1. What is your relationship to the natural world? And do you bring the natural world into your writing? Interpreting “natural world” to mean semiotic language; landscapes not territorialized by tourism, gentrification, or ghettoization; animals (domestic, and those “housed” in museums and wildlife preserves), and other necessary essentialisms:  one of rapture, formerly. I grew up in Cleveland, so while my experiences of that post-industrial urban landscape were mediated, suburban life was per contra unpunctuated by commerce, diversity, and serial time. I spent many childhood hours in a backyard biosphere I created with my sister Anne, scavenging for berries and weaving [Read more]

Look at handiwork that doesn’t make sense. I’m tempted to write fertile here, but I don’t think that’s the right word. In the roving grocery we make choices about our eats. So we can give to the neural families inside us. No one knows how many because guts are marketed to serve, not to rule. Never, never rule, especially as horizontal. That would involve Mr and Ms Self backing down from the bodily speakeasy, the wreath thallus drunk enough to black out. I will play table tennis. Back and forth, back and forth, but that’s not the way it really [Read more]

“Ping,” said my colleagues when they learned my promotion denial, “just stay quiet till a new president and provost, and you’ll have no problem to be promoted.” “Ping,” said another, “if you make ‘noise,’ no college will ever want you, no matter how breathtaking your resume is.” “Ping, don’t complain to the human rights department if you still want to teach here. It’s equivalent to taking poison and hoping that your enemy will die. It’s a suicide.” Suicide: an act of taking one’s own life…may stem from social and cultural pressures, such as isolation, bereavement or estrangement. –Merriam-Webster I know [Read more]

When have you acted the fool? When I think about my accidental surrealist phase, it’s not clear to me how long I was misreading words. It may have only been when things became bizarre that I noticed that something was wrong. “Dogmeats are in the mail,” the email read. Is that legal? What am I supposed to do with dog meat? I looked again, dragging a finger beneath a line of text. Doc– okay, no dogs. Hopefully non-perishable, too. –uments. Paper. Non-fleshy, no-refrigeration-required documents. I don’t know whether it was the degenerative disease I carry around in my nervous system [Read more]

I remember thinking, “I will remember this outfit for the rest of my life,” and now I can’t remember the outfit at all. What I remember is the woman I spoke to on the train from Toms River to New York. She was dressed like a cast member of The Real Housewives of Atlantic City and was, bizarrely, the mother of a boy I’d gone to elementary school with, who I remembered because he had been odd and dark and I’d liked him. The woman was dating a rich older man who lived in the city and her son, who [Read more]

When have you acted the fool? In romance, almost every time, because I am idealistic and a troubadour. A fundamental part of being a troubadour is foolishness – the word having sketchy origins but coming probably from the Occitan trobar, “to compose, to discuss, to invent.” Invention presupposes a foolishness or at least a foolhardiness. What makes being a troubadour in the Contemporary Era particularly foolish is that to fight for the ideals of Chivalry and Courtly Love is not fighting a losing battle, it’s fighting a dead one. It’s not even bleeding anymore; it’s a fossil. In Woman is [Read more]

“If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.”—Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones   I believe that writing is a conversation with those that guide you to your highest potential, or your highest self. Which leads me to link my writing with my spirituality. It has become a ritual of sorts, something I do every day whether I feel like it or not. I use it to process the world around me. Natalie Goldberg talks of the fear of your own voices, those that guide, inspire, and write through you. [Read more]

1. Do you pray? Prayer is communion with the ancestors. It is conversation with the divine. For my birthday last year, I tattooed a double gong hanging from an OM symbol so that I would always have access to the divine. Essentially, every time I speak, walk, bend, move about in this world, I am in conversation with the ancestors. So, yes, I pray. I find that prayer is a great way to commune, without the whole bloody mess of human sacrifice in a chalice and a wafer like bread product that is to resemble the body of a man. [Read more]

The Facebook post went something like this: “I’m so sick of women claiming that they are ‘really gay men!’ Who does this girl think she is? I mean, come on. Find your own tribe.” The post was in response to a magazine article, about my performance work and me. A friend of mine, working as my official PR man, had posted the article on his wall. We were proud of the article and the remark bummed us both out for a minute. But before he took it down, my loyal and crafty friend and PR man, shared the post with [Read more]