On the last 9 months

I had no intention of abandoning this project.

I had no intention of abandoning this project, but here we are, nine months later. I could’ve gestated a baby in that amount of time! Spoiler, I didn’t.

In May I was invited to submit a story to Spokane’s local newspaper, The Spokesman Review, which runs a 10-week series of short stories in the summers. I was working hard on that piece when I went to visit my spouse, historian Kaden Jelsing, in Northampton Massachusetts, where he was teaching in the American Studies Department at Smith College, for my birthday. On my 41^st birthday, the issue of Puerto del Sol containing my short story “Wisdom Teeth” arrived at my door in Spokane, while we were enjoying a beer at The Dirty Truth in Northampton. Joni was cat/house sitting for me, and sent pics. “Wisdom Teeth” was a winner of the 2023 AWP Intro Journals Award. In “Wisdom Teeth,” a story of failed T4T romance, Hale falls for their long-time roommate’s boyfriend while he’s recovering from oral surgery. The piece features ruminations on five-year-plans, the shameful secret dream of home ownership, and Bob Ross saying “The canvas is wet and slick and ready to go, and I hope you are too,” (a real Bob Ross quote).

Since the rights revert to me after publication, I am delighted to begin sharing my previously published stories as part of this newsletter. First up, in February, will be “Wisdom Teeth,” then “Avoid the Darkness” from The Spokesman Review (if you can’t wait, click that link). I’ll follow with essays I’ve self-published in zines, one on Elizabeth Freeman’s idea of chrononormativity as reflected in the work of Tove Jansson and Miranda July (long before All Fours hit the scene), and a personal piece on how my understanding of adult sexuality as a teenager was influenced by Liz Phair lyrics (“you fuck like a volcano”).

A couple days after my 41^st birthday, while I was still in Northampton, my grandma passed at age 96. I re-routed my trip home to stop in Waukegan, Illinois for her funeral. It was a really nice time reuniting with cousins I hadn’t seen in decades (we’re a loud and wacky family), and pulling old stuff out of the crawl spaces. I came home with a bunch of pictures of my mom and her first husband, and drafts of the letters her parents wrote in support of their annulment. Wild.

In mid-June, Kaden came home after attending the Applied History Initiative workshop in Boulder, and we went directly from the airport to gaaaaay priiiiiide with all our Spokane friends, and a few days later we attended his brother’s wedding. Eric and Reny had a wedding really similar to the wedding Kaden and I had in 2010, in the backyard of the Jelsing family home, with their next door neighbor as the officiant. The following weekend, we went to Glacier with the Spokane pals, which was more drinking than hiking.

In late-June I had the honor of being part of Foray for the Arts’ sunset reading on the theme of illumination at Saltese Uplands Conservation Area, where I shared “Avoid the Darkness.” In this piece, which I will post here in March, a young environmental activist in the 1980s, Jimmy, is tasked with babysitting his comrade Shirley’s kid while she puts her body on the railroad tracks, protesting the nuclear warheads being transported through Spokane to the naval base in Bremerton (true). It’s a story about creepy kids, Magic 8 Balls, tensions between environmentalists and natural resources managers, and the work of anthropologist Loren Eiseley.

In July, I participated in a small lunch time reading series with colleagues at Spokane Community College, where several flash pieces were enthusiastically received. I shared excerpts from “How to Resuscitate the Drowned,” a series of vignettes about queer life in the early days of industrialization in the Pacific Northwest (based on the work of historians John D’Emilio¹ and Peter Boag), and “Delayed Gratification,” about a seamstress living on a patchwork houseboat in the late 1960s. Those are out for submission, so they will not (yet) be shared here.

In August, I quit my awesome job at Spokane Community College, to prepare to move to Northampton with Kaden, who had accepted a second yearly contract at Smith. We spent a week visiting loved ones in Olympia, and Joni was housesitting again when the issue of Spokesman Review with “Avoid the Darkness” arrived at our doorstep!

Then, we drove across the entire country, mostly on I-90, stopping at my late grandma’s house in Waukegan for one night, just days before the house was sold (it’s an Airbnb now, if you ever need to stop in Waukegan Illinois!). I spent most of September cleaning and organizing our apartment in Smith faculty housing. Kaden had been living in extreme minimalism, having assumed he was only going to be in Massachusetts for 8 months. The apartment had not been deep cleaned before he moved in, and there had been a pool of fish sauce on a cabinet shelf the entire time. He just avoided using that cabinet. I had my work cut out for me. At the end of September, I flew to Minneapolis for Megan and Soren’s wedding, and reunited with the Spokane friends I had so recently left (including two who had moved away earlier in the summer). I had a bunch of time to kill, dependent on others for rides to and from the airport. I went into Saint Paul and then Minneapolis proper by myself, and had an awesome time. Fuck yeah public transportation.

Back in Northampton, my life finally began again. The life I’d been dreaming about since I started wage work when I was 17: I’m writing full time. I’m also homemaking, while Kaden is teaching, completing his book manuscript, writing articles and proposals for workshops and panels, and applying for tenure track jobs all over the country. I’ve also done a lot of hiking, and some volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity. I installed vinyl siding!

Writing full time is a fuckin trip. Surprise, you can’t sit and do it for 8 hours a day. I’ve struggled a lot with figuring out a routine that works for me. I do my best work from roughly 4pm to midnight, but it’s been really hard for me to embrace because I also prefer to get 9 hours of sleep and get up before 8am. When I do stay up as late as I want and sleep in as long as I want, my days are formless and hazy. Even if I am technically more productive with my writing, I feel gross. Which is to say: I haven’t figured it out yet. I may be someone who doesn’t work best under strict routines (confirmed in a consultation with my astrologer, Rosie Finn). But I believe in a creative practice, I don’t believe in working “when inspiration strikes,” I believe in working constantly, and I’m always running scenes through my head or asking myself questions about my narratives. I expect to have a full draft of my linked story collection completed in about a month.

And you can expect future posts to include the aforementioned published pieces, alongside more of me pushing ideas and styles around to find my niche and voice on this platform. My favorite Substacks include a healthy dose of day in the life shit and personal stories, so I’m going to do more of that. There will be discussions on creative practice (permission + faith!), writing fiction, and stuff about music. I recently took a break from or possibly quit Instagram, and my posts on Bluesky² have felt so stilted, like I’m trying to be polite among new co-workers. I hope to find my voice there, too. I’ve been expressing myself on the internet since I was 16, moving from email lists to Livejournal to MySpace to Blogspot to Facebook to Instagram, I don’t know why a new platform suddenly feels alien. Despite this somewhat boring re-introduction post, I will aim to make Lifeguard of Love queer, personal and political, equal parts irreverent and reverent, and full of love! My fiction celebrates queer relationships in subcultures of the North American west, and Lifeguard of Love does too.

1. John D’Emilio’s essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” is phenomenal and I want everyone to read it. You can google it and download the first PDF that comes up, but it’s a scanned copy. Clean enough to read if you have the ability, but rates low on accessibility.

2. Please join Bluesky, post, and add me so I don’t feel like I’m talking to strangers in the void!