Category: anecdotes

We’re All Punks Now

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It’s July again, almost August, and I’m sweating and sneezing and sleeping. We got our very first batch of avocados from one of the trees in the backyard. They’re small and not ready yet. Originally, the sapling was a gift I gave my husband many years ago, maybe just two or three years after we started dating. The tree has grown and grown, but never bore us any fruit until now.

Despite the oppressive heat, we’ve been going on evening walks. We’ve made a game of finding kitties along our route. I pretend I’m catching them like Pokémon with my camera. There are so many cats in our neighborhood and people take care of them. There is one corner house that we estimate must have 15-20 cats that come around to get fed. We’re always seeing new ones appear. They hide in the bushes, lounge on the driveway or sidewalk, and sometimes stare at us from the roof.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been going more and more analog (which I intend to take into the classroom in the fall) as the internet becomes deader and deader, emptier and emptier. I subscribed to a gaming magazine called Patch and delight in receiving a new issue every month in my mailbox. Whenever I pick up a new book to read and spend some time with it, I feel so much closer to humanity. I do not feel this way when I go online; if anything, I feel much more disconnected and unsettled by not just difference of opinion and temperament, but what sometimes seems like complete separations of reality. Apparently, some people just experience an entirely different universe that I am not able to access. How we move further away from each other despite creeping technologies that insist on continuous oversharing, how we move further away from ourselves and our imaginations. Taking trips to the library has helped, which seems to me hilariously punk at this point. I’m glad I have my sister to take these trips with, in between getting slices of Oreo cheesecake.

I continue to work on my poetry manuscript, submitting new or revised poems when I can. Exploring different forms, I’ve fallen in love with the haibun (I think my manuscript will end up having a handful), and I’m also working on erasures and odes. I recently published a poem in the “In-Between” issue of Folio, which explores the fraught battlefield of gender and childhood. If you’ve ever felt like a misfit of any kind, maybe it will resonate.

Earlier this year, writer-friend Stephen Delaney published Our Place Is In Between, a chapbook of curious, occasionally fabulist prose and prose poems (featuring a kitty curled on the cover, which Jacob conveniently posed for). The chapbook includes a collaboration we worked on together. I’m grateful for the writing folks I’ve been able to get to know (whether in school or in online circles), since, increasingly and surreally, writing has become a radical act of communion and resistance.

Who Are You, What Is This?

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I used to chronicle my life compulsively via an online journal. In it, you’d find: complaints about high school and college, thoughts on books I was reading (in addition to the ones for school) and movies I was watching, photos with friends who deigned to give me the time of day, and inside jokes that I’ve long forgotten the origins of. This journal was semi-private in that we had to be “friends” first for you to read it and leave comments. The writer Sarah Manguso discusses her obsessive tendencies to document everything in her life in Ongoingness: The End of a Diary and how a certain event (in her case, motherhood) put a freeze on this compulsion. I feel like I used to be obsessive in this same way, but I can’t really pinpoint any one event as to why the compulsion stopped. Maybe it was because everything started moving too fast for me online, too fast to process. Maybe it was because everything and everyone became too scattered in the digital ether. Regardless, the obsession has not been the same. I still jot down notes to myself, mostly lines for future poems, but I don’t really journal much anymore. Manguso used to be scared that she would forget most of the events in her life and that motivated her compulsions, but I don’t have that same fear anymore. I know I’ll forget and that’s okay. Maybe that’s just getting older, that particular acceptance.

This month, my university hosted a reading with Sarah Manguso that I got to attend. Manguso is a writer who started out as a poet, branched out into lyrical and fragmented nonfiction, and is now writing novels. Her cross-genre work has been helpful in how I think about my thesis, which experiments with form and has a lyric essay at the heart of it. She discussed her frustrations in finding the appropriate mode that fits with the project she envisions, and I often find myself similarly frustrated. I got her to sign her newest book. One of the few things I find invigorating at the end of the world: being among writers and people who still believe in writing.

Even though my online journaling has been much more infrequent in recent years, I feel as if most of my writing has been a kind of journaling. Through it, I’ve been able to chart my changing tastes and moods, my affinities. My literary experiments reflect the current obsession I want to contain in a certain space during a certain time. This has definitely become even more apparent through my thesis writing, which relies on the epistolary and the confessional.

A project that I’ve shelved but may return to after graduation: a sequence of poems (or one long poem?) that is part erasure and part revising of old journal entries. This concept may end up proving more self-indulgent than useful in the end, but who knows. Of course, the “who knows” is always what makes it interesting.

Over the Sun

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The avocado sapling I gifted to my husband years ago has begun to look more like a tree. Swarms of mosquitoes have been feasting on our flesh every time we walk outside. Fireworks are still going off around the neighborhood, even at random times during the day. My husband worries about the animals.

We should catch up since it’s been a while. The pandemic is still ongoing, in case you were wondering, and perhaps will never go away completely. Regardless, I think our lives will never be quite the same. Our “pod” has been fully vaccinated, even though a good portion of the American population continues to disregard the safety of others around them. Fortunately, most people in our area still wear masks in public, but certain other parts of Florida don’t. We have only really started venturing out in the past month or so. We still avoid large public gatherings. We have seen some friends and family, however, which has definitely been the most welcome change to our lives.

I was accepted into the MFA program at FAU. This comes at an unusual time, since I am nearly done with my MA degree in English. However, I am able to transfer over the credits in my current program. I finished taking all the necessary literature classes, so I will be focusing exclusively on creative writing workshops in the future. I’m excited. I’m also looking forward to potential opportunities to teach creative writing as well instead of composition.

Both my husband and I will be returning to campus in the fall. This will be my first time teaching in-person. I am nervous about that, but it will also be nice spending some time with my peers and not having to deal with unresponsive black boxes on Zoom. The break from Zoom over the summer has been very nice.

I’ve been trying to get through the audiobook of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo for months, but it’s just not working out. After taking a truly enlightening class about race in American culture and literature last semester, it makes sense that reading a book like this would just pale in comparison. It’s just bad timing. Throughout the semester, I got to read a lot of Black authors I was never assigned in school. It seems criminal that I never had to read Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or W.E.B. Du Bois until graduate school! I even had to read Morrison on my own after undergrad, having majored in English. I let my professor know there was an obvious gap in my education and I sought to rectify it. I am so glad I did because the class was revelatory and definitely a highlight of my graduate education so far.

Throughout this summer, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry collections. Last semester, I took my first writing workshop since undergrad, which focused on the lyric essay. Lyric essays fit my writing style and some interesting writing came out of that class. For my thesis, I will be working on a poetry manuscript, but much of my writing bends forms and falls into hybrid categories. Lately, I’ve been interested in letters-as-poems. If you have any recommendations, please reach out! I’ve been reviewing books on my Goodreads.

When I haven’t been reading or writing, I’ve been playing many, many video games. I’ve been gravitating more towards visual novels. Visual novels seem to be much more popular in Japan than here in the U.S., but I’ve grown more interested in what is out there in the genre because: 1) it combines two mediums I love: games and writing, and 2) interestingly, there seems to be a lot of queer creators putting out queer work. The gaming aspect for visual novels typically comes in the form of dialogue choices and branching narratives, which allows for a lot of exploration in nonlinear storytelling. This visual novel binge of mine started with Doki Doki Literature Club (dating sim with meta-horror, which deserves all the trigger warnings) and continued with games such as Our Life: Beginnings and Always (slice-of-life romance with customizable pronouns), Hustle Cat (witches, magic, and a cat café), Red Embrace (gay vampire romance), and The Testimony of Trixie Glimmer Smith (horror mystery with queer cast). As you can see, there is a lot of variety here. I’ve also been forever eagerly awaiting the sequel to Butterfly Soup (queer coming-of-age story about a group of Asian American students in California), which is one of my absolute favorites.

I’ve realized that if it weren’t for day jobs and routine, I would probably be staying up very late every night, possibly into the early morning and waking up around noon. I’ve always be a night owl with a lot of vespertine energy. I am guessing this is true of most introverts, seeing as it is the time that gives us our space and everything is quiet. Most of my creative ideas come to me right before bed. Sometimes I remember them in the morning, sometimes I lose them. If it’s lines for a poem, I try to recite them to myself many times so they stick. In the fall, I will be taking all night classes. This will be a change I’ll be ready for. The sun has always been offensive to me anyway, much like how the poet Brenda Shaughnessy is over the moon.

Summertime Madness

Joseph Dante1 Comment

This summer is decades long. Time no longer functions as it once did and cannot be trusted. The mosquitoes are the least of our problems. I’ve been meaning to write something, anything, but where to begin? Every day brings another disaster, another grave mistake that could’ve been easily avoided if we had strong leaders with even somewhat humanistic values and hearts in the right place. But we don’t, and this year has been a test of how shaky and precarious this country’s foundations truly are, how weak our democracy. There is a lot to be angry about. America’s leadership has politicized a pandemic, responded to police brutality against Black lives by inciting MORE violence, and continues to sow seeds of distrust in science and empirical evidence that extends and deepens our suffering. Florida has always been a complete train wreck, blitzed out and brain-dead, a window into the act of schadenfreude, but has become a nihilistic, anarchist paradise where people try their very hardest to live like they’re never going to die.

What to do? Everything seems so overwhelming, so irreparable, so far gone, that paralysis and withdrawal seem inevitable. It’s hard to say. All I can do is listen, share credible information, be skeptical of misinformation, raise voices that are better equipped with the language and experience, donate to organizations that are helping overcome deeply ingrained systemic issues, and vote. When I’m not doing these things, here are ways I’ve tried coping:

  • Playing many hours of video games, especially Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Summer in Mara (both of which allow you to explore and live an idyllic life on tropical islands and help well-intentioned anthropomorphic animals), as well as Maneater (you play as a bull shark and you can eat rich people on yachts and golf courses!)
  • Listening to music (examples: Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple, Petals as Armor by Hayley Williams) and funny audiobooks (like: Samantha Irby and R. Eric Thomas)
  • I want to say reading and writing, but I keep getting away from these activities because they simply aren’t escapist enough – at least, not the things I tend to read or write – and require thinking deeply about the world around me
  • Limiting my time on social media while still trying to stay informed
  • Reminding myself of the future goals I have, grad school, writing projects, and work

There is also this: I have to remind myself constantly that the craziest voices always carry the farthest. There are some lovely and tough minds left, some love and empathy, strength and hope to make everything better. All of this is getting drowned out because everything else is so overwhelming and overtakes the airwaves/our screen time.

I often tell my husband that nothing surprises me anymore. I anticipate Florida will get much worse. The virus isn’t going anywhere. I expect we will have multiple Category 6 hurricanes (a new hurricane for a new kind of terrible) in the fall. I wouldn’t be surprised that this year would be the end of all years. Maybe the Mayans were just a few years off.

Logophobia with Transition

Joseph DanteLeave a comment

That sounds like a title of a poem, doesn’t it? Or maybe I’ve just been reading too much poetry this year and my brain has become a poem, oh no.

I am going back to school for the upcoming spring semester and I’m very excited. I was accepted into the English graduate program at FAU. I’m going to be reading a lot and I can’t wait. Alongside my studies, I will be assisting students with their papers at the university’s writing center. I’ve left my job as a content editor. This change in my life makes me nervous, but I am incredibly fortunate to have such a supportive husband as I continue my education.

When I was little, I used to play imaginary school. I was the teacher, of course. My class consisted of 20+ stuffed animals surrounding me in a circle. They each had a nametag and a last name. I’d do rollcall and give them homework assignments. After I graduated college, my family was surprised that I didn’t pursue teaching and/or continue to graduate school. At the time, I just wanted to find work. I didn’t find work for a while because the timing was not great in terms of the economy. I occasionally regret not immediately going on to graduate school a decade ago. However, if I did, I may not have gained the perspective of someone who worked as both a civil servant and as a small cog in the private sector, deftly navigating corporate culture and all the big personalities it brings with it. But who knows. Anyway, what-ifs will drive you crazy. Poetry is a testament to that.

Perhaps the most important experience I’ve gained in the workforce is how to be more assertive, especially when I know I’m right about something. Doubt is a plague for any thinking person, but I used to apologize for being correct, even when I was absolutely certain. Now I take a step forward and reiterate. I give ample explanation where necessary. Despite this, I struggled a lot with collaboration. This was not due to an inability to speak up, but a difficulty in dealing with a lot of different personalities, each with their own problem with language. Whether it was using their own jargon, deliberately withholding or omitting information, having English as a second language, or not responding to my messages, this huge breakdown in communication really tested my patience. I am a writer. I use words to the best of my ability. I cannot read anyone’s mind, nor do I wish that curse upon my worst enemy.

I am looking forward to being around people who love books as much as I do. I am looking forward to helping students become better writers. I am looking forward to a new year of change and possibility.