Category Archives: Site News

ICYMI: Watch Video of Jendi Reiter and Ella Dawson Reading at the BGSQD

Autumn-time, and the living is spooky… Happy October! I’ve just returned from New York City, where I had the privilege of reading with Ella Dawson at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division. In the Q&A session, we discussed how humor and romance leaven the portrayal of healing from abuse in our new novels. Mine, of course, is Origin Story (Saddle Road Press), perfect for fans of butt sex, radical Judaism, superhero comics, and hating adoption social workers. Ella’s debut novel is But How Are You, Really (Dutton, 2024). A bisexual love story with a theme of healing from intimate partner abuse, Dawson’s witty novel is set at a 5th-year college reunion where journalist Charlotte Thorne must contend with her bullying boss, the friend group who wonders why she ghosted on them, and the lovable almost-boyfriend who got away.

Watch our video (1 hr 7 min) on the BGSQD’s YouTube channel, admire our fit, and buy our books from their store. The BGSQD is located in the LGBT Center at 208 W. 13th St. off 7th Ave. in Manhattan. (Contact them for ordering if you are not able to visit the store in person.)

 

Cat Pee Hegemony

In my capacity as cat-sitter to the literati, over Labor Day weekend I shared my home office with my orange nephews Rilke and Lorca, as well as my furry son Theodore. Much hissing and pissing ensued while the three lads jockeyed for territory. I alternated separating them into different rooms and allowing them supervised free-range interaction.

Theodore “Big Pussy” DiMeow approaches a sit-down with Li’l Ril from the Jersey Mob.

“You come to me…on the day of my daughter’s wedding…and you didn’t bring cat treats?”

From my superior (?) perspective, the boys’ squabbles seemed wasteful. Guys, I would say, you’re all cats! The most lovable creatures on earth! There are enough snuggles and kibble for all of you. Why can’t you get along?

The gingers’ dads are card-carrying members of the Communist Party. (Do they even have cards now? Probably codes in your Apple Wallet.) When I asked whether their cats needed a refresher course in communal ownership, they reminded me of the difference between personal and private property. Technically, I own the means of production, so the cats should band together to redistribute the contents of the kibble bag. Good thing they don’t have opposable thumbs.

The feline Game of Thrones taking place in my office led me to recall my unease during parts of Kamala Harris’ Democratic National Convention speech. Why does America need, or deserve, to have “the most lethal fighting force in the world”? Why should any country treat this as a prime objective or source of pride? I imagined folks in China probably listening to similar speeches from their politicians, promising that they would and should win the competition with America for global economic hegemony. The moral worth of this approach to international relations was simply assumed, as it always is in our presidential candidates’ and leaders’ speeches, Democrat or Republican.

Related to this, a Christian friend last month sent me a video of her favorite theologian, Greg Boyd, describing his “Warfare Worldview” as an ethical alternative to the idea that every event is part of God’s plan. He made a pretty convincing case that spiritual warfare between a good God and demonic forces explained the problem of evil better than the traditional theodicy that preserves God’s omnipotence by minimizing the importance of human suffering. As Ivan Karamazov famously argued, even one innocent child’s pain is too high a price to pay for “free will”.

Yet these two options felt like a false alternative imposed by an unexamined winner-take-all attitude to the cosmos, not unlike my cats’ competition to be Lord of the Office. Once we posit the existence of multiple spiritual entities, we should be able to imagine them coexisting and cooperating, not only fighting to wipe each other out. Evil and suffering could then be a consequence of the messy and imperfect business of sharing power. Intentionally malevolent spirits can be part of this worldview but you needn’t see bogeymen under every bed.

With the obvious caveat that human beings can warp any worldview to justify primitive monkey-brain status fights, I propose that there’s a connection between our cultural legacy of monotheism and American imperialism. As a survivor of abuse and gaslighting, I used to be comforted by the idea that someday everyone would agree on the same reality, on earth as in heaven. But Bible passages anticipating Jesus as sole acknowledged ruler of the earth hit me differently in this era of resurgent Christian nationalism.

Richard Beck’s trenchant essay “Bidenism Abroad” in New Left Review (March/April 2024) clarified why the Democrats’ version of American supremacy troubled me so much. Beck critiques how the foreign policy establishment prioritizes competing for superpower status with China even though this leads to decisions that could doom the planet for us all, like trade restrictions on Chinese-made electric cars and semiconductor technology. The Biden administration was caught off guard by October 7, and continues to enable the genocide in Gaza, because they didn’t want the Middle East to distract them from this objective. The problem is that our role in this human rights catastrophe destroys whatever remaining claim we had to deserve world leadership. Beck concludes:

Biden didn’t just promise to ensure that America’s economy remains the world’s largest, or that America’s military remains the world’s strongest. He promised to do what Giovanni Arrighi said is required of a hegemon in The Long Twentieth Century. Hegemonic power, Arrighi wrote, is ‘the power associated with dominance expanded by the exercise of “intellectual and moral leadership”’. What distinguishes it from its non-hegemonic competitors is that only the hegemon can plausibly claim to be advancing global interests other than its own. ‘The claim of the dominant group to represent the general interest is always more or less fraudulent’, Arrighi writes. ‘Nevertheless . . . we shall speak of hegemony only when the claim is at least partly true and adds something to the power of the dominant group’.

American hegemony certainly lives on for now in Europe, where compliant nato allies continue to fall over one another in their rush to hollow out social services and buy American arms. And the us may be able to retain economic dominance in a relative sense even if it never manages to reverse the slowdown in global growth, so long as its own economic power weakens less than that of its rivals. But after Gaza, America can no longer credibly claim global ‘hegemony’ in Arrighi’s sense. Biden’s support for Israel, motivated both by strategic considerations and what appears to be a real inability on his part to see Palestinians as fully human, flies in the face of both American and global public opinion. Europe may hold on to America’s coattails for a while yet, but in the rest of the world, continued American supremacy will be based primarily on coercion. Arrighi identified the catastrophe of America’s invasion of Iraq as the turning point: ‘The unravelling of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century’, he wrote, ‘has for all practical purposes resulted in the terminal crisis of us hegemony—that is, in its transformation into mere domination’. If it is true that Iraq marked the point at which American hegemony actually changed into domination, then perhaps Gaza marks the point at which Americans finally realized it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still voting for Harris in November, but I am not joining a cult of personality around any politician. Hoping for a political savior, be it a nation or a president, is part of the winner-take-all worldview that got us into this mess.

I’ll close with this Beatitudes hot take by singer Jon Guerra, “American Gospel”. Hat tip to historian James R. Moore for the link.

Cummington Fair Blue Ribbon!

They’re strawberries. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Best in show! My poem “Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair” won first prize in the 2024 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award for LGBTQ Poetry. You can read this poem and my finalist poem “Why the Sunrise Is Trans” in their online journal ArLiJo, Issue #201.

The Cummington Fair is a real event held the weekend before Labor Day in the Western Massachusetts town of Cummington, also home to the Cummington Creamery, I kid you not. It’s a great old-fashioned country fair with an amateur art exhibit, antique cars, midway rides, a petting zoo, and great Polish food. One year they had an acrobat who took breathtaking dives from a tall metal pole, telling the story of his sobriety journey between feats. Lest I be accused of smuttifying this family event, the Japanese dumpling vendors at the Nom Nom Hut this year had to wear shirts saying “Put our balls in your mouth”.

I wrote this poem after the 2023 fair, where they did hold a Golden Wedding Award contest for couples (presumably straight) married 50+ years. The country singer covering “Gentle on My Mind” was also real, though I can’t recall her band’s name. Around this time, my mom’s lesbian movie club was on a Bloomsbury Group kick. We saw the 2018 film “Vita and Virginia” followed by the 1990 miniseries “Portrait of a Marriage”, which was based on Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson’s book of the same name. For those who don’t know, chaotic bisexual novelist Vita was married to British diplomat and moderately discreet homosexual Harold Nicolson. Apparently they were deeply devoted to each other and found a way to express their sexual complexity while maintaining a strong partnership. I was yearning to make some space for this kind of marriage to be recognized as praiseworthy, or at least possible.

Vita Sackville-West Wins the Golden Wedding Award at the Cummington Fair

An optimistic alto covers Gentle on My Mind

in the bandshell by the chicken barn.
Her calves chunk-chunk in floral-stitched boots.
Is the idea of a woman less demanding than her pussy?
Twinned oxen yoked to concrete

blocks pull through dust
to cheers. Desire anything

because it’s in front of you,
soap, mortgages, and dyed quartz flowers
sold from white wooden stalls

at the bottom of the hill. Ideas don’t tire,
rub themselves to rash, or bleed like roast beef dinner
that’s promised as a prize over the loudspeaker

to the best couple fifty-plus years wed.
Man and woman is understood
by the burlap-faced leaders of the two-step, gently
resting their chins on their wives’ tucked curls.

Slow, slow. The alto swings
long molasses hair back from her cheeky face
singing that not-like-other-girls song.

The oxen win a ribbon. The boy who hits
the bell with the hammer wins a ticket to do it again.
His mother sticks her face into a cream puff
the way Vita would have

tongued Virginia Woolf’s cunt. To be pleasant
memory, to be covered in art,
don’t cry at leavings. Blame

is a trash barrel of single-use knives.
Ideas are insatiable. Vita and Harold died

one anniversary short of golden,
she with her tea cakes, he with his Persian boys.

And Virginia, when she weighed down her pockets
with tickets for the final carousel,

what vows held her up so long?

American Eclipse

We had a fine view of the total solar eclipse on April 8 from the terrace of my best friend’s house in Buffalo. The clouds came and went, giving us hints of the drama behind them. Watching the sun’s disc shrink to a crescent through our eclipse glasses was awe-inspiring enough, but then when the cloud cover was just right, we could see the phenomenon in context with the naked eye. Here’s the sun coming back:

In an age when one can instantly retrieve high-resolution images of nature’s most dramatic sights, one can underestimate the power of being physically present. Sure, there are clearer photos on the Internet, but nothing compares to experiencing a historic moment with the people you love. The energetic resonance of sudden darkness at mid-day, or of the waters thundering over Niagara Falls at the golden hour, can’t be captured by our eyes alone.

Political analyst Sarah Kendzior expressed this eloquently in her latest Substack post, “The Path of Totality”. Sarah’s work is remarkable because she chronicles the ancient and imperiled beauty of the American landscape alongside our slide toward totalitarianism, holding the terrible alongside the sublime, not to cancel each other out, but to give us reasons to keep fighting.

We look to the skies because everyone on earth is lying. We look to an eclipse because it shows deception clearly. Here are how the pieces fit together, here is how fast darkness can come, and here is how fast it can depart. The world is not changed when it is over — but you are.

Sometimes, when people talk about the apocalypse, I wonder if we are already in hell, and days like this are glimpses of the heaven we squandered. That we had everything we needed and lost it in lust for lesser things. And I wonder how to get heaven back.

Subscribe to Sarah’s Substack. It’s free!

The confluence of the celestial and the political was on my mind in 2017, the last time we had a solar eclipse visible in the U.S., when I got the idea for the poem below. We had just returned from NecronomiCon, the cosmic horror fan convention. The indifference of the Elder Gods seemed less scary than the hatred brought into the open by a Trump presidency. The poem is reprinted from my book Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022).

93 Minutes of Darkness

Do not call up that which you cannot put down.
— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”

I

In Liberty, Greenville, Idaho Falls,
on summer-sprinkled lawns, in toolsheds
fumed with engine tinkering,
fathers hold nails in their mouths
building a viewing box.

In Leavenworth, Sweet Home, the other Cleveland,
in flour and mayonnaise kitchens,
when the moon is new
as a dark neighbor, when the radio
predicts the bodies’ line-up,
mothers clip out eye-holes.

From Excelsior Springs to Independence,
schoolchildren cover their faces
with official sunshades,
crayon the textbook pathway
by which their allotment of day
will soon be occluded.

YOU MUST BE IN THE SHADED BAND
(the “Path of Totality”)
TO SEE TOTALITY FROM SOUTH CAROLINA!

Nine in Charleston
will not see,
above the brooding steeple
of Mother Emanuel, the moon
drape a black veil over the sun’s church hat.

Marse Robert, the Marble Man,
will not see
the daytime shadow graze
his cracked-off pedestal
like a misfired Union minié ball.

And the lost cause’s buzz-cut acolytes
will not see,
in Charlottesville, any natural darkness
in the heavens
their torches smoke across.

You want to be somewhere in the dark band
on eclipse day!

II

Howard you thirsty boy
fascinated by the crumbling
foundations of Providence
the despised intertwining
of suckered flesh
through your dreams’ merciless orbits

Howard through the night rubbing
gravestones to reconstruct
origin and fall
scratching tales of the old man’s portrait
that possesses his weak-willed bloodchild
what a privilege to be horrified
by knowing your ancestors

Howard when the stars are right
will the earth be flooded
like a bursting mind
with memories of what oozed, invaded, flopped
in the infant darkness
will the slattern’s offspring with a god
colored invisible to human eyes
cry for its father on Federal Hill?

III

We’re kind of prepared
for the end of days here in Providence:
wearing lobsters on our hats,
cracking jokes about the democratic
maw of omnivorous Dagon.
It’s the birthday of the creator
of our universe, who is dead,
his stomach eaten
by its own cells, eighty years past.

South of us, starched ghosts
peering out through the masks
of great-grandfathers’ wars
scream “You will not replace us” to the sea
of earth-dark faces
who turned the soil without owning it,
as the rain does.

We’re north-northeast from the shadow
that will slice the map tomorrow,
what the news is calling
American eclipse. City of hills,
city where a role-play gamer’s dice
could tumble miles before hitting the tidal river
once laden with trade ships
of oysters, rum, and slaves.

What the news is calling
a rise in temperature.

We’re eating breakfast
in a grand ballroom, plasma of powdered eggs
on every plate while a black-hooded choir
sings monster parodies of tunes
our bodies still half believe,
about being rescued when we’re gone.

What the news is calling
our president. White headlights sweep the crowd.
A praying woman crumples
under aimed wheels, as a coastline slips
beneath lapping warmth.
The moon sweeps closer to the sun.

In Memoriam: The Poet Spiel

Friend of the blog Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel passed away on March 1 at the age of 82. In recent years he had suffered from vascular dementia, though he remained active with his creative work. His most recent major publication was the retrospective anthology of his visual art and writing, Revealing Self in Pictures and Words (2018). He is survived by his longtime partner, Paul Welch.

Spiel was a prolific, irreverent, multi-genre artist whose oeuvre included poetry of gay male love, lust, and childhood trauma; vivid animal prints and graphic designs inspired by his travels in Africa; and gritty stories about trailer-park elders and war veterans. His aesthetic could be shocking, satirical, or grotesque, but these techniques were always directed at inspiring empathy for the downtrodden and outrage about American inequality.

The bio he provided for a 2022 retrospective at the Sangre de Cristo Arts and Conference Center in his native Pueblo, CO reads:

Internationally published artist/author Tom Taylor aka The Poet SPIEL (b. 1941) savors the past, dares the future, swallows the present; steady hand, open heart, countercultural, passionate, sardonic, sometimes absurd.

As a child, the artist’s temperament was already edgy and precocious. For survival in the farm world he’d fallen heir to, making art allowed him to discover that he could freely create his personal child-view of a complicated world where everyone was bigger and smarter than he. Amidst his 8th decade on earth, coping with losses associated with predementia, art is the friend which has withstood the petty and the foolish, the graceful, the garish, and the grand of a diverse career in the arts.

As a child, Taylor discovered he could make a sunny picture, a sad picture or a pretend picture. He could define the ME of that moment—happily wishful, pissed off, and lonely, hungry for something he did not know. Making art, as work, as play, as sustenance and medication, has rescued him from drowning in the chaos of his troubled and hungry mind, destined to express the manic-depressive disorder he’d inherited from his mother’s blood. A family curse, indeed; but one with coping tools he’s acquired through introspection and decades of talk therapy so he is able to work it through by painting or writing it’s discomfort to more easily recognize it, then, better cope with its horrors. It’s taken him a lifelong pursuit to become reasonably competent at understanding why he is the way he is and how to accept his Self.

Taylor considers making art to be his best medicine and his safe place.

I was honored to feature Spiel’s artwork on the cover and section title pages of my most recent poetry book, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022). He enthusiastically accepted me into the brotherhood of queer male writers. Here’s some bonus art that didn’t make it into the book.

Enjoy these highlights from the poetry he’s shared at Reiter’s Block over the years. “birdchild” was his favorite among his many poems. I have a soft spot for “queers for dinner”.

“a suite of dirty pictures”

“The Baptism” and “Touching”

“birdchild” and “witness”

“Absent Member”

“queers for dinner”

“Reading ‘Sexuality Beyond Consent’ with My Cat” and Other Recent Publications

Sexuality Beyond Consent

It is I, your favorite groomer, and Theodore “Big Pussy” Cavalieri DiMeow, here to share my latest publications!

My poems “Satisfaction” and “Reading ‘Sexuality Beyond Consent’ with My Cat” were published in Action, Spectacle (Winter 2023). I’m honored to share space in this issue with dozens of fine poets including Denise Duhamel, Koss, Rodrigo Toscano, and Eliot Khalil Wilson.

Reading “Sexuality Beyond Consent” with My Cat

the polymorphously perverse nips at my heels.
no, Theodore! in the fishbowl
of the office, the analyst dabbles

a claw in slippery waters. Dr. Saketopoulou:
affirmative consent assumes a rational subject
who doesn’t tear open
bags of raw chicken, who knows what’ll make him sick
of his childhood. Theodore: rrrrr

part-object, infantile desire attaches to feet
like the old ball-n-chain
they taught us was love and kittens.
it’s all over the skin like fur,
attachment’s barbed tongue
supposed to clean us
of saying Yes to No. Theodore,

down! is not a safeword
but a shot we both
didn’t see coming, the future’s needle
that’ll make you perfectly

compliant in my arms. more and more and more
says Dr. Saketopoulou. who wants to eat my eyeballs
when i die. who’s a good boy.

****

In other news, two poems from my Waste-Management Land series about “The Sopranos” appeared in Lammergeier, Issue 16 (Winter 2023): “Kill Your Darlings” (for Christopher Moltisanti) and “Commendatore” (for Tony Soprano). This issue’s theme was “Party at the End of the World,” because the magazine is going on hiatus. A lammergeier is a bird that eats bones–something that Tony and his crew could have used when disposing of bodies at Satriale’s Pork Shop! The magazine also ran an interview with me as their featured poet for this issue.

Jacqueline Boucher: Your poems are ekphrastic interactions with The Sopranos. How did you arrive at The Sopranos as source material? What drew you to this as a poetic project?

Jendi Reiter: Where else is a short, balding, oversexed trans man with a hot temper and mommy issues going to find himself represented on television? Every one of those New Jersey goombahs is a dad bod style icon…

…Mafia stories are a more colorful, but not really exceptional, illustration of the idolatry that permeates human society. Every institution, if we’re not careful, ends up perpetuating itself at the expense of its members’ souls and happiness. That institution could be religion, the family, the nation, the workplace — anything we mythologize in order to justify sacrificing people to it. I like to say that The Crown is just The Sopranos with posher accents.

Before I transitioned, I thought I would be a David Bowie gay or an Errol Flynn as Robin Hood gay. As testosterone did its work, I turned into George Costanza from Seinfeld instead. Is it terrible to say I learned how to perform masculinity from The Sopranos? Not the sexism or violence, but a certain aesthetic, flamboyant without being effete, not young or pretty but confident in my power. Walk like Tony, dress like Silvio, be as loyal a husband as Johnny Sack. And try not to get pushed overboard from a yacht.

Read the whole interview, and find out what my favorite bone is, here.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2023

I finally feel cuter than my cat. Photo by Ezra Autumn Wilde; shirt by Robert Graham; body by Pioneer Valley Plastic Surgery.

2023 was another year of huge spiritual and material shifts. I am now a certified Priest of Witchcraft, having completed Year Two of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School in September. I manifested the three big things I’ve been working towards for years: top surgery, adopting my own cat, and a publisher for my second novel, Origin Story, which will be out from Saddle Road Press this summer. In case you missed it, my essay “Double Incision Diary” in Solstice Lit Mag describes how my witchcraft practice made my surgery a sacred experience.

Theodore “Big Pussy” Cavalieri DiMeow lives for snacks.

Our family visited Los Angeles, Cape Cod, Boston, and New York City this year. Shane has become the star pupil at Hilltown Sled Dogs, a camp where young people learn to train Alaskan Huskies. I wish they operated a junior high school! Shane’s other happy place is Home Depot. He is teaching me how to use a leaf blower and a power drill.

Adam and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary with tickets to Barns Courtney‘s rock concert at Irving Plaza in Manhattan. It was a Dionysian experience, with the energy of a pagan religious revival. We didn’t go in the mosh pit, though.

I did not publish many poems this year, but I wrote a lot of weird new ones about butts. There’s still time to sponsor me for 30 Poems in November. We raised over $75,000 for immigrant literacy and job-training programs at the Center for New Americans! I achieved my personal goals of raising $500, writing 30 poems, and avoiding my novel.

Some books that made an impact on me this year:

Psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou’s provocative book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York University Press, 2023) restores mystery and risk to our encounters with one another through limit-pushing sex or controversial art. Saketopoulou proposes that we should not pathologize trauma survivors for seeking out states of “overwhelm”. Wounds have an erotic charge, and going towards this taboo experience can free up our energy for new ways of processing what cannot be cured. It’s liberating to acknowledge that there’s no undamaged state to get back to, because then we can move forward without so much fear of contamination–what she calls “traumatophobia,” or the goal of avoiding triggers at all costs. Therapists are not immune from pushing a patient toward a tidy but illusory closure because of their own discomfort with witnessing trauma.

In fiction, I’m currently enjoying The Best Mystery Stories of the Year: 2021, guest-edited by Lee Child. This series curated by Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Bookshop has been hit-or-miss for me, with some years’ entries stuffed with sad literary stories with a crime in them, rather than real whodunits. This edition will satisfy fans of old-school detection, and also has a good gender balance of protagonists and writers. If you’re feeling more literary, check out King of the Armadillos (Macmillan, 2023) by my fellow St. Ann’s School alum Wendy Chin-Tanner. Based on her father’s life story, this bittersweet novel follows a Chinese immigrant teen in the 1950s who’s sent to a leprosy hospital in Louisiana, and his father and brother left behind in Brooklyn, who must balance traditional family duties with the forbidden loves offered by the freedom and anonymity of America.

2023 was an encouraging year to be an old guy. Henry Kissinger died at 100, bringing joy to the world. Charles III was finally crowned at 75, with Camilla by his side. The guy paid his dues. But “The Crown” is still boring since Princess Di is gone.

“And now, at last, I shall be King of Engl–“

Introducing Theodore DiMeow!

Please give a warm welcome to my new son, Theodore “Big Pussy” Cavalieri DiMeow!

Theo is a quiet but inquisitive young fellow, somewhere between 1 1/2 to 3 years old. He greets everyone with enthusiastic head-rubs. A stray living with a feral cat colony, he was rescued by the good folks at Animal Friends of Connecticut. I went down there for a different cat I saw on Petfinder, but as soon as I met this little guy, he reached out his paw and patted me on the arm. When I was about to walk away, he grabbed my shirt front with his claws. It was destiny!

“Big Pussy” and the DiMeo crime family are “Sopranos” references, of course. “Cavalieri” means knight in Italian, as my name, Reiter, does in German. Theodore was the name they gave him at the shelter. It suits him. He is a gift of God.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2022

A highly eventful year on the Block!

Made My Bones: My third full-length poetry collection, Made Man, was published in March by Little Red Tree, with cover and interior artwork by friend-of-the-Block Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel. Solstice Lit Mag calls it “a comitragic, day-glo accented, culture-hopping, snort-inducing, gender-interrogating rollercoaster of a ride.” The American Library Association’s Rainbow Round Table says, “A mix of somber moments and charming wit, Reiter’s collection makes space for humor in the maelstrom of navigating gendered experiences.” Made Man was included in Q Spirit’s list of Top LGBTQ Christian Books for 2022 and was the subject of an essay on later-in-life transition by J Brooke at Electric Literature.

Persia Marie says, “The cover feels nice to rub my whiskers against.”

Reading from Made Man at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Shirt by RSVLTS; suit by Hart Schaffner & Marx; body by Valley Medical Group Endocrinology.

Big Pussy: I turned my home office into a cat AirBnB for my friends’ fur babies when they go on vacation. The shy and regal Persia Marie is the child of artist and writer Jane Morrison. Check out her website for sublime Greek landscapes, caricatures, portraits and more. Ginger rascals Lorca and Rilke belong to author Michael Bondhus and poet/photographer Kevin Hinkle. If you have a reasonably well-behaved cat that you are willing to deliver and pick up in Northampton, get in touch with Uncle Jendi!

Ginny Sack Is Having a 90-Pound Mole Taken Off Her Ass: The impossible has become possible. In March I had a consultation for top surgery. My surgery date is March 23, 2023. As soon as I can lift my arms again, expect this blog to show way too many pictures of my pepperoni nipples.

My Crew: I celebrated my 50th birthday this July by meeting a dear friend in person for the first time. Friend-of-the-Block Richard Jackson, a/k/a the poet “Conway” from my Prison Letters series, visited us with his loving partner Vanity. We were devastated to learn that Van passed away in a motorcycle accident over Thanksgiving weekend.

Nostradamus and Notre Dame: I graduated from Year One of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School. Year Two began this past September. My spellcraft is going a lot better, now that I figured out that I was trying to light the incense holder disk instead of the cone.

Waste Management: Why throw anything out when you can glue it together? I made a lot of collage greeting cards this year.

John Ollom and I will be teaching a multimedia workshop at TransHealth Northampton on May 7. We’ll use collage, bodywork, improvised movement, and journaling to guide participants on a journey of gender self-discovery.

You Know Who Had an Arc? Noah: An embarrassment of riches for best books of the year, as I read three novels that would have been #1 on my list, not just for the year, but in general.

Tara Isabella Burton’s sapphic boarding-school novel The World Cannot Give shows idealistic teens getting their crushes all mixed up with their yearnings for transcendence. The author understands, and eventually the protagonist does too, that sincere passions with life-and-death stakes can coexist with a highly performative, aestheticized selfhood. In other words, you might say it’s a Catholic (or Anglican) book, as well as a very queer one, in that ritual and artifice are the container for authenticity rather than its opposite.

Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a hard-science thriller set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind’s aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. On a deeper level, it’s a dramatization of different philosophies of consciousness, in which the impossibility of truly seeing through another’s eyes becomes an invitation to rekindle empathy and wonder.

GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot imagines what would happen if Baba Yaga, the witch of Eastern European folklore (and patron saint of this blog), had American Jewish descendants who inherited her chicken-legged hut. The Yaga siblings–a puppeteer with the power to bring objects to life, and a street performer and thief who can uncannily imitate anyone he meets–find themselves charged with the task of laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. Don’t miss the chance to see Nethercott perform a puppet show dramatizing sections from her book. Join her mailing list to find out tour dates.

Bro time with Shane at the Big E!