Early February 2025

Everything is terrible & I still believe we will get through this together.

Hello from the snowy woods of New Hampshire where I am writing & reading & encountering so much tremendous art at this residency at Macdowell which is everything everyone says it is & more.

News & Analysis I’m Taking In

• Democracy Now! I donate monthly so that I can support these heroes even when I don’t have the emotional capacity to listen every day. Thank you Amy & Juan & all of you!

• M. Gessen: Get your moral clarity right here - “To Obey or Not to Obey” (NYT). Thank you, M!

• Margaret Killjoy’s Live Like the World is Dying podcast. Anarchism in action! I love this thing she says: “De-escalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy.” Thank you, Margaret!

• Ezra Klein’s podcast (NYT): For balance & I like his voice. Also useful if you want to listen to news with your tween & you don’t want them to fall into the spiraling vortex of chaos & despair we call contemporary adulthood. If you are feeling really bad right now & maybe having a slow motion panic attack, may I suggest this recent episode “Don’t Believe Him.” (also on spotify). Thank you, Ezra!

• AOC: I love her. Fight me. Or don’t! De-escalate all conflict that isn’t with the enemy! Thank you, AOC!

• Rebecca Solnit: I have been following her Guardian column & on FB for years & now she has a newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency. If you need hope without denial, Solnit’s your source. Thank you, Rebecca!

• Chase Strangio: Our man on the inside, breaking down all the trans stuff from a legal perspective & as a trans guy & a parent. Thank you, Chase!

• Also look at what Public Citizen is doing every day for us, my god, those heroes. Thank you, lawyers!

Reading log (January & early February)

• Anne Carson’s Short Talks (1992): I somehow never had read this whole book & now I realize I must have sponged it up by osmosis somehow. This is her first book of poetry & it consists of 45 short prose poems. I love her. I just do! Our own Bartleby.

• David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (2018): “We need to ask ourselves, not just how did such a large proportion of our workforce find themselves laboring at tasks that they themselves consider pointless, but also why do so many people believe this state of affairs to be normal, inevitable—even desirable?” Graeber, you hero. Gone too soon. You are missed.

• Deborah Hautzig’s Hey Dollface (1978): An explicitly queer YA novel from the 70s I’d never read! Fun! From a writer who apparently went on to write those Little Witch early readers.

• Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9--Fog (2019) & Kick the Latch (2022): Bring me your wry conceptual fiction about labor & animals & ordinary life! Bring me your oral history made narrative! My new fave.

• Edmund White’s The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir (2025): A terrific retrospective on a long queer life of sexual pleasure & experimentation from one of the originators of the genre. Also, so fun & dishy!

2025 Releases I’m Excited About! Pre-orders help!

• Rav Grewal-Kök’s The Snares (April 2025): Hotly-anticipated thriller by one of the menschiest guys I know.

• Denne Michele Norris’s When the Harvest Comes (April 2025): Stay tuned, I just got my hands on this sweet romantic novel & will report back.

• Hilary Plum’s State Champ (May 2025): Somehow simultaneously a searing portrait of political & personal desperation, a deep anti-hagiographical investigation into how to be a person in our contemporary fascist state, & a relentlessly funny bildungsroman for the rest of us. Every time I put this book down briefly, someone else picked it up & refused to give it back until they finished, because once you start, you can’t stop. You’re next.

• Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us (June 2025): Oh I finally wrote the blurb: Joe Westmoreland’s Tramps Like Us is irresistible: a spare, unflinching, generous & lusty masterpiece of adventure writing, that great adventuring queer quest for sex & friendship & love & home.

• David Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (June 2025)

• Benedict Nguyễn’s Hot Girls With Balls (July 2025): Benedict Nguyễn’s Hot Girls With Balls is literal genius: nailbiter sports fiction meets Kathy Acker on EMDR meets our shiny screentime moment, with all the desire & denial & overwhelm & the queer Asian trans girls at the heart of everything that matters. I love this book! It's so observant & emotionally intelligent & moving & shot through with clarity. SO SO GOOD! & I like volleyball now!

• Charlie Jane Anders’ Lessons in Magic & Disaster (August 2025): Charlie Jane Anders has done it again! Lessons in Magic and Disaster has everything I love in a novel: an utterly absorbing story, a huge heart, deep emotional intelligence, the real problems and delights of queer families and communities, a book-within-a-book, a couple of grad students, and legit trans magic.

• Miranda Mellis’s Crocosmia (August 2025): I’m super excited for this! Stay tuned!

Some Artists I’m Excited About

• Juan Jose Cielo: Speculative near future Colombia in paintings & conceptual art. The shadows of the flying cars, oh my god.

• Melissa Ling: Dreamy monochromatic drawings & paintings of family photographs that won’t let me go.

• Elle Perez: Wowza, these photos! My dude.

Where to Get Books

• You can buy (or pre-order) most of the books I’m recommending here at Bookshop.org or at your local independent bookstore!

• Also, it definitely helps writers & publishers if you pre-order or suggest-a-book to your local or school library! More about where to get books.

Western Mass QT Lit Events

• 02/15: Queer Story Slam: Love, Libido, Liberation at Bombyx, Florence

• 02/22: Sara Smith’s Shift Again at Loculus in Holyoke! 7pm! Ft Sara Smith & members of the network time human chorus & me reading a couple of poems

• 02/25: Launch for reissue of S/HE ft. Jack Gieseking, Jen Manion, Andrea Lawlor, and more! Bookends, Florence

• 02/25: K Iver, at Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, Smith College, Northampton

• 04/01: Jenny George, at Boutelle-Day Poetry Center, Smith College, Northampton

Online QT Lit Events

• Sinister Wisdom presents: More Love!: Lesbian and Feminist Publishing
  in the 2000s and 2010s. Join Julie R. Enszer from Sinister Wisdom and Marisa Crawford, curator of Weird Sister, the book and the blog, along with other special guests, including Carmen Rios from Ms., Eesha Pandit of the Crunk Feminist Collective, Alyse Knorr from Switchback Books, and Stephanie Andrea Allen from BLF Press, to celebrate lesbian and feminist publishing in the 21st century.. Password is LOVE. February 18, 2025 at 7 P.M. ET

Workshops (online & in person)

• Theatre of the Oppressed workshops (in person, South Hadley). Co-facilitated by CarmenLeah Ascencio & benefiting the Palestinian Children’s relief fund. Register by February 12!

• Cocoon writing workshops with Joss Lake! (online)

• Fine Arts Work Center: Queer Week III: ft. Cameron Awkward-Rich, Alexander Chee, Celeste Lecesne, Carmen Maria Machado, Catherine Opie, Ilana Savado, Miriam Klein Stahl, and this guy. A week of workshops in Provincetown Mass! Still a few spots available!

• Workshops for Gaza

• Shipman Workroom

• 24 Pearl Street

• Writing Co-Lab’s 100 Days of Creative Resistance

What I’m Watching

• Bad Sisters (Apple TV+). Finally finished. If you’re thinking of bailing after 2 or 3 episodes, stick with it. I can’t explain but you won’t be sorry.

• Black Doves (Netflix). A satisfying spy show for the girls gays & theys. I found Black Doves more action-y than disturbing (I generally just fast-forward or check my phone through loud or repetitive action scenes (boring to me), but I sometimes do wish I hadn’t seen something, like Dexter, or that motel room scene in season 2 of The Americans). Anyway, so good. Kiera Knightley has become really fun to watch & Ben Whishaw is my guy.

• English Teacher (Hulu). Relatable content! The actual world! Butch gay English teachers. It’s possible.

• Extraordinary S2 (Hulu). One of my favorite shows. Does anyone else watch it? It’s the best. I fucking love that cat, this world, the outfits ohmygod. Also the decency! I’m hooked on decency.

• Young Sheldon S6-7 (Max). Just finished. Damn. If you need to feel good & also cry & you haven’t watched this series, it’s truly a gem.

Tidbits

• Subscribe to the Mass Review, which will get you four beautiful print issues mailed to you each year, plus you get The View from Gaza special issue for free.  

• Hanif Kurieshi mentioned Paul in this interview recently & I’m freaking out! Do you subscribe to his newsletter? It’s phenomenal. I have some gift subscriptions to give away if you want one, so let me know.

More Cool Stuff Happening in Western Mass

• Drop-in classes at Spirit of the Heart. This queer/trans/feminist/inclusive martial arts studio offers self-defense classes & martial arts training & more for kids & adults. First class is free! Sometimes people need a safe place to hit things & also learn self-defense.

• Saturday Sangha at Insight Western Mass. Queer/trans/family/inclusive/recovery/beginner-friendly weekly Insight Meditation space. Co-led by Bernadine Mellis & Sarah Malzone. Drop in or come every week! Kids very welcome & don’t have to be quiet. Donuts provided! 9-10am, Saturdays at Eastworks!

• Very useful Collective Trans Resource List from the good people at Translate Gender. Massachusetts-focused but with national & online resources.

• Trans Relocation Support WMass. If you need help relocating to Western Massachusetts from a hostile environment, check this out. Also, if you’re in Western Mass & can help, check this out. We are the ones who will help us!

• Support immigrant teens in Western Mass to get drivers' licenses. An easy way to make a difference.

Okay that’s it for now. Off to write a poem. Let me know if you want any specific types of recommendations & I'll make a bespoke booklist if I can.

xo AL