“17. Undermine your own authority, be certain in your uncertainty, develop a voice that can be trusted even as it is subjective, unreliable, and impossibly to pin down, unless of course, you want to be pinned down in a sexy way.” -Stacey Waite, “How (And Why) To Write Queer,” Re/Orienting Writing Studies p. 45

                Stacey Waite develops a wonderful, poetic list of 63 rules for writing queer, which can mean many things including (for me, at least) write against the ways you were told it had to be written, and write into the ways you need. Which means part of the joy of Waite’s rules is that you can’t follow them, or can’t get to where they point by following them. And part of the joy is that it’s a delight to pick them up like dance steps you’re trying to learn by watching someone across the crowd. In these last weeks as I write cover letters for job applications—so many “Dear So-and-So’s,” so many “Sincerelys,” so many “my experiences”—I’ve thinking back to Waite’s rules. Imagining a few more to go with them.
                64. Write without getting to the point, and then when you realize you’ve meandered off just go back to what you meant to start saying, or as close as you can get to it, by which I mean this is a post about how exhausted and overwhelmed I was at about 3:32 today (and 3:25, I suppose; it doesn’t happen all in a minute). Even with everything—especially with everything—my family has patterns for speaking the things we need to say, so that with my brother I say I’ve just been reading Tochi Onyebuchi’s Harmattan Season, it’s so good, and with my dad I say I’m out for a walk just saying hi, and with my mom I say I hope you slept well last night, and with me my partner says do you want to sit and breathe together for a few minutes, and maybe none of those are exactly where we meant to end up, but they’re where we make space to remind ourselves to start.
                65. Start every sentence with “so.” So we can see you thinking. So you can keep thinking. So the train of your thought can puff its steam as it gets going. So we can hear the steam. So you can mix metaphors willy-nilly. So words are a dance and even if we’re out of step we hear the steps, hear the music, hear how we’re lagging or catching up and dancing.
                66. Forget where you were going. Do you need to be going? Did you want to be coming back?