“I locate myself alongside those who labor toward emancipatory ends.” -Sarah Keeton, Tracing the Past to (Re)imagine the Future: A Black Queer Pedagogy of Becoming

                I started writing — and studying, and teaching — out of joy. The delight of sharins. Of making. Of maybe. And I started out of a hurt confusion. A sense of lost. Of bewilderment, and trying to understand how we fit into a world that fit together. Reading Sarah Keeton, I’m reminded that relationships are the clearest maps I’ve ever had.
                As a kid, hiking with my parents, I didn’t love looking at maps. My dad always did. He’d gesture between the page and the horizon, pointing out and that’s Mount Gabb, and Bear Creek Spire, and Royce Peak. I think, at twelve, a sense of where we are — because I was wondering that, too — came more from listening to the creek, or dipping into. From watching the clouds swimming like whales through sunset light, or lying on my belly to watch an insect moving along the edge of a lake. From each other, when “each other” includes all that. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to like paper maps more. I’ve kept some from places I’ve been (St. Petersburg, Russia; Starved Rock State Park in Illinois). But more than these printings of roads and trails I go back to relationships. Like many of my friends, I come to reading (and studying and writing and meeting people, and talking with those I know) as ways of looking for home. And home has always been the nested, particular yous and mes and wes that gather like clumps of grass and swimming creatures at the lake’s edge.