growth even excluding the Yarros.”

I am not going to dis romance writers because I myself wrote a romance novel and I fucking loved it! But was writing When Darcy Met Lizzy remotely as hard as writing my first book, The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs? No way. And yes, part of what made it easier was that I copied Jane Austen’s plot. But I’d argue that doesn’t make much of a difference because romance novels, like all of genre fiction, rely heavily on beats. These are things you’re expected to do at a specific page count. As Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, says of her addiction to romance novels, “I am now sadly in possession of the knowledge that if you open any romance novel to approximately three-quarters of the way through, you can get right to the point.”

There’s comfort and safety in a formula. It doesn’t make it less inventive; it doesn’t mean you have less talent or that you’re less creative, but it does mean that writing takes a lot less time. Especially if you’re a professional like Rachel Reid, who clearly possesses both the habits and talent to churn out a book a year (to be fair, her work did take a long time to generate massive sales and a lot of it had to do with her work being recommended on social media. Later on I will try to make the point that social media won’t make a huge difference to your career and I recognize that Rachel Reid is an exception to that point.)

There’s a reason people are hungry for romance right now. Our attention span is nominal, we’re exhausted, and we just want to feel good. So the beats of a romance novel act like a consistent delivery of dopamine to your brain. You know precisely when you’re going to feel good and how, and you begin to crave it, just like you would any other kind of drug. And, Amazon wants to keep you on your Kindle just like Netflix wants to keep you on your TV. As Netflix’s CEO has publicly stated, he’s not worried about Disney or Apple. His biggest competitor is sleep.

Reading literary fiction is hard work. Reading poetry is hard work. It doesn’t deliver dopamine at a consistent and steady pace. And so how can the consumer (reader or film connoisseur) fight literal billion-dollar industries invested in building media and technology designed to keep you gorging yourself on content? You’re at war right now, and you probably don’t even know it. You’re at war for your time, for your rest! Let alone your intellectual or spiritual growth.

So, how does all of this equate to Socially Necessary Labor Time? If people aren’t buying books, but they are buying romance, and (based on the minimal publishing pace of a single author) a romance novel can be written in a year, then the SNLT of a book is a year.

So what if you spend 10 years writing your hybrid lyrical novella about Proust? The value of that book will still just be 1 year. Not only that, your publisher (should you have a publisher) won’t want you spending those nine extra years on the book because they’re a waste, because they go beyond the SNLT. There’s no profit in it. They want you churning out books at least once every three years, if not faster. (Take a look at all the indie bestsellers, and most, if not all, match this cadence. Think Brandon Taylor or C. Pam Zhang. Message me if you think I am wrong.)

But! It gets even worse! If your book can be published in 2018, like Heated Rivalry, and still be relevant in 2025, you’ve got yourself, and more realistically, your publisher (who owns the means of production), a true hit. So, the SNLT of a book is not just the time it took to write the book, but also the time the book remains present in the consumer’s mind. And, unless your book wins a Pulitzer, like Martyr!, your lyrical, hybrid work of fiction is likely not to remain relevant in the consumer’s mind for long. And how do you stay relevant in the mind of a consumer?

The landscape of publishing, journalism, and film has changed dramatically in the past twenty-years. Newspapers, movie theaters, and books have been replaced by platforms for digital delivery of content. Like news apps, Instagram, Netflix, and Kindle. We’re living in the age of the platform industry, which is essentially where the majority of reading either begins (people are more likely to buy print books on Amazon) or takes place on an eBook (where you can impulse buy anything you want) or through audio (the fastest growing area of books by far), how you stay relevant in the consumer’s mind is by feeding the algorithm. And feeding the algorithm with more posts or reels isn’t enough. You need to create more art to be sold and promoted again. So, the more you’re in people’s feeds, the more the algorithm promotes your work, the more people buy your product, etc.…

What does this mean?

The market has standardized the speed of creativity. And you will literally break your neck trying to maintain that speed. And when has speed ever truly been conducive to creativity?

If the market has standardized the speed of creativity, then that means that the SNLT, or socially necessary labor time, i.e. how much your art will be worth in the eyes of the market, is going to match the fastest product with the most returns. For example, your indie film about the existential experience of childbirth is going to be worth the same as a made-for-Netflix movie like Nonna’s, that’s very cheap to make and can be released quickly to keep users engaged and always watching TV. So, it will be harder to get the funding for your film because it’s competing against the standard of Nonna’s.

Also, in true Marxist theory, art used to fall into a different category called “unproductive labor.” This means that it doesn’t produce surplus value for the capitalist class. But, if you sell your book to Penguin or Netflix and they take a cut of your work and then heavily market it for increased gains, they’ve turned your art into “productive labor.”

I believe that in 2026, the algorithm is the new Socially Necessary Labor Time. In 2026, a book’s value is no longer the time it takes to write, but the frequency with which it must be ‘fed’ to the platform to stay relevant.

Writing and craft have been replaced with content generation.

TLDR:

So you might have started this essay thinking that it is theoretically possible to sell your work (your labor time) to a publisher and generate enough money to buy yourself some more time, but, in reality, unless you are one of the lucky few (and I mean 50 out of hundreds of thousands), your work will either:

1. Have no value to the market, or

2. Be valuable to the market, but to remain valuable, you will have to continue delivering content at a steady pace to the capitalist beast that is the platform industry.

And most importantly, when you sell your work, you might get an advance, and if you’re lucky, a share of the profits, but you won’t get ownership. Which means you still don’t own the means of production. Which means that, even after all of this, you still must exchange your labor time for money. You are still exactly where you started.

To be continued next week.

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Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing a series of essays that delve into the work of art: the labor behind making art and what art does and does not reveal about this labor.

I wrote this to better understand my own life choices and struggles. If you know me, it’s no secret that I hate working. Like I hate the fact that we have to spend a minimum of 40 hours a week selling our time to the highest bidder. I have resisted this at every turn (to my own detriment), and I pretended I lived in a fantasy world where I didn’t have to work and kind of act like I didn’t have a full-time job, only to have to pay the piper, as my mom says

Not only did this pretending not to need to work while simultaneously really needing work cause extreme anxiety and instability, but it turns out, it’s also really bad for your self-esteem! Because as much as I might not like to work, any sort of disconnect between my commitments and my actions degrades my integrity. Which meant that while I pretended I lived in a fantasy non-work world, I still felt like shit about myself for avoiding work.

Over the past few years, I’ve had many revelations about work and my relationship to it. I never really understood that my relationship to work and my feelings about it came from a very privileged place. Then I met my partner, who is an immigrant, and her perspective on work revealed my own assumptions.

Until I met Caro, I never realized that I felt entitled to a comfortable and easy life. I’d always prided myself on being self-sufficient. I worked at a sports bar in high school, in the school cafeteria in college, and I cleaned toilets at a resort. I had grit, I reassured myself; I can “get the job done.” I grew up with my mother and my sister in my grandmother’s house after my parents got divorced. My grandmother was a teacher and mother was a teacher. I didn’t grow up wealthy, so I didn’t, deep down, expect to be rich. But through my conversations with my partner and my research into capitalism, I have begun to understand that the vision for my life that I had in my mind—a life spent reading books and writing all day and taking walks in the woods—is the life of an independently wealthy person. I didn’t want to face the reality that I am a member of the working class. It came as a shock when I discovered that I was exactly like those white Trump supporters who secretly believe that they’re about to be billionaires when really they’re living paycheck to paycheck. And I avoided facing up to reality because the thought of working a 9-5 for 50 years was too depressing for me to bear. It was depressing, because deep down, I believed that something better had been promised to me, that I was entitled to more. Without acknowledging it, I had embodied the beliefs of a white American—that I was born for, and owed, a good life, a happy life, a safe life.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe all human beings deserve a safe and happy life. But no one is entitled to a beautiful life based on their position in the world. And the truth is that the vast majority of us have to work to sustain our lives. There is nothing special about me that makes me exempt from this universal truth in the age of capitalism.

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Toni Morrison has a beautiful piece about work in the New York Times. She wrote:

All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.

I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.

Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike….

Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid She would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.

Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

That was what he said. This was what I heard:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

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My partner and Toni Morisson helped me see that you can’t change your reality if you deny reality. I can’t organize for workers if I don’t acknowledge that I am one.

Then I read All About Love by bell hooks and had another lightbulb moment. Before I read her words, it had never occurred to me that my capacity to love myself was affected by my inability to commit to paid labor. Working was the opposite of self-love. I am an artist! To work is to be chained to the man! But me? I am a free spirit! A wild child like an Enya song or Strider in The Lord of the Rings!

But, in reality, I was pretty miserable daily because I was both avoiding work and dependent on my paycheck. I felt really rotten inside. Like one of those little slugs from Stranger Things was rooting around in my esophagus, just dying to get out.

I am sharing the section on work from All About Love in its entirety because it’s the foundation upon which these essays were built, and it will serve as a touchstone for us as we go on this journey together. There are, of course, copyright issues at play here, so I’d ask that, if her words move you as much as they moved me, you buy her book. It’s one of my top ten books of all time.

In the words of bell hooks:

Work occupies much of our time. Doing work we hate assaults our self-esteem and self-confidence. Yet most workers cannot do the work they love. But we can all enhance our capacity to live purposely by learning how to experience satisfaction in whatever work we do. We find that satisfaction by giving any job total commitment. When I had a teaching job I hated (the kind of job where you long to be sick so you have an excuse for not going to work), the only way I could ease the severity of my pain was to give my absolute best. This strategy enabled me to live purposely. Doing a job well, even if we do not enjoy what we are doing, means that we leave it with a feeling of well-being, our self-esteem intact. That self-esteem aids us when we go in search of a job that can be more fulfilling….

Marsha Sinetar writes about this concept in her book Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow as a way to encourage readers to take the risk of choosing work they care about and therefore learning through experience the meaning of right livelihood.

While there are many meaningful insights in Sinetar’s book, it is equally true that we can do what we love and money will not always follow. Although this is utterly disappointing, it can also offer us the experiential awareness that doing what you love may be more important than making money. Sometimes, as has been the case in my life, I have had to work at a job that is less than enjoyable in order to have the means to do the work I love. At one point in a very mixed job career I worked as a cook in a club. I hated the noise and the smoke. But working nights left me free to write in the day, to do the work I truly wanted to do. Each experience enhanced the value of the other. My nighttime work helped me relish the quiet serenity of my day and enjoy the alone time so essential to writing.

Whenever possible, it is best to seek work we love and to avoid work we hate. But sometimes we learn what we need to avoid by doing it. Individuals who are able to be economically self-sufficient doing what they love are blessed. Their experience serves as a beacon to all of us, showing us the ways right livelihood can strengthen self-love, ensuring peace and contentment in the lives we lead beyond work.

Often, workers believe that if their home life is good, it does not matter if they feel dehumanized and exploited on the job. Many jobs undermine self-love because they require that workers constantly prove their worth. Individuals who are dissatisfied and miserable on the job bring this negative energy home. Clearly, much of the violence in domestic life, both physical and verbal abuse, is linked to job misery. We can encourage friends and loved ones to move toward greater self-love by supporting them in any effort to leave work that assaults their well-being.

Folks who are out of the paid workforce, women and men who do unpaid work in the home, as well as all other happily unemployed people, are often doing what they want to do. While they are not rewarded by an income, their day-to-day life often provides more satisfaction than it would if they worked at a high-paying job in a stressful and dehumanizing environment. Satisfied homemakers, both women and the rare men who have chosen to stay home, have a lot to teach us all about the joy that comes from self-determination. They are their own bosses, setting the terms of their labor and the measure of their reward. More than any of us, they have the freedom to develop right livelihood.

Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being. No wonder then that we have become a nation where so many workers feel bad. Jobs depress the spirit. Rather than enhancing self-esteem, work is perceived as a drag, a negative necessity. Bringing love into the work environment can create the necessary transformation that can make any job we do, no matter how menial, a place where workers can express the best of themselves. When we work with love, we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It’s not what you do but how you do it.”

God, bell hooks. What a beautiful human.

Thank you thank you thank you.

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What follows over the next few weeks is an exploration into what it means to be an artist in America in the age of capitalism.

Together, we’ll discover what it means to value our work for ourselves and without playing into the market.

I hope you will come out at the end feeling that, while the reality is that most of us are working class in a capitalist world, there is still a way to do this labor and maintain artistic integrity.

Love to you all,

Sammie

Art/Work: A short introduction

I recently worked with the talented Jessie Broom to redesign this Substack. New name, new look! I’m so grateful to have a talented friend like Jessie who can read my mind and funnel my unfiltered spirit into imagery.

I got the idea to reconfigure this Substack last summer at Mudhouse Residency in Greece. The residency is hosted in a small village nestled high in the Cretan mountains. Agios Ionnais contains a series of homes so interconnected it’s difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Half of the village lies in ruins. A forlorn and crumbling building, home only to feral cats and broken blue bottles, abuts another glistening, renewed mudhouse. The effect is that when you’re walking its narrow and winding paths, you feel you’re meandering the halls of a giant abandoned castle.

On the few occasions I rode the winding road up from the sea and back to the residency, the sight of the village, revealed at last, astonished me. It looked so precarious! A trick of the wind and the stone creature would slip off the edge the mountain.

This place was not of the real world; it was the stuff of Miyazaki.

The visiting artist for my session was the Iranian artist, Amitis Motavalli. Ami is a true, glamorous beauty who, even in her regular clothes and without make-up, appeared at dinner every night like Cher at the Opera in Moonstruck.

Her work balances the passionate and explosive, the rage, with the deeply thoughtful and introspective.

As part of her residency, she offered to read coffee grounds for us. So, on a windy afternoon, we sat together at the cafe and I drank Greek coffee while holding the tablecloth, my notebook, firmly to the table to keep them from being whipped away. She saw a lot in the sludge at the bottom of my cup, mostly different types of birds. A peacock, swallows swarming, a little sparrow. But what stayed with me was her interpretation of a cat, poised above the little bird. She said it was a sickness or an illness or some darkness that had been preventing me from really moving forward.

Ami told me, “Let it go, it’s no longer there. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

We started talking about art and my fear of death, and how it’s always been there but accelerated after I had an emergency, life-saving surgery during the pandemic. I have been so worried that I’ll run out of time, I rush and rush and try to do whatever I can as quickly as I can.

To this, Ami replied. “Yes, but you also want quality.” Her voice was stern and a little reproachful.

Ami is a prolific artist and it’s hard to imagine generating the amount of work she’s created in her lifetime, and yet all her work is a testament to her talent and integrity. To hear her tell me to value quality over quantity felt prophetic and a little bit like being chastised by the teacher for your half-assed homework.

I often use this Substack to subvert the frustrations and impatience ignited by submitting my work to formal institutions like agents, editors, and lit mags. Submitting your work is a long, arduous, and rejection-riddled process. Not to mention my deep urge to feel witnessed! Stuck alone in my office I imagine myself struggling in vain, and I feel existentially tortured when I think of myself spending each day going to work at a tech company where no one really knows me. I want to shout from the rooftops, Hey! I am here! I am an artist! Look at all this art! (More on this coming in a few weeks). But that urge is not dissimilar to someone posting on Instagram or Facebook. It’s a desire to be liked! To be validated! And that rushing, impulsive desire to be liked RIGHT NOW, while human and understandable, can come at the cost of life itself.

So, Art/Work is my attempt to put quality over the impulsive desire for the NOW. Because, sure, I could die tomorrow, or next week, or in five years, and most likely when I die, at 85 or 45, I will still have ideas that will die with me, unrealized. But I don’t want to be driven by fear any longer.

Our culture of news push notifications twenty-four seven, podcasts where you need to come up with something interesting and world-altering to talk about every week, and Substacks that flow into your inbox at an ungodly pace, is creating an intense pressure to have something to say at any given moment, even for regular people like me, people who don’t have a giant following, people aren’t famous or regarded intellectuals. George Saunders said a recent Substack:

It’s interesting the way that the world these days seems to make us feel that we need to have an opinion on everything, even when having a certain opinion may not change anything we do, or anything about the way the world responds.

We seem to be losing the ability or desire to just be silent on certain questions. (Silent and sad; silent and interested; silent and alert.)

Sometimes silent curiosity is the best thing we can offer the world. And if we are working on a thought, it takes time. Ideas take time. Art takes time. And sometimes we won’t have the time to finish them. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth our time.

What to expect next

Going forward, I’m only going to share something if I feel I have something worth your precious time and attention and I have given the idea my full time and attention.

Right now, what I have to share is a thought exercise titled, The Myth of Instagram and the Artist.

This series will be released in four parts:

• January 12th: Part 1: The Work of Art, and The Artist and Instagram

• January 19th: Part 2: Instagram and Addiction

• January 26th: Part 3: The War for Your Attention, and No One Will Read Your Book Anyway

• February 2nd: Part 4: So Why Even Make Art? And Why Share it? (This has already been discussed here and here)

Other News

• I was lucky enough to be the winner of Cutbank’s Big Sky, Small Prose contest. You can subscribe to their lit mag here.

• My memoir, Oracles, was longlisted for Dzanc Books 2025 Non-fiction Contest. The winning book, Ghost Maps by Annalisa Bolin, looks so good, and I can’t wait for it to come out!

• Half Mystic, the publisher of my book The Family That Carried Their House on Their Backs, is having a holiday sale! You can get 20 percent off their entire bookshop with the code BYE2025!

  
  

I had the privilege of giving a talk at Petals and Pages in Denver with the effervescent Alyse Knorr. What a cool space! Run by such beautiful people!

Fun fact, you can order pretty much any book from an indie bookseller, even if they don’t have it on the shelves. A much kinder way to get your favorite read than Amazon. If you’re in Denver, use the link below to get your next book 🔮

ORDER FROM PETALS AND PAGES

That’s all folks!

Live long and prosper and “know the high stakes”,

💓 Sammie

Before we begin… Denver folks! Mark your calendars!

When Darcy Met Lizzy is coming your way!

✨ Join Alyse Knorr and me in conversation at Petals and Pages on June 7th at 12pm ✨

About this episode:

In March, a friend let me stay in her little house in Oysterville, WA so I could finish editing the audiobook for When Darcy Met Lizzy. Sequestered in that little house as the wind and the rain beat down upon the windows and roof, I learned more about writing, craft, and my own particular human wounds than I have in ten years of workshops.

Writing is scary, and facing what you’ve written can sometimes feel like looking at the ugliest, most shameful parts of yourself. But if you want to complete something, you can’t allow yourself to run away. You have to work through the shame and fear, otherwise, you’ll never get to the other side. But sometimes that process is unbearably painful! All of this sounds incredibly cheesy and cliche but that’s because it’s SO TRUE.

My good friend, the talented and ingenious poet, essayist, and novelist, Alyse Knorr, often helps me with my revision fears, and I wanted to share our conversation with you all in hopes that she may be a guiding light to you, too.

Live long and prosper,

Sammie

I’m continuing to experiment with the video essay. Mostly because I am tired and don’t have much time—

(although I know that’s not really true. We all have time, it’s just a matter of what we choose to do with it and I am choosing to work a day job that takes up a lot of my time so that I have health insurance and can afford to buy my dog way too many toys, but… I digress)

If you’re not into video essays, you can listen to the essay on Spotify. Or you can read the (unedited) transcript below.

TL:DR

Humans are narrative beings. We tell stories to bolster and justify our actions and beliefs. So, even the most innocuous stories have power and we should be very careful about which stories we choose to repeat or create.

That’s all folks!

❤️ Sammie

✏️ 💌 p.s.

For those of you who have watched/listened, my mom brought up the point that my book is “stuff” too. Isn’t the act of printing this book part of a bigger system that I am condemning? Which I guess is what I was saying about the point of art—at what point do we think “stuff” or “art” has value? And if we understand that our art, too, has consequences, what do we do with that information?

The unedited transcript:  

Hello, beautiful humans.

Long time no see. I've been wanting to do an update about When Darcy Met Lizzie for a while, but my day job has been incredibly busy, and I can't just not do it. So that's why I'm recording this late at night. And if I look haggard and tired, it's because I am haggard and tired, but I wanted to do a little post about the progress of When Darcy Met Lizzie and talk about some things that are on my mind. I think the inner school perfectionist in me is struggling with the fact that I'm not writing these essays anymore and that I am just kind of speaking.

I think there's something about me that really likes to do an in-depth research paper. And also, I'm sorry if you hear my dog in the background. She's having a moment. But I like to do a really in-depth research paper, and I really like to make an argument and take it all the way through. But honestly, who's got time for that nowadays? And I have other things that I want to work on. The time that I want to spend writing, I want to be writing other things, not stuff for this Substack. Not that I don't value this Substack, it's just more that the in-depth research I want to do is for projects that are just beyond here.

So anyway, I'm trying to realize that perfect is the enemy of the good. And I'm just trying to stifle my little Virgo, teacher's pet, Hermione Granger, and just try to get some stuff out there. So, actually, let me do a little show and tell.

Welcome to my office. So, ta da! This is the cover. Oh, not this is the cover. This is the real shebang. This is When Darcy Met Lizzie, designed by Jesse Broom. The layout on the inside is from this lovely human named Alyssa Natosi. I don't actually know how to say her last name. I should have double-checked. It's got a beautiful spine. My previous novella couldn't be sold in a lot of bookstores because it didn't have a title on the spine, so this is a huge win for me. The back, so great. I know that this is backwards in your view, and that's because I have flipped the video horizontally. Yes, I have done that, and it is true. I did it because I am Bane, and I prefer one perspective of my face. And I'm giving that perspective that I prefer to you. Even though it's not the real perspective. But you know what? I can do that if I want. Okay, so this is the test one. And I just wanted to make sure that it was good before I bought a bunch of copies and shipped them all out to everyone who pre-ordered. And the answer is that it is good. It's, I'm very impressed with it. I am annoyed by certain indentation issues in it. And I'm trying to not let it bother me because really it doesn't matter, but I think some of it really... you know how there's that one typo that really pisses you off? There's a lot of indentation issues. So I'm just trying to... this is a process. Accepting the process has been a little hard for me, but I am very proud of it. And I'm glad it's going to be out in the world shortly. And anyone who pre-ordered should expect it soon.

So, the topic of today's Substack is the responsibility of writers and art. What did I think about when I was writing this book? Did I think I had a responsibility, or was it just pure fun? And the short answer is that yes, while I had so much fun writing this, I did take it very seriously because I take everything very seriously. Unfortunately, it's kind of a bummer, but I realized that if you have a classic, a beloved classic, and you're going to retell it and make it queer... You can't just plop queer characters in. You can't just make people gay in a world that wasn't forgiving of gay life or gay love. Because that really does a disservice to queer people and queer stories. And as much as I want to support the magic and the beauty of just imagining your own life and your own world and just imagining we all live in a frolicking, magical land where everyone loves each other and there's no harm, and no hatred... That is not the world we live in, actually.

So, I had to balance this. This book that I wanted to really revel in queer joy and love and sex and make it really special. I also had to balance the realities of what it was like to be a woman in the 1800s and potentially be gay. In the Culture Study podcast by Anne Helen Petersen, she has a four-part series about romance that I thought was really great, but she has one episode, "The Expansive World of Queer Romance." And it came out on December 11th in 2024 with Adib Karam. He wrote I'll Have What He's Having—love the title—but something Adib said is that it's really thoughtless to just create a magical realism world without understanding the consequences, and that historical fiction has a tough job to do if you're going to take a speculative approach to it.

So, what I did to respect the cultural confines of Regency England while also subverting them was two things. So, first of all, I had to figure out, what does it mean to be free in this world? And what does it mean to have power in this world? And why would Darcy have it, theoretically, and why wouldn't Elizabeth? And what are the ways in which power and freedom are exchanged in this world? And I came upon the idea that money grants us freedom and power. So, I made it so that in this world, if you are a woman and you are the eldest child of a lord or a lady or someone who's wealthy, theoretically, you can be a woman gentleman. And this was a way of basically saying that power and rights and freedom go hand in hand with money. And so, the more money you have, the more freedom and the more rights you have. Which is why Mr. Darcy, with her 10,000 pounds a year, would be theoretically free in this world. However, that doesn't mean that she's free totally or liberated, because she's free in this system that, even though she is a woman, it's a system that upholds the patriarchy and upholds this idea that to be powerful, you must be a man, or you must have manly occupation, meaning you have to be a landowner, or a lot of these people had slaves, or were part of this colonial world, and that's how they got their money. So, there's this idea that money and freedom aren't necessarily inherently free.

So then I was also in a plot problem. So, the second part came from a plot problem, but also from an ideological problem. But the plot problem is I couldn't just have Darcy be the only gay woman in the book because that makes no sense. That would be a boring book. And also very weird to just have one random gay character. I wanted to really embed queer culture into the whole story. So then I had to make a list of characters and think: who could be gay in this world? And then of course I came up with Colonel Foster, who is loosely mentioned in Pride and Prejudice. He is the one who takes Lydia, the youngest sister, off to Brighton and all hell breaks loose afterwards. And I was thinking, wow, there's a lot of cosplay that could come with a military queer woman. And I liked the idea, especially because I think when you're coming out and you're queer, a lot of women want to be EMTs or firefighters. I remember I went through a firefighting phase where I was living in Tahoe and I was like, 'I'm going to be a wilderness firefighter.' And I think there's something very attractive and sexy about being this outdoorsy, woodsy, 'I can take care of myself in survival mode' type. So I thought, 'Oh, Colonel Foster is going to be that sexy EMT/firefighter character, and it's going to be great.' But then I thought, how does Colonel Foster, if I've equated power and freedom to money, how is Colonel Foster going to be, how is she able to be free? And how is she able to marry a woman, walk around with men, and how is she able to be in this life? And I was thinking, well, I thought about the fact that in modern-day culture, the military is often pandered to people from low economic circumstances, and basically it's shown as your ticket out. 'Oh, you can use the GI Bill, you can get your education, you can make a name for yourself.' It's an escape from the circumstances from which you were born, but all you have to do is join the army. And I do think that that happens a lot. I think there are a lot of people who have no other opportunities. They're stuck. And they see the military as their way out.

Back in the day, if you were wealthy, you could buy a position in the army. You didn't have to be really good. But in this position, in this story, Colonel Foster is actually very good. She's very capable and she's earned her way to become a colonel all by her own merit.

So then I was faced with this other plot problem where Elizabeth Bennet, the character that I've painted for her, is a very feisty, independent, strong woman and she does want to be free and why would a woman who's incredibly feisty and independent and brave not choose to go into the army if that was available to her? Because I really don't see Elizabeth Bennet being very scared of very much. She's funny, she's charming. I think she could, theoretically, go into the army if she wanted to. So, I was in this plot problem where I've created a world in which Elizabeth Bennet, theoretically, could have been free on her own if she wanted to and she didn't need Mr. Darcy. And because part of the whole problem with Pride and Prejudice is that Elizabeth Bennet needs Mr. Darcy.

The moral of the story is, they don't have any money. Their property, their estate is entailed away. Theoretically, if their dad dies, they would literally have nothing. And, on top of that, because they don't have an education, and they weren't trained, they don't really have any skills. I say this with love, I'm not trying to diss the Bennet sisters, but they don't have any skills. So they couldn't... they don't have any practical skills. They couldn't even work in an inn if they wanted to. There was very little available to them, but they also couldn't be a governess, which is this thing that we all always see. In Jane Eyre, in these old novels, these women are going off to be a governess. So really, they're screwed. If their dad dies, they're screwed. So why would this girl, who's precocious and wonderful, not take an opportunity to save herself or protect her family? And put herself in a position where she does need to be married to essentially save herself from prostitution. They don't say that explicitly, but that is pretty much the only thing that would be available to them if they didn't get married, which is why Mrs. Bennet's pressure for them to get married is less of a funny joke and more of an act of care and an act of love. She's got her own problems, but it's an act of care.

So I was thinking about this, and this is where art, this is where I think that maybe I deviate from other writers, and I would be curious in the comments (not that anyone ever comments, but if someone should) how I deviate from other writers about the responsibility of art and how much an artist, how much a writer should show their influence and what is our role. And so my opinion of art, which I understand is incredibly controversial and borders on censorship (which I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about this and I realized I was coming across as Nancy Reagan, which is not cool because I don't want to be Nancy Reagan)... However, my personal value system is that stories have power and words have power and what we repeat is magnified. And I take that very seriously. On a daily basis, I try really hard not to share things that are negative and harmful. And I do think that a story can be violent. I really do. I really do think that words and stories can be violent. And I don't support art that is violent for no reason. I'm trying to find an example of art that feels where the violence feels purposeful versus just not. And this is where I think I really deviate, but I truly believe that it is through stories that we will change culture and we will change the world. And if the world is to be changed, if the world is to be saved, I do think the stories need to change. And I think our stories, our narratives right now are so rooted in trauma and revenge and violence. There's just violence everywhere. And I mean, I'm not even talking about murder and serial killers. I'm talking just harm in the way we speak about other people. Anyway, so I decided I was going to use this opportunity to make Elizabeth Bennet my little totem girl for nonviolence.

And I say this knowing that I may wish that I was a nonviolent person. I may not believe in violence. I don't believe in violence. I think violence begets more violence. I don't believe in war. I don't believe in it. And I know that I have some extreme, more militant friends and I understand their views, but that is not my personal view. I think that we need to eradicate violence on all levels. And I say this knowing (if you want to go back to my previous post about heroism and the fact that no one is going to be a hero)... I say this knowing that we are deeply enmeshed. As a white American, I am deeply enmeshed in violence and that my life is buoyed and supported by acts of violence. And that just by living my daily life—this computer I'm recording this on, this phone—everything is rooted in some harm across the world. I'm spiraling. Anyway, I'll get back to it. So I understand that I want to be nonviolent. However, I am violent in my existence. So I understand that's a confusing dichotomy. However, I do feel that... and I'm not trying to absolve or liberate myself from violence or try to wash my hands of it like Lady Macbeth saying, 'Out, damned spot!' I'm not trying to do that. However, I do think that it's important to aspirationally dream the world in which you want to live, or somehow change the story. And maybe this is me being naive, but this is where I'm at. Where I feel that I don't want to live in a violent world anymore and I want to raise awareness to the fact that we are living in a violent world every day. And so I decided to make Elizabeth Bennet not want to join the army because she doesn't want to kill or murder anyone and she has a line, which I probably should have saved earlier, but she's talking to (I'm not going to spoil it) some other colonels in the war... and I can't find it anyway, but basically she states her opinion right there. Which is that she's not going to take her freedom. She can't be free if she takes her freedom from somebody else. And so that is an explanation of how you're faced with a plot problem. The plot problem was, how do I create more gay people in this world? And then I'm forced to answer it with an ideological answer. So it's twofold. Plot problem, enter sexy firefighter EMT soldier lady Colonel Foster. Then, creates another plot problem, which is, why wouldn't Lizzie just join the army and be free? And I was able to share my ideological perspective that I don't think anyone should kill another human being. I just don't, I think it's wrong. I don't think we should do that as human beings. And so that was my, that's my story.

So anyway, you might be reading When Darcy Met Lizzie and you might think that it's just a story, just a story about two ladies getting it on. But really, you're reading my propaganda. My non-violent propaganda. No, I'm kidding. But really, I do think it's important, when you are given the opportunity to create and write, to consider the repercussions of your story. Even if literally 50 people read your book. Even if three people read your book, I think writing and creating forces you to think about things and question things and it forces you to take a stance and create a perspective and a story. So, that gets back to the responsibility of art. Should art be moral? Is that the responsibility of art? Or should art just be art, art for the sake of art? And I'm not going to go so far as to say that art should be moral, but I think that we should all understand the weight of stories and how powerful they are.

I also read this book, Parallel Lives, by Phyllis Rose, which was very good. It's about Victorian marriages, but she talks about John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and Harriet Taylor was married to a man and she fell in love with John Stuart Mill and this was in the 1850s, and remarriage was off the table. She basically wrote—she contributed to—that famous piece called On the Subjugation of Women. And this is a quote: She says marriage appeared to her 'no more than the transfer of a sexual commodity, with men getting all the pleasure and women getting all the disagreeables and pains.' Which is crazy. It's hard to think about this from this generation, that a woman would be thinking about this. But basically back in the day, you couldn't—I mean, still to this day, a lot of women can't say no—but if you're married, your husband... you just... you are literally his sex slave, which is what Harriet Taylor is saying in On the Subjugation of Women. And we don't think about it, right? But marriage and romance is a story. It's this idea of a monogamous marriage, this idea that we are bound to one person for life is a story and a lot of us are participating in it every day, and this story was created as a power dynamic and, in a lot of ways, for capitalism and property. So we can think, 'Oh, this is just a romantic storyline, this is just a really fun, nice story about two people who end up together.' And sure, that's true, but a lot of these stories of finding your one true love in your husband or your wife was literally a story used to force women into this property arrangement, right? And I think when you know the story, and when you see the inner workings of the story, you can choose, you can decide whether you want that story for yourself. I don't really know any woman alive who wants to be the sex slave of their partner, like Harriet Taylor was, but there are plenty of people who think that marriage is worth it for their own purposes. So anyway, this is an example of all of us engaging in a story that was told and created for us a long time ago. And if we don't expose the structure of the stories or choose to tell our own, better, different stories, we're basically just giving away our power. And no one wants that. Why give away your power? I mean, any more than we already have to.

And another thing that I was going to mention is that I read this book. I'm currently reading it. I'm not finished with it. Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand. And I wish that this book just came out. And I wish that it had come out before I had written When Darcy Met Lizzie. Except sometimes thinking too much can be the enemy of creativity. But something I didn't address in When Darcy Met Lizzie was race. I didn't address it. For Darcy, I based her physical appearance on my girlfriend, who's Brazilian and she was born in Rio and she has traditional mixed Brazilian heritage. So I described Darcy as having her physical attributes, which are really curly, coarse hair, very tan skin. And obviously that wouldn't have been Darcy back in the day. Darcy would have been a white woman. But, so anyway, I subvert race a little bit by just making Darcy and her family look the way that my girlfriend looks and the way her family looks, and that was just a subtle way of basically saying that not everyone in this world is white. But I didn't address it. I didn't talk about colonialism. I didn't talk about slavery. I didn't deal with it. I know that Bridgerton deals with it in its own way in the TV show and it's not satisfactory to a lot of people. But anyway, I wanted to talk about this in terms of stories, because Dionne Brand is basically talking about how the reading culture, the canon, and reading things like Pride and Prejudice (she talks about Mansfield Park in this book) actually did her harm. As a person of color, this canon, this literary canon that we're all supposed to read, just bolsters and further supports this culture of whiteness and colonialism. And let's read this section that I thought was good.

One second. She says (so she's talking about Vanity Fair, which is another book from that time), 'I propose that the colonial event is the aesthetic, that its pleasures, tastes, manners, consist of this juxtaposition. What is pleasing, what is in beautiful form, is the violence.' And what else does she say? She says, 'the wealth is a given, not the subject in question.' So, talking about the fact that all of these people in Vanity Fair—and, specifically in Mansfield Park, the Bertram family—get all their money from slave plantations. But it's implied this money's coming from somewhere. I don't know where Darcy's money came from, but in my world, it doesn't come from slavery. Anyway. She says, 'everyone, meaning individuals and companies, had their hands in slavery and colonial exploitation. Just as today, individuals and corporations have their hands in extracting oil or minerals and producing electronics as they destroy the earth on which we live and the oceans, waterways, and air, while describing their actions in terms of jobs, livelihoods, and wealth as a right of the rich.' And then 'the colonial conquest embedded in the book without any of the actors from those places speaking, but rather appearing as immutable.' What she's trying to say, and which I just wish this book had come out when I was in high school... I think it would have changed my perspective on things. But what she's trying to say is that these books that we so treasure are really holding up a violent ideology, and that these stories, the stories of Pride and Prejudice, this colonial wealth that we all kind of romanticize like the Cinderella story, is really just upholding these colonial views that we are engaging in today.

My girlfriend said something that I thought was really profound the other day, which is that this war on immigration is similar to the war on drugs, which is just this idea that in the Northwestern Hemisphere, we are addicted to commodities. We're addicted to shit. We're addicted to stuff. And in order to get this stuff, we need to funnel more stuff in at a really high rate, which we just can't. We can't get our stuff. We can't generate this much shit on our own. And as a result, we need cheap labor. We need a story. We need a story to support this addiction, right? Because it's just not sustainable. We can't, you and I can't live in this world where we have really fancy devices and cheap groceries if we don't engage or partake in some version, essentially, of slave labor. And our modern-day way of getting that slave labor is through undocumented migrants, right?

So, another example, besides marriage, of a story that we're living in today, is the story of the undocumented, illegal alien. And that they are a criminal, and that they're bad for America. And why is this story so important? Why would so many people care that there are these undocumented—not even undocumented, illegal—aliens? They're everywhere. They're criminals. They're coming, why do we fucking care? Who cares? Why do we make anyone a villain? Why do we make anyone a bad guy? It's because if you make someone a villain, or if you make them a bad person, or if you make them a monster, you take away their rights. Monsters don't have rights. The dragon dies, Godzilla dies, Sauron dies, monsters have no feelings, they're not free, they don't have liberty, right? So the first thing you want to do if you want to take advantage of someone, if you want to strip them of their rights, is you tell a story, you tell a really fucking good story that they are a monster. And if you tell that story good enough, well enough, suddenly you have an entire population that believes that there are all these monsters out there that don't deserve basic human rights. And what happens when you have a whole population of people who don't deserve basic human rights is then suddenly you have all these people that you can just exploit and no one cares if you exploit them because they're monsters. They have no rights. You can not pay them. You can have undocumented child migrants working in meatpacking plants that are eight, nine years old, doing all sorts of dangerous labors. And no one fucking cares because you have told a story so well that they are bad, right? So, it's funny, it's honestly laughable to me. I mean, it's not laughable, it's horrendous, it's awful. But all these people out there who think that Trump was saying that he built a border wall. If you look at a map, the wall is literally a piece of fiction. It is a story piece. Yes, there are pieces of the wall that were built, there are. I've seen the wall, yes, it does exist. There are pieces, but there are also huge gaps in the wall. It was never completed and it was never intended to be completed. The whole point is that they want people to come in to America. We need undocumented labor. America runs on undocumented labor. We could not function. The reason America has cheap groceries (everyone's complaining about the price of groceries) is because we have undocumented labor, right? And that's just the state of affairs, but you tell the story of this big wall, right? Suddenly you have... that is literally out of a fairy tale, like Sleeping Beauty. The big bad witch built the wall of brambles or something.

So anyway, that's the point of stories, right? We can, to bring it back to my point, the point is that stories matter. We live stories every day. You and I are participating actively in a story right now where the world is trying to tell us that undocumented migrants in the United States of America have no rights and that they're monsters. And the reason we're doing that is so that we can exploit them and use them so that we can live our lives without having to understand that our lives have consequences and are unsustainable, right? But you tell a good story that marriage is good for women, and suddenly you have women like Harriet Taylor exposing the truth that, actually, women are commodities.

Anyway, so the moral of the story is, I take stories very seriously. I think it's important for everyone to take stories seriously. And I don't think we should be naive and just assume that when we're creating art, we don't have the potential for propagating and perpetuating harm.

This is why I should just write an essay and not just talk, because clearly this is a rambly piece. But the flip side is, obviously: should we make art that only has a good moral? Because no one likes to be preached at and obviously no one, it's not very productive to constantly just be writing things that are about good people doing good things. No one wants the Ted Lassos of the book world to just be the only books we have available. We need complicated rich stories. So where does it lie? What do we do?

So the truth is I don't really have an answer to this question of what is the responsibility of the artist and what do we owe the audience, real or imagined, even if it's just ourselves. I don't have, I wish I could tell you a prescription, but I guess that's the whole point that we can't prescribe other people's experiences or lives. But I did want to share with you all something that has brought me solace over the last few years, that my friend Sheila Heti wrote to me in an email in 2020. And I have this printed and it's sometimes just a really helpful touchstone for me when I feel dark and lost. And I think I just wanted to share it with you all. And this was something that was sent in an email. So, here it is:

I know what you mean about feeling like the books have to help people in some way. I think it's the times we're living in. We live in such "non-fiction" times where everyone seems to be a journalist or online with some agenda, and also we know more about the horrible realities and problems that other people are experiencing, and we know the world needs us for a million things, and we can easily forget the value of art (which is a form that doesn’t always know what it’s saying) in the midst of all this. Maybe this has been the case in every era in history, but it seems especially so now.

Everything we make, we have to imagine into some huge river of information and utility and talk, and that can also be intimidating: how does it fit into this rush of words and pictures; a lot of it with a very legitimate moral claim? How do we come to feel that our art, or art at all, has a moral claim, or a right to take up time and space?

I think the only answer to that is to think of the art that has had value in your own life, the books you've loved, that have stayed with you or formed you, and just see what they are when you look at them all together: What is art? What is a novel? What does it give us? Did the writer mean to help us, or can we be helped even if they didn't, and isn't there something outside of help that is valuable? I don't think books "help" me, not the ones I love best. I think they just stretch the universe I'm living in, so that it encompasses more. Like those dreams where you visit a house you know and then there are suddenly more rooms? A great novel is like the world we're living in, which we think we know, but look—now it suddenly has more rooms!

At least, that's how I feel about it today. I think that's always worth something. I think it's not clear what makes a novel one of those "more rooms" versus what makes it flat and just the same room as the one that you've been living in. We just don't live in a time that knows how to say what the imagination or art is for. But surely a world without the products of the human imagination wouldn't be worth much. I guess some of us have to be the fools who make these rooms, who have that as their faith, that it’s genuinely worth something.

I just find that so comforting. And so, I think she has an interesting thing to say, which is: I don't think art is there to save people or help people. But I do think it's there to make more rooms. And I do think, as a writer, even of a silly fan fiction remake of Pride and Prejudice, I do think I want to build more rooms. I want to make the world a bigger, safer, more expansive, more beautiful place. And I do think that that's what writing is for. Anyway, if you've made it this long, you deserve a treasure, and I will give you one in your subconscious right now. Okay, bye!

P.S. I just watched it and I think it's worth explicitly stating, even though it was implied, but I don't think I explicitly stated it. I one hundred percent don't think undocumented immigrants in the United States are monsters. I think that what is happening is that our government and the political world as well as people like business owners and the economic system that we're in is deeply committed to telling a story that undocumented migrants and immigrants to the United States are monsters, so that we, the American public, especially white Americans, can benefit from their exploited labor. So I'm saying that we are living in a story. We are complicit in a harmful story. That's what I'm trying to say. I don't believe that anyone is a monster. That's another belief that I have. Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to say, because it occurred to me when I was doing this, I was just speaking off the cuff. But I did want to explain a little bit about why it is impossible for me as an aspiring nonviolent person to claim that I am nonviolent. And this is a tangible explanation that I wanted to share with you.

So I wanted to explain the hypocrisy of ideology versus reality. And so there's this article that came out in The Atlantic. 'The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans.' And the goal of the article is basically to talk about the security breach that happened, which is crazy and I don't even want to get into it. What I find more enlightening, or not even enlightening, but what should be the focus is the fact that the United States government orchestrated attacks on Yemen, and the Houthi terrorist organization. Supposedly, we blamed terrorism and national security. But in the text messages or in the Signal messages, JD Vance... Well, let me just see who is exactly saying it. It might not be JD Vance who said it specifically. Pete Hegseth says, basically they're debating whether or not they should bomb Yemen, bomb a country with bombs. He says that there are two benefits to it. One is restoring freedom of navigation, a core interest, and reestablishing deterrence. So what they're saying about the freedom of navigation is essentially that because of these Houthi—basically resistance, arguably justified resistance—there has been (let me quote) a 70% decrease in trade. Let me just confirm. 70% decrease in trade volumes, shipments basically, as a result of these strikes. So there was a 70% decrease in volume. So essentially the United States, we were experiencing, I think, 5% decrease in trade because of this shipping blockade, navigation blockade, and then Europe was experiencing a 40% decrease in trade. So essentially what is happening is that there was shipment for fucking products. So products, it is shit, it is stuff. It is that people and human beings were bombed by the United States of America in order for us to get shipments of products. That should be the headline. It should not be that the Trump administration texted the war plans. It should be the fact that in order to get our products and in order to get our things, they were—human lives were lost. And I think that that is the thing that we don't understand sometimes is that our lives are so buoyed (and I'm speaking as an American here right now; I'm not trying to put this on the world), but our access to these things is creating destruction and death. And so I don't even know why I'm laughing, but the point is that I think as much as I want When Darcy Met Lizzie to be this totem of nonviolence, I also think it's equally important to recognize our complicity in this world, and I don't have an answer. I think that the answer that I have is the same answer as before, which is that in our lives, in our daily lives and in our work, whether it's stories or actual work, I think it's important for us to try to live truly with as much integrity as it is possible to live in a darkly enmeshed, entangled life.

Anyway, so I thank you for listening to this Postscript, but I just wanted to clarify a few things because I had to do it. Okay, for real though. Goodnight. Bye.

Here’s a little fireside chat that details my motivations for writing an open door romance. If you’ve ever wondered why anyone would want to write a spicy, lesbian retelling of Pride and Prejudice, this video contains the answers! I talk about our largest sex organ, imagination, stories, and this iconic scene.

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In this video, I reference:

• Come As You Are, Emily Nagoski

• OMGYES

• The Blue Hour, Laura Pritchett

• Dipsea

• Culture Study Podcast, The Expansive World of Queer Romance

This little fireside chat is NSFW, but I hope my vulnerability will help enable us all to live the healthy and satisfying lives we deserve ❤️ Welcome to my Island.

Meet the cover of When Darcy Met Lizzy, designed by my very talented friend Jessie Broom.

Isn’t she beautiful?!

✨ Preorder now

First, some housekeeping.

Thank you all for contributing to my previous Kickstarter for When Darcy Met Lizzy!

Unfortunately, I didn’t meet my fundraising goal. Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, meaning that your project isn't funded if you don’t meet your goal. This is a good thing and protects artists from having to deliver something if they don’t get funding.

GOOD NEWS! I will still do preorders for When Darcy Met Lizzy via Kickstarter, but instead of printing a limited edition hardback, which would cost $4000 😬, I will stick with a paperback version. I was also generously supported by some of my friends, which will help lower the overall costs. This means that instead of raising $9800, I need to raise $3000 to cover the audiobook cost.

BAD NEWS! If you preordered your copy the first time, you’ll have to order again. This is a major pain in the ass, I know! But you weren’t charged for your previous preorder, and if you still want the book or audiobook, you’ll need to do this anyway, whether it’s on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Audible. So, no matter what, if you want to hear Darcy and Lizzy get it on, you’ll need to do this again 🥵 (p.s. I have never used this emoji so much in my entire life lol).

The moral of the story: sometimes you make budgeting mistakes, and you need to recalibrate. Listen to Angie McMahon tell you it’s okay to make mistakes. I listen almost every day, highly recommend.

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So, why preorder via Kickstarter?

You’ll still get the book or the audiobook. If you buy them both together, you get five dollars off. But the only real difference is that if you contribute through Kickstarter and not via Amazon, Jeff Bezos and his cronies won’t get extra money 💸 Don’t get me wrong, they will still get money. But not nearly as much. And I’d rather keep the money raised from queer joy out of the hands of big corporations.

How can I preorder?

Click this link and select the product of your choice! Options include an audiobook performed by the lovely Lilli Hokama or a signed paperback copy.

Now for the good stuff!

Here’s another teaser for When Darcy Met Lizzy. This is the third chapter of When Darcy Met Lizzy. I chose this chapter because it explicitly explores the speculative spin WDML takes on this classic. It’s told from Mr. Darcy’s perspective and focuses on her experience as a “woman gentleman.”

I repeat! I will not be reading the final audiobook. My talented friend, Lilli Hokama will be doing the honors!

So, without further ado, Chapter 3, folks!

DARCY SAW THE young woman with bright, explosive eyes immediately. She was standing with an astonishingly large group of ladies—six at least—but she had them all under her power. Darcy watched as the young woman masterfully conducted the conversation as if it were a symphony, gathering laughter from some and more conversation from others. When an older woman at her side seemed to work herself into hysterics, the young woman managed to dissipate the tension into an easy peace. Darcy had always been envious of people with such social confidence. People who could capture the attention of a whole room, hold it, and return it with more emotion and more joy than before. People who made the party more alive simply because they were there. The young woman was beautiful. She had dark hair that flickered red in the candlelight. And—unusual for a lady—her naturally pale, white skin was tan from the sun, with a dusting of freckles across her flushed cheeks. This woman must spend a lot of her time outside. This didn’t surprise Darcy. It was evident that she had more energy than anyone in her entire group combined, and where can energy go but out into the world?

“Ah,” Bingley said. “That must be Mrs. Bennet and her daughters. I met their father just before I found you in London and dragged you back here with me. He mentioned they’d be here tonight. I think I’ll introduce myself. Come along?”

Darcy shook her head, and Bingley shrugged with a coy smile as if to say, your loss, old friend. He wasted no time crossing the room towards a blonde woman standing beside the woman Darcy most admired. Classic Bingley. He was always drawn to obvious charm, a tiny waist, and an ample bosom. Bingley was easily entertained by a pretty face. He could dance with many women. Darcy had seen him in love before, and she was bound to see it again. Bingley loved love. He loved to find a pretty girl and flirt and smile and dance and be merry, but he never wanted to go much further than the laughter, the exchange of a glove or a flower, or perhaps a kiss on the palm. Commitment was not Bingley’s style.

Darcy wasn’t interested in flirtations or passing glances. Darcy wanted someone to share her life with—not a bevy of women surrounding her, each woman feeling that Darcy might propose at any minute. She hated the drama of it all. What Darcy wanted in a wife was someone who would only need to take one step onto the grounds of Pemberley to understand how the earth changed there and the world grew calm. She wanted her future wife to feel, in her soul, how life made more sense along the river that ran through her estate—as if everything that worried you suddenly disappeared. She wanted to take her wife to that spot where she spent so many childhood afternoons, surrounded only by the sound of water flowing against mossy stones and the faint call of lapwings. She wanted a woman who would understand her home so deeply and profoundly because she understood Darcy so deeply and profoundly. But how could any of the women here in this assembly hall in the village of Meryton ever come close to understanding Darcy?

Darcy looked around the ballroom. These women had probably not traveled more than twenty miles from the house where they were born. Ladies whose entire social circles lived and died within a five-mile radius. Women who knew nothing of the world, of the books she’d read, of the countries she’d seen, of the flavors she’d tasted. These women could never understand what it was like to be one of the few hundred women to attend Cambridge since 1736 when Princess Amelia demanded that her father, King George II, let her wear breeches, marry the woman of her dreams, and decree that any woman who could afford it be free to pursue her education. Yes, it had been seventy years, but women gentlemen were still a minority. In small, rural villages like Meryton, in a ballroom like this one, Darcy felt her skin tighten and her chest constrict when the villagers appraised her from across the room. What do they think of me? she wondered.

Darcy always thought she’d find the woman she’d share her soul with at school or touring the continent, but it turned out that just because a woman had been to Cambridge or joined her for fencing practice, that didn’t always mean that these women wanted other women the way Darcy wanted other women. There were many women gentleman who went to school with Darcy who wore dresses and went on to marry other men. Darcy learned early on that just because a woman was studying to become a solicitor didn’t necessarily mean that she, too, wanted to part open a woman’s mouth with the delicate pressure of her tongue, to pull a woman’s taste into her body and gorge herself on it, the way Darcy did. Of course, some women did want what Darcy wanted, but they never seemed to want it from each other.

In the end, there had only ever been Rebecca. Standing in the dark ballroom, Darcy could still remember the first time she snuck Rebecca into the library after dark—how Darcy’s hand slid along Rebecca’s leg until she felt the heat of her swell against her fingers—what it felt like to push Rebecca against that same desk and kiss her from her earlobe to the place her collarbone met her shoulder. Darcy’s throat grew tight, and her eyes began to pulse. It never ceased to amaze her, even after all these years, that the memory of Rebecca brought such a swell of shame and regret. No, Darcy would not think about Rebecca tonight—not here with these people.

“Come, Darcy,” Bingley said. Darcy had been lost in thought and hadn’t noticed him approach. “Please dance! For the love of God, would it kill you to have just a little bit of fun?!”

“I came to the ball didn’t I, Bingley? Please don’t make me dance as well. Why ask me to do something you and I both know I loathe? You’ll only be disappointed.”

“You and I both know you’re only pretending to be such an ass. Why don’t you give it up for once?” Bingley said.

Darcy ignored him.

“Being your friend is exhausting. Have I ever mentioned that? But Darcy, I must tell you, I’ve never met more beautiful women in my whole life!”

“You’ve found the only beauty in the room,” Darcy said, looking at the blonde woman with the bright smile. Darcy knew that she was the lady Bingley liked most of all, and Darcy also knew that Bingley wanted to see if she approved of his choice.

“Isn’t she breathtaking?!” Bingley blushed and beamed across the ballroom at the beautiful blonde woman, who was now dancing with another gentleman. Then, as if to distract himself, Bingley whispered, “But look! One of her sisters is sitting down just behind you. She’s quite stunning, too.”

Darcy looked behind her to see the woman she’d admired when she first entered the ballroom. She was sitting with her hands folded in her lap. It appeared as though she was looking out at the dance, but Darcy couldn’t help feeling like somehow, out of the corner of her eye, the woman was watching Darcy instead. It unnerved her, this feeling of being secretly observed.

Darcy shrugged, “Not beautiful enough for me. Besides, no other gentlemen are dancing with her. I won’t dance with a woman out of pity.” Darcy looked around the room with disdain. “Even here, I still have my pride. I told you, Bingley, you’re wasting your time with me.”

Bingley threw up his hands in mock frustration and left her. Darcy was safe again. She would not have to dance tonight. The energetic young woman with freckles and bright eyes stood and walked across the hall to her friend, a plain, short woman with intelligent eyes. Both women looked at Darcy and burst into laughter. So she’d heard Darcy. Good, she thought. There was nothing Darcy wanted less than some country woman with no education or intelligence thinking Darcy had any interest in her. The thought was mortifying.

Darcy came from an ancient noble lineage, and her family’s Pemberley estate prospered more and more each year. People said there was something magic in the river that ran through Darcy’s lands that brought wealth and success to all who lived there. But Darcy knew it was not magic. Everything Darcy possessed resulted from her father’s marriage to her mother, the daughter of an earl. Her father married her mother not because he loved her but because she had a large fortune. That fortune had been put to good use, and because of it, Darcy was even wealthier than her parents. Darcy’s father had been practical and left his affairs for his daughter in a better state than he had received them, and Darcy would do the same. Especially because it was her sister, Georgiana’s children, who would inherit Pemberley as Darcy would have no children of her own. At least not now. There was a time when she might have had a child, but she’d missed her chance. The thought of Grace sent longing and grief through Darcy’s body in a wave. What is it about tonight? Darcy thought. Her palms began to shake, and for the second time in the evening, she almost cried. Why was this smoky ballroom dredging up such ancient wounds?

Darcy watched a young man approach the woman with bright eyes. She curtsied and allowed him to whisk her around the room. When she passed Darcy on the dance floor, she looked her straight in the eye and smiled wickedly as if to say, Who said I would have ever wanted to dance with you? Darcy's face flushed, and she tugged at her cravat. Darcy wouldn’t let this woman get under her skin. There was no time for any distractions. She would not make that mistake again. She would marry, and she would marry well. Darcy would do many things to preserve her reputation, but to protect Georgiana and her future children? There was nothing Darcy would not do.

Caroline was also dancing with a handsome young officer. He looked like he’d just been the victor of a historic battle, proudly puffing out his chest, but she kept looking over her shoulder as if hoping no one was watching. After all those years looking for a partner at Eton, then Cambridge and afterward, touring the continent with Bingley, Darcy had decided that the other women like her, the first women to be lords of their class, generally only had two things in common: they were all rich, and they all had fathers who loved them deeply and would let them do whatever they wanted. Caroline Bingley was an example of a woman who wanted women the way Darcy wanted women. Who knew if Caroline would have liked to have gone to Cambridge like Darcy, but her father was in trade and not yet secure enough in his position to risk it on his daughter’s education. Darcy pitied her. She couldn’t imagine what her life would have been like if she’d been unable to go where she wanted or speak to anyone she pleased. But she also didn’t think that Caroline really would have enjoyed the life Darcy led. She seemed content to follow wherever Bingley went. There was a lack of imagination in her aspirations.

Darcy looked around the assembly hall. If women who were to be the next earls and dukes couldn’t satisfy Darcy’s desire to know and be known, how could the women here ever possibly understand her needs? She could never find pleasure in simple smiles and easy company the way Bingley did. In all her life, Darcy had had only three great friendships: Bingley, her cousin Anne de Bourgh, and the other, who she’d rather never think about ever again. Over time, she’d discovered that true friendship, let alone love, was a rare and precious gift. Not something she’d likely find in this stuffy, overcrowded hall with women who all dressed alike and seemed just as pleased to dance with one gentleman as any other. There was no taste, no discernment, and Darcy wanted none of it. Not even the beautiful woman with the bright, intelligent eyes who commanded the room with nothing more than the sound of her voice.

Caroline finished her dance and came up beside her. “What do you think of it all, Darcy? I bet you wish you were still in London, surrounded by more suitable company.”

Darcy said nothing. Caroline wanted to make it clear that she and Darcy were on the same side and that these Meryton people were nothing compared to them. But Darcy didn’t want to be connected to Caroline in the way Caroline wanted, and she hoped that her silence would discourage her. Darcy was still furious with herself for letting that flirtation go further than she’d meant. Now she’d have to spend the entire visit with Bingley ensuring that Caroline didn’t get the wrong idea.

Darcy knew she could never marry Caroline, but sometimes Darcy was so lonely that her skin burned as if she’d been dunked in ice. Sometimes she wished she could go to brothels the way her friends did and come back with stories about which woman was prettiest and which one was the best kisser. Darcy had gone once and paid a handsome sum. But when she’d found herself alone in the room with a blonde beauty, naked under red silk sheets, she’d stood there, frozen. What she wanted couldn’t be taken and couldn’t be paid for. She wanted an exchange, not just a release. She wanted someone to open her the way she opened them, sharing the gift of giving and receiving. Darcy and the woman had played chess instead.

“I have heard the Miss Bennets described as the most beautiful in the country. That’s the eldest there, dancing with Charles. But her younger sister, Elizabeth, I’ve heard, is considered quite the beauty. What do you think, Darcy?”

So Elizabeth was her name, Darcy thought. Elizabeth Bennet. To Caroline, Darcy said nothing and pretended she hadn’t spoken.

Darcy looked at the clock. Very soon, she’d be in the carriage and away from all these people who stared at her. Whether they looked at her for her ten thousand a year or because beneath the coat and trousers, she was a woman, Darcy did not know. And frankly, she did not care. Midnight could not come soon enough.

When Darcy Met Lizzy: Some backstory

You might think I’m exaggerating when I tell you that I think one of the reasons it took me so long to come out was Mr. Darcy. I was raised on the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. My father gifted my mother, an ardent Austen fan, the VHS set for her birthday in 1997. I was seven years old. From then on, whenever my sister or I were sick and we stayed home from school, we’d all curl up on the couch and watch six hours of Regency England. Seven years old is probably a little young to be indoctrinated into the world of romantic comedies (the enemies-to-lovers trope in literally every romantic comedy ever made was started by P&P), but I could not get enough! There was something about Mr. Darcy that captivated me. I loved the way he stared at Elizabeth with such ferocious intensity. I loved his brooding, unsociable manners. I loved how, over time, he grew warm and tender and let his real self shine through.

When Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice was released in 2005, my friends Daria, Joanna, Xiao, and I went to see it on opening night at the local theater. The next day, I went to see the movie with my Mom. I then went to see the movie on my own six different times! I was fifteen years old, didn’t have a car, and I’d walk to the Esquire to see the movie. I loved the tension between Darcy and Lizzy. That hand flex, am I right?

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But growing up, my family and I didn’t just watch Pride and Prejudice. We watched Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion. And we didn’t just watch these films when we were sick. On Sunday evenings, drinking our root beer, huddled on the blue corduroy couch watching Austen, my mom, my sister, and I all sought something we desperately needed. We each saw a dream that filled a hole in us. I learned to watch movies through my mom’s eyes. Yes, these films were about love—but to me, they were something more. When I watched Mr. Darcy declare his love for Elizabeth Bennet despite her “lack of connections” and dysfunctional family, I saw someone willing to look at a person’s trauma and love them anyway. In Sense and Sensibility, I saw that Elinor’s constant insistence on being good and strong prevented her from being vulnerable and that Marianne’s desire for romance and passion blinded her to real life. These movies made me feel seen; I saw myself in Elizabeth, trying to prove herself in a world of people who didn’t understand her. I saw myself in Elinor, protecting the happiness of others before her own and refusing to follow her own dreams until she broke.

I grew up wanting love! But I didn’t just want love! I wanted Mr. Darcy’s love! This was confusing because even though Colin Firth is, of course, a major babe, he’s not my type.

But there was something in this story that made me feel like it was possible to change! That we really could become more patient, loving, tender versions of ourselves. We really could leave our prejudices and pride behind and see one another for the flawed, complicated humans we are! Dear god, how badly I wanted to believe I could change for the better! That I could change for good!

How When Darcy Met Lizzy all started

So, a few years ago, I started telling everyone that I wanted to adapt Pride and Prejudice but make Mr. Darcy a woman. And everyone kept saying, that doesn’t make any sense! Women couldn’t own land or property! It’s not true to the history! And I kept saying, I don’t care! I want it! But I think a part of me, the part of me that is definitely not like Elizabeth Bennet, really wanted people to approve of my idea and think it was interesting and that I was smart and a super genius. And, since that wasn’t the response I got for my idea, I decided that I wouldn’t write it. At least, this is the excuse I gave myself at the time. When, in all honestly, it’s probably that I didn’t believe in my idea and I didn’t think this book had any value in the world. Why does believing in yourself seem like a herculean effort?!?!?

Then, in January of 2021, I had a massive emergency surgery, and I couldn’t leave my bed for weeks. I was in a lot of pain and pretty existentially depressed. A friend recommended I watch Bridgerton. I initially scoffed at the idea because I thought it was going to make a mockery of the world I loved so much. Boy, was I wrong.

I loved it! I immediately decided two things:

1. I needed a Regency-era suit jacket so I could look just like Simon. (This is being made as we speak by a beautiful and talented human, Bailey Raynor. Thanks Bailey!)

2. Fuck history! Let’s dream up a world—a past, present, and future—where we belong!

While all this was percolating in my mind, I was writing a hybrid memoir-novel about my father’s death from his addiction. I was submitting it to agents and publishers and getting a lot of great feedback and then requests to edit this and refine that. Over time, the process of submitting and writing had become incredibly depressing. I was not only getting rejected after getting my hopes up, but I was also losing sight of what made the book special to me in the first place. I spent so much time trying to make my book appeal to various tastes and desires that it stopped being my book and became just an amorphous blob. And writing was not fun anymore. I didn’t get any joy from it. I avoided writing.

So, last October, I decided to finally write Gay Pride and Prejudice. Not for anyone else, but as an exercise. Could I make writing fun again? Could I go to my desk every day feeling joyful and alive? And the answer was: Hell Yes!

I had SO MUCH FUN writing Gay Pride and Prejudice. Not only have I seen the BBC production and the Joe Wright production more times than any sane person would admit to, but I’ve also read the book more times than I’d like to admit to. I feel so close to Darcy and Lizzy and it was so fun to bring them to life with my own imagination.

p.s. AI made this :) I will pay a real human to make something soon.

The decision to self-publish When Darcy Met Lizzy

I briefly considered printing off Gay P and P, putting it in a drawer, and closing that chapter forever. But I really wanted to share it with the world! And I wanted to share it my way (yes, I am a self-aware control freak).

I wanted to write Pride and Prejudice exactly like the Pride and Prejudice I had grown up loving. If this was a movie or a TV show, it would be considered an adaptation, and it would be much easier to do. But as a book, the fact that When Darcy Met Lizzy so closely follows the traditional plot is a deterrent for publishers. I am technically allowed to do this because Austen is in the public domain, but it’s not something books do. I wanted to keep the plot pretty much exactly the same. I wanted to keep the lines I love so much: you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you, and my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever. I wanted to give little Sammie, glued to the TV in her grandmother’s living room, the gay romance she deserved!

So, because this book is basically glorified fan fiction, and I want to keep it that way, I couldn’t really pursue traditional publishing avenues.

Or maybe you’re not gay; you're just a female-identified person who wants to a different world where you’re not beholden to the patriarchy, and you can be free. If that female-identified person is you, this book is for you, too ❤️

Or, maybe you’re just someone who just wants to read a story about two people who fall in love despite their initial judgments and prejudices, and you want to add some extra spiciness to your life. Then, this book is also for you 🥵

But, more than anything, I just want to bring a little joy to this otherwise pretty dark and depressing world. I want fun! I want playfulness! I want to take the traditional world and turn it upside down! LETS BREAK DOWN WALLS. Even if just in our imagination :)

I could just release this book as an e-book and be done with it and maybe it’s the perfectionist Virgo in me, but I feel like anything that’s done should be done well. So I want to make a beautiful book you can hold in your hand! I want an audiobook version (because who are we kidding? No one really reads anymore anyway), and I want to do it all really, really well.

But that’s expensive! I need to print the hardback copies; I need to pay an editor, I need to pay the recording studio, the actor, etc.… Also, I have to pay taxes on anything I raise through Kickstarter. So, I have to raise 30% more than what I actually need (I really wish I could channel my inner Maggie Gyllenhaal).

In other words, publishing When Darcy Met Lizzy on my own is all really, really expensive. So, I need some help making my dreams come true.

Help me make When Darcy Met Lizzy

Too soon for a political meme 😬?

Before you contribute, here are some things you should know (I am looking at you, my mom’s friends!):

1. This book is NSFW! It’s pretty spicy. I’d like to say that it’s tasteful, but it’s not a “closed door” book, if you know what I mean 🙈 This book is definitely Sapphic Romance with an erotic twist.

2. When Darcy Met Lizzy takes place in a speculative world where women can be gentlemen, gender is fluid, and ladies and non-binary folk get it on. If this content bothers you, you’re probably signed up for the wrong newsletter.

3. This book is for fun! It is for joy! It’s just meant for all you Austen gay nerds out there who are tired and just want to curl up with some comfort food. I am not reinventing the wheel here. I am just trying to put a smile on your face.

If you choose to contribute, please know I don’t take you for granted! It still boggles my mind whenever anyone reads an essay or a poem of mine. I feel so lucky and grateful that, given a world of choices for what to do with your time, anyone would choose to spend time with my work.

If you can’t contribute but like the idea, please share it with all of your rich, gay aunts! If you don’t have any rich gay aunts, share it through the interwebs?

Support WDML

I love you all so much. Keep your head up! Bring love to the world, if you can <3

This summer, I watched Twisters with my mom and sister. I had seen the trailer and thought it looked tacky and ridiculous, but our goal was family bonding and mild entertainment, so I didn’t need much. I left the theater as giddy as a teenager. I FUCKING LOVED IT. Why?! 

A few reasons:

1. Country music is my jam. I have no shame. 

2. Yes, I am v gay. But Glen Powell?! Woof. How can a man wear a white t-shirt with a cowboy hat in the rain and not be too cheesy to bear? Please read this amazing substack about why Glen Powell is a true movie star. 

3. I have a major hero complex. (Spoiler alert) A girl with a complicated and tortured past drives into the eye of a storm and pretty much certain death to save everyone she loves and redeem herself? Count me in! 

A little backstory: 

My hero’s complex has been a long time in the making. It started with Mulan. I had a drawing book filled with illustrations of Mulan with her horse, Kahn. I went to bed every night, fantasizing that one day, I, too, would save my country, my family, with the strength of my loyalty and the power of my convictions. I’ll Make a Man Out of You was the soundtrack of my life.

I’m never going to catch my breath, say goodbye to those who knew me.

The hero I found after Mulan was Alanna of Trebond. Alanna: The First Adventure was published in 1983 and written by Tamora Pierce.  Alanna cross-dresses as a boy and trains to become a knight. 

The final notch in my hero complex was delivered on my thirteenth birthday. My uncle gifted me The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on DVD. Every night after my family fell asleep, I watched the entirety of the film alone in my room (in addition to a hero complex, I might have a little OCD 😬).

Nothing in my real life could compare to the pure, unadulterated joy of watching Aragorn, torn and broken but still standing, arrive at Helms Deep and force open those great oak doors just in time to save the people of Rohan. I, too, wanted the strength to rally a wounded group of people! I, too, wanted to survive when all the odds were stacked against us!

I cried when Legolas—angry and resentful about being trapped in a palace of rock awaiting ten thousand, huge, blood-thirsty Uruk-hai to brutally attack—says to Aragorn, “They’re all going to die!” and Aragorn says, “Then I shall die as one of them!”

What loyalty! What selflessness! What a hero!

Listen to my Hero playlist

The problem with heroes:

A few summers ago, I attended a writer's workshop with a well-known queer author. It was a generative workshop, and I was looking forward to creating in a queer space. On the first day, the author told us all that if we ever wanted to succeed in publishing, we would need to follow the Aristotelian plot structure. She mapped it out for us: inciting incident, rising action, climax, blah blah blah. It was not the queer, genre-bending workshop I hoped it would be. Sure, she's most likely right. You need to follow the expected structure to get published, at least by the big publishing houses. This plot structure is so ingrained in our psyches that we notice when a film or book doesn't follow this pattern. If a movie doesn't have a dark night of the soul or denouement, you feel hungry when you leave the theater. You crave the seductive burst of serotonin released when you watch a hero assigned an impossible task struggle against all odds and ultimately succeed.

The Aristotelian plot structure is how I teach the students I tutor how to write. I often have them watch Lessons from the Screenplay, a YouTube channel that examines the plot and pacing of famous films. There's also a book called Save the Cat that many novelists use when writing their first novel. It teaches a writer to lead a character from an inciting incident through the dark night of the soul and out the other side. 

Who doesn't love a good hero? Like I said, I am a hero fiend—a wannabe. And we have had so many! Where to begin?! Odysseus? Moses? Jesus? Muhammad? But heroes have three major problems. First, the hero is always singular. Yes, they can have a fellowship (Lord of the Rings slightly subverts this, so LOTR fans don't come at me), but in general, the hero is one single being. He is also problematically often a he, but I don't have either the time or energy to get into that right now.  This singular being spends the entirety of the story fighting the villain. The big baddy. Think the Emperor in Star Wars or Voldemort in Harry Potter. This villain is his own entity that can and must be defeated. Sometimes, we get a little humanizing backstory for the villain, like Tom Riddle's mom was isolated by society and abused by her father, but aside from a few facts, Voldemort is just a tool to demonstrate that while Harry was also orphaned and raised by people who didn't love him, Harry was able to do good; Harry was able to stay true to his innocent, pure, authentic, heroic self.  And this takes us to the second problem with the hero: the hero is good. 

A hero is someone you can root for, so he needs to be good! He needs to be fighting something big and universal. Aragorn is fighting to defend Middle Earth from Sauron–a force that plans to destroy all that’s good and green in the world. Luke is fighting the Emperor, who wantonly blows up whole planets. And, except for the dark night of the soul part of the book or movie, the hero doesn’t stray from his good objectives. He is the champion who fights the unbeatable foe, who rights the unrightable wrongs! (unless you’re talking about the anti-hero, which is much more nuanced and arguably creates better fiction–think Native Son or Giovanni’s Room)

The third and final problem with this whole setup is the idea that there is an end. The hero goes on a journey, and that journey ends. An end means a beginning and a conclusion. The bad guy dies, the curtain falls, and good springs eternal. 

Why do I care that this structure is the dominant storytelling structure for Western civilization? I care because we expect it and if we expect something, it means that it's so familiar it has become invisible. There is a Fernando Pessoa quote: We are stories telling stories.  If that’s true, what happens when the story we are made of and the story we continue to tell contains three truths: that there is a singular good guy and a singular bad guy and that all suffering will end if the good guy murders the bad guy? We become a species that can't tolerate nuance, that can't understand our enmeshment with all the other living creatures surrounding us. No matter where we live or to which ideology we belong, we think of ourselves as the good guys instead of what we truly are: humans entangled in a world so interconnected it is impossible to be good, even if we want to. (Provided we could even align on a universal definition of goodness).

The first problem: A hero is good. 

Aragorn appealed to me because of his stoic strength. He watches, observes, and barely speaks, but when he does, he’s honest. He puts the whole of Middle Earth before himself. He loves Arwen and doesn’t want to see her suffer. He’d rather let her go than let her die. He’s not possessive. These strengths make him unique as a man and a king, leader, and warrior because he embodies historically and culturally feminine traits: putting the joy of others before his own, putting his pleasure last, fighting for those he loves when all hope is gone, being quiet, observant, and unassuming. 1

Who does this selfless martyr, the son of an ancient and revered line of men destined to rescue humanity, remind you of? Aragorn’s classically “feminine” traits—compassion, altruism, and generosity—are the tenants upon which Jesus based his actions and teachings. So, not only is Aragorn the pinnacle of masculinity for all nerdy boys aged 8-100, but he is also a feminine Christ figure—an image of purity and virtue. 

In our culture, we want to be perceived as good. Who’s to say if this is the influence of Christianity or our ego, but we’re constantly telling stories about ourselves to feel we are the valiant and virtuous hero of our lives. In bygone eras, we crafted our stories of ourselves through which neighborhoods we lived in, the events we were seen at, and the clothes we wore. How we physically moved in the world managed how well we embodied good thought and right action. But, with the dawn of Instagram, it’s storytelling on steroids. The internet has become the new place to flaunt our right ideas and our correct beliefs. Not only are we trying to prove our “goodness” in the material world, but the immaterial as well.

Heroes also get us confused about what it means to take action. To be a hero, you must take a stance! You must declare yourself against evil with grand and heroic gestures! You can’t just be good; you must put your character on the line! There’s nothing heroic about buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. That’s not action! Going to the grocery store, the atm—those aren’t actions! Who is there to witness me?! To take action must be radical and performative. And once we’re seen, we want to construct our character so as to put us on the side that we believe is good.

Some people believe that what I, as a singular individual, post on the internet is taking action and that by not posting, I am not only apathetic but committing harm. With Instagram and the internet, we all believe there is a right side and a wrong side, and not only must I be on the right side, but I must publicly posture this position. This is divisive thinking. It’s polarizing and dangerous, but is it unexpected?2

Problem two: A hero is singular

In her book, The Second Body, Daisy Hildyard says humans have two bodies. 

In normal life, a human body is rarely understood to exist outside it's own skin… You are encouraged to be yourself and to express yourself to be whole, to be one. You need to take care of yourself, it says. You need boundaries. You have to be either here or there. Don't be all over the place…. Even the patient who is aneasthasized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeon's lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. This is every living thing on Earth…. You are stuck in your body right here, but in a technical way you could be said to be in India and Iraq, you are in the sky causing storms, and you are in the sea herding whales towards the beach.

I read this book, loved it, logically believed it, and still didn’t feel it to be true for me. I thought that my body, my life, my self, was contained within the boundaries of a white, medium-height, thirty-something woman. I thought I could choose what actions I wanted to take, for good or evil and those actions would be enacted by my physical body moving around in the world. Ultimately, I thought I had the power to control the impact of my body. 

I “daylight” as a technical writer. For a long time, I avoided truly learning about technical stacks, frontend, backend, blah blah blah, until it became clear that if I didn’t begin to take my work seriously, I’d be out of work. But I didn’t want to work for the big bad tech company. I did want their amazing health benefits and competitive salary. I thought that if I didn’t fully understand the work we did, it would be pretend and I wouldn’t really be participating. I wouldn’t be a character in the story that destroyed San Francisco, that contributed to the ever-growing wealth gap, to a downtown Seattle where men and women park their Teslas and then literally step over the body of a houseless person on their way to the office. But passivity does not negate complicity. So, I started to learn how applications are built.  I studied computer architecture to understand how technology works: everything from your phone to the place you host your blog to the app that holds your bus pass. Once I had a basic understanding, I wanted to laugh at my naivety.

Imagine you are buying a coffee at your local coffee shop. You’ve picked this coffee shop because it’s not a chain, and you want to support local businesses. You also know they use compostable cups and energy-efficient practices. Sounds great! So you buy the coffee, a physical action made by your hand and the baristas. But wait! That action is then broken down and sent all over the world. Something as simple as a transaction at the company Square might be created from a hundred or more tiny pieces. Each of those pieces has a little job and a destination. There is the physical you standing in the coffee shop and then there is an army of yous feeding off the energy in rural Virginia, stored as data in Amsterdam, sorted through a data table on a computer in Hyderabad. In the modern world, our bodies and the consequences of our actions are nearly infinite, and to completely abstain from harm, we’d have to make like Into the Wild, and we all know how that turned out. 

I’m not trying to justify my choice to work in tech (although who am I kidding? Who doesn’t want absolution); I am trying to suggest that now, more than ever, the idea that any human could be considered boundaried, singular, or wholly good is the stuff of myth. We are enmeshed. Every choice we make, even one so seemingly innocuous as ordering an espresso, has a consequence. Everything we do–from ordering a cup of coffee to opening this newsletter has a global repercussion. Post whatever you want on the internet, but no amount of political posturing on TikTok can make you the hero. Our complicity and our responsibility are much more complicated.

The third hero problem: The story/time ends when the hero kills the villain

But I didn’t just love Aragorn because he is good. I wish I could say I admired him for his demure acceptance and quiet fortitude. But at that moment in The Two Towers when Howard Shore’s score quickens and Aragorn raises his sword, I get a thrill because I know he's about to beat his enemies back! In a series of glorious shots, you see Aragorn’s bloodied knuckles against the hilt of his sword as he slices through one Uruk-hai and then another, all perfectly timed with the beat of the drum. Heads roll.  It feels good. In this violence, there is the physical expression of a body fighting back against the world, saying: I'm alive! I'm here! This is the life I will fight for! You shall not pass! 

Even though the battle scenes in Return of the King won the film an Academy Award, mass cinematic death and destruction didn’t really take the stage until the dawn of Marvel. Marvel movies are frequently featured on the YouTube channel Lessons from the Screenplay. These films are basically designed as a crash course in Aristotelian plot structure. There's always the bad guy, and there's always the hero, even if they have some dark, complicated past like the black widow or they’re insufferably cocky and arrogant like Tony Stark. 

The Marvel series started with a villain we could understand.  The first Marvel film, Iron Man, came out in 2008 when we were all still painfully aware of the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. The villain in Iron Man is Terrence, a corrupt weapons manufacturer–pretty human scale. Yes, there were a lot of explosions, but not too messy or too bad. Then you have the first Thor, and aliens get introduced, but it's still pretty tame. The little New Mexico town is destroyed but looks mostly abandoned anyway, and no one really dies. Plus, Natalie Portman is a hot scientist. But the villains had to get flashier and bigger as the series progressed. Soon, you have an alien spaceship swimming through the skies of New York, crashing into hundreds of buildings and flattening them into cement dust. People are screaming. The death toll of such a battle has to have been in the millions. But by the time we have gotten to this movie, we are nine movies deep into the Marvel universe. Suddenly, when people get squashed and flattened, they're just little CGI blips, snuffed out in a nanosecond before the next shot. It didn't take very long, but in less than a decade, global, planetary warfare became something that didn't even phase us—instead, it’s a blockbuster.

Then something very interesting happened.

For millennia, the hero's journey has always had to end. It was a one-way road. Villain vanquished, hope springs eternal. Then came Marvel’s Infinity War. At the end of the film, half the population of the universe (not just Earth) is turned to dust. Dead. Never to be seen or heard from again. Can you imagine the gravity of such a loss? Could you imagine if half your family, half your city–just died? One minute, you’re looking at your wife over a cup of coffee, and the next, she is gone.

A little aside about death and loss: 

When I was young, my family went to a church called The First Divine Science Church. One of the ministers, Karl Kopp, wrote plays inspired by William Blake; he honored children and made sure there were roles for young people in all his plays. After my parents got divorced and my dad moved to California, I latched on to Karl like his very own imp. I stole into the church library to pour over his books of poetry, which, while beyond my comprehension, I cherished in my bones. I still remember when Karl, my hero, over 6 feet tall, a gray-haired giant, was standing on stage with us at rehearsal when he suddenly collapsed. It was like watching a tree felled. He suddenly caught at the knees. We all ran to his side. When he stood up he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a little smile. I never saw him again. He was the first person I ever loved and lost. He was diagnosed with ALS and went quickly. I tried to visit him at the hospice, but he wouldn't let me in the room. I remember being so angry with him for not letting me say goodbye, but now, after holding the hand of three dying people, I can see why he wanted me to remember him as the lyrical, nerdy giant, not a man who couldn't move. 

After Karl died, I started having panic attacks about death. I began to think I was dying at night, that my heart had stopped, and it was the end. I had panic attacks in physics class, before bed, in the park. Periodically, these panic attacks will return the way they did when I was 15, and I'm faced with the truth that this life of mine will end. 

The self-centered aspect of death is still there for me–what will happen when I lose my own life? What will happen to my memories, etc… But now, after the death of my father and several friends, I am learning about what it’s like to lose the people we cherish the most. Losing a being you love is a grief so profoundly painful you have to escape your body to lessen it. It’s why when people grieve, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they literally want to deny their bodies.  

We can't live constantly awake to the truth that one day we will lose everyone we have ever loved lest it paralyzes us, but we can't escape the truth of it either. Because if we ignore death, if we don't give it our attention, we also don't give life attention. Death grants life weight. And vice versa.

Back to the third problem: 

In Infinity War, half the population of the universe dies. Imagine what it was like to lose your parent, your sibling, your friend. Now, picture that on a massive, interplanetary scale! Is there a name for that colossal grief? Until now—for all of history, the story was the story! The hero dies, and then they’re dead forever. But suddenly, in 2019, the Marvel movies declared that the dead don’t need to stay dead! Half the POPULATION OF THE UNIVERSE dies, only to be resurrected in the next movie! 

And just like that, superhero movies entered a battle with time. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all the superhero movies now have to do with time. Time has become the villain. Because that’s what we’re really fighting, right? This is what we’ve been at war with all this time. Our true enemy is this: that there is only one time, and it is now. There is only one choice, and it’s the choice I’m making right now. And the present isn’t something you can make more of! It’s not something you can put in an accelerator program and grow. You can’t put it in a high-yield savings account and check on it five years later. Now isn’t something you can buy or multiply; it is singular and defined only by one thing: our attention. 

Our fear of our finitude is not new. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky wrestled with it in the 1800’s. Dante confronted death in his own way in the 1200’s. What’s new, I think, is our belief that we can stop our own death, that we can prolong our experience in time. Modern medicine, our ever-increasing lifespans, botox, and a capitalist society obsessed with exponential growth have given rise to the belief that our battle with death is a fight we can win. And now, our stories have shifted too. Now, when the heroes lose, there’s a second chance. 

Sure, there might be a multiverse. In a book I read about time, I learned that it moves slower at sea level. The moon is making our days longer. It’s true, time is fluid and not linear, and maybe it’s theoretically possible for you to die in this universe and still be a famous chef in another, but the truth is that our perception of time, in this universe, in this now, can and does end. One day, there will be no more now. 

The moral of the story is:

The problem with the hero's journey and stories about the one righteous hero fighting against the villain is that in real life, when that villain is vanquished, the story doesn’t end. The curtain doesn’t fall. Time goes on. The only thing that ends is that person’s, that “villain’s,” now. 

I think we’ve lost our cultural understanding of what it means to die. This isn’t a Marvel movie. We can’t turn back time. When people die, those deaths aren’t something that happens in a nanosecond before we cut to Robert Downey Jr’s face.

Marvel is proof that in fiction, at least, we’ve run out of villains. There’s only time. Which isn’t really a villain, provided you can look it straight in its toothy, scaly jaw and recognize: I cannot run, I cannot fight—I can only surrender. And when we surrender—surrender to this one, precious now—it becomes even clearer that if there’s anything we should not be doing with our wild, precarious present, it is depriving someone else of theirs. When we end someone’s life, it’s over. This is not a game. They’re not a number on a chart. Their now is just as fragrant and rich as this moment of mine: sitting on my front porch in the sunlight, my dog at my feet. I don’t want to lose this experience, I cherish it. So what right do I have to take it from somebody else? And I’m under no illusions. That is what I am doing. While I sit here, with my coffee and my pup, I am depriving someone else of their now. Because I am not singular; my body and my actions are nearly infinite, and my tax dollars, my 401k, and my newsletter hosted on servers powered by Amazon are all politically and financially entangled. The multiverse is already here in our present. Yes, my body is here in Olympia, Washington, but it is also in a bomb dropped on a country I have never seen with my own eyes. 

I no longer want to teach my students to model the hero’s journey in their writing. It’s barbaric to me now: two forces–one for good, one for evil–pitted against each other. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, she sums up the history of literature as having two essential pieces: a hero and a conflict. She says, “I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag… A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” 

I don’t want to teach young people that stories need to follow a structure I have blindly adhered to for most of my life. What if we wrote without antagonists and heroes? What if we wrote as if we were beings held in a powerful relation to each other? What if we lived this way, too?

In high school, my teacher, Jana Clark, had us read an Ursula Le Guin story called The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas. In the story, we’re told that the prosperity of one little town is dependent upon the extreme suffering of a child. The people of the town are given a choice. They can live with the knowledge that their world, their laughter, and their joy are contingent on the misery of another, or they can walk away, never to be seen again. My teacher asked us if we would walk away. As young, idealistic teenagers, we all said Yes! I will walk away! But the truth is, we don’t. This is Omelas, and none of us are walking away.

I've recently been attending ACA meetings (Adult Children of Alcoholics), and we have our own serenity prayer.

Higher power, grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one that I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me.

It’s true, I can’t be a hero, and you can’t be either. And it’s also true that I have very little control over the infinite versions of myself scattered across the globe. And, while I don’t have a solution to the problem of Omelas, I know that, at the very least, in the end, it’s just as Gandalf says: the ultimate choice is what to do with the time that was given to us. And, as much as I can, I want to choose to commit acts of kindness from within the body I can control.

Afterthought:

There is an end, but there is also a way to make time, if not grow, at least expand. Attention. 

Mary Oliver wrote:

It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer. It was my pleasure to notice such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. 

P.S. I didn’t think of this all on my own. Duh! I am greatly influenced by the work of my dear friend, Daria Reaven. Listen to her here and read her here. 

I also loved Against Purity by Alexis Shotwell and The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard.  

This essay is very old but I watched “The Iron Claw” over the holidays and it sent me into a rage about stories and the way we tell them and reminded me of what I wrote in this piece. So, if you’ve already read this, move along :) If not, this is Part 1 of a new series about fiction, stories and dreaming.

p.s. the audio crackles. I still haven’t bought a fancy mic/podcast set. Perhaps one day! For now, pretend I am FDR and these are fireside chats and that this is the best audio quality the 30’s have ever seen!

Ninety percent of what I thought to be true about the world I learned on a blue corduroy couch in my grandmother’s living room. Every winter we moved the couch closer to the fire and my mother, sister and I would huddle in the heated refuge and watch the only genre of movies I believed existed: romantic comedies. For most of my young life I thought a hundred years of cinematic history was comprised solely of The Sound of Music, When Harry met Sally, Notting Hill and South Pacific. We’d spend our sick days under heavy denim quilts watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice.

My father gave my mom the 6-tape VHS set for her birthday and it was one of her most treasured possessions. He could be a very tender man, my father. I still remember sitting next to him on the couch as he watched Mr. Darcy tell Elizabeth, I’ve been a selfish being all my life… Such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth. Comic, big tears pooled on his chubby cheeks: You’re choking me up, he said.

My father left my family when I was nine. We moved into my grandmother’s house and the rom-coms accelerated. The highlight of our week was Sunday evening when we were allowed a bottle of root beer and a movie. Even at nine years old it was not hard for me to see what my mother loved about these films. Two people from irreconcilable backgrounds and prejudices meet under unusual circumstances and are presented with the opportunity to change. And if they resist transformation? They lose the privilege of a future where the world turns out right. My mom was a single mother who allowed herself to dream in movies.

I still remember her pausing Jerry McGuire in outrage, standing before us in the disconcerting darkness, her face illuminated only by the fire in the fireplace and blue glow of the screen.

“No one completes you,” she said, pointing at us in her flannel pajamas. “You are a cake.”

We laughed and hoped she’d press play. “You are a cake and you are delicious. There is nothing you need. Nothing could make you taste any better.”

A cake. It’s not hard to see what I loved about those movies, those characters, magnetically drawn to each other, overcoming insecurities and past traumas, choosing, despite it all, to run through a sea of New Year’s party goers to tell their beloved, I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. They did what my parents couldn’t.

*

At fourteen years old, two significant things happened. I was accepted into an all-girls leadership camp in rural New York where I watched But I’m a Cheerleader for the first time and a beautiful Norwegian girl, a year older than me, asked me to dance. She stood behind me, both her hands on my hips, and pulled me towards her while she whispered in my ear, be loose, be free. Something happened that had never happened in all my years of watching screen kisses. I felt a belly seizure: both internal fire and field of worms simultaneously.

I still remember huddling around the TV in the camp living room with twenty other girls. The room was muggy and mosquito ridden. We sprawled across the floor and ratty couches in our bathing suits or sports bras. There were no men here. We could wear whatever we wanted. Our counselor pressed play. When the film’s main character Megan is sent off to True Directions, a camp designed to “rehabilitate” her by seizing her queerness, we all felt it — the room buzzed. Soon, Megan meets Graham, the only queer at True Directions who seemingly doesn’t want to be rehabilitated. When Graham, alluring and confident, crosses the distance between their two bodies to give Megan a tender and yet assertive kiss, I swear you could hear our brains click, like a train changing track — suddenly, there was another direction available to us. I spent the rest of that summer sleeping in a tent surrounded by young women from all over the world. We danced under the full moon and ran barefoot through the woods. I was fully awake to my queerness for the first time in my entire life. I felt powerful — a sexual magic flickered through me as I unraveled, bit by bit, the varied paths that were now seemingly open before me. When I returned home to Denver, Colorado I started dating a boy and didn’t kiss a girl for thirteen years.

But I’m a Cheerleader is a fantastic work of cinema. Its wit, playfulness and camp critique the very real and damaging practice of reparative therapy. The movie is, in and of itself, a queer interrogation of a violent heteronormative practice, and through its satirical approach, the film manages to reclaim ownership and power over this narrative. But director Jamie Babbit’s genius and heart does not negate the fact that our two heroes exist in a world that denies their right to be heroes at all. I watched these two beautiful women tentatively kiss one another, afraid of what we’re all afraid of: relinquishing the boundary between one and the other and engaging in symbiotic vulnerability. They’re tender and shy. But they exist within a narrative that makes them choose between this new beginning and the love and understanding of their families. There is no winning in this story.

Recently my friend Daria organized a queer virtual watch-party of Happiest Season to celebrate her birthday, a film that would supposedly bring queer love to the holiday movie limelight. We were hoping for a movie like The Family Stone or Love Actually (a film whose storyline about a lesbian principal and her terminally ill partner was removed) where characters wrangle with the very real problems of grief, familial obligations and the fear of rejection. Not ironically, Daria and I met at the summer camp in New York. We are both queer and yet, after leaving that green and sacred place, it took each of us over a decade to separately acknowledge and embrace our own queerness. She and her date were watching from New York City while my girlfriend and I watched in Denver. We had all been waiting for the release of this movie for months. Daria and I shared memes and watched the trailer on repeat. We were excited to see Clea Duvall’s, Graham from But I’m a Cheerleader, directorial debut. We hit play at the same time.

The film begins with a series of images depicting the year-long relationship between Abby, played by Kristen Stewart, and her partner, Harper, played by Mackenzie Davis. They’re seen exchanging necklaces, moving in together, playing games with their friends. It looks like a charmed and loving relationship. Abby hates Christmas. Her parents died when she was eighteen and she always feels outside during the holiday season. Harper doesn’t want her to be alone and invites her to spend Christmas with her family. Ten minutes into the film, the premise is clear: on the way to her family’s house, Harper admits to Abby that she has not told her parents that she is gay. What follows is an hour and a half of pure torture. Abby is relegated to the closet (literally) while Harper publicly denies any connection the couple share. Abby is erased and her disappearance is orchestrated by the person she loves most. It is an age-old tale of denial and isolation and it was almost too painful to watch.

Not long into the film a collective, virtual shudder rippled through our group. It was abundantly clear that we were about to watch another movie where one protagonist is either ashamed of their lesbian identity or hiding their true self from their family. While But I’m a Cheerleader took on the isolation of the queer experience by structurally and thematically setting itself outside the rom-com genre with its camp and satire, Happiest Season, released twenty-one years later, is still the same story and much less original. Happiest Season failed to center the experience of its queer characters in any meaningful way outside of fraught alienation.

“Here we go again,” Daria said.

*

Maria Tatar, who chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, wrote that the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, is “celebrated as the quintessential story of romantic love, demonstrating its power to transcend physical appearances. But…it is also a plot rich in opportunities for expressing a woman’s anxieties about marriage, and it may at one time have circulated as a story that steadied the fears of young women facing arranged marriages to older men.” The debate about the true meaning behind fairytales is long and burdened, but a great many folklorists believe that these stories were often used as allegories designed to teach children how to live. The goal of a fairy tale was to relieve the fear of leaving home, their first sexual experiences, and childbirth. Tatar says of Cinderella, “In this splitting of the mother into two polar opposites, psychologists have seen a mechanism for helping children work through the conflicts created as they begin to mature and separate from their primary caretakers.” Throughout human history it is through story and, more recently, fiction, that we learn how to live.

We look to origin stories in order to understand our physical world — they tell us what will harm us and what will heal us. Our ability to provide a narrative for our human existence both validates our experience and also informs our future.

Growing up, my mother was the librarian at my elementary school. The school had just opened after being shuttered for over thirty years and the library was filled with the dust of decades. She was a single mom and didn’t have the option for daycare, so every night as she perfected her little world, my sister and I spent hours hidden under tables reading every retelling of Cinderella, The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Rumpelstiltskin that we could get our hands on. We had an entire universe open to us. As a child, I loved fairy tales for their beauty, for their inexplicable sadness, for women discovered and redeemed through their love. Every day I was able to enter the lawless domains these tales provided and feel like I belonged. Fairytales offered the escape I so desperately needed.

Notting Hill is not so unlike the fairytales I gorged myself on as a child. Watching it with my mother and sister in that familiar living room, we loved the scene when William Thacker and Anna Scott break into the secret garden and find the bench that reads, For June who loved this garden, from Joseph, who always sat beside her. Anna wistfully sits on the bench and says, Some people do spend their whole lives together. We watched this scene with a kind of hunger. There was a palpable want in our attention. All three of us wanted to fall in love and have someone always sit beside us. We wanted to go back in time, rewrite history, and have our father, here on the couch, watching with us. What I learned from romantic comedies is that when women are loved by men, a cycle is complete and what was broken is rendered whole again. More than anything I wanted to be whole and I thought to be whole, I needed to be loved. Until I was fourteen, I had never seen two women kiss on screen nor had I seen a movie where two women loved each other and lived happily ever after. Instead, I watched Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility on repeat. I began seeking that revelatory acceptance that would come when a man would walk through my doors and say to me, I’ve come here with no expectations, only to profess, that my heart is, and always will be, yours.

*

On our second date, my girlfriend and I went to see Call me By Your Name, a film in which a teenage boy enters into a summer affair with an his father’s older male graduate student and experiences his first deep feelings about love and sexuality. She immediately took my hand in the theater, curled into my body, making nothing of the armrest between us. It was monumental, to see reflected on screen, a version of love that felt familiar and beautiful and real. The question posed, to speak or to die, felt like the question in our new, careful relationship — will we put ourselves out there? Will we risk exposure in order to draw closer?

Now, whenever we search for a movie, we always look through the LGBTQA section of every streaming platform. Stories of LGBTQA love are out there, but, with the exception of Call Me by Your Name and the 2015 romantic drama Carol, they don’t often reach the mainstream. They’re frequently sectioned off into their own category. A specific section designed to contain the weight and breadth of queer life is problematic — it reinforces the idea that this love belongs outside.

More often than not, my girlfriend and I find ourselves cuddled up together in bed watching as Cate Blanchet lights Rooney Mara’s cigarette in Carol, melting under their visible tension and Carter Burwell’s score that oozes longing and desire. We’re hungry for a love story in which two women struggle to overcome insecurities, fear of vulnerability or childhood trauma in order to draw closer. Instead, what we find is movie after movie depicting women who are afraid to own their queerness — or who are punished for their lesbian identity. Carol loses her daughter. The redemptive quality of these films is not the humanity of the protagonist, but her ability to accept her queerness. The antagonistic force is not the death of a parent, a divorce, or the fact that one of the characters is a movie star with a fear of intimacy — no, the antagonistic force is always the protagonist herself. Before there can be love, before there can even be a story, she must accept the fact that she is queer. The central question is: am I acceptable despite my queerness? It is never self-evident that these characters are loveable, whole and worthy regardless of their sexual identify or gender. Before we can even get to the queer equivalents of Notting Hill or When Harry met Sally, we have to muddle through entire films in which characters grapple uncomfortably with the question: is my queerness wrong? From Better than Chocolate to Imagine Me and You, Saving Face, or Kissing Jessica Stein, we watch our heroes wrestle with their identity before they can even begin. If it is through fiction and story that we dream of other worlds and new possibilities, what new frontiers do these films conjure for us?

*

Some may argue that fighting for a slice of the mainstream is contrary to queerness itself. In The Art of Queer Failure, Jack Halberstam states, “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world…For queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin crisp, or a way of life, to site Foucault…. What kinds of rewards can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhood to orderly and predictable adulthood.” Perhaps, in order to create the stories we need, we need to seek the freedom of the fringe.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a perfect film. Marianne is hired to paint the portrait of a young woman, Heloise, for her future husband — if he likes her portrait, she will move to Milan and get married. From the beginning, Céline Sciamma’s film takes the male gaze and flips it on its head. We are in a world where men appear twice, once at the beginning to ferry Marianne to Heloise, and once at the end, to take her away. But on the island, Marianne and Heloise are free to observe one another through the device that will ultimately separate them. The act of painting and art itself enables a greater understanding of their love and of themselves. It is because of this refreshing and liberating gaze that the ending comes with such a devastating force — Marianne is forced to look at her love not through her own eyes, but through the eyes of men and society. After she leaves the island, Marianne sees Heloise twice more: once in a portrait of Heloise and her son and again when she catches a glimpse of her lover at a concert. The film ends through Marianne’s eyes as she sits in a crowd and watches Heloise transform under the emotional power of art. While this film does not have a happy ending, it elevates the discussion of intimacy by examining how art, memory and story shape our relationships with the world. Queer love is structured into the narrative, but despite how simple and easy a story of forbidden sexual desire in the 18th century would be tell, it is not the obstacle that must be overcome. Instead, the film chose to demonstrate what we see and how we choose to remember. Portrait of a Lady on Fire won many international film awards but remained on the outside of the American film scene.

Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 film The Watermelon Woman is an iconic queer film that never made it to the mainstream and yet interrogates our need for a queer archive, and specifically a Black queer archive. The film follows Cheryl, played by Dunye, in her quest to make a documentary about a fictional actress, Fae Richards. In The Watermelon Woman Richards was a gay, Black actress working in the 1930’s and was relegated to the role of a “mammy.” As a result, her story was erased. The plot of the movie, in essence, is the desire for both Black women and Black lesbian stories to be seen, heard, recorded and valued. While making the film, Cheryl’s begins dating a white woman who perpetuates the erasure of queer Black stories.

In An archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich states, “The Watermelon Woman points to the vital role of archives within lesbian cultures as well as to their innovative and unusual forms of appearance. They demonstrate the profoundly effective power of a useful archive, especially an archive of sexuality and gay and lesbian life, which must preserve and produce not just knowledge but feeling. Lesbian and gay history demands a radical archive of emotion in order to document intimacy, sexuality, love, and activism- all areas of experience that are difficult to chronicle through the materials of a traditional archive.” Dunye captures the hunger for a Black queer archive while simultaneously illustrating that it is almost impossible to manifest within the conventional narrative. Towards the end of the film Fae’s lover tells Dunye, Please, Cheryl, make our history before we’re all dead and gone. But if you’re really in the family, you better understand that our family will always only have each other.

The Watermelon Woman and Portrait of a Lady on Fire are both transcendent queer movies that manage to free themselves from traditional queer film tropes. And yet, one could argue that their ability to challenge and reframe the narrative derives directly from their position on the outside. Perhaps Halberstam is right, being a queer artist on the fringe allows us to fail, and, in turn, define our own vision of success. But, as with every negotiation, we may gain freedom, but at what cost?

*

Yes, it is important and vital to tell each other the stories of our lives. A great many people are still unable to feel empowered in their queer identity due to threats of violence or the potential loss of family and friends. These stories are real, and we should honor them through our cultural narrative. But if mainstream film continues to perpetuate a narrative of loss and alienation, how does humanity grow its idea of what it means to love and be loved?

How do we begin to build new spaces for ourselves if we don’t allow ourselves to dream?

Myths and fairytales evolve and morph over time — there’s a dialogue between what’s being lived and what’s being told. The Grimm Brothers completely reshaped the fairy tale canon through the many editions of their collection. While the brothers were always forthright about their changes, with each new edition Christian ideology and puritanical values were enhanced. Women’s voices were literally removed with each release. In an attempt to create more literary stories, the brothers took years of oral history and reshaped the narrative — one that has defined our culture for two-hundred years and we still reckon with today. The seams of their work can be seen everywhere, from Disney princesses to Jerry McGuire.

What do Disobedience, Ammonite, The World to Come, Tell it to Bees, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire, have in common? Like my queer experience at camp — these films demonstrate the fleeting nature of the safety and acceptance found in queer love — it’s a space you’re lucky to enter, but a place you must inevitably leave. The lesbian canon is filled with films depicting the impossibility of love between women — whether the impossibility of the time period (Carol), culture (Rafiki, Saving Face) or circumstance.

Our stories and our lives inform each other. I could write a whole essay about how my idea of romantic love was completely informed by the 90’s rom-com and how my girlfriend and our therapist are still trying to undo the damage. I’m not asking for a lesbian Pretty Woman. I don’t want a scene where one queer rides the top of a limo to the base of another’s apartment blasting Verdi with roses in their mouth. But I do hunger for new depictions of queer intimacy. I’m tired of watching someone struggle for 120 minutes to accept the fact that being queer is okay — I want to watch a movie where that is self-evident. In The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl said, And most importantly, what I understand is that I’m going to be the one who says, “I am a Black lesbian filmmaker who’s just beginning. But I’m gonna say a lot more.”

Like the Grimm Brothers, we, too, can define the future in which we will live through the stories we tell. By reclaiming our own narrative and our right to see our stories represented on the big screen, we can create a world in which a young girl sits on a blue corduroy couch with her family and watches two queers struggle to come to a deep understanding of themselves and each other, not in spite of their queerness, but regardless of their orientation. I don’t want a new dawn of lesbian rom-coms like The Happiest Season where hetero-relationship tropes abound (one partner is an abuser and the other, generally the woman, struggles to accept the abuse and ultimately decides that love can conquer all). I don’t want more queer movies designed to make the statement see, we’re just like you! Being queer is a different experience and a singular way of being in the world. I don’t want to strip us of our stories. Erasure in order to “belong” is not the goal.

I’m not interested in happy endings, either (although they’re always nice). What I do want is for lesbian films that depict the love between women to reflect the varied and unique experiences of falling in love. Right now, the defining characteristic of queer films is that gay love is impossible. What if we rejected the queer category completely? Suddenly all we’d have are stories of love — the messy, disturbing and beautiful task of reconciling differences in order to understand. The solution is not more queer stories, but simply more stories.

Together, we have a responsibility to build a world in which it does not take decades for young queers to see themselves reflected in the romantic love portrayed on screen — but instead are presented with a vision of their love from the beginning and are allowed to interrogate that vision as art and as story and form their own conclusions.

We dream the world in which we will live.

Lovely humans!

Summer has finally made it to the PNW. Thank god. I was starting to lose my mind in the deluge of grey and water.

And yet, rain aside, this landscape feels familiar in my heart. I was in Bellingham the other today, eating oysters and overlooking the Sound and I was dumbfounded by the profound sense of familiarity I had for a place so unfamiliar from my home. I grew up surrounded by sandstone, limestone and shale but as I watched the unique, radiant blue of distance islands, I felt as if I was always destined to live near water. It makes me wonder if somehow my Scottish ancestors have left their longing, their home, swimmingly present in my blood.

So, here’s to summer! To adventures! To the blue of distance!

Hot Summer Playlist

In this newsletter I interview my dear friend, Alyse Knorr, talented writer and professor, about why I NEVER KNEW that all my favorite writers were gay.

This is not a joke.

A brief list of my favorite writers who are ALSO queer:

• Virginia Woolf

• Carson McCullers

• Rachel Carson

• Emily Dickinson

• Mary Oliver

• Walt Whitman

• Louisa May Alcott

• Shakespeare

If you want to listen to one of the letters Virginia Woolf received from her lover, Vita Sackville-West, watch this super sexy reading by Jodie Comer. Please, Jodie Comer. I beg you. Read me lesbian love letters all day long.

This interview might seem tangential from the theme of romantic love but queer erasure and the literal, physical practice of removing queer love from our classic texts has caused unfathomable cultural damage that we’re only just now beginning to repair.

It’s time we start sharing queer stories and make sure that young people know that their role models, their mentors, and their leaders contain multitudes.

Shout it from the rooftops! Tell your grandma!

*p.s. I’m new to the world of interviewing! It turns out interviewing people for podcasts is really hard and kind of awkward, even when the person you’re interviewing is a good friend! Thanks for bearing with me on this adventure, lovely humans.

Reading list:

Want to fact check this episode? Here’s a reading list!

• My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland

• Open Me Carefully, Edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

• The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems, Paul Legault

• Love Letters: Vita and Virginia, foreward by Alison Bechdel

IT IS THE BIRTHDAY OF MY FAVORITE HUMAN: FRANCESCA (FRANK/FRANKIE) DOWNING. I love this woman so much I wrote a book about it. Happy birthday, dear heart <3

When we were little, we watched two movies pretty much every other day: Robin Hood and The Three Musketeers. At the end of The Three Musketeers there is a music video for the song, All for Love. We’d rewind the music video and dance in the living room to Rod Steward, Bryan Adams, and Sting jamming out (I blame these movies and this music video for my issues with romantic love).

Here’s to you, kid! It’s All for Love :)

ALL FOR LOVE

*p.s. I know there are typos in the below essay. I am tired. Please forgive me.

I’ve been having a difficult time with fiction recently. I’ve tried reading a variety of books and nothing seems to stick. When my copy of The Paris Review arrived in the mail (me=snob of snobs!) I started every story and read a few lines and then moved on, frustrated and annoyed. Where’s the heart?! Where is the life?! Then I came to a piece written by Annie Ernaux. It’s a stunning excerpt from her journal written while she was having an affair with a Russian officer before the fall of the Berlin wall. I dissolved into the piece. When it was over, I looked up and noticed that I was not in Paris in the 80’s but in my apartment. It felt so real! So intimate! So unashamed to be ashamed—to be grotesquely obsessed, filled with desire and anguish. I then went on to read a piece by Kathryn Scanlan (who are you, you mysterious genius?!?) about a horse trainer. I knew it must be a story (based on the very little information I can find about Kathryn Scanlan, I know she was never a horse trainer) but I couldn’t put it down. Finally! Fiction that was engaging! But when I came to the end of the story I noticed a footnote that said the story was constructed from a series of interviews. It was fiction. It was crafted and honed and manipulated for story and tension and yet it was also real. I could feel the life in the work—pulsing and human—like the smell of a person who just woke up, sweaty and a little sour. I want that raw honesty! Give me vulnerability or give me death! Fiction feels like a heavily buttressed cathedral with structural and methodical wings holding the roof aloft. I want to worship in the grass under nothing but space.

A few days ago I went to a bookstore and asked the clerk for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a book I’ve read already but wanted to look at again.

I said, “I looked in biography and didn’t see it.”

He said, “It’s not a biography.”

“Oh, do you have a section for memoir? I didn’t see it”

And then he laughed and said, “It’s a novel. It’s fiction.”

I was embarrassed to be mocked and embarrassed because I knew it was a novel. But I also believe that it’s not really a novel. It’s a work of art that belongs to no genre. You could call it poetry as easily as you could call it fiction.

TL;DR- If you don’t have time to read this essay, just read this:

For the love of all that is holy, can we please live without labels?!?! Who cares if a book is memoir or fiction or somewhere in between? Memoir is a misnomer. There is nothing “factual” about memory. The only question I care about when reading literature is: is it real?

Autofiction

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous could be described as autofiction. Autofiction is difficult to define, but I think this quote by Christian Lorentzen is helpful: “In the past, I’ve tried to make a distinction in my own use of the term between autobiographical fiction, autobiographical metafiction, and autofiction, arguing that in autofiction there tends to be emphasis on the narrator’s or protagonist’s or authorial alter ego’s status as a writer or artist and that the book’s creation is inscribed in the book itself.”

Marguerite Duras is said to have pioneered the genre with her book, The Lover. The Lover is about a fifteen-year-old French girl in Saigon who has an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old man. It spans years and countries and ultimately describes a woman’s attempt to reckon with the past that built her. The Lover is not a book of fact and anyone who attempts to read it that way is an unimaginative slug (yes, I am a judgmental person, sorry not sorry). People have criticized the piece for not being “accurate” to Duras’ real life. Although she did state that the book was completely autobiographical, according to her interview in the New York Times:

“Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity. After "The Lover," Duras said, in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the story of her life did not exist. Only the novel of a life was real, not historical facts. ‘It's in the imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life.’"

While The Lover is not fact and it is not true, I do believe that it is real. What do I mean by real? I don’t mean: actually existing as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed. I suppose my definition is more spiritual and amorphous. I believe The Lover to be true to a woman’s emotion and true to an experience. The book is an honest, vulnerable excavation of what made this woman herself. The Lover is real according to the spirit not the world.

I’m not sure if any of you remember the Million Little Pieces scandal, but I’ve been scarred by it for life. James Frey sold his book about dealing with addiction as a memoir and went on Oprah describing his experiences with addiction. But lo and behold! He exaggerated. Frey originally wrote a novel based on his experiences, but it was denied by most publishers so he made it a memoir. Why would a memoir be more attractive to publishers than a novel? Because we live in a society that likes to hang our hat on reality! We want to say—this is what really happened! We want reality where, if life were a cake, we could slice out this man’s experience and eat it. His story is so real we could hold it in our hands! Even though we’re continuously duped by social media, deep fakes, politicians and systemic and structural manipulation we still believe there is a single source of truth to be had! We believe there is a “real” life physical enough for us to hold.

Frey has said he "stands by the book as being the essential truth of my life". And yet he was crucified by the literary community and accused of literary forgery. Since then writers live in fear of the scandal of someone combing through their work and fact checking how many times they’ve had a root canal. So much for Duras’ “imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life.”

I would say, presumptuous as this may be, that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is also real according to the spirit. And I would go so far as to say that what sets the book apart, what makes it spectacular is the reality of its emotional spirit.

But where is the room for creative freedom, for art, and for craft if all writers fear being indicted by the community as literary forgers? The answer is: calling every book a novel and that little disclosure at the front—

“This work is fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.”

The Problem with Memory

My novella, The Family that Carried their House on their Backs, is technically speculative fiction but, if we lived in a world that wasn’t so aggressive about fact and fiction and the truth, I could call it a memoir. It’s true, my dad did not turn into a wolf and my mother, sister, and I are not nomadic people with houses literally stitched to our backs. But, the book is real.

When I was in my final semester of college I wanted to write about what it was like growing up with an addict as a father. House began as a poem describing what crack cocaine does to an addict’s lungs—it causes pulmonary alveolar and interstitial edema which, in X-rays, looks like a tree or a blossoming flower.

But after I wrote the poem, I realized that the reality of the piece prevented any true feeling. The work felt impotent. In the end, I didn’t want to be trapped by the confines of what had really happened. Memory is fantasy; what we carry with us has little to do with fact, everything to do with feeling.

Memory is defined as an organism’s ability to store, retain and retrieve information. It’s been clear to psychologists for some time that trauma can mar the brain’s ability to perform these functions. That is to say: trauma can so radically transform the landscape of memory that often it is nearly impossible for a person to return to their regular thought patterns.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve struggled with conveying my memories to certain members of my family, often because those people don’t hold those same images, feelings or thoughts to be true. When I set about writing this novella, I wanted to avoid the trappings of fact versus fiction. Instead, I wanted to create a world that felt, smelled and looked exactly like the world in which I’d grown up: the world from which I’d watched my father slowly disappear, in which I’d watched my mother stripped of her agency. I didn’t want to build this world within reality because, in the end, belief in reality is belief in fantasy. What I remember and what my mother remembers are two different universes. I wanted this novella to feel like a story passed down for generations until the truth of what happened begins to feel like myth.

Writing requires craft. What makes a book a work of art and not just a series of sentences on the page are the creative choices the author made while writing.  Every story can be written a hundred thousand ways. What point of view are you going use? What’s the timeline? What tense? In the end, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a work of art— special and transcendent, not because of its relation to fact or fiction. What sets it apart are the craft choices that Vuong makes in order to maximize the emotional weight of the story and to wring the reader dry. When you finish that book you’re spiritually consumed. You’ve fallen into a space outside of your time and body. Vuong’s lyricism, insightfulness, and poetic syntax carry an emotional weight that builds and crashes through you. He manipulates time and space in order to ensure that every scene maintains maximum impact. He integrates memories and poetry and utilizes that juxtaposition to help the reader infer hidden intentions and draw their own conclusions. If Vuong were confined to the truth of what really happened, there would be less freedom to craft that crash and the book would be the poorer for it.

Let us consider the phrase “the truth what really happened.”

I’m sure you have all heard about the flaws in eye witness testimony. One of the most famous fictional representations is the 1957 film Twelve Angry Men. I am about to spoil this film, so skip ahead if you don’t like spoilers. Twelve Angry Men centers around the trial of a young man accused of murder. One of the main witnesses claims that she saw the young man in the apartment across from hers. She says she woke up to a startling sound and saw the young man clearly in that single moment. Henry Fonda points out to his fellow jurors that this woman couldn’t have seen him clearly because she wears glasses and she couldn’t have seen the young man without taking the time to put on her glasses.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has an entire report about why eye witness testimonies fail:

The first step toward correctly identifying something you’ve seen before is seeing it accurately to begin with. Research over the past few decades has revealed much about how vision works. Visual sensation is the initial process of detecting light and extracting basic image features. Sensations themselves are evanescent; only a small fraction of what is sensed is actually perceived. Attention is the filtering process by which information sensed by the visual system is selected for further processing. Perception is the process by which attended visual information is integrated, linked to environmental cause, made coherent, and categorized through the assignment of meaning, utility, value, and emotional valence.

TL:DR:

Perception is your brains organizational process as it attempts to make sense of what it sees. And what our brain actually sees is very little.

Bias fills in the blanks when visual information is uncertain, fills them in with what we believe is likely to be out there based on prior experience. Formally, this characterizes vision as a problem of statistical inference, in which the observer infers properties of the world from data in the form of retinal images. Bias refers here to prior probabilities (“priors”)—knowledge or dispositions derived from experience—that enable the observer to make context-dependent inferences about the environmental cause of visual stimulation. For example, prior knowledge that bank robbers carry guns enhances the probability that the bank robber will be perceived with gun in hand, even when the sensory evidence is equivocal.

But there is a catch: This same system that grants certainty of perceptual experience in the face of noise is also capable of filling in the blanks with the wrong information. In other words, misinformed biases cause us to perceive or make decisions about things that don’t exist. The coat rack may be experienced as an intruder in the hall, the shrubbery is mistaken for a police car, or the woman at the rendezvous point is wrongly identified as a friend. Similarly, uncertainty and bias can yield a situation in which information sensed by an eyewitness is of poor quality but the witness nonetheless perceives what he or she expects to see.

TL:DR

Our brains were designed to fill in the blanks. We see very little of the actual physical world and our little, lizard brains were trained to use context and bias to complete the picture.

Why am I talking about eye-witness testimonies and vision in an essay about fiction vs. autofiction vs. memoir? I’m using it to prove my point that memoir does not exist.

Memoir is defined as a writing based on an author’s personal memories. They are interpreted to be “factual”. But, factual and memory can never be synonymous. Not only because our brains fundamentally cannot be counted on to record the truth in any given moment, but we cannot be relied upon to recall such events accurately.

The reason James Frey was shunned by the literary community was because he wrote about his experience and used craft to make it more interesting, to intrigue readers, to enhance tension—which is what writing is! Augusten Burroughs faced a similar issues with his book Running with Scissors. Do I think that Augusten Burroughs exaggerated the story? Yes. Do I care? No. Because I’m not delusional enough to expect my art to be fact.

I trust artists to ingest the world—evanescent and elusive—and craft an artifact that represents the core of their perception.

Subject vs. Object vs. Truth

I’ve stated many, many times that I want a single truth. I want there to be an answer! One unadulterated and pure truth! Specifically related to death and love. Those are the two unknowable forces in my life that I’d really like to pin down. Just stick them to the floor and violently shout, “Stay!” But I have also acknowledged that despite my profound, visceral desire for truth, I don’t believe in it.

In my attempt to understand truth I’ve read a lot of philosophy books (only a few of which I actually fully understand) and I think the correspondence theory of truth resonates most deeply with me.

Proklos (In Tim., II 287, 1) speaks of truth as the agreement or adjustment (epharmoge) between knower and the known. Philoponus (In Cat., 81, 25-34) emphasizes that truth is neither in the things or states of affairs (pragmata) themselves, nor in the statement itself, but lies in the agreement between the two. He gives the simile of the fitting shoe, the fit consisting in a relation between shoe and foot, not to be found in either one by itself.

Truth then, is like our vision. Truth is like human memory. Truth is the act of perceiving the world and creating an agreement between ourselves and what is presented to us. (Obviously this gets sticky when it comes to outright lies—I’m not trying to excuse politicians that craft stories to justify drone strikes that murder civilians). What I am saying is that it is impossible to consider our reality without considering ourselves.

If we can’t trust our eyes or our memories to translate “the truth of what really happened?” what are we doing when we write and when we make art?

Michael Singer says:

When you were ten years old, did you ever look in a mirror? Did you see what you see now? No. Was it you looking? You’ve been there the whole time haven’t you. That’s the core. That’s the essence of everything we want to talk about. Who are you? Who is that that is in there, that is looking out through those eyes and seeing what you’re seeing… When you look out at the mirror, you are not what you see. It’s what we call subject object. You’re the subject. And what you are looking at is the object.

We can perceive an infinite amount of objects. All our lives we are looking at objects beyond ourselves. We perceive the world through that being that is us.

The act of creating art, then, is similar to the act of opening our eyes. We see the world and our brain bounces light, distance and color back to us and we fill in the blanks from that which we are, which is the subject of our own lives. We are incapable of achieving anything else. Even the most spiritual leaders of the world don’t suggest reaching outside of ourselves for truth or understanding—rather becoming more deeply rooted within our own consciousness.

So, what is the point of all of this?

Marguerite Duras did live in Saigon. She did have an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old man when she was fifteen. She wrote about the experience of the affair and how those months ricocheted throughout her life—coloring every preceding moment with its fire. I believe that much to be true. And I don’t care to pin her to anything else.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

So yes, I want to write “a novel of a life.” I want to live in that liminal space between memory and experience. But that sort of raw vulnerability comes with high stakes and hight consequences.

In her journal excerpts, Annie Ernaux describes having sex in her son’s studio with a younger, married, man. How do you think her son feels about that? How do you think the married man, unnamed but loosely identified enough that I’m sure her friends and acquaintances know who he is, feels about having his sexual encounters described with specific and tangible details? This affair obviously had a profound effect on Ernaux. She wrote a novel about the experience. The writing she produced after the affair is described as her best work. I’ve never had an affair. I’ve yet to become a middle-aged woman with two children. But Ernaux’s journal entries awoke in me the same sense of furious hunger, of unrequited need that leaves you starving and bereft. Her honesty, perhaps not to historical fact, but her honesty to her emotions, allowed me to melt into the piece until author, reader and page lost all distinction. Ernaux’s detailed description of her sexual exploits while her sons lingered just beyond the door made me believe her story even more. It’s not pleasant. She’s not behaving “well,” but that’s the point. Ernaux is laying her humanness bare. The writing is phenomenal. But there’s a cost.

If we’re to be artists working in this space of “a novel of life,” we’re obviously going to affect the lives of those around us. If we’re translating our experiences into art then our family members, our lovers, our teachers will all feature in our work. And with great power comes great responsibility. Joyce Maynard is quoted as saying, “Write like you’re an orphan,” because the fear of betraying those you love will keep you from ever putting pen to paper. You must psychologically kill your parents in order be creatively free! Anne Lamott has said, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Sure, I agree with both of those statements and yet…

Nicole Krauss writes about this in her short story The Young Painters. She describes how a writer tells the story of her friend’s tragedy in a short story. In writing the story she changes little, merely embellishes and fill in the blanks. Krauss says;

Yes, I believed—perhaps even still believe—that the writer should not be cramped by the possible consequences of her work. She has no duty to earthly accuracy or verisimilitude. She is not an accountant, nor is she required to be something as ridiculous and misguided as a moral compass. In her work, the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.

How do you navigate being free in your work while also being responsible in your life? How do you write what’s true to you, how can you be as honest and free as Ernaux without harming the people closest to you? You can write like you’re an orphan but you are, in fact, not an orphan—even if both your parents are dead, there is someone out there who cares about you and will be hurt by what you say.

I recently attended a reading in which the author, Sheila Heti, was asked what trait a writer needs in order to create great work. She said, “kindness.” I think that’s how writers should navigate their art. Esther Perel says that when navigating tough conversations with your partner you should ask yourself: is it honest? Is it helpful? Is it kind? And I think that’s what writers should ask themselves every day as they create.

• Is it honest? Don’t slander people or tell wild untruths just for the sake of being mean or for revenge. Sure, you can manipulate details to create maximum emotional effect but don’t be cruel and don’t make shit up just so you can make people look bad.

• Is it helpful? Why are you writing about this event? Does it serve the larger question of the story? Does it advance the themes of the work? Or did you just slap it in as an exposé. Look at this horrible thing this person did! Look at this horrible thing I did to someone else! Don’t put that shit in if it doesn’t contribute to the material. Does the scene make the work stronger? Is it essential to the art?

• Is it kind? You know how you’re supposed to use I statements when fighting with a partner? Well, I think that goes for your work as well. Being an artist of any kind is narcissistic. Embrace the narcissism. You’re creating this because you have something to say—you have questions to answer—whether or not you intend to show it to others. Your work is, literally, all about you. Anyone who say’s differently is selling something. But everything that happened to you happened through your own perspective. Acknowledge your bias! Your memories aren’t real. Get over it. While your perspective should always be the focus of the story you shouldn’t ignore the very real experience of those around you. Write from your perspective but remain objective enough to acknowledge that there are as many way of looking at things as there are galaxies: infinitely unknowable.

• Also, don’t share stories that aren’t yours to share. This goes for a lot of things—like don’t be a white dude writing about what it’s like to be a black woman. Don’t be that guy. Write what you know, or what is in the realm of your understanding.

It’s difficult to take responsibility for your art and make the best work you can possibly create while also protecting the people you love. My family has been super patient, especially my mom, with me writing about our joint story. My sister let me write about her personal and intimate history in my most recent “novel.” But it’s still uncomfortable for them and I know that in a lot of ways, they’d prefer I wrote about other things.

But, I hope that by following the rules: is it honest? Is it helpful? and is it kind? I can be true to my work and also remain true to those I love.

It’s winter. I’ve been sick and tired and unable to write and avoiding all my friendships (sorry friends). So, because I’m being lazy—baby’s first video essay on Substack! In this essay I talk about the three reasons I can’t quit Instagram. I reference Erich Fromm, Simone de Beauvoir, Subjects vs. Objects, The Social Dilemma, and this incredible book called Four Thousand Weeks.

But before we dive in to Instagram I want to take a moment to address that the world is at war and Ukrainians are standing strong—I encourage us all to support them in whichever way we can. Also, a Black, masc lesbian is being detained in Russia for possessing a vape pen and we should all be nervous. And finally, the latest climate change report came out and it’s bad. Very, very, very bad. Like humanity ending in our lifetime bad.

While I’m at a loss as to how to help Ukraine or Brittney Griner—I do know how to fight climate change.

The top 10% of the world seems to not care or even acknowledge that we’ve already reached a tipping point and we’re on our way to reaching a point of no return. Human life doesn’t seem to really matter. But you know what does matter to the uber rich? Money. And do you know what we have more than the uber rich? People. So what do we the people need to get the uber rich to understand? That it’s financially beneficial of them to care about climate change because investing in fossil fuels is a bad idea for us and for the world. Getting the rich to care about their money has proven effective when it comes to fighting climate change. (Also, something to note—if you make more than 38,000 a year, you too are considered the uber rich in terms of the world).

So what can you do today? You can go to this site and learn about how to talk to your asset managers (your 401k people) about creating more sustainable investment opportunities. Don’t move your money! Just talk about your money! Show up for the people by demanding a more sustainable future. I just had this conversation with Vanguard and let me tell you, it felt good.

BONUS: If you are on the fence about climate change—i.e. don’t believe in it, don’t think it’s that big of a deal, don’t think it will end humanity for our children, then I will BUY you this book. FOR FREE. Just send me your address and it will be delivered to your door. No shame! This is a shame free space. I will send it with love and light and without blame or shame or judgement.

And—if you a)love the movie Robinhood: Prince of Thieves as a kid and watched it obsessively (me) and b) want a laugh, like a full belly, wild laugh—read this.

Okay,

live long and prosper,

Sammie