“‘Cleric, make sure you note the story as I have told you, and not as my young foolish sisters have done.’
                Chih nodded, because that was what footnotes were for.”
                -Nghi Vo, When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, p. 102

                Well, my friends, my dissertation is just about complete. There’s a bit more to do. There can always be a bit more to do. But I’ve just been looking over the entirety as I complete some revisions: an introduction, five chapters, three interludes (these are my favorite), an appendix with the script for a writing workshop I love leading, and hundreds of footnotes. I love footnotes. I poked around with different ways of adding them here, but all of the formats felt fussy, so instead how about a list that isn’t quite a list:
                Footnotes are wonderful for when
                a) someone said something so beautifully well that I have to include it, all of it, even if I don’t know how to fit their paragraph into mine. And so: footnote.
                7) there’s something else I’d really like to talk about—a book I read, and a friend who gave it to me. All that’s a wonderful rabbit hole I’d like to invite you down, but the chapter or the story’s headed somewhere else. Footnote.
                iv) folks have very different views on whatever we’re discussing, and right now I want to follow one view enough to understand how it moves and where it’s looking. But it’s also important to remember the story’s told another way, to go in another direction. Footnote.
                ?) really I just want to share a joke, a delight, a moment of seeing, like the rabbit who poked its head up from the tallish grass to look at me, and then went back to eating. Which makes me hope you have a snack nearby.
                Writing forms make it easier to say some things (and harder to say others). I love forms that open up linearity: that unfold flat space to show there are always different paths and thoughts moving through here, even if I’m arranging some ideas into a sentence with sequential words. Forms like footnotes. And lists that aren’t quite lists: no beginnings, no ends, and a web that makes sense all together.