Hi there,
I last wrote to you from the mud of early spring which, I’m pleased to report, has now transformed into green, green, green and an embarrassment of lilacs (my favorite invasive species). My yard is full of unwanted grass and my garden beds with weeds, but the camas I planted in the fall is popping up and, in the hills all around, the arrowleaf balsamroot appears to be enjoying a particularly flush year. Soon, too soon, it will be dry here again and the air will fill with monocultural wheat dust and (likely) wildfire smoke, but I’m trying to store up all this green for those harder times.
All the blooming is a culmination of sorts, and somehow, amid all that distracting life buzzing, I finally finished and turned in my MFA thesis last week. It’s been a difficult, rewarding, frustrating, pointless-feeling, cathartic two years and at the end, I’m glad I gave myself such an elaborate gift of time and energy. Because, really, as someone who doesn’t particularly want to teach (especially in this moment…shout out to my friends holding on in the academy by their fingernails), a degree in creative writing really only symbolizes an investment in myself.
I’ve gone back and forth in countless cycles about the “point” of engaging in such a process—before, during, and, still now, in the early stages of after. And, objectively, I should just become a small farmer and write on the side, given the state of the world. But also, as someone for whom it took a decade of writing to identify as a “writer” and a few years more to identify as an “artist,” I do finally feel able to claim the value of witnessing, translating, storytelling, and entertaining. Without imagination and clear articulation—two traits our current strain of fascists actively reject and seek to destroy through lazy AI “innovations”—we really won’t survive our ongoing intertwined crises. Not in any form that preserves our full humanity.
At the same time, I still find “being a writer” somewhat, well, cringe. My first AWP conference left me with visceral dread at the thought of capitalizing the W in my Writerly Identity. While I connected with some fascinating people who are doing important work, the thick fog of ego, the striving in the air set off internal alarm bells. Walking twice a day through the desperation and dystopia of downtown LA—where self driving cars and food delivery robots navigate among the debris of chronic disinvestment in human life—and into the sterile environment of a convention center packed with, yes, a mix of writers from different backgrounds and walks of life, but overall a crowd characterized by the dominant presence by the professional creative class and its aspirants, to mix among cultural institutions who too often fail to meaningfully engage systems of power, was, frankly, too much for my brain to process in the moment.
When I came home from that overstimulating journey, staring down the final month or so until my thesis due date, I had to get clear about whether and why I even wanted to “be a writer.” Here’s my (painfully honest) list of what I want out of all this, as of now:
External validation (In the margins of my great-grandma’s work on her family story, which I inherited, the excavation of which makes up a great portion of my thesis and current book project, she wrote, “Is this good? Tell me,” and that, dear reader, is too real.)
An engaging intellectual life (I could have this without writing, because I have brilliant friends and loved ones, but nothing makes me read and think like having to write it down.)
Autonomy in how I work and on what (This is a broader goal, complicated to achieve, but I am addicted to the freedom of a blank page, particularly as I become brave/skilled enough to navigate its potential.)
Contributing to the sweep of culture in a small way (I know that I and the thinkers whose work I engage with have better ideas than the people in power do, and if we can’t change the way we live in meaningful ways, then what is the point?)
Making bad people look stupid (Honestly, I just get a lot of pleasure from dunking on people who suck, and sometimes writing provides an outlet for that deviant impulse.)
So, now, at the completion of this portion of my creative work, I still have a lot to consider about the future. I know I will continue to work on the book projects I started before and during this program, that I will continue to connect with other artists who share my goals of collective liberation and transformative imagination, and that I will probably vacillate back and forth about how best to do that forever. But, for now, I’m grateful to the incredible mentors I was able to work with during this time in higher education and for the time my future self bought me to focus in on deepening my understanding of language and its uses. I’m especially grateful they let me keep my cranky preface (which explores some of these same questions and the psychic horror of working as an artist during times of genocide, climate collapse and rising fascism) intact. Paying subscribers should look for a copy of that in their inbox later this week, along with a special thank you message.
Speaking of completion, I finally finished another long-running project this past week. Long-time readers most likely know me from my near-decade of work in community radio and early podcasting on my show about activism and organizing, Praxis Radio. It is the project that set me on course to start writing creative nonfiction, the project that helped me keep one foot in the door of journalism while breaking its rules about “Objectivity,” the introduction to my other career as an audio engineer, and the way that I met some of the most important people in my life.
There are over 250 surviving episodes—and yes, the one with queen Amy Goodman is one of the only lost episodes :’( —and now they are all properly archived on The Internet Archive. I’m working on getting them presentable on my website, but it feels great to be done and to have shelved the hard work of my twenties in our own contemporary Library of Alexandria.
Posting the Praxis archive online has been a fraught process. Most people in my generation (Twitter power-users and BreadTubers aside) did not so thoroughly preserve the wild swings of political development of their twenties for all to observe and consume. I went back and forth, navigating my impulse to self-censor the more embarrassing moments, slides into conspiracy thinking, poor use of language, and so on, but determined that a complete record should be just that. The impulse to self-censor, after all, has been born in me from exposure to the most pernicious dynamics of the social media era, dynamics that I’ve made a commitment to seek out and destroy within my personal life.
When I first posted the archive as its own podcast feed (before abandoning that because I could not afford to keep self-hosting that much audio at the time), I wrote a note about it, which I’ll share in part here:
“There are uncomfortable notes of history in this archive, interviews with former friends with whom I’ve fallen out, references to relationships which are no longer pleasant to recall, and bittersweet interviews with friends and comrades who are no longer with us. In addition to the personal, there are some interview inclusions that have not aged well. Rachel Dolezal is the elephant in the room, but there are also a handful of other locals who I would not include as guests or platform in any way today knowing what I now know about their beliefs and/or behavior.
Nonetheless, I’m posting every interview as a complete archive to truly reflect the history of the activist scene in Spokane and to be transparent about my own development and learning, both personally and politically. We are expected sometimes, particularly among our friends on the greater “left”, to be perfect in our knowledge, opinion, and behavior. While I support the broad movement toward accountability, and seek to implement responsible accountability practices in my own life, I don’t wish to censor the past by retroactively de-platforming any of the guests (or in some cases, my past self).”
Anyway, I’ll post a link to the archive once I have it set up in a user-friendly format on my site.
For the purposes of this little dispatch, going through all those episodes and reading the notes about what we discussed brought back memories of speaking to so many inspiring people and made me want to find a way to incorporate long-form interview back into my work. It’s more than likely that those will end up here, and perhaps writing it will make it so, eventually!
That’s all I really have for now, other than a message for any Inland Northwest readers that I’ll be back at Spokane Zine Fest at the end of the month, peddling some zines that will be familiar to you (second printing of Fry Sauce, anyone?) and some brand new (including a zine-ified version of The Big Dumb Gold Rush series, first written here). If you are a paid subscriber, you will also get a new zine by mail, as promised to you as your one tangible benefit (since all my posts here are free).
I hope that the completion of my degree will give me some time and space to consider what I want this newsletter to be in the future. While I’m still increasingly smug and satisfied about leaving social media, I would love to have some kind of dispersed “community” space online to keep in touch with people I can’t connect with in person and with those I just want to be internet friends with. And on that note, look for the next post I have cooking, tentatively titled “Are We Still Doing This?” which will include a review of this wonderful tiny book, thoughts on the rapid enshittification of Substack (the app), and the undying question, “Will the internet ever be fun again?” If you have a fun internet, you let me know about it!
Anyway, thank you for reading, and a special thanks again to my paid subscribers, who have helped in a small way to float me through the strange MFA journey, and stuck around even when posting has grown thin. I know you don’t need a vending machine filled with piping hot takes (you’re in the wrong place for that), but still, I hope to hold up my end of the bargain by continuing to write here with some consistency. <3
xoxo,
TRW