Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Cultural Erasure and Resistance

The National Park Service has removed all references to “queer” and “transgender” on the Stonewall National Monument, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City where trans women kicked off the modern LGBTQ rights movement by fighting back against a police raid. Journalist Ari Drennen reported on X that the picture of legendary trans activist Sylvia Rivera on the NPS website is now captioned, “At a young age Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights”. I guess all the proofreaders have been sent to re-education camps already.

Want to get on a government watchlist? Go to the NPS website and press the “No” button for “Was this website helpful?”, then leave a comment telling them to put trans people back the fuck on the sign, you fucking cowards.

I have been unsuccessfully applying for a National Endowment for the Arts grant since Ronald Reagan was president. ($25,000 went a lot further then.) Good thing I didn’t bother renewing my extremely cumbersome Grants.gov login this year. A new page on their website, “Legal Requirements and Assurance of Compliance,” instructs applicants to pledge that they will not “operate any programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI)” or “promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Gee, does this mean they don’t want my fantasy novel about a transgender Black minister and his Indian psychiatrist husband using witchcraft to defeat Christian nationalism?

I learned about the NEA debacle from the fuck-you letter that the venerable poetry publisher Tupelo Press posted on social media. Here it is on Instagram. “If adherence to our principles means that we will be ineligible for NEA grants going forward, so be it. Compliance with the new regulations would be immoral.” Send them a donation or buy some books. May I suggest Manoleria by Daniel Khalastchi, The Next Ancient World by Jennifer Michael Hecht, or Butch Geography and The Lake Has No Saint by Stacey Waite.

You’ve heard by now that Trump and Netanyahu are plotting to turn Gaza into Mar-A-Lago East by encouraging the Palestinians to live somewhere else. Jewish Voice for Peace shared this petition on social media, Jewish People Say No to Ethnic Cleansing. It was published as a full-page ad in the NY Times on Feb. 13. Notable signatories include Holocaust survivor and trauma specialist Gabor Maté, queer theorist Judith Butler, playwright Wallace Shawn, actor Joaquin Phoenix, and a long list of rabbis and cantors. Add your name too.

February Links Roundup: Monkey Mind Mother

February already? When the passage of time surprised me, I used to think “Have I done enough work on my novel?” but now I think “One fewer month of the Trump presidency.”

Close friends of mine recently became first-time parents. When I check in with the mom about her sleepless little angel, I remember the unnecessary self-doubt that was instilled in me about having boundaries as a “mother”. I put the term in scare quotes for gender identity reasons, but also because “motherhood” is a societal idol that eclipses the actual person in relationships with her baby and the world.

At Electric Lit, Sarah Wheeler reviews Nancy Reddy’s parenting meta-advice book, The Good Mother Myth. Her interview with Reddy, “What a Bunch of Monkeys Taught Us About Motherhood–and Why It’s All Wrong,” summarizes how the science behind attachment parenting, including Harry Harlow’s famous wire monkey experiment, was heavily skewed by social pressure to push women out of the workforce after World War II.

Harlow is a really fascinating example of what happens when scientific research escapes academia: how it circulates and recirculates, and how much nuance is lost and how things get used for other purposes. In 1959 he gave this talk as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) called “The Nature of Love.” He played 15 minutes of a video where you see the baby and the cloth mother. And he says something like, ”Look at her. She’s soft, warm, tender, patient and available 24 hours a day.” And that’s really what got picked up about what it means to be a mother. But even in that talk, there are these little moments that are actually pretty radical, where he says, for example, if the important variable is not lactation but comfort, men could be good monkey mothers too. And nobody picks that up!

As a result, Reddy notes, stay-at-home motherhood ends up importing the competitive individualism and anxieties of the capitalist workforce into the home:

It is so easy to see motherhood as a professional identity– that it’s the most important job in the world, and it’s so high stakes, it can only really be done well by the biological Mother and…you should bring all of the skills from your education and your professional life to bear on this work. And I am really aware of how that approach to parenting sucks the joy out of so much of it. If you’re trying to improve your performance as a parent, it’s really hard to actually connect with your kid, which is where the joy is.

Or as I say to Shane when he complains that I haven’t brought him enough ice in his water glass, “Whattaya gonna do, leave me a one-star review on Yelp?”

My alma mater, the Death Star…oops, I mean Harvard…has been way out front in capitulating to Trump’s DEI purge. I thought I was beyond being disappointed, but I hoped that institutions with such tremendous financial and cultural capital would put up a little more of a fight to save civilization. This Harvard Magazine article from Jan. 29, “A Shakeup at Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Initiative,” describes the university’s abrupt decision to close the Harvard Slavery Remembrance Program (HSRP) and outsource its work to American Ancestors, a lesser-known and presumably lesser-resourced genealogy research nonprofit. HSRP’s mission had been to track down living descendants of people who were enslaved by Harvard and its faculty and administrators, with the goals of reparations, correcting the historical record, and helping descendants’ families discover their roots. Some researchers affiliated with the shuttered project speculated that the administration was unpleasantly surprised by the scope of Harvard’s slavery ties and the number of descendants who might have a claim.

Anyway, here’s some good poetry. “Science” by Susie Meserve, at Palette Poetry, opens with an injunction–or perhaps a prayer–to “Let It”. Let it hurt to love what is mortal, let yourself persevere through the discomfort of birthing new life or facing terminal cancer. “Science, the miracle./Science, the limit.”

Enjoy a laugh of self-recognition with Ruth Bavetta’s poem “The New Battery Should Come Tomorrow,” published April 24 in Rattle. One undone household task leads to distraction by another, and by the chain reaction of emotional associations and memories that any mundane object can set off. Nothing gets done, but we’ve certainly gone on a journey, and maybe that’s what we needed!

Poetry by a Mom of Queer Kids: “Why I Want to Resist”

The author of this poem is a fierce mom in Florida protecting her queer kids from legalized bigotry. She shared this poem in an email to me on the weekend of the inauguration, and has kindly permitted me to publish it here, without attribution to protect her kids’ privacy.

Why I Want to Resist

Why do you want to resist?
You, of all people?

You’re white,
From the more privileged class,

All these minorities are wanting to take away all our gold,
Is the message I heard from my dad growing up,

God rest his soul,
Banker of a third generation,

So why do I feel like all the lights are going out in the world?
They’re taking away our safe spaces.

Please don’t let them blow out our flames,
Goddard College, they accepted me there to pursue my MFA in Creative Writing,

Amongst all the cool intellectuals there,
I felt imposter syndrome,

Why did they accept me here?
We met at Fort Warden, a former military base in Port Townsend, Washington.

It was an eye-opening experience,
I fit in here.

I’d finally found my tribe.
Goddard closed last year.

The lights are going out,
Fort Warden announced they’re no longer hosting events there,

Another light went out.
Oh how I long to bum an American Spirit off a fellow classmate-writer,

Oh how I long to walk the foggy sidewalks,
As a distant ship sounds a melancholy foghorn.

Goddard College was a safe space,
Not only for queer people, but simply for an artist such as myself,

Born into a family in which I did not belong,
Why do I want to resist?

What forces are bringing darkness into my life?
Why do I want to resist?

What forces of evil and darkness
Want to put out my light?

You’re of a privileged upper class,
Why do you want to resist?

I want to resist. I need to resist.
How can I not resist?

The memories flash through my head like a slideshow of oppression,
Yes, me.

The memories flash through my mind like a slideshow of oppression,
The moment my baby girl was born into this world,

A tiny, precious doll,
A light entered my life, a light I thought could never be extinguished.

Precious baby girl; teasing, dyslexia,
Remove her from the public school system,

She has dyslexia,
She’ll never be able to read normally,

She’ll never be able to do math.
“That homeschooling is a bunch of bullshit,”

Were the words of Cruella de Vil,
My own narcissistic mother,

“You’re educationally neglecting her because the doesn’t know how to read.”
She’s a brilliant artist, mom,

Look at her now,
She’s a lesbian, mom.

When I left an abusive marriage
And you refused to help to the fullest capacity to which you were able with all your wealth,

Then no, we couldn’t afford fabric or clay
For her to make her art,

“You’re projecting oppression,”
Someone who’d once been a dear friend of mine

Told me when I dared speak out against the Monroe County Sheriff Department
On social media.

He refused to speak with me ever since,
He returned a bag of gifts I’d gotten him as a peace offering to the store Mother Earth.

He has friends who are cops,
All hail the men in blue,

All hail the enforcers of corrupt and unjust laws
In this Florida.

The dictators are taking their place in the Oval Office,
They wear their bigotry and hatred like a crown.

The slideshow of memories,
My firstborn child, my son,

I didn’t know about gender identity
I did not know

Until he told me at 18, mom do you love me?
Yes.

Do you love me mom?
Yes.

I bought a skirt,
I like to wear it in my room.

Accused of being transphobic,
My ignorance was bliss.

I learned, I educated myself,
My daughter is a lesbian.

I take them shopping,
I don’t care which department they buy their clothes from.

She wears his hand-me-downs.
I was asked once by someone looking at my children from a distance,

‘You have two boys?’
‘No, that one’s my daughter,’ I proudly replied.

I could give two shots
What anyone has to say about it.

Slideshow, my son is standing in the streets of our neighborhood
Between two deputies, a third looking on,

On a mental health call,
After he’d been left home with his abusive father,

Claire and I had been gone.
Why do I want to resist?

The slideshow in my mind,
My ray of sunshine is lying in the back of an ambulance,

I’m in front with the driver,
Half the motherfuckers won’t even pull over.

“That’s my baby girl lying in there.”
When I finally told them at the hospital, “she’s not pregnant, she doesn’t like boys.”

The slideshow in my head:
“Please, can you take the handcuffs off him?

He’s unarmed. He was just crying out for help.
Take the God damn handcuffs off my beautiful baby boy.”

Slideshow:
We’re at the ICU with Claire,

She didn’t know that OD’ing on Tylenol could be so serious,
Could cause her organs to shut down.

Jacob and I were texting, if our sunshine didn’t make it,
The Lord forbid, we were gonna’ protest

All over the streets,
Bail each other out of jail if we had to.

Slideshow of memories:
They put my child in the back of the squad car still in cuffs.

Would you want to resist if you were me?
Ask yourself this; how could I, in good conscience, do nothing?

I want to resist.
My two amazing kids were my only support

In leaving my marriage,
My two amazing kids who the world loves to hate,

My two amazing kids who saved their own mom’s life,
That’s why I will never stop resisting,

Because I love my two babies too much
And I love all the other kids like them,
Trying to make their way in this harsh, cruel world.

Poem by Rythea Lee: “I Blamed Myself for the Election”

As we approach the second inauguration of Tan Dumplord, I feel rather like the heroine tied to the tracks in an old melodrama, watching the slow inexorable approach of the train. I’m not alone in having a lot of PTSD reactions to the narcissist-in-chief. Trauma therapist and singer-songwriter Rythea Lee wrote this poem in her e-newsletter, which she’s kindly allowed me to reprint here.

I Blamed Myself for the Election

I blamed myself for the results of the election. I know that’s insane. But it’s true.
In the face of a tsunami of horror, my whole body blamed itself.
That’s what I also did when I couldn’t hold off the weight of my father’s violence.
I blamed myself for having been born into it,
I must have done something wrong.

I blamed myself for other children getting hurt, for how could I be so powerless?
I should have kept them safe. I could have. I wanted to.
I tried and failed.
I must have done something wrong.

And now every trigger is here. The man and the hurting souls.
It looks so similar to my past.
All I knew to do was blame myself. That was my best strategy,
I must have done something wrong.

I can see now that it’s not really gonna work.
Hating on myself, or everyone else, isn’t really efficient.
It was a good idea at the time because back then, at least I could hope to be better.
Hope to change something inside me that might make them stop,
I eviscerated every corner of my heart to be better for them.
And IT NEVER WORKED.
They abused me anyway.
I must have done something wrong.

The sun rises today like the sweet song of a mother.
Calling me into a new paradigm where fighting the system
no longer requires me to harm myself.
Lifeforce courses through my cells with a river of determination.
Love wants its way with me.

Love wants to remind me that I never broke
and I’m certainly not going to break now.
Love is showing me the song of sanity that connects me to others
who are singing the same song.
We don’t have to try to know the song, it has always been playing.
We don’t have to force this song, because even when we were utterly alone,
the song played inside our bodies.
We never forgot the song. We are the song.

And now, as the world cries in its deepest pain, it is the clarity of love, not
shame, that guides me forward, putting me to work to the beat of that song.
In knowing who I am right now, I can trust that within me, within so many of us,
something has gone incredibly right.

In Memory of My Mother

My estranged mother, Irene, died shortly after midnight on New Year’s Eve/Day. She was 84 years old. I last had contact with her in January 2011. My husband, our son, and my mom-of-choice Roberta (her ex) attended her graveside funeral in New Jersey yesterday, along with her late brother’s widow and a good contingent of cousins from her side of the family.

The Orthodox rabbi hired by the funeral home was very kind and diplomatic about the rather unorthodox eulogy I wrote, which is reprinted below. He didn’t know any of us, but he made an educated guess that my mother, for all her narcissism, was someone who wanted to give to others. When she retired early from teaching elementary school after a nervous breakdown, she lost a creative outlet she might not have realized she needed. He suggested that we do mitzvahs (good deeds) to ease the repose of her soul. If you feel so inclined, give some tzedekah (charity) to a dance program that you value; Jacob’s Pillow was a family favorite.

Though quite a beauty before stress ravaged her health, Irene was never satisfied with photos of herself. So instead, here are some characters she resembled in looks, mannerisms, and/or personality.

A predominantly red illustration of an older woman's wrathful, enraged face looming large over a frightened younger couple; the title 'Sunset Boulevard' is displayed over a strip of celluloid film tied in a knot.

(L-R: Queen Elizabeth I; Glenn Close in “101 Dalmatians”; Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond; a favorite Mary Engelbreit Design)

Eulogy for Irene

My mother Irene was a lot like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard. Charismatic, disappointed, desperate for love but unable to be satisfied by it. She was too big for the picture of her life. She was an abused child in the body of a femme fatale.

My mother was a lot like Queen Elizabeth I, the historical figure she most admired. Both had rage-filled fathers and early betrayals that taught them to carve out their own path without depending on men. “Queen Irene” was fashionable, intelligent, and a rule-breaker. When she willed something, it happened…but at a high price. Addicted to control, she couldn’t let the mask of command slip for long enough to maintain honest intimacy.

My mother was a lot like a hungry ghost, a Buddhist metaphor for a spirit who seeks what cannot fill her up, looking for something outside herself that was hidden within her all along. Today we hope that the best part of her is set free from the patterns of a personal history that led her to starve herself and others.

Irene was a lightning storm of contradictions. I remember her leading us in joyful improvised flamenco dances after watching a performance at Jacob’s Pillow, in one of the Berkshires cottages we rented during my childhood. And I remember her breaking a picture frame over her partner Roberta’s head in that same cottage, one of hundreds of incidents of violence I had to witness or mediate over their 34-year relationship.

I remember her encouraging me to be a maverick artist, to devote my life to writing even when we had very little money, so that I wouldn’t live with regrets the way she did. Misogyny and family pressure pushed her into the more “respectable” profession of elementary school teacher when she really wanted to be an actress or a ballerina. She channeled that artistic passion into filling my childhood with books, museum visits, and season tickets to Lincoln Center and Tanglewood. (Sadly she was also a pop music snob who made me return my Cyndi Lauper cassette to Tower Records. Assigned-female-at-birth people just wanna have fun, Mom!)

And I remember her trying to sabotage my wedding and telling the adoption social workers that I would be an unfit parent, so that no other relationship would compete with her for my devotion. She wanted me to be the girliest little girl but not to grow up to be a woman. Well…I guess she got that part right.

Irene would have described herself as a child of the Sixties, with all of that generation’s iconoclasm and self-focus. Spiritual but not religious, she took deep interest in Native American cultures, Jewish folklore, and New Age self-help. She raised me to take it for granted that no opportunities would be foreclosed to me because of gender, yet she struggled to apply feminist ideals to herself and other people when her personal shame around social class and body image was triggered. Her longest relationship by far was with her lesbian partner, but she would never have identified as queer. I think she just liked being in a class by herself.

When she retired from teaching, her world became much smaller and unhealthier, caged by her OCD compulsions. She wasn’t able to learn how to transmute her intergenerational trauma into creative energy, so she offloaded that unbearable anger and anxiety onto the people closest to her.

Roberta and I literally had to save our own lives by ceasing direct contact with her in 2011, after ensuring that she had good nursing care in her apartment and then in her assisted living facility. We’re grateful to our late friends Anne and Sid Emerman, my late Uncle Phil, and my Aunt Susan for buffering us by handling Irene’s medical and legal affairs.

I learned from my mother to speak my mind, question authority, believe in magic, buy the best chocolate, and never run up credit card debt.

May she have a peaceful rest and a fortunate rebirth.

January Links Roundup: Fiction and Poetry from Gemini Magazine, Missouri Review, and More

Happy (?) 2025, readers. We will resume our regularly scheduled signs of the apocalypse next month, unless I get arrested for peeing in a red state. Let’s start the year off with some reading for pleasure, rather than the news.

First, I was really moved by Stan Duncan’s story “Hodgens” in Gemini Magazine. The narrator, a young preacher in small-town Oklahoma, reminded me of characters from Marilynne Robinson or Walter Wangerin Jr. Perhaps the holiest thing he does is stay present with his sense of inadequacy and not run away from the man he can’t help, a tough-looking but emotionally vulnerable inhabitant of a prison camp. Stan is looking for a publisher for his collection of linked stories; contact me if you can help.

Also in Gemini, Wess Mongo Jolley’s slice-of-life tale “A Candle in the Sun” shows a moment of tenderness between two strangers on a bench in New York’s Union Square Park. Being homeless, the narrator is someone that people often overlook, which allows him, in turn, to be an astute observer of their interactions. “What magic is in this city! How sheer the curtain between Fifth Avenue and Alphabet City. How intertwined the strands of rich and poor, like gray hair and black, braided together in a rope that supports the weight of this city’s soul.”

Gabriel Fine’s “Days of Awe” was The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week on Dec. 2. Observing the Rosh Hashanah traditions with his family, against the backdrop of the Hamas attacks and Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the speaker is chilled by the legend that God decides whom to re-inscribe in the Book of Life during the High Holidays.

…Stone and coiled steel
of the maps and tomes. Signs obscuring the way
to the other country. When did I first learn the terror
of inscription? I loved our songs, feared the book
of names: who shall live and who shall die a cruelty
I failed to understand…

Abby E. Murray, author of the fantastic poetry collection Hail and Farewell, has a poignant parenting poem in One Art called “How (Not) to Die” about “children on playgrounds, processing/what it is to exist in a world built/only by hands that cannot survive/or save it”.

Published in Necessary Fiction in 2023, Robbie Herbst’s flash fiction “The Harvard Whisperer” is part horror, part satire of the precarious society that young people enter and the pieces of themselves (literally!) that they lose to get ahead.

Over at Bending Genres, Shannon Frost Greenstein’s hermit crab essay “Quiz: Are You Perpetuating Intergenerational Trauma and Using the Wrong Skincare Line?” reveals that this humorous non sequitur is not so random after all. There are lots of possible connections to be drawn; I was reminded how mothers try to protect their daughters from cultural misogyny by oppressively micromanaging their appearance.

2. What is your nightly skincare routine?

A. I cleanse, towel dry, and threaten my children with bodily harm if they get out of bed.
B. I fall right asleep because I’m not that invested in modeling positive behaviors.
C. I do a laser light therapy facial mask and pit my children against one another.
D. I cry into my pillow because I’m making the same mistakes as my parents.

Tighe Flatley’s essay in the new issue of The Plentitudes, “How I Learned Victoria’s Secret”, is a young gay man’s coming-of-age story about working in retail at the ubiquitous mall store. By turns melancholy and hilarious, the essay describes the slow process of first assembling a false self and then letting it go.

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/

Tips from a Year of Indie Book Marketing

It is I, your favorite obscure novelist, here to share with you the good, the bad, the immeasurable, and the pleasurable results of a year of marketing my second novel, Origin Story. Which, by the way, makes a great Christmas or Hanukkah gift for an emo homosexual, comic book fan, theology nerd, or person who really needs to set boundaries with their family. Stuff your stocking with Peter and Julian today!

Best Value for Money

Pride Book Tours is a Bookstagram tour service run by Sasha Zatz. For just 125 pounds, she’ll get your LGBTQ book featured on about a dozen Instagram book recommendation sites. A lot of her clients are romance writers but my literary fiction book did quite well with her contacts. The real benefit was that several of the Instagrammers also wrote insightful, quotable, 4- and 5-star Goodreads reviews for Origin Story in addition to featuring it on their social media.

Worst Value for Money

Publicist John Madera’s firm Rhizomatic charged me $4,000 for a 3-month campaign (after I talked him down from his $10,000, 6-month offer) whose sole purpose was to secure blurbs and reading dates. I sent him contact information for a dozen bookstores and twice that many queer authors to approach. He delivered zero results. Three people supposedly agreed to write blurbs, so I sent them the book at my own expense, yet they never met the deadlines he kept promising. Moreover, he actively discouraged me from following up with any of the blurb writers after our contract’s end date, because he wanted to keep those relationships proprietary. As part of the inducement to sign with him, he said he’d publish any review that I couldn’t place elsewhere in his magazine, Big Other. However, when I sent him such a review, he ghosted on me until it was no longer timely, then rejected it without explanation.

The more widely applicable lesson here is that freelance publicists probably can’t do more for you than you could do for yourself. They’ll never have the same access that a Big Five publisher’s on-staff publicist has. Also, a contract that is worded subjectively (“so-and-so will use their best efforts to secure blurbs,” etc.) isn’t going to be easy to enforce.

NetGalley and Other Mysteries

In retrospect, it wasn’t cost-effective for me to pay $550 for a NetGalley listing, still less so to pay $700 for a featured spot in their LGBT Books email. Of the approximately 75 people who downloaded my book, only a handful wrote reviews, and these tended to be lower-quality in terms of their understanding of this admittedly challenging novel. If your book fits more securely within NetGalley readers’ genre expectations, you may get more out of being listed there. But I had to find out!

I can’t track whether the $350 full-page ad in Shelf Awareness sold any books. They did design the ad for you, which you could use in all your other digital promotions for free. It was marginally worth it for me because I have no patience to muck about with Canva. The ad itself was pretty generic, however, and the first version was full of errors–the inclusion of random text from my email signature made me suspicious that it had been “designed” by AI.

Review Outlets

Not all of these venues reviewed Origin Story but they’re good places to contact about your literary and small press books. Eternal love to Solstice Lit Mag, a longtime supporter of my writing, for this in-depth discussion of my novel’s innovative structure and theological themes. Oyster River Pages also ran a great review. DIAGRAM is the place to send your quirky hybrid writing and reviews of the same, especially if the review itself plays creatively with form. Best of the Net sponsor Sundress Publications recommends new poetry books, especially those with social justice and queer content, in their e-newsletters. The Masters Review regularly reviews literary prose books.

Electric Lit’s Reading Lists column is a good way to get your book featured in this prestigious online journal. Your article should be a list of 6-8 books that have a similar unusual angle as yours, with mini reviews, and in the process you can summarize and link to your own book. Mine was “8 Graphic Novels About Healing from Sexual Abuse” because Peter, the main character of Origin Story, recovers his memories by writing a superhero comic book.

Similarly, you can pitch a guest article for a website that’s related to your book topic. My personal essay “Companions in the Mirror: How My Novel Characters Are Allies in My Healing” was featured on the Curated Stories page of Time To Tell, a child abuse survivors’ support organization.

Though paid reviews have low prestige among knowledgeable literati, I wagered $59 on one from Readers’ Favorite. I liked their policy of only posting 4- and 5-star reviews; if a book doesn’t merit that ranking, they give the author private feedback instead. They did give Origin Story 5 stars, but I was a little disappointed that the review lacked depth. It mostly restated the jacket copy and added some generic superlative praise.

I’m starting to write book reviews at The Rumpus so if you’re about to release a literary small press novel, memoir, story or essay collection that you think would fit my interests, email je***@wi************.com .

Readings

You know a great way to get your indie book into more bookstores? Interview your friends at their book launches! Thank you, Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, for asking me to emcee her Brookline Booksmith event for Off the Books, her political thriller/road trip/love story about a Chinese-American rideshare driver whose handsome client has a secret in his suitcase.

Both in terms of book sales and in emotional satisfaction, I gave the best reading of my life at Easton Mountain, a clothing-optional retreat center for queer men. Events are not videotaped for obvious reasons, so you’ll just have to imagine me standing in front of a crowd of 60 guys in my sequin mesh briefs from Skull & Bones. Hat tip to my fellow Authors’ Night guests Mike De Socio (Morally Straight: How the Fight for LGBTQ Inclusion Changed the Boy Scouts–and America) and Carl Siciliano (Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth). If you’ll be at Easton for Bear Your Soul in January, come say hi!

Easton is a good example of a nontraditional reading venue with a really engaged audience. Think outside the usual list of bookstores and libraries. What affinity groups or community service organizations would be uplifted by your story? Could you give a workshop based on the book’s themes or your writing and research process?

For example, Tarot played a big role in both my writing process and Peter’s healing journey, so I led a class for our local Tarot society about ways to use the cards for fiction plotting. I sold two books to an audience of about 20 people, which is a pretty good return on investment, and we all had fun. Moreover, once you design the curriculum, you can take it to other venues where you might sell more books.

Inspirational Thoughts

My resolution for 2024 was “Appreciate those who appreciate me.” I resolved to manifest “satisfaction” as well as “success” and let the former be a touchstone for the latter. We can always make ourselves dissatisfied chasing more fame, more sales, more recognition from people we think are more important than ourselves. To step off this treadmill can feel abandoning ambition, because we’re unaccustomed to trusting that we’ll still do our work if not driven by fear and lack.

Knowing that my work was obscure and likely to stay that way, I asked myself about each marketing goal: Why do I actually want this? What do I hope it’ll make me feel? Is this something appropriate to ask from my writing? What community do I want this book to bring me into?

I do feel satisfied with Origin Story. I wrote it to encourage survivors that they won’t end up alone when they choose truth over toxic relationships. I said what I wanted to say about abuse-enabling Biblical religion, mental health stigma in the social work and adoption industries, and alternate spiritual paths that affirm our bodies’ wisdom. Reviews made me happy when my readers recognized the connections I made between these phenomena. That’s a benefit that isn’t about marketing per se, but can be remarkably rewarding.

I was able to afford a license for the cover image that I’d dreamed about for a decade, by artist Jim Shaw. The editors at Saddle Road Press always reply promptly, are well-informed and detail-oriented, have a great design sense, and take risks on innovative literature whether or not it’ll make money. (So please buy my book and keep them in business!) When you’re shopping around your filthy hybrid-genre novel about radical theology, look for a press like SRP that builds community among its authors.

Writing is mycelial. Market like a mushroom. You and other writers are part of the same organism, although your connections may be subterranean. My anxiety diminished when I absorbed the witchcraft worldview about interdependence. I realized that my life as a writer makes an impact, not only through my personal creations, but through promoting other people’s writing that matters to me.

When I started writing fiction seriously in 2006, underneath all the career concerns was my barely understood yearning to be included in the erotic, cultural, and spiritual world of gay men. Two Natures taught me I was trans. Origin Story helped me take risks to live my truth. Lying on the massage table at Body Electric this past autumn, sharing a transcendent ritual with my fellow nude homosexuals, I thought to myself, “This is why I wrote those books!”

I hope your writing brings you to such a moment, a joy that is an end in itself.

December Links Roundup: Living in Boxes

As a very strange year comes to an end, and a disruptive and destructive one is likely to begin, the question with which I begin this links roundup is: why can’t we Make Architecture Great Again? Megan Gafford’s Substack newsletter Fashionably Late Takes laments that “America was supposed to be Art Deco”. Iconic early 20th-century skyscrapers married ornamentation and the machine-age aesthetic to produce a distinct American style. But soon the Bauhaus style of flat, featureless prisms took over, responding to a postwar malaise that was suspicious of beauty. Gafford’s historical essay explains why, “for a hundred years, Modernist architects have been stabbing the world’s cities repeatedly with their glass shards.” Nostalgia has been weaponized by the Right, but the average person’s sense of alienation is not wrong.

A couple of related stories came to my attention this fall about crackdowns on political speech. Since the election, lots of social media users have shared On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder’s first directive, “Do not obey in advance.” Authoritarianism advances when people preemptively try to placate the dictator. Sometimes I’m glad I grew up in an abusive home, because I already know that this never works. There is no moment when the Dear Leader will say, “Thanks a lot. I guess I owe you a concession now.”

I would like to tattoo this message on the forehead of every mainstream cisgender pundit (I’m looking at you, New York Times) who’s suggested that Democrats should abandon transgender human rights in order to build a winning centrist coalition. What are you winning for? Once you concede that one minority group can have their children taken away, their healthcare criminalized, their jobs and housing dependent on the goodwill of the majority, and the very mention of their existence expunged from school curricula and libraries, you’ve created a repressive state apparatus that could chew up anyone next.

At LitHub, Gabrielle Belliot reflects on the Kafkaesque sensation of “Waking Up Trans in Trump’s America”.

America’s rigidity about categories betrays the conservatism that underlies much of it, and with conservatism comes an obsession with ideas about how families are supposed to look and how men and women are supposed to behave. Conservative outlets repeatedly broadcast to men, in particular, that they will be lesser, weaker, somehow more “effeminate” if they are queer, and they turn this toxic idiocy into homophobia and transphobia—both of which were darkly alchemized into votes for a man who wishes to end our existence.

To accept us, by contrast, is to accept wider possibilities of being. To embrace the idea that binaries are too restrictive, that life, at its core, is a curious flowing thing that cannot fit our simple human categories. To accept us is to reject a frighteningly powerful myth.

At Xtra, Jude Doyle tries to sort out facts from improbabilities: “Could the Trump administration criminalize queer speech online?” Infamously, Project 2025 seeks to redefine any positive portrayal of queer identities as pornography, whether or not it has literal sexual content. Doyle is less worried about book bans than about erasure of LGBTQ internet archives.

One way Trump has already moved to enact Project 2025 is in his pick of the FCC chair Brendan Carr. Carr wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025, and as chair, he would be in a position to enact at least some of the criminal sanctions proposed—specifically, the bit about shuttering telecommunications firms that allow queer and trans voices to proliferate. The way he could do this is to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which would make it an intolerable legal risk for internet platforms to host content by queer and trans people.

The article links to some guidelines for saving your materials offline and protecting your digital privacy. Remember that you don’t actually own the books on your Kindle. Save those paper books!

Meanwhile, some of our universities have already lost sight of their mission to protect free expression and teach critical thinking. This blog is a Harvard haters safe space. My alma mater makes it pretty easy to bash them, with increasingly absurd interpretations of its conduct rules in order to stifle pro-Palestinian activism. Max J. Krupnick reports for Harvard Magazine:

Last December, approximately 100 pro-Palestine students filed into Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room, taped flyers to the back of their laptops, and read for an hour. This “study-in,” billed as “silent” and “non-disruptive” by the student organizers, was not the largest or highest-profile protest of the year. But that event set the scene for this semester’s most significant challenge to the University’s efforts to curtail disruptive student protests.

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech…

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon…In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.”

…The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

These faculty members, too, were banned from Widener for two weeks following their study-in. Participating professors were especially upset to be punished for speech that was not controversial—in some cases, for displaying quotes from sources published by the University itself.

A similar faculty solidarity action took place at Northwestern University in Illinois. The campus newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, reported Nov. 21:

Around a dozen Northwestern tenured faculty members rallied by The Rock on Wednesday afternoon in protest of the University’s new demonstration policies. The demonstration drew a small crowd as faculty members marched with signs and spoke out against the new policies.

In September, the administration rolled out the new demonstration policies, which prohibit protests at The Rock before 3 p.m. on weekdays and the use of amplified sound in the area before 5 p.m.

…English Prof. Sarah Schulman, who is the faculty advisor for NU’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, condemned the University for disciplining students for putting up two “Gaza Solidarity Sukkah” on campus.

This policy “criminalizes” and “alienates” students from the University, Schulman said.

“Instead, we should be listening to our students, supporting them and praising them for having the integrity to stand up against this violent status quo,” Schulman said to the crowd.

Follow queer historian and AIDS activist Sarah Schulman on X because she doesn’t seem to have jumped ship to BlueSky yet.

Resources for Resistance

Well, well. America woke up and chose fascism. Again.

The day after the election, I wrote a lot, because fury is a great creative motivator for me. In the following days, I had unwise quantities of boba tea in order to fuel myself with pleasure. I bought a new hat that is not as good as my old hat, which I lost in a taxi in NYC on my way home from a nude gay spiritual retreat last month. I cried when I needed to cry, and fought the twin temptations of denial and anxious proliferation of strategies.

Abuse, dysphoria, and the pandemic taught me something about staying present in a crisis I can’t control. I’ve learned not to talk myself out of the future I want, even when it seems impossible. Yes, it is going to be that bad, and no, I don’t know what to do about it, except keep being queer and making art until it’s really obvious that someone will kill me for it (and maybe even then). That’s my version of not obeying tyranny in advance.

At least I will die as the hottest version of myself.

I’m rereading Stephen Dobyns’ 1996 poetry collection Common Carnage, a stoic yet compassionate book about finding beauty in a cruel world. My favorite poem in this book, not available online as far as I can tell, is “Indifference to Consequence”, in which the speaker contrasts the resilient peacefulness of wildflowers in a sidewalk crack with the bloody, miserly competitiveness more typical of human nature. An excerpt:

…What does it mean to be joyous,

to transform one’s frailty into flower?
But even that judgment must be wrong.
To you the image of weakness is a wolf
offering its neck to the pack. Such
sacrifice is beyond your comprehension.

Effortlessly these flowers bear the gifts
that remain to you a mystery. Think
of the boots that will crush them here,
trash cans and car tires yanked over the curb.
Even in life their death couldn’t scare them.

A poem I wrote last year, “These Characters and Themes Cannot Exist”, takes its title from a memo from a Charlotte County, FL education official directing schools to remove all books with LGBTQ content. It’s found a home at The Garlic Press, Issue #3. An excerpt:

…Emily is Nobody
and Abe never shared
his bearded honesty with Speed
in his bed.

Don’t snap
your fingers, butterfly
boy bestie, your whispering sisters
will have to get along

without

your paper to copy
the unspeakable thing
Claggart was willing
to die to say to Billy.
…

At Electric Literature, Bareerah Ghani interviewed Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who has emerged as a leading voice of artistic resistance to Israeli occupation. Knopf published his second collection, Forest of Noise, last month.

When I write poetry, I’m not trying to humanize Palestinians. I’m an artist. This is how I perceive things. I see details. When I write about the people I love, or the people I see and care about, my students, my neighbors, my house, the garden in our house, the sunset, the clouds, the birds, I don’t see the frame of the picture. I see the picture itself. I’m not trying to humanize Palestinians, so that people in the outside world would say, Oh, you know these people are really kind, oh they deserve to be alive. No, this is another function of the poem. I, as an artist, care about the details of everyone’s life. Not because I’m Palestinian, and I want to humanize my people. But this is the way life is. When there is an airstrike, I don’t see the victim. I don’t see the baby who was beheaded by the Israel airstrike.

I see the pacifier, I see the cot, I see the blanket. It’s visible there as much as the baby is visible. These details indicate that there used to be a life before death happened. I see the full picture. I don’t only see what happened after the airstrike. I also see what was happening before that, which is equally important.

Torrey House Press, a literary publisher with an interest in the cultures and environmental issues of the American West, has revived its blog series “That Thing With Feathers: Hope & Literature in a Time of Upheaval”, which was launched in 2020-21 during the pandemic. Their goal is to publish nature writing that is spiritually replenishing and reminds us to fight alongside our allies in the nonhuman world. In a recent installment, Laura Pritchett shares this advice from Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius:

“Whatever anyone does or says, for my part I’m bound to the good,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations. “In the same way an emerald or gold or purple might always proclaim: ‘whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors.’” Whatever happens in life, in world events, in politics, our job is our job, our duty is our duty. How does this stop you, Marcus asks elsewhere in Meditations, from acting with courage, discipline, justice and wisdom? In fact, it may well be that these election results present you with an incredible—and urgent and critical—opportunity to act with virtue.

In case you missed it, this post-election pep talk from Rachel Maddow is good for reviving your fighting spirit (12-minute video).

Boundary-setting queen Captain Awkward is on fire in her latest post about your right to distance yourself from Trump-voting relatives.

…The longer you stay invested in trying to extract accountability or persuade the un-persuadable, the more you expose yourself to people who hurt you. So, do you want to win the argument, or do you want to be free?

You can have space and peace and healing, with time.

You can re-invest all the effort and resources that you spent on them into building community with people who don’t make you feel this bad.

You can have the last word, sort of, in that you can say your piece and then stop responding to whatever they say back.

You can try to maintain a strictly superficial relationship that requires the least possible amount of effort and engagement from you. (Often useful or necessary when the problem person is the gatekeeper to relationships with other family members, like children).

But no matter how hard you try, you can’t fix other people’s hearts for them. These bogus calls for “unity” and “not letting politics distract us from what’s really important” are the same trap they’ve always been: “I get to treat you like shit, and you have to love and forgive me forever no matter how I treat you, and if you ever decide to stop playing this terrible game, I get to play the victim and blame everything on your supposed lack of empathy and commitment. Who wants a hug?”

Le sigh. Patriarchy is nothing if not boringly consistent, and you’ll notice that these articles about “how to coexist peacefully at holidays despite contrasting politics” are always about the concessions and compassion we owe them, and never about the basic human fucking decency they owe us. Continuously debating your own humanity with abusive people is a fruitless project that maintains the illusion that your safety and happiness are something they grant you, and not something that has always been yours. Sometimes all you can do is divest, disengage, and go somewhere safe to lick your wounds and rebuild a life that doesn’t revolve around them.

Finally, I enthusiastically recommend the website Waging Nonviolence for resistance ideas that don’t depend on naïve trust in our institutions, but don’t wholly destroy them either. Daniel Hunter’s article “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” encourages us to work on our mental health, avoid despair and isolation, give mutual aid, and remember they can’t execute their plans unless ordinary people cooperate…so what if we just don’t?

Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide…

This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust.

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.

This also means being trustworthy — not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you.

***

We’re not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). We’re not going to stop him from doing these things just by persuasive tactics or showing that there are a LOT of us who oppose them.

It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships.

The central tenet is that like an upside-down triangle, power can be unstable. It naturally topples over without anything supporting it. To prevent that, power relies on pillars of support to keep it upright.
Casually, the left often focuses on pillars of support that include governments, media, corporations, shareholders and policy makers. Describing the pillars of support, Gene Sharp wrote:

“By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.”

Removing one pillar of support can often gain major, life-saving concessions. In response to Trump’s 2019 government shutdown, flight attendants prepared a national strike. Such a strike would ground planes across the country and a key transportation network. Within hours of announcing they were “mobilizing immediately” for a strike, Trump capitulated.

“Our grief can help direct us toward what is ours to tend”: check out this 5-minute meditation on post-election grief from the spiritual wellness site Wild Heart.