“This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”
                -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

                I finished another draft of my novel (ninth, by some measures, or twenty-third, depending; I can’t really separate the rewriting into drafts) in April, 2022. And again in late October. Then I lay in bed, thinking over a section I wanted to rewrite, and finished again in mid November. (My partner was very patient with me. I’d tell them, “I finished!” and they’d be all excited for me. It wasn’t until after the third or fourth time that they asked, a few hours later “You’ve said that before, right?”).  I “finished” again in December, though really there was a section I wanted to pick back up. In January I started back on page one, and I’m walking my way through the whole manuscript again. These characters, they trick and inspire me. The questions they’re asking are questions I’m still asking, and I learn a lot from how they’re trying to support each other. Though just now I haven’t worked on it in a week or more.
                I’ve given up on this novel a number of times. And come back. I’ve failed again and again to make this story what I thought it would be—and stumbled closer to what it is. During my MFA, when I felt I had to push through and finish the book for good and always, the words started making me sick. I couldn’t keep walking with these characters until I realized I would rather fail to finish a draft than write a draft that didn’t feel messy and loving and complete.  Embracing that messiness, that mix of cans and can’ts, of identities and relationships—that’s what this book project has always been.
                So I love Halberstam’s reminder. Where am I failing today, what am I losing? And by failing, what else can I make, how else can I love, what else can I be?

“If we refuse the notion of away,
could we relearn the truth of far?”
                -Ursula Le Guin, from “Distance”

                My family, away at the edge of the Pacific, where I grew up watching driftwood bob in the waves, feels far off from tonight. The child I was in tidepools feels far off. The friends I’ve made in different places — Rishi Valley in Andhra Pradesh; Amherst in Massachusetts; a cafe in St. Petersburg, Russia — feel far off. My grandparents feel far off. Earlier this week my mother sent us a picture of her mother, a teenager surrounded by friends in 1946. I tilt my head, trying to recognize her. To meet her eyes. Far off in place, far off in time, far off in world.
                I think I often practice a kind of holding, a hug that’s looking for closeness. Tonight, with all this far, I’m sitting with distances. The “truth of far,” spreading out beyond what I can see, what I can feel. Some of my friends will move away next month, and who knows when I’ll see them again. Many of my friends I haven’t seen in too long. And here far inland from the tidepools of the pacific and across rivers and plains from Amherst and across an ocean from Rishi Valley, I feel a closeness and also a depth. Like drinking from a spring: water up from aquifers so far below, water maybe from a rain that fell somewhere sometime, a far that takes my breath away and gives it back like a breeze passing.

                “And your name is medicine over my skin. And our kinship is the kind of salve that heals whole oceans.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

                Today my friend Leo and I met in Carle Park. Breezes and blue flowers. Bright sky and warm shadows. We’re both creative writers, and since we’ve taken creative writing courses in higher ed, we’re used to a kind of feedback where I print pages, perhaps one copy for the professor, perhaps sixteen for all the other students, and then a week later I get back pages with little ink notes about what I’ve written. Today, instead, Leo and I sat in the dirt and the grass and read work out loud.
                I like written feedback. I’ve learned so much from friends and mentors who’ve written words around my words. But as the breeze made branches sway and flowers bounce, I liked reading aloud together even more. Reading is an invitation to be “here” together. Seeing—the visual act of reading and being read, of presenting and being interpreted—feels interwoven for me with all kinds of power narratives. We choose where to look and when to close our eyes. Voices wrap around me in a more sensual way, like spring breezes, a touch-way like shadows and sun. Reading Leo’s writing out loud— or hearing Leo read mine—is a chance to live inside that moment of sharing. Instead of commenting, responding, we root into sound, finding ourselves and each other in the soil of our voices.

                “[My diary] is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.” -Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

                My friend John Moist runs UIUC’s GradLIFE podcast. Lots of my students are interested in podcasts, so I invited John to visit a class. We talked about podcasts, microphones, sound equalization. Along the way we talked about art and capitalism. John’s a musician and a podcast nerd (though not, I would argue, a podcast bro), but he didn’t try to start his own podcast. He was fortunate enough to get hired making a podcast that someone else wanted. Our class ended by reflecting on that as one example of art interacting with capitalism, of “an artist” finding a way to make “a living.”
                 Conversations don’t stop when the metaphorical bell rings. John and I walked back toward our next meetings together, and along the way he told me about a friend of his who’s been asking, “Why don’t you try to make it as a musician? That’s what you do all the time.” John isn’t trying to “make it as a musician” because that’s what he does all the time. As capitalism and a hustle culture tries to claw its way into everything, John’s building walls around music, around soundscapes and wandering into them with his friends who are not his employers (or his “listeners,” a different relationship capitalism might suggest). We ended up talking about creating different spaces, not just “here’s where I make money” and “here’s where I turn the sound up for me,” but all sorts of spaces. Next week I’m starting a tabletop game, which will be a space for a specific community in Urbana-Champaign. Sometimes I paint with some friends — another space for another community. My creative writing training taught me that more viewers was always better, that (as John joked) “eyeballs = worth,” but I want to luxuriate in all these nested spaces, in the moments I step into them and out of them, in the very different things they’re trying to do.

“The green orchid fell from his hand and splashed a moment later.”
                -Emma Trevayne, Spindrift and the Orchid

                I really liked Spindrift. It was fun, fast, sweet, and filled with lots of snacking. It was also the first novel I read at my niece’s recommendation, which is delightful, and I’m looking forward to many more.  And as I read (spoiler alert) I started thinking about how Spindrift follows a common path. There’s a powerful object that corrupts people. It has to be destroyed. Our main character is almost corrupted, but then decides to let this object go. Have you seen that story somewhere?
                Lately I’ve been thinking about the ‘scale’ or ‘focus’ of our answers. For me, Spindrift and stories like it (I can’t help naming Lord of the Rings) are dealing with materialism and capitalism and physical greed. There is something dangerous (the story says) in how we want to claim things, control things, own things that give us power. At the same time, the stories I’m thinking of understand and resolve this danger in a fairly specific way. They end with the magic-thing being thrown away. I start imagining how else such stories might look for a resolution. For example, what if the people in them moved past greed, past this mad need for the thing, and the resolution wasn’t somehow ‘removing temptation’ (by getting rid of the object) but a changing worldview (in which the object was not imbued as a kind of magical source of meaning)? It would be a different story. It would take up our capitalist materialism, and suggest a different response. Maybe now that I’m writing this I’ll see this other story everywhere, but the destroy-it story, the its-too-dangerous-to-go-on-existing story, seems more common in the American spaces I move through.
                As we ask these questions, what other ‘scales’ or ‘focuses’ could we take up?

                “Ultimately, [Achille Mbembe] seeks to destabilize the opposition between stability and chaos […] to allow for what might issue forth from it, what it might produce, rather than seek the antidote that would suppress it.” -Jasbir Puar in the preface to Terrorist Assemblages 

                Reading Puar, I’m curious about what grows where, which roots in what soil lifting what leaves and blossoms and fruit. Even more, I’m interested in the soil where I tend to think nothing grows, or at least nothing “worthwhile.”
                “Nothing good happens after 2 am,” a friend told me back in college.
                “I don’t have good ideas while watching Netflix,” another friend told me.
                “I need to stop being lazy,” I tell myself a lot.
                Of course, lots of things do happen after two am (I remember some lovely long conversations beneath the stars). A lot happens when I watch Netflix: sometimes it’s thinking and sometimes it’s an attempt at not-thinking, an attempt to “turn off my brain,” and all of that is fascinating. A few weeks ago my partner and I stretched out in the grass, feeling the warmth of almost-spring, and there’s plenty of lovely things that grow in exactly the space I call my “lazy.” 
                When I stop trying to end it or ameliorate it, and start listening to it, attending to it, what comes from “chaos”? Or to put it another way, where are my weeds, my shoots and stems that somehow keep sprouting up, and what happens if I care for them?

                “I need to stop it from leaping any which way through time and space.”
                -Emma Kubert and Rusty Gladd, Inkblot 

                The magical cat in Inkblot jumps through time and space, from world to world, and a magician sets out to learn how that works and stop the chaos. Hilarity, of course, ensues, and the covers for individual Inkblot issues show the cat appearing in unexpected places, like inside a magical potion mid-mixing or in front of a dragon’s glowering nose.
                I’ve been reading lately about different understandings of time and space: different definitions of what they “are,” and different experiences of how we live them. And now this cat is happily appearing and disappearing through those readings and thoughts. Noticing the travels of inkblot’s velvet feet helps me notice time and place blurring together in my experience. Right now I’m back at my kitchen table in Illinois, for instance, but I know that some of my family on the West Coast will read this, and so will a friend in India, so while I’m typing inkblot steps from this room to those rooms and back again. As in the graphic novel, the cat leaves temporary portals between worlds, and so in its track I can for a moment follow along. 
                I’ve been noticing this leaping through time and space especially when I’m lying in bed. A particular pool behind the rocks of a beach in California (and the waves through it), a sycamore in a nearby park (and the shade beneath it), the set of a TV show I’ve been watching (and lying on the couch with my partner)—I move between these, or feel close to all of them at once. In general (especially when “trying to fall asleep” so that I can be “well rested” and “ready for the day”), I try to discipline my mind, to control the leaping cat. Lately I’m more interested in the movement, in what the magician sees as “chaos”—in being my own mischievous furball leaping through time and space.

                “I wonder what came first: this brutal innovation, the nonsun clock, or the Puritan adage about idle hands. Either way, there is a barbed wire tether between time and virtue, by which I mean, probably obviously, the proper usage of time in this regime, i.e., not fucking off, is considered virtuous.”
                -Ross Gay, “Out of Time”

                Following Ross Gay and Jack Halberstam, and my own obsessive productivity, time management, and determination to fuck off, I’ve been thinking about all the different ways my friends and I inhabit time. Halberstam’s In A Queer Time and Place (following another scholar: this is all a conversation, all the way down) says, yes, capitalism and other systems of power tell us to inhabit time in certain ways, and the coercion is powerful and directly dangerous, but there are also always twists and gaps and changes in people’s real practices. We don’t live time just the way we’re told. Gay’s essay starts with something similar: a celebration of the “be-right-back Post-It Note” in a coffee shop, ready to hand, which shows the barista is both on the clock and ready to slip off when life goes that way.
                I wonder: how do you live time? What different ways? Where do you buy into that “barbed wire tether between time and virtue,” which makes the clock we got on for survival into the clock I ask for self worth? Where do you fuck off?
                When I was a kid backpacking with my family, I usually wanted to bring a watch. I ‘had’ to know what time it was. My parents said they didn’t want to bring one, that part of the fun was how clicking seconds washed away in the floods of light and shadow. I was a stubborn kid. I brought a watch, trying to learn the “time” I felt I had to learn, but looking back the watch couldn’t do what it was supposed to. Sometimes I obsessed over what time, how long, how long left. Sometimes the clouds moved like a family of giant whales, swimming slowly through sunset colors, and I watched, chilled by the wind, ready (but not yet) for the warmth of my sleeping bag. And that’s not something that only happens way up in the mountains.

“Don’t be so poetic that you forget the practice. The main point of the practice is to cultivate more concentration. In. Out. Deep. Slow. Calm. Ease. Smile. Release. Present Moment. Wonderful moment.”
                -Thích Nhất Hạnh, How To Walk

                I was talking with a friend recently, and we both realized we’d been holding things tightly for days. Our shoulders. Our jaws. Our fists. Our work. And there are plenty of good reasons to hold things tightly — as a rock climber and a teacher and someone who rides my groceries back home on a kick scooter, I believe that. But my friend and I were talking about the importance of letting things go, too. That brought me back to Thích Nhất Hạnh. I’ve written before about his descriptions of meditation as something that can happen between one breath and the next, one step and the next. And that idea’s been blooming again for me in beautiful ways.
                Sometimes I’ll eat a handful of chips and then watch an episode of Netflix and then lie on the couch and then be grumpy, wondering why I still feel so tired. I’m resting, aren’t I? Shouldn’t I be rested? But in all those chips and episodes and couch cushions, I’m often holding on tightly. To control and the urge to “manage” myself, maybe, or to the “need” to get things done after “resting,” or to my plans and worries for the day. It sounds silly — and obvious — but forty five minutes “trying to unwind” with Netflix often doesn’t bring me a single step toward stillness. Pausing, even for half a second, as my foot feels its own weight and then shifts down to here. A step like a breath. In. Out. Or my hands, relaxing to sink down onto the wood of this table. Weight. Release. Wood. Skin. Touch. Rest.

“We are more patient than we have ever been.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in the short story “Evidence”

                “Evidence” unfolds looking backward, as people five generations from now wonder and share about how the world has changed. The short story is hopeful, heartfelt. The future Gumbs imagines is sweet and alive and (in the story’s word) “possible.” So reading we wonder, how did things get to this good place?
                “We are more patient than we have ever been,” writes a twelve year old looking back.
                Since reading the story, I’ve been looking for places to be patient. Patient with this writing, with not knowing what to say. Patient with my disagreements with friends — feeling the space of our tensions, and of our coming back together, and not rushing either of them. Patient with the projects I’m part of, these tasks that often feel like giant oaks, unwieldy with so many roots and branches, growing their long, quiet, balanced way toward the sky. Patient with the slow change we’re working toward in broken systems. Patient with sleep, when it’s slow to come, and with waking when I’m tired in the morning. Patient with hurts and confusions. It’s become a bit of a game, a bit of a joke, a bit of a joy. Something goes not-how-I-expected, and whatever other reactions I have, I hear an echo of Gumbs’ writing: this is a chance to be patient.