Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

March Links Roundup: The Transience and Greatness of Books

Happy March–the month when, theoretically, spring will arrive, even in New England. As they say, if you don’t like the weather, wait a day. As changeable, too, are the fortunes of books. This essay by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), reprinted in Narrative Magazine, limns the author’s destiny in terms that are simultaneously humble, noble, and humorous.

Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. A bridge constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful career. But a book as good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. The art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life…

No secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs. This is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form—often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation.

Given the fickleness and unpredictability of the literary life–like any life–Conrad advises the author to prioritize clear understanding, compassion, and the liberty of the imagination. Art is already dead when it merely serves to illustrate an ideological or aesthetic agenda.

It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral Nihilism. I would require from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and renunciation. It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction. It gives an author—goodness only knows why—an elated sense of his own superiority. And there is nothing more dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation.

To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.

At the Southern arts and culture magazine Scalawag, poet Minnie Bruce Pratt urges us not to give up hope for the queer and leftist struggle in the South. Don’t write off the region as belonging to the right-wing racists. Like her late spouse Leslie Feinberg (Transgender Warriors), Pratt sees transformation occurring through intersectional alliances among queer, POC, and working-class people.

The South is full of our queerness—35 percent of the LGBTQ population in the U.S. lives here (the Northeast is home to only 19 percent). In the Deep South—Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana—almost 40 percent of us identify as people of color; In Texas that figure is over 50 percent.

Pratt shares anecdotes about political organizing and how we can learn from each other’s limited perspectives, such as her white mother who appreciated women’s gains in independence in the 1970s, but was unaware that Black activism laid the foundation for her freedoms.

In this video at Poets & Writers, Paul Tran, in a gorgeously gender-bending dress, reads “Copernicus” from their new poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books). Read more of their work at the Poetry Foundation website. From “Endosymbiosis” (a word that means one organism living inside another):

It wasn’t him
but what he did
that lived on
inside me.
I had to
learn that.
I had to
cleave  action
from figure,
the verb  do
from the noun  doll…
Performance artist Kris Grey creates thought-provoking shows and videos with their trans body, often nude, as the centerpiece. This untitled piece, in which they move in and out of a cast of their former body shape, helped me visualize how I might look and feel after top surgery. In their 10-minute video “Suspicious Packages”, Grey tries on some unexpected phallic substitutes. It’s deadpan funny, but maybe only trans guys will get the poignancy of it, too–that way in which a packer both eases dysphoria and uncomfortably emphasizes its own artificiality, its separateness from the body.

My Poetry Book “Made Man” Is Here!

My third full-length collection, Made Man, officially launches March 1 from Little Red Tree Publishing.

Staci Wright at the American Library Association’s Rainbow Round Table Reviews says:

A mix of somber moments and charming wit, Reiter’s collection makes space for humor in the maelstrom of navigating gendered experiences. Their poems synthesize recent historical moments and deeply personal anecdotes to create commentary that dares you to question binaries and social construction itself. Reiter sources material from the nooks and crannies of the human experience; they sculpt each poem using anything from Scholastic Book Club books to Jewish folklore to 1970’s photography series to Manhattan dumpling houses.

Poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt says:

Dense with figure and dense with thought, full of fun and full of anguish, superbly conscious of every rule they break, sometimes giving us comfort and sometimes “another live coal in your mouth,” the poems in this collection work and play and travel in many directions, speak through many and varied masks. Then they come back together to point to a confident future, a nonbinary embodiment, a way past the limits of what other people have told us counts as feminine (“the mermaid bleeds lipstick”), as masculine (“chaos softboy”), as sacred, as childhood (“happy as a rubber ball”), parenthood, adulthood (“I didn’t grow up. I had more laundry”).

I regret that I did not send the poem below to queer theorist Leo Bersani, author of the seminal-in-all-senses text Is the Rectum a Grave? And now he has gone to the great bath house in the sky. Dr. Bersani passed away at age 90 on Feb. 20. From the NY Times obit:

Dr. Bersani was best known for his 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” a dense, polemical critique of the tendency among some gay activists to respond to AIDS by downplaying their sexuality and emphasizing the need to replicate bourgeois heterosexuality.

Male homosexuality was not the mirror image of heterosexuality, he argued, but something radically different, lacking many of the patriarchal inequalities that he said defined straight life.

“Far from apologizing for their promiscuity as a failure to maintain a loving relationship,” he wrote, “gay men should ceaselessly lament the practical necessity, now, of such relations, should resist being drawn into mimicking the unrelenting warfare between men and women.”

This poem (like many of my best works) was inspired by a joke from my husband, so I guess marriage is good for something. FYI, the opening line of Bersani’s famous essay is “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”

 

Is the Roasting Pan a Grave?

There is a big secret about turkey: most people don’t like it.
One November day’s duty, otherwise ignored, the bottom.

When the legs are moist, the breast’s dried out
With a hellbound heart, closeted clerics exhort the bottom.

The more savored the taste, the more later despised:
Rest now, fabulous martyrs who whored the bottom.

Play families, play natives’ welcome spread for the plagued men:
Our schoolboy histories will not record the bottom.

But for one night, we feast together in a dying year —
What, then, that too much stuffing may distort the bottom?

We “failed to find the idea of the holocaust unbearable”:
Rather police meat market into pastoral, report the bottom.

Give thanks to ghosts, our unquenchable forefathers,
Pilgrims of filth, who on their knees adored the bottom.

TL;DR? Should Bersani’s words prove dry,
Read the foil pan embossed: ALWAYS SUPPORT THE BOTTOM.

The Poet Spiel: “Returnee” Series

Time for some more hard-hitting poems about war and American manhood from my friend The Poet Spiel, a/k/a the artist Tom W. Taylor. Watch this space for news of our collaboration on my next poetry book!

returnee: commandments 6 and 3

on his knees,
in reverse
of the sacred thou shalt commandments,
first taken to his heart as an innocent,
he killed for you
on lofty commands
drilled deep
in the immediacy
of fear and steel
and fire.

he’d come back home
and robbed you
of what he thought
he’d fought for;
and when he found himself confused,
he cleansed your colon
with his 9 mm glock.

so he fell to his knees —
like when he was a child —
to humbly wash your feet
of what he’d done;
but recognized he’d finalized
his shames
when he exclaimed
his first lord’s name
in vain.
___________________________
returnee: last words

he is so glad to be free
of those god-forsaken sandstorms.

glad to sink heels into real dirt
he’d worked
before he was called.

but he cannot know these bodies,
occupying the same address
where they all watch tv,

where he’s been pissing away big rents
from over there
for all these years.

these aliens have the same names as those
who have been shipping monthly selfies
and xmas goodies to him:
jen and tiffy, billy lou and little john.

though they have
somewhat familiar faces,
he wants nothing to do
with these strangers.

the square truth is:
he just doesn’t have to kiss
nobody’s ass
no more

he’s already said his last words —
every ten breaths of his life
for the past one thousand days.

February Bonus Links: Go Ahead, Break That Dish

When the pandemic started, my spiritual guide Julian said to me, “We’re all going to die, darling–wear your good shoes.” (For more advice from an imaginary fashion photographer, read this book.) The sudden closeness of death and impermanence brought home to me that there may be no “later” that we’re saving our luxuries for. Or, as a less slutty higher power is reported to have said, “You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” (Luke 12:20)

In the magazine Eater, journalist and witchy writer Jaya Saxena advises “Stop Worrying and Start Using Your Fancy China”:

 It is such a waste of beauty to keep the loveliest things out of sight, away from the parties and the food and the people you love, just because you’re afraid you’re going to lose them.

The thing about owning nice things is you’re going to die one day. Which isn’t to say throw it all to hell and only eat off paper plates, but that nice things are meant to be enjoyed while we’re still on this earth… Honor your ancestors or your family who bought such nice things off your registry by actually using what they’ve given you.

This mindset shift is not easy, I admit. Referencing the fraught family dynamics of our wedding, I often caution my son when he’s playing too vigorously next to our the china cabinet, “Many Bothans died to bring us this Royal Doulton tea set.” Which, now that he’s seen “Star Wars”, perhaps he will understand.

Shortly before that wedding, a much-fought-for event that I’d dreamed about all my life, I wrote this poem about my ambivalence about making any life-altering decision, even one that I wanted. Now, contemplating another big step in my gender transition, I appreciated this article by Joseph Bikart at the UK-based digital magazine Psyche: “How to make a difficult decision”. Bikart offers several thought-exercises to help you identify the parts of yourself that want opposite things; expand the range of choices; clarify your underlying goal; and break down big overwhelming projects into manageable steps.

Bikart writes, “Decisions cut us off from other choices, other opportunities and the possibility of better outcomes. For this reason, the act of deciding can feel like a self-inflicted wound.” (Literally, in my case, since I’m thinking about top surgery!) And he really called me out with this one: “Indecision and procrastination do not postpone the pains of a decision to a future day: they multiply that pain by spreading it across every minute of every day, until you finally decide.”

On that note, hats off to cultural critic and historian Lucy Sante, formerly known as Luc Sante (author of Low Life and The Other Paris), who transitioned last year at age 67. In her recent Vanity Fair article about her journey of self-discovery, this passage stood out to me:

I once described myself as a creature made entirely of doubt, much of it self-doubt, but as soon as I made up my mind to come out, last February, I ceased doubting. That is to say, I experienced regular bouts of dysphoria, which in this context means intense recurring periods of self-doubt, self-hatred, and despair, which happen irregularly for varying lengths of time, typically (for me, by now) about two or three days a week. Yet paradoxically I had never before experienced such wholehearted conviction. Even in the throes of those bouts I felt an unaccountable bedrock of certainty.

Trans people colloquially refer to this moment as your egg cracking. It would be equally true to my experience to describe it as an iceberg thawing. All of the frozen feelings emerge like the Old Ones in “From the Mountains of Madness”. Along with euphoria, wholeness, relief, and a new sense of integration and resonance with myself, I have bouts of grief and fear. I confront internalized cis-het beauty standards that tell me I’m mutilating my body, or squandering the safety afforded by presenting as an average-looking lady. My younger selves finally speak up about the shame and discomfort of puberty. Paradoxically, I mourn both the young man I never got to be, and the older woman I won’t become.

Here’s another poem, “Couplets”, from the same pre-wedding period. “One can never/prove anything to the world, only make it surrender/by ignoring it or being ignored.” Thanks, Jendi-age-26. You were a smart guy.

February Links Roundup: Eat a Book Every Day

In elementary school they read us this delicious poem by Mark Strand: “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry…” The gender politics of “Eating Poetry” are a little cringe but the visceral engagement with language still resonates with me.

And apparently also with machine learning expert Janelle Shane’s AI, which generated this list of New Year’s resolutions. Eat a book every day. Speak only to apples for 24 hours. Jump in front of a moving tree. And more…

A lifetime ago, it seems, I went to Columbia Law School. Lawyers generate a lot of bullshit, but my alumni magazine has good news about that, so to speak, in their article “The Remarkable Power of Poop”. Reviewing Lina Zeldovich’s The Other Dark Matter (University of Chicago Press), Paul Hond explains that the biomass fuel in human waste is an untapped resource for renewable energy.

Progressive Christian and “opti-mystic” Mike Morrell’s e-newsletter highlights creative spiritual thinkers who strive to reconnect Christianity to social and environmental justice. (And it’s sad that that sentence has to be written at all.) This post from January excerpts poet-theologian James W. Perkinson’s book Political Spirituality in an Age of Eco-Apocalypse. Perkinson draws a connection between our ecologically unsustainable lifestyle and the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature. Beyond that, he sees the homogenizing, totalizing impulse of Christian evangelism as laying the groundwork for the depletion of species.

“God” in its multiple-millennial-long career as an agri-business construct, legitimizing hoarding of means among an elite and of meanings among a priesthood, is perhaps the primal technology of “civilizational” control—the Great Licenser of Hierarchy and Patron of Locked-Down Food, withheld or given for the sake of obsequiousness at the royal whim.

The kingdom of God, by contrast, is a mustard seed, a mystery of proliferating wildness that coexists with many other life forms. “The role of mustard is not to convert all living reality into itself.”

Meanwhile, in the latest issue of Harvard Magazine, Lydialyle Gibson profiles textile artist Celia Pym, who knits up holes in old clothing in such a way as to highlight their unique history of wear and tear. In so doing, she honors the wearers’ long relationship with the garments. It’s like a yarn version of kintsugi. I loved this because it’s always felt disrespectful to just throw out old clothes–we’ve been through a lot together.

“One reason it’s good seeing what you’ve mended is that, once things change, once damage creeps in, it’s very hard to return to the original,” she says. “To make it something new, but different—that’s the stronger move.”

And finally, RIP André Leon Talley, a flamboyant yet regal plus-size couture icon, who was one of the few Black editors in the fashion industry. Among other things, he was creative director of Vogue under Anna Wintour, and a judge on “America’s Next Top Model”. From the NY Times obit:

Mr. Talley, who stood 6 feet 6 inches tall, was an unmistakable figure everywhere he went. Given to drama in his personal style (he favored capes, gloves and regal headpieces), his pronouncements (“My eyes are starving for beauty”) and the work he adored, he cultivated an air of hauteur, though his friends knew him for his subcutaneous sentimentality…

…Mr. Talley continued to believe in the power of the well-placed seam and the perfectly polished shoe, the way the shallowest of objects can transform our deepest aspirations into reality.

“To my 12-year-old self, raised in the segregated South, the idea of a Black man playing any kind of role in this world seemed an impossibility,” he wrote in his memoir.

For more on his unique career, check out this 2018 NY Times article about the documentary “The Gospel According to André”. The movie is available on the streaming services HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Hulu Premium.

Hell Is the Absence of Closure

Having just finished my intensive immersion in “The Sopranos”, I don’t have an explanation for the enigmatic and (some would say) unsatisfying final cut-to-black scene of Tony in the diner. To quote Wednesday Addams, Are they dead? Does it matter? What I do notice is a psychological resemblance to the endings of two other shows that made a deep impression on me, “Mad Men” and “BoJack Horseman”. The central character of all three shows is a charming and destructively narcissistic man whose antisocial behavior at first seems clever and entertaining, then tragic, then dull and predictable.

I binged “BoJack” during 2020 quarantine (how fucked-up is it that we have to specify which year of COVID quarantine we’re in?) and something about its combination of bleakness and surreal frivolity spoke to the sudden bizarre shift in our lives. I was late to the “Mad Men” trend, but caught up in time to watch the last season in real time. Back in 2015 I thought Peggy Olson had finally shown me the kind of woman I was, which I’d never seen on TV before. Isaac Fellman’s essay “Peggy Olson Is a Gay Trans Man” tells you how that worked out.

As viewers, we crave a conventional narrative arc. Someone changes, or is shattered by the consequences of refusing to change. The endings of these three series frustrate that desire, because a wearying stasis is truer to life with a person trapped in his own narcissism.

Don Draper seems to have a breakdown and breakthough in the finale, shedding the status symbols of his ad-man life to wind up sobbing in an encounter group at Esalen. But the final minutes strongly suggest he’s going to spin his moment of enlightenment into a Coca-Cola commercial as soon as he catches a ride home to New York.

A “Hollywoo” treatment of “BoJack” would have ended one episode earlier, with him drowning in the swimming pool of his former luxury apartment like Joe Gillis in “Sunset Boulevard”. Instead, a subdued BoJack is directing amateur theater productions in jail while his friends’ lives move on without him. “Life’s a bitch, then you die, right?” he says to Diane, who replies, “Sometimes, life’s a bitch, then you keep living.”

In my opinion, that’s the punishment to which Tony Soprano is sentenced. He’s dead inside, whether or not his physical body is alive. Like the Flying Dutchman, he’s going to go on eating onion rings in that diner forever, after almost all his old friends and close family have died (many by his hand).

Sometimes the redemption arc is that other people get away from the one guy who’s been soaking up all the energy in the room because of his resistance to growth. The guy who thinks he’s the main character in everyone’s life, not just his own.

January Links Roundup: As the Crow Flies

Welcome to 2022, readers. Let’s start the year with the energy of this Oregon crow who befriended a class of fifth graders:

[Education assistant Naomi] Imel said the bird wasn’t aggressive at all and seemed to love the kids.

“It landed on some people’s heads,” she said.

And, she added, it spoke. The bird could say, “What’s up?” and “I’m fine” and “a lot of swear words.”

I’m doing my part–I’ve taught my 9-year-old to say “va fungool”, which he prefers to pronounce as “fats and goo!”

In other linguistic news from Harvard Magazine, my alma mater has articulated some useful principles for “de-naming” buildings and programs that honor slave-owners and other problematic characters:

 Harvard Law School has changed its shield, given its prior association with a founding benefactor who was a slaveholder. The faculty deans of Lowell House have relocated representations of Abbott Lawrence Lowell—a former Harvard president, whom they associated with racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic views and actions—and prompted a wider discussion of the House’s name. (“Faculty dean” is itself a 2016 retitling of the position formerly known as “House master”—a decision accompanied by some controversy.) Critics of the Sackler family, associated through their pharmaceutical company with the lethal opioid epidemic, have called for renaming the eponymous museum (the donor, Arthur M. Sackler, pioneered pharmaceutical advertising, but died a decade before Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin, the compound associated with the epidemic.)

One of our local writing groups hosted an online discussion this winter on Craft in the Real World, by bestselling novelist, essayist, and writing teacher Matthew Salesses. In true Harvard student fashion, I hadn’t actually read the book yet when I attended, but it’s on my long wishlist because of the compelling insights in his January 2021 LitHub essay “25 Essential Notes on Craft”. Salesses points out that aesthetics are never universal or apolitical. Rules for good writing are audience-dependent, and we don’t always need to cater to a white American individualist audience.

Craft is also about omission. What rules and archetypes standardize are models that are easily generalizable to accepted cultural preferences. What doesn’t fit the model is othered. What is our responsibility to the other?…

Craft is the history of which kind of stories have typically held power—and for whom—so it also is the history of which stories have typically been omitted. That we have certain expectations for what a story is or should include means we also have certain expectations for what a story isn’t or shouldn’t include. Any story relies on negative space, and a tradition relies on the negative space of history. The ability for a reader to fill in white space relies on that reader having seen what could be there. Some readers are asked to stay always, only, in the negative. To wield craft responsibly is to take responsibility for absence.

I never get tired of reminding people that the controversy over false memories was largely manufactured by defense experts for parents accused of child molestation. “Harvey Weinstein’s ‘False Memory’ Defense and its Shocking Origin Story,” a Longreads article from February 2020 by Anna Holtzman, is subtitled “How powerful sex offenders manipulated the field of psychology.”

Founded in 1992, [the False Memory Syndrome Foundation] was on its surface an “advocacy group” created by and for parents who’d been accused by their children of sexual abuse. The group’s supposed agenda was to provide support and fellowship to families that had been “destroyed” by accusations of incest. They launched a well-funded media campaign purporting the existence of an epidemic of “False Memory Syndrome” — not a scientifically researched condition, but rather a slogan concocted by accused parents to discredit the testimonies of their children…

The strategies by which FMSF infiltrated the psychology profession share much in common with Trump’s methods. The foundation used a carrot-and-stick technique to coerce the mental health field to fall in step with their agenda. The carrot was an impressive list of researchers, psychologists and academics that the accused parents of FMSF had recruited to be on their Scientific and Professional Advisory Board. The stick was a far-ranging assault of well-funded lawsuits aimed at discrediting, disbarring and suing therapists who dared to support incest survivors and validate their memories.

Psychologists and therapists were threatened with professional ruin if they sided with survivors and were tempted with professional reward if they aligned with the powerful forces behind the anti-survivor backlash…

Elizabeth Loftus, widely cited as the preeminent memory researcher in the “false memory” camp, has made a career of defending alleged child abusers in court for large sums of money. By her own admission, she has no experience working with trauma survivors in any clinical or research capacity.

Holtzman notes that the FMSF board included University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Orne, known for working with the CIA on mind-control experiments during the Cold War.

Orne and his MKUltra colleagues likely believed that by traumatizing their “research subjects,” they could ensure that their victims would not remember the abuse or would at least be too afraid to tell anyone. When survivors started speaking out, however, it became evident that their memories were resurfacing. So, what better way to silence sexual abuse victims than by launching a propaganda campaign that labels victims as crazy and discredits their memories? And what more natural frontmen to hide behind than the aggrieved parents of FMSF?

Holtzman’s article carefully and clearly debunks the main arguments used to discredit recovered memories. Whether or not you buy the CIA conspiracy theory, her logic is sound. And the Weinstein connection? One of his expert witnesses in his rape trial was, you guessed it, Elizabeth Loftus.

Safe Communities Pennsylvania has created this free 36-page guide to making your church congregation a safer environment for survivors of child sexual abuse. What I appreciate is that they treat it as a theological issue, not only a pastoral care issue. The guide suggests ways to rethink your preaching about forgiveness, suffering, and peace, among other concepts, so that survivors are not silenced or pressured to do emotional labor to redeem their abusers.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2021

How it started:

Jennifer Melfi - Wikipedia

How it’s going:

Silvio Dante Picture

Another year around the Block. I definitely don’t take that for granted. It’s one thing to know intellectually that life is short and unpredictable, entirely another thing to feel that urgency as one wakes up every day in a country under threat from fascism and disease. What am I waiting for?

High Spirits: I tried marijuana edibles for the first time in November. It was pleasant to feel my brain slow down for about 5 hours. No time to do it again till February, I imagine. I really need to readjust my work-life balance.

Salem’s Lot: Studying witchcraft this year has brought me great satisfaction, mind-body integration, and optimism. ICYMI, I blogged about it earlier this month. My first year of training will wrap up in March 2022. Time to start selecting my magickal name, which may coincide with applying for a new passport and driver’s license with a male gender marker. (My desire for gender affirmation conflicts with my basic laziness regarding paperwork and my Ron-Swanson-esque opinion that my gender is none of the government’s business anyway.)

Personal Soundtrack: Remember that week in January when everyone was singing sea shanties on TikTok? I got hooked on The Longest Johns, and particularly their song “Bones in the Ocean”, a poignant ode to survivor guilt that seemed extra meaningful as America’s COVID death toll reached 800,000. The Young Master independently discovered this song at summer camp and now we listen to shanties together on Spotify. His fourth-grade music teacher also introduced him to 2Cellos, an energetic pair of HOT guys who play pop tunes in a classical style. And I still can’t get enough of that German Karneval music.

Bookbag: Some of the extremely homosexual books I enjoyed this year were Aden Polydoros’ Jewish paranormal mystery The City Beautiful, Brandon Taylor’s literary short fiction collection Filthy Animals, and the poetry collections Mutiny by Phillip B. Williams and The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed. I’d been meaning to read Glen David Gold’s historical novel about vaudeville magicians, Carter Beats the Devil, for almost 20 years, and it was all I hoped for and more. Julie Murphy’s queer YA romance Pumpkin gave me the courage to sign up for a transgender runway show next month. Pictures forthcoming!

The Writing Life: I finished a major revision of my novel Origin Story with guidance from the peerless editor/sensitivity reader Denne Michele Norris, co-host of Food 4 Thot Podcast and the new editor-in-chief of Electric Lit.

Once again, I took part in the 30 Poems in November fundraiser for the Center for New Americans, while binge-watching “The Sopranos” on HBO’s streaming service. The conjunction of those two pastimes generated The Waste-Management Land, a poetry chapbook manuscript in need of a good home.

My third full-length poetry collection, Made Man, comes out in February from Little Red Tree and is now available to pre-order. Cover art and interior illustrations by Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel. This book explores female-to-male transition and gay masculine identity through the voices of unusual objects and fictional characters. Enjoy the opening poem, first published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal.

Self-Portrait as Pastry Box

Under my roof, cathedrals of piped
icing breathe out the sacred stale
sweetness of cream and cardboard
white as a right-hand man’s
final satin bed.
Under my roof we pay our respects.
The family is a thin shelter, soon wet.
If you don’t believe me, open
and see the red smash where tiered berries kissed
the jostled lid. No shifting
the ingredients. No loose knots in the string.
Under my roof I’ll thank you
not to take knives in vain.
Remember him who was lifted
from the river, from the box he was sealed in.
The snapped wafer laid on your tongue like a secret
recipe. Religion‘s root means to tie
string round the wrists, the trash
bag sinking, the harbor’s surface restored.
Under my roof the family’s bound
to gasp, glorying in the sugared name
I display to be sliced after the blown-out wish.
Take the cannoli, broken for you.

Why Witchcraft?

The time has come “to give a reason for the hope that is in me” (1 Peter 3:15).

Since March 2021, I’ve been a Year One student at the Temple of Witchcraft. Co-founded in 1998 by Christopher Penczak, Steve Kenson, and Adam Sartwell, TOW offers online and in-person courses in magical training and personal development. My current program is an independent study course conducted by email and audio recordings. It has five levels, with each course lasting a year and a day. TOW is an ecumenical tradition combining neopaganism, witchcraft, and magic. It is not specifically “Wiccan” but some practices and beliefs do overlap.

When I run into old acquaintances who ask what I’ve been doing lately, I generally say, “Oh, you know, revising my incest novel and watching my leg hair grow.” I’m coy about discussing my new spiritual path because, number one, I’ve barely learned enough to describe it accurately, and number two, it’s exhausting to anticipate people’s negative misconceptions about the Craft. I’m not worshiping the devil, and I’m not crazy (or not any more crazy than before). Usually I make a joke that I’m studying witchcraft by correspondence course but can’t turn Donald Trump into a toad because spell-work is Year Two.

A more substantial cause for my reticence is that I don’t wish to disparage other faiths or be a one-right-way evangelist, as I was during my evangelical days. But I can’t really explain why witchcraft feels right, without criticizing some features of Bible-based religion and its institutions.

It’s an analogous problem to explaining my transition. How can I describe what it feels like to be a man, without contrasting it to womanhood? And if I do that, won’t I inevitably fall into binary stereotypes, or make over-broad generalizations? One could, after all, wear neckties and be sexually assertive and not apologize for one’s career ambitions, and still identify as female. And one could remain in the church without believing in the Bible or the creeds (which I suspect is the majority of Episcopalians).

During the 2020 lockdown, I binge-watched “BoJack Horseman” on Netflix. Diane Nguyen, an introverted human journalist, and Mr. Peanutbutter, a humanoid Golden Retriever who’s very impulsive and outgoing, have a realistic bad marriage: neither of them is really at fault, they’re just fundamentally mismatched in their energy. They have to face that it’s not working in the Season 4 episode “What Time Is It Right Now”. After Mr. Peanutbutter’s latest grand gesture goes awry, Diane tearfully explains that their marriage is like an optical illusion. If you squint at it just right, it suddenly makes sense. But she’s so tired of squinting.

That’s exactly how I felt about trying to stay a woman, or a Christian. With a lot of effort, I could sorta make it work. I could shoehorn my personality and beliefs into something superficially female/Christian, and try to ignore the aspects of that identity that didn’t apply to me…and all the people constantly assuming those aspects did apply…and all the other people invoking our shared identity to justify transphobia and other oppressions. Or I could just…NOT.

While my church and denomination have been supportive of queer people, my deconversion and transition have mutually amplified each other, because once I discovered how it felt to “fit” in one area of my life, I couldn’t settle for “almost good enough” in other important areas.

So, why the Temple of Witchcraft? I was looking for formal training that would provide the liturgical richness and theological depth that I missed about Christianity. I’d bought some spell books in metaphysical shops, but it was hard to have faith in their recipes when I didn’t know the reasons behind them. Many folks who leave Bible-based religion for witchcraft are seeking something more female-led and goddess-centric. That wasn’t me. I asked my Tarot community about queer masculine teachers and Christopher Penczak’s name came up several times. Perhaps a year earlier, I’d had a funny experience in NYC’s Namaste Bookshop where I was browsing the shelves and said to myself, “What I really need is a book on gay witchcraft,” and seconds later, I spied this. (Did I buy it? Yes. Have I read it yet? No.)

Year One of our course, “The Inner Temple,” focuses on mental exercises, discovering and working with our embodied energy, and imaginative journeying. There are some simple rituals but it’s mainly about self-knowledge and psychic training. This proved to be exactly what I needed for my next stage of somatic trauma healing. The inward orientation made a refreshing contrast to liberal mainline churches’ emphasis on service projects at the expense of spiritual formation. Not that the social gospel isn’t important, but we took refuge in politically uncontroversial good deeds to avoid grappling with our religious doubts and disagreements.

Here are some things about Witchcraft that feel healthier for me:

Acceptance of Change

The nature of reality, according to the Hermetic Principles, is vibration and rhythm. Everything is evolving and in motion. We’re part of a larger pattern, but because it’s dynamic, there’s plenty of room for human agency to shift the pattern in a different direction. Moreover, there’s no presumption against change. It’s not sacrilegious to alter a tradition. You just want to do it thoughtfully, as Tim Gunn says about accessorizing your clothing. Understand the rationale for the old ways, so your changes will be effective and intentional.

By comparison, scriptural religion seemed to me like a structurally conservative force. The words of ancient writers are given a special authority over people alive here and now–no matter that those writers didn’t see some of us as fully human. Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton quipped that “tradition is the democracy of the dead,” but the dead can’t change their minds. Their votes are permanently cast for whatever values prevailed 2,000 years ago.

Variety of Commitment Levels

Traditional institutions conceptualize membership as an important boundary, and regard greater involvement as spiritually superior. Liberal religious leaders are not immune from contempt for the “nones” and the “spiritual but not religious”, assuming that their faith life must be shallow and selfish compared to belonging to a congregation. Some of this high-demand attitude must be driven by the economics of supporting a church building and staff salaries on volunteer contributions and labor. But it just has a cultish feel to it that reminds me of the loyalty tests and guilt-tripping in dysfunctional families.

The Temple of Witchcraft has a building and a few employees but its brick-and-mortar overhead is pretty low and its classes do cost money ($360 a year, really good value IMHO!). Beyond that, their philosophy of involvement is relaxed and consensual. You can complete each year of training without committing to the next year. You can use the techniques but decide not to pursue witchcraft as your spiritual path. There is a great deal of study and self-discipline required if you stick with the training, but no judgment if you decide to leave. Year Five graduates can qualify for ministry but it isn’t the required next step. In Year One, we’ve learned a little about certain entities that the Temple works with, but we are encouraged to continue or discover our own relationships with deities and spirits. Witchcraft is not exclusive of other faiths we may be practicing. (Those other faiths might not be so thrilled with witchcraft, however!)

Basically, they treat us like adults who know what’s best for ourselves, not like we’re trying to get away with being spiritual dilettantes and slackers.

Distributed Spiritual Powers

The exclusivity of Biblical monotheism had become a sticking point for me. I could see how it shared a common DNA with other oppressive forms of social organization: On the personal level, a family headed by a jealous, isolating parent. On the political level, the homogenization or erasure of competing worldviews by colonialism and white supremacy.

Traditional Christianity proposes a gulf between the human and the divine that can only be bridged by an exceptional event. This rang true to me when I was younger because I was cut off from my own life force and from any safe community. It made sense to conceptualize the world as islands of fragile holiness in a sea of danger. Nature seemed cruel or indifferent because I was an abused child, and children can’t survive in the wild without parental care. God the Father was my only hope.

As I’ve made a safer life for myself, and opened up to the experience of embodiment, divinity no longer seems remote and capricious. Witchcraft teaches me to attune to the presence of benevolent consciousnesses and accessible spiritual gifts in every aspect of the physical world. My individual self begins to feel more porous and continuous with the earth’s cycles of death and renewal–a great comfort during this pandemic.

When I thought there was one God, who considered himself infinitely better and wiser than me, I was afraid of him. I was told I was obligated to be in a relationship with him, but I didn’t see how there could be trust without consent. In my current paradigm, there are a multitude of spiritual beings, and I can choose which ones I work with. (Within the limits of avoiding cultural appropriation, and whether they want to work with me!) I don’t have to engage closely with any parent-like figures or anthropomorphic beings if I find them triggering. I can ask for guides who are on my level of the hierarchy, so to speak–equal companions rather than authority figures. There’s no expectation that gods will be part of my practice, at all.

Agency Over My Experience

Year One training starts us on the path of noticing and reshaping our emotional, physical, and psychic states. I’m much less afraid to sit with my emotions because I’m being given techniques to perceive them as tangible energy forms that I can investigate and tinker with.

In a lot of Christian discourse about retraining our minds and hearts, a power-struggle paradigm is central. We’re pressured to “surrender”. More intense experience must be better. By contrast, in the Temple lectures and materials, we’re reassured that we will have the experience that is highest and best for us right now. No judgment, no comparison.

When I wish for something, I’m no longer sitting around wondering if it’s “God’s will”–a concept that seems unknowable to me, given how many contradictory statements people have made in the name of Jesus. What seems to work for me, lately, is a combination of faith that it will happen, and acceptance of not knowing how it will happen. I set my intentions “for the good of all, harming none,” take whatever practical steps are available now, and wait. Right now I’m working on manifesting cats in my home office. Watch this space for updates.

Flash Fiction by Spiel: “Blue Boy”

Multi-genre creator The Poet Spiel, a/k/a the visual artist Tom W. Taylor, has now licensed his colorful, energetic prints of flora and fauna for sale on Spoonflower fabrics and home goods. Spiel’s artwork will also grace the cover and frontispieces of my next poetry collection from Little Red Tree, forthcoming in early 2022.

Meanwhile, he shares with us this short story about the plight of survival sex workers. ACAB!

Blue Boy

Bigelow spits his gold-plated Masonic cufflinks; polishes them against the knee of his Brooks Brothers charcoal herringbone dress trousers. He circles this dingy block a fifth time as he frets his opening line:

“One-day intergalactic space travel will be available to everyone.”

Yeah, that seems pretty harmless. Even if she’s a cop, she won’t be able to hang him with that.

Night hits Honeybunch’s regular hangout wall like a splitting maul — sucks the warmth out of it.

Leaves her skin the same color as the cold deep shadow hovering over Northern and Central. She’s been warned and busted three times since she’s hit this crummy town.

Her kid is stashed four blocks away on the floor of her flat-tired booted truck, trying to disappear beneath a blue plastic tarp — chewing his fingers for nurture. Freezing.

She’s been doing quickie b.j.’s at four bucks a shot just to buy him a now-and-then Hershey bar and a bag of corn chips so she doesn’t have to grab them and run like hell.

Bigelow’s rig is long and shiny. Big bucks, she figures. Maybe he’ll be good for a tenbucker.

She’d throw in a buttfuck for fifteen. He wantsa go bareback? Christ! That oughtta be a fifty but on a night like this, she’d settle for a twenty.

His tires growl against the curb. Automatic passenger window whispers as it vanishes. She sticks her head through the hole. It’s like the Vegas hotel room that slimy Mayor flew her to when she was fifteen — but no ceiling mirrors. She wonders if this creep might slit her throat. Worries if she might stink too much. A fifty-dollar bill lies right beneath her nose. A limp pecker peeks out from beneath his padded steering wheel. His palms are wet white.

“N-n-nice night, Miss, uhh, I g-g-guess I don’t know your name. Uhh, one day, d-d-d-did you know intergalactic space t-t-t-travel will one day be available to everyone…even such as yourself?”

Honeybunch practically inhales the fifty. Damn near swoons over the instant thought of a bucket of hot greasy breast meat from KFC. “Shove yer fuckin space rockets, White Ass!” she sneers as red lights flash through Bigelow’s steamed rear window. His flabby neck looks like a fat ripe tomato as he quickly presses his clammy hands upwards — like he’s scared his plush white leather roof will collapse and suffocate him.

Her kid is turning blue on the rotten truck floor — barely able to comfort his little head against the gawddam froze-up brake pedal.

Honeybunch spends another night in the convenience of a cell huddled with her kind.

Any kind of bread will be just fine.