Hi all,
I’m on the Vermonter (Amtrak train) on the way to Northampton for a visiting writer gig at Amherst. I’ll spend my down time working on one last milk essay.
Jeanne is now my editor at Feminist Press, the kind of ideal turn of events I could not have dared to dream. We’re aiming for a November 2025 pub date for this next book, my milk book, which is—soon. I thought I’d send out a hello/still here before I dunk myself in milk for the rest of the year.
This time last week I was on Fire Island, in the Meatrack with Marigold, me the salty sailor to her beach bird wood nymph demigoddess, squeezing her ass cheeks as she leaned against a low tree branch. (The Meatrack is the cruising zone between the Pines and Cherry Grove.) It was a hard return from that to a heavy teaching week, and I’ve enjoyed our hot texts keeping this silly Moby Dick x Edith Hamilton fantasy periodically alive. I cast off tomorrow with thy sultry image on my heart, I sent last night, fortifying my every heave and ho Sun emoji, fire emoji, two hearts facing each other.
Now “last night” is last week. I recently reviewed Renee Gladman’s new book My Lesbian Novel for 4Columns and in revisiting her body of work became transfixed by her thinking about time in writing. “Was progressing along a line of language moving forward in time?” she writes in Calamities. “It didn’t seem so, since I was still trying to say what I wanted to say, an idea that occurred to me many moments ago, that was now no longer with me but had hold of me nonetheless” (124-125). One goal of a sentence may be the illusion of a held present, but only the writer knows how many moments run through it. When does a sentence become temporally estranged from where it started? When does it become a ripple or wrinkle in time? Do I know what I meant when I typed that? Do you know how long it took me to write this paragraph?
A few weeks ago I reread T Fleischmann’s Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through for class and got caught up in time again. Within the present of the narrative Clutch opens a document they’ve been working on and begins to read over it—a poetic text that then gets interspersed through the narrative, a way of keeping the past alive in back story when the back story is writing; but probably the writer is revising this back-text while writing and rewriting the front-text.
This is the fifth newsletter I’ve started since the last one I sent out. Can I make myself write it in one continuous swoop? (No.)
On Fire Island it was Trans Celebration Weekend with the main event being a t4t play party at the Belvedere. The party is conceived as a takeover because the Belvedere—a clothing-optional guest house in Cherry Grove in the style of a (chintzy) Venetian Palace—bills itself as a “Gay Resort For Men.” This was the second year of the t4t party and (I’m told) it was much bigger this time. I was staying in a house in Cherry Grove with Liz and three other friends. We got ready with martinis and the usual suspects (Chappell, Charli). I had brought my Shagalicious harness, but it didn’t work with anything else I had, so I lent it to A and went with mesh, what can you do. One day I’ll compose an outfit that gives this item its full due, activating my dream scene where one hot queer after the next tells me they like my harness, and I say, “Thank you. It’s Shagalicious.”
A and I were restless and decided to head over while our friends finished getting ready. We did a sweep and I tried to relax—I hadn’t been to a play party in (1.5?) years. Part of the front grounds is a patio area with small pool, hot tub, and gym. People were lifting dumbbells; some couples fucked on the weight benches. Further into the hotel, a rope top was tying someone from the railings of a spiral staircase. The dance floor was too brightly lit but A and I tried. Wade arrived and enlisted four of us in a filmed performance in which we ripped off his falling-apart jeans from the cuffs: a Shedding. Then Marigold showed up in a tightass dress in tropical floral print with matching long gloves. My Pretty Young Tern! (An inside joke.) She led me through the hallways to a less-public area and we hooked up overlooking the bay.
I set this aside to read more of Jennifer Doyle’s new book Shadow of My Shadow, about her experience of being stalked by a graduate student and the appalling mess of institutional bureaucracy the case got mired in.
I’m also reading Carley Moore’s beautiful Heart Less, a poetry collection, her first.
I’m also reading Temple Grandin and thinking about hugs and milk and cows. Time ripples and jumps.
Every heave and ho!? Marigold texts back. Don’t tease me so Melting face emoji, panting emoji. I laugh.
Other recent reading: Avgi Saketoupoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent and Sol Brager’s (tremendous) Heavyweight. Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies. Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden. A lot of Renee Gladman.
*
The class visit happened. I’m on the train heading home. My host was Dennis James Sweeney, who used to run the small press guide for Entropy (RIP) and is working on a book version of that series. I’ve been reading his newest book You’re the Woods Too, a hybrid work of ecopoetics that uses refrain (“I went out in the woods to find myself and…”) dynamically to explore via multiple modes and scenarios the relationships between nature, mystery, masculinity, and self-discovery.
Marigold and I didn’t go out in the woods to find ourselves. We went out there to fuck and be trans in gay space. Thank you, gay woods, for having us. Yes, we checked for ticks.
Terrific questions from students. With these things I often feel disappointing because I don’t show up spouting pithy craft lessons – I mostly talk about the stories behind the stories: the cultural and personal contexts that specific stories, and the ideas and choices within them, came from and how they may mean differently now. I guess that’s craft, but it’s personal. To prepare, I revisited the stories Dennis had assigned, which included “The Strands,” a break-up horror story that’s not nearly as dour as I remember it—it’s rather funny! Plus “Trauma-Rama,” “Take Us to Your LDR,” and “AB-469: A Po(r)ny-ography in Three Parts,” the latter of which students had a lot to say about/weren’t sure what they thought about (reasonable).
As we wrapped up, Dennis asked me for one piece of advice I might offer new fiction writers. A completely appropriate and uncontroversial question, but I blanked, overthinking it, then scrambled something together about finding yourself in the story even if your characters are not you. With more time I still don’t have a great answer but it might be something about honoring your literary heritage as part of your DNA. Or something about Community.
Writing as archive. Honor the writer you are. I don’t fucking know. But I should.
The dinner happened, with Dennis, his partner Thirii, their three-year-old, and four students who were appalled that Dennis and I kept talking about Percy Jackson as the author and not the protagonist of the Percy Jackson books (which are written, it happens, by one “Rick Riordan”).
The reading happened. More great questions, really thoughtful questions. Thank you, Amherst students!
Afterwards I chatted with a librarian at the college named Alana, who shared that she is—get this—the person who wrote the article on Sick Lit in Bitch Magazine that informed an important section of my novel! These sorts of connections feel miraculous, like the memory of a page spread has turned into a person I feel like I know. We had a nice chat. Then back to my hotel room for a sweet phone talk with my long distance flame.
This morning I stopped by Amherst Books and picked up a copy of The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson #1) for penance purposes. I’m reading it now.
These, friends, are my train rides, squeezed down to <1500 words which is my rule. Thank you for reading! I’ll be back in a few months.
Yours,
Megan