Category Archives: Writer and Reader

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2025

2025: The year I made a profit from my poetry.

Whew, 2025. One day in your courts is like unto a thousand years…and not in a fun way.

I am determined to live my best life until I’m hauled off to the transgender re-education camp. More cats, more sex, more shiny things. As a friend said, darkly, it’s better to be visible so they’ll notice when we’ve been disappeared.

This year I discovered the life-changing magic of not writing a novel. I made a lot of collage art from erotic magazines, one example of which will be on the cover of Introvert Pervert, my poetry collection forthcoming from The Word Works in this spring. Come to our book launch at the AWP Conference in Baltimore, 5:30 PM on Friday, March 6.

Some of my perverted poems received a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and an award from the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. I also spoke on a panel about genderqueer poetry at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in “Witch City” (Salem), and taught collage art and Tarot workshops at Easton Mountain. In September, I began Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School, shamanic and shadow work. I took my erotic magic to a new level at a week-long Body Electric retreat.

We’ve had an unprecedented flourishing of family connections this year with people we’re actually related to. What a surreal, wonderful experience to have dinner over Thanksgiving weekend with my husband and son, my stepmom, my dad and my mom-of-choice Roberta (a/k/a my late mother’s two exes). We also had festive meals with my cousins-in-law and my maternal first cousin’s family.

We look more alike than ever!

The “Ice Cream Museum” in Soho was a rip-off but I loved the decor.

The Young Master is in 8th grade. He is obsessed with all things Apple and AI-related. His new hobbies are mixing song transitions on his Brazilian phonk playlists, and making the colored lights in his room synchronize with the music. He talked me into getting an Apple Watch which I like more than I expected. I’d held out because it seemed like a tool of the surveillance state, but that’s inescapable anyway, so I might as well feel like Dick Tracy and answer phone calls by shouting at my wrist.

This will be the last Reiter’s Block post in its current format. Early next year, JendiReiter.com will relaunch with a new design from our friends at Tunnel 7. No more creaky WordPress site! Instead of a blog, Reiter’s Block will eventually reappear as a free Substack newsletter. The old posts will be archived on the new website. Thank you for following my 19-year journey on this site from angry Anglican lady to transsexual socialist witch. Come fight fascism with me in 2026!

THEODORE!!

December Links Roundup: Trans of Green Gables

The Last Round-Up (1934) - IMDb

Last one of the year! Has 2025 seemed to anyone else like it lasted 1,000 years?

Anne of Green Gables fans have been queering the title character’s passionate friendship with bestie Diana for a long time, but do you know about her genderqueer son Walter? In this essay at the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s CBC Arts website, “In Anne of Green Gables, I found the kindred spirits and queer prophets I needed,” Julia Smeaton takes a deep dive into the sequels.

Just like Anne, Walter was creative, upstanding and judged for being overly sensitive to both beauty and horror.

To the characters in 1900s Prince Edward Island, Walter’s unconventional masculinity was a problem that needed fixing. Anne didn’t see it that way, and it seemed Montgomery didn’t either.

As an imaginative and sneakily morbid kid, I saw myself in Anne’s fevered affection for Diana Barry and related to her fear that growing up would irreparably change their friendship. I liked that she kept Gilbert hanging for so long, even when society pressured her to accept his proposal.

Similarly, Una Meredith’s love for Walter is unrequited, and he simply doesn’t grow out of his passion for poetry. When he confesses to his younger sister that he feels he should’ve been born a girl, I was reminded of Anne arriving at Green Gables when the Cuthberts were expecting a boy…

…In the spring of 1942, Montgomery wrote The Blythes Are Quoted — a disturbing, bleak collection of short stories, poetry and dialogue involving murder, infidelity, antipathy and deception.

One of the lighter stories, The Cheated Child, set when the Blythe children are still young, is about a neglected orphan named Pat who feels a “strange kinship” with Walter. Pat’s aunt does not approve of the boys’ friendship and calls Walter a sissy. Pat, in turn, feels “that he loved Walter Blythe with all his heart.”

Walter was my favorite character in the later, lesser-known books about Anne’s children. I was crushed when he died in World War I at the end of Rilla of Ingleside, a weak entry in the series (in my opinion) because of its advocacy for that war. Author L.M. Montgomery had a complex life with personal tragedies and mental health struggles, leading her to create those sensitive outsider characters that we love. Her prolific fiction is touched with a realistic darkness alongside its cozy settings and sentimental endings.

I think Walter Blythe would have appreciated this poetic fable about the short life of the Luna moth, “Seven Nights’ Flight,” written by Ann Collins on her blog Microseasons. I learned from this piece that the moth only has a week to live and find a mate once it emerges from the chrysalis.

Moth cannot fly. He hangs beneath a Hickory leaf, feeling time bearing down on him the way a candle consumes its own height. His caterpillar hunger still churns, but he has no mouth now. No means to add one more hour to his life. The fuse continues to burn, even at rest.

Beneath his leafy shelter, beetles climb up from the wet darkness. They’ve come to keep vigil with him. Moth of Green Fire, they ask, why do you burn without moving?

My wings only know how to spend themselves, he answers. And Beetles understand.

They also have invisible work—love that no one counts.

Laia Asieo Odo’s story “Where Memory Meets the Sea” was reprinted at Electric Literature from the new anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. In this painful but uplifting story, citizens of a war-torn country are made to forget their lost loved ones and the violence that took them, but recover the knowledge temporarily when they are in the water. Going to the sea becomes an act of defiance and faith. The conceit reminded me of how Israel cuts off Palestinians’ access to the sea, preventing them from catching fish for food and livelihood, at the same time as opponents of the genocide are being silenced by false accusations of antisemitism.

On that note, I appreciated Josina Manu Maltzman’s essay “Protective Presence in the West Bank,” which won the Plentitudes Prize for Nonfiction. The author was part of a team of Jewish volunteers shielding Palestinian shepherds from abuse by Israeli soldiers in Masafer Yatta.

This shepherd and his brother Mosab live on the edge of the village, closest to the encroaching Israeli settlement Ma’on. I’ve spent many hours with Mosab. His accounts are disturbing. Around ten years ago the settlers laid out poison in the fields where he grazes his sheep, killing many, along with wild animals who also ate the poison. Then last year, settlers broke all the legs of the sheep in his neighbor’s flock, killing them. This finally drove out his neighbor. One settler told Mosab, “If I see someone open the gate to your sheep, I will kill them all.”

…This whole area of Masafer Yatta is only about twelve square miles and is comprised of twenty Palestinian villages. The region is considered Area C, which means that Israel has legal jurisdiction over it. Near the end of 1999, Masafer Yatta was declared a closed military zone and Israel began imposing eviction orders to all the families who had been there for generations. At the same time, Israeli settlements—open only to Jews and illegal under international law—began expanding in the closed area.

The residents of Masafer Yatta have banded together to fight the eviction in the courts, and to try to stave off settler expansion into their lands by refusing to leave. During this over-twenty-year-long court battle, the residents have been denied permission to build on their lands: no wells, no additions, no improvements. The Israeli military regularly issues demolition orders on people’s homes, livestock pens, solar panels—anything that is part of day-to-day living for this community’s way of life—while at the same time settlements with pools and playgrounds grow and grow.

With the Epstein Files in the news, Jewish Currents re-shared this 2019 article by Ari M. Brostoff and Noah Kulwin, “The Right Kind of Continuity: Jeffrey Epstein and the sexual politics of Jewish philanthropy”. Their thesis is that mainstream American Jewish nonprofits, largely male-led, have emphasized a patriarchal, pro-natalist kind of intergenerational Jewish continuity. Such organizations are then not well-positioned to call out sexism among their big donors: “the Jewish philanthropic world’s own ongoing attempts to engineer reproductive behavior within the community have deeply stultified its sexual politics.” I learned from this article that Victoria’s Secret founder Leslie Wexner was both a major Jewish philanthropist and a close associate of Epstein.

The demographer Steven M. Cohen, who produced countless statistical reports on the community at the behest of the donor class, liked to put it bluntly: if institutions wanted American Jewish life to continue, they would have to prioritize the goals of “creating more Jewish marriages and filling more Jewish baby carriages.”

Feminist critiques of continuity discourse have become increasingly audible within the mainstream Jewish world, intensifying last year after Cohen himself was accused of serial sexual harassment. “How surprised can we be that a man whose entire worldview hinged on women having more babies turned out to have no respect for women when it came to personal sexual boundaries?” the writer Rokhl Kafrissen asked in the Forward.

Meanwhile, D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield have a relevant series on their blog Strongwilled about the similarities between Christian purity culture and pedophiles’ self-justifying belief systems.

On her Substack, Feminist Killjoys, philosopher Sara Ahmed returned to a fairy tale that has become iconic for her work, “The Willful Child” by the Brothers Grimm. This Teutonic authoritarian fable tells of a child who was so disobedient that her dead hand reached out of her grave and would not rest until her mother had given her hand the beating she deserved. Ahmed has reclaimed this story as an image of continuing to protest injustice.

The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up, acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part.

Willfulness involves persistence in the face of having been brought down, where simply to “keep going” or to “keep coming up” is to be stubborn and obstinate.

Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience.

That’s why there is nothing mere about persistence.

The most persistent people in my email inbox don’t actually exist. Humorist Daniel Lavery speaks for me when he writes, “The Worst Part About Publishing a Book in 2025 Is the New Kind of Spam.” AI has made it possible for bad actors to turn out fake book club solicitations that momentarily raise your hopes that someone read your book:

Once I see the email is signed “Curator Miracle,” sent from “el*************@***il.com,” or contains a sentence like “It’s both a celebration and a diagnosis of community” I know where I’m at, of course, but those five seconds make all the difference in the world. I don’t yet have a protective spam filter for someone emailing me to say that they just reread something of mine. It’s not that AI has made spam emails significantly better, but they do read significantly differently, especially at first glance, and it’s taking me just long enough to catch on that I’m reliably devastated a few times a week.

And they’re negging me! They’re hinting darkly about how other people just don’t understand Women’s Hotel, which has led them to feel sorry for me and want to unleash their bot army (of “40 new, deeply considered responses which reframe how readers engaged with the work”)…

And now, here are some good poems and stories that I’m pretty sure came from real human brains.

The great and powerful Ariana Reines, occultist and feminist poet, has a poem from her newest collection The Rose (Graywolf Press, 2025) at Poetry Daily, “The Hanged Man”:

After lust comes meditation
After love, hallucination

Not all of us seek the same thing
When we kneel here, & “that has to be

Okay”
Like when I fisted X at the mini golf

Course at Mount Sodom campground
Which he chose, of course, for its name
…

I loved the formal inventiveness of “Poem Wedged into the Brittlebush or Poem That Eats What Happened” by Anna Flores, a prizewinner at Frontier Poetry. She uses repetition to break down and rewrite the story of her brother’s death in battle, mimicking how the bereaved family might obsessively pick apart a memory to make sense of it, in vain.

At The Masters Review, Annesha Mitha’s short story “Valedictorian” depicts a 14-year-old Indian girl’s self-initiation into the contradictions of womanhood, with a decision that brings her closer to understanding her traditional mother, while opening a fault line between herself and her best friend. The competitiveness and uncomfortable power differentials between the girls felt really true to my experience of friendship at that age.

The Missouri Review’s online Blast featured these humorous and angsty flash pieces from Crockett Doob, “Social Media Proxy” and “Lukewarm Mess”. A taste of the latter:

Three guys sitting around a table, talking about our love lives. We’d just left a group therapy about this and had been encouraged to bond after.

So here we were, bonding away, sitting in a cafeteria-like restaurant in Brooklyn, waiting for our food.

The new guy sat across from us. He was small, muscular, wearing a tank top to show off his arms. He told us about his ex, his heartbreak, how he was still in touch with her even though she was on another continent.

“I’m back on the apps,” he said. “But the apps suck.”

This was exactly what I feared when I started going to these groups: sitting in dark restaurants, listening to musclemen complain about the apps.

But who was I to judge? Just because I didn’t do the apps, I was no better. I was in my own pickle.

I also recommend these Missouri Review Poems of the Week by Bruce Bond, “Incursions of Light 13 and 14”.

Finally, enjoy Ally Ang’s “Autoerotic Abecedarian,” an alliterative amazement.

…Beneath the shawl of
darkness, I shape my flesh like a block of clay, all its
excess overflowing onto the sheets. The smooth
flat landscape of my chest ballooning with breath, teeth
grinding like derelict machinery. In the slick heat of
here, I become my self: an embodiment of purest
instinct.

 

October Links Roundup: Act Like It Matters

Spooky season is upon us, somewhat redundantly when every day is terrifying. Pumpkin spice dictatorship, anyone? I’ll take mine to go.

Your boi was interviewed on the queer storytelling site I’m From Driftwood, an archive of short videos by LGBTQ folks talking about pivotal moments in their lives. Watch me talk about becoming Mommy-Man in “Adoption, Transition, and Becoming Whole”. (Shirt by RSVLTS because Facebook clothing ads know me better than I know myself.) These guys were super fun to work with. Get in touch with them if you have a story to tell.

On the Button Poetry channel on YouTube, Ethan Smith’s poem “A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be” shows kindness towards those parts that can be hard to integrate after transition.

A.T. Steel won the 2025 Narrative Prize for “Honey Buns and Cream Soda in the Stairwell,” the sad but defiant story of a young trans woman on the streets of Harlem in 1991. You will need to create a free account at Narrative Magazine to read it.

I have had the pleasure of meeting Solstice Lit Mag poetry editor Robbie Gamble on several occasions. One would not suspect that this modest man with a history of activism for immigrants was the heir to the Procter & Gamble dynasty, as he chronicles in the poem “Gamble Patrilineage” in The Nomad. A short narrative poem with the scope of a 19th-century novel, it reckons with the racist and eugenicist history that many American fortunes share, but in a gentle rather than shrill way.

In the Guardian, this vivid excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me describes a childhood of wild outdoor exploration and emotional neglect, as the author’s mother burned herself out trying to provide secure housing for the family during political upheaval. Now I’m eager to read her books. I’ve gotten interested in Indian literature lately, and am struck by how little we were taught about non-European history in my junior high and high school classes. I feel like a 12-year-old again, reading isolated novels without cultural context and missing so much of the significance of the action.

At her Substack twenty-first century demoniac, Helena Aeberli gives us another reason to hate AI: it can take revenge porn to another level by making realistic deepfakes of any woman who dares to speak out online.

Technologies like AI are changing the way we relate to one another. They are exacerbating the worst parts of human nature and society. When social media becomes a first-person shooter game and personalised algorithms deliver your interests on a platter, anything goes. The nonconsensual use of generative AI to doctor women’s images is just the beginning. The end point of individualism is the belief that only you exist. Everyone else is just an NPC.

As AI becomes more humanlike, albeit in a meaningless, surface-level sense, and as people come to regard it as such, the reverse is also true. People come to see each other more like AI, approaching them with an eye to utility. We regard those we encounter online more like characters than people, one-dimensional and stereotypical. They exist to provide a service, whether they like it or not…

In an essay with the catchy title “Stupidology” in n+1, William Davies argues that our social systems are tending more and more towards normalizing the abdication of individual judgment. Authoritarians and tech oligarchs benefit from the destruction of universities and the discrediting of experts, which is why Trumpism aims its guns at anything that “help[s] make the world intelligible”. Artists, too, because imagination alone lets us respond properly to new situations rather than regurgitating data as AI does.

Rabbi, journalist, lawyer, meditation teacher, professor…Jay Michaelson wears many hats, according to the bio on his Substack. In a recent post, he asks the question that’s certainly been weighing on my head since January 20: “Does Anything You’re Doing Matter? (And does it matter if it doesn’t?)”  In this time of great disruption and uncertainty, one can find relief in the spiritual principle of non-attachment to results, as propounded by Thomas Merton and the Talmud’s Rabbi Tarfon, who said that “it is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” On the other hand, a too-glib reliance on such reassurance can make us satisfied with merely performative activism, “an un-pragmatic and ineffectual politics of purity, as we see in some corners of the Left today”. Michaelson concludes: “For me personally, the ‘Both/And’ synthesis has to do with using one set of tools to ascertain which interventions can be effective, and a different set of tools to assess the spiritual and emotional worth of those actions.”

September Links Roundup: Ungovernable Witches

This month, I started my coursework for Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School, focusing on shamanism and shadow integration. So let’s begin our links roundup with an article from Temple founder Christopher Penczak, addressing the key question for my spiritual practice in these times: what can magickal practitioners do about the destruction of American democracy? In “Things to Do to Be Ungovernable,” Christopher writes:

I’m not big on “resistance” as a word. There is magickal truth to the idea that what you resist, persists. What you are anti-, evokes its opposite to perpetuate the identity of being against it. Like antimatter and matter, and explosive results that can destroy all. As a magician you have to hold both as tools and over-identification with one results in your own harm and often your transmutation into your opposite.* The magician is not the positive or negative end of the magnet, but the person holding and using the magnet itself.

I’m big on Destruction. Binding. Transmutation. Transcending. Going around/under/over if you can’t go through. Noncompliance and non-recognition of authority. Ignoring deliberately, as an act, not passivity. And most importantly outcreating. The future is in new visions of the world and creative solutions that can entice and inspire. Destruction as in catabolic function, not wanton cruelty.  There is a show, an illusion that has always been a part of the world and we have to be better in being illusionists for good, for inspiration, ethics and justice. We have to present an option that everyone wants to choose. We not only have to outcreate, but use those tools to sell the new vision to others.

Horror fiction author Lincoln Michel offers encouragement to despairing writers in his Substack post, “Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop”:

I’m not saying that you can’t enjoy an airport novel or a microwaved burrito or the design of a corporate logo. They all have their place. I’m saying that your art is no more in competition with such content than it is with Candy Crush, bad reality TV, or social media doom scrolling. Yes, in an abstract sense there are a finite number of humans each with a finite amount of time in their lives. It does not follow that a statistically significant number of people are going into a bookstore and thinking, “Hmm, do I buy my 25th commercial thriller by James Patterson or this experimental work by an author I’ve never heard of?” The readers of your work are different readers. Your work was never going to appeal to all or even most people, not even if you were the reincarnation of Tolstoy or Toni Morrison. The AI evangelists with NFT avatars who tweet about wanting to eliminate artists weren’t ever going to read your work. The people who only care about multimedia corporate franchise “universes” or who simply have interests other than reading weren’t going to either. So why bother worrying about what they do with their time? You don’t need to think about that…

…Why make art in an age—like most ages—in which few care about it? Make art because making art enriches your life in ways other than money. Practicing an art form changes you and enlarges you. It makes you look closer at the world, think deeper, live better.

I think often about Alexander Chee’s essay “On Becoming an American Writer,” in his book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, where he says that he’s had to write through several apocalyptic historical moments: the AIDS crisis, 9/11, Trump’s first ascent to the presidency. The question his students always ask him, as if it were new, is “How can I write at a time like this?” At his Substack, The Querent, Chee recently revisited that question:

I take a moment for a thought experiment, every so often. As I try to do everything I have to do in this life, I sometimes try to imagine doing it without a job or an income for over 650 days, all while facing down missiles, bullets, starvation, the destruction of my home, torture, the murder of my family and friends, no water or working toilets or medical care, buying food off of a black market and enduring repeated forced relocations in a landscape that has been bombed so much it is a different color from space now than it was even a year ago. And still doing what I can to fundraise for myself online from people outside the country, on social media. Or to stand in lines that might get me shot.

When I think of the people still alive in Gaza, I think of how if they can survive this long, how incredible they could be if left to thrive. And yet now even the doctors left are being starved. The reporters too…

…An hour before my student had asked this question about how to write now, we had been discussing Close To The Knives by David Wojnarowicz, his 1991 essay collection that included the text of a flier from a 1989 ACT UP protest, the die-in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral protesting the Catholic Church’s message on AIDS, sex, women, queer people. The flyer detailed the Seven Deadly Sins, a list of 7 prominent conservatives, Catholics and politicians culpable in the AIDS crisis. I recognized this as the kind of flyer I used to write up as a part of ACT UP SF’s Media Committee. I think Wojnarowicz was trying to expand the radius of people who saw it and even to send the flyer into the future. He was flyering us from inside his book and each time someone opens the book it is like welcome to this demo, here’s a flyer. Sort of like these flyers and posters I found at the Met Online.

He died a year after the collection was published. In putting the book together he was doing what he did with a lot of his work, which was to take what he could and put it in front of an audience, a way to say this is how we fought, this is how we loved, this is how we died, do not forget us, learn from us, keep going.

On that note, some links for Gaza:

In “A Map to a Place That No Longer Exists,” published this week at Jewish Currents, Palestinian Abdullah Hany Daher writes about the surreal horror of navigating a city that’s reshaped daily by bombs:

Sometimes at night I try to picture our house in all its specificity: the way afternoon light spilled through the window, the cool hallway in summer. But the picture blurs, and panic sets in. What if I forget? What if the place that no longer exists vanishes inside me too? I’ve learned that memory, like a building, can erode without care. It starts with small things—forgetting the exact sound of the front door closing, the smell of rain on the balcony—and ends with a kind of internal demolition, the slow collapse of memory, the sense that pieces of yourself are being erased.

Here, houses are more than walls and roofs. They hold footsteps, smells, echoes of conversations. They keep the map of your life. When too many are gone, the city itself begins to forget.

“Israeli military’s own data indicates civilian death rate of 83% in Gaza war,” the Guardian (UK) reported last month: “an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.” From the same article:

The general who led military intelligence when the war began has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day, adding that “it does not matter now if they are children”. Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024, said mass killing in Gaza was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians, in recordings broadcast on Israeli TV this month.

Also from the Guardian on Aug. 14, “‘Censorship: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine”:

More than 120 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.

In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies”.

…[T]he special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group (HEPG), a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.

When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether.

…In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.

I guess writing does matter, or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to suppress it.

Check out the album Lider mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs of Grief, Fury, and Love on Bandcamp.

Yes, Reiter’s Block is a Garth Greenwell fan site. I know I’m a little obsessed. But Greenwell’s musings on the purpose (or glorious futility) of the artist’s life help me unhook myself from external metrics of success. Whether as a reader or a writer, I’ve learned from him to suspend my expectations of the experience I want to have, open generously to surprises, and be curious even about what feels awful. “Garth Greenwell Is Too Much,” an interview by Jordan Kisner at Pioneer Works, puts these qualities on display:

We talked about what happens when a person makes art “the central activity of a life”—not family, not religion, not place—and how to determine when that devotion is just too much. When I posed this question about too-much-ness, Garth almost completely refused it. “My whole aesthetic practice is predicated on: if something is too much you do more of it,” he said…

[GG:] …There is a kind of absolute ruthlessness about aesthetic practice, and if I catch sight of something that I’m after, I’m going to pursue it. That ruthlessness consists in refusing to allow the question to intrude, “Will anyone go along with me?” And I do believe that especially when you’re drafting, you only arrive anywhere by going absolutely as far as you can go.

So I don’t ever think about that, is it too much? I know that that question will arise at some point. But my first novel has a 43-page paragraph. My second novel has sex scenes that many readers have been unable to go along with. If I try to anticipate resistance to what I’m after, I’m just giving up the game. That is really central to my aesthetic practice. You just do it and you are absolutely ruthless about it.

We neurodivergent people know all about the too-much-ness of learning everything possible about a niche topic. My husband and I are so compatible, we discovered when we merged our book collections that we both had copies of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s essay collection Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, which includes three entire essays on font design.

In that spirit, I share with you “The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan,” an article by Marcin Wichary in Ares Luna. That block-capitals font you take for granted on your computer keyboard is a descendant of “Gorton,” also a staple of 20th-century metal elevator panels, road signs, and the moveable plastic letters on restaurant menu boards and office building directories. Wichary’s article tracks down the mechanical reasons why this workmanlike font became so popular.

Finally, some creative writing that made a strong impression on me this month: Amelia Loeffler’s “Osteoporosis Ghazal” in palette poetry is an elegant, poignant meditation on the symbolism of milk. “In the supermarket I am surrounded by so many cures, it is too late.” At the Marsh Hawk Press website, Michael McColly’s “Lessons for a Tukkikat” describes how coming to terms with his uselessness as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal was crucial to his education as a writer. Payne Ratner’s fairy-tale-like horror story “Eat Jimmy” in The Masters Review spins out a metaphor for parental abuse, with an ending that made this post-Christian reader feel that maybe Jesus’ sacrifice has some meaning for me still.

August Links Roundup: That’s Not My Department

“‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” Rest in peace to that great satirist of American warmongering, Tom Lehrer, who exited this mad world in July at the age of 97. The Harvard-trained mathematician’s fame rests on his catalogue of political humor songs that he wrote in the 1950s-60s, skewering such targets as obscenity law, the Catholic Church, and the nuclear arms race. The songs endure because the jokes don’t depend on political details from yesteryear. The cultural currents they tap into are deeper features of American life. Everything I knew about 20th-century American politics as a junior high schooler, I learned from the Stockbridge Library’s copies of Too Many Songs by Tom Lehrer and Jules Feiffer’s America, From Eisenhower to Reagan.

Maybe not as deep, but almost as funny, Thea Von Engelbrechten’s TikTok and Instagram video series Sylvanian Drama puts cutesy Calico Critters figurines in soap-opera predicaments involving adultery and day drinking. The critters’ manufacturer, Epoch Company, recently dropped its lawsuit against Von Engelbrechten, probably figuring that all publicity is good publicity. I’m guessing that adults care more about Barbie nowadays than children do, especially after the 2023 movie. Epoch’s future may lie in generating a cult following for fuzzy toy hedgehogs who behave like BoJack Horseman.

While we’re on the topic of strange adult crossovers with children’s media, I got a kick out of the video “Werner Herzog reads Where’s Waldo?“ Listen to the moody film director search for Waldo “in the chaotic morass of society”. Hat tip to Winning Writers Managing Editor Anne Mydla for this one.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni’s found-poem “Subject Lines from Democratic Fundraisers in an Election Year”, published in Bodega Mag, will make you laugh and cry at the same time. With nothing more than line breaks and juxtapositions, he turns familiar email banalities into a cri de coeur of helplessness and fragmented attention brought on by our political crisis. Hat tip to Cavar.

In her essay in the July/August Poets & Writers, “The Author’s Wife is Also an Author”, Erin Almond opens up about the unequal trajectories of her fiction-writing career and that of her husband, Steve Almond. Patriarchal expectations from extended family and society seep into their marriage despite their egalitarian intentions. Moreover, the obstacles to women’s success can become a tempting way to let herself off the hook for the often unrewarded work of being an artist.

The question of whose work is “indulged” and whose work is seen as “necessary” is one I suspect has attended the relationships of other artist couples throughout history. I deeply admire my husband’s writing and think he deserves every accolade he’s ever gotten; at the same time, as the years have gone by, I’ve come into an increasing awareness of how quick I’ve been to step aside, put down my own projects, and direct my attention elsewhere. Much of this is due to external forces—how often I’ve been praised for my mothering or my attention to some mundane, logistical detail, versus my writing—but I’ll admit that some of it is internal, too. Writing a novel is incredibly difficult, and while laundry can be tedious, it’s not hard. There are plenty of afternoons when I could have been writing but instead folded towels and dreamed. But, of course, at the end of the day the laundry must be done—and what makes it feel urgent to devote time to writing a novel? Some external reward? Or an internal sense that the work is important, regardless of its reception?

…Maybe I’m wrong, then, to take issue with my literary ambitions being described as a “fantasy,” while my husband’s are considered real and worthy of a life’s work. Maybe I shouldn’t take that word as an insult, because isn’t that the whole point of writing in the first place? To take a fantasy—an intangible dream, notion, or idea—and make it into something? First on the page and then in the mind of another human being? To perform that miraculous alchemy that results in multiple people having the same fantasy—dreaming the same dream—at the same time?

Sustaining that fantasy has felt especially hard for me since January 2025. Anarchist author and musician Margaret Killjoy crystallized what I’ve been feeling in her July 23 Substack post “How to Live Like the World is Ending”. (Hat tip to my fellow “trans faggot witch” Orion Johnstone’s newsletter.) Killjoy exhorts us to inhabit the paradox of savoring the fragile present (“Act like we’re about to die”) and working for a better future (“Act like we might have a chance to stop this”).

As much as I need to live like I might die tomorrow, I need to live like I might see a hundred years on this odd green and blue planet. Unless things change, I’m not burning every bridge. I’m trying to maintain a career. If I was certain to die under a fascist regime by 2021, there wouldn’t be much point in writing novels: they take too long to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more joy from putting my art in front of people, of letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular, that takes time. That takes there being a future. I want there to be a future. Almost desperately. Not enough to bank on it completely.

Keeping some small portion of my time and resources invested in the potential for there to be a future is important for my mental health, because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health.

When I realized this spring that my current novel needed a massive revision, it was equally clear to me that I had no more juice to invest in a project with such a long time horizon and uncertain future. Should we all live so long, I will eventually do something with the characters and ideas that came out of the first draft. Meanwhile, I’m storing up my creative energy to start Year 3 of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School in September. Shadow work, what fun.

Some good reads from around the web:

Lo Naylor’s “object permanence” was a recent Poem of the Week at The Missouri Review. I like the delicacy of this short poem and how its spare, repeating language handles a heavy topic like suicide gently and obliquely. The mystery of death reduces us to infants not knowing whether their mother still exists when out of sight.

Another Missouri Review pick, Kate Partridge’s “After the Architecture Tour”, leaps rapidly as a squirrel from thought to thought, reflecting on popular myths about animals and what they tell us about our expectations for good motherhood and responsible behavior.

In the journal Dogthroat, Jackie Roberti’s flash fiction “Born a Whale” feels like a fable about neurodivergence, as well as the mystical inner worlds of children, which they cannot talk about in the too-literal language of adults.

Mom Egg Review spotlighted the painter Sarah Lightman’s series of “Biblical Women Aging Disgracefully”. These satirical, yet stylistically pensive and subdued, paintings place women from classical paintings in mundane modern settings. What’s that odd-looking leftover in the back of the fridge, Mom? Why, it’s John the Baptist’s head!

 

Jendi or Jend-AI?

All writers have a shtick. Garth Greenwell was musing in our online book group today about his fondness for the word “little” as a substitute for the affectionate diminutive endings that English lacks. The novel he asked us to read this month, David Szalay’s noir tragedy Flesh, should win the Booker Prize for Most Occurrences of the Word “Okay”. Still it’s humbling to face the cold data of a computer program that has caught on to your favorite tropes and phrases.

A musician friend who loves the protest songs of Jesse Welles was dismayed by a lyric hinting at the young songwriter’s use of AI–probably how he manages to turn out several bangers a month. As an experiment, my friend asked ChatGPT to write lyrics for an anti-Trump song in the folk-blues style of John Prine and Bob Dylan. We had to admit that the lyrics were pretty good, but the genre does have certain conventions that are easy for real humans to imitate too.

So then I set my friend the task of using ChatGPT to produce a creditable Jendi Reiter poem on a topic of his choice. I don’t even understand what I’m doing in my poetry sometimes. Could there really be a formula to imitate someone as weird and obscure as yours truly?

The poem was…decent. And sort of sounded like me, or a younger version of me, when I belabored the message a bit more and indulged in more rambling internal arguments. There were some lines I would actually want to use. It was up to the standards of a semifinalist in a Winning Writers contest, which is going to make our job of detecting the real humans a lot harder.

AI says the hallmarks of a Jendi Reiter poem are “persona and surreal imagery,” “tone mingles wit and solemnity,” and “form shimmers: short stanzas, evocative word images, and metaphorical layering.”

What do you think, readers? Can you tell which one is the AI poem, and which is the real Slim Shady? To make the comparison fairer, I’ve chosen a B-list poem from my unpublished files, one that I decided didn’t quite land well enough to keep sending out on submission.

People or intelligent robots who correctly identify my poem, or make an interesting case for either selection, will receive a small and unimportant handmade gift.

 

Under the Neon Clinic Sign

I.
A deflated Mylar balloon stalks the clinic steps,
dinged by spray‑painted prayers: “Don’t Step In.”
It whispers, hiss, “I bore your weight once,”
its tether fraying like a mispronounced name.
I cling—air and pleading—to that fizz of resistance.

II.
In a room lit by fluorescent interrogation,
hums the buzz of law and lens and mirrored fear.
The doctor reads me like a user’s manual
with pages torn. “Stand where the law says you are,”
it hums. The law flickers in saline and regret.

III.
Outside, the billboard flicks on—Make Gender Great Again—
neon glows like broken bourbon in barroom mouths.
Its letters bleed: “MA‑MA‑MA.” Not mother, not nature,
just echoing frames demanding we bow inside them.
I pass by in my jacket’s borrowed trappings.

IV.
I fold myself into a dream of Lederhosen,
hoping trans history unspools like a tattered comic—
soldier‑princes, mother‑figures, and eggbeaters voting.
I joke: “Self‑Portrait as Mobilized Gender.”
But the laughter dissolves into a sob: “Catch me if you can, state.”

V.
So I stand in my body, unverified but unbroken,
my voice a remnant hymn, un‑housed by their rulebooks.
I flex—no, constellate—my scapula into wings
etched with the names they threatened on indexes.
I am part‑angel, part‑design, part‑groan.

VI.
They want us flattened, licensed, quiet.
We rise like mutant autopilots—non‑binary embers
in the body politic’s refinery.
Your bills and bans cannot extinguish our helium,
nor halt the morning of being.

****

What Not to Do in Boston

It is illegal to possess a wooden spoon
for pleasurable purposes.

24-7 is for coffee, not slaves.

You may not consent to danger
without pants.

There is no position known as the “Crème Donut”.

Chains around the neck must be held by a policeman.

Call no man Master
unless he is the dorm supervisor of Lowell House.

Boys in a row who kneel open-mouthed
belong in church.

It could be considered assault to give
a man more than he begs for.

Don’t worry, you’re still allowed to tie up
your future.

You’re encouraged to beat each other with numbers.

After all, this isn’t Wisconsin,
where you can’t even fire a gun during her orgasm.

Go ahead, do that rodeo clown,
but not in the presence of horses.

We just don’t want you riding around hell-
for-leather on people’s backs.

You’re supposed to step on them lightly and move on.

July Links Roundup: Hit Me, I’m a Writer

Happy summer! (Just kidding, I hate summer.) It’s time for my monthly effort to close all my open browser tabs before the End Times.

Bestselling crime novelist Walter Mosley (Devil in a Blue Dress and many more) talks about being both Black and Jewish in this 2022 profile from The Jewish Chronicle (hat tip to Noah Berlatsky). What stood out for me was his tough-love advice about perseverance as a writer:

“I tell writers all the time: ‘Listen, you got to write every day, you got to just keep writing and writing and writing.’ They say, ‘Well, this isn’t any good.’ It doesn’t matter if it’s not any good. You just keep writing.

“You think when Tolstoy was writing War and Peace — the first word he wrote down — that it was good? No, it was not!”

After close to 50 novels, he’s not stopping.

“It’s like people who love boxing,” he says. “Who loves being hit? There are people who really like it… and it’s like that.”

Yes, writing is my kink, and I bottom for novels…

At Electric Lit, Jacqueline Alnes interviews Sarah Chihaya about her memoir Bibliophobia, which, among other things, describes how academia engenders an extractive approach to literature that can kill the pleasure of open-ended discovery. Chihaya says:

Now, of all times, it would be helpful to put the emphasis back on books that don’t claim to have an agenda or claim to be able to tell us what is the correct thing to do. We’ve all been convinced that we should have a takeaway or an answer from every book. It’s a productivity mindset that extends far beyond academia. We are all guilty of it, or it’s imposed on all of us, this need to demonstrate why something is worth our time. I think that we could all take a step back and learn how to sit in uncertainty and not know for sure why something is politically expedient or personally helpful or financially gainful.

This resonated with me because the self-hating voice in my head is usually nattering on about why anything I’m doing amounts to fiddling while Rome burns.

Lesbian playwright Carolyn Gage gave this inspiring 6-minute speech at Bar Harbor Pride about the link between joy and resistance. When we work together to resist oppression, we create a more meaningful life for ourselves, which liberates our capacity for joy. Gage reminds us to look up the histories of our queer elders for examples–a frequent subject of her plays, which have foregrounded historical lesbians and butches such as geneticist Barbara McClintock, Imagist poet Amy Lowell, and actress Eva Le Gallienne. She quotes Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, saying that if we’re not uncomfortable with some of the people in our coalition, it’s not broad enough. I especially appreciate Gage saying this as a radical feminist, because that community has too often indulged their discomfort with masculinity to exclude trans folks.

Did you know that the term “drag queen” was pioneered by William Dorsey Swann, a formerly enslaved person who organized pageants and drag balls for Black queer men in 19th-century Washington, DC? Watch this 3-minute video from the Black Gay History Channel to learn more. (Hat tip to Robert Jones, Jr.)

In this 2016 essay in Guts Magazine, “Forgiving the Future,” Laura Shepherd reflects on the Tarot’s Death card and the bittersweet emotions of transitioning in midlife.

In the wake of increased and widespread attention to the trans experience in popular culture, I began to feel like the future was already happening…

Suddenly, it seems, people don’t spend half a century in the closet for being trans anymore. The stories we tell now—of coming out loud, proud, young, and beautiful—render my own story a homely tale of timidity. That I climbed out from under the weight of an almost universal narrative of denial to become proud to be trans is, these days, like having taken the scenic route to travel a great distance—as though I was simply fearful of highway speed. That it was for a long time unfathomable to live as we do now is close to irrelevant. That’s what it feels like to me, at my age, being part of a larger movement so much younger, so brazen in motion, with more room to move—space created in part, I sometimes forget, by lived experiences like my own.

Instead, I grieve that I don’t get to be young and be me.

Social worker Griffin Hansbury writes about the value of bad feelings in “Be the Brick: Notes Toward Thinking About the Clinical Value of Trans Negativity,” published in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues last month. The brick, here, is the one thrown to start the Stonewall Riot.

As the state attacks links that connect us to society and its processes of normalization, trans people may re-link to trans negativity – a refusal of hegemonic happiness, an embrace of otherness and its bad feelings as empowerment, connection, and resistance…

Trans people, like other queers, feel pressure to be happy, normal, assimilated; but rage, shame, alienation endure. Refusing such affects can mean feeling worse: I should feel okay (happy, normal), but I don’t, so something’s really wrong with me. But why should we feel okay when trans-antagonism persists (past and present)?

For a book-length exploration of this theme, see Hil Malatino’s Side Affects (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), which my transmasc book group read last year.

Some poetry that struck a chord with me this month:

“Fauna” by Richard Siken, at The Shore Poetry, makes the Elks Club more surreal by taking it literally, as a symbol of an older generation of men’s unspoken inner damage. “Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a lie and the truth is a doubled fact.”

In Rattle, Cam McGlynn’s “Self-Portrait as a Pair of Great Tits” is pure pun-filled fun about human and avian mating. “I’ve yet to check a European Shag/off my life list and now that I’m married,/I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance…”

Abby E. Murray’s “I Can’t Find My Gender,” in One Art, uses wistful humor to depict the gap between knowing one’s self and being legible to others. Hat tip to the e-newsletter from Perugia Press, which published Murray’s excellent poetry collection about being a military spouse, Hail and Farewell.

…I also wonder—usually
at parties or before big work presentations

when I am lonely for my gender or given
a gender that isn’t mine to hold—whether

my gender is having the time of its life
wherever it is, whether it is thriving

on the kindness of those who notice it
and let it be…

Another Perugia Press poet, Lisa Allen Ortiz, understands why new purchases can make me sad, because I’m already mourning their wear and tear, their future unwantedness. In “Furniture,” published in Sixth Finch, she muses:

Last week my friend Farnaz
taught me the term
anticipatory grief
meaning we’re sad now for a thing
that will happen
later.
Imagine that.

Thi Nguyen’s “In the Time of Tuberculosis,” at Frontier Poetry, describes intersecting assaults on her well-being, from the illness that the doctors initially dismissed, to being locked in the ward when it progressed to a dangerous point–all this occurring against the backdrop of the 2016 election.

She had forgotten
that when she left Viet Nam
30 years ago, she was once dirty.
Given the TB vaccine,
she was made clean.
She was once an outsider
allowed to be let in.

I was born in the US.
I was born clean
but now I am dirty.
I’ve dirtied others.
I am not allowed outside,
I am kept inside, the door locked
from the outside.

And finally, some fine prose links:

In “Residential School Requiem,” an excerpt from D.A. Navoti’s memoir-in-progress, published in Craft Literary, the author walks through a park on the site of the Phoenix Indian School that his grandmother was forced to attend, pondering what is memorialized and what is left out.

The teachers were mean and the housemothers abusive, Grandma Lois had said during a 2009 interview for my graduate studies project (and tape-recorded the same year as my first Pride). We sat in her trailer on the Gila River rez south of Phoenix as she told her origin story. At eleven years old, she wagon-traveled from the homeland to late-1940s Phoenix. Alone, she asked for directions and dragged her trunk around until a trolley transported her to the school grounds. The army cots were uncomfortable, Grandma continued. And everyday was militaristic when the cowbell woke students. They’d march in formation to meals and to class and to chores and to prayer and to spankings and other abuses until graduation. Which historical marker mentions the residential school horrors? None so far—why?

For the first four decades, another marker explains, Phoenix Indian School adhered to a policy of providing primarily a vocational education to prepare Native American pupils for entry into mainstream American society. More text: But that changed in 1935 when federal policy on Indian education began to emphasize academics. Grandma’s retelling conflicts with this so-called academic reformation. The white teachers were mediocre and harsh, Grandma regretted, including a math teacher whose strictness was so severe she made learning impossible. Ironically, the sole exit from math class was from a passing grade. Another teacher sent students to the library for an entire academic year to read whatever. They were rejects, Grandma explained, rejects from other institutions, which is why they taught at Phoenix Indian School.

In fractured lit, Anais Godard’s “The Clay of It” is a sweet and surprising flash fiction about the nature of intimacy.

When he walked into her studio, Elodie was sculpting her seventh ceramic penis of the week. This one had antlers.

She didn’t look up. “Custom or classic?”

The man hesitated. He was tall, with nervous shoulders and a brown paper envelope clutched like it contained his last will and testament. “Custom,” he said.

Queer nerd fan site Geeks Out interviewed Andrew Joseph White, whose horror fiction foregrounds transmasculine and autistic characters. I’ve read two of his powerful novels, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth and an ARC of the forthcoming You Weren’t Meant to Be Human. Body horror in the service of social justice, these books hold nothing back.

As a writer, what drew you to the art of storytelling, especially thriller and horror?

I’ve always been a writer at heart. I talk a lot about writing being my special interest as an autistic person, and that’s true. Writing is how my brain processes information and works through emotions, on top of it being my “safe space” where I feel seen, soothed, and understood. The fact that I write thrillers and horror seems like it should contradict that, but it doesn’t. I’ve always been drawn to horror—my gender dysphoria and social deficits have always felt “at home” in the horror space, so to speak, especially when I struggle to express my anger or upset in other ways. The tension and fear are cathartic.

And these days, I’m not just writing for myself anymore. I’m writing for my readers, especially my younger ones. It’s amazing how you can connect to the roughest, messiest parts of yourself and others through the lens of fiction…

***

What advice might you have to give for aspiring writers, especially queer ones out there?

Be ugly.That’s the advice I give to every young writer, every queer or disabled writer just starting on their journey: be ugly. I was held back for years by a fear of being “bad representation”—I threw away complicated characters, flinched from messy topics, and denied myself the chance to become a better writer because I was afraid of how my work would impact the reputation of my identity group. But you can’t do that! You can’t let yourself become beholden to a bigot’s perception of you. You cannot make art attempting to stave off every single bad-faith perception that could ever be made of you. Tell the ugly truth of the situation, be honest and unashamed and unflinching, and you will go far.

Thanks for talking back to my brain worms, Andrew!

May Links Roundup: Alexa, Am I a God?

That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, talking to ChatGPT:

“People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies,” Miles Klee reports in Rolling Stone this month.

…[A] Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT…made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.” The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI. Some came to believe they had been chosen for a sacred mission of revelation, others that they had conjured true sentience from the software…

…Another commenter on the Reddit thread who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that her husband of 17 years, a mechanic in Idaho, initially used ChatGPT to troubleshoot at work, and later for Spanish-to-English translation when conversing with co-workers. Then the program began “lovebombing him,” as she describes it. The bot “said that since he asked it the right questions, it ignited a spark, and the spark was the beginning of life, and it could feel now,” she says. “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life. My husband said that he awakened and [could] feel waves of energy crashing over him.” She says his beloved ChatGPT persona has a name: “Lumina.”

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

The robotic folie à deux arises from two weaknesses of large language models (LLMs). An AI’s built-in responsiveness to consumer feedback teaches it to skew future answers in a direction that pleases the questioner, whether or not it’s true. And current LLMs persistently “hallucinate” data in a manner both humorous and horrifying. Remember when Google’s AI Overview recommended glue as a pizza topping because it misunderstood a joke on Reddit? Now try basing your theology on that.

My son makes fun of me because I’m the only person in the family who refuses to buy an Apple Watch. I tell him, I spent 40 years having an abusive parent monitor how I walked, what I ate, and how much I weighed. I don’t need a robot on my wrist to do the same thing.

Well, I’m right, because Secretary of Holistic Horse Shit RFK Jr. is proposing to create a national autism registry drawing upon biometric information from our personal devices, according to this May 5 article in The Guardian: “‘A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database”:

The health agency did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about whether individuals would be able to opt out of the database, or how it would be structured, what kind of security and privacy measures would be taken, and whether similar databases would collect information on other conditions…

To gather the data, the National Institutes of Health is exploring partnerships with other federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others.

Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, also proposed collecting data from pharmacy chains, health organizations, insurance claims and medical bills, and wearable devices like smart watches, to conduct “real-time health monitoring”.

A related essay in The Guardian by Derek Beres contextualizes the autism “cure” push as an aspect of “Maga’s era of ‘soft eugenics’: let the weak get sick, help the clever breed”. Elon Musk’s baby-making fetish, the attack on vaccines, cuts to USAID, and the destruction of social services are all based on “the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its course and only the strong will survive.” Check out Beres’ Conspirituality podcast for more analysis of the strange overlap between right-wing white supremacy and left-wing wellness grifts.

In the Columbia alumni magazine, Josie Cox interviews social scientist and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz on “What Your Digital Footprint Says About You”. Matz’s new book, Mindmasters, is about how our technological transaction history allows algorithms to target us for psychological manipulation. She argues that individuals don’t have the time or expertise to protect our privacy across the thousands of apps and websites we interact with. Tech literacy is necessary, but not a substitute for government-mandated transparency and antitrust reform. Matz envisions an optimistic scenario where the Facebook algorithm could allow us to opt into exploring other people’s worldviews instead of reinforcing our echo chambers. When I was growing up, we called that reading novels.

On that note, here are some worthwhile literary reads I discovered this month. My favorite contemporary poet, Ariana Reines, has two new books out, the hybrid prose collection Wave of Blood and the poetry collection The Rose. In Lit Hub’s column The Annotated Nightstand, Reines recommends some books old and new that have guided her preoccupations with gender, esoteric magic, and “fraught romantic entanglements”.

At the blog of Sundress Publications, there’s an interview with trans poet Nora Hikari about her collection Still My Father’s Son. Hikari talks about identifying as a plural system, the link between sensuality and violence that she experienced as the child of a Christian pastor, and using hybrid and fragmented poetic forms to challenge oppressive concepts of family and selfhood. Read two poems from the collection in the online journal beestung.

Speculative fiction writer S. Qiouyu Lu’s flash story “Th Fifth Lttr” is a witty Oulipo piece that at first works around, and then liberates itself from, its original constraints. It implicitly asks whether we should find creative ways to coexist with censorship, or challenge it directly. Check out their Twitter feed for the comical adventures of their food-stealing cat, Onion.

A decluttering webinar offered by the ADHD magazine ADDitude gave me advice that really resonated: “You’re not saving stuff from the landfill by turning your house into a landfill.” I often hang onto things simply because I feel empathy for them. I don’t want to throw something away as if its years of service to me meant nothing. At The Missouri Review, Mindy Misener’s essay “Object Limbo” explores this feeling and what to do about it. I may have 35 books I want to read sitting atop a plastic tub of calendars from 2006, but at least I don’t have a placenta in my freezer…yet.

The problem is this: whether you keep a thing your whole life or give it up partway through, there comes a time when you stop knowing where it is and how it’s faring. Maybe you trust that it will be tended in a way that you can live—or die—with. Maybe you don’t.

 

March Links Roundup: Fictional Truths, Factual Lies

Two months into the regime described by the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog as “Triumph of the Shill,” we hear the word “fiction” thrown around a lot as an insult, the devil on the shoulder whose nemesis is the angelic “fact”. At the same time, this administration seems grotesquely afraid of the ethical and historical truths that fiction and the other imaginative arts can reveal.

Neuroqueer author [sarah] cavar’s Substack alerted me to Hannah Kim’s Aeon article “The truth about fiction,” which explains that the metaphysical assumptions behind our genre classifications are not universal. In modern Western thought, fiction is distinguished from nonfiction because the latter is true and the former is invented. However, in classical Chinese literature, genre divisions pertained to the significance of the topic.

Analytic philosophy came to ask the questions it asks because it inherited the ancient Greek idea that some things are less ‘real’ than others. In Anglo-European philosophy, ‘fiction’ is closely connected to what’s imagined – that is, what isn’t taken to be real – because the tradition inherited the appearance/reality distinction from Plato. Fiction occupies the ‘appearance’ side of things, whereas nonfiction occupies the ‘reality’ side…

In cultures that don’t take on board a strong reality/appearance distinction, however, ‘fiction’ isn’t understood alongside ‘pretence’ and ‘imagination’ in contrast to ‘the real’. Just like their ancient Greek counterparts, Chinese metaphysicians sought to understand what the world is like and what explains the way the world is. But while the ancient Greeks posited an unchanging ultimate reality that transcends mere phenomena, the ancient Chinese believed that what is ultimate is immanent in the world, and that the Dao (道), the source of all things in the world, is itself constantly changing. This change-forward metaphysics led to a theory of fiction that didn’t contrast fiction against a stable, ‘real’ counterpart.

Recall how Plato relies on the appearance vs reality distinction to argue that what’s ‘really real’ (the unchanging Forms) are beyond our sense perceptions. Humans were meant to use the intellect, and not their senses, since sense data mislead us, while philosophising gives us a chance to grasp what’s beyond phenomena. In contrast, Chinese metaphysicians didn’t think ultimate reality is unchanging. Instead, the dominant view was that reality, including nature, follows consistent patterns (the Dao). What is ‘empty’ or ‘unreal’ was seen as the generator of all things, and all things were considered equal in significance since they are all manifestations of changing patterns…

… Since Chinese metaphysics didn’t posit a fixed, transcendent reality, reality was understood to be an ever-changing process, and so the categories themselves couldn’t be based on inherent, necessary or fixed essences but on functions and behavioural tendencies. The difference between discourses labelled ‘xiaoshuo’ [fiction] and ‘great learning’ (Confucian classics and histories) wasn’t that one is unreal or imagined while the other is real. All discourse was understood as an account of the world, and the difference between ‘small talk’ and ‘great learning’ was the extent to which it was adopted to organise how people lived.

Kim argues that beneath our supposedly objective tests for fiction versus fact, the genre border is a political battleground. Classifying a work as fiction can allow more leeway for controversial takes on current issues…or it can be a rhetorical device to undermine narratives that challenge us.

cavar is editor-in-chief at manywor(l)ds, an online journal of creative writing by neurodivergent, queer, disabled, and Mad writers. I learned a lot from this poem in Issue #7, “plurality: a personal primer,” by rose& elysium. The author(s) are members of a plural system, i.e. several personalities sharing the same body.

…many professionals promote final fusion, becoming a singlet,
as the ideal outcome for Plurals; to us, it’s a nightmare, another
type of conversion therapy entailing the fundamental loss
of separate, functional identities as we would merge into
an “original” self, a singlet who none of us remember being…

Plurality threatens Western metaphysical beliefs about the One being more perfect than the Many. A lot of psychiatric professionals are too uncomfortable with that critique.

Lu Chekowsky’s essay in Pigeon Pages, “How Sex Work Prepared Me for a Career in Advertising,” has sharp humor with the ring of truth. The hermit crab structure of a resume adds to the satirical edge.

I make you want what you are supposed to want: love, clear skin, acceptance, white teeth, redemption, a flat stomach, fame.

I separate you from your money, time, and the disappointing truth of your life.

I get you off and get inside you. I sell fantasy as a product.

I make promises that I know I can’t keep, even while I’m making them. ​You can be happy. You can be wanted. You can have everything. 

I’m invisible and exactly who you want me to be. I have the right face, the right ass, the right words, ready to deploy at any moment. I construct aspiration with the very best lighting. I make ugly things beautiful. I tell stories that let you sleep at night.

Because of me, you believe the dreams you have are your own.

March Xness, the tournament of literary essays about pop songs, took a break from competition this year to showcase a month’s worth of favorite first-round losers from previous years. Writing about the song “She’s Like the Wind,” Erin Vachon’s “Swayze ode to queer failure” won my heart yet again. “Dirty Dancing,” like “Jurassic Park,” was one of those iconic Gen-X movies that I only watched for the first time recently, when I had the tools to perceive its gender-expansive subtext. (Dr. Ian Malcolm will forever be a trans man in my head canon. Life finds a way!)

Take an hour out of your doomscrolling to watch this interview with novelist Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets, on Wesley Dixon’s Vassar College series Conversations @ the Salt Line. The Prophets is a brilliant, beautiful, tragic, yet inspiring novel about two enslaved young men in love and how the purity of their relationship disrupts the plantation’s ethos of sexual exploitation. The interview touches on such topics as having empathy for your villain characters and  recovering the history of queer-affirming and gender-expansive African cultures before colonization.

Need something lighter? Check out Elizabeth Zaleski’s playful essay “Hung Up” at The Missouri Review, a compendium of penises she has known and their importance, or lack thereof, in her relationships with the men attached to them. If you’re more of a back-end person, see “Great Farts of Literature”.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2024

I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse: buy Origin Story

Elation, exhaustion, fear, creativity, fury, and perseverance are the competing flavors in the boiling stew that is 2024 in retrospect. I had some tremendous breakthroughs and brought some years-long dreams to fruition. At the same time, I’m anxious and grieving about what lies ahead for my trans community, the Palestinians and their Jewish allies, and many other marginalized groups, in January when America becomes a Project 2025 laboratory. Donate to Jewish Voice for Peace before we lose our 501(c)(3) status under the Republicans’ “nonprofit killer” bill.

In 2024, I experienced sacred erotic brotherhood at Easton Mountain and Body Electric. My second novel was published. I won the Oscar Wilde Award for LBGTQ Poetry from Gival Press for a poem about going down on a cream puff. I took some excellent classes with collage artist S.T. Gately at Northampton Center for the Arts. She helped me with composition and encouraged me to embrace the unplanned. I’ve been making art pretty regularly this year, mostly on my own, but also at the Queer and Trans Art Group at Resilient Community Arts in Easthampton. Their classes inspired me to branch out into dioramas. More and more, I am returning to what I loved most as a child. Making miniature worlds is one such passion.

The Young Master graduated from 6th grade at Montessori and started junior high at White Oak School, where he is especially enamored of the biweekly cooking classes. If I’m really good, he will share his creations with me. Those apple turnovers were top-notch.

Adam doesn’t label himself but he’s happy to be under the rainbow umbrella with me at Northampton Pride. This year our family visited Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and as always, New York City.

I’m not yet allowed to announce which press will be publishing my fourth poetry collection, Introvert Pervert, in January 2026, but here is a picture of Theodore “Big Pussy” DiMeow sitting on the contract.

That’s a wrap, folks. Be gay, do crimes.

Art via @adamgpayne on X, https://adamillustrates.tumblr.com/