“My process of selection is driven both by my personal friendship and political networks, as well as by happenstance…” 
                -Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

                I’ve been sitting with how the shape of what I think (and how I think) is also a map of who I know, of what groups have made me feel at home, what friendships I’ve worked to build, what causes I’ve taken up and where I’ve managed to listen.
                There are so many examples. On Friday night my brother and I took his two kids camping, thunder echoing above our heads, and I remembered an early camping trip when I helped carry my little brother (a year old, then, or thereabouts). On that trip years ago we walked in close to sunset, and when my little brother woke up in someone’s arms in the middle of the woods while we set up a tent, I could hear in their child’s voice that all of this felt normal. How could it not be, raised in the family we were raised in? Sometimes you woke up in the woods.
                And of course, since then, my little brother (like my older brother, like just about everyone I know) had challenged the way I think about things. They’ve directed my attention toward different viewpoints, different works of art. Day by day, quietly, they pull my selection of what I believe and what I look at towards what they believe, what they look at. This summer they played me a song I hated. They sang phrases from it. And now, weeks later, that song’s running through my head. It’s more interesting than I noticed at first. I find myself wanting to sing it. And wondering about the viewpoint this song takes up, the implications, for relationships and politics, of what it says.

“To my nieces and nephews, who need a better story — BL
For Kai — MG” 
                -Brittany Luby and Michaela Goade author dedications in their children’s book Encounter

                Encounter’s pages have lots of creatures in them. Seagulls. A mouse. A mosquito. Deer. A crab. Beluga whales. Wasps. A sign of a spider. In a way I suppose that’s true for lots of children’s books, but this one struck me with its shifting, expansive perspective. 
                Building on historical notes from 1534, Encounter imagines “an open and friendly meeting between a French sailor and a Stadaconan fisher” in what is now known as North America. The picture inside the front cover shows a beautiful sunrise seaside, and the view’s closer to a nesting seagull’s view than a person’s. In the middle of the story we spend time with both the French sailor and Stadaconan fisher (shifting between being closer to one, then the other, then close to both). When the animals speak up, Goade’s art puts us close to them. We look down with a seagull toward these two people on the beach. We retreat with a mosquito back into the leaves. When a mouse celebrates some crumbs left behind, we’re down in the grass, the people small shadows on our horizon.
                I love the gentle, generous way Encounter’s paintings bring us from sky  to grass to bushes and back to these humans’ hands. I’m writing this in my brother’s backyard. Three bunnies in view. They seem more interested in the green of the grass than the green of the page, but looking up from the book, I wonder, what do those tall ears make of my typing?

                “One year was enough to sear [the landscape] on the lens of memory…so that, in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry, just like that.” -Dorothea Tanning on her time in Arizona, and on her 1944 painting Self-Portrait

                Tanning has me thinking about modes of diary-keeping as modes of memory, modes of thinking.
                For example, I spend a lot of time thinking about phrasing. Over the course of several days I toyed with the sentence above, rearranging words, wondering, forgetting and coming back. When I sat down to write, I habitually reworked the wording another four or five times. Wondering about clarity, sentence rhythm, sound. Wondering what it was that had so struck me as I stood in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, looking at Tanning’s Self-Portait—a tiny figure at the edge of an immense landscape, a bit like I was standing, now, before the largeness of her portrait. What’s the idea-seed here, I wonder as I write and rewrite, and more, how does it grow as I water it with words? 
                Spendings lots of time thinking about phrasing changes the way I interact with lots of things. Take song lyrics— phrases stick in my head, and the melodies usually slip through my fingers. Though now I’m thinking about it, a musician friend and I wrote a song together in the last few months, and since then I’ve been noticing melodies more. If diarying is a process of stitching words or shapes or images into the cloth of memories, does that process change what kind of thread my memory is ready for? And how I hold on—make real, for myself, what has happened?
                I have a friend whose sketched “diary” tends to include patterns from people’s shirts. Another friend whose “diary” includes movements, the way they’ve seen people walking. And I wonder, what am I “searing” into my dream?

                “It’s all there. Everything. Take a look.” -Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

                I’m visiting family in California, and there are six small boxes in my mom’s garage marked ‘Azlan OKC.’ In 2019 my mom helped me pack these boxes and send them from Oklahoma City to her house. That was just after I left the high school where I’d been teaching for years, and just before we drove up to Illinois together, my mom and I, storms in our rear view mirror, so I could start graduate school. This summer I open these boxes, sure whatever’s in there is something I can give away. I’ve been living without these for years. And I come face to face with books.
                There are moments in these books. The ones written by the authors, and the classroom moments of talking about these words with my students. The moments of my marks in the margins. The moments I shared with these characters—Anne Sexton in her poetry, Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Amity Gaige’s Schroder, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince; so many others. The moments I sat with them, listened to them, imagined conversations with them while I walked through the woods. There are the moments of sitting with my mom in Oklahoma, deciding what will come with me to a co-op in Illinois with me, and those bring the moments just after, our road trip together, a hotel room in Urbana. A copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet isn’t here, as I gave mine to a graduating senior (who called me years later to say they’d just picked it back up). And here’s Richard Wilbur’s poems, which I brought with me from undergrad. Scattered through its pages are so many conversations with friends and so many more I’ve forgotten.
                All these moments, here and not here. I take a look. See the book, and feel for the spaces inside them and beyond them.

                A few weeks ago I read Kessler’s The Gull Yettin, a graphic novel told with no words and sometimes dreamlike scenes that drift and fracture through each other. There’s something in the art style—the bold bright lines, the simple figures—that for me evokes childhood. Like a child drawing their family, drawing the house they come from, or the house that is their imagined home. It reminds me of an interview I heard a long time ago with cartoonist Charles Schultz—I think he said (in explaining some of the themes in his comic, Peanuts) that it seems like most people stop feeling the questions and hurts and confusions they had as a child, but that all those things, for him, never went away. I wonder if all those feelings for most of us never go away, and we just get better at not talking about them. Or maybe worse at hearing what they’re saying to us.                 I’m back in California, a little ways from where I was born. A little ways from where I learned to swim, where I laid awake, too scared of nightmares to fall asleep, where I got lost in stories my parents read me while I played with twigs and pinecones, where I watched an escaped parakeet way up in an oak’s branches and wondered for the first time about pets and cages, trees and open skies. I think that’s why Kessler’s The Gull Yetin sticks with me. I love the kind of art that lets us keep drawing and finding and caring with/for the children there are in everyone we love. Ourselves, I hope, included.

                “The message of the comic doesn’t really feel right anymore (I need people) but I appreciate the positivity.” -Tillie Walden introducing “Alive,” a comic she drew years earlier, in Alone in Space: A Collection

                “Alive” tells the story of a young woman, alone in a spaceship, whose job is to repair complicated machinery. And she loves that life. As Walden playfully acknowledges how that expertise and isolation were once alluring, and aren’t any more (“I need people”), I’m struck by how making a way of life (through art) can also mean making a “way” that you later realize is not your way. How drawing a path can also be discovering the way you will not walk.
                Sometimes, for me, that’s been dangerous. I get enamored of how I said something, how I described it—if I could draw that path, then of course I should walk it, right? Walden teaches me again here: I love her soft kindness, her “appreciation,” in dealing with the past self who wrote this comic. Instead of getting worked up about the difference between the way of life she imagined then, and the one she imagines for herself now, she notices the differences while leaving gentle room for a was, an is, and growth between them. That’s something I want to practice. For example, when I was young—eleven, maybe—I dealt with some of my loneliness by pretending I wanted to be an outsider (I’d just read S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, after all!). Silly, you could say. Counterproductive, absolutely. But also an attempt to understand and find balance, an attempt in its own strange way to connect, and I appreciate the care that was in my loneliness, the attempt to imagine my way into a being that felt closer. I appreciate drawing the paths: the ones I hope to walk, the ones I don’t.

                “But the inner lives of animals are such a mystery to me, which has made me feel that my understanding of the world is incomplete.” -Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, Author’s Note for What We Fed to the Manticore

                Each story in Kolluri’s collection is narrated by a different animal—a vulture, a wolf, a whale, a pigeon, and more. As I read through these stories (and lay in bed, thinking about them; and watched a neighbor’s cat, thinking about them more; and walked at the park watching two robins, thinking about the birds that flew above my head and through Kolluri’s stories) I was interested in the “inner lives” of these different characters, but I find myself even more interested in what we might call the ‘outer world’ of each story. When I look at a broken tree trunk and see woodgrain like the wood of my floor, when I see something like lumber, I’m seeing the forest differently than the robins do. The patterns of my “inner life” are sloshing out to paint a picture of what here is. A wolf, a whale, a pigeon—what world might they see around them?
                I spend a lot of time thinking about these ‘different’ spaces that sit on top of each other: what “my counter” is to me, as I wipe it down, and that surface is to the fly who lands on the far end. What, to me, is the green area behind my apartment—a firepit, a nice place to gather with friends—and what is that space to the crabapples growing there? And as we all share it, the robins and the trees and the grass and the flies and me, what is it now?

“The farther I ran…
…the more I wanted him to catch up to me.”
                -Deb JJ Lee, In Limbo

                Lee has me thinking about the things I do that I want to go awry — the plans I make that I want to come undone. When I think back through my life, watching for this kind of experience, I find fever memories from eleven or so. I would get sick and hallucinate, wild burning dreams more vibrant than I knew how to deal with. Then I’d argue that being alive didn’t mean anything. Couldn’t mean anything. I remember arguing that so loudly, wanting so much for my mom (usually the one who stayed up with me) to somehow ‘prove’ me wrong. 
                In Limbo centers on a fraught relationship between Lee and her mother. In this scene, following an awful interaction with her mom, she’s running from her dad. He doesn’t catch her. Instead Lee meets with a friend, who eventually drives her back home. And heavy as this all is — intense (and heartbreaking) as In Limbo sometimes is — I don’t think this is a sad book. Or a sad thought. As a kid I didn’t know how to deal with these moments when I was “trying to do something” that I also wanted so much to fail—when I was running, hoping to be caught. Maybe I still don’t. But Lee helps me think about the tension of those moments. Those buildings I make that I want to have broken, like when I purposefully made a sandcastle down near the waves at low tide and then tried so hard to build a moat and a wall to protect it. Even as it had to collapse.
                In Limbo ends with Lee and her mom falling asleep together. Gentle. Close. Which doesn’t erase the hurt that has come before. Instead of thinking that, as a child, I should’ve learned to stop running when I wanted to be caught, stop arguing when I wanted to be wrong, I’m sitting here thinking about making space for the running and the catching up. The outpouring of feverish words and my own mother’s open silence, wider and fuller than any answer. Sometimes these are the ebbs and flows of our hearts, aren’t they? Our connections. Which doesn’t mean stop making, but does mean that there’s something wonderful in the making, and something wonderful in the waves that come in and wash my sandcastle all away. 

                “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.