Don't fall for it!
Everybody's doing the island wave
But at no point did I think of myself as having an agenda that could be called political. Rather, my agenda, to the extent that it can even be called that, has always been to speak as honestly as possible to my own experience of negotiating and navigating a life as myself, as a self — multifarious, restless, necessarily ever changing as the many factors of merely being also change — in a world of selves.
— Carl Phillips, “Politics,” from My Trade is Mystery
Hi —
First, there are still spots available in an online writing workshop I’m teaching next month. It runs from March 4 to 21 and meets on Tuesday and Friday mornings, 9:30-11:30 Pacific. Please note that my remaining classes in 2025 are either in-person or open only to existing students, so this is the last online chance for a little while…
Speaking of in-person workshops, I’ll be teaching at Asilomar, near Monterey, from October 27 to 31. I believe this will somehow be my first(?!) time teaching in California, a state I love and, as a teenager in Oklahoma, used to fantasize about fleeing to. No complaints about my now-home state of Washington, but California — see you in October.
Third, the wise and generous Nadine Kenney Johnstone invited me to join her on her podcast Heart of the Story, and I loved our wide-ranging conversation. Thank you, Nadine.
I’ve arrived at my desk today with a strange feeling in the vicinity of my stomach. It may be that my breakfast was not sufficient padding for my multivitamin — instead of my usual two slices of toast with peanut butter, there was was only a sad and skinny little butt of bread. But I think instead it’s a sort of visceral burbling-up of the past month.
I’ve been thinking a lot about The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by the Czech novelist Milan Kundera. I should qualify this by saying that I’ve only read it once, and I was sixteen, maybe fifteen. I read it at the recommendation of a former-teacher-turned-friend who told me it was her favorite book. I am not sure what she was thinking, suggesting that I, at age young-and-dumb, read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I choose to take it as a compliment: she must have thought I could manage it? I sure tried. I pored over every word. I decided I liked it, though I didn’t understand most of it. It had a lot of sex, and because I’d just taken Twentieth-Century History, I was fascinated by the story’s political landscape: the aftermath of Stalin’s purges, the way totalitarian regimes wield power by manipulating history and erasing inconvenient facts. Here is the first page:
Reading those paragraphs, I remember feeling like I do when I read sci-fi or watch a horror movie. That anecdote, though drawn straight from Czech history, was so bizarre, so inconceivable, so antithetical to everything I understood as an American teenager in the 1990s, I experienced it as pure fiction. I remember those paragraphs for the delicious, ominous, almost sexy chill they gave me, the thrill of a terrifying story that can’t hurt you. A government executed a public figure and then airbrushed him out of a prominent photograph, like he’d never existed! As if nobody would remember! WTAF, TELL ME MORE!
I hadn’t thought about The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in decades, but that opening page came rushing to mind this week, when news broke that the ‘T’ and ‘Q’ from ‘LGBTQ’ have been deleted from the page for the Stonewall National Monument on the National Parks Service website. It wasn’t that this was so surprising; trans and non-genderconforming people were officially erased from existence a month ago, when the Trump administration announced that the United States only recognizes two sexes, male and female. But this new redaction, the way the letters on that website were straight-up disappeared — it made something newly clear, legible because of its obfuscation, the way in cartoons a puff of smoke marks someone’s sudden vanishing.
