Terrestrial by Suzy Eynon. Literary Fiction Paperback. 90 pgs.

ISBN 13 9781968523107

ISBN 10 1968523103

SOLD OUT. Copies available from Asterism.

Terrestrial tells the story of a young girl, Daisy, who lives in the humdrum world of suburban high school life and crafts one of her own design. That description alone would have you think this is a young adult novel. But this isn’t YA, this is literary magic, science fiction, secrecy, and conspiracies (or is it?) written in a style of psychological poetry.

The story begins with Daisy hiding in the bathroom only to discover a note attached to the door with bubble gum: do you believe we’re alone. She loves adventure films and like the boys in her favorite cinematic masterpieces, she goes on her own quest to find who left the mysterious correspondence. Was it her romantic interest, Steven? Her sister? Some unseen boogeyman?

At a bookstore she runs across a copy of Unexplained Phenomena, which in my head is similar to Mysteries of the Unexplained. There is an entry about UFOs and an event that happened 50 years prior near where she lives proving an impeccable intuition on her part. The story’s peak leads to a very surprising moment and ends with a figurative answer to the note.

Like most teens, Daisy feels like an outsider, but we imagine Daisy is the misfit’s misfit--an anxious introvert who is very astute, smart, and fiercely independent of mind. Her life with her family, especially her sister, is a bit strained.

Her relationships with boys are complex, which I, without being a woman attracted to men, somehow understand. And the reason why is that the gift of Terrestrial is I had the opportunity to empathize and put myself in Daisy shoes.

Eynon throws you into her protagonist’s world first hand so that you know what it means to be an anxious teenage girl in a world that feels alien to you. I understood what Daisy meant when she said she was often both attracted to and strongly empathized, if not outright identified with characters who were the opposite sex.

In her mind, she sees herself not as herself but as a boy. When she watches movies with them as protagonists, including her favorite Three Ninjas (did I watch this film for the first time to understand the reference? You bet your sweet ass I did), she sees herself as both a boy and someone who wants to hang out in Rocky’s amorous company.

While Daisy watched The Lost Boys and Three Ninjas, I used to come home every single day and watch Heathers. I started smoking so that I could be cool enough to hang out with Veronica Sawyer. And while girls at school identified me with JD, I always strongly identified with Veronica. But while I understood the exterior of Veronica’s life, so much was not given to me in the one hour and forty-three minute film.

I read the entire Babysitters Club series, even though I was a boy, and it turned out that I related to it heavily as an older sibling, but I was lost when it came to understanding girls. I loved the weird girls in Greek mythology, Persephone, Athena, Cassandra, etc more than I ever did the heroes, but they were nearly all tragic.

Sure, there were literature books, but I avoided literature because it was for rich people. It wasn’t until I read Go Ask Alice, or about Elise in Mary Gaitskill’s Because They Wanted to that I read anything about the terror of being a teenage girl.

I believe the science that says reading can improve a person’s empathy and the way they look at the world. Not just me, but Daisy’s background in these adventure movies (she’s also a fan of Huckleberry Finn and Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries) informs how she sees the world and how she navigates it. She is brave, inquisitive, despite coming off shy in the company of her peers. She is a perfect heroine.

Reading Eynon’s depiction of teenage girlhood offers me insight into at least one teenage girl’s life and I will appreciate in perpetuity. I can’t help but notice that in Suzy Enyon’s Instagram post announcing the books release, she has a picture (I asked permission to use it) of herself in a Phoenix Sun’s jersey with braces (which is how Daisy looks) as if to impart, that not only are we getting an opportunity to see inside the mind of the novelist, but the author isn’t too far removed from Daisy. And this is truly important to me.

Suzy Eynon is an important flash fiction writer and editor. Having published widely and edited for Variant, Five South, and JMWW, she is a literary citizen extraordinaire. She’s published in places I can only dream about. She’s one of my favorite people in the universe and if you read her work you will know why.

I don’t know how much of Eynon is Daisy, but I do know this: I will treasure this novella forever. I’ve read it multiple times and sometimes out loud so I can hear Eynon’s words roll off my tongue and swim into the air. I love reading passages from this book with my voice, every breath acting as a small prayer before I recite the glorious internal rhythm of Daisy’s consciousness as articulated by Eynon. Somehow even the most mundane moments are precious. Even the moments we’re reading about her struggle with counting calories because the descriptions are so vivid. And as weird and fanciful and moonbatty as all that sounds, it’s that way, because life as a teenage girl really is that hard and we are blessed that Eynon wrote it down for us. And I know that Daisy is just a character, but Eynon makes you care so much that you want Daisy to know that she is way cooler and more special than she knows.

First, check out Lexington Bailey’s story “Pieces: a Retrospective” in the Red Rock Review. I love it so much. It’s a Gen Xish queer marriage, queer divorce, cancer story that looks at relationships. If you ever think about past partners you’ll appreciate this story.

Also, Suzy Eynon has a really awesome book out called Terrestrial. A full review should come from me within a week, but for now, check out her interview with Variant and order her book from her Malarkey.

Christina Tudor has a story out with Craft.

Okay, now the personal shit.

11 years ago, today, I graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park at the age of 37, with a Bachelor of Art in English (with departmental honors), with an emphasis in creative writing, as well as a creative writing minor, a certificate from the creative writing living-learning program, the Jimenez Porter Writers House. They gave me the Mike Angel Award for resilience and academic excellence in the face of adversity.

From the Statement of Purpose I wrote in 2011:

You’ve never read Land of Lost Headaches because 1. it’s dated now and 2. It’s been rejected a lot. But one professor loved it so much they regularly encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D. She said I already wrote above an MFA level (which meant so much more in an academic environment than in the real world). She was very sweet in that way professors can be. The truth is that Land of Lost Headaches was my attempt at JL Borges.

I would love to say that I achieved all my goals in my statement of purpose, but that would be a lie. No MFA. No Ph.D.

The fact is everything I went to college for sorta died in a dumpster fire (what real college experience would be complete w/o that?). I WILL NOT make a living as a writer. Neither will I get an MFA. Some of it is circumstantial, as in my circumstance makes it nearly impossible if I apply an appropriate risk analysis. I will likely end up homeless if I pursue an Master of Fine Arts in anything. Some of it is the changing market. Some of it is that my writing never caught the wind necessary to sail me into the seas of simple mediocrity, let alone allow me to port at a harbor near the empire of relevance.

But despite not meeting my goals, I’m actually doing alright. Because in 2007, I was not alright.

I was riding my bicycle to outpatient rehab, doing odd jobs (everything from shoveling rocks to sex work), until they let me back at UPS, only to be demoted from driver to truck washer. Then I was still riding my bike, cleaning vehicles with soapy brushes during those cold November midnights, eating dumpstered cherry scones from a bakery, sleeping under a bridge, and bathing myself and washing my brown UPS uniform in the work bathroom sink with whatever green grit soap they put in the dispensers. Let’s just say I never want to scrub my body with Lava soap and then dry off with a brown paper towel ever again ( honestly it wasn’t so bad, my balls and armpits were always so perfectly exfoliated).

I got my act together in 2008, went to community college in 2009 and in 2011, having saved up some money, I applied to university and attended for a couple years, but a stark realization came in my junior year. I’m not lucky or cushy enough to just pursue writing as a vocation.

So I pivoted to information science. I got a job managing a collection for an academic journal and interned at National Archives.

Now, I’m a librarian who just got promoted (effective tomorrow) and I’m caring less about “making it as a writer” and more about just finishing one of the damn books I’m writing.

Just saying I didn’t or won’t meet my goals, on the surface, seems a little negative but it’s realistic.

Creative writing is something I’ve been pursuing for some time, with my first published piece in 1998. After that publication, I was so embarrassed to have something so shoddy published in my name, I decided to dedicate myself to improving my craft. I submitted here and there and I was solicited for a couple pieces, including a couple poems. I didn’t publish again until 2018.

In the real world, if you aren’t good at something, you just simply try again. That’s the way resilience is supposed to work. And in the creative writing world, that was the recipe for decades. You write something, send it out, take your rejection slip, listen to the editorial feedback comments in the rejection, read read read the classics and your peers, and eventually you will find yourself waste high in book deals. Resilience is the key to success.

This is an extremely dated way of thinking.

What I can tell you is this: at the end of the day so much success depends on the amount of support you will receive, whether its from your mentors, agent, editors, friends, family, etc.

In 2020, I was approached for representation by someone who read a short story of mine. She asked me for my manuscript, looked it over and said my writing was too dark. She told me my writing is beautiful and that she was disappointed because good writing is genuinely hard to find but my subject matter is too bleak, almost unbelievably so.

Does that suck? Yeah. But I’m still here, plugging away, hoping that one day I can have a product where people will be like, “Fuckin’ A, Chris!”

Yep, that’s my literary career now. I’m working for Fuckin’ As.

But honestly, that’s what resilience looks like.

The truth about resilience is that it’s about being able to adapt to change. People who are resilient often set low or reasonable expectations. If you set your goals too high, then when you don’t get what you want, you will crumble. Set reasonable expectations and if you achieve anything more than that then you should be grateful because resilience isn’t the key to success, it’s the key to dealing with the world’s bullshit.

I have a friend who grew up going to writing camp. Everyone in her social circle expected her to be one of The Greats(tm). But as is often the case with many writers, rejections got the best of her. Sometimes, I think that best minds of my generation were stifled by astronomical expectations. Indeed, she admires my resilience but when she found out that I was pursuing creative writing she warned me that I was absolutely not the right person. Not my breeding, my class background, or anything. Not that I wasn’t a good writer, but rather good writing will never ever be enough. And also, what the fuck is good writing, anyway? Don’t the vox populi complain that the literary world and every lit mag is bloated with boring bullshit? Good writing for whom? If I really wanted to put my talents to good use, perhaps I should pursue YA novels or Hallmark movies.

She’s not wrong. I could’ve pivoted that way but the truth is, those markets are no less risky.

Instead, I chose libraries and for ten years, I been running writing workshops armed with the knowledge that support will always matter more than so-called talent or the brute strength of hard work.

Many of the writers in my workshops have books. Many of them have been published in litmags I gave up on.

Lexington Bailey is one. Christina Tudor has a chapbook coming out in autumn, and a new piece in Craft Literary. Denise Robbins released a book last year.

Truth is I’ve been lucky to know so many cool people.

At the end of the day that’s what I have, which is significantly less than shabby. And really that’s all anyone needs to survive.

And while it will never be what I went to college for, it will most certainly always be better than sleeping under a bridge and scraping myself with pumice soap.

Love,

Christopher

Dear friends,

More on Grieving ( where the CW is, you can skip this if you need to)

I’ve been working on this newsletter for two weeks. Mom died almost four weeks ago. I am still trying to process that. It’s not just that I lost two parents in six months, sure that’s rough, it’s also the details. When Len Bias died, I knew that I never that I never wanted to try cocaine. Some of my heroes, like Waylon have used cocaine. I’ve dated people who’ve used it. I just knew that every time you take it for that very short lived high you are gambling with your life. More than heroin. More than even alcohol.

Mom used to smoke crack in the mid-1990s. She also used to sell it until my youngest sibling was born. That was the only time uppers were really her thing. She preferred opiates because they distracted her from her primary addiction, alcohol. Before she died she was on methadone for 19 years. Mom checked into a motel the day after my parents 49th wedding anniversary. The motel clerk said she was only there for two hours before she called 911, unable to walk.

But I went back to work because I still have things to do.

Away for two weeks, I returned to my memoir workshop I run for Bread for the City. I’ve taught this workshop many times, but never for a non-profit and never for a specifically underprivileged community. This particular group is often tardy. It’s an hour workshop and sometimes people are 50 minutes late. It works, though. People drop in when they can.

It contrasts with the folks I taught for Johns Hopkins-Osher, where everyone was punctual and many had graduate degrees.

It’s also different because what things can be talked about, in particular trauma. When I told people at the Hopkins cohort I went to rehab, I was shattering a barrier that now opened the discussions for unfettered vulnerability. But my going to rehab is directly related to me going to college and my entire life changing.

Another example:

The inevitable question of how Mom died comes up and I can give one or two answers depending on who asks.

1. “She died of pneumonia” and I’ll get the response “I’m so sorry! That’s a reminder to myself to get my pneumonia shots!”

   OR I can say

2. “She died of pneumonia and intestinal ischemia, liver inflammation, and kidney failure.” “Drugs?” “Yes, it appears, crack cocaine.” “Oh, honey. Let me give you a hug.”

Mentioning drugs would be seen as TMI elsewhere, but it is just the news of the day in Ward 8 in Washington, DC. One lady in the workshop recently told me a story about the time her mother shot her when she was five years old with a .32 pistol. We were shocked and showed her love but the other fact is that the classroom sits in building that has seen a few shootings. The street it sits on is named after an infamous, but also beloved mayor, who smoked crack, was booted out, and then re-elected.

If she told her story in the Hopkins class, the students reactions would’ve been different kind of shock. It might even be considered trauma-dumping.

There are definite economic and racial differences between the two classrooms, but what’s key to all of this is community. And communities matter and which communities are willing to hear the news of the day (or your pain) is always important.

Communities

A friend on Twitter asked about Ben Lerner and what the big deal is and why people are so agog over him when there are so many better indie writers and I say what I always say (which annoys a lot of people): the right people support him. In my estimation, literary success is about who believes in you, and never really about your craft or how much hard work you put in (not that those things are necessarily absent). There are thousands of writers whose craft is impeccable who will never be read and even more whose voluminous output is forgotten.

There is a well-beloved indie writer who is a bit of a “star” who came out with a very beloved novel some years back and I picked it up because everyone said it was genius. An editor at a very very well beloved indie press knew I was reading it and asked me how I felt the novel. I said, “It was fine but not as funny, entertaining, or moving as everyone said.” The editor agreed.

How the fuck did such a mid novel get so much critical success? The answer?

The motherfucking writer has a lot of friends.

And the fact is at a local literary event, I tried to talk to someone about just how meh the novel was and it turned out the my convo buddy loved the writer so much and whatever criticisms I had were shut down. The indie lit star has a wall of friends.

The editor and I agreed that this was actually the coolest thing about the situation. Your friends are willing to go the edge of the universe for you to promote your book. Your community believes in you and your writing.

Most of us will never have access to Ben Lerner’s networks. Even if we did, we might not click. I often think of this writer who grew up working class and went to Brown for her MFA and Denver for her PhD, which if I’m honest, is what I wanted to myself for many years. I never made because I knew I couldn’t afford to move and at 38, I had no resources to live on nothing. I couldn’t turn to my homeless mother nor my father living on his disability and retirement. And my partner (now fiance) pulled me off the streets because, 1. she wasn’t to date a homeless person and 2. she wanted me to finish college.

The writer I mention, , didn’t feel welcome in those circles prestigious circles. And while prestige surely has it merits, the prestige that only ever matters is the kind the the prestigious care about. She writes and talks about it a lot.

At AWP, I was talking with a group of writers and I mentioned that I have a “Dad” test when it comes to deciding how “great” a writer. Has my Dad heard of them? I was questioned, “So no writer is a great writer if your Dad hasn’t heard of them?”

They might be great as an well-skilled, but not great as in well-known. There’s a difference.

More often then not, when I think about community and writing I think about the purpose of writing. And when I think about the purpose of writing, I think about our ancestors on the savanna. I know they’re saying humans might not have come out of Africa, but this is my story on my blog and I get to tell it. The purpose of stories is to entertain and share possible insight. Marx said that the philosophy shouldn’t just interpret the world but change it. That works for philosophy. Stories on the other hand? I don’t know if a story can change the world but if can certainly offer an interpretation. Even commercial bestsellers offer this. They tell us morals, they entertain us, or relay important information. I imagine every story about getting water or hunting our ancestors told on the savanna served all those reasons. But those stories only mattered as much as the storytellers community’s interest in those stories.

Our communities might be other writers. Our communities are almost always our readers. And they are the cool motherfuckers who help us along the way.

That’s what I have for you this week.

Love Always,

Christopher Stevenson

Dear Friends,

March was a weird month. AWP was beautiful and wonderful (still working on a report back about that). Then, I attended an Atlanta wedding with really rich people (who didn’t know they were rich), and immediately afterward rushed to be with my mother, hospitalized with pneumonia and intestinal ischemia, until she passed.

Women’s Magic

While dealing with this, I read Nailing the Colors to the Mast by Sarah Hypatia (free with Kindle Unlimited). For me, writing, especially poetry is like the craft of and the casting of spells. Sarah loves magic and she wades in rivers of heartbreak and hopefulness. At moments her poetry girdles horror, even dipping toes into murder, but in the end we know the kind heart of the scribe.

One poem that has stuck with me since I read it is, especially while venturing across weddings, and my mother, is Scorpio Secret:

If you know me, you know that I love women. Not strictly in a sexual sense (although, sure), but if you really really really really know me, you know that my mother (RIP) was a female supremacist for much of her life.

This isn’t your run of the mill male-tears-on-coffee-cup so-called misandry. It’s a notion that there is something intrinsically special and superior about women that separates them from men. It’s the notion that women do everything better: communicate, run society, take care of kids, etc. It’s a belief that has had incredible baggage in my romantic relationships with women. Afterall, if women are so much smarter and all powerful, what’s my purpose in a man-woman relationship except whatever my abilities are between the sheets?

That’s essentially how modern matriarchies are and that’s how I viewed so many of my relationships. Even in my late 20s, when I was dating 5 people, I wasn’t in a position to help them bear children or be a provider. I was to provide romantic fun and erotic entertainment (they saw me differently).

The fact is that like most supremacies, female supremacy comes with an essentialized ideal—a super-imposed superwoman that all women are supposed to meet or they’re not good enough—more often than not transmuted through the role motherhood (a very traditional and harmful definition of woman). Not a mom in a matriarchy? Then you’ll have to adopt if you want any power. OR guess who gets to play babysitter?

It took time to eliminate this ideology from my soul, from romantic partners explaining there is literally nothing really special about women at all (compared to men), to a feminist and lesbian professor and mentor in college suggesting that not only is my belief gynocentric (in a bad way) but that the pillar of women-are-different-than-men is quite literally what holds up the patriarchy. After all, in a heterosexual context special supreme women deserve special supreme men—the latter being the central concept of the patriarchy.

Indeed my mother, who I love, was a Trump supporter and often sharply looked down on women who didn’t add up—even if she never wanted me to really do that myself.

But also, as my mentor explained, if women are as pure as many female supremacists make out, doesn’t that mean they are unfit to make difficult decisions?

That’s how misogynist men explain it in regard to leadership: Best leave such dirty work to the dudes.

While I’ve eschewed the supremacists’ notion, what sticks with me, however is one beautiful belief that I refuse to give up: the concept that ALL women (yes every single one) are special and magic—in their own way: whether maiden, mother, and crone, or whatever modifier we place on them. Each with their own mystical abilities.

And one way I express this is through my enduring love for Baba Yaga.

Indeed, one thing EVERYONE KNOWS about me is that I am a Baba Yaga fanboy.

Some men and boys fantasize about living with supermodels. I dream about cohabitating with a bog witch.

Baba Yaga fascinates me. She neither moralistically evil or good. And while Baba comes from babushka, Yaga or Iaga likely comes from Finland. Indeed, she eats Russian children and comes from the free country (which might be Finland). She’s a literal outsider even in her Slavic folklore.

Another theory is that she’s a Slavic rendering of Persephone (my first love).

As I grew, I couldn’t help but realize how many of the women in my life looked like Baba Yaga as they age.

Of course, the truth is that most women, especially those of European descent look like Baba Yaga.

My mother, who I felt really looked like her, said that in her older age, men still tried to pick her up. She died right around the time she decided to live alone and be free of men.

But back to Sarah’s point about a younger woman’s magic, bearing children doesn’t erase any of this ability anymore than not being able to to bear children. If anything, the magic simply ages, and if in some aspects might become stronger. Or in the case not having the ability to bear children, it shows up in different ways.

But also, I’m not sure millionaires or anyone should define what a woman’s magic is. No one should but herself, the very person who gets decides what kind of woman she wants to be.

Either way, I appreciate so much of the language in Nailing the Colors to the Mast. Sarah needles into my brain with her words and this collection will sit me for a long time as I try to parse out my life.

Cowboys

Earlier this week, I had a story published in the Lucia Berlin issue of Cowboy Jamboree. If you’re interested in hearing me read my story, listen here. Other wise you can read it here.

The other stories in the issue are:

MUG SHOT by Rebecca Tiger

A quintessential friendship story. I love it. I also want a job repairing umbrellas.

CLARK BUYS A MOTORCYCLE by Alex Miller

Another friendship tale, this story is awesome. I'm so sad right now and this was a wonderful glimmer of goodness in camaraderie.

WILD CAUGHT by Burke De Boer

More friendship.

Some of this is too timely for me, but it's an excellent story, and I adore the character, Kim Fitzpatrick. I’ve been a fan of Burke’s for a while. He has a book w/CJ, "Songs of the Cyberspace Cattle Drive."

SNOW TO RAIN by Evan Morgan Williams

Friends, about also a post-school professor-student relationship. My favorite thing about Evan’s piece “Snow to Rain” is how hopeless and anxious everything feels in the cozy of the restaurant. Like life itself.

​DISCIPLE by Charlie Kondek

Disciple is awesome. It renders the anxiety of Christianity into perfect view. I'm definitely gonna share this with my very religious family. A friend in the story says the most wonderful line, “Jesus and sausage.”
Love it!

​FRESH FADES by Jesse Binger

Friendship and lust. Love the strong 90s vibe. Much of it feels familiar, like the ill-planned public display of affection. Tension is on point throughout. Good good shit.

​HOW TO FISH by Andrew Careaga

Pure friendship. We all know that one guy who peaked in high school but had more in him. I love this story and the friendship between Jerry and College Boy.

​ADJUNCT by Travis Turner

I love a good story about work. Travis Turner’s piece asks what does it mean to work and fight so hard for a job that you love? Even if it means working another job to support it?

And the poem

​FOR SECONDS OF SILENCE or A MANUAL FOR SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION by Grace E. Ludlow

Read it out loud. Your mouth will thank you!

And that’s what I have for you this week! Until next time friends!

Love,

xxoo

Christopher

Dear Friends,

I have a new piece up at Cowboy Jamboree for their homage to Lucia Berlin called Hogzayden. It’s my Manual for Grieving Sons. Friends have called it chilling. Others have said it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve written.

If you’ve not read Lucia Berlin, you are missing out. You can check my reading of her piece, The Trouble With All the Houses I’ve Lived In on youtube below (her son left a comment on the video).

Anyway, the piece Cowboy Jamboree published is me trying to evoke the spirit of Lucia Berlin as I write about my father and my desire for him to have lived a happy life.

It’s a very odd but coincidental time for it to be published.

I lost my father last autumn. I knew it was coming. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in November 2024, which by itself is a terrible illness. I wrote a little bit about me struggling with his impending death in Believable Characters in Bull last year.

Dad caught a few other cancers along the way and finally died of the esophageal kind.

When I got back from AWP, earlier this month, I found out my mother was admitted to ICU on March 6th, the day after my parents’ 49th Wedding Anniversary (they divorced in 1985, but she returned to take care of him in his final months).

March 6, 2026 is also the day her Aunt Olive died. Olive is the last of my mother’s biological father’s siblings. I wrote about Mom’s bio-dad in yesterday’s post Truth and Consequences.

Mom died March 26, 2026 at 11:19am (her youngest child’s birthday) at the age of 68 (coincidentally the same age as Lucia when she died) from what appears to be complications of pneumonia and something else.

She took her last breath listening to Time, Love, and Tenderness by Michael Bolton.

I hate Michael Bolton, but I’m taking the song as a sign. The rest of the coincidences, I’ll parse out at another time.

Anyway, thank you for listening. If you get a chance, please read my piece Hogzayden out with Cowboy Jamboree.

Love,

Christopher Stevenson

Dear Christopher,

Per your email, you’ve spit into a tube and mailed it to a DNA company and found a cache of untold grandpas.

One untold Grandpa, known as Alan Bennett, was from London, UK. This must be difficult for you because at the age of 16, you watched Mel Gibson scream “Freeeeedddom!” and hated England forever.

But we assure you, there’s nothing more English than hating England.

The story is that your grandparents were swingers, who later fell for each other, and this Alan Bennett gentleman fathered your mother.

You’ve contacted us because you like a do-over.

You’ve noted that your girlfriend has said that your life could’ve been better if your mother lived with her biological father when she was young and perhaps she would’ve provided a better life for you. This is because Alan is the son of the former secretary of Hillman Airways which later became British Airways. Indeed, his known children and grandchildren live relatively prosperous lives compared to you and your four siblings.

It’s true that if we changed her timeline you and your siblings wouldn’t have experienced bouts of homelessness and abuse and your lives would’ve been a lot less rednecky, but to think you’d be a known great-grandkid of the secretary of a major airline is not quite certain and is at best, tricky.

In one of your letters of recommendation it says that your friend believes you’re lost potential. That you’re sharp as a tack, attractive, and bursting with star power and charisma , but it comes with none of the connections that are part of a well balanced and complete upper middle class life breakfast. We are sad to say that’s because those accessories of life are sold separately. If everyone were born with all the connections required to be successful, how could anyone feel they were truly special?

That said, we have found a spot when your mother, Karen, is nine years old, and her mother, your grandmother, Mary, tried to leave her husband and they moved in with Alan for a couple months.

The story goes that it was Karen whose love for her father of record was so great that the couple got back together.

Of course, life is built upon so many consequences. Looking upward has its complications. Perhaps inside every person lies only eight miles of potential and the sky’s the limit. And while it’s eight miles from soil to cloud, if you start from the bottom of the Mariana Trench, seven miles is just the water’s surface and by the time you swim to shore, you’re too far away for the stars. Look, only people born at the summit of Mount Everest reach the stars.

But that doesn’t mean you aren’t important.

Here’s the thing, you did end up going to a good school. Sure, attending in your mid-thirties put you at a disadvantage in your peer group, but it’s also true that you’re the most successful person in your American side of the family going back several generations.

Sure, to the white noblesse oblige of Washington, DC, and your English family, you’re simply a mediocre white guy, but to everyone else you are a rockstar.

If your mom demanded to stay with Alan, her father-of-record would’ve gone to Vietnam, divorced, and probably remarried.

Your mother wouldn’t have gone to high school in Iran because she would be living in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. She would’ve received all the tools that she needed to become a successful woman.

Projections suggest UPenn or Cal Tech would be her alma mater.

There’s a scenario where she lives in Denver, Colorado, runs a successful veterinary practice and lives in the house she always dreamed of. All the bad choices she made in her life are replaced with better and more informed ones.

But, since your mother graduates high school in Langhorne, there’s no reason for her to meet your father, Abe, at a discotheque in Tehran in 1974. Abe will fall in love with a different woman with whom to share his unstable life, wrecked by war and heartache.

There’s one other opportunity for change and that’s after grandfather-of-record dies. If your grandmother told your mother about Alan, her life still could’ve ended up different. Yours too. She probably wouldn’t have gone to Harvard, but she could still open up a vet clinic in Denver. You, on the other hand probably could have attended Harvard or more in line with your personality, Marlboro College.

In one projection, you become a US Senator and in another the author of “Mischievousness in the White Space in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” It sells only 500 copies but cements you on the East Coast as a medieval literature scholar.

You’ve also pointed out that you would like a do over because of the risky encounters you had with lesbian couples after finding out that thanks to your grandparents swinging, your mother is an accident, and you recently found out you weren’t planned either and your parents had a shotgun wedding. You say that you met the couples in back alleys to be a black market sperm donor and you are thoroughly embarrassed.

While we understand why you might be embarrassed, worse things have happened in the history of mankind. While you selfishly tried to procreate, you also were offering childless couples the opportunity to be parents.

We’ve denied your request to change the timeline because there are no bad choices made by your mother and since there are no bad choices by her there there is:

1. No you to experience homelessness as a child and develop a fiery passion that led him to be an anarchist organizer.

2. No you to introduce veganism to a hundred high school students in Frederick, Maryland. Veganism that leads to antiracism, antisexism, radical environmentalism and intersectionality.

3. No you to kick off the punk scene that inspired an entire generation of antifascists in the Mid Atlantic that would end up working for political candidates, nonprofits, and various artistic causes.

4. No you to push consent as sexy to a generation of Millennials living in West Virginia and Maryland.

5. No you to question his closest friends’ belief systems.

6. No you to reshuffle the union at work into a more democratic union.

7. No you to visit your biological grandfather. Which while on the surface is unimportant, meant a great deal to him. None of his offspring look like him, except you. And when you told him you were a librarian, what did he say? In his fading Cockney, “Well you know librarians are very interesting and important people.” He waited for you to visit him, knowing what day you would stop by his house 1700 miles away. A week before you visited he caught sepsis and was given three days to live. You saw him on day seven.

8. No you to make your father happy during his last days. No Chris to tell your father’s life story.

9. No you to watch after your mother as she took her last breaths.

Furthermore, if we change you or your mother’s life, there’s no you.

At least not the you everyone knows. And if there’s no you there’s no one to change everyone’s life you touch for the better.

We suggest that instead of trying to change your history that you continue to try to change the world.

Sincerely,

The Universe

For the past few months I’ve been complaining to myself that I don’t experience joy—that something in my past has allowed me to fracture my brain so that I can never ever feel joy. My partner, Elaine, once said that the first time she saw me smile was when I was with friends I’d not seen in ages and that the second time she saw me cheese was at the beach.

Surely, it can’t only be those two things, right? Elaine makes me happy but more often than not I don’t show it. To be fair, I’m not known for showing emotion. So I guess the question is what makes me put my guard down and show pure joy.

Sometimes, I get stuck on believing those really are the only two things, but the other week I found about the new Buffy spinoff and I danced.

I only discovered Buffy about two years ago. When it first came out I was going through a decade of not watching television. I missed on so much. Not just Buffy. I missed The Wire, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, Dexter, and The Office.

Related, I didn’t watch the Gilmore Girls because why in the world would I want to watch a TV show about blue bloods. Have you met me? Then one day, while visiting Davis, WV, my partner said, “This looks like Stars Hollow.”

I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

She had me watch one episode and I immediately fell in love. I became emotionally invested in Rory’s future. Rory lived the life I always wanted when I was child. Yes, friends, as young as nine, and mostly thanks to my mother’s brainwashing, I wanted to go to a snooty private school, and some super old LAC or Ivy and end up a pretentious writer, but the universe is not big enough for such wishes. Instead, I took a long road to being a librarian.

Gilmore Girls is comfort food. It’s not a full joy I experience, it’s a half-joy. A comfort, where if my serotonin has dropped off, I can put it on and thank God that things are okay in Stars Hollow.

Elaine regretted introducing me to Gilmore Girls. I wanted to watch the whole series. I haven’t bc Elaine says the series drops off and Rory turns out to be jerk and she can’t handle me being disappointed.

She thought maybe we’d have better luck with Buffy as comfort food, so we watched it after I cut Rory and Lorelei off. The Vampire Slayer series is defined and ends. No more new episodes. Until now (muhahaha!")

But back the main question for me: what does bring me joy?

1. Romance and hopeless romantics. I will always tilt toward windmills and celebrate my fellow Quixotes. We’re naive but keep people hoping.

2. My coworkers having wonderful days. I genuinely love them. Loving your coworkers is a wonderful privilege. Also not a coworker, per se, but that Kate Janosko (the DC firefighter) episode of Queer Eye is awesome.

3. Helping writers. I guess this is bc the scene isn’t easy and my chances are slim and if I can help anyone else’s chances being read or seen then cool. AWP was definitely a blast.

4. Writing. So much. I know that it’s basically me talking a lot but there are things I can do with writing that I can’t naturally do with talking. I’m not smart enough to simply speak the words I craft after revision (you can find me copyediting this after pressing send).

5. Rainy days. And not just rainy days, but rain. I love being in a tent when it pours. It’s a good excuse to stay inside and read. I love being under a tin roof as drops play metal sonatas.

6. I love plants. Saplings and cotyledons. Old trees but I really love new growth. Eh, my favorite flower is the thistle of course.

   

7. Dancing. There are few things in life I love doing more than dancing. If I could go back to school and get an BFA in Dance, I would. I mean I could do it now, but I’m not as limber.

8. Music. I love the sound of good music. These days, I’m exploring bands I should’ve known in my youth but just simply didn’t have access to: Cocteau Twins, my bloody valentine, Korea Girl.

9. Human touch. Which is odd because I’m somewhat averse to cuddling and used to be scared of massage. I love the idea of cuddling but I think I’m the worst cuddler. But I love humans and hugs.

10. Cooking good food. Also cooking bad food for that matter. I often see myself as a witch before a cauldron. I love turning on Fela Kuti or Can’s Tago Mago, lighting some incense, and dancing around the kitchen. If I’m feeling extra spicy, I cook while drinking a couple glasses of wine.

Warning: This story is a bit dirty but is meant to explore longevity of a relationship over changing times (and also weird folklore stuff), but also just how far I can take language in a lust/love scenario.

Originally Published in Unnamed Journal Issue 40 (October 2024)

α

You paw my old mastectomy scar on our seventieth wedding anniversary, and hum hymns sung from Bible camp—from when we still loved God. Back when we were wide-eyed junior counselors in the bubble of the 1940s.

Even back then, I shooed you away from the other girls. Too young to know what to do with them, but that never defeated you.

Oh Jesus, how I fell in love with that boyish swagger that annoyed so many. All my girlfriends told me to leave you alone, but I couldn’t. My heart fluttered every time you passed. Even when you stuck fries up your nose. You were the hottest nutcase my eyes ever laid upon.

Then one night, you stopped by my cabin, and I woke to you petting my hair. You scared the shit out of me, but once I realized it was your hand and your arm caressing my scalp and forehead, my fear turned to lust. You took me by the hand and led me out of the bed and onto the porch. First, you kissed me gently, then a little harder, and then under the 2 AM moon, we traded the secrets of our tongues to the sound of campers’ snores.

β

You move your paw to feather the cancer wound, and I look up at the mirror across from us. I see your face peer over my shoulder as your index finger traces the scar. Our bodies have aged 90 years a piece, but I can’t do anything but think how beautiful we still are. Like sculpture gardens in the Louvre. You trace over my back like you’re looking at a menu. I hear a noise and you jerk a bit.

“Are you okay?” you ask.

“I just don’t want to be interrupted by Ginny.”

“Ginny’s probably sleeping right now at the bottom of the pond in the backyard, hanging out with snapping turtles and snakes.”

“Yeah, I just want this to be just you and me today.”

“I like that,” you say in the phone-sex voice you’ve used to seduce so many.

I whisper to you out of Ginny’s range, “Are you going to give me my green gown?”

“Oooooh,” you say. “You bet I am. You’re going to get it so bad.”

Green gown. A reference from high school when I lost my maidenhood out by your family’s koi pond after your father mowed the grass one summer morning between our 9th and 10th grades. The afternoon sunbeams rained down on your back and in my eyes. We caught ourselves in the moment and rolled into the water hole as children in the distance ran after an ice cream truck. We climaxed to Slipping Around by Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely blaring from some nearby turntable. The semen mixed with algae blooms and freshly butchered fronds stained my linen dress. No matter how many tumbles in the washer or visits to the dry-cleaner the gown maintains those imprints of blue-green, lawn, and sward. It hangs in our closet to this day as a sign of everything in our life.

γ

You grunt and nuzzle my ear, and say, “Are you a good girl?” and you guide your hand down and rub the small of my back. My sciatica flare recessed a couple of weeks ago, but I love that you’re still thinking of it. But then you move your hand and massage the inside bottom of my butt, “Or a bad girl?”

And at my age, I’m not any kind of girl, but in another time, I used to wet when you touched that part of my body. I remember fearing just how dirty it was. Just how close that part of my ass cheek was to the very dirty dirty spot.

You first explored that part of my body that morning, decades ago, before you bent your knee, told me I’m your honeybunch, and promised to be the best husband, give me plenty of kids, buy me a mansion and a Jaguar XK120, so we could rocket to the farthest ends of earth to spots where maps say “there be dragons” and shove sakura, wagassi, and brie into our jaws.

You laid me down on the bed and gave the most amazing massage, and when you hit the delicate spot, you pulled away. I moaned. “Noooo!,” I said. “Don’t stop!!!” That’s when I learned I loved having that area touched. But I was always worried. What if you wanted to explore more. At the time, the idea of you sodomizing me was not something I could imagine nor emotionally process. Not just because you would hurt me but also the bible isn’t keen on sodomy. God destroyed entire cities over things people enjoying a bit of ring. That seems silly now, but back then it was better to stick with fantasies of fast cars and fancy cheeses. But I didn’t expect you to propose to me right there, hand on my ass, while I laid down completely vulnerable.

“Look under the pillow,” you said, and between the bed and my chin was a small box. I popped the lid, and the gorgeous stone I would wear for the rest of my life looked up at me. Of course, I said yes!

But I feel like if you owned the car now, instead of buying a diamond bracelet, necklace, lingerie, flowers, or sending thoughtful thoughts for me on our anniversary, you’d drive all day today in red-light streets searching for an over-endowed and young somebody, someone not me or Ginny, and sword fight their guts ‘til you lost yourself, and spasmed behind their back.

And in this scenario, if it were up to me, I’d hawk that Jag at cost, and still buy your fantasy lay, but drop the surplus on a cemetery plot down from a hoary weeping willow I named Fred, for your hull of a body’s last day.

But there’s no fast car, and it’s not up to me, and as it turned out, our life went in a different direction.

δ

As you rub the skin in the deepest parts of my backside, you grab my shoulder with your other arm, and you kiss my nape. I moan and I say, “Spank me first, and”

You smack my ass and say, “And what?”

“If you’re going to play with that part of my body, there’s lube on the nightstand.”

You slap my rear again and tell me that I’m still pretty, always pretty, as pretty as on my wedding night, and I think back to that night on October 31, 1950. We went to the justice of the peace and your parents held the reception in their backyard. Instead of champagne, we drank moonshine. Your father shot rabbits and your mother made hasenpfeffer.

We mourned that my parents passed the summer before, but set a spot for them at the table for dinner. We spent the rest of the night handing out treats to little ghosts and ghouls as they stopped by. When it came time to consummate the marriage, we were both too tired, but we fucked anyway. Mostly for the symbolism of it. We both drank way too much that night and I felt like I needed to take a shower before bed. But we still lived in your parent’s tool shed. Sure, we had privacy from your parents, but it was the only time we could fuck and they would not hear us when while sleeping. I wasn’t just pretty, I was gorgeous on our wedding night and you were more handsome than Tab Hunter. I remember thinking how sweet it was that you fell asleep inside me.

Thankfully, I got a scholarship from Mount Olivet Bible College and they set us up in married housing. We didn’t need to worry about interrupting anyone with our sex noise. The other couples were loud enough. Almost like we were competing. But I would never medal against other wives in a moaning olympics, and you were always rather graceful when you orgasmed. Your eyes would close and your lips would slightly purse and you’d say, “ooooh---uuuh---ohhhh!” and I would always tried to kiss and steal one of your grunts and swallow it for my own.

“All your delicious sounds belong to me!” I’d always say. We were sweeter back then.

While I went to college, you got a job at the sawmill to tide us over until the Korean War draft board made a decision.

While you fought communists, I finished my BA in Bible and stayed a faithful wife, praying every morning and night for your safe return. I got a small apartment in town and I welcomed you back with open arms. You talked about how different life was everywhere else. You said that while you were away you slept with other women, Korean prostitutes, nurses, and the lonely wives whom “you took care of” when you spent six months stateside at Fort Dix. You said the sex helped you keep your mind off the war. At first, I was livid.

You wrecked our marriage.

Also, what if you while you were out sticking it in every woman who’d let you, you gave me something I had to see the doctor about.

One day, I simply didn’t come home from work. I stayed in a motel and tried to confide in any of the women friends I had.

I joined a wife support group set up by the Veterans of Overseas Conflicts.

The other wives and they said their husbands also slept around, but not all of them came clean. The doctors would prescribe antibiotics for simple ailments to try to control the spread of disease.

At least you were man enough to tell me.

Many husbands left children in Korea or Germany. I worried that you might have children somewhere running around. But also it puzzled me as well that so many women would let you poke them. But then so many of the wives were surprised that I remained faithful. Just like the wives that you took care of, they also found someone to tend to their intimate needs.

I didn’t care.

“Can you imagine if I went around fucking every guy that came along?” I asked you.

And you said, “I wish you would.”

I slapped you so hard that you cried.

I never understood why God would allow this. What kind of a holy plan for a God-fearing wife was this?

But I came back anyway. I decided that First Corinthians Chapter Seven Verse Fourteen was something worth living by. Perhaps, I could prove myself to you and to God through my piety.

My reward for piety came in the form of the VA helping us buy a trailer so that we could be forever indebted to lot rent and you drinking your weight in whisky every night for the next five years. Our lives simply moved day in and day out.

When rock and roll became big, all the songs were about sex. At the time, I knew I was supposed to despise it but I saw the allure, I guess. Sex to me was about having kids and making an intimate connection. But when we had you tested, we found out that you couldn’t produce children. So what was the point of God’s great gift?

For a few months, you were distant. You drank to kill yourself. You almost succeeded until the police pulled you over swerving into oncoming traffic. You told the cops that you were trying not to hit god’s angels that were standing in the road. Then you got another DUI, and another.

And another. The court ordered you to attend Alcoholics Anonymous.

Then the Sixties came.

Instead of going to bars, you spent all your time at AA, while I worked full time as a receptionist at Salvation Bible Church for Pastor Wilson. You devoted your entire life to it: morning groups, evening groups. You became officers of multiple groups. But for years, I didn’t know that you were 13th-stepping every vulnerable woman that came along, until one day when your meeting was at my church, and I came down to bring you lunch and caught you with Lilly Beth in the basement. I felt ashamed.

“How many women?” I asked

You weren’t sure, but you told me that Lilly Beth was open to a threesome and I slapped for the second time in our relationship. This time it left a mark.

What sort of sin would you have me participate in?

Also, why wasn’t I enough? I didn’t understand.

But then on our 15th anniversary, desperate to fix things, I wanted to be as sexy as possible for you. I went down to the lingerie shop and they outfitted me with something they claimed was underwear but doubled as a doily. I asked the lady at the counter what I could do to make the night so much sexier, and sent to another store, a dirty bookstore, where I bought scented massage oil and cute bondage rope.

“All I’m saying is that when men sleep around, they’re trying to get something they aren’t getting from you,” she told me.

So, I let you tie me up with the cute rope and do whatever you wanted.

You were like a boy at a dessert bar. You stood over me with the biggest smile. You put a blindfold on me and I was terrified, but it was a good terrified. I wanted you to take me. I wanted you to own me. My body was yours. I was your wife and you were my husband.

And you did the unthinkable.

You did the dirtiest and most sinful act by my standards at the time.

I’d never thought about oral sex but you told me you read about it in those X-rated books you bought at the newsstand. And our marriage counselor, Pastor Wilson suggested we try to explore our God-bestowed gifts on our bodies. He called it speaking in tongues.

None of the women I talked to ever did it. They would never. How could they? They were ashamed of everything below the waist. But you tied me to the bed and blindfolded my eyes.

You tried to put yourself in my mouth, but it wouldn’t go. Not because I wouldn’t let it but because you couldn’t fit in my small jaw. When it touched my lips I felt dirty and slutty, in the best possible way but I knew it was not going to work. I had the hardest time sucking on lollipops. Just the tip of your cock resting on my tongue made me gag.

Then you kissed between my thighs and loved my loins with your mouth. I orgasmed for the first time in my life. Before that moment, I confused feeling lightheaded or the happiness after sex with the big O. That’s when I started touching myself more often, and learning what exactly made me feel good. Not only what made me feel good but what turned me on. You took me to the dirty bookstore and we bought toys and equipment that brought pleasure after untold pleasure. I bought a number of books. The Happy Hooker. Pauline Reage. We invited Lilly Beth to our bed and she taught me things that Sappho could only dream about. That helped our marriage float for a while. That’s when the Seventies came.

ε

You kiss the back of my ear, and smack my ass again. You grab a couple of tufts still left on my nonagenarian scalp and you tug just a little bit and say, “I’m going to make you cum harder than you’ve ever cum before.”

“How hard?”

“The neighbors will call the police! From how loud you are!:

“Not too hard, sweetie.”

“What?”

“Not too hard,” I say. “I don’t want Ginny to know what we’re doing.”

You lightly smack my ass again, and I don’t think about the absence of the riches or kids foretold, as life has a way of lifing, and circumstances forced you to break your promises. Circumstances such as war. Such as you couldn’t produce fertile sperm. Such as I didn’t want kids anyway. Such as you drank too much. Such as I couldn’t escape to my parents as they were long dead and women weren’t even allowed to have a bank account, let alone own anything. Such as my Bible degree only trained me for secretary work for a minister who mostly wanted to explore my body with his wife than the word of God. Such as when you convinced me to fuck them with you. Such as how we went to a party with the minister and met hundreds of married couples. Such as how you realized you didn’t just like the wives but husbands too. Such as how I realized how much I loved women, but their husbands could never fill the lacuna in my soul like you. Such as you spent most of your free time trying to fill the holes of anyone who’d let you. Such as if this convinced you to quit booze, I could live with it and maybe it would lead you to getting your life together.

But also, I wanted to know if there was more to sex than just you. I learned so many things about from fucking so many people. I learned that men had more than one size and while you weren’t the biggest you were certainly in the top 10%. I learned that the most effeminate man would have the largest penis I’ve ever seen and the hairiest most masculine man would have the second biggest. I learned that there was such a thing as too big and too small when it came to penetration. Not just for men, I learned that some women who were not virgins had a hard time fitting anything inside them. I learned some people didn’t enjoy sex at all, that what made them aroused and excited was serving, while others love pain. I learned that some men had vulva and some women had penises. I learned that some people had both. At that point, body parts started to matter less. I enjoyed the one-on-one connection.

ζ

A growing warmth builds in my chest, and I remember how, in our early swinging days, you just wanted to know you were still a man, perhaps a god, always an Adonis. You couldn’t produce swimmers to impregnate me, and the agony of not having kids destroyed the deepest part of your soul. But one thing you knew you absolutely could do was make anyone swoon. For years, that kept you moving forward. And for years, I played the part of a good Christian wife listening to her husband in public and the part of salacious sexpot in bed. I enjoyed the sex. I became an acrobat with my private parts but at the end of the day, I fell into the service side of things.

Then on our 25th anniversary, at a swinger’s club in Frederick, Maryland, while I fell on random dicks who wore werewolf masks and clown faces, you plunged into a strange green woman named “Ginny Greenteeth.” A name I remember being too accurate. She cast the sexiest magic spell with her Swiss Army crotch that’s lasted 40 years. You liked her long legs, and I loved how she devoured anyone with those beautiful gray eyes. Part amphibian, part human, part goddess. She spoke both Ancient and koine Greek and both of which I knew from my Bible degree. I taught her how to talk dirty in Aramaic and Ancient Hebrew. She taught me Sumerian and this old Assyrian trick to crush a man’s penis with my kegels.

It didn’t matter that she wore azure sweaters on her teeth or that she smelled of pond scum. It didn’t matter that she said she watched us live our lives, from our first romp in the koi pond to the first time I actually came to just last night. It didn’t matter that she claimed to follow you all over Korea to make sure you were safe and made it home to me. It didn’t matter that she came with a penis, vagina, and something called a conus which matched some interstellar race that she hoped to meet someday in the future. It didn’t matter that she idolized Paculla

Annia. It didn’t matter that she said the Vestals and Bacchae joined forces to create the New

Order of Vestals and Bacchae (Bestals) to overthrow the patriarchy. It didn’t matter because she made both our souls feel whole when we shook in what the French call little deaths. To some extent, I believed God answered my prayers with her. And she agreed.

That first night, she fucked you to sleep, and then she took me out to a local senior living facility and we killed a man to bring in the winter. In the course of a couple hours, I went from pious hotwife to Bletonesioi postulant.

For three decades, we agreed to set you up to fuck hundreds of couples in homes and hotel rooms and Ginny would be my paramour. My serial murders never bothered you. And for me, in God’s eyes all sins are equal. You plunging into the tops and bottoms of housewives and their helpmeets wasn’t any different than human sacrifice.

So, Ginny and I made love in the blood of old-timers we stole from wheelchairs in Downtown Frederick on Market Street. We handed them over to the local cult of young Bestals who drowned them in Carroll Creek, so they could perform the Aphrodite ritual and grow new friends from his genitals. Ginny would often tell the story of how Saturn grew Venus from the bullocks of Caelus. And how Saturn’s day used to be March 14 and May 15, and how the Vestals would drown men over 60 years of age in the Tiber. But then Rome did away with the Vestals and Vesta’s fire died out. She told of how after Christianity replaced the Gods in the Roman Empire, Vesta and Bacchus found common cause in their love of women. Vesta being an eternal virgin vowed to remain chaste for life, lest she commit incestum. Bacchus asked his father Jupiter what could be done and Jupiter said that if anyone was going to fuck that virgin it was going to be him. As Jupiter strolled over to take what he believed was rightfully his, Caelus stepped in. He handed Bacchus the scythe Saturn used against him so many years ago. Jupiter’s testicle landed not on water but on ground and they turned into spiders. A new cult was born.

It all makes more sense when you realize that Caelus is Uranus to the Greeks and the Romans linked Caelus to Yahweh, the father of Jesus. No wonder the early Christans were crazy about eunuchs.

She told of how Paculla Annia, that beautiful Campanian Bacchae anarchist, moved to hold Bacchanalia many times a month instead of once a year, and so this new crop of Vestals and

Bacchae decided to make every day a holiday. So every Lupercalia, Argei, Lemuria, Samhain,

Beltane, Lughnasadh, Imbolc, Fourth of July, Arbor Day, and Bring-Your-Daughter-To-Work Day, we drank margaritas with Moloch, Absinthe with Artemis, and ate chicken sandwiches with Abraham on Mt. Moab. We even wrangled Pi Day in the mix. With 60-year-olds being rather spry these days, we raised the age limit to 90, but after seeing Dick Van Dyke dance on YouTube, we’re thinking about raising the age to 100.

Ginny said that this is how she was born. Her father, an old man whose time came, lost his testicles and when the creek effervesced, and she rose on a clamshell like some Martian version of the Botticelli painting.

Needless to say, after a while, it didn’t matter that we owned no Jag or mansion, and that we lived in a dilapidated single-wide trailer with a carport that housed an ancient Oldsmobile inhabited by generations of bees. We had Ginny.

η

Ginny moved in with us in the 1980s. With no room in the house, we built her a small pond in the back where she could have privacy. For some time she got a job doing phone sex. Easy work for her. She didn’t need to show up in person and she had a nice sounding voice. You, you got a job at the local book plant, which did us pretty well until your back started going out on you. I kept working for various churches in the quad-state area. I hit up a new one every time the local pastor found out about my lascivious lifestyle. Every single pastor, man or woman, wanted to make some secret sex pact.

You touch my right breast, the one that’s scar-free and that escaped cancer and I ask, “Do you still love Trista?”

You say, “I love Trista very much! She’ll always be my best girl.”

You call my left breast “Trista.” I never enjoyed naming body parts myself, but you wrote adventures about Trista and her rightward sister, Lucille. You sent them around the world: conquering villains and thieves with their perkiness. You wrote them theme songs. Eventually, we role played, me, the boss and brains of these superheroines and you, the international jewel thief. After your capture, I locked your favorite part of you in my vulvic box until you paid your debt to society.

When Ginny started living with us, she started regularly walking around naked. We were in the kitchen and I accidentally bumped to her breast and said, “Sorry to disturb you Triss and Lucy!”

You got mad and said, “No! There is only one Lucille and Trista!”

Taken aback, Ginny asked us to act out the sisters’ adventures for her, which she gave five stars and proclaimed better than those films at the XXX movie theaters.

The cult kept growing. Due the risky nature of the business, the Bestals came up with an ingenious system to cover their tracks. The Bestals bought a senior community in very rural West Virginia. They would only take men who had no family, preferably with some sort of dementia. The men would be “transferred” to this private senior community and no questions were asked. In the 1970s, it was easy. The disappearance of older white people in Prince Georges County was linked to white flight that came with school desegregation. In the 1980s, when it seemed all the racists for the most part had left, they had to employ a different tactic.

When the cancer came in 1989, I worried that you wouldn’t have adventures with Trista anymore, but you came up with a story about how she became a new and improved superheroine and fit into spaces that Lucy couldn’t. You also said that this made me double gifted: both buxom and a member of the itty-bitty titty committee. Something you assured me every man born under the sky always dreamed of. While you certainly didn’t prize our marriage, no one could ever say that you didn’t love my body.

The two of you nursed me through the whole thing and finally, when my fight ended, everything we fell back in love for a couple years.

The Nineties slowed us all down for a bit. We practically lived off Ginny’s phone calls, which took off when she started working for a psychic hotline. We had three different phone lines: sex, psychic, and trivia. Perfect for her since she hated wearing clothes. Around that time she started to get a little bossy since she was essentially our meal ticket. We lived day in, day out and then a Blockbuster came to our area. We started checking out all sorts of movies we never heard of. You loved Fellini, I loved Star Trek, and Ginny loved Penny Marshall films. At one point we Ginny saved up enough that we went on vacation. Galway, London, and Paris. We did the little touristy things, even tried sakura, wagassi, and brie, but Ginny was at an international convention of Bestals.

Everything went swimmingly until you got prostate cancer in 2003. We tried to take of you but the thought of losing part of your manhood almost killed you by itself. No sex for two years was a bit much. But Ginny and I tried to reassure you. When you could no longer maintain an erection, we practically put you on suicide watch. But you figured it out. You wore weights so your bulge didn’t get so disrupted and you bought a cock ring and a whole line of pumps.

People don’t tell you this, but it gets harder to have sex when you get older, especially if you are a woman. While you were trying to deal with your perpetual floppy cock, the doctors diagnosed me with vaginal atrophy. Not only is it hard for me to get wet but my vaginal walls are too thin for penetration and it hurt when you enter me. Might as well fuck me with a cactus.

We tried anal for a while but then, the doctor said I needed to be careful with that too. After I lost my teeth, more of you could fit in my mouth but I couldn’t hold you for longer than five seconds before I would start heaving. I became the worst pillow princess, but you never minded.

Ginny still took care of us. She had some luck with an internet start up and got out before the crash. $200K. It wasn’t a lot but it was enough for her to invest. She promised to cover the lot rent forever. When the markets tumbled, she invested most of it into Apple, which was going for 33 cents a share. She said, “A lot of things are going away, but there’s absolutely no way this behemoth will disappear.”

By the time my body started falling apart, couples our age started to find each other boring. Even you. It didn’t matter how big in the pants you were, milf-hunting became all the rage, and no one wanted to fuck old men or gilfs. And by the time everyone fell in love with zaddies, no one lusted for eighty-year-old prostate cancer survivors who have to pump up a hard on that only sticks around for 30 minutes. With the exception of you and Ginny, I didn’t have the mental energy to last. Of course, Ginny, whose body never aged, didn’t mind and she loved giving you the attention. She had no problem putting the equipment on you herself and then sucking you off with her bassmouth and snake tongue. Something easier for her than me. Not just the lip shape and jaw size, but she never minded the bleach-salt taste or pollen smell that came with ejaculation. Not that you produce much or any of that these days. It’s just the trauma of the thing. But it usually worked out, because while she remained the world’s best blow job queen, she couldn’t eat pussy to save her life, and you remain the one who knows how to tickle me there. She also loved the attention you gave her. The way you wooed her amphibious skin made her shake.

She continued to take care of us through the naughty Aughties. Not just the Apple money. Thanks to the internet, she could make money all sorts of way. She started an Etsy account and sold Sculpey statues of mythological creatures on Etsy and Ebay. She’d have us buy cars and she’d part them out. While most of the money went to us, a lot of the money went to the Bestals. She started a forum online to recruit new members to the cult. After years of focusing solely on

One night over a bottle of Jim Beam she told me she loved you most, only to recant it, and say that I was always the true apple of her eye.

Eventually, I got too old to help her out with the sacrifices and she went out by herself. My relationship with her deteriorated and somewhere around 2013, you and she got closer. She started regularly talking about how she hoped the government would legalize marriage between triads. But I simply asked where would that leave me?

For ten years, we lived peaceably. Our lives were never boring but all we did was watch TV. Television is fine, but we managed to watch everything on Netflix.

Ginny started diversifying her income sources. She started out selling an age-defying lotion made from collagen collected from dead fairies. She moved to selling an unliving fertility lube that she said would change everything. Made from ectoplasm, the lube contained the ghosts of spiders that not only aided in lubrication, but would help sperm find its way to the ova. She told us that the spiders activated more lube from the woman’s body by biting the cervix and forcing it to produce mucus. I never used it because like hell I’m sticking spiders, let alone ghost spiders, up there. She also created one for men in which they inject ghost spiders into their penis.

But Ginny took care of us. We never had to cook any food, thanks Meals-On-Wheels and local soup kitchen. At some point, we both delved into video games and play long stretches of Final Fantasy every day.

But thanks to my deteriorating body, every night you and Ginny got closer and closer. She could handle the things I couldn’t, which I suppose made you two feel more like a couple. It’s not that she and I didn’t carry on ourselves, it’s just for so long it was me and her, and you had your way with everything on two legs on the Eastern Seaboard.

Last night, she got excited about Halloween, like she did every year, but then snarled about it being our Seventieth wedding anniversary. She always wanted to hold a Halloween party but never could because this is the day we celebrate us.

Well, I wasn’t going to let her hog our day this time. Seventy years is a long time. 840 months. 25000 days. 36 million seconds. So, I woke you from your afternoon nap and carefully pulled out your catheter. I gave you your afternoon medicine, I told you that I wanted to play your favorite game.

“What game?” you asked. I disrobed and you smiled at me bigger than I’ve seen since we were pre-teens.

θ

And all that led to now, where I hear the cap of the drug store lubricant we use to get each other off with open and close. You cup my pubic mound with your soaked hand and my groin tingles as you lube me up and massage my nether-regions. Heat rushes to my midsection and then my whole body, like bees swarming in and around every erogenous zone.

I reach back and grab you, also wetted, and hard and firm, at least for 20-30 minutes. I tug it. More than ever, I’d love to put it inside me, but the pain and burning is too much to bear.

I tell you I love you and that you can do anything you want, as long as you tell me that you love me more than you love Ginny.

“Of course, I love you more,” you say.

“But anything?”

“Yes,” I say. “Anything.”

You thrust in my hand a couple times and say, “You know I’m 90 years old now.”

“We both are,” I say. “But this isn’t great sexy talk.”

“Take me to the River. Let my last time be with virgins.”

“What?”

“I know I’m getting in the way of you two.”

“And it’s true, you are, but I also love you. Seventy years, y’know?

“Ginny says that if you sacrifice me, you’ll get your youth back.”

“What if I don’t want my youth?” I ask. “I earned all these scars.”

“What can I do to convince you?”

“Make me,” I say, hoping that maybe you’ll turn this into a game of erotic cat and mouse.

You rub my vulva, and warmth fills my groin and reverberates throughout my whole body. You flick quicker and the warmth swells. Swelling more and more. Hunching, while I hump your hand. The swelling raises, hovering just under the top. I hear you turn on a vibrator. Where the hell did you keep that hidden?

“I’ve been waiting for this moment all year!” You say.

You tease me a little bit with the head of it and I moan.

“I want it!”

“You’ll take me to the river?”

Every muscle in my body tenses, and I can’t stop myself from convulsing. Hot huffing, holy hot seething honey, baby hold me there, hush, Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, I spasm in places I didn’t even know existed. Flopping like a fish out of water. My toes curl. My leg involuntarily raises and I get light headed and my face tenses, and I growl, drool, and almost pass out. As my body feels everything it’s meant to feel, our whole life flashes before my eyes. I think back to the very first time I met you and of that boyish smile and how you made all the girls squirm in disgust except for me, and I tell myself how much I love you. I think about how terrible things you did when you were an alcoholic and how you pulled out of it and I love you. I think about how you cheated behind my back but in the end that led us to our unconventional lifestyle and Ginny, and I love you. I think about how part of me loved watching you express your fiercest masculinity. I see your face cum a thousand times. I hear the orgasms of a thousand women and men, all enjoying you. I’m sure you were the most amazing lover the earth ever provided.

As I come to, my thighs jiggle a marathon and I fear incontinence and I need water.

You masturbate for as long as you can and collapse from all the effort. And while the sex isn’t the best, it’s not the worst either and I cum hard. The dirty talk wasn’t the strangest ever, but I never thought I would ever say, “You’re gonna die, baby” in an erotic way.

Ginny walks in and rushes in to help you. She brings you to orgasm. It’s not the gusher that it was when you were younger. Barely a tear drop comes out. I get up and I reinsert our catheters.

All said, the afterglow could be enough to carry anyone’s marriage another year or so, but not now. Today, while you eat Chicken à la King, wheat bread slices, and salted succotash from a can, Ginny and I talk. I tell her that you decided on your own.

We call the Bestals, and they promise to make your last time the “bestalist” ever. We order an Uber and we take you Carroll Creek.

We wheelchair you out to the bridge near the water and ten young women who wait for you in stola and suffibulum grin wide. They disrobe and sheer your clothes off, bit by bit, kiss you all over your body, and tell you sweet nothings any old man would want to hear from twentysomethings. “Yes, anything!”

You lower the vibrator on my clitoris and oh Jesus motherfucking Christ, you smack my ass and command me, “Take me to the creek!”

“Yes, sir. Yes!”

“Take me!”

“I will baby! I will!”

“Are you

“Tell me I’m going to die!”

“Yes honey, you’re going to die!”

“And you and Ginny can be wife and wife!”

“Yes, honey, always!” and I respond. “Tell me you love me more than her!”

“I do love you more than her.”

“I love you so much!”

“I love you too! Take me to the creek!”

“I will take you to the creek!”

“Promise!”

“I promise!”

“And I will die!”

“And you will live forever through what comes!”

They massage you and chant erotic words that make you hard. Under Samhain moonlight, Bestals dance for your arousal and make your member harder, longer, and larger than it’s ever been. Your face winces, and I can’t tell if it’s because of pleasure or pain from the swelling in your loins. When the time comes they tear you tooth to limb. One vestal grabs your enormous cock. Another cups your testicles like guarding a baby’s head. One woman with a scythe slices your privates and two others carry your bits from your corpus to the river and chuck it in, while another performs the Aphrodite ritual. Your organs explode in the water, which foams. The Bestals pick up your whole body and throw it in.

A woman rises from your foam on a pearled Queen Pink conch shell. Like Ginny, she also has a Swiss Army crotch.

“Hello, baby,” she says in a voice that can only be yours. You caress my face and the aches in my bones disappear. The world gains more color and my eyes focus. The skin on my body tightens. My mouth fills with teeth, and the world plays in surround sound. Ginny embraces me from behind, and you from the front. Has anyone ever been so lucky?

Dear Friends,

Happy Valentine’s Day!

For those that don’t know, Valentine’s Day is a big deal for me. I was that kid in elementary school that usually had the least Valentines. If there were 30 kids, it wasn’t uncommon for me to get 15. IDK, guys, maybe I was an asshole kid, but the trauma that carries with you for the rest of your life is real.

As an adult this has led me to celebrate love intensely. When I was a UPS driver, I used buy a bag of chocolates and hand them out on V Day. My girlfriend tried to push me harder and asked me to deliver roses to all the women on my route. I declined. I was already getting sexually harassed and wasn’t going to encourage it. One piece of Endangered Species Bug Bites seemed harmless enough.

As a librarian, I often do a Valentine exchange with other librarians. Sometimes other writers. This year, a woman I wrote a love poem for in high school wanted to send me one and she did. She sent along stickers for the kids at my library. Another woman from back home hopped on that bandwagon. The kids at work have all the heart stickers they’ll ever need.

But, as the Adult Services Librarian in Ward 8, I try to make the day special, for those in my neighborhood. It’s a high trauma neighborhood in a traumatized ward in a traumatized city. It’s extremely important for me to make sure that the community I serve has a loving experience in the library. And as someone who very pro-love, I need everyone to feel loved inside the library.

I hang up the Valentines I get from all across the country. I put out self-love quotes. I choose romance books that run the spectrum from over-vanilla Amish romances to very sexy steamy urban romances to one book called Coming Soon: Women’s Orgasm Erotica (which I ended up having to hide from the kids). I pass out paper roses and a hug to anyone who wants them.

For the kids, I had them make their own versions of candy hearts and put them on the front desk. A coworker asked me to make a window display with Gunna and the intitials wgbt (we getting booked tonight)… after his song wgft.

What am I doing for Valentine’s Day? Lobster dinner for Elaine.

Other notes: I’ve been recruited to start up a new memoir workshop at The Michelle Obama Southeast Center of Bread for the City in March. It’s a dream gig for me. Having run one for the library and also Johns Hopkins, I hold this one in the highest regard.

Also in March, I’ll be at AWP and thanks to Melissa Flores Anderson and Michael Chin, I’ll be reading at the Cowboy Jamboree/ Malarkey and friends reading Thursday, March 5, 7-9pm. A slew of a stellar writers will be there including Michael Chin, John Waddy Bullion, , Kelly Ann Jacobson, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Benjamin Drevlow, , , Melissa Flores Anderson and Jonathan Danielson. I’m sure I’ll spam bunches over the next couple weeks.

Speaking of Stephanie Austin, if you’ve not read her novel Burn, you should order it now. It’s gonna be worth your time. And if you know me in real life, I won’t shut fuck up about it. Yeah, it’s that good.

I suspect I’ll write a full review of the book along with reviews of books by two other Arizona writers, (who lives in Washington but hails from Arizona), and Jonathan Danielson.

Jonathan Danielson’s The Lowest Basin is kicking so much ass and taking all the names, having been longlisted for the 2026 PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Shorty Story Collection. You can order his book here.

You can preorder Suzy Eynon’s novella from Malarkey Books here. As a member of the Malarkey Book Club, I received an advance copy. You all are in for a treat. But Suzy is one of my favorite people in the universe so I’m biased, so, you should click on the above link and read the blurbs about her book, preorder it then argue with me on the internet if you don’t love it (but you will).

Love always,

Christopher

XXOO

I caught of lot of flak for that from most of my artist friends for thinking so. I decided, “Fine, maybe I should take art seriously.”

Of course, the problem with this is that art will never take you seriously, because as entity, it doesn’t have consciousness. Sure, all artists might have thoughts and dreams, but the things they make are plainly just things even if the process of creating might seem spiritual.

Here’s to seeing art (and life as well) as absurd.

In this episode, I talk to four writers with an emphasis on why they write and what to do about it. We also get to hear excerpts from Tracy Cross’s A Gathering of Weapons and Lacey N. Dunham’s The Belles. Listen here.

https://dcplpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/get-lit-cross-flores-anderson-dunham-and-fleury

Anything you want to hear? Let me know.

Dear friends,

I’m going to AWP this year.

Traditionally, I’ve railed against it, because well, the first time I wanted to go, I couldn’t afford it.

I have been mad ever since.

I do have writing programs. They’re not college programs, but my writing programs at the DC Library are turning 10 years old this year.

One program, my Wednesday night group suggested that maybe 2026 is the year I started doing shit for myself rather than just for other people.

They said this is the year of the Stevenson.

As such, one writer told me to get my ass over to the AWP volunteer sign up, I can fucking go.

No more excuses. So I did.

One thing about AWP is the Writer to Agent opportunity. I’m not stupid enough to think I would score an interview, and my manuscript still needs polished before I send out a query, but it did get me thinking about the first five pages, which I shared with Elaine, my partner.

Elaine’s traditionally not been very supportive of my literary endeavors. For starters, she feels it’s a bit narcissistic for me to think I have something special to say. Even worse is that having the notion that I can somehow break through, given my background and the relative privilege I have, which becomes increasing less with every second I age.

I have all the white privilege and all the male privilege, but none of the economic or cultural privilege that would 1. give me the sensibility to write something that would appeal to most fans of literary fiction, like say Don Delilo, 2. give me the connections that would allow me to surpass the world’s most privileged people, at all the top universities, who also want to be remembered after they die.

She has regularly pointed out that people with 10 times more privilege than me have followed the rules, did the work, and are now stuck depressed, often struggling with addiction, and hoping someone would by their book, let alone leave a review on Goodreads.

I try to balance her views with my own views of “It doesn’t matter just so long as I continue to write. I will die with a body of work.”

But lately, she’s been reading my writing and while sometimes she says, “You are a gifted writer but gifts don’t mean you’ll get the goods,” she also respects my tenacity and my refusal to give up. She lovingly compares me to Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

To be sure, she grew up going to creative writing camps. She’s even an award-winning playwright. She gave up writing in college after her favorite writer killed himself and he was a well-known writer. And she just didn’t have patience for all the bending over backwards for no guarantees, and somehow even if success came, depression would still be there.

But for her, the central question for my writing has always been, “For whom are you writing?” What is my market and who is it that I was to attract? When I got masters in library science, I took the management and admin track. We spent a lot of time talking about marketing. Indeed, in library world, it’s what I’m best at.

So, I know when people talk about marketing, usually what they mean is promotion. But for Elaine and I, market research is what you do before you begin writing: find out what readers/customers want. Marketing is what you do when you’re writing: fulfilling a customer’s wants. You promote your product to a market that you are sure wants it. Most of us fuck this up because we’re artists with egos and we want pour souls into our art.

In the past, Elaine has challenged me to find out what made Lauren Groff ( a writer she’s often compared me to), so successful. How was she able to propel her career?

I’ve often resented this because I’m not Lauren Groff. There is only one of her. I will never be able to replicate her life. And nearly every story of a successful literary writer is they had lot of money and cultural capital so people believed in them. Those with out, had someone believe in them. But I also know this because if I believe in a writer, I will promote the fuck out of them.

This fact sort of proves Elaine’s point.

Anyway, Elaine has begged me to let her help me. So. I showed her my five page opener.

She was impressed.

She’s physically incapable lying (which is not always good) so I believe her.

Her notes were to the point but annoying: stop using jargon your market isn’t going to understand. And most literary markets, if we understand that statistics correctly are mostly educated, liberal leaning, white women. She is one of these and probably one of the most well-read I’ve ever known.

In this case, I used the phrases “BDU pants” and “rock salt shells.”

It was a fair comment. I changed it to “military pants.” It annoyed me that it’s probably true that most people have no idea what BDU pants are. Rock salt shells, I understood more, but BDU pants? But it dawned on me that I’m a veteran and so are most of the men I associate with.

It forced me to reckon with how much jargon I really have in my writing. There are words and phrases that are part of my every day life or were in regular us while growing up.

How much of my prose drags because no one knows what the fuck I’m talking about (and not in that fun surrealist sort of way)?

Last night, I was laying in bed and with a Louis L’amour novel. Elaine laughed and said, “Are you posing for a picture or something?”

She thinks I look sexy reading in bed and could one day use that to sell books. Indeed, I briefly entertained having her take a picture of me reading LJ Pemberton’s Still Alive, and ask Malarkey to use it to sell books, but I decided that was too fucking weird and better judgment prevailed.

“No, I’m reading.”

“What are you reading?”

“Louis L’amour?”

“Why? He’s notoriously a shit prose writer.”

“Yes, but he’s great at tension and I’m examining how he does it.”

The conversation went back to marketing and the question of which market am I writing for. “If you want to write genre, you should write genre. There are formulas that work, and you might make a lot money with that. But you’re probably gonna have to choose between literary fiction and genre. Audiences like consistency.”

She’s not wrong. My writing is all over the place. I don’t really write for markets because I don’t know which market my voice lends itself to best. Like most writers without books, I don’t receive a lot of feedback. And yeah, I’ve been writing for way too long without having chosen a market.

I’ve generally done the whole, “Write what you would like to read.” Which is great advice if you’re not fucking weirdo. And I’m definitely weird.

Anyway, I hope to have the current draft of this novel done by AWP and maybe by mid-summer, I’ll have a working copy. Apparently, the first five pages are stellar if I can stop being so esoteric.

As for what market?

Well, the novel is inspired by a Cowboy Jamboree prompt that went too far. The market again is me. What do I want to read. But I’m gonna hafta ask myself, what about everyone else? It’s gonna mean beta readers and shit.

So, we’ll see but I’m also not going to pretend that it doesn’t mean I still won’t join the International Order of Writers Who are Sad No One has Their Book. I have the application right here on my desk and they’re a wonderful group of people.

Love Always,

Christopher

XXOO

As of July 2025, Zozobra Press is no more. If you are interested in a copy of book please contact me.

Everybody has a story. Sometimes it starts with, “Let me tell you about myself.” Other times it’s, “Hi, I’m so-and-so, nice to meet you. I work for…” Or, “Oh man, let me tell you what happened.”

Sometimes it’s something we write, like a memoir. Fiction stories tell us about possibilities, poetry tells us the truth, and memoirs tell us about how we came to that truth and why we decided on the possibility. I believe that every single one of us has at least one memoir inside our brains. This is because we all have a story, no exceptions. Even this anthology has one, beginning with the library and neighborhood that birthed it.

If you check, Petworth shows up on many old maps of Washington, DC. Before the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital, Petworth was a largely rural area and home to slave stocks. The name “Petworth” was the name of the estate owned by slaveowner and military officer John Tayloe III. While this terrorism existed, to its north laid one of America’s oldest free Black communities in what is now known as Brightwood. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln set up home here. To this day, you can find his cabin at the Armed Forces Retirement Home (also known as the Old Soldier’s Home). From that cabin, he traveled to Fort Stevens during the only battle inside the District. Petworth was somewhat forgotten and remained rural, until developers discovered a way to make more off the patch of land and started building housing. In 1887, Tayloe’s heirs sold the land, and Petworth officially became a neighborhood. Slowly, more and more housing took over, with rowhouses appearing in 1920 and a retail epicenter in 1922.

In 1927, local civic organizations in Washington, DC, lobbied the city to build a library in Petworth. The once rural community found itself with increasing development, with the introduction of a streetcar stop. Over the course of 10 years, the Petworth community argued that with 50,000 residents, and 11,000 students attending 11 schools, the community had a serious need for a library. After tireless work, they got their library and it finally opened in 1939, serving Petworth, Park View, Brightwood, Crestwood, 16th Street Heights, and Fort Stevens. While the demographics have changed in Petworth, the library still serves as an outlet for the community. Located in the heart of the city, today, Petworth is home to one of the largest immigrant communities in DC, with 25 percent of residents having been born outside the US. A neighborhood in transition, the library serves a large white professional class, and a traditional African American cohort that’s called Petworth home for 60 years.

In my younger days, I used to frequently visit Petworth to support local musicians and political prisoners at the People's Media Center at Café Alfishaway. The library sat on top of the hill. Often, leaving the café, I’d walk around the corner and use the light of the library and of Roosevelt High School behind it to try to roll a cigarette. Café Alfishaway closed after gun fights broke out at shows. Shortly after, Yes Organic Markets moved in nearby. With the loss of the café, I stopped coming to Petworth for some time.

After that period in my life, I worked at UPS, helped oversee two radical libraries, and eventually worked for the Institute for Palestine Studies and National Archives while attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a BA in English and Creative Writing. After graduating, jobs were hard to find, so I worked as a day laborer for the now defunct Labor Ready. I’d worked for them in the past but in rural mountainy areas. It was different in the city. I spent a lot of time working in many places around the DMV, often as the only White person, and always the only White man, working jobs no one else wants to do— jobs involving lifting heavy things from one place to another and driving for auto auctions.

My time as a day laborer clued me into the fact that there were stories many people weren’t hearing. While lifting heavy things for minimum wage, people would tell me their life stories. Most of my coworkers grew up in Wards 7 and 8 or western Prince George’s County. Many of them knew that Northwest DC existed but had never been. I heard stories about families’ struggles, crimes people committed to pay the light bill, and young men with dreams of becoming an artist if they could ever move beyond day-labor work. There were also stories about being hired to evict neighbors at the apartment complex they lived in, struggles with addiction, and returning citizens trying to find a place in society eager to discard them.

While these were stories some people might not want to hear, I believed that they deserve exposure. I’d always wanted to collect local stories so that people could share them with each other. Unfortunately, most of the stories we are exposed to privilege the most powerful or influential in our society, and we rarely hear from anyone else. We hear lots of talk about the US being so divided, and rarely about how our communities are divided, segregated. For sure, schools are segregated but so are neighborhoods, restaurants, and housing. Even in racially-diverse housing, we often find ourselves divided unless we are members of a co-op, condo board, or HOA, and even then, we mix for only a couple hours a month. Personally, I believe that the US has always been this divided, and what people are seeing today is the current incarnation of division.

In 2015, I took a job working for Kuhn Farms at the Petworth Farmers market, a job that paid more in four hours than working forty hours as a day laborer. While there, I started to learn more about Petworth and all of its beauty. While working for the Farmers market, I applied to the DC Public Library. They hired me and coincidentally put me at the Petworth branch. Shortly after my hiring, my boss, Jeff Neher, suggested I start up a writer’s workshop. This lead to the formation of Writers Working, a multigenre workshop, which has been going on for seven years. After a year, I started DC Writes, another multi-genre workshop. The next thing I knew, I was serving Ivy League graduates at the top of their careers while they sat right next to unhoused persons, returning citizens, and nannies. We were all one community.

In 2017, remembering my time as a day laborer, I decided to start an oral history project. I contacted Dr. Anna Kaplan with the DC Oral History Project and took a course on how to conduct them. After doing a few oral history interviews, I realized that I wanted people to hear each other’s stories, not just in archives or digital repositories but in community. If they heard them in community, they could respond to each other in person and build connections they might not make while searching a repository.

Around this time, my DC Public Library mentor, Lisa Warwick, asked me if I would help her on a project she was working on, a memoir anthology of people who live at the Bernice Fonteneau Senior Wellness Center. My contribution toward a couple of essays on that project inspired me to think about putting stories down on paper. Then I remembered that the library once facilitated memoir workshops. I thought, what better way to do all of this than to have people write memoirs and share them with each other?

Despite past success with Writers Working and DC Writes, when I started the “This is My Story Workshop” (“TIMS”) in January of 2018, I wasn’t sure just how popular it would be. I assumed that there’d be a few people interested, but I didn’t think there would be a large draw. Once again, I was wrong. Sure, I promoted and advertised the workshop to every listener that I could in the DC area. I created flyers and handed them out everywhere: stores, community events, laundromats, etc. Petworth News picked it up, and so did outlets as far away as Channel 13 WGAL in Pennsylvania.

While I prepared mentally for a small group, one or two people became fifty or sixty. People from all over the city and from the outer DMV traveled to hear about the workshop. They poured into the library, and I gave my argument for this workshop to much fanfare. I looked into the crowd, and I knew I had enough people to make any library program successful.

This was great, but I wanted this to be more than a library program. I told them my intention was to create a community. All too often, people form temporary communities but rarely stable ones. Inspired by my social justice organizing background and my time at Jimenez-Porter Writers House at the University of Maryland, I put together this future workshop. By design, the workshop needed to sustain itself as a functional community. If, by chance, something happened to me and I was moved to another library, I wanted this program to remain intact for the foreseeable future.

I took the best practices I saw from literary movements and every workshop I’ve attended and incorporated them into TIMS. So many treasured, major literary movements had intentional community, often friends or people who became friends. This is the case whether we talk about the expatriates in Paris, the Harlem Renaissance, the Bloomsbury Group, or the Black Arts Movement. I tend to believe that strong communities of friends who are invested in each other are more likely to share the best constructive criticism than strangers in a 15-week course.

That said, not everyone was interested in an open-ended workshop, let alone becoming friends with strangers, so half of the fifty to sixty people declined to join TIMS. Some people couldn’t commit to TIMS for more than a couple of weeks, so we lost another half. The city being the transient metropolis it is, people came and went, many of whom still keep in contact with the rest of us. Others just wanted me to edit their 200-page manuscripts, and still, others wanted me to ghostwrite for them. I referred them elsewhere. I wanted neighbors who might not’ve ever spoken with one another to hear each other's stories.

TIMS’ first year was a success. Community connections were made, and people told their stories. We heard stories from two completely different successful African American women (coincidentally, both civil right activists) struggling with the fact that both of their grandfathers were Confederate generals. We heard stories about growing up in Jamaica, about bicycling across the country, and even being of service in Africa.

The second year was also wildly successful. I promoted the workshop again, and we ended up with a dozen new people, and two members, Rebecca Cusic and CM Miller, stayed on for the next year. This group stuck to each other almost instantly. One of our participants, opera singer Rachel Evangeline Barham, workshopped her piece “Coral Reef, 911” and published it in the Unearthed Literary Journal. She eventually moved after taking a new job, but her spirit remains.

By working together, these writers not only learned about craft, but also became a functional community, as intended. Next thing you know, writers were hanging out at each other’s houses and traveling from opposite sides of the city for doggie dates.

The remaining writers from that second cohort are who you will read in this anthology. They have been with me for a few years now. We’ve been through a lot together but had to begin by unlocking memory. For this we did embodied practices that included things like sniffing garlic or intense listening –to rain, Joni Mitchell, Louis Armstrong.

Once they realized they could recall memories, they read extensively. They received heavy doses of Zadie Smith and answered tough questions like “What is the meaning of life?” as informed by Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolff, and Albert Camus. They explored empathy through David Foster Wallace, without neglecting his abusive past with Mary Karr. They read Porochista Khakpour, Maya Angelou, Virginia Woolf, Spalding Gray, bell hooks, Shirley Jackson, Ernest Hemingway, and James Baldwin.

More importantly, they read each other.

By reading and critiquing each other, they were no longer just library patrons to each other. They became peers. By talking and being with each other, they became more than peers. They became friends.

What started as a library program became a functional community, a group of people who speak and talk to each other, something of which we as a society often wish there were more of.

When Covid-19 hit, we all came together despite library and city closures. During the lockdown, the group came to me to ask about pursuing this anthology project. I am not going to lie; I wasn’t even sure if, on an existential level, I was allowed to facilitate this project. Up to this point, I never participated in such an endeavor and believed this sort of business belonged to someone of higher stature. The group members wouldn’t let that ride and helped me realize how to help them with their goals, but also how to help myself. And we persisted through disease and turmoil over Zoom. We started meeting every single Monday.

Week in and week out, we watched the pandemic unravel while working through their earliest drafts from our respective houses. We watched the country fall into mask protests, social justice protests, and plague, trapped in our homes with Zoom calls about memoir essays being our only respite.

One group member, Dionne Brown, stepped in as project manager in the earliest incarnations of the group. In the very earliest days, she counseled me on my strange question concerning whether I was even allowed to pursue a project like this. Her answer was an emphatic, “Yes.” A minister by training, she kept the group together psychically and physically until she left to attend graduate school. Her memoir, Deinstitutionalizing God: A Minister's Journey on Leaving Church to Save Her Faith, was released in April 2022 and can be found where you buy books.

Another important member, Adelle Dantzler, inspired by her writing in our group, found a joyful spark and wrote Competencies That Catapult Careers: 100 Strategies That Lead to Change, released in July 2020, thus propelling her career as a consultant. All of us powered through the pandemic, armed with righteous emotion. We roared at injustice, shed tears for those we lost, and laughed and loved, holding each other in our hearts. All the while, we were busting our butts over two years to make this project happen.

While many look at me as a teacher, I’ve always considered myself a facilitator. After all, I have learned a great deal myself, and still have much to learn. They’ve taught me about my faults and my strengths. I’ve learned new perspectives. They taught me that some of the things I’ve learned throughout my life are flat wrong. They showed me how to laugh at myself and to seek help from them when I need it. They taught me how to love myself and others in newer ways. It’s with this in mind that I offer you the writings of my friends.

From my friends, you’ll read about regret, oral history, and earthquakes. You’ll read about how love still wins. You’ll read about dip wads who cheat at chess and knucklehead cops who racially profile. You’ll read about Cold War attempts at utopia and about trauma. You’ll read about part of the DC lesbian community in the 1970s and a French-Italian’s reflections on the spirit of protest at the Women’s March. You’ll witness how these authors live, love, and fight. This is the spirit in which these stories were crafted and have been brought to your hands.

I hope these stories will inspire you to take stock of your own life and get involved in a community. Maybe you’ll find a workshop of your own. Perhaps you’ll start a discussion group. Maybe you’ll read a memoir and call someone you’ve not seen for some time to hear their voice again. Maybe you’ll get to know your neighbors. Maybe one day, we’ll all start talking to each other.

With these stories in this collection, I invite you to read about peoples’ lives and memories with not just sympathy but also empathy for what they have to say. From their words, I hope you learn what we’ve learned from each other about writing. Deep inside each of us is a story waiting to be set loose upon the world.

June 2023