year-end roundup: the personal & the writing edition.

on the love, sickness, work, & bylines of 2023

2023 started with a baby in my belly, unplanned but somehow, complicatedly, adored. A small embryo that I knew in my heart was no longer growing; a tiny little mass who, at the size of only a poppyseed, managed to transform the size of my breasts, the glow of my skin, the shape of my love….And by the second week of January, she was gone. The lifeless embryo would not pass on its own, the nurse told me, and so I would have to get a dilation and curettage procedure, otherwise known as an abortion. My first. I will never forget the cold of that January; I felt the freeze of it inside me, chilling my bones and where she used to be. 

We got through that, me and P, quite beautifully. We made ritual around the loss; it has been a sweet and tender thing for us, not a trauma thing. (I wrote more about her here, which I’ll mention again below). 

The spring was hard though. I will continue to keep some things out of this newsletter, but I have to acknowledge that the months before P’s diagnosis were hard for us, as a couple. We were not in a great place when we got the news. 

The news was, as most of you know, a brain tumor. I have been writing “avoid clichés” on my students’ papers all semester, so please forgive this, but— our lives turned upside down. (This one, I’ve decided, is clichéd for good reason; it’s apt, the toppling over metaphor, for times of crisis). We had to mend our relationship while also confronting cancer. It was not easy! It was grueling some days. We were both in so much pain, emotionally, and him physically. Summer was the ugliest parts of healing, in every direction. 

The first half of 2023, I was hustling. I had a variety of freelance jobs which included writing, editing/coaching, adjuncting, and SW. It was exhausting. In May I found out that there was an opening for a two-year Gender & Sexuality Studies professor position at a college near me. I made a commitment to myself, back in 2018, that I would not let academia rule my life anymore; I was done letting this career move me all over the country, I was done spending every autumn applying for the 50-100 jobs posted for literally thousands of PhDs, I was done letting academia define me. But this position didn’t require moving, it only required one application, and since it’s not tenure-track, there are no research expectations — this means I can write what I want to write, wherever I want to write it, without the pressure to publish articles for paywalled academic journals. There are still difficult things about having a full-time academic position again, but generally, it’s been an absolute gift. 

Other things that I will remember about 2023: the meetings and events at The Rhizome House, feeling proud that we’re helping to carry on the tradition of anarchist social centers; movies and dinners with my mom and my uncle, and missing my Nana and extended family who moved to Georgia last year; a profound mostly-silent retreat and the beautiful humans I was lucky enough to share it with;  the three-week trip through Europe, so P could say farewells before his more permanent move to the States; becoming “hospital people,” learning the inner-workings of a giant medical complex; one of the most aesthetically stunning autumns I’ve ever experienced; and of course, bearing witness to genocide. 

And also, writing. At first, reflecting on the year, I thought I’d have nothing to share. What initially comes to mind is my failure, which is that I still haven’t finished the book I was supposed to have completed in late 2022. I am frustrated and embarrassed that this is the case. The publisher is being patient, but I’ve never been this late on a project in my life (I struggle with many things, but missing deadlines has not, historically, been one of them). I could write a lot more on why it’s taking me so long, but this newsletter is for what did happen in 2023, and it turns out, I actually do have writing accomplishments to celebrate. It was nice to remember that, in the midst of a very hard year, I still got words out.

Please forgive the self-indulgence of what follows. We used to have Twitter threads for end-of-the-year bylines, but now I have Substack, which means more space to talk about it. I also used this as an opportunity to share a bit of what my invited book talks tend to cover. (If you’re interested in having me give this talk at your school/library/bookstore/etc., feel free to shoot me an email.)

Invited talks for Rust Belt Femme

My memoir, Rust Belt Femme, came out in March 2020, the exact week that things started shutting down. My book tour was canceled immediately. I did some Zooms of course, and podcast and print interviews, but it has always left a bit of a hole in my author heart that I didn’t get to do the book launch thing. That said, I’ve been lucky that RBF has had some staying power, and I’ve ended up doing a number of in-person events for her since. In 2023, it looked like this: In February I had an invited talk and classroom workshop at Western Kentucky University; I did the same in April, at my BA alma mater, DePaul University. Also in April, I spoke to a class at Tulane about RBF, which they read during their autotheory unit. In June I was the Pride week speaker at the Clark County Public Library near Columbus, OH; that month, I also gave three talks (one RBF-focused) at the Rust Belt Humanities Lab at Ursuline College. In September, I gave an invited book talk at Hiram College, and also spoke to a class that read my book at Elon University. In October, at Oberlin College, I was in conversation with author Claire Forstie about our respective books. In November, I was invited again to speak at Ursuline and Tulane. 

I have a few thoughts on what turned out to be a really fruitful year of book-related events. First and foremost, many of these talks are a result of a beautiful network of friends and colleagues who go out of their way to support working-class artists and scholars, and they’ve found ways to shuffle university money to the precariously employed amidst their communities. I am forever grateful for that kind of solidarity, and I want to name it. Art thrives with strong relationships.

Additionally, it’s been really wonderful to get to talk about so many facets of the book. Generally my talks are much less about the content, and much more about the process and the possibility of theoretical contributions from the finished product. Most of them focus on place-based writing, autotheory and its relationship to radical women’s history, and also gendered aspects of memoir. 

Here’s a little snapshot of some slides I’ve shared in previous talks. (I rarely write out talks word for word; instead I have slides with key takeaways that I expand on. This is also how I teach, so although I love writing, I think talks will always feel better for me when I’m riffing.) 

I usually introduce the talk admittedly a bit on defense. Especially in academic contexts, I sometimes feel embarrassed that my first solo-authored book wasn’t a more strictly academic project. So this is when I share femme scholar Andi Schwartz’s note about the dismissal of memoir being rooted in sexism. I hope it quiets the judgment in the room (and reminds me to do the same for myself). 

And though memoir is worth defending on its own terms, I also like to remind folks that the idea of “navel-gazing” is ridiculous when our “personal” lives are always already collective. This is the part where I talk about autotheory, and the way that many of us weave theory into reflections about our lives and/or make theory from our lived experience. 

Here are a bunch of examples of women who have blended the personal and the theoretical. From the top: the Wages for Housework campaign (Silvia Federici theorizes on this here); Chicana feminists, like Cherríe Moraga; anarchist orator and hopeless romantic, Emma Goldman; and The Combahee River Collective, who were the first to coin the term “identity politics” as the insistence that lived experience matters to political struggle and analysis. 

Here I get nerdy about citations and knowledge formation. I love that my memoir let me tell the truth of how I learned things — I didn’t have to reference a line of famous theorists like you do in academic publications, I got to say “my friend told me about this.” Sometimes I supported it with published theorists, but I grounded it first in the relationships that taught me how to think. Memoir is such a rich place to remind people that we make meaning for and with each other. 

I also share how the project led me to investigate land, labor, and social struggle history in Northeast Ohio. I did not set out to write anything particularly historical, but as I wrote about my childhood, remembering how close I was to the water, trees, and animals around me, I realized I had to pay more homage to the past. It was not my plan to include chapters that explained how the canal was dug, or the way police used to beat up artists three decades before I was born, but….that’s what happened. 

Sometimes audiences do want to dive into more personal questions, which some memoirsits have problems with, only wanting to talk about craft; but I know that so many of us connect with memoir because it helps us feel less alone, and I am happy to answer questions about trauma, love, and friendship. I’ve received these questions mostly from younger women, and honestly it’s a pleasure to bring personal stories into the classrooms I visit, to say “yes, we can talk about the body and the heart here.” 

Winner of the Gordon Square Review Ohio Writers Contest for “Poppygoblin” 

The essay about my miscarriage poured out of me more easily than anything else I’ve written. I submitted it to three different publications, all rejected it. Then I submitted it to the Ohio Writers Contest, with guest judge Hanif Abdurraqib, who happens to be one of my favorite writers of all time. Winning was a huge honor, and it still feels so special that I was able to memorialize my pregnancy experience in print. 

“Decision-Making in Brainless Organisms,” essay published in Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest

It was a true delight to be included in this collection of essays and poetry all vaguely related to the theme of “making the golf course a public sex forest.” The editors — who created the project in response to a contested golf course in Minneapolis — wanted smart smut, and so that’s what I gave them. It’s an extremely hot, fun, intelligent assemblage of writing, and even if I wasn’t in it, I would say that it belongs in some kind of queer anti-canon. You can read my interview with the editors here, and get an excerpt of my essay from the book here. But, as is the case for a number of things I put out in the world, please practice good reader boundaries — if you do not want to read pornographic accounts of my sex life juxtaposed to theories about mycelial communication and the relationship between blow jobs and affinity groups, don’t read it! I’m hoping that if you are family or co-worker (or goodness, a student), you will understand that this means you. :) But if you’re not in those groups, please read and buy the book! 

Foreword for Heavy Petting 

I have to make a similar disclaimer here: family and professional associates, keep moving. 

Still here? Okay cool, here’s another hot book for you to get your hands on! I was extremely honored to be asked to write the foreword for this collection of erotic and straight-up pornographic photography from Ohio artist, Heather Hite, and published by a wonderful small, local press, With an X Books. I got to gush about Hite’s work and also think about storytelling through images. It was such a stimulating creative exercise, I loved it. But also, here’s why I shooed away the family: I am among the naked people in the book! This feels extremely not a big deal to me, which I will eventually write about. Anyway, the book is great and if you like hot pics, consider a purchase. 

Miscellaneous 

• In May, I presented a paper titled “Criminal Sex and Other Lessons in Insurgent Fugitivity” at the CLIFF Conference at the University of Michigan. (P spoke at it too, cute! And Joy James was the keynote, we got to share dinner with her, it ruled.) 

• It turns out I love writing in the genre of “essay/book review” and in 2023 I got to do it for Autostraddle, reviewing Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex. 

• In addition to speaking at Ursuline College about Rust Belt Femme, I was also invited there during the Rust Belt Humanities Lab to speak about community-based journalism, mostly in relation to my former position as Community Engagement Editor at Belt Magazine. I got to meet a great group of thoughtful, regional scholars.

• I taught  two five-week classes for Literary Cleveland, an organization I really love. One was Intersectional Memoir, the other was Autotheory. Both were very fulfilling experiences. My autotheory crew is still meeting semi-regularly, and I feel really lucky to have found so many ways to make writerly community. 

• I was asked to be the guest judge for the Hiram College Creative Nonfiction Contest. There are some incredibly talented young writers out there. It was cool to be asked (and paid), and it’s a treat to read the essays. 

Whew. So, it wasn’t a nothing year after all. 

My 2024 goals are to finally finish that book, to love well, and to joyfully contribute to the abolition of the state and capitalism and to the building of beautiful things in their place. <3 

What about you? What will you remember about 2023? What shifted, what did you write, how did you love, what did you question? What are your 2024 goals? I’d love to hear whatever you want to share!