the work of a year.

what I got up to in 2024

reflecting.

I want to write something beautiful about the liminal dreamspace between winter solstice and the Gregorian new year, but I am still grading. Alas. I will tell you that we had a beautiful collective solstice with comrades, and that P and I shared ritual with our cherished tree and water neighbors. Christmas was with family; there were big emotions and thoughtful gifts and the Bob Dylan movie. 

This week of in-between is a reflection time, I’m powerless against it, and so I did make time to look back on what I got up to this year. This is the public-facing/professional stuff, the highlights. If it sounds braggy, maybe it would be helpful to remember that this year, for me, was also spent: in hospitals, in therapists’ offices, in painful commutes, in mourning, and messy tears. 2024 was the silly tenderness of look-alike contests, and also it was genocide. “This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief.” 

Okay that’s all I have for my emo intro. Here are some things that, despite it all, I’m proud of. I would *love* to know some of your accomplishments in the comments. Please tell us! <3 
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I finished a (rough) draft of my next book. 

Y’all, writing this book was hard. The subject feels important to me, and I’m glad to have been so immersed in it, but it was not a book that poured out of me (probably because it was so research-heavy). ICYMI: I am writing about the current cultural climate around gender and sexuality, specifically examining it through the history of the feminist sex wars. I am interested in the ways history is repeating itself, and I am interested in the moments that feel truly unprecedented. Mostly I am interested in interrogating what hasn’t worked as a way to inch closer to imagining truly liberatory responses to sexual and gender-based harm—-and truly liberatory approaches to sexual and gender-based pleasure. Research required a lot of engagement with Right-wing writers/podcasts, and also some truly terrible Marxist Feminist TERF/SWERF thinkers. I critique both, of course, along with some of the failures of liberal and lefty/progressive feminisms. I do some dreaming of possibilities, but I don’t offer answers. I hope and think it will create fertile ground for thinking together, though, and that’s what I’m most excited about. I still have a lot of revision to work through (and a bit more writing to do on the conclusion), and the publisher hasn’t set a pub date yet. But hopefully soon-ish the book will be in the world!

My essay-review of Pamela, Julia, & Britney’s memoirs was published in the (print version of the) Cleveland Review of Books. 

I loved spending time with these women. You can read the essay here (gotta order it in print, it’s worth it, it’s a dreamy material publication!). Also: if I end up writing about The Last Showgirl, I think Pam will officially be one of my beats. (I also wrote about her documentary here). 

I presented a paper on sex work and criminal cartographies at the Feminist Spatialities conference in Dublin. 

I examined the ways in which the war against sex work is also a spatial war, seen most explicitly in gentrification efforts like the notorious “cleaning up” of Times Square in the 70s. I go on to argue that the strategies sex workers have built to navigate these physical and digital assaults are strategies everyone can learn from. As more things become criminalized (trans healthcare, teaching books with ‘pronouns’ (lol), existing without state documents, accessing reproductive health care, and so on), more of us need to get comfortable with illegal ways of being. (I expand on these ideas in my forthcoming book.) I wrote more about the conference and our week in Ireland here.

I taught seven classes to ~200 students. At the college, I taught: Queering Prison Abolition & Transformative Justice; The Feminist Sex Wars 50 Years Later; Reproductive Justice After Dobbs; Intro to Queer Studies. For the local writing center, I taught: Introduction to Memoir. 

I love teaching and it is always a gift to learn from and with young people (and also elders, which I get to do sometimes through Lit Cleveland.) The classroom is a mercurial space though, and this past year has brought a mix of deeply nourishing conversations, extreme anxiety, stress, difficult dialogues, lightbulb moments, mistakes, and growth. I feel lucky to do this work; I also feel tired! 

Miscellaneous

⇼I was featured on an episode of Inner States, talking about Midwest punk and the scene’s reciprocal relationship with its geography. 

⇼I was invited to be on a crit panel for the History Design Studio workshop at Harvard. 

⇼I was the keynote speaker at the InterReligious Task Force’s annual Liberation Lab; the theme was “Build Worlds Not Jails.” You can read a transcript of the talk I gave here. 

⇼I was a mentor for Lit Cleveland’s Breakthrough Residency program, and guided two women’s memoir projects. They both completed full drafts. They are both beautiful books. One of the women is 68, the other 83. The three of us shared so much this past year. They are incredibly talented writers, and now they are also dear friends. <3 

⇼I was a low-capacity member of The Rhizome House collective. My fellow collective members—and the hundreds of people who help create actual community at our social center—deserve a lot of love. Between working full-time, supporting P through chemo, and my own health issues, I missed a lot of meetings, and didn’t make it to many events. But I’m still really proud to be a part of a group that is working to fight alienation through book clubs, skill shares (stop the bleed! repro health! SW basics! tech stuff! jail support! trans voice circles! etc!), fundraisers for Palestine, movie nights, poetry readings, meals, mutual aid distro, and so much more. Radical slogans can feel cheesy and hollow, but sometimes we make good on our propaganda. Rhizome House is demonstrating building a new world in the shell of the old, it is demonstrating how we can take care of us. I’m grateful to be a part of it. <3  

Newsletter. 

I sent out 49 newsletters this year. My most popular essays were on girl culture; All Fours (and aging, gender, desire); fibroids and a hellish healthcare journey; and social media & Palestine: 

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I feel content with newsletter output, but I also feel some grief around not having more time to devote to the many essays that I’ve begun in my brain. My notebook is full of snippets of ideas that haven’t been fully realized. Because I’ve been working full-time, this makes sense; but it’s been hard for me. I need to keep writing as a part-time job to cover the bills, and I also need to keep writing because I am a writer and the lot of us go pretty bonkers if we’re kept from it—so when I don’t get to do the thing as fully as I want to, it can feel….itchy. When I no longer have a full-time job (which is coming soon, as is built into my contingent faculty contract), I have lots of ideas to go bigger and better (or maybe “deeper and more thoughtful”) with this space. So stay tuned. <3 

Okay, now your turn! <3