What I'm reading

Also, hi. How are you?

Since the election results were called, we’ve seen a lot of finger pointing. Everyone has a take. Every take is then whittled down to a singular thought. Everyone is fighting with some other person’s single sentence to say, no, actually it’s this or that or the other sentence. Or just to say, it’s everything, or nothing. People on the internet who didn’t lunge right are moving through their five stages of grief, flushing out their denial and anger, and bargaining with America. Basically, everyone is losing their minds and the Left especially is eating itself from the inside out.

Photo by Hannah Fleming-Hlll on Unsplash

Obviously there are many reasons we find ourselves here, not least of which is see above re: how discourse now moves. On Tuesday, I’ll release a raw and winding debrief I had with my Reading the Comments co-host

Veronica Wong

. Those are the kinds of conversations that help me right now— the kind that hold it all, but also end with more questions and the understanding that one cannot actually hold or say it all.

I’ve been mostly offline (or trying) speaking voice to voice and body to body with friends and loved ones, sitting around kitchen tables and on couches, caring for my children and my nervous system (or trying), and reminding myself that real conversation doesn’t happen on the internet. Any essay or post or god forbid tweet can only offer a limited word-count-and-screen-and-genre-bound perspective, just a friendly reminder. There will always be more to say and discuss and add and develop if we’re doing things right, and if we’re listening.

Whenever this country is plunged into crisis, which is constantly, I re-evaluate what I’m doing here. I am not a political strategist, have no desire to be one, and don’t think it’s actually part of my job. Same for most people conducting postmortems right now. But as a feminist critic and theorist and memoirist and essayist and teacher of writing, I will continue to show up the way I have— with as much nuance and endless questioning and full-throated refusal as possible. I am not going to go quietly.

I thought this week of what Chelsea Bieker said in my recent conversation with her:

I am not interested in a moral high ground. I’m interested in what justice looks like in our lived lives, if it’s even possible. Our society seems to love watered down, simple soda pop stories. I hate that. It makes me cringe. I need stories that are doing the most, saying the things, snarky, full of rage, smart as hell, stylish, and a full fuck-you to the patriarchy and systems of oppression. I just want to keep writing books like that.

I know it hurts right now, but let’s keep making those stories together.

Below are some of the more helpful readings I’ve found online because they are easy to share, but I’m also putting together some books and art to share that, like our best conversations with friends, hold it all, refuse, and demand more.