On this, the final day of the year, I feel it’s finally time to think back and make broad, sweeping statements, to set some things in stone. In January I wrote about the problem of year-end lists, how they come too early, how waiting until the bitter end of a year offers more depth, and I stick by that.

On my personal creative front, this year has been challenging—the grim state of the world alongside a relentlessly busy work schedule always seemed to stand in my way—but it was also the year that I felt like my novel-in-progress finally started to take shape. So, I’ve mostly been chipping away at that manuscript and I feel excited about how it’s going. I did manage to publish the 20-year anniversary issue of my Basic Paper Airplane zine series and had lovely release parties in Philadelphia and Portland to celebrate the occasion.

I also wrote two short pieces for The Pumpkin Dispatch, a few blurbs, and was interviewed in a few zines and DIY magazines (Questions & Answers, Behind the Zines, and Hit the Decks), but my short-form practice is largely just what I write for Basic Paper Airplane and this newsletter. On that note, perhaps I should include this newsletter as part of my year-end publications and say that I wrote about:

The aforementioned year-end lists and new-year traditions; writing in the midst of political chaos; the creative act of being in creative community; the importance of reading widely and wildly; art’s relationship to politics and social change; and the one you’re currently reading.

A few weeks ago, my pocket-sized book Writing Exercises (and Various Approaches to Life on Earth) came back into print for the first time in a long while. It reminded me that one of the initial reasons behind this Substack was that readers of this little book kept asking for more—that’s why each has a writing exercise, and why craft and the writing life are at its center.

When I regularly reviewed books, I read enough new titles to warrant a list, but in recent years my only year-end lists are albums and TV. Still, I put weeks of thought into them and have a lot of fun weighing the particular factors of such lists. Despite working as an arts and culture writer for some years, I’m not a critic in the traditional sense. So I often weigh pure enjoyment heavier than other writers might (while keeping in mind that it’s often the things that challenge me the most that stick in my mind the longest). With that said, here are this year’s lists. If you’d like to look at past years, here are my last 17 years of favorite albums and 9 years of favorite TV.

My Top 5 Albums of 2025

1) Molly Nilsson- Amateur (Night School/Dark Skies Association)

2) Sacred Paws- Jump Into Life (Merge Records)

3) Idle Ray- Even in the Spring (Life Like)

4) Amulets- Not Around But Through (Beacon Sound)

5) Emily Hines- These Days (Keeled Scales)

Honorable mentions: Oneohtrix Point Never- Tranquilizer (Warp), Big Thief- Double Infinity (4AD), Mint Mile- andwhichstray (Comedy Minus One), Lapalux- On the Grid (Self-Released), Cay is Okay- Housekeeping (Self-Released), Snocaps- Snocaps (Anti-), and Halls of the Machine- All Tribal Dignitaries (reissue) (Copy This).

My Top 5 TV Shows of 2025

1) The Lowdown

2) The Chair Company

3) Severance, S2

4) Hacks, S4

5) School Spirits, S2

Honorable mentions: North of North, Pluribus, Dying for Sex, Common Side Effects, and The Rehearsal S2.

Writing Exercise

In a recent interview on Kat Lewis’ Substack about her new memoir Holding, my friend Karleigh Frisbie Brogan said: “I think it’s wise to take in all the craft advice we can, even when it’s contradictory! The diversity of craft advice ensures our books all don’t sound the same and that there is an appropriate way for each individual.”

This is similar to how I think about craft advice: take in as much as you can, since you’ll never know what will resonate. Some of my least-favorite craft advice is from writers I adore and some of my favorite crafts advice is from writers I’ve never otherwise read. (I often think about how, if I’d solely sought advice from writers I already liked, I’d have missed out on most of the advice that’s really been useful to me.)

Exercise: Write your own piece of craft advice or writing exercise. You could think of this as a quick prompt or a full-on craft essay. Use your unique experience as a writer as a way in. Whatever you’ve written, whatever your particular path to this has been, it’s yours and from that you’ve arrived at a singular perspective on the act of putting words to the page. View this exercise as a way to briefly bring other writers into your perspective and approach.

Assorted Recommendations

*Christine Dupres’ essay in Oregon Humanities, a piece I had the honor or reading and editing in its early drafts.

*Miriam Toews on the Thresholds podcast.

*Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney on the Prestige TV podcast.

*The two Substack newsletters I read the most this year were Abigail Oswald’s Microfascination and Liina Koivula’s Lifeguard of Love.

Donations

If you’d like to help keep this newsletter going, head over to my Ko-fi tip-jar page.

I don’t want anyone to be pressured by Substack to pay for this, so this is my attempt at a low-pressure workaround. Thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

You can also buy my books, audiobook, or zines.

Every time I see a leaf on the ground, I feel joyous. While it’s been in the 80s the past few days in Portland, fall’s official start is just a few days away and, for my tastes, it couldn’t come soon enough.

It’s been one of my more stressful summers on record—overworked, dealing with pet grief, health issues within my family, living in an apartment that never fully cools down while reading the news hell-scape—but when I think back I realize the details have already fallen away a little. What I mostly remember are all the students I worked with and all their great manuscripts-in-progress, the albums I’ve been assisting with, how I have a life where I get to lend a hand in so many projects. It’s not a glamorous life, but I only have to question whether I’m on the right path when I check my bank account. As long as don’t do that too often, my little world is alright.

I’ve been working on the 20-year anniversary issue of my zine series, Basic Paper Airplane, which has made me think back on 2005, the year of its birth. Though I thought I remembered a lot about 2005, I’d forgotten what a stressful time it was politically. The first issue came out six months after Bush’s second term began, in the midst of a war that seemed like it would never end, a month before Hurricane Katrina. Given the state of the world at that moment, it would have been easy to convince myself not to make anything. Why did the world need a zine celebrating being simple and small?

In times of political upheaval, writers and artists of all stripes inevitably question their role. The question most often asked is, “Does art affect political change?,” which makes sense to ask, though I can’t imagine coming up with a reasonably accurate answer. How would we know? Art persists, often even at times when basic needs aren’t being met, so politics and art are eternally pushing against each other.

I tend to think the more useful question is, “Does experiencing and making art keep a good percentage of humans from falling into despair?” To me the answer is an undeniable yes. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be thinking about what you as an artist can do beyond your art-making, but it does mean to keep making art without worry or question. We need it.

Fall Events

I’m doing a handful of events in the coming months, which is the first concentration of events I’ve had since my book tour a couple years ago. One date is still unconfirmed, so I’ll just put my best guess.

September 21^st in conversation with Karleigh Frisbie Brogan @ Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle)

October 4^th The Pumpkin Dispatch zine release party @ Grover’s Curiosity Shop (Portland)

November 14^th-ish Basic Paper Airplane zine release party @ TBA (Philadelphia)

December 6^th Basic Paper Airplane 20-Year Anniversary Party @ Grover’s Curiosity Shop (Portland)

Book Recommendations

-Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts by Karleigh Frisbie Brogan- It’s such a thrill that the debut memoir from one of my best Portland writer friends is finally out. The book stunningly weaves its component parts into a dizzying whole, and I can’t wait to ask her how she pulled it off during our event at Elliott Bay Book Co in Seattle this Sunday.

-Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis- A curious and surprising book about how an object can be imbued with so much weight and beauty. I’m not completely sure what reading this without any context for Warren Ellis’ music career (Dirty Three, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) is like, but I’d recommend his 2021 interview with Jordan Kisner on the Thresholds podcast as a starting place or accompaniment.

-A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders- It’s a style of writing craft book I don’t always love (bouncing off full or long excerpts of stories/essays/novels), so it took me years to get around to this one. But I left feeling the power of fiction more acutely than I had in a long time. (And the audiobook is truly wonderful.)

Podcast Recommendations

-I went on a little journey through the past year of The Writer’s Voice podcast and particularly enjoyed listening to recent stories from Miriam Toews, Zadie Smith, and Sally Rooney.

-I always love hearing what Portland novelist Chelsea Bieker has to say, so I naturally enjoyed the far-ranging conversation she recently had on the Otherppl podcast.

-Really had fun hearing Madeline McDonnell on the Sad Me of the Past podcast, where writers read a very early work.

-Mix for the Cassette Culture podcast- I was asked to put together a mixtape episode for the Cassette Culture podcast. It’s a short primer to new releases reviewed in the Copy This Cassette! zine series. It’s maybe pretty out there by the standards of most readers here, but I had a lot of fun making it.

Movie Recommendations

-Secret Mall Apartment- Earlier this year, my friend invited me to go see this documentary. I was only vaguely interested, but he’d met someone who knew one of the artists involved and swore it would be up my alley. He got stuck waiting for a train that was stopped on the tracks, blocking a major road for an hour (this is something that happens in Portland and no one knows exactly why), so I watched it alone. While grumpy about it at first, by the end I was changed by the film and deeply grateful.

-Past Lives- Given how many people recommended this to me, probably no one needs my assurances that this is great movie, but I finally watched it and the hype didn’t take away from the film’s dreamily methodical perfection.

-The Ballad of Wallis Island- If you can deal with Tim Key’s schtick, this is a pretty tender-hearted watch.

New Music Recommendations

Most of the new music I’ve been listening to are the albums I’ve been helping release through Antiquated Future. The three that are in the world or up for preorder now are:

-Oh, Rose- For Art – An EP written, recorded, and released during singer Olivia Rose’s pregnancy, this is a really special release that digs into some different corners of the band’s range—dream pop, alt-country, ethereal folk, and one rocker for good measure.

-Dao Strom- Tender Revolutions – This is an epic album traversing folk, ambient, electronic, and spoken word from one of my favorite Portland writers. Released alongside a series of four chapbooks from Olympia’s The 3^rd Thing press.

-Little Angry & the Sweets- Screamin’ Inside Your Heart!!! – Newly up for preorder and coming out next month, this is the project of the ever-versatile Evan Hashi. Expansive psych-pop perfection.

Not-New Music Recommendations

-The Railway Children- Reunion Wilderness – Thanks to Paul Heck, writer and co-curator of great compilations like 1993’s No Alternative, I got hooked on The Railway Children’s 1987 album this summer. A somber jangle-pop collection with big bass lines, it’s a lost gem in the ‘80s Factory Records catalog.

-Thanks to Susanne Lohkamp’s great Old Music for New Times series on her Substack, I’ve been listening to more of the folk-country singer Hoyt Axton, in particular his 1973 album Less Than the Song.

-And I’m sure I’d heard the Dolly Parton-penned song “Two Doors Down” at some point, but its charm never really hit me until I picked up a country compilation LP from a thrift store a couple weeks ago and heard Zella Lehr’s 1977 take on it.

Donations

If you’d like to help keep this newsletter going, head over to my Ko-fi tip-jar page.

I don’t want anyone to be pressured by Substack to pay for this, so this is my attempt at a low-pressure workaround. (Admittedly, it’s far less affective, but oh well.) Thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

You can also buy my books, audiobook, or zines.

Over the past five years, as I’ve moved away from teaching writing classes to doing one-on-one sessions and consulting on manuscripts, my reading habits have changed. I read far fewer published books, I listen to more audiobooks, and read more zines. But most of what I read are books in progress. As I’ve mentioned here before (and will surely mention again and again), it’s a joy to witness a book manuscript grow and change, and to have a hand in that process is an honor I’ve yet to start taking for granted. But it’s also created a question I didn’t have when teaching low-pressure community writing classes, and it’s a question that writers often ask: what do you do when one of your greatest joys becomes your job?

For context, I’ll say that this work isn’t full-time—it’s at best half of my income and the hours vary a lot based on the week—but I have 15-20 students and clients each quarter and that means there are a lot of different stories vying for space in my brain. Depending on the quarter, maybe 10-15 of those are working on book-length projects and another 5-10 of those are working on short-form pieces. Then there are the two book manuscripts I’m working on, manuscripts or pieces I’m reading as favors to friends or as part of an accountability exchange, and at the end of most days I don’t have a lot of mental space left for published books. I try to read a few pages before bed most nights, but that means I’m not breezing through books like I used to.

Maybe the wise response to this would be to play it safe and solely read the best reviewed books of each year, but I’ve found that my choices as a reader are just as unwise and illogical as my choices as a writer. Instead of going toward a more system-oriented, zeitgeist-driven path, I’ve read randomly, picking up books on complete whims, reading chapters of numerous books at a time here and there, and rereading books I read decades ago just to see how my current self feels about them. In many ways, it hasn’t been particularly enjoyable or satisfying, but it has been interesting.

My approach here essentially comes down to a belief I have that reading should not be a checklist of only the most famous, bestselling, or critically beloved. This belief may have been born out of my education as a reader. Early in my teens, without friends who actively read or a cool English teacher, I had trouble figuring out what to read. When I finally made a friend who could guide me a little, I was still limited to whatever he had on his bookshelf at the moment, what our small-town library and one dusty used bookstore had in stock, and my mom’s collection of mass markets.

Through this, I ended up discovering authors (almost always) through one of their “lesser” works: Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan before Slaughterhouse Five, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row before Grapes of Wrath, Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act before Invisible Man, Aldous Huxley’s Island before Brave New World, Robert Heinlein’s Double Star before Stranger in a Strange Land, Truman Capote’s unfinished posthumous novel Answered Prayers before In Cold Blood, and on and on like this.

Through this process, I occasionally found books that felt more distinctly “mine” and made writing feel slightly more accessible. An author’s most famous work often felt like it was created by a god rather than a human, its inner workings mysterious and obscured, while their other books felt more real and tangible—at the very least I could imagine how someone came to write them. Some of the books I found in my early twenties were the books that most shook up my ideas of what could happen on the page: a seemingly unread copy of Gertrude Stein’s Useful Knowledge on a library shelf, Elizabeth Alexander’s Antebellum Dream Book in the depths of the poetry section at the bookstore I worked at, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever fiercely discounted in a pile of remainder books.

I think we as writers should embrace being idiosyncratic in our reading. I’ve been trying to get more comfortable admitting when I haven’t read a book that everyone else has read. In these moments, I try to think about all the things I’ve read instead—all the things that probably no one else I know has read. I do this to remind myself that the holes in my reading are okay, because it’s rarely been the “important” books that have made me the writer I am. I’ve learned about my own inclinations, my own tastes, so much more from the singular and strange novels and essay collections and books of poetry. And I think that’s the way it should be for most writers—finding one’s own writerly uniqueness by way of unique books.

Writing Exercise

When Tin House still published a literary journal, their “Lost & Found” column was my favorite (I even got to write an essay for it in 2018). The premise was authors writing about their personal history with either: a forgotten book by a well-known author, an unknown book by an unknown author, or a book that was popular in its time and has since faded into obscurity.

For this, write your own Lost & Found. Pick a book that you love or loved at one time in your life and is (by whatever measure you decide to use) relatively unknown. The only rule is to avoid the book’s plot whenever possible. This isn’t a book report; this is a story about the book’s role in your life.

Recommendations

*My dear friend and bandmate Justin Hocking’s new memoir is out this week on Counterpoint Books. A Field Guide to the Subterranean Reclaiming the Deep Earth and our Deepest Selves is a one-of-a-kind fragmented text that mixes the personal with nature writing, history, geology, skateboarding. If you’re in Portland, come out to Powell’s tonight for his book release.

-The past couple days, I’ve been emailing with a musician friend about how independent music is really suffering in recent years, perhaps in part due to a “comfort in times of upheaval” situation—people sticking to music they know as a response to the state of the world, leaving relatively unknown artists and new music more generally behind.

I’m always seeking out music I’ve never heard before. In recent years, that most often means older music that I haven’t heard—or at least music I haven’t previously paid attention to or gone deep with—but I still listen to a lot of new music by independent artists. So I’m going to start including some new music recommendations with each newsletter now. Note that, while my taste in music is all over the place, my new-music listening is largely all music on independent labels and leans more heavily toward the realms of rock and folk. In short: it’s not for everyone.

*The biggest new music surprise was last week’s out-of-nowhere full-album drop of Idle Ray’s second LP. Idle Ray ‘Even in the Spring’ makes good on the long wait between albums; it’s compact and clever, co-led by the impossibly prolific Fred Thomas. It’s influenced by ‘90s indie rock, ‘80s jangle pop and post-punk, and ‘60s bubblegum and garage rock, while still sounding completely fresh.

Friendship “Free Association”- This is the lead single off the Philadelphia band’s new album. I’ve only given the full album one spin and, while I do like it and think it’s an achievement, I haven’t been very into the sound of pedal-steel guitar of late and this album has (to my ears/memory) more of it than their past albums. But I’ve listened to this single a dozen times and think it’s a true four-minute masterpiece. An off-kilter, slowed down “punk rumble” drum beat keeps the song grounded while piano, guitar, violin, and clarinet weave in and out. It sounds like a bunch of people who once made really noisy music and have organically evolved into making something different than they ever could have imagined.

*RIP to Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, who both passed this week at 82. While I of course love Brian Wilson, I feel like he’s getting a lot of tributes right now, so I’ll say that I probably heard more Sly & the Family Stone than Beach Boys growing up since my mom and uncle are huge fans. The hits are great, but I feel like some of the album cuts are even better. Particularly some of the groove-oriented ones, but there are also songs like “Crossword Puzzle” that are so impossibly fun and catchy that I can’t believe they’re not classics we all know and love.

*Finally, I recommend telling ICE to go to hell, in whatever way you see fit. I don’t often mention it, but the only reason I ever got my foot in the door as a writing teacher is that I taught English and life-skills classes through organizations for recent immigrants on and off for many years. ICE terrorized the sweet, close-knit communities I worked alongside and seeing the aftermath of their raids is utterly devastating.

And if you ever wonder why folks from Latin America immigrate to the U.S.—while the reasons are of course varied and complex—it can usually get sourced back to horribly exploitative practices the U.S. government carried out in Latin America. Remember that few people want to leave their homes to come here; most have no other option. Regardless of how you think the borders should be handled in the future: mass deportations are the wrong side of history, without question, so let’s stand against ICE together.

Donations

If you’d like to help keep this newsletter going, head over to my Ko-fi tip-jar page.

I don’t want anyone to be pressured by Substack to pay for this, so this is my attempt at a low-pressure workaround. Thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

You can also buy my books, audiobook, or zines.

As of this past week, two of my closest Portland writer friends have long-in-the-works books up for preorder. Both are expansive takes on memoir: Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts by Karleigh Frisbie Brogan (out in August) and A Field Guide to the Subterranean: Reclaiming the Deep Earth and Our Deepest Selves by Justin Hocking (out in June).

I truly couldn’t be more excited; it feels almost like I have two books coming out. While I wasn’t instrumental in either book’s path, I did have the honor of reading several early versions of both and have had countless conversations about these projects, so I know the amount of thought and years of work that went into them. This is a really special feeling. Growing up as a book lover, books were magic acts—where did they come from? how did they contain so much?—and now getting to regularly see behind the curtain is a dream I never really imagined coming true.

It’s without a doubt so joyous to have one of my coaching students have a book published—to know I saw it through almost every step of the process and now it’s a real, physical object in the world that anyone can find and open up. But it’s a different experience when my friends release books because, even if I’ve read drafts and given feedback and had conversations, so many of the steps of the process I wasn’t present for, which allows me to feel hints of the magic act more acutely when I finally hold a copy in my hands.

Celebrating these two in recent weeks has made me think about how the competitive aspect of writing and publishing is so often highlighted in media, whether that’s The End of the Tour or “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” and how little of that I’ve experienced in my decades of actively publishing. I know it happens, I hear stories, but my writing communities look nothing like the jealous, frenemy writers so often portrayed. Maybe it’s living on the opposite coast from where the publishing industry’s money resides; that distance just makes the imagined financial windfall publishing still conjures seem more imaginary. But I’m happy to be in writing communities where each writer’s win is a win for the community as a whole.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, while the country’s largest annual writing conference, AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs), was going on in Los Angeles. I’ve gone a few times in the past dozen years, basically just whenever it comes through the Pacific Northwest (it city-hops each year), but I know people who go every year, regardless of where it is in the U.S.

I’m of two minds about AWP. On one hand, it’s thrilling to be a writer surrounded by so many other writers. I always have a good time, if largely just because I can’t help but let the excitement of the situation rub off on me. To be among writers; what a dream.

On the other, though, the conference at times makes publishing feel like a purely who-you-know, personality-driven affair. This of course isn’t true in a sweeping sense, but there’s a rubbing-shoulders, shaking-hands aspect of AWP that doesn’t always feel particularly genuine to me.

Being a lifelong naive idealist, I like to think that the act of writing creatively is a chance to transcend the ego briefly, to let go of our very human external insecurities, to be a mind at work on the page. So it’s confusing to gather with other writers and let ego and insecurity run the party instead of trying to kick them out. While there, I find myself at times participating in this vie for status and connection, which means I always leave the conference with a bit of regret.

But then, of course, when I don’t go I miss being among all the writers. So if you went last weekend, tell me your favorite part.

Writing Exercise

Write about a writer you appreciate having in your life. This could be someone who is very literally in your life (a friend, community member, teacher, or mentor) or simply someone you read and enjoy or like to see perform. Think about how this person inspires you generally and/or keeps you going on your own writing/creative path.

Recommendations

-Pacific Power & Light by Michael Dickman- Last year I received a lovely, open-hearted letter from Michael Dickman after he read my essay collection, Staring Contest, and I’ve been slowly savoring his 2024 poetry collection almost ever since. The collection’s mix of elements—Pacific Northwest natural world sitting alongside illicit substances, ‘90s consumer culture, skateboards, the fuzzy convictions of youth, and single mothers—is so deeply familiar to me that I often wondered while reading if a parallel version of myself, or perhaps one of my high school punk bandmates, wrote these poems.

-Sleepy’s Delay by Erin Tanner- I’ve long been a fan of Erin Tanner’s comics and his new book (out on Portland’s Secret Room Press), is a perfect encapsulation of everything I love about his work. Sitting somewhere between a comics collection and a bizarro graphic novel, it’s odd and tender and often hilarious. For an introduction, Moon Diary, the 2010 short animated film based on his comics, is a great place to start.

-The Pinnacle by Benjamin Kessler- This new novella (released on the great Portland press, Buckman) is the story of a near-future tallest building in the world that, for mysterious reasons, is perpetually under construction, becoming ever taller. I was asked to blurb this book a while back and said this: “Benjamin Kessler's page-turning, dystopian-skyscraper novella is both appropriately psychedelic and surprisingly emotionally vulnerable. The imagery and unique dreamstate of The Pinnacle will linger with you long after you finish.”

-Last night I saw Emily Kendal Frey read from her new poetry chapbook, The Present (The Economy Press), and Sara Jaffe read from her upcoming short story collection, Hurricane Envy (Rescue Press)—both so good! This was at the release party for Dao Strom & Alicia Jo Rabins’ new EP of ambient-tinged folk-country songs, Wild Nights.

-Two giants of my childhood absurdist television viewing passed recently: Michelle Trachtenberg and George Lowe. Trachtenberg I’ll forever know best as Nona on the brilliantly silly and strange The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Lowe is best known as the voice of the titular superhero talkshow host on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Watching both of these shows as a preteen in the early/mid ‘90s shaped my sense of how far comedy and art as whole could be pushed. Three decades later, they’re both somehow still totally singular shows. If you’re already a fan of Pete & Pete, I loved Julie Halpern (writer of the zine My Adventures With Pete & Pete)’s post about working with Michelle.

In my own writing news

*Behind the Zines interview (print only)- One of the fiercest champions of zine culture, Billy McCall, interviewed me for the latest issue of Behind the Zines: A Zine About Zines. Curiously, the interview isn’t about zines at all, but my 2022 young adult novel on Korza Books, How to Forget Almost Everything.

*Smallpresspalooza- At Powell’s Books’ annual small-press marathon reading a couple weeks back, I had the pleasure of stepping in for my friend Rachel Lee-Carman, since she was unable to make it up from Bend, Oregon due to snow in the pass. It was a joy to read her work and talk about how deeply I love her zines (including the latest, Digging #19). If you, dear newsletter reader, ever need a live reading proxy due to snow or illness, let me know; I feel like it’s my true calling.

Donations

If you’d like to help keep this newsletter going, head over to my Ko-fi tip-jar page.

I don’t want anyone to be pressured by Substack to pay for this, so this is my low-pressure workaround. Thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Whenever the world changes in a profoundly negative way, creative writers tend to question their role. The immediate worth of our writing projects can seem minimal or nonexistent in times when the headlines are, say, signaling a burgeoning dictatorship.

As my students have been understandably lingering on these questions in recent weeks, I keep thinking back to a writing mentor who talked about how we as writers are most often writing for the future and how the slow work of a long-form writing project will never come to fruition if you let the news cycle fully dominate your body and brain.

I’m not suggesting completely turning off, not showing up for your community, not causing a fuss in whatever way you deem most useful, I’m just saying leave enough mental space to make something beautiful for the people of the future. Doing so is a way of believing in the future, of creatively imagining a world beyond the awful present.

It might seem like books don’t have the influence they once did, but books wouldn’t be currently getting banned en masse if the misguided people leading this charge didn’t believe that the written word has a particular power—a power truly unlike anything else.

Mostly this month’s newsletter is just a batch of recommendations. This is a time where quality distractions are needed and the act of wintering should be embraced. But I feel it’s also important to say: don’t stop paying attention, don’t get complacent, and don’t stop working on your writing projects.

Writing Exercise

Write about a book that changed your life. This doesn’t have to be on-theme with the current political moment in any way, it just needs to be something that really affected you at the time. (My go-to for writing prompts like this, for example, is Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary.) It could even be a book you no longer feel excited about; we need different books at different times in our lives and sometimes a book is just a stepping stone to finding the books or authors that we can truly stand behind.

Recommendations

-Los Espookys- I was a little late to the game on this one, but watching the short-lived HBO absurdist sitcom Los Espookys over the past month (desperately trying to savor it) has been a singular joy.

-Stranger on a Train by Patricia Highsmith- last fall, I strangely had several separate conversations about having never read Patricia Highsmith. After watching the film Perfect Days, the line the bookseller (played by Inuko Inuyama) says about her got stuck in my head (or at least the English subtitle version): “Patricia Highsmith knows everything about anxiety. I didn’t know fear and anxiety were two different things.” Last month, I picked up her 1950 debut. I changed what I thought about the book and its characters a dozen times while reading; the emotional twists and turns are strange and uncomfortable and deeply layered. I can only imagine how this read 75 years ago.

-Countercraft- maybe it’s from reading a lot of idea-heavy/action-light sci-fi when I was a kid—where artificial intelligence almost always proved to be a bad idea, something the humans in the story create out of a foolish belief in their own invincibility which inevitably becomes their downfall—but I have a lot of skepticism when it comes to the current push for AI-powered everything.

The latest article on Lincoln Michel’s great writing/publishing-world Substack captured so many of my feelings about the present and near future of AI’s relationship to creative writing. It’s hard to choose just one quote from this piece, but I think for our purposes here, his summation might be a good place to start: “I would expect a GenAI-powered literature, if it emerges, to be its own niche of the market. Not something that replaces traditional books. The reason for this is the book is a remarkably durable technology. It may not be the most popular technology, these days. But it really does what it is supposed to do and it is hard to find many ways to improve it.”

A couple days after I read this, I listened to the new Craftwork episode of the Other Ppl Podcast, which was a discussion with John Kaag from Rebind, an interactive AI reading-experience company that hires authors to give long-form talks on classic works of literature and philosophy. Then (if I understand correctly) the reader can ask questions about the book while reading and Rebind’s AI technology will provide answers or find the part of the talk that addresses that query in some form. Listening to this wasn’t uninteresting, but it seemed to just prove Michel’s point: the fact that they have authors like Margaret Atwood and Roxanne Gay on board seemed to be the most interesting thing about the service and the AI component was just a footnote that mostly offered a buzzword-level selling point.

-In terms of a book-based tech company I can really get behind, a recent episode of the podcast Decoder has Bookshop.org’s CEO Andy Hunter on it, discussing the work Bookshop is doing to support local bookstores around the country and it’s pretty great. I had no idea that 90% of the U.S.’s bookstores are now on Bookshop! The bookstore/weirdo variety store/artist collective I’m a part of here in Portland, Grover’s Curiosity Shop, is on Bookshopand the money we receive from them has helped keep us going. So I can attest that buying books online through Bookshop instead of Amazon really makes a difference.

-Severance, Season Two- I’m not sure yet if this is a recommendation or not, but the long-awaited second season of the mystery-box sci-fi show Severance is five episodes in and...it’s mildly interesting. It seems like maybe the hype was too great for them to actually live up to it but, again, I’m trying to give it time. Aside from great performances by the whole cast, I’m mostly just loving all of the tiny details, many of which the Prestige TV podcast is helping me find.

-A Complete Unknown- while I thought the trailer for this Bob Dylan biopic looked ridiculous and like something I’d never watch, it was recommended to me too many times to not go see it. It will likely come as a surprise to no one that I was very much the kind of boy that had a Dylan phase. In my preteen years, my mom gave me a stack of her early Dylan records, and I studied them like they were great works of literature. Though I haven’t been a regular listener since my very early 20s, it was still pretty incredible to see his early years in New York brought to life. The film isn’t life-changing by any means, but I think that’s why it’s successful: it focuses its energy on being entertaining, the folk-revival scene’s interpersonal dynamics, and young Dylan’s prolific-to-the-point-of-near-possession songwriting. Gilbert Cruz’s interview with director James Mangold on The Book Review podcast illuminates some of the thinking that went into this, including adapting Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties for the screenplay.

-Chloe Caldwell selling books on dating apps- former Portland writer Chloe Caldwell’s recent essay for LitHub about promoting her books (and books she loves) on dating apps is entertaining and kind of surreal. I can’t imagine doing anything like it and that’s what made it such a fun read.

In my own writing news

*Questions & Answers- I was interviewed by Dave Hankins for this zine of interviews with great people in the zine world.

*Cay is Okay Housekeeping hype sticker- the new album from Portland band Cay is Okay just came out and I was blown away to have my blurb of the record on the LP’s sticker (right next to a blurb from Katherine Paul of the mighty Black Belt Eagle Scout).

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I don’t want anyone to be pressured by Substack to pay for this, so this is my low-pressure workaround. Thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

While year-end lists have always ran earlier than I think is right, the modern digital age has pushed them to come out earlier than ever before, in part to avoid the list exhaustion that inevitably occurs for anyone who pays attention to current arts and culture. This obviously isn’t a devastating shift, but it does encourage a certain cognitive dissonance: the idea that the year is over when there’s still 3 ½-5 weeks left to go. Many people make the argument that the holidays are a blur anyway, so why does it matter?

And there’s personal truth in that for me: I mostly sleepwalk through most of November and December. All at once, the online store I head up goes into hectic holiday mode, my students’ come to the end of what’s often the busiest quarter of the year, and my freelance work picks up. For a good chunk of these two months I’m more or less working in one form or another from the time I wake up till the time I go to bed. It’s always a relief to get up one day post-Christmas and have it be (at least slightly) more mellow.

But I still think it’s not great for our brains to imagine an ending too early. Our common associations around a new year always makes me think of all the things we expect from our stories: broad change, a new beginning, a rebirth. Even if the changes we make personally are much smaller than the kind of changes that happen in the typical novel, I still think it’s good to think in these terms at least once a year. Our fictional narratives are so full of life crises brought about by complacency, and I feel like the antidote to that (or at least one of the antidotes) is looking at our lives anew periodically.

And what does the first month of a new year have to offer if we preemptively jump into a new idea of self before we’ve finished an old one? Solely hard work? There’s suddenly none of the joy of looking back, of reimagining, only an often-futile attempt to put some plans made too early into action.

For me, I’ve always liked waiting until the actual end of the year to finalize my year-end lists and waiting until January to make my resolutions and intentions. On both counts, it feels more meaningful, more personal, less caught up in a culture seeking clicks and likes.

While I’ve already done most of this looking back and planning for the year by now, I’ve also left some undone as a way of keeping hope and excitement alive personally during the often-difficult-for-many midwinter. And it’s a tough January in this country: the Los Angeles fires have been devastating (affecting the friends and family of so many people I know), and we’re mere moments away from having a team of comic book-level supervillains control this country. In my mind, this is the perfect time for all of us to be looking at (or looking back on) our personal intentions for the year and getting excited about the things we can change.

Writing Exercise

I typically have a breakthrough with a creative project around the new year. Usually this is more conceptual—some kind of reimagining of my approach or intentions—but I think it happens because of the personal work I’m doing.

Looking back at the previous year and making lists of the things you did, writing down ideas or goals or resolutions for the year ahead, these things restructure not only your daily life but also your creative life.

So, however you choose to do it, look back at 2024 on the page. At our low-key New Year’s Eve gathering, my partner made a “year-end bingo” card where each of us listed various experiences of 2024. This was more illuminating than I imagined it would be. For a year that seemed so one-note in my memory, so work-heavy with little fun and few creative accomplishments, I was surprised by how much I did. A lot happens during the course of a year! I think it’s important to remember this, so our memories don’t collapse a year into solely the biggest personal events and news headlines.

This could also be a fictional take on your year. The path you didn’t take, the strange adventures it led you on in a parallel dimension. Especially is you find looking back somewhat tedious, a creative reimagining of your year might accomplish at least some of the same things.

In my own writing news

*I had the pleasure of interviewing my old friend Rhea Melina about her new poetry book, Found Confetti. It’s published in the book itself, as an afterword, to give some context to the poems as a whole. I first met Rhea when we were in our very early twenties in the Olympia poetry scene, and we got to work together at the non-profit press I helped run, publishing her first chapbook in 2004. It felt really special to interview her 20 years later.

*I was interviewed by Prague-based researcher David Verbuč for his most recent academic journal article, the full interview of which was just published in the large-format zine, The Social Lives of Zines.

*I was also interviewed by Chris Auman of RoosterCow Press for his Regular Wiglar site.

*My 2023 book, Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes, got some unexpected love: the wonderful Portland memoirist Zaji Cox included it on her year-end list for Heavy Feather Review.

*The new issue of Basic Paper Airplane got a little a mention on the new episode of the Zine Report podcast.

*The first lo-fi EP from the little basement rock band I play in, Golden Tiles, was just released in November and can be streamed and purchased via Bandcamp or streamed on Spotify.

Recommendations

*Alexis Wolf on What’s Her Name Podcast- My dear friend Alexis Wolf is making the podcast rounds for her new scholarly book, Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840, and the first of these really emphasizes what an exciting story her research has uncovered. For much of our 20s and early 30s, there was rarely a moment when Alexis and I weren’t working on a project together in some form. Listening to her was such a joy.

*If you’re able to support L.A. fire victims, there’s a great list of more off-the-radar organizations and GoFundMe fundraisers on Polyvinyl Records’ most recent newsletter. There’s also an extensive list on The Cut.

*While I no longer read enough brand-new books to make a year-end book list, I do still make them for music and TV. I thought it was a great year for independent music (though, counter to almost everyone else’s opinion, a largely boring year for pop music) and a terrible year for television. The new golden age of TV is over and we seem to now be living in its wake, but there are still some playful gems. You can check out my favorite albums of this year (+ the past 15 years) and my favorite television shows of this year (+ the past eight years).

Neither are likely terribly interesting if you don’t follow independent rock, folk, and experimental music or quirky, off-beat comedies/dramedies. While these are by no means the only things I listen to or watch, they most often become my favorites of any given year. Regardless of what you’re into, I would love to see yours! Leave them in the comments or shoot me an email.

*Like many, David Lynch’s work helped me define my personal tastes and find my people in my late teens and early twenties. I largely never got into Lynch as a figure, preferring to let the work speak for itself, but I was gifted his book Catching the Big Fish when it came out in 2007 and was surprised how much I enjoyed it. I likely don’t have any recommendations that will surprise fans, but I will say that my younger self liked his divisive, unhinged 1990 film Wild at Heart perhaps more than any other and would adamantly defend his Disney film, The Straight Story. Novelist Luke Geddes’ incredible 2024 issue of TV Grime goes into the impossibly broad influence of Twin Peaks and is a must for any obsessive fan of the show. RIP to one of the strangest mainstream filmmakers of my lifetime.

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Over the past decade, I’ve often expressed my distaste for big books. By “big books,” I mostly mean doorstep realist novels. It’s not that I think those books are inherently bad due to their length or that writers who write them are untalented—it takes a lot of work, I imagine, to maintain character consistency and narrative tension for 500-800 pages—but they are, in a wide variety of ways, just not for me. My aversion is in part the hubris of doing such a thing, my perception that it implies a self-importance I can’t imagine. Then there’s the typical fanfare for such a book, and how it leaves little room for countless slim-and-unassuming books. But my biggest issue is just how I feel while reading an exceptionally long book.

As a reader who puts so much importance on the sentence, the sheer number of sentences in a big book overwhelms me and, at various points in the reading process, I wonder what the point of writing and reading fiction is, how there’s language left after a sweeping 100K-word novel for other novels, how words aren’t just all used up. Instead of feeling more engrossed as I go, I often end up noticing the artifice of the fictional world more frequently. I also have trouble recommending a long novel; so much inevitably happens in the course of one that the question of who would enjoy it or who it’s ultimately for gets muddy in my mind.

While I did occasionally feel that same sense of language overload and mind muddiness at points during the course of reading The Bee Sting this fall, a 650-page 2023 novel by Irish writer Paul Murray, I came out of it feeling what a big book is supposed to make one feel: the small enormity of each human life, the complexity of figuring out right action in an unwell world, the power of fiction. (I should note that I would have never read it unless my dear writer friend Karleigh Frisbie Brogan hadn’t recommended it multiple times, insisting I would love it, so I’m very thankful to her.)

On the personal creative level, the most important result of reading the book is accepting that the novel I’m writing needs to be a little longer than I initially wanted or imagined. It’ll hopefully still be half the length of Murray’s novel, but it won’t be the trim, quick book I thought I was writing. (When I started, I thought of it being closer to a novella.) While the concept for this manuscript had long been growing through backstories, time periods, and subplots, I’d refused to let go of the idea that I could (somehow) keep it tight and succinct. How freeing it was, as I read the last page of The Bee Sting, to sweep that to the side, to no longer stand in the way of what the story is asking for.

Writing Exercise

I’ve long identified as a nonfiction writer who occasionally writes fiction. But as I’ve been working on this new novel, that identity has started to slightly shift. That said, I’ll likely never be a fiction writer who starts with story, though; I almost always start with character and let the story come from that person or persons. Recently, a student was asking about that process and I told her how I usually experienced it, which made the idea of writing fiction (something she’s interested in but hasn’t done much of) seem more accessible to her. So I thought maybe it could be useful to others too. Here’s how I see it:

Regardless of the type of fiction, we always meet a character at a moment of change. Either that change just happened, is beginning to happen, or is about to happen. So, if you start a story with just a character, within a short amount of time of free-writing that character's words and thoughts you'll begin to get some hints or ideas of what that change might be. In other words: story begins to emerge just from the act of putting a fictional character onto paper.

Exercise: Free-write on a fictional character. This character can be one you’re working with or have worked with before, or it can be a wholly new person. If you don’t normally work in fiction, feel free to make the character a fictionalized version of yourself or someone you’re loosely acquainted with.

Write a page of material in the first-person or third-person, trying not to overthink it. Once you get to the end of the page, stop and read back on it, thinking about story. What seems to be changing in the character’s life? What are their concerns or interests? See if you can intuit a larger story from just this single page of writing.

In my own writing news

-I just released the latest issue of my Basic Paper Airplane zine series. It’s subtitled “Zines That Never Existed” and delves into some of the abandoned issues from the past 19 years of the series. You can pick it up online, or in-person in Portland at Powell’s Books, Powell’s on Hawthorne, Grover’s Curiosity Shop, My Vinyl Underground, and Flutter. And elsewhere in the country at Quimby’s Bookstore (Chicago) and Pegasus Books (Berkeley). It’ll also be available through The Word and Behind the Zines distros, as well as part of an upcoming Zine-o-Matic subscription box.

Recommendations

-Free Food: Earth Eating by Andrew Barton- In my last newsletter back in September, I mentioned the inspiration I was getting through editing Andrew Barton’s latest food-writing book/unconventional cookbook. It just came out this past week and is absolutely beautiful.

-Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino- This one snuck up on me. A quiet, filters-down novel about an alien growing up as a normal human girl.

-Miranda July- Earlier this year, I got to see Miranda July while she was on her book tour in support of her new novel, All Fours. I first found out about her in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, as she was doing a range of weird things in the Pacific Northwest. She made short films and curated tours of women-made DIY films, she made albums of spoken-word pieces that felt like alternate-realm old-time radio plays, she made music with an oddball electronic group I loved—in short, she was a powerhouse of the unusual. I was surprised when her 2005 film You Me and Everyone We Know became an indie hit, but I was even more surprised by how divisive it was; previously, she’d seemingly been universally beloved and suddenly she was some kind of cultural litmus test. I was also surprised a few years later when she started widely publishing work on the page and that I loved her writing perhaps even more than anything else.

Somehow I’d never seen her read or perform before this spring, and it was just as joyous as I’d always imagined. It took me months to get around to reading her new novel, and I was surprised yet again when it didn’t grab me in the same way as her other work has. It wasn’t for the reason that some might expect—the fact that I’m not a woman going through perimenopause; that aspect was actually one of my favorite parts of the novel—but in a host of small ways it felt like a departure from her past work. I’ve heard from some friends that the departure was what finally helped them access her, which is fascinating to me and honestly great to hear—she’s one of my favorite artists, so I want more people to experience her incredible and strange mind.

Regardless of the piece of writing, July always packs her writing with curious observations that require, I imagine, always looking at the world from a slight angle. Everything she writes could only be written by her and, in that way, this is a recommendation for her new book. But it’s maybe more a recommendation to go back and, especially if you’ve had an aversion to her, to see her career in a different light. While her great short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, likely makes the easiest recommendation, I’d also recommend her overlooked nonfiction book, It Chooses You, which is truly unlike any book I’ve read and was so unexpectedly moving to me. If you want to get really weird, her radio play/performance piece album, The Simon-Binet Test, released on Kill Rock Stars in 1998, has long been a favorite of mine.

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I’ll be posting again in a couple weeks with some new year/old year bits and pieces.

Like many people, I mark my birthday as a new year, complete with quiet resolutions and time spent reflecting back on the previous twelve months. I’m currently a few weeks into my new year, and I’m still feeling that clean slate, the sense of the unknown, an excitement for what might be. I have two book projects slowly in the works, a couple big tentative life plans, but there are so many variables at play that I’m not sure when things will happen or what will get prioritized. The mystery! Who knows what might await?

This past week, I’ve been deep into editing my friend and frequent collaborator Andrew Barton’s latest book of food writing. It’s called Free Food and is about growing up in Eugene, Oregon with nontraditional hippie food being the norm and how that created a sense of freedom and creativity in him when approaching the kitchen. In a way, I might seem like an odd editor for the project, since, due to being diagnosed with Crohn’s a half-dozen years ago, my diet is fairly limited. But while I can’t always partake in the same degree of culinary freedom Andrew espouses, it’s a great book, this mindset is inspiring to me in a wide variety of ways, and I’ve (unsurprisingly) already applied the messages of the book to my writing, teaching, and editing.

His concept has a bit of “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist” embedded in it, which is a maxim I actually think usually applies to writing (most writing maxims I believe only apply sometimes—I’m looking at you “show, don’t tell”) and, even though I’m personally less interested in being experimental on the page than I have at any time prior, I also feel more able to break rules than ever before. This combination is the kind of interesting creative friction that I like to work with. Now if I could just find time to write.

I’m chipping away, trying to find time for my novel and the nonfiction book proposal I’m forever putting the finishing touches on, and hoping to have a new issue of my Basic Paper Airplane zine series in the coming weeks. But there’s always something. This year I’ve been more focused on the little record label I co-run and those releases have taken priority over everything else. And there always seems to be another manuscript around the corner that needs an extra set of eyes; it’s been (wonderfully) almost more than I can keep up with.

Working on the new zine over the past week has been helpful; it doesn’t have the same pressures behind it, I can be more casual on the page, more easily apply the lessons I’m currently taking to heart while reading and editing. But I still marvel at how a seemingly simple thing (sitting down and writing) can feel so complex, so weighted, so difficult to schedule in. This is I think part of why we keep coming back to the written word, as readers and writers: its ostensible simplicity and infinite complexity.

Writing exercise

In the introduction to Free Food, Andrew writes: “In the kitchen, as you prepare this FREE FOOD, act with instinct, impulse, intuition – whichever of those three suits your mindset (perhaps all). Joy of Cooking is such an iconic title because it speaks to the possibility of truly enjoying the act. Realistically, you can’t always start from a place of joy, or concoct it as you twirl your wooden spoon – but you can always start from a sense of freedom, and an openness to the possibilities the freedom might take you to.”

For this exercise, take this mindset and bring it to the page. Set up your desk or coffee-shop counter with whatever tools and accoutrements you have at hand, then start writing. For the time being, don’t worry about particular craft elements or storytelling dos and don’ts, just let instinct, impulse, intuition, and joy guide you. Write for 30 minutes with this freedom in mind, stopping whenever you need without shame (breaks are okay).

Sure, Andrew is in part writing about the generative stage of cooking—the idea and concept of the larger meal—and at some point the practical mind (using logical cooking techniques, times, timing, etc) will jump in. But I think it’s important that he doesn’t differentiate here; he doesn’t say (as we often do in creative writing) “first it’s the generative stage and then it’s the structural stage” because I think he sees this mentality going in and out: you act with an intuitive creativity, then you get practical for a bit, then return to a creative mindset (adding a particular spice or type of oil, say). And I think this is a wonderful way to think about approaching the page! So often, we think of that initial generative stage being the creatively free period and then it’s just endless rounds of grueling, practical edits. But the reality is that we’re being creative at every stage, down to the copy-edit stage (punctuation is such a huge part of style!), and remembering this makes going through the editing process so much more fun and even, at times, joyful.

In this same section, he writes that you should not be “cooking from a place of envy,” from an “I saw a picture of this thing, it looks sooo good, now I have to have it too” mental space, because it “pulls you away from any honest intentions you may have begun with.” I think this is important to note for writers, as well. Writing from a place of envy—there being a writer you really want to be like/have an art career like, the fact that your peers or members of your writing group are getting more attention or journal acceptances, etc—will only bring you and your work down. I know, I know: to rid envy from your mind is easier said than done! But remember that what makes your writing special is that it’s you writing it; the uniqueness of each particular style, each particular voice is part of the excitement of creative writing (again, for reader and writer both). The sooner you fully embrace that, the quicker things will start moving forward.

In my own writing news

-Tomas Moniz on Lives of Writers podcast- I had the pleasure of interviewing my old pal Tomas Moniz when he toured through Portland earlier this summer in support of his All Friends are Necessary novel. The podcast episode just came out a few days ago and (despite not always enjoying listening to myself recorded) I actually really enjoyed giving it a spin. Many thanks to Autofocus Books for inviting me back to the pod.

-nostraDAMus 2032 by Jason Arias- One of my favorite writers and people in the Oregon literary scene, Jason Arias expands out from his usual short story brilliance into a truly wild poetry collection that comes out next month and is now up for preorder. I had the honor of blurbing the book and wrote this bizarre thing about it: “In a series of post-apocalyptic ennui poems, Jason Arias channels prophecies of everyday singularity. nostraDAMus 2032 speaks to our quotidian tech present (and future and past) with a tragic humor that is at its core generous and accepting, acknowledging both the base-desire dopamine hits we as humans crave and the ever-loving consciousnesses we wish to become.”

-Copy This Cassette! zine- I was interviewed for the first issue of this new zine series edited by D. Blake Werts about how much of my life the audio cassette tape occupies. The zine’s concept was inspired by issue 13 of my Basic Paper Airplane series—how cool!

Recommendations

-Portland Zine Symposium- twenty-some years in, Portland’s largest zine fest is still going strong. I went to my first one in 2008, I believe, and I don’t know if I’ve missed a year since (pandemic years notwithstanding). It remains much the same as when I first went: free, open to the public, hundreds of tablers/vendors (most local, some from around the country and world), and some of the most unique handmade publications you’ll see in one room. This weekend, September 21^st and 22^nd, Portland State University Smith Ballroom, 11am-5pm.

-Prince and the Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions by Duane Tudahl- This is a very niche 600-page book that maybe only fellow Prince obsessives can appreciate, but it’s a treasure-trove for those of us who have read countless Prince books—this one tops them all and dispels some long-standing rumors and assumptions. I listened to the 19-hour audiobook, narrated by the great Ron Butler, and it was my comfort food for several weeks of my summer.

-Oh, Rose ‘Dorothy’ LP- the latest release on the Antiquated Future label I co-run has been occupying many of my waking hours of late, as I try to help foster this album into the world. In a way it’s not hard to sell people on this one: the Olympia/Portland band is beloved for good reason—Olivia Rose’s elastic vocals and brilliant songwriting, the band’s genre-hopping prowess, their impossibly good live shows. I got to see them and spend time at the merch table this past weekend in Portland, as part of their tour opening for Future Islands, and it was a true delight.

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More next month.

Over the past month I’ve finally been sharing bits and pieces of my books-in-progress with my writing group and various writerly friends. There are always some moments of mild dread when letting go of a piece of writing you’ve held very close and, while these were no exception, most of the response has been very encouraging and I feel like I have some momentum for the first time since I started these projects last year. It’s also been a reminder about how many people help in the course of a book manuscript’s development.

So far, I’ve erred toward absurdly long acknowledgments in my books, thanking as many people as my various publishers will allow space for. When drafting those acknowledgments, each time I remember people who looked at pages early on—friends, folks in a workshop or class, brief members of a long-lost writing group—and I often remember their feedback, their kind words or critiques, even if sometimes I don’t remember their names. Over the course of this month, I’ve thought of those people again, wondering who might look at these new early chapters or book proposal drafts and make a suggestion that changes the course of the whole. Maybe I’ll forget this person when the time comes to write the acknowledgments, but their feedback will secretly be in there, a part of the book that for some reason only my name will be attached to.

I like that in my life and work I get to be helpful like this for so many different kinds of people and books. A number of books I worked on as an editor, coach, or early reader came out in the last few years, and I highly recommend all of them:

Altogether Different: A Memoir About Identity, Inheritance, and the Raid that Started the Civil War by Brianna Wheeler (Korza Books) (memoir/history)

And Yet by Jeff Alessandrelli (Future Tense Books) (autofiction novel)

Caboose #14: My Canadian Boyfriend by Liz Mason (memoir/music writing)

Discount Ceremony by Timothy Day (Game Over Books) (short story collection)

Garden of Earthly Delights by Carly Cohen (Raglan Books) (young adult novel)

The Long Loaf: Bread for All Days by Andrew Barton (Nickel Dinner) (food writing/cookbook)

Misdirections: A Serio-Comic Catalogue of Details, Detours, and Derivations from the Life of the Magician, Vaudevillian, & Comedy Emcee Werner 'Dorny' Dornfield by Carl Diehl (biography/memoir/media studies)

My Grandfather’s Trunk by Elayne Halpern Shapiro (historical novel)

Reflective Meditation: Cultivating Kindness and Curiosity in the Buddha’s Company by Linda Modaro and Nelly Kaufer (Tuwhiri) (spirituality/self-help)

Split Aces by M.L. Schepps (Korza Books) (sci-fi/noir novella)

Tibetan Nomad: Memoir of a Tangled Hair Woman by Norzom Lala (McFarland) (memoir)

Not all of these are books I had a great deal of impact on; two of these I just read in draft form and provided some spotty feedback or encouragement, one I read bits and pieces of over the course of many years, and one I just read early drafts of in a writing group most of a decade ago. But the rest I more-or-less got to be with from start to finish—from the earliest drafts to the final edits. Each was a joy to hold in my hands, to see the physical manifestation of what was once an idea inside the head of a friend or student.

Writing Exercise

Share a piece of writing with a friend or acquaintance and, if possible, have them share a piece of writing with you. Tell each other what kind of feedback you’d like (if this feels particularly scary or vulnerable, you can request that their feedback just be about what they liked) and set a date to send that feedback or discuss in-person.

If you don’t have other creative writers in your life, try to think of someone you know who’s working on a piece writing for their job or personal project, or a friend who’s working on a big social media post and wants to get it just right. All types of writing could use feedback and sharing writing always requires a little bit of vulnerability. In short: everyone can use this, even if they’re doing something markedly different from what you’re doing.

Recommendations

-July is International Zine Month. For this year’s annual festivities, I helped draft some of the writing and reading prompts for this year’s flyer. I’ll have more to say about zines in my next post, but this is a great month to search out some new zines or to start making your own. Or, if you’re new to this self-published format and term, find out what they are (the Wikipedia article about zines is surprisingly robust) and pick one up.

-I’m always listening to a lot of podcasts, especially writerly ones, and the past couple months have had some particularly good ones: Hanif Abdurraqib on Otherppl; Miranda July on It’s Been a Minute; Justin Taylor on The Lives of Writers; Kimberly King Parsons on Otherppl; and Lucas Mann on The Lives of Writers.

-It’s a big year for the small record label I co-run, and we had four new releases come out in the past month. As is the case with everything we release, I highly recommend it all: Mighty Clouds You Can Tell Everyone Under the Sun (Selected Songs, 2004-2013) (a retrospective of this indie-pop duo inspired by ‘60s girl groups, garage rock, and bubblegum pop); Mighty Clouds Anagram / Just Friends (a 7” single of their first songs in over a decade—one noisy and joyous, the other sparse and dreamy); Hazel Briar The Night Before (a gorgeous ethereal folk album); and Oh, Rose That Do Now See (10-year Anniversary Reissue), a remaster of the raw 2014 debut from a now-beloved Pacific Northwest band). We have six more releases coming out this year, so I’ll say more about such things in the coming months.

Donations:

If you’d like to help keep this newsletter going, head to my Ko-fi tip-jar page.

More next month.

Today is the one-year anniversary of my book Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes and it’s also the release day for its audiobook (available at a sliding scale through Gumroad and the Kobo audiobook platform). This was my first time recording an audiobook, and I’m very thankful to Miranda Selinger for engineering and editing the whole dang thing. (I messed up a lot, so the latter was surely a ton of work.) In large part, I enjoyed the process more than I dreaded it. We recorded it at the end of last summer in the XRAY FM recording studio, deep within the basement of an old arts building, while Portland experienced a ridiculous heat wave. I listened to a lot of audiobooks leading up to it, as well as a lot of podcast episodes that discussed recording audiobooks—all of which I more or less enjoyed—imagining I might come out of it with an approach I wouldn’t have previously tried. But I think I ended up just reading it like I would have read it before all that listening and, in part, that might just be because I’m in some way not the audience audiobooks are trying to appeal towards.

I find it a little curious how big audiobooks have become. Over the last few years, among many of my friends, it seems to be the preferred way to experience a book. For some of them, that’s simply convenience, for some it’s due to vision or other health issues (this being the main reason my publisher and I prioritized doing an audiobook), but for many they just find it really enjoyable.

It’s the fastest growing format in the publishing industry, they’re generating billions of dollars a year, and are far surpassing ebook sales (the format that was long predicted to be the death of print books). Reading recent audiobook statistics has kind of blown my mind. The New York Times’ Book Review Podcast’s episode about audiobooks last fall (“Audiobooks are the Best”) was fascinating, since now even these big book critics are often going between a print copy and an audiobook of the same book and sometimes seemingly doing reviews in large part off of the audiobook.

Though I’m of course not opposed to the format, I haven’t fully fallen in love. In my current life, the convenience factor is their sole appeal for me. As someone who reads a lot of work from my one-on-one students each week—many of whom are working on long-form book projects—and takes on a handful of book-length editing projects each year, I now read published books a lot slower than I used to. (Embarrassingly so.) But as I also have a lot of physical work and bookkeeping work for Antiquated Future, the online store and record label I head up, I do end up with plenty of listening hours. While these are most often occupied by podcasts, a format I’ve long loved, I’ve been trying out more audiobooks in the past couple years and it’s admittedly been nice to get through some books that were on my list but I probably wouldn’t have otherwise found time for in my life of so many books-in-progress and so few fully formed books.

Having now recorded an audiobook, I can better understand the skill and the challenges involved in narrating a book over the course of 50,000+ words and many many hours. But I still find most audiobooks either overly formal or overly performed. I’m usually able to ease into it after a couple chapters, but I rarely get to that point of deep enjoyment with the narration (even when I’m deeply enjoying the book itself). I’m continuing to try, in part because I know my reading will likely shift away from print as my vision changes, but I feel unsure if I’ll ever get over a knee-jerk aversion to the conventions of the format.

I really don’t know if the Staring Contest audiobook is any different and, if it is, whether it’s appealing to people who have spent more time with the format than I have. In the process of recording, I quickly realized what should have been obvious all along: a degree of formality comes from simply enunciating every word and trying hard not to mess up. But I also tried to make it more casual and more conversational than any audiobook I’ve heard so far, since that’s what I most often want as a listener. Since the audiobook was being made more for accessibility than financial gain, I felt the freedom to make it something that I would want rather than whatever I imagine other people want. And perhaps—more than a specific tone uniformly across audiobooks—what I want from audiobooks is a style that more closely resembles the book itself. As with most art and media, I want a variety of personalized, unique experiences.

Exercise:

Whatever you’re currently working on, try reading it aloud. While this is a fairly standard editing exercise, for this I’d like you to not think about editing while you’re reading as much as possible.

I’ll also suggest that you let yourself perform it, whatever that means to you. For me and my work, that means very slight intonation shifts, clearly noting the emotional and logical developments and connections. To some—especially those with a background in the dramatic arts—that might not seem like a performance. But to me it is, because it’s the way that I read for an audience and it adds a layer of personality that isn’t inherent to the words on the page. But for you, performing could mean being a bit sillier or more dramatic, somehow wilder. (When I primarily worked as a poet in my early 20s, for example, I had a period where I used a bullhorn at most of my public readings. Feel free to use a bullhorn; I found it quite freeing.)

The point is that your performance should suit your work, not an imagined idea of what a writer should sound like nor the conventions of audiobook narration.

In my own writing news:

-Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli- the Lives of Writers podcast was kind enough to have me back as a guest host, and I got to interview Jeff Alessandrelli about his new autofiction book (And Yet on Future Tense Books), what the folding of Small Press Distribution means for the press he founded (Fonograf Editions), and the podcast we hosted together some years back (The Steer).

Recommendations:

-Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka- Illuminating and wildly depressing, this book is wide-reaching but most concerned with how we create and experience art and culture in the age of algorithmic feeds and recommendations. What Chayka ultimately ends up making the case for is not disengaging from the internet entirely but (at least in my interpretation) to shift to an older model of internet engagement—blogs and newsletters over social media, artists working toward their own inspiration rather than the algorithms’ “tastes,” making and following personalized human recommendations over algorithmic ones.

-Mrs. Davis- Chayka’s book has me thinking a lot about Mrs. Davis, a Peacock show that came out last year about a near-future where an ostensibly well-intentioned AI algorithm has connected the world and one nun’s quest to shut it down. A lot of people passed this one by, since it has a dozen intersecting plot lines and the first couple episodes are pretty overwhelming and hard to get through on first watch, but my partner and I watched it when it came out and keep coming back to it.

-Jason McCall on Lives of Writers (with guest host Aaron Burch)- I thought this was such a great interview about literary community, being on the other side of a life-threatening illnesses, and teaching writing with joy.

-Strawberry Mansion- This 2021 film about a dream auditor and an eccentric artist who’s created a helmet to block ad placements in dreams really knocked me out. It might not be wholly original conceptually—the list of possible comparisons might range from the films of Michel Gondry to Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine to The Wizard of Oz—but it’s a pretty wild ride nonetheless and is worth it for the handmade props and costumes alone. Not for everyone, but the wackadoo trailer might be a good litmus test.

Donations:

If you’d like to help keep this newsletter going, head to my Ko-fi tip-jar page.

More next month.

This is, in a way, a reimagining. Which is a way of saying: welcome to the new version of A Collection of Index Cards, an idiosyncratic monthly newsletter of writerly things. Initially I started this as something like a makeshift blog about my books and events, a way to be more off of social media than on, but ultimately that idea felt a little underwhelming to me.

So, while there will be some bits about my work and projects along the way, each month will primarily be more outward than inward: a newly drafted writing exercise if you need one, things to read or listen to, a line or two from whatever book or zine I’m reading, some ideas of how to be in the world when the world is constantly changing. Hopefully it’ll be fun (or something approximating fun).

So, without much fanfare, here’s a prompt. This is an ever-so-slightly adjusted version of an exercise that appears in Writing Exercises (And Various Approaches to Life on Earth), a pocket-sized book that came out on Two Plum Press in late 2022. I’ll largely be drafting new exercises in the months to come, but I thought I’d start with a known quantity, one that my students have brought up or incorporated into their longer book projects several times in recent months (so it’s been bouncing around in my brain of late as a result).

We Exercise

I often get a bit of a thrill when I see a book break into the first-person plural (“we/our”) for a page or a chapter. It signals a time when two or more people’s lives intertwined and that’s always interesting to me. The actual experience of intertwining can be fun, horrifying, a learning experience, a big mistake, or a lifelong path, but I always like seeing how this happens: how we meld our sense of self with others and how we grow and are changed by that.

Exercise: Try writing a page using the first-person plural as much as possible. Write about a time when you were a part of a “we.” Or simply write about one friend, family member, or partner in relation to your own life. You can also write about two fictional characters who are, at least for a period of time, inseparable. Or a group that goes everywhere together. Or a close-knit family unit. You can break into the first-person for a line here and there, but try to use the “I” sparingly. Notice how the “we” changes your approach to narrative, how it immediately pushes your prose style to new territory by putting some constraints on what you can say or include.

In my own writing news:

-I published a new issue of my long-running Basic Paper Airplane zine series in December. It’s ostensibly about the book tour I went on last year, but it invariably goes elsewhere (as I tend to do).

-I interviewed the poet Russell Brakefield about his great book My Modest Blindness for the Lives of Writers podcast a while back and had the best time.

-For the annual March Xness music essay series last month, I wrote about The Gossip’s 2006 barn-burner “Standing in the Way of Control.” I meant it to be a pretty straightforward essay about seeing them play an Olympia basement show shortly before they became near-superstars in Europe, but the essay went off the rails and in part became a story of a rather complicated friendship I had in my early 20s.

Recommendations:

-Novelist Catherine Lacey on the Otherppl Podcast- I love Lacey’s work and wrote about several of her books when I was more active as an arts-and-culture freelancer (including this essay-ish review of her 2017 novel The Answers for the Los Angeles Review of Books). While I don’t think her latest novel, Biography of X, is the best starting place for someone new to her work, I think this interview gives a wonderful peek into her endlessly wild mind.

-The new season of Jordan Kisner’s author-interview podcast Thresholds- Many past episodes of this show have really felt like true gifts. This season is somehow curiously off-kilter in an interesting way, and I’ve enjoyed being pushed to look at the world differently by great minds like Vinson Cunningham and Rumaan Alam.

-“Thursday” by George Saunders- Saunders’ latest short story has quickly become my all-time favorite of his. I feel like most writers have messages about the world that they’re trying to impart through their work—ideas that come up again and again, that are further refined with each new angle, each new situation and set of characters—and this story feels to me like all of his messages and themes beautifully and chaotically coming together at once.

-JB’s From the Kitchen zine- I deeply love all of JB’s curious zines of odd histories from rural Missouri and this dive into community cookbooks is no exception.

-Supporting small presses directly- The small press world took a devastating blow last week when Small Press Distribution, the most prominent channel for small press books to make it into bookstores and libraries for 55 years, closed overnight. If you haven’t been following this, Lit Hub’s overview from when it happened and update from a couple days ago are really good places to start. So, order directly from your favorite small press’ website this month.

Donations:

Lastly, some of you know I have a complex relationship with money, especially when it comes to pressuring anyone into buying my books or suggesting that I need to be paid for being an artist. Due to this concern, I shut off all of Substack’s payment options as soon as I got on here (you couldn’t have even paid me if you wanted to!).

Now that I’m reimagining this newsletter, though, I thought I should at least offer the option of donating. So you can now donate to me/this newsletter by going to my Ko-fi tip-jar page. To be unnecessarily clear, though: this is only an option and not something I require or expect.

See you in early May.

This Sunday, I’ll be calling my book tour done. In a way, though, this isn’t true—I’ll still be doing some events and readings here and there (including at the Portland Book Festival in November)—but this is the last one that my press or I will set up specifically for Staring Contest. It hasn’t been the biggest or most expansive tour (a dozen events, mostly in the Pacific Northwest), but it’s taken up a lot of my mental energy for the past four months and I’m feeling ready to finally sink into the new book manuscripts I started earlier this year.

The tour will be ending in style, since Perfect Day Publishing received a Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) grant for this event and I was able to invite some of my favorite local writers and artists to help create a multimedia event working loosely off the themes in the book. I gave everyone free rein to do what they’d like, so a lot of what happens will be a surprise even to me, but it will likely be an assortment of talks, slideshows, videos, comics, music, and readings. Many of these may be one-time only performances, so it should be a pretty special night.

I’ll be joined by memoirist and podcaster Brianna Wheeler (whose upcoming book Altogether Different I had the pleasure of working on as an editor), short story author and novelist Margaret Malone, photographer and musician Yaara Valey, comic artist and illustrator M. Sabine Rear, and experimental filmmaker and writer Carl Diehl. The event will take place at the Open Signal media arts center in Northeast Portland this Sunday, October 1st, starting at 6pm. It’s free and open to the public.

In other news:

I’m working on a new issue of my Basic Paper Airplane zine series, loosely about this book tour, and I’m doing something new for it: putting it up for preorder long before it’s done. Preorder it now (only $5!) and receive it at some point in the month of November. And if you’re interested/confused about what this is, there’s a short history of Basic Paper Airplane on my website.

My publishers want me to remind you that you can rate and review my books on Goodreads. (Many thanks to all who have.)

A conversation I had with the writer Candace Jane Opper (while reading with her and Patrick McGinty in Pittsburgh a couple weeks back) has got me thinking about how to move this newsletter offline and into your mailbox. Would that be of interest? Do we all have too many Substack subscriptions? Wouldn’t it be fun to one day receive a piece of weirdo mail instead of bills? Just an idea I’m throwing around thanks to Candace.

More soon.

To say I’m on tour right now feels like a bit of stretch, since I’ve mostly been home in Portland. But I feel a particular brand of tired that I only know from hitting the road, so I guess my body wants to claim the tour title.

For the past couple weeks, I’ve mostly been driving up I-5 to my home state of Washington and back. The various events in Seattle and Olympia (mostly for Staring Contest, with bits of How to Forget Almost Everything thrown in) have all been pretty special, and I’m sure when the summer is over I’ll look back at these as some of the season’s highlights.

Upcoming dates:

On August 6th, I’ll be reading on the literary stage at the Pickathon festival in Happy Valley, Oregon. There are some real gems on this lineup, and it’s such an honor to be among them.

From September 6th-14th I’ll be on the East Coast, doing events in (at least) New York City, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Things are still getting figured out, but they should be confirmed in the coming week or so and I’ll add them to my events page when they are.

On October 1st, I’ll be doing a multimedia event at the Open Signal media arts center here in Portland. It will feature a panel of artists talking about their different relationships to vision and the creative process.

A few non-tour things:

*Tonight I start hosting Creative Writing Accountability Night at Grover’s Curiosity Shop here in Portland (1410 SE Clinton St). This will run every Tuesday night from 6:30-8:30pm, now until the end of August. If you’re in town, feel free to drop in tonight or any of the upcoming Tuesdays.

*Brianna Wheeler’s Altogether Different: A Memoir About Identity, Inheritance, and the Raid that Started the Civil War, an upcoming memoir I helped edit, just got a cover reveal yesterday and will soon be up for preorder. I can’t wait for people to read this.

*I’m lucky enough to be helping release the debut full-length from beloved Portland indie rock band Babytooth (led by poet Isabel Zacharias). The album went up for preorder today, and its release party will be on August 18th at the Doug Fir Lounge.

*For those who want to dig deep into the Staring Contest universe, I’ve been collecting the various radio appearances, print interviews, reviews, and various odds and ends over here.

📸 Amanda Wolf

Today, my new book, Staring Contest: Essays About Eyes, comes out on Perfect Day Publishing. I started this project six years ago when a few wise friends and mentors convinced me a couple essays I’d recently written were the start of something bigger. I was only fully convinced when one of them suggested moving more thematically, so I wasn’t locked into the personal throughout; immediately, I had a rush of ideas.

It’s been interesting to look back at some of my early brainstorming notes from that time and see how many of those ideas eventually made it into the book. (It’s also fun to see the weird ideas that never went anywhere, or that I tried to make into essays and couldn’t make work—many of which I’d completely forgotten about.)

A few things:

*If you’re in or around Portland, come down to Powell’s Books tonight for a release event where I get to chat with one of my very favorite essayists, Elena Passarello. She’s the best. 7pm, free, should be good times.

*Today, Largehearted Boy published my essay-tinged playlist for the book as part of their Book Notes series.

*There’s a really kind review of the book in this week’s Willamette Week, written by the great Michelle Kicherer.

*While not specific to this book, I’ve been working on a new writerly website over the past few days, replacing the decrepit site I’ve been using for a full decade now. I always want author websites to be just a little more interesting than they are, so I set out with the goal of this new one somehow being both professional and quirky, both clean and packed with content. It’s feeling close—a lot of interior links to hidden pages, exterior links to publications and podcasts and other assorted media, a lot of switching between the third-person and the first-person—but I’m open to (and looking for) feedback, if you have ideas.

Though the book has been out there in a soft-launch way for the past month—quietly working its way into pre-orderers’ mail boxes and onto bookstore shelves—a lot more people will likely be encountering it for the first time today. Perhaps because of this, I’m feeling the “release” part of the term “book release” more meaningfully today than ever before. Equal parts letting it go—releasing it into the wild—and the more interior release of having gotten a tangle of thoughts and ideas and experiences out of my head and body and onto the page.

I built my spring quarter so I could have this week off from teaching, and it’s feeling like the wisest move I’ve made in quite a while (I’m not always especially realistic when scheduling my life). While the hype around this book is fairly tame, it’s more attention than anything I’ve published has received prior to the release date, so there’s been kind of a lot to attend to.

While having a week off is of course nice, I will say that I’m having a lot of fun this quarter being very flexible and, for many of my students, in a more manuscript consultation or editing role. Everyone is writing such good stuff. I feel so lucky.

This is mostly just a way to keep people updated on my upcoming publications, classes, and events in a way that sidesteps social media. But also, it will likely be a place for me to regularly tell some stories, test out new writing exercises, and recommend some things.

If you’re interested in supporting my work, you can:

Preorder my interlinked essay collection coming out in May on Perfect Day Publishing.

Order my young adult (ish) novel on Korza Books.

Order my writing exercise book on Two Plum Press. (Or one of my other chapbooks on the press.)

Sign up for a class, coaching session, or editing consultation.

This coming weekend, March 10th-11th, I’ll be at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Seattle. I’ll be doing signings at the Korza Books table on Friday and Saturday and moderating a panel about working between zine and literary worlds/communities on Saturday.

Thanks for reading and subscribing. (Note: future newsletters will likely be more fun than this.)

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