For #BlackHistoryMonth 2025—in this case, the month of February, as well as all of March, in part because February is the shortest month of the year, but also because I wasn't able to do it for most of February—I’m writing a post-a-day on the fediverse on Black writers that influenced me, including links to a short piece you can read in one sitting, and download links for at least one of their books.

I’m replicating these posts below as they appeared on my profile, and updating this page as the months unfold. All of the links should work, though some are not properly formatted yet, but will be by the end of this project.

Finally, this project was temporarily on hold as of February 9 but returned on March 1 and will continue throughout March.

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february 2: Octavia E. Butler

for today, february 2, i'm celebrating Octavia E. Butler, a writer of speculative fiction whose name i see more of each year, as we enter the time periods she wrote of, and discover that our reality parallels the narratives she created in her novels, especially those of the duology of Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).

Butler grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Pasadena, California, at a time when the area was dramatically more segregated than it is today (and it still very much is). she navigated dyslexia early on, and later got her AA in History from Pasadena City College. she often speaks in interviews of a pivotal experience that put her on her path toward writing:

The movie was called Devil Girl from Mars, and I saw it when I was about 12 years old, and it changed my life.... I had a series of revelations. The first was that 'Geez, I can write a better story than that.' And then I thought, 'Gee, anybody can write a better story than that.' And my third thought was the clincher: 'Somebody got paid for writing that awful story.' So I was off and writing, and a year later I was busy submitting terrible pieces of fiction to innocent magazines.

Butler kept copious journals in which she manifested a writerly life for herself, and much of what she wrote in them (all of which is available by appointment to explore at the Huntington Library in Pasadena; many excerpts available online) came true. she was the first science-fiction writer to receive the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and though none of her books were “bestsellers” in her lifetime, after renewed interest in her work throughout this century, in 2020, Parable of the Sower hit the bestseller list for the first time.

her books explore race, history, alienation, segregation and hierarchy, gender and sexuality, religion and spirituality, and much more. Kindred (1979), the tale of a Black woman writer in the 1970s (much like Butler) who is spontaneously thrust back in time to the early 1800s whenever her white, slave-owning ancestor's life needs saving, is still probably the best novel i've ever read, even as it is deeply disturbing and as much horror as sci-fi.

below, i've linked to what i believe is one of the last short stories she wrote, “The Book of Martha,” in which a Black woman writer (much like Butler) confronts an ever-changing manifestation of God with questions about life and purpose. it reveals a writer wrestling with extremely difficult questions about the role of creative work, and is a story i return to often.

read “The Book of Martha”

download PDF of Kindred (1979)

february 3: Stuart Hall

for today, february 3, i'm celebrating Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-British writer of academic works focusing on cultural analysis, sociology, race, power, colonialism, semiotics, representation, Marxist thought, and many other topics, and whose work i believe is more important today than ever in our increasingly media-saturated world. (also today is his birthday!)

we usually think of the ability to understand the many (and subtextual) meanings of the media we consume as “media literacy.” as a young person learning to be media literate, i'd begun to wonder why so much of the media i'd been exposed to was (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) pro-imperial, pro-capitalist, white supremacist, cisheterosexist, ableist, etc., etc. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)—edited by Hall and including a chapter by him called “The Work of Representation”—was the first book that gave me the answers i'd been looking for.

much of what you'll find it might seem obvious today: that there is a language of symbols, signs, and images that can be wielded in order to represent ideas, objects, or peoples, in ways that may or may not be accurate, and in ways that are necessarily structured by power. but to a young me, this was groundbreaking, and gave me the language i needed to challenge these expressions of (racist, capitalist, colonial, imperialist) power and thus better understand the world around me.

Hall's work in this area (semiotics) is only the tip of the iceberg of his vast and sprawling oeuvre, but it's the part i'm most familiar with, so below i'm linking to the “The Work of Representation” chapter from Representation, as well as 45-minute video lecture by Hall (along with transcript) that gives a broad overview of his approach.

watch “Representation and the Media”

download transcript of “Representation and the Media”

download PDF of “The Work of Representation”

february 4: June Jordan

for february 4, i'm celebrating June Jordan, a poet, writer, teacher, and all-around real one who lived her values as loudly as possible. a bisexual woman who dropped out of college after being asked to read not a single Black author, nor woman author, she is often thought of as an activist, though i would say the word does not do justice to her impact and legacy.

as has made the rounds online lately, Jordan was an outspoken champion of Palestinian liberation throughout her life, and was openly willing to confront amerikkkan imperialism and its genocidal proxy, israel, in her work. the famous line from “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” goes:

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family

i do think these lines are best read in context, and of course, this was only one of many of her poems on this topic. her staunch anti-zionism predictably limited her professional success, in ways recently charted—and contrasted against the trajectory of fellow writer Audre Lorde—in this long essay about the correspondence between them.

it's obvious in her work how much love she had and attention she gave to the Black people around her, even (or especially) those who didn't necessarily share Jordan's interests; “A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters” catches the speaker of the poem twirling difficult questions in their mind about the nature of genius, in the context of albert einstein and his supposedly endearing quirks, then unloads some of this onto an unsuspecting neighbor whose concerns are somewhere else entirely and whose stance on the matter ends up being as (or more) pithy and honest than Jordan's.

my favorite of her works, however, is a long piece titled “Poem about My Rights,” which i listened to her read for the first time last year via the audio recording available at the link below. it's a sprawling, kitchen-sink of a poem that seems to draw all of history (Jordan's and the world's) into itself, and more than that, it taught me how meaningful it can be to hear a poet read their work aloud, and has moved me to take the way in which i read my work aloud more seriously.

read and listen to “Poem about My Rights” here (audio recording available by clicking the speaker icon at top)

download PDF of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2012) [16 MB]

download PDF of her memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000) [11 MB]

february 5: Tongo Eisen-Martin

for today, february 5, i'm celebrating Tongo Eisen-Martin, who describes himself as “an absolute product of every nook and cranny of San Francisco.” thus, it should be no surprise that he's currently the city's poet laureate. he's also an educator, known for creating the “We Charge Genocide Again!” curriculum (downloadable link at bottom) while teaching at Columbia, based on his mother Arlene Eisen's report on the police/state violence against/murder of Black Americans.

i wrote yesterday about how hearing June Jordan read her work aloud taught me about the critical role of the auditory in poetry; in my opinion, Tongo Eisen-Martin embodies this and then some. some describe his work as jazzy; to me his work really epitomizes “rhythm.” every single one of his lines is sharp, heavy, intimate, gripping, and often darkly comical, brilliantly insightful, or just plain surprising—or all three at the same time. he also does this wonderful thing with what i think of as mini-anaphoras: just two or three lines that start with the same word or clause, to wonderful, powerful effect.

i had the great pleasure of hearing him read through a livestream of Beyond Baroque's Southern California Poetry Festival (starts at 42:34), and what stunned me was that he didn't just read one or a handful of poems; he performed a mashup of what must have been a dozen different poems, collaging excerpts together into a 15-minute tour de force of explosive lines of inimitable profundity (and all while holding a baby in one hand lol).

because of this, it's hard for me to point to one favorite poem; i could isolate any one of his lines and spend as much time with it as i might spend with a single poem by another writer. i'd definitely recommend Blood on the Fog (2021), his entry into the legendary Pocket Poets series from City Lights Books; the final lines from “A Good Earth,” the first poem in the collection, comprise a mantra i return to over and over:

It's a simple matter this revolution thing To really lie to no one To keep nothing godlike

To write a poem for God

read that over and over again, in or out of the context of the rest of the poem (linked below). if poetry can be used to discover truths beyond the reach of other forms or mediums, i don't think there's anything more truthful in this world than those four lines.

listen to “M'ap Pale / A Good Earth (feat. Tongo Eisen-Martin)” by Zeke Nealy

read “A Good Earth” [note: it's spaced differently here than it is in Blood on the Fog]

download PDF of Blood on the Fog [1.1 MB]

download PDF of “We Charge Genocide Again!” [5.5 MB]

february 6: Saidiya Hartman

for today, february 6, i'm celebrating Saidiya Hartman, a Black woman writer and academic who grew up in New York, and, like Tongo Eisen-Martin, attended and teaches at Columbia University, and, like Octavia E. Butler, is also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. but what i love about her work most may be that it betrays none of these things.

Hartman twists and breaks the academic mode/register so elegantly, it's easy to forget (and i think it's intended to be this way) that she is a product of the ivory tower and technically works from inside it. there are many other academics who bring influences from outside academia into their work, but to me, Hartman's work stands apart: it is diligent, rigorous, critical; raw, vulnerable, confessional; inventive, speculative, novelistic; never self-serving; somehow also anarchistic; demanding as hell; and, as far as i know, still inimitable.

i just started reading Scenes of Subjection (1997), where she confronts the limitations of the tools we (the West, academia) have at our disposal for understanding and historicizing slavery; and i had the brief pleasure of quasi-auditing some lectures on Lose Your Mother (2007), a memoiristic exploration of her family history—or lack thereof (her work often revolves around this gap between the violences and erasures that shape what can and cannot be known about the past).

but it's “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), a coda to Lose Your Mother in which she tries and intentionally fails to tie up a loose end from the book, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) that exemplify the power of her approach (though her work constantly and beautifully builds on itself). the former work explores a Black female figure called “Venus,” omnipresent in the archives of slavery, and yet who turns out to be wholly unknowable, revealing the problem at the heart of archival work: whose archives are these really? (short answer: white people's.)

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments picks up on this question with another kind of answer: here is the speculative archive that she can and dares to create, from a deeply engaged counter-reading of archival materials about Black women and girls whose supposed errantry, Hartman shows, was a gesture towards liberation, and she peppers in critical reflections on her own role as archivist/academic/witness to both tender and explosive effect. in short, Hartman's work is potentially life-changing for those seeking a methodology for understanding the past that is attentive to one's present and insistent on a liberatory future.

download PDF of “Venus in Two Acts” (2008) [706 KB]

download PDF of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) [33 MB]

february 7: Fred Moten

for february 7, i'm celebrating Fred Moten, another academic and writer. born and raised in Las Vegas, Moten attended Harvard intending to study economics, but was suspended for a year after failing academically (he was apparently more focused on reading Chomsky and living his politics), during which time he worked as a janitor and read and wrote poetry, then returned to Harvard, where he met his future collaborator Stefano Harney—and the rest is history.

like so many of the writers in this series, Moten crosses genre lines with aplomb. he's as prolific a poet as he is a scholar, and like Hartman and Octavia E. Butler, he's also a recipient of the coveted MacArthur “Genius” award, though i think that, of the three, he might be most critical of the award's status and purpose.

i say this because of how i read The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a lyrical treatise/manifesto co-written with Harney on a variety of topics, though the parts i remember best are about the corporatization of academia, the politics that facilitate this, and, most importantly, the reason the state is so deeply invested in it: the lure and vortex of academia may be the state's most successful strategy for defanging radicals and rebels and reconstituting them into something of a counterrevolutionary class of bureaucrats (i am very loosely paraphrasing lol).

beyond critique, however, Moten and Harney encourage the reader to—if they have or want to—attend anyways, but to, in the process, forge and foster an underground (the titular “undercommons”) diametrically opposed to the ivory tower—what it represents and produces—and to live in this underground, use it to rob academia of what it's worth, and redistribute that hoarded wealth of knowledge freely. it should be no surprise, then, that The Undercommons was immediately released for free upon publication.

but maybe none of this speaks to these ideas as well as Moten's poetry does, and so i leave off with this excerpt from “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally”:

2.

and tear shit up. always a pleasure the banned deep brown of faces in the otherwise whack. the cruel disposed won’t stand

still. apparatus tear shit up and

always. you see they can’t get off when

they get off. some stateless folks spurn the pleasure they are driven

to be and strive against. man, hit me again.

read “Fugitivity is immanent to the thing but is manifest transversally”

download PDF of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) [1.4 MB]

february 8: Lucille Clifton

for february 8, i'm celebrating Lucille Clifton, a poet and educator born and raised in New York, who lived out the end of her life in Baltimore, having been poet laureate of Maryland for six years in the early 1980s. she was also born with a genetic mutation that ran in her family called polydactyly, giving her an extra finger on each hand that were surgically removed during her childhood. i bring this up because of how this kind of absence—or, as i think she conceived of it, the ghostly presence of what seems absent—influenced her work.

i hesitate to call her poetry humble or straightforward even though it can appear that way in comparison to the showy or dense work of others, but she is simply not a kitchen-sink poet: her lines (often two or three words) and stanzas tend towards the short-and-sweet, and her poems (of which there are bajillions) are focused and are already spiraling to a close from the first line. (i deeply admire this, as someone who tends to bloviate, lol.)

whether it's because i'm not familiar enough with her ouevre or because she comes at politics slant, what i've read of her work feels to me intimate and personal—still political, but the politics of a loving correspondence rather than of a stirring speech or manifesto. “wishes for sons” indicts patriarchal masculinities by casting a spell of pain at those who perpetuate them; “sisters” cherishes the shared Black womanhood of Clifton and her sister and ends with the killer lines, “only where you sing / i poet.”; and “my dream about being white” pithily, elegantly rejects the idea of assimilation:

and i’m wearing white history but there’s no future in those clothes

the other part of her work i'm interested in wasn't really celebrated in her time, or else remains unpublished, according to this article about Clifton's spirit writing. Clifton was a “two-headed woman”—someone with access to another plane of existence, specifically that of ghosts, spirits, and the dead (hence the reference at the start to ghostly presences/absences). she, like me, relished automatic writing, and used it to tap into her past selves, to understand her corporeality not as fixed in her body, its color, its shape, its racialization, its gendering, but rather simply as one incarnation of many, inextricably entangled across space-time. a relevant excerpt from the article:

the once and future dead who learn they will be white men weep for their history. we call it rain.

read “far memory”

listen to “homage to my hips”

download PDF of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965 – 2010 (2012) [13.2 MB]

march 1: Starr Davis

for march 1, i'm celebrating Starr Davis, an incredible Black woman poet, essayist, and all-star mother from whom i had the great honor of learning from last year in a workshop called “Poetry and Legalism.” what immediately stunned me about Starr was her brilliant pedagogy, which i only began to process as i sat down to work on our first assignment. i realized that, in our first class, she'd beautifully and unshowingly modeled a frank honesty and vulnerability that i'd never seen someone in the role of a teacher do so in such an unflinching way — and among new students, and, thus, relative strangers. it was only because of this that i was able to be as honest and vulnerable myself in the first piece i wrote, the first of a slew of poems written in her workshop that represent the best of what i can do.

the class was called “Poetry and Legalism” in part because we happened to study the intersection of the two subjects, which is sizable and fascinating. but it was also named for the margin at which Starr has lived much of her life. Starr is one of the inaugural Haymarket Books Writing Freedom Fellows, which “recognizes and elevates the vital artistic and cultural contributions of system-impacted poets and writers,” and her work consistently engages critically with the so-called criminal justice system, and the ways in which it is one of the many roots of the oppression she faces as a mother, a partner, a Black woman, and a survivor.

i consider her a kindred spirit as a writer because of how much she embraces hybridity: the first piece i ever read (and heard) of hers was “Hoarder,” the simplicity of which — it is what i call a “list poem” that resembles something like a collage — only strengthens its accumulatory power. it begins:

I collect broken BiblesThe pages hang off the bindingThose religious pamphletsFrom pushy pastorsBroken pieces of English onBroken pieces of paperNewspaper clippings of dead boysI had dead sex withI collect old blood

and only increases in intensity from there. meanwhile, “COUNTERPETITIONER’S SUPPORTING AFFIDAVIT” does one of my favorite things that a poem can do, which is “hermit crab” a dry, legal form in order to generate powerful, transcendent ideas and language:

1. She was born in flight
2. Our survival my breasts & these poems
3. Current Occupation(s): not becoming my mother, manifesting a man that ain’t my father

Starr mentioned during our class that she is finding as welcome a home in essay as she has in poetry, and indeed, i am a huge fan of her Substack newsletter, Notes from a Writer Mama, where she regularly writes essays “on the family court system, [her] struggle to reclaim my daughter, and [her] ongoing journey of healing while navigating the complexities of parenting a child who has faced trauma.” subscribe and support her if you're able; she is an unignorable and inimitable writer whose work i will seek out for as long as there is work of hers to find.

her forthcoming debut collection of poetry, AFFADAVIT, will be published by Hanging Loose Press.

read and listen to “Hoarder”

read “COUNTERPETITIONER’S SUPPORTING AFFIDAVIT”

read “Notes on Government Assistance & Motherhood”

march 7: Samuel R. Delany

for march 7, i'm celebrating Samuel R. Delany, a queer as hell, Black sci-fi and fantasy writer, as well as essayist and memoirist, who (and i know i say this about a lot of these writers) may have had the largest influence on me of all — if not on my writing, then on my life. he was born and raised in Harlem, where he was living and going to school when he published his first science fiction story, setting him on a lifelong path of writing. he and his partner, the poet Marilyn Hacker, promptly married and moved to the East Village; less than two years later, at age 20, he published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962).

he details much about the years that followed in his memoirs: Heavenly Breakfast (1979), The Motion of Light in Water (1988), and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999). i've only read pieces of the first two, but he is as adept at writing honestly and vividly — yet, in such a clear-eyed way — about his life as he is about the fantastical worlds of his fiction. i think this is because his work betrays no distinction between his approaches to the two; in a compilation of essays, lectures, and letters about writing — called, fittingly, About Writing (2005) — he writes about the art of storytelling in a way that doesn't differentiate between the skills needed to captivate an in-person audience with a lively life anecdote and those needed to captivate a reader.

this abolished border between life lived and lives imagined culminates in what is considered the first-ever literary work about HIV/AIDS, his novella-length hybrid piece titled “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” which appears in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), the second book in a series of collections of stories that take place in the fictional, titular Nevèrÿon. “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” however, moves back and forth in alternating sections between the land of Nevèrÿon, where a mysterious sexually transmitted illness is spreading among its queer/sex worker population, and the land of New York, where Delany moves among his fellow queer folks (some of whom are also sex workers) in the very early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic at a time when no one can even be certain exactly how it's transmitted. it's brutal, devastating, disturbing, brilliant, and a marvel to read.

that about describes all of Delany's work to me, or at least those to which i find myself returning over and over again. one of these is “Wagner/Artaud,” an essay from Longer Views (1996), one of his many essay collections on an impressively wide variety of topics, though usually somewhat literary in nature. it's the essay that inspired my own “Parables” essay, the first piece i wrote after transitioning, in which i attempt to do something like what Delany does with Wilhelm Richard Wagner and Antonin Artaud for Octavia E. Butler. essentially, he makes a convincing case that their oeuvres sit at the bivalve heart of Western art. i mostly skip the sections about Wagner when i re-read it; it's the parts of Artaud that reveal Delany's beautiful approach to writing, understanding it — as few others do — as a mechanism of apartheid that separates good writers from bad, the worthy from the unworthy, the published from the never-known. Artaud's lifelong desperation to express himself and have his work taken seriously (and, perhaps, for it to change the world) screams chillingly from behind Delany's words.

i've already waxed poetic about Delany for long enough, so i'll only note briefly two more of his works (he is prolific enough to write about for the length of this entire page). one is the mega-tome, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), which changed my life upon beginning to read it; it blends erotica that depicts every possible taboo sexual act, with a profound and touching lifelong love story between, in my opinion, two of the most memorable characters in fiction ever written. the other is a short story called “The Game of Time and Pain,” the last story chronologically in the Nevèrÿon series, which has Gorgik the Liberator, a character that recurs throughout the Nevèrÿon stories, reflecting on his life from middle age and musing on the strangeness of being the person most closely associated with abolishing slavery in his time and place. it includes what i consider the most beautiful phrase ever uttered in English:

...the self that want defined.

download Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985) [2 MB]

download Longer Views (1996) [21 MB]

download Return to Nevèrÿon (1987) [14 MB]

Independent publishing and archival

Drawing on forking practices in software development, sampling practices in audio production, my work with collage art, and the speculative archival work of Saidiya Hartman, I've been trying to develop new artistic forms more sensitive to the networked nature of our histories and futures. Enter incarnations: a literary form in which you rewrite a historical text and set it in a far future, and write it from the perspective of your future self. The form also functions as a strategy for intervening in processes of “copyright”-making by challenging traditional conventions of authorship and (self-)publishing. Finally, incarnations also fall under a new, umbrella genre of speculative writing I call autofabulation, conceived as an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-oppressive artform intended to allow its practitioner to actively work towards liberation. This event will also include generative prompts that encourage participants to engage in their own forms of speculative archival work, including—but not limited to—writing their own incarnations.

Content/trigger warnings: Discussions of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, anthropological dehumanization, mental health (depression), death, and transitioning; brief references to parental abuse, parental death, illness (cancer), economic apartheid, torture, lynching, amputation, medically transitioning, and transphobia; oblique references to current U.S./world politics

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Dear [REDACTED],

A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space.

I've had the honor of teaching others about incarnations and autofabulation three times now: last summer, to creative nonfiction writers at a seminar hosted by Tin House, a small press and esteemed literary institution; and twice in the last few months during two virtual workshop series hosted by Relatively Queer, a small community of queer and trans creatives that I was invited to join as a co-facilitator after meeting one of the other co-facilitators in the Tin House seminar. They listened to me read an incarnation aloud during the seminar, and were compelled to correspond with me via e-mail about archival work, speculative writing, and the mechanisms of (neo)colonialism (among other topics), and soon I was formalizing what I'd developed around autofabulation into a workshop curriculum and presentation slides.

My original intention was simply present you with a slightly modified, more “tech-oriented” version of the materials I'd previously created, but a series of strange and unpredictable events this week has pushed me off this path and onto another one.

Bear with me, if you will.

More background: I was admitted to the Tin House seminar after submitting an unfinished draft of the second chapter of a book project written as a series of a letters to my younger self. I wrote the first chapter, and had the idea to turn it into a book project, after a publication reached out to solicit a piece from me, the first and only time this has happened to me since I began taking the work of writing professionally seriously. The editor who solicited the piece reached out because she had read an early draft of my forthcoming essay collection as a reader for one of the small presses to which I had submitted it; they didn't accept it, but another of their readers was the one who connected me to the small press that eventually did accept it for publication. The essay collection only came together in the first place because I took all of the writing I did in 2023, during the first year of my medical transition, and then assembled it into a little book, the idea being to use the sales from the book to fund mutual aid projects like the one I started in January 2023, Art, Strike!, which was essentially the catalyst for everything I wrote that year.

This is a lineage.

The connective tissue here (the line of this lineage) is one of tiny interactions. My publisher, tRaum Books, noted recently that they've never held an open submission period. Every book they've ever published has found them through one connection here or elsewhere in the vast and sprawling network of small connections people make online. My book is no exception. The correspondence I've had with tRaum's founder, Rysz, has produced some of the most impactful writing I've ever read and/or written; as is the case with my correspondence with alks, my former Art, Strike! co-editor, whom I met in a comment thread on a now-defunct, short-lived, and little-known microblogging platform; as is the case with some new correspondence that began this week on precisely the topics of this session with a relative stranger on the fediverse; as is the case with my connections to and with the Relatively Queer community; as is the unidirectional correspondence I've had with my younger self in the aforementioned epistolary essays.

As is, perhaps, the correspondence we are embarking on right now.

Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (2023 to 2025). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: Art, Strike! (mutual aid project); The Ecology of Art, Strike! (essay collection); Split/Lip Press tiered rejection (connects me to my publisher, tRaum Books); Under the Sun reaches out (essay solicitation); The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy, chapter two (unfinished draft); Tin House seminar; Relatively Queer (virtual workshop series); FluConf 2025.

---

exhortation

Draw a straight line across a blank page. What series of events brought you to this moment? What tiny interactions, online or otherwise, facilitated your ability to be present here? Who is part of your lineage? What else is that lineage comprised of? Mark these on the line with labeled dots. Go as far into your history as necessary to get as clear a sense as possible of how you got here. Honor momentous occasions. Honor mundane ones equally. How integral have small connections been to your journey through this life? How integral are they certain to be moving forward?

---

As a child and teenager, in order to escape a household rife with violence and abuse, I spent a tremendous amount of time in libraries. My favorite sections were those where books were for sale, usually for pennies, and often books you'd never find available for checking out (books that were out of print, wholly unpopular, self-published, or otherwise perceived to be relatively valueless). One of these was a writing textbook published sometime in the latter half of the 20th-century; I took it home with me and didn't crack it open for many years after, and only did when I was in my early 20's and facing a stubborn case of writer's block.

One of the chapters was about style; in order to get the writer thinking about what comprises style, it exhorted the reader of the textbook to take a passage written by another writer, and replace all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in it with nouns, verbs, and adjectives of their own. Everything else was to remain the same: the pronouns, the conjunctions, the structures of the sentences. The idea was to wear another writer's rhythm like a glove, to try it on for the length of a paragraph and see what it felt like. The author's style (their essence), the textbook argued, was not in the content of their writing, but in the unique ways in which they chose to present that content to the reader.

I tried it out for myself with a passage from a short story from my big blue The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (even then, a decade before admitting to myself I was a trans woman, I was always drawn to writing by women, and the main characters of my stories were always women, too).

Immediately, the writer's block vanished. Abandoning the passage I'd tried on like a glove, but remaining deeply inspired by it, I wrote and completed a short story for the first time in years. It was terrible, and I wouldn't show it to anyone even if you paid me, but I did finish it. And the exercise stayed with me.

Many years later, I began taking computer science classes at my local community college with the intention of minoring in the discipline once I transferred to a four-year university. I'd been playing with code since childhood, when my parents enrolled me in a small, free summer program at my elementary school that included curriculum on HTML programming; it was then that I built my first website, which sported nothing more than a menu for an imagined restaurant. I'd taken computer science classes in high school, part of the school's requirements for graduation, being a public science and technology magnet high to which I'd had to apply in a process not dissimilar in intensity to the process I'd go through again four years later, and then again many years after that, in order to make my way into higher ed. But it wasn't until the community college classes that I learned of Git, and version control systems, and the forking of a codebase that can occur during a solo project as you take it in a slightly new direction, or a collaborative project when one or more decide to spin it off into their own.

Many years after that, in Pasadena, California (a city which I like to call Robledo, after the fictionalized version in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower), I found myself in the midst of a profoundly disabling depressive episode, catalyzed by the diagnosis of my stepfather with stage four colon cancer, the assurance of his imminent death, and my brewing awareness that I was trans and that I needed, more than anything, to muster the courage to tell him before he passed. Trusting a whim whipped up by a long-ago learned strategy for combatting depression—taking on a silly art project—I sat before some blank canvasses I'd bought years before and began cutting up the copious political flyers residents of a city receive in the mail promoting this or that local candidate, or local resolution. I taped the words onto the canvas to form a cheeky critique of the economic apartheid my city, like all others, was deeply invested in maintaining: eliminating rent control, protecting the rights of landlords and property owners, criminalizing homelessness, and so on, and so forth. This was my first collage—the first of what would soon be many.

Less than a year after that, after my stepfather's death—after my failure to come out to him in time, after coming out to my partner and then the world, after starting my medical transition—I wrote a hermit crab essay, a genre-agnostic literary form in which the author takes an otherwise “unartistic” format (like a recipe, product review, or job application) and uses it as the shell for a piece of writing that subverts and/or transcends the format. A tiny excerpt from a pages-long run-on sentence in the piece, titled “Job Application”:

...I am trying to learn to trust my whims more instead of talk myself out of them (I can talk myself out of—or into—anything, which I learned far too late is a very, very bad thing)...

This approach to trusting my whims had drawn me that day into a downtown Pasadena bookstore, where the employees' kindness in trying not to misgender me at a stage in my transition when I felt extremely self-conscious about my gender presentation had made me want to apply to work there (“Job Application” hermit crabs the application I would have filled out had it not been for the fact that the bookstore was apparently very anti-stealing, and asked multiple questions on the form about what you would do in the case of witnessing theft, and, given my staunch belief in the necessity of abolishing the concept of property, plus the fact that a few Reddit threads noted the bookstore's extremely hostile attitude towards its employees, all this made me turn the application into a hermit crab essay instead of actually applying).

Inside the bookstore, though, and before the interaction with the kind employees, trusting my whims made me pick up, for no articulable reason, a book on Martin Luther, about whom I knew little save for his most well-known act: nailing 95 theses to a church door in 1517 and subsequently ushering in the Protestant Reformation. I took the book home with me and began to read it, and all I could see was myself.

The book begins:

In Spring 2017 I was asked to speak from Luther's pulpit. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years writing a biography of the reformer. Few biographers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Wittenberg pulpit had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my father, who had died just ten months before, and who had been a minister of religion when I was growing up in Melbourne, Australia.

Moments after reading it, I began to type:

In Spring 2117 I was asked to speak in Rivera’s apartment. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years of my life writing a biography of the abolitionist. Few writers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Robledo apartment had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my stepfather, who had died just two months before, and who had been an organizer around abolitionism when I was growing up in a U.S. American colony.

The Rivera in the second excerpt is me.

This was the first incarnation.

Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (1991 to 2023). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: turbulent household/obssession with libraries; first exposure to programming; purchase of writing textbook; first short story completed in years; first exposure to version control systems; diagnosis and death of stepfather; first collage; purchase of book on Martin Luther; first incarnation.

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exhortation

Consider a project of yours that you care about. What events pocked your journey towards it? What texts did you need to access in order to begin? How did you use them? When and why? Who wrote them? What whims did you need to trust in order to begin this journey? What traumas did you needlessly endure theretofore? What coping mechanisms did you develop in response? What have all of these prevented you from doing? Enabled you to do? What firsts did you need to hurdle over in order to get there? How did these coalesce, over time, into this particular project? How have they endlessly shaped it? Draw another straight line across a second blank page. Mark your answers with labeled dots. Go as far back as birth, if needed. Recognize the unceasing current of happenstance. Locate it in all that seems predictable, assured.

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I have a standard definition of incarnations and autofabulation that is included in the abstract for this presentation, but I think the best way to define these terms is to quote directly from my work.

First, an excerpt from the source text for the first incarnation I wrote that explicitly defined the terms:

In 2001, everything changed. Cercas exploded onto the literary scene with his novel Soldiers of Salamis, which sold more than a million copies worldwide, won numerous awards, and was quickly turned into a major film. The novel, which tells the story of how a journalist named Javier Cercas finds an anonymous Republican soldier who spared the life of the fascist ideologue during the Spanish Civil War, swapped the university campus for the reporting trip. But the metafiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved Escheresque circularity but rather something much more directly self-referential. Cercas had inserted himself—name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofiction, and it can be found everywhere in contemporary fiction. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest names in literature today: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson. The list of practitioners is long. Autofiction describes fictional writing in which the author, narrator, and protagonist share a name, many biographical details, or, most often, both. It is frequently seen as the fictional corollary to memoir, and thus as a genre of “life writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Knausgaardian novella-length digressions that give rhythm to the mundane chores of daily life, others favor the vibes of the Nelsonian graduate school theory classroom, replete with sex, gender, and philosophy. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the self.

Not so for Cercas. His autofictional novels deal with a different kind of intimacy: the intimacy of how to report a newspaper opinion column. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair op-ed writer, opinion journalism, like its newsroom corollary, relies a great deal on facts and, often, on first-hand reporting. Opinion writers might report on the history of feminism or the history of their own family. But the best report all the same. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in a newsroom write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which opinion journalists avow the persuasive techniques they use in their own writing. Op-ed writing, after all, doesn’t just identify a problem, it proposes a solution.

And now, an excerpt from my incarnation of it:

In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.

For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which autofabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Autofabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.

Autofabulation—and in particular, this manifestation of it, the incarnation—weaves together all the threads I described in the previous section. It is as much influenced by version control systems and collage art, as it is by the humble writing textbook I stumbled upon as a teenager, as it is by the (speculative) archival work of Saidiya Hartman.

To both explain and tell the story of how I learned of her work, here follows an excerpt from the source text for the incarnation I presented to the people in my Tin House seminar:

In 1910, Dr. Kleiweg de Zwaan went to Sumatra to take facial casts of Nias Islanders. He covered their faces with plaster and brought the masks home. Now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam you can see a wall lined with the plaster casts of these men’s faces, eyes squinted, mouths shut against the intrusion. This is one kind of research. De Zwaan lacked the imagination to see that Nias Islanders were also people, just like him.

At its worst, heavily researched nonfiction risks becoming not only anti-feminist, but also inherently western and White, in privileging disembodied intellect—the clinical voice, the pretext of objectivity, as well as outside authority—over one’s own lived experience, body, and imagination (though as Toni Morrison has pointed out, imagination itself can be conscripted or constrained by the same biases that drive such clinical research). 

In contrast, one of the powers of autotheory is its push toward embodiment and invention. It refuses the objective voice, the pretense of neutrality, the fabrication that we can be all brain and no body, with body’s accompanying pleasures, embarrassments, and disappointments. It brings in the vulnerable elements of personal narrative and of one’s own body.

One reason Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been so popular, and that other works of autotheory including Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable books, divulging very personal details in ways that are neither confessional nor egoistic, but are instead an offering to readers: here is mine. In this way, they have the power of giving voice to experiences and lives that are more often sidelined, discounted, silenced, marginalized. 

And here follows an excerpt from my incarnation of it, which was eventually published by queer/trans indie publishing pillar fifth wheel press's GARLAND:

Almost sixty years ago, at a moment of great upheaval in the imperial core, I had yet to understand what was ahead of me. I was attempting to squeeze some sliver of economic survival out of a writing practice, and had hastily cobbled together an experimental hybrid novella titled EUPHORIUM. At the time, a service called QueryTracker allowed me to seek out literary agents, a relic of a profession, from a time when art was still largely mediated by capitalist exchange. I found an agent who I believed would understand the work I was trying to undertake and did my due diligence in researching her. She kept a list of the books she was reading on a pre-collapse networked database called Goodreads, and there I spotted a book I’d never heard of: Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. At the time, I couldn’t afford to buy the book and I didn’t have a library card, but I did find a free-to-access scholarly journal article discussing the book and its central conceit: critical fabulation.

Critical fabulation is one kind of research attuned to the fact that the archive is necessarily lacking. Archives regularly draw on what history leaves a record of, and what history leaves a record of is defined and delimited by settler colonialism, white supremacy, cisheterosexism, and biases along all sorts of lines of apartheid that allow the details of one person’s life to be easily excavatable, and the details of another’s to be completely erased. At its worst, archival work is a patchwork quilt filled with gaping holes. It risks telling a narrative that is not only wholly false, but also carelessly upholds what the archivist’s milieu already believes about the subject of the archive. In privileging what is available—the clinical record, the objective document, the authoritative report—over what one senses, intuits, and imagines both about what is and what cannot be available, the archive becomes as fictional a tale as any novel or short story.

Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, as I understand it, was to foreground this idea, to lean into it, to push through it—and to draw attention to the impossibility built into this ambition. In “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman explores a Black female figure both omnipresent in the archive of Atlantic slavery, and yet whose story or history, or stories or histories, cannot be told, cannot be excavated. She writes: “The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified… It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive… I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.”

One reason that Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments has been so popular, and that other works of critical fabulation have been so powerful, is that they are vulnerable texts, divulging the very personal experience of doing archival work in ways that connect one’s present to the past, offering readers a methodology for doing the same: here I am, here we are. In this way, readers have the power not of giving voice to experiences and lives that have been silenced or marginalized, but rather understanding the silencing and marginalizing more deeply, and to do so through an active process of participation, through a terrifyingly incomplete process of connection, reconnection, and disconnection, as a fragmented collage of past, present and future.

Hartman writes: “As I understand it, a history of the present strives to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state, not as the time before captivity or slavery, but rather as the anticipated future of this writing.”

So, yes, I can write to you to tell you that incarnations are the practice of forking a historical text, setting it in the far future, and centering yourself in this new narrative (for example, by narrating it from the perspective of your future self, as I do in the second incarnation in this section, or by narrating it from the perspective of some other future figure who is writing about you, as I do in the other incarnations I've shared so far), a narrative explicitly defined by its certainty in the triumph of anti-colonial and anti-imperial forces (for example, as is the case for all my incarnations, a storyworld in which the U.S. American empire collapses in the year 2089). And I can tell you that autofabulation is an umbrella term for an emerging genre of work that combines introspective, critical, historical, and speculative writing in order to giving the writer (at least a few of) the tools necessary to determine how they can participate in ensuring such a narrative/storyworld becomes reality.

But these simple, textbook definitions cannot do justice to the magic of writing, or reading, incarnations. As someone who has written and published a handful, and worked on but left unpublished several others, and as someone who returns to read these incarnations over and over again, enough to have memorized entire chunks of them, I can tell you: every incarnation is utterly exhausting to write (and sometimes to read). As I write, I have to hold in my head, all at once: the history being traced by the source text; the future being written by someone far away in time and space as though it is their present, looking back on what will be my history; my own present, as well as the present of the person who will read this today or tomorrow; and everything that will unfold in between these present and that future, which I will eventually traverse, and throughout which others will read this in their own time. It's dizzying. It's mesmerizing. It's terrifying.

The category under which this talk is filed is “Independent publishing and archival,” and as someone who has been doing a lot of both over the last two years, dizzying, mesmerizing, and terrifying are exactly how I would describe this work. I've found that last term, “terrifying,” especially useful as a framework for understanding archival work as it relates to trans and nonbinary peoples, Black and Indigenous peoples, and people of color. There is so much horror to be found and to experience in these archives, so much that is frightening and chilling and appalling, if only because there is a direct throughline between what is there, what isn't (and cannot) be there, and what is and has been unfolding around us right now.

From the transcript of a Relatively Queer session where I talk more about Saidiya Hartman:

Saidiya Hartman is a Black woman writer and academic, whose work has been really influential, for I think all of us [transcriber's note: this is in reference to the three co-facilitators for Relatively Queer, which includes me], especially because it goes beyond reparative archiving. And I’m not super familiar with all of her books, but I had the pleasure of like, sort of, kind of, auditing a course at the Brooklyn Institute around her 2007 book Lose Your Mother, which is about how the slave trade and its associated destructions of archival materials, not just in the form of tangible objects, but also familial connections, how this causes slaves and their descendants to “lose their mothers,” their histories, their countries, their kin and their past.

So she develops this methodology for addressing this that she calls critical fabulation. And it comes out of her own understanding of her own archival or historical work as being a bridge between theory and narrative. In an interview, she says, “I work intuitively, and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges. When writing, I will ask what are some of the key terms that I’m thinking with or that I'm writing against.” For her, archival work is always extremely personal. She writes that “narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom,” and that “this writing is personal, because this history has engendered me.”

So that last quote, and this one, come from an essay of hers, called “Venus in Two Acts,” in which she reflects on her attempts to confront the limits of the archive while writing Lose Your Mother. And she’s reflecting on writing that book and feeling like she’s failed in some way in addressing one particular Black female figure that appears over and over again in the archives relating to the slave trade. In that essay, she goes over the fact that, actually, the archive is almost excessive, in that there is such a meticulous documentation of the violence perpetrated by slave owners against slaves. And she writes: “Scandal and excess inundate the archive: the incantatory stories of shocking violence penned by abolitionists, the fascinated eyewitness, reports of mercenary soldiers eager to divulge what decency forbids them to disclose, and the rituals of torture, the beatings, hangings, and amputations enshrined as law.”

And this quote really doesn’t do justice to just how explicit and graphic the archival materials she's working with are, and she describes some of that in the essay. But because she’s relying on archival materials being produced by oppressors—white lawyers, white surgeons, captains, etc.—she writes that her own writing “falters before the archive’s silence and reproduces its own omissions. The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know, and that will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive impossibility defines the parameters of my work.”

So by the end of “Venus in Two Acts,” what Hartman essentially does is create a non-story or an archival fiction about the Black female figure called Venus. And this story, or non-story, it explores her own wishes for the story she wants to tell. It explores the ways in which the archive both supports and contradicts that story; the ways in which the archive can neither support nor contradict it; and what are the limits of even trying to write that non-story. And she acknowledges it’s totally possible that she hasn’t really succeeded at anything except just drawing attention to the impossibilities built into archival work.

There’s really no sense of closure or a solution to the problem she's describing in “Venus in Two Acts,” but she notes that that’s important. She writes: “Narrative restraint to the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure is a requirement of this method. The intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death, social and corporeal death, and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance.”

So, in contrast to reparative archiving— Oh, excuse me.

[transcriber's note: brief silence]

Sorry! I just needed to cough.

In contrast to reparative archiving [transcriber's note: this is in reference to an earlier part of the presentation that explores Lae'l Hughes-Watkins's work with reparative archiving], which seems to take a more material approach to reparations, Saidiya Hartman’s work highlights the utility of imagining, speculating, and negotiating with the limits of archival materials, and trying to exceed the limits of the archive oneself, as well as reckoning with the limits of archival materials, and contesting those limits in a variety of ways.

And this is the kind of the most difficult part of all of this for me to sit with, hence the dizzy emoji [transcriber's note: a large dizzy emoji appeared on the presentation slide during this part of the session]. She also advocates for methodologies that include things that feel like antithetical to academic work or archival work, which includes things like: refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.

*Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's Life and Legacy by Lyndal Roper. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled with this source text. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled “there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination”. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.*

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exhortation

Consider a project you care about, yours or someone else's. Reflect on what it means to offer it freely to others: to allow them to remix, adapt, fork, and incarnate it as they please, to treat it as an open source. What are the potential risks therein (to you, to them, to the project, to your communities)? What are the potential benefits? What kind of world does this approach to a project leave behind? What kind of world might it inaugurate? For the last time, draw a straight line on yet another blank page, but start the line somewhere off of the page's left edge. Label the left edge of this line with a dot and the name of your project. Who would you want to incarnate your work? How would you hope for them to do so? How would you have to treat your own project in order to court these future developments? Draw diagonal lines that begin at the dot at differently angled forward directions. Somewhere along one of those lines, place a single dot. Can you see the future ahead of you yet? Can the future ahead see you?

---

I told you at the start that, “A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space,” the epistolary greeting and the you of this quoted sentence implying a singular correspondent.

I alluded near the end of this correspondence to the importance of “refusing to provide or refusing to even seek out a sense of closure; denying that closure for the reader; and maybe even also being open to failing, which I think can be its own kind of success.”

This letter may have ended somewhat abruptly, without providing clear or concrete answers to many implied and unasked questions, including what incarnations mean for conceptions of “copyright” and “intellectual property”; how they may come to transform (self-)publishing; and what kinds of technologies might be best suited (or need to be invented) for an incarnated, autofabulated world.

Additionally, this letter may appear in a public setting, and it may even benefit those who read it but for whom it is not meant, but ultimately, this letter is intended for you, and only for you—whoever you are, whenever you are.

But you know already what this world is. You already know what is happening. You know what you and I must do.

We may not yet know exactly how, but we've always been quick studies.

To quote myself once more:

there's a girl out there watching and now probably laughing, saying, “girl, i literally laid the roadmap out for you.” and she did. and she has.

Black and white illustration of the incarnatory forking of this letter. A straight line just off of the left edge of the page begins with a dot labeled “Forking the historical text: Incarnations, autofabulation, and beyond”. Diagonal lines branch off of the dot and off the page in forward directions. Further down the straight line is another dot, labelled with a question mark. Diagonal lines also branch off of this dot and off the page in forward directions.

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exhortation

Incarnate some or all of this letter. Send it to someone you (want to) know and care about.

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Relevant resources

Relatively Queer, a virtual workshop series and community space for queer and trans folks seeking to recover lost queer and trans traces in their families of origin, broadly defined

Art, Strike!, an online art/literary publication founded on the principles of mutual aid

tRaum Books, a trans-led micropress that will publish The Ecology of Art, Strike!, an essay collection by me, in late 2025

“Job Application,” hermit crab essay

“The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy,” epistolary essay written to my younger self

“Venus in Two Acts,” by Saidiya Hartman, PDF download (131 KB)

“Reparative Acts and the Caste of Archival Erasure,” hour-long presentation given by Lae'l Hughes-Watkins, YouTube link

“Ted Nelson in Herzog's 'Lo and Behold',” three-minute clip from Werner Herzog's documentary Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, YouTube link

“there is no writing without editing, there are no futures without presence, and there is no such thing as predestination (incarnation of the preface to Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy by Lyndal Roper)”

“there is no self without reflection, there is no mirror without light, and there is no such thing as fabulation (incarnation of an excerpt from The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain by Bécquer Seguín)”

“there is no intuition without revolt, there is no movement without a turn, and there is no such thing as speculation (incarnation of Arianne Zwartjes’s “Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction”),” available to read by downloading Issue 2 of fifth wheel press's GARLAND for any price, including $0, on Ko-fi

“ends,” prose poem

My definition of consent

I, Erica Rivera, define consent as a process through which people interacting with each other have the space, time, resources, and support necessary to be open and honest with each other about:

• our histories;

• how we are currently feeling;

• how we may feel in the future;

• how we want to address the possibilities and realities of our boundaries being crossed/violated, or of us being harmed, abused, wronged, and/or being on the receiving end of violence;

• how we want support for making time and space to share our boundaries, desires, needs, aspirations, hopes, dreams, loves, and interests;

• how we can support each other in our pursuits of these parts of ourselves;

and checking in regularly about: 

• the power we each hold;

• how one or some of us may have more power than others;

• and how that will affect our abilities to do some or all of the above;

all as part of an infrastructure of interaction that allows anyone involved to feel free to disengage at any time, for any reason, as respectfully as possible, and without being judged for this decision and knowing that they will not be badgered or pursued later about that decision. 

I fear that—because we live in a world that gives so few (if any) of us time and space and resources and support, for anything, let alone for being in healthy, consensual relationships with the people around us—consent can sometimes feel impossible. But we have to try. We have to always, always try.

A website, for better or worse, is a piece of digital real estate; this is an imperfect metaphor, but I sure as hell've got a landlord (Cloudflare), a building manager (write.as), and only a certain amount of freedom around how I'm allowed to use the space. I'll use this page to aggregate links that might be useful to anyone who finds their way here; if you have any ideas for how else this space can be used, including ways you'd like to use the space yourself, please e-mail me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].

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Free Stuff

On Palestine

Reading list on the history of Palestine, the experiences of Palestinians, and the infrastructures of settler colonialism

InkWell Workshops

Provides free, high-quality literary programming to people living with mental health and addiction issues led by accomplished professional writers with lived experience of mental illness  Virtual course catalog available

Submission Calls

These are some of the resources I've used to find opportunities for publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, hybrid work, and visual art; inclusion on this list does not equal an endorsement. A friendly suggestion to use an e-mail alias whenever possible, especially when subscribing to newsletters or signing up for accounts; this guide from Proton has useful information about e-mail aliases. A big shout-out to the folks who pointed me towards these resources.

List of Magazines and Presses

Database Free  Work in progress; focus on magazines and presses that pay, offer very quick response times, offer free feedback regardless of acceptance, and/or accept previously published work  Aggregated by me 😊

Opportunities of the Week

Newsletter, twice per week  Pay what you can/no one turned away for lack of funds  Suggested rate of $5 USD per month  Aggregated by Sonia Weiser 🙌

Prose manuscript venues (Google Doc) / Poetry manuscript venues (Google Doc)

Database Free  Prose list sorted by genre, poetry list sorted by length; focus on free or low-cost submissions for manuscripts  Aggregated by nat raum of fifth wheel press

Authors Publish

Newsletter, several times per week  Free  Some newsletter issues focus on promoting their own programming  About once a month, they focus on opportunities for marginalized writers

FundsforWriters

Newsletter, once per week  Free  Focus on relatively well-paid opportunities

The Queer Writer

Newsletter, several times per month  Free  Focus on queer writers  Run by Milo Todd

Oleada

Submission manager  Submitting requires sign-up via e-mail; free to join  Focus on small/independent publications and presses

Small Publishers (Google Sheet)

Database Focus on small and independent publishers  Includes information about genres accepted, whether submissions are open, and whether an agent is required

Submittable

Submission manager  Requires sign-up via e-mail; free to join  The bane of my existence, with a business model that I'm certain is terrible for publications and presses  You can use the Discover feature to search by genre-specific tags; please note that the “fee-free” tag is often inaccurate, and some publications move their deadline as soon as it expires so they're always listed at top when sorted by deadline

Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP)

Posting board  No sign-up necessary  Postings are submitted by publications so they're usually accurate  Also has a CLMP job board, though most postings are for volunteer positions

Poets & Writers (P&W)

Database  No sign-up necessary  Also has the P&W job board, though most postings are for professorships

Chill Subs

Database  No sign-up necessary to browse and sort database; filtering and search requires sign-up via e-mail  Database pages are sometimes outdated; check the publication's website to confirm

Duosuma

Submission manager  Requires sign-up via e-mail; free to join  The other bane of my existence, mostly because of their overpriced sibling service, Duotrope

Workshops and Classes

What many refer to as “craft” is, of course, totally subjective, and I feel like most of the time we're better off engaging with things that are as far away as possible from what's considered “good writing” if we really want to improve our ability to express ourselves or communicate with others. That being said, sometimes it's nice to lean back and let someone else take the wheel. Here are a few places that offer free, affordable, sliding-scale, or free-with-scholarship workshops and classes, all of which are virtual; I've put a little information about accessibility for those I'm familiar with. Check out your local libraries too, as well as your local community colleges.

Abode Press

Open to anyone  Sliding scale, minimum is usually $10 USD plus nominal service fee  Focus on LGBTQ+/BIPOC writers  Held on Zoom with auto-generated captions; you can engage via chat rather than using a camera and/or mic

The Loft

Open to anyone  Prices range from $8 USD to in the hundreds; 95% reduction in tuition available on a first-come, first-served basis for those receiving public assistance, verification required, application available on their site Wide range of topics, including craft, pitching, self-care, and more

Honey Workshops

Open to anyone  Prices seem to be around $25 USD  Focus on BIPOC writers  Niche workshops on some pretty cool stuff (e.g., “From Barbie to Beyonce: Reclaiming Pop Culture,” “Amateur Just Means You Love It: Demystifying translation as a practice for all writers”)

Brown Bag Lit

Open to anyone  $75 per class, with a sliding-scale option available if you reach out via e-mail  Focus on small classes with a maximum of ten students  Single session classes held on Zoom

Crow Collective Workshops

Open to anyone  Prices start at $19 CAD; each class has at least two free spots available on a first-come, first-served basis on the workshop sign-up page; tip-jar donations go towards creating more free spots  They also offer a free Crow Collective weekly writing group

Tin House Craft Intensives

Open to anyone  Price is usually $75 USD; each class has one free spot awarded through a random lottery, apply on the workshop page  Wide range of topics, including craft, querying, and more  Held on Zoom with auto-generated captions; you can engage via chat rather than using a camera and/or mic

Hudson Valley Writers Center

Open to anyone  Prices are usually in the hundreds; limited scholarships are available for LGBTQ+ writers, writers of color, women writers, and nonbinary writers, application reopens in May 2024  Durations range from one-offs to multi-session

GrubStreet

Some are open to anyone, some require an application with a sample  Prices range from free to in the hundreds; each class has some free spots awarded based on expressed need, apply on the workshop page  Durations range from one-offs to multi-session

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Promotional image for “Intro to Hybrid Writing,” a virtual workshop hosted by fifth wheel press and facilitated by Erica Rivera (February 15, 2024, at 12 PM PST / 3 PM EST). The workshop info is presented on a beige ticket, atop a lavender background with wisps of white and aquamarine.

Intro to Hybrid Writing

Virtual, via Zoom Facilitated by me, hosted by fifth wheel press February 15, 2024, at 12 PM PST / 3 PM EST  Access to all six of fifth wheel press' winter 2024-2025 workshops also available for $50

Overview

This introduction to hybrid writing will provide students with a broad range of approaches and strategies to incorporating elements from other artistic mediums into their writing. The two-hour session will be broken up into four thirty-minute segments, across four categories of hybrid works: [1] prose poetry/lyric essays, [2] audio art that combines sounds/music with text/narration, [3] visual works that blend aspects of photography, collage, sculpture, and art installations with text, and [4] writing that incorporates “non-artistic” disciplines, like history, science, and math.

Content

During each thirty-minute segment, we will spend:

• about ten to fifteen minutes exploring examples of successful and impactful hybrid writing by esteemed writers and artists (e.g., Arianne Zwartjes, George Abraham, Starr Davis, Axel Kacoutié, Sophie, Gabrielle Civil, Patricia Smith, Mita Mahato, Ro Daniels, Jenny Holzer, Derek Beaulieu, makalani bandele, Saidiya Hartman, and Shabez Jamal, among others), and drawing from them concrete strategies that students can apply in their own writing;
• a few minutes exploring an example I created myself, with a brief explanation of my process;
• and then about ten to fifteen minutes with one or two short, generative prompts, with time for students to share their work in-session if desired.

---

Relatively Queer: Post-Disciplinary Approaches to Recovering Trans* Traces in Families of Origin

Virtual, via Zoom, Discord, Patreon, and Jitsi Co-facilitated by me, K Angel, and Dr. Lloyd Meadhbh Houston July 28 to August 11, 2024, for four-session experimental pilot workshop  November 17 to December 12, 2024, for four-week asynchonous iteration Free

Origins

In mid-2024, I had the pleasure of meeting K Angel during a Tin House Seminar focused on the intersections of collage art and essay writing, led by Aisha Sabatini Sloan. During our seminar, I presented on my work with “autofabulation,” which involves rewriting biographical/historical texts with oneself as the protagonist, while also setting them in the far future.

Afterwards, K generously invited me to join an project they began with Dr. Lloyd Meadhbh Houston, called Relatively Queer (RQ). In July and August, the three of us co-facilitated a four-session pilot workshop of the same name, during which we explored strategies, prompts, and examples of work relating to how one might conduct (and reimagine) archival work in the context of “reconnecting” with LGBTQ+ relatives who were erased or excluded from one's lives, families, and/or related archives.

Logistics

For the Summer 2024 pilot workshop, K Angel created a Discord server for interested participants. K, Lloyd Meadhbh, and I co-managed the Discord, as well as a shared Google Drive folder, both of which served as spaces where folks could share their work; explore and discuss the topics we covered during the workshop; access resources like handouts, workshop transcripts, and sample prompt responses; and participate in co-writing/body-doubling sessions. We held the workshop sessions in a live, presentation-style format via Zoom, with auto-generated captions available.

For the Autumn 2024 asynchronous iteration, we held a single live introductory session on November 12, and then distributed materials on a weekly basis via the Relatively Queer Patreon, the RQ Discord server, and e-mail. We also hosted multiple co-writing/body-doubling sessions each week via Zoom and Jitsi. Zoom sessions had auto-generated captions available.

---

Please note that the following workshop, “Writing, Publishing, and Political Action,” has been postponed to 2025.

Product image for “Writing, Publishing, and Political Action,” a virtual workshop, facilitated by Erica Rivera (September 7 to 8, 2024). Product image is a background of blurry, blobby, gradated pink and orange, with a lime green strip at the bottom, and the workshop info in black text on top.

Writing, Publishing, and Political Action

Virtual, via Discord Developed and facilitated by me 2025 (dates TBA) Free (donations encouraged)

Origins

In 2024, I began participating in workshops, seminars, and residencies hosted by traditional art and literary institutions. Although I appreciated the sense of community these offered and cherished the space and opportunity to learn, create, and co-create new works of art and writing, I found myself (as usual) concerned by the political economy of this kind of programming.

This forthcoming anti-workshop, titled “Writing, Publishing, and Political Action,” is my attempt at an intervention. You'll find more information here as I develop the project, which will take place in 2025.

Logistics

I'll be hosting two 8-hour livestreams with generative prompts/writing time scattered throughout, in between other kinds of programming. That way, folks can tune in at any time over the course of those two eight-hour livestreams and get a little bit of everything.

You can officially register via the Ko-fi link above. The event is free to attend (though donations are encouraged!) and I'll post links to it on this page closer to the event. I'll be streaming from the Writing, Publishing, and Political Action Discord server, but you won't need to have or create a Discord account in order to access the livestream.

If you do register via Ko-fi, I'll e-mail you a video recording (MP4) of the instructional lecture content with an accompanying text transcript, as well as a digital zine (PDF) that functions as the “workshop textbook.” I will also make those resources available for download on this page after the event.

Content

I put up a poll on my fediverse and Ko-fi profiles, asking folks to vote on which of the following four kinds of programming they'd like to participate in:

• Generative prompts/in-class writing time
• Somatic exercises
• Instructional lectures on craft, etc.
• Collaborative co-teaching

The first one, “Generative prompts/in-class writing time,” received the most votes, so for most of the two 8-hour sessions, that's what I'll be offering. I'm also planning on giving some craft lectures that are focused on my own writing.

What we call “the submission grind” is brutal. In order to illuminate the process for emerging writers like myself, and to make my own journey more transparent, my publication history is detailed below, including submissions, rejections, acceptances, payments, and, in relevant cases, how the payment was or will be used. If you'd like to read any of the unlinked pieces, please e-mail me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com]. You can see a list of the magazines and presses on this page, with additional info and links to submissions pages/portals, on my List of Magazines and Presses page.

---

Book cover for Erica Rivera's The Girls from Pasadena: A neon green microchip texture with gridded blocks of black and gray. In between the gridded blocks, the words of the title in a bold white serif, a thin white line leading from the end of each word in the title to the next. Sometimes the lines go off the edge and then re-enter the page elsewhere, as with the final phrase in the title, “and other stories,” in italics. At bottom-right: Erica Rivera.

Or maybe, shy as they’d been crafted, the Octavias would meet and not say anything at all. Probably they’d keep to themselves. Octavia would have kept to herself. Octavia, the research seemed to indicate, probably wouldn’t even have noticed. From the beginning, Mína had known the egoism of messiahs was the project’s best shot at success.

from “The Girls from Pasadena,” in The Girls from Pasadena, self-published

The Girls from Pasadena

Book, collection of short stories  Available on Itch, to be released on March 15, 2025 Send proof of giving $15+ to a Black and/or Indigenous person's mutual aid request to receive the book for free, more details here Free community copies for those unable to pay full-price for the book are available Declined by Host Publications, LittlePuss Press, and nine literary agents; earlier versions declined by Unnamed Press, Apocalypse Party, Persea Books, Split/Lip Press, Madrona Books, and 26 literary agents

I start writing her story and she feels so real—so much like me—I resolve to be her. She is my glimpse into a future that cannot yet exist, except here she is—here I am—existing.

from The Ecology of Art, Strike!, forthcoming from tRaum Books

The Ecology of Art, Strike!

Book, collection of essays  Forthcoming from tRaum Books, 2025  Royalties will go towards maintaining Art, Strike!'s website, shipping outstanding Art, Strike!deliveries, and funding future mutual aid projects like Art, Strike! Selected by Split/Lip Press as a finalist during their 2023 Nonfiction/Hybrid open reading period; withdrawn from Sundress Publications, Feminist Press, Rescue Press, and Blair upon acceptance

these are not just words. this is a life.

from the year that i was born into, forthcoming from Querencia Press

the year that i was born into

Chapbook, collection of prose poems  Forthcoming from Querencia Press, TBD Withdrawn from kith books upon acceptance; declined by Prismatica Press, Papeachu Press, Abode Press, and Bottlecap Features, and selected by Essay Press as one of ten finalists for their 2023 Chapbook Open Reading Period

When we check the mailbox, the third letter is already waiting for us.

It says we should kill a politician.

from “Los Anaranjados,” forthcoming in Bennington Review

Los Anaranjados

Fiction, short story Forthcoming in Bennington Review, 2025 Payment of $250 Withdrawn from FICTION upon acceptance; declined by Seize the Press, The Ex-Puritan, and Joyland; early versions declined by Michigan Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Southeast Review, TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, and Massachusetts Review; withdrawn from The Masters Review in solidarity with Sarah Ghazal Ali's open letter about Discover New Art

While some amount of these texts were redistributed upon its defeat, stripped of their materiality, and subsumed into the text collection process, a significant portion remains in the hands of U.S. American sympathizers, whose attempts to hoard and preserve the original physical texts, including the original authors’ claims to rights over their writings, provides physical evidence, and continuation of, the appeal and practice of fascism.

from “there is no art without arms, no text without teeth, and there is no such thing as erica rivera,” forthcoming in Mizna Online

there is no art without arms, no text without teeth, and there is no such thing as erica rivera

Incarnation of an excerpt from Laura Raicovich’s Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest Forthcoming in Mizna Online, 2025 Payment of $100

“Terrorist” is a misnomer, a straw man; an invented conceit intended to drum up support for endless, omnipresent wars.

from “everything i know about genocide, part two,” forthcoming in Broken Antler Magazine

everything i know about genocide, part two

Creative nonfiction, essay  Forthcoming in Broken Antler Magazine, 2025 Payment of $20, will be distributed to mutual aid funds  Withdrawn from Griffith Review, Mizna, Defunkt Magazine, and X-R-A-Y upon acceptance; declined by House of Gamut

The boys, they drank, then they wrote. Sometimes they wrote and then drank. Pass the Natty, as command, could refer to Natural Light or to a worn-out Hawthorne with the covers missing.

from “The Boys,” published by fifth wheel press

The Boys

Fiction, short story  Published by fifth wheel press, February 2025 No payment Part of D.W. Baker’s Contemporary Masculinity call

Almost sixty years ago, at a moment of great upheaval in the imperial core, I had yet to understand what was ahead of me.

from “there is no intuition without revolt, there is no movement without a turn, and there is no such thing as speculation,” published by fifth wheel press's GARLAND

there is no intuition without revolt, there is no movement without a turn, and there is no such thing as speculation

Incarnation of Arianne Zwartjes’s “Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction” Published by fifth wheel press's GARLAND, September 2024  Payment of $5, declined in exchange for a free contributor copy  Support fifth wheel press by buying the full issue at any price here

a well can be fracked three times / before everybody’s poisoned

from “six miles southeast of rupaul's mansion (extracted from Morgan Thomas's 'Surrogate')” published by The Offing

six miles southeast of rupaul's mansion (extracted from Morgan Thomas's “Surrogate”)

Poem Published by The Offing, July 2024  Payment of $50, will be redistributed to mutual aid funds Withdrawn from Ninth Letter and The Ex-Puritan upon acceptance; declined by fifth wheel press for their secrets in the garden anthology and Eco Punk Lit; early version declined by The Drift and The Marrow; withdrawn from Guernica in solidarity with those resigning and withdrawing their work over the publication of settler apologia

Download PDF of “six miles southeast of rupaul's mansion” [608 KB]

Sometimes you settle for virtual reality when reality reality isn’t enough.

from “Sim City,” published by HyphenPunk Magazine

Sim City

Fiction, short story  Published by HyphenPunk Magazine, June 2024  Payment of $25  Withdrawn from The Tales Between and Nightmare Magazine upon acceptance; declined by Seize the Press, Ninth Letter, and Augur Magazine Support HyphenPunk Magazine by buying the full issue for $2.99

Download PDF of “Sim City” [84 KB]

What happens when you can forget that you're trans? That you’re on stolen land? That your ability to breathe and drink and eat and think and love and mourn and write and cry is built on someone else's grave?

from “statement of plans,” published by Osmosis Press

statement of plans

Creative nonfiction, essay  Published by Osmosis Press, June 2024  No payment  Withdrawn from Fugitives & Futurists upon acceptance

Download PDF of “statement of plans” [1 MB]

From the gym, running on the treadmill, you could see in the center of the park a shimmery blue-green haze, shaped into peculiar, unstable forms, ever morphing slightly, distorting your perception of what was by and behind it at its edges, like the flames of a large, dancing fire.

from “The Hologram,” published by The Emerson Review

The Hologram

Fiction, short story Published by The Emerson Review, June 2024  Payment of $5, declined for personal reasons Declined by The Drift

Download PDF of “The Hologram” [3 MB]

there's no biomedical roadmap to cure my disdain for expression, except maybe stories of sisters refusing to speak—to anyone but each other, in a language their own.

from “ends,” published by beestung

ends

Creative nonfiction, prose poem  Published by beestung, May 2024  Payment of $20

Download PDF of “ends” [203 KB]

Unlike the other main characters of the shows you watch, the main character of this show looks like she's always on the verge of tears, and is always being forced by her circumstances to hide them. This is new to you, and appealing: it is a joy to see someone on TV who's as perpetually devastated as you.

from “The Trans Girl’s Guide to Grey’s Anatomy,” published by Under the Sun

The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey’s Anatomy

Creative nonfiction, essay  Published by Under the Sun, May 2024  Payment of $50; received thorough comments from a large team of readers, as well as multiple rounds of editing Withdrawn from Gulf Coast and Porter House Review upon acceptance

Let's make writing do what it’s supposed to. Let's figure this out for good.

from “everything i know about genocide, part three,” published by Isele Magazine

everything i know about genocide, part three

Creative nonfiction, essay Published by Isele Magazine, April 2024  Payment of $10, was redistributed to a mutual aid fund  Withdrawn from Foglifter and The Rumpus upon acceptance

Download PDF of “everything i know about genocide, part three” [123 KB]

She vanished history and superstructure and became a party of one, abating the unanswered questions: would a vaccine come, when would she get it, when would she go outside again. When would she get to be herself.

from “Pandemic Story,” published by Sophon Lit

Pandemic Story

Fiction, flash  Published by Sophon Lit, March 2024  No payment; requested to receive free feedback provided regardless of acceptance, and received response within 24 hours  Withdrawn from Split Lip Magazine, The Worcester Review, and New Delta Review upon acceptance; declined by Variant Lit and Big Whoopie Deal Available to read at Sophon Lit

Download PDF of “Pandemic Story” [411 KB]

text is meaningless. colors flow in different directions; to and from where is anybody's guess.

from “self-portrait,” published by manywor(l)ds

self-portrait

Mixed media, series of four images with image descriptions  Published by manywor(l)ds, February 2024  Payment of $10, gifted to manywor(l)ds in support of their mission  Available to view and read at manywor(l)ds

Download PDF of “self-portrait” [18 MB]ds in February 2024”)

november 20 is the day they invented the word: the first day of the last day of the rest of our lives.

from “november 20,” published by JAKE

november 20

Creative nonfiction, prose poem  Published by JAKE, December 2023  No payment; received response within three days  Early version declined by beestung and Stanchion Zine Available to read at JAKE

Download PDF of “november 20” [206 KB]

and she laughs kind of hysterically, and i laugh kind of hysterically, hyster comes from the greek hystéra meaning womb, am i woman enough to transition yet?

from “can't sleep when i think about the year that i was born into,” published by en*gendered

can't sleep when i think about the year that i was born into

Creative nonfiction, series of three prose poems Published by en*gendered, November 2023  No payment; received response within 24 hours Declined by CRAFT and Cutleaf Journal; withdrawn from Peatsmoke Journal upon acceptance Available to read at en*gendered

Download PDF of “can't sleep when i think about the year that i was born into” [43 KB]

Residencies, Workshops, Conferences, Grants, and Prizes

2025

2025 Periplus Fellow (Fiction)

Virtual/remote Focus: Yearlong mentorship and community for BIPOC writers in the U.S., will be mentored by Denne Michele Norris

2024

2024 Off Assignment Masters' Series

Virtual/remote November 3 – November 24, 2024 Focus: “Writing This Warming World,” with Meera Subramanian; featuring guest lectures by Emily Raboteau, Elizabeth Rush, J. Drew Lanham, and Helen Macdonald Cost: $400, received full scholarship to attend

Docu-poetics: Between the Stanza and Archive

Virtual/remote October 23 – November 20, 2024 Focus: Exploring research and archival practice through poetry, led by Ajanaé Dawkins Cost: Free

2024 Brooklyn Poets Fellowship

Virtual/remote September 29 – November 3, 2024 Focus: “Poetry and Legalism: Articulating the Forbidden,” with Starr Davis Cost: $395, received full scholarship to attend

Granta 2024 Nature Writing Workshop

Virtual/remote September 16 – November 10, 2024 Focus: Nature and environmental writing with Jessica J. Lee Cost: £1000; declined due to financial inability

The Shipman Agency 2024 Master Class

Virtual/remote October 19 and October 26, 2024 Focus: “How to Read and Write Palestine,” with Fatima Bhutto; featuring guest speakers Raja Shehadeh and Eman Basher Cost: $50, received full scholarship to attend

Arizona State University's 2024 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference

In-person October 10 – October 12, 2024  Focus: Classes, workshops, panels, and talks on literary craft, technique, and the business of writing  Cost: $220 plus travel and accomodations, received $395 grant from California's Center for Cultural Innovation Quick Grant to attend

2024 Off Assignment Masters' Series

Virtual/remote October 2 – October 23, 2024 Focus: “Navigating Literary Publicity,” with Lauren Cerand; featuring guest lectures by Andre Banks, Dan Sinykin, Kathleen Schmidt, and Sonya Chung Cost: $400, received full scholarship to attend

School for Poetic Computation Fall 2024 Session

Virtual/remote September 21 – October 19, 2024 Focus: “TO THE STREETS!” with Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Sarah Al-Yahya, and Paige Fulton Cost: $750, received $650 scholarship to attend; declined for personal reasons

Kenyon Review 2024 Summer Online Writers Workshop (Creative Nonfiction)

Virtual/remote June 23 – June 29, 2024  Focus: Intensive generative workshops, as well as community critique and readings  Cost: $895, received $500 scholarship from Kenyon Review; declined due to financial inability

Abode Press 2024 Virtual Summer Retreat (Fiction)

Virtual/remote June 9 – June 30, 2024 Focus: Anti-racist craft and generative workshops with Diamond Braxton Cost: $200; declined due to personal reasons

Los Angeles Review of Books 2024 Publishing Workshop

Virtual/remote June 4 – July 26, 2024 Focus: Recruitment, training, and mentorship of aspiring publishing professionals Cost: $3000; declined due to financial inability

Kolaj Institute 2024 Poetry & Collage Residency

Virtual/remote May 1 – May 30, 2024  Focus: Pushing the boundaries of the definitions of poetry and collage Cost: $500, will barter five collages as payment in lieu of paying residency fee; resigned on May 21 for personal reasons

Tin House 2024 Online Seminar (Nonfiction)

Virtual/remote May 4 – June 8, 2024  Focus: “On Collage,” with Aisha Sabatani Sloan Cost: $600, received full scholarship to attend

Waitlisted or Finalist

Washington Square Review Fall 2023 New Voices Award (Poetry)

Kenyon Review 2024 Winter Online Writers Workshop (Creative Nonfiction)

Kenyon Review 2024 Winter Online Writers Workshop (Fiction)

Tin House 2024 Summer Workshop (Nonfiction)

Kenyon Review 2024 Residential Writers Workshop (Creative Nonfiction)

Fall 2024 Orion Online Environmental Writers' Workshop (Nonfiction)

Kenyon Review 2025 Winter Online Writers Workshop (Creative Nonfiction)

Kenyon Review 2025 Winter Online Writers Workshop (Poetry)

Kenyon Review 2025 Winter Online Writers Workshop (Fiction)

2024 Otherwise Fellowship

Submitted

Stanford University 2025-2027 Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Poetry)

The Maureen Seaton Poetry Prize 2025

2025 Fine Arts Work Center Summer Workshop

Rejected

2025 Ann Friedman Weekly Fellowship

Quarterly West 2024 Prose Contest

2025 Welcome to My Homepage Digital Artist Residency Program

Latinx in Publishing 2025 Mentorship Program (Poetry)

Tin House 2024 Summer Residency (Poetry)

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Mt. St. Angelo Summer 2025 Residency (Creative Nonfiction)

Brooklyn Poets 2025 Mentorship Program

FSG 2024 Writer's Fellowship (Fiction)

2024 Granum Foundation Prize

Center for Book Arts 2024 Small Press Incubator

Tin House 2024 Winter Residency (Nonfiction)

Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources 2024 Critical Minerals Institute

Tin House 2024 Autumn Workshop (Fiction)

2024-25 Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic Fellowship

Portland Community College 2024 Carolyn Moore Writing Residency

Tin House 2024 Fall Residency (Nonfiction)

Sewanee 2024 Writers' Conference (Nonfiction)

Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Mt. St. Angelo Fall 2024 Residency

MacDowell Fall 2024 to Winter 2025 Residency

Adroit Journal 2023-24 Anthony Veasna So Scholars

The de Groot Foundation 2024 COURAGE to WRITE Grant

Princeton University Press 2024-25 Publishing Fellowship

Stanford University 2024-2026 Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Fiction)

Kenyon Review 2024 Developmental Editing Fellowship (Fiction)

Gulf Coast 2023 Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing

Epiphany 2024 Fresh Voices Fellowship

Periplus Collective 2024 Fellowship (Fiction)

Tin House 2024 Winter Workshop (Fiction)

Witness 2024 Literary Award (Fiction)

Tin House 2024 Summer Residency (Fiction)

Latinx in Publishing 2024 Mentorship Program (Literary Fiction)

Curationist 2024 Critics of Color Fellowship

Porter House Review 2023-2024 Editor's Prize Contest (Fiction)

Guernica 2024 Poetry Fellowship

Gulf Coast 2023 Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing

Withdrawn

Blair/Carolina Wren Press 2024 Bakwin Award for Full-Length Prose

Porter House Review 2023-2024 Editor's Prize Contest (Nonfiction)

2024 Milkweed Fellowship, withdrawn in solidarity with Su Hwang's open letter about Milkweed Editions

Unpublished works

the((hi)st)ories

Book, hybrid collection of prose, poetry, and visual art  Submitted to new words {press}

(Me and) My Surgeons

Poem Submitted to The Ex-Puritan and Strange Horizons

Patient

Poem Submitted to Poet Lore; declined by Foglifter

A GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE IS OCCURRING AT THE HANDS OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL AND AMERICA HAS FINANCED IT WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS

Poem Submitted to Poet Lore and The Drift; declined by Foglifter and Rattle Payment will be distributed to mutual aid funds for Palestinians

The ocean

Poem Submitted to The Drift; declined by Rattle

fill in the blanks

Poem Submitted to Poet Lore, The Ex-Puritan, and The Drift; declined by Rattle

art markets (centralization x scamminess)

Digital art, image with image description Submitted to Underblong; declined by MEMEZINE Available on my website

Murder Mystery

Fiction, short story Declined by Fahmidan Journal and Apparition Lit

Archivist's statement

Poem Declined by The Offing

pcosryh/isetsoyp

Poem Declined by The Offing

trans girl as a metaphor for western hegemony

Poem Declined by Rough Cut Press, The Offing, ANMLY, and Barrelhouse

Upward (1929), Among Us (2020)

Poem Declined by Barrelhouse, Poet Lore, and ANMLY

After the art show

Poem Declined by Barrelhouse, Poet Lore, and ANMLY

The Harvest

Fiction, flash Submitted to Apex Magazine; declined by Neon Hemlock and X-R-A-Y

Rosetta Stone

Fiction, flash Declined by The Kenyon Review, MYRIAD, Astrolabe, trampset, If There's Anyone Left, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Flash Frog, Fahmidan Journal, Cursed Morsels, Metastellar, Radon Journal, and Seize the Press

The essayist

Fiction, prose poem Submitted to The Paris Review; declined by Barrelhouse, Astrolabe, Flash Frog, Poet Lore, If There's Anyone Left, The Future Fire, Smokelong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and ANMLY

Excisions

Fiction, flash Declined by The Kenyon Review, Flash Frog, Fahmidan Journal, and trampset

for Vassily et al

Creative nonfiction, prose poem  Declined by SICK

The Television Writer

Fiction, short story  Declined by PRISM International, Tahoma Literary Review, and Seize the Press

(Me and) My Surgeons

Fiction, short story  Declined by Foglifter, khōréō, The Rumpus, Witness, Radon Journal, Brink, Joyland, and Porter House Review

TRUCRIME presents: A Murder in the Metaverse (1x01, “Trust in the Numbers”)

Fiction, short story  Shortlisted by Good Pointe for their Someone Just Like You audio fiction anthology

A theory of fiction

Poem Declined by Barrelhouse, Ninth Letter, and Protean; withdrawn from The Ex-Puritan for personal reasons, and withdrawn from Guernica in solidarity with those resigning and withdrawing their work over the publication of settler apologia

The Dead

Fiction, flash Submitted to Briefly Zine, Alternative Milk Magazine, and The Good Life Review; declined by Sans. Press, Fahmidan Journal, and Smokelong Quarterly

dysphoria (reprise)

Poem  Submitted to Kweli Journal; declined by  The Offing, ANMLY, Protean, Ninth Letter, ONLY POEMS, and Rattle; withdrawn from The Ex-Puritan for personal reasons, and withdrawn from Guernica in solidarity with those resigning and withdrawing their work over the publication of settler apologia

THIS CITY

Creative nonfiction, flash Declined by Alien Magazine, Ninth Letter, SAND, Split Lip Magazine, trampset, and Fahmidan Journal; withdrawn from Chestnut Review in solidarity with A.R. Arthur and others

The Girls from Pasadena

Fiction, short story  Early version declined by Analog Magazine, Canthius, The Rumpus, Radon Journal, and NonBinary Review

everything i know about genocide

Creative nonfiction, essay  Declined by Protean, The Malahat Review, The Baltimore Review, and Foglifter; withdrawn from CRAFT in solidarity with Sarah Ghazal Ali's open letter about Discover New Art Payment will be distributed to mutual aid funds for Palestinians  Available to read on my website

.

Hybrid, prose poem/lyric essay/story-in-verse  Submitted to The Kenyon Review; declined by Foglifter, Passages North, Graywolf Lab, and theHythe Payment will be distributed to the LA Trans Defense Fund and other mutual aid funds  Title is pronounced as a pause without sound

editing/transparency

Poem  Declined by Foglifter

like a sub/scribe

Poem  Submitted to Chismosa Literary; declined by new words {press}, ONLY POEMS, Rattle, Wasteland Review, and The Ex-Puritan

what my mother gave me

Poem  Submitted to Chismosa Literary; declined by Wasteland Review

everyone thinking

Poem  Submitted to Chismosa Literary; declined by Wasteland Review  Available to read on my website

this may be proof

Mixed media, photograph of poem  Submitted to The Paris Review; declined by Protean, Poet Lore and The Ex-Puritan

essay

Creative nonfiction, essay  Declined by HAD Available to read on my website

First-Person Shooter

Fiction, short story  Declined by The Georgia Review, River Styx and Alien Magazine; early version declined by Peatsmoke Journal and Guernica

The People vs. John F. Kennedy-North

Fiction, short story  Declined by ergot.

A Brief History of Fear

Fiction, short story  Declined by Prismatica Press for their Good for Her anthology

the company u keep

Fiction, short story  Declined by The Maine Review

the company u keep

Criticism, essay  Declined by Denver Quarterly

neocolonial data capital extraction model

Digital art, image with image description  Submitted to The Drift; declined by Protean, Wasteland Review, Rattle, and Alien Magazine; early version declined by Cutbow Quarterly  Available on my website

Her Own Personal Jesus

Fiction, short story  Submitted to Open Minds Quarterly; declined by Sonder Lit Early version available to read on my website

Platformer

Fiction, short story  Submitted to Prolit Magazine and n+1; declined by Radon Journal, Funicular Magazine, and Untenured  Available to read on my website

biography

Creative nonfiction, prose poem  Declined by new words {press}, Rough Cut Press, SAND, SICK, and ONLY POEMS

Artist

Fiction, short story  Declined by One Story, Anarchist Fictions, Conjunctions, and Malarkey Books; early version submitted to The Baffler, declined by The Offing, A Public Space, The Missouri Review, Joyland, and Gulf Coast

descendance

Creative nonfiction, prose poem  Submitted to Exposition Review; declined by SAND and Zero Readers

Transcript

Creative nonfiction, script  Submitted to The Rumpus; declined by Tolka, Foglifter, The Loveliest Review, and Topograph

Station Twelve

Fiction, flash  Declined by Astrolabe, Paranoid Tree, Apparition Lit, and Apple Valley Review

Cuts

Fiction, flash  Declined by Wigleaf, If There's Anyone Left, New Delta Review, Variant Lit, Fractured Literary, and Apple Valley Review

how to write a short story, part one / how to write a short story, part two / how to write a short story, part three

Creative nonfiction, series of three essays  Declined by The Kenyon Review and The Broadkill Review  Early versions available to read on my website

how to write a short story, part three

Creative nonfiction, essay  Declined by The Forge  Early version available to read on my website

An Exhortation

Fiction, flash  Submitted to The Common; declined by Minor Literature[s] and Fahmidan Journal; early version declined by New Delta Review, Variant Lit, StreetLit, and The Worcester Review

Assignments

Fiction, short story  Declined by The Ex-Puritan; early version declined by Smokelong Quarterly  Early version available to read on my website

this is not for/about me, it is for/about the fish; stop feeding it data, stop using it (you are, indeed, using it (everyone)) until it's not for/about you and is only for the fish (i.e., never; i.e., burn every parasite motherfucker alive)

Creative nonfiction, interview  Declined by Full House Literary

burst

Poem Submitted to Arboreal; declined by ONLY POEMS and Rattle Available to read on my website

advertisement

Creative nonfiction, prose poem Declined by Canthius and Foglifter

April 2025 update: This website presents my work as Erica “ERN” Rivera, from January 2023 to March 2025. I'll be winding down this site and my work as Erica over the coming year.

Hi! My name is Erica “ERN” Rivera (she/they) and I'm a performance writer, editor, and collage artist.

I'm the author of The Girls from Pasadena, my debut collection of short stories, available now on Itch! The collection brings together 15 twisted, transfeminist modern fables that peel back the skin on a technocolonialist hellscape that's just around the corner. You can read early versions of some of my short stories, including two that will appear in the collection (“Platformer” and “Assignments”), on this site.

I'm also the author of The Ecology of Art, Strike! (tRaum Books, Fall 2025), my forthcoming debut collection of essays. The book doubles as an “anti-publishing manifesto,” and a speculative memoir loosely tracing the first year of my medical transition, as well as my experiences serving as co-editor for Art, Strike!, an online art/literary publication.

I'm also the author of the year that i was born into (Querencia Press, TBD), my forthcoming debut chapbook of prose poems. The chapbook chronicles the mundane aspects of transitioning as they relate to the world at large. Each of the twelve prose poems in the collection roughly correspond to a single month in the first year of my medical transition.

I'm currently at work on my first novel, Artist; an epistolary memoir tentatively titled The Trans Girl's Guide to Modern Television (you can read the first chapter, “The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy,” here); and a short hybrid book of poetry and prose, the((hi)st)ories. You can more about my published and unpublished works on my Publications page, and about the workshops I'm facilitating this year on my Teaching page.

If you'd like to learn more about me and my approach to art and writing, you can read my essay titled “Parables,” available on this site.

Please note that the essay above references my history of being violent and abusive. Being publicly open about this is part of my ongoing accountability work and one way in which I remain accountable to those who I am in community with.

I am unsure whether this is the right thing to do or say here, but if it turns out not to be, I will change this note accordingly: if you have any questions about my ongoing accountability work, especially if you have a history of being violent and abusive and are unsure how to begin your own accountability work, please feel free to contact me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com]. I am not a professional, but I am willing to share what I have learned, or at least point you towards other kinds of resources.

One resource is “learning good consent,” which is available as a free PDF online, but which is also available for purchase from multiple presses and distros. If you want help finding it, or would like to me to assist you with purchasing it, please let me know and I will help as best I can.

“learning good consent” is only one resource of many, and although not all abuse or violence is inherently sexual in nature, much of it is, and the text offers important information to anyone who has harmed others in any way.

Also, please feel free to reach out to me for any reason at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].

Finally, please note that my public-facing online presence is comprised of:

• this website,
• my presence on the Relatively Queer Discord server, 
• my Itch page,
• my Ko-fi page,
• Signal, Twitter, and Instagram accounts,
• assorted dating apps, and
• my supporter Patreon account.

If you're messaged by someone claiming to be me through a social channel not listed above (including Bluesky, Facebook, Threads, Telegram, Snapchat, and Substack), please note that it is most definitely not me.

content/trigger warnings: graphic depictions of self-immolation, discussion of genocide

---

after “Palestine” by Samuel Mena, Jr.

Photograph of a man with his left arm on fire, clutching his face with his right hand, looking upwards, screaming in pain. Photograph of Samuel Mena, Jr., a photojournalist, his left arm on fire, his agonized face pointed up towards the heavens. Photograph of a light-skinned person in a lilac button-down, press credentials in plastic attached to a lanyard hanging from his neck, his sleeves rolled up, his left arm on fire, his face twisted up, his mouth agape. Photograph of Samuel Mena, Jr., a Mexican American photojournalist, in a light purple dress shirt, its bottom-left corner blown upwards by wind, the bottom-right corner draped over dark pants, where his shirt sits under his arms dampened by sweat, his right sleeve sloppily rolled up, the left sleeve a little more neatly folded, its bottom edge blackened by soot and combusting in flames leading down the shirt towards his elbow and leading up the bare skin of his arm to the point where pinky meets palm, the flame white-hot at the center and yellow-orange at the edges, emanating at least a foot away from his body. Photograph of a young person with his left arm on fire. Photograph of a young man with his left arm on fire, his left hand a half-fist, lifted up towards the sky, his right hand open and over his forehead and eyes. Photograph of a person of conscience with his left arm alight. Photograph of Samuel Mena, Jr., an artist, writer, and activist, his left arm in flames, face torn by exhaustion, body clenched up with pain, torso steady and firm, legs out of frame but holding him upright. Photograph of someone with something to say. Screenshot of a Tweet with the photo described heretofore, posted on October 6, 2024, at 5:37 pm, with 911,000 views, 444 comments, 12,000 retweets, 48,000 likes, 1,700 bookmarks, and the caption reading, in white text on black background, “In his words: ‘To the 10,000 children of Gaza who have lost a limb in this conflict, I give you my left arm.’”

content/trigger warnings: discussions of political violence, imperialism, and colonialism; references to police/state violence and delusional thinking; brief depictions of political assassinations; use of ableist language

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This week is what I call Parable of the Sower week: the seven days leading up to July 20, 2024. This is the day that inaugurates the narrative in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, as well as the 15th birthday of its protagonist.

I'm what you might call superstitious about things like this, though I don't know if superstitious is the right word, since I consider myself and claim to be something of a clairvoyant.

I have feared for a very long time that something of great import would occur on the 20th, though I try to approach phenomena like clairvoyance, superstition, and serendipity soberly: things of great import occur every day, at every hour, at every moment. At the same time, things of great import don't really “occur” at all; they unfold, over much longer periods of time than a day, and in tandem with all other things, of import or no, in ways that are inextricable from each other.

Nevertheless, because of my particular vantage, I feel and understand the world in moments, hours, days. It's hard for me to not assign importance to the day at the end of this week, or even to the week itself (despite neither “day” nor “week” being particularly coherent temporal groupings anyways).

I often describe my writing as an attempt to intervene in the thorny political economy of art production, but you could just as well describe it as an attempt to democratize clairvoyance. If pressed, I would admit that I consider these projects to be one and the same. In my essay titled “Inca(r)n(t)ation,” I write:

The truth is that everyone is clairvoyant. Those who already know this know also that its source is trauma; trauma is the catalyst for clairvoyance. This is because clairvoyance is the same as hyperempathy; a better word for it may be hypersensitivity. Clairvoyants are sensitive to everything: the tiniest twitches, the most invisible winds. If you allow yourself to feel enough, you will have visions too.

My visions come to me mostly in my dreams, but also in my writing. Earlier this year, I dreamt a long dream—had a long vision—in which I shot a politician. I transcribed what I remembered of the dream after waking, and then turned it into a short story originally titled “Letters,” and later retitled “Los Anaranjados.” The short story follows three economically precarious siblings as they navigate the chaos initiated by a series of disturbing letters, sent out to seemingly random groups of residents of their unnamed metropolis. Each letter urges its recipient to commit a specific act of murder.

The original title was a nod to the power of language, that a city could be thrust into turmoil by a few handwritten words on paper. The change in title came from the speculative conceit that helped me give narrative coherence to my strange and violent vision.

From the story:

The mayor is holding a press conference, where he announces that he’s the one who’s been writing the letters. I push my way to the front of the crowd because I need to hear him speak. I want to understand.

The mayor says his office commissioned a novel law enforcement program, an artificial intelligence that can determine a person’s propensity for murder. It sorted residents into groups coded by color: fresa red, piña yellow, limón green. Of our populace of millions, eleven percent comprised the first group: extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person. He says the program was defunded but his conscience remained ablaze. He says he illegally obtained the addresses of those flagged as killers—mailed letters to their residences, to goad them into doing what he thought they’d do anyways, what he’d be powerless to stop unless he got them to do it sooner, got them all off the streets and behind bars in one elegant swoop.

He corrects himself. Six elegant swoops.

Doing it all at once would have overwhelmed the postal service, he explains dispassionately. He says he’s sorry for the trouble and the trauma he’s caused. He says he sees now the error of his ways, and he says nothing else because I shoot him in the chest.

I buy a gun after the third letter because I know it will come in handy. I kill him as a matter of self-defense. As the city protecting itself, acting through me.

“Los Anaranjados” is Spanish for “the orange ones.” It's an oblique reference to the idea that, if there are groups of people “extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person” (the red ones), and groups of people less likely to do so (the yellow and the green ones), there must also be the orange ones: those only extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person under very specific circumstances.

For example, as a matter of self-defense.

And in a world riven by colonialism, the vast majority of us are in the business of defending ourselves.

As I wrote this part of the story, I left out a small detail: while the mayor talks about the artificial intelligence and its color-coded groupings, he gestures to a screen behind him. On it, a slide from a presentation depicts the three colors the narrator describes: “...fresa red, piña yellow, limón green.” In my mind, it was a pie chart with big, brightly colored slices, but I couldn't think of a good way to write this into the story, for two reasons. The first was that, earlier in the story, I referenced a “colorful infographic” that ran in the city paper, and I simply didn't think it artful to repeat such a detail. The second, more substantive reason was that I felt it took away from the explanation for the letters, which—at this point in the story—is essentially the story's climax. The city and the characters have been shaken up over the course of six rounds of letters, and the mayor's press conference is the big reveal that purportedly explains what they were all about. (Shortly thereafter, this is revealed to be a charade; the press conference was all lies, for reasons not relevant enough to this essay to explain here.)

I worried that cramming too much detail about the presentation into this moment would take away from the climax: the politician's speech, and the narrator's violent reaction.

***

I've followed the national news this week at something of a distance; I always do. I like to know the broad strokes, not because I think that it can tell me much about reality directly, but because what small fraction of information it has chosen to become the quote-unquote “broad strokes”—and how that fraction of information is depicted—can. Sometimes on social media I'll read a post that says people who watch reality TV are preternaturally intelligent because they are avid scholars of human behavior, but the problem with this thesis is that you are never really seeing human behavior on television, reality or otherwise. Reality TV provides insight into the psyches of reality TV producers, whom I definitely consider an interesting bunch to psychoanalyze, but are certainly not a representative slice of humanity writ large.

In the same way, keeping abreast of what most people refer to as quote-unquote “the news” does not provide any insight into what is actually unfolding in the world, but rather gives one insight into the psyches of news producers. And since news producers are beholden to all kinds of mechanisms of colonial power, watching the news is an excellent way to keep tabs on how empire is seeing itself. How it understands itself. How intensely it is rationalizing its contradictions. How close it is to its inevitable implosion.

***

A presidential assassination attempt inaugurated Parable of the Sower week. The assassination target in question wasn't the president at the time of the shooting, though he will likely soon be again, and he wasn't badly injured, nor is there much evidence that the whole affair wasn't staged, which—as is the case with all violence—is more or less irrelevant.

I don't bother to watch the footage save for the highlights that appear on my TikTok feed against my will—I try to engage with quote-unquote “political content” on TikTok as little as possible—and then the short clip posted on the front page of every major U.S. news website. In only one of those clips—one which I see days after the shooting, and the one which catalyzes the bulk of this essay—can you clearly see what was behind the assassination target at the moment of impact.

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States emoting at a podium while pointing during one of his political rallies on July 13, 2024, moments before he is shot. He, like the crowd behind him, is white, and dons a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. Behind him is a large screen with a white background on which is displayed a compound line graph titled ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION INTO THE US. The bottom layer of the compound line graph is the largest, and is filled in with orange. The graph looks almost like the flame of a fire.

I am a bit taken aback by this, but only insomuch as any clairvoyant can be surprised by the accuracy of their visions. I quickly process the mechanism by which I came to see this before it happened: it is not uncommon for politicians to be framed during political rallies by a screen, or for that screen to display informational graphics like charts. It is not implausible for politicians to be shot during political rallies; in fact, it is more likely for them to be shot there than anywhere else. If you asked a million people to describe in detail what they saw if they carefully imagined a future presidential assassination attempt, the majority would likely include somewhere in their description a screen like the one in the photo and a chart like the one in my dream.

None of this contradicts my understanding of clairvoyance. It only reinforces it.

The thing I am actually taken aback by is how superstitious the assassination target turns out to be. Multiple times after the shooting, he publicly credits the chart for “saving his life,” most recently just yesterday, in a 90-minute speech on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. In the story he tells of his supposed near-death experience—a story he will tell and retell until the day on which death fails to elude him—the chart is the climax.

From his speech:

Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership. The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024. He looks tiny behind a small metal podium on a large stage packed with nine differently sized screens that form an arc over him. Behind him is a facsimile of the White House. American flags bookend the stage. All nine screens display the chart depicted in the previous photo.

And again, later in the speech:

But you can see [the] chart that saved my life. That was the chart that saved my life. I said, “Look at, I’m so proud of it.” I think it’s one of the greatest — it was done by the Border Patrol — one of the greatest charts I’ve ever seen. It showed everything, just like that. You know the chart.

Oh, there it is. That’s pretty good. Wow.

***

In April, I receive an $75 scholarship to attend a short seminar on writing. The scholarship is randomly assigned via a lottery, so it is completely by chance that I receive it and attend (though I hope you have come to understand by now that there is no such thing as quote-unquote “chance”).

During the seminar, we undertake a far more practical writing exercise than most: putting together an artist's statement that argues why we deserve this or that share of a pool of funding. For many artists, these statements are what receiving meaningful funding hinges upon. We are constantly asked to explain and justify ourselves. I am no exception, in this regard and every other.

The seminar leader frames the exercise uniquely, and for this, I feel grateful. We are asked to take the strangest and most unpackageable part of our work and to package it up into a tidy, compelling artist's statement, strangeness be damned. At first, I resist my instinct to write about the topics in this essay—most of my time is spent worrying about whether or not I am using my clairvoyance appropriately—until finally I determine an interesting way into the exercise. How do you write about clairvoyance without sounding mad? How do you pitch delusional thinking as an asset?

In the few minutes we are given to produce a draft, I write the following:

As a prophetic writer, I conjure predictive fiction and nonfiction that traces the trajectory of the near-present and far future. The value of this work is its prescience; my readers can learn about the future the way they might learn about history from a textbook. Prophetic work is not uncommon or particularly esoteric in the age of big data: corporations, institutions, and governments regularly use data analysis, a tool of prophetic writing, to make weighty decisions about resource allocation.

Projection and prophecy, after all, are one and the same—equally flawed and equally potent.

***

Time, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly stable. I begin writing this essay on July 14, 2024, at 6:50 PM PST. I write this sentence on July 19, 2024, at 3:30 PM PST. If you read this essay, you will likely experience it in a single sitting, which will of course not correlate at all with the rhythm of the temporal arc over which the essay was written. And if you read it in pieces—or revisit it over and again as weeks, months, or years pass—that experience will not correlate with mine either. Time, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed.

In most of the rest of the world, it is already July 20, 2024.

And it will be over 37 hours before July 20, 2024, has officially come to a close.

Looking outwards from so-called “American politics,” the news reports this morning are of a global tech outage across airlines, hospitals, emergency hotlines, retail stores, and more. One outlet refers to it as the most widespread information technology failure in history. I have been preparing for a cyberattack of these proportions—or larger—for some time, forgetting perhaps that the cyberattack already took place, over the course of many decades, carried out by countless attackers: the construction of a way of life in which critical biosocial functions are so reliant on fragile, interconnected digital networks that a bug in an otherwise banal software update can rewrite the trajectories of millions. It rerouted mine. I wouldn't have spent the last five minutes writing this paragraph if the outage had not made its way into the broad strokes of today's English-language news reports. There is no way to know what this paragraph—or the rest of this essay—would have said if it had not occurred.

There is also no way to know what this part of the essay would have said if I knew more about the countless processes that have proceeded, piecemeal, around the world since the start of July 20. Since the start of this week.

The present, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly complete. Reality, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed. There is no way to know what today or tomorrow will hold.

I mean, of course, I have some ideas.

I am certain you do too.

length: 5,540 words

content/trigger warnings: discussions of mental health, the medical industrial complex, psychiatric incarceration, suicidal ideation, death, grief, ableism, substance abuse, the biomedicalization of transness, transphobia, hormone therapy, neurodivergence, sterility, settler colonialism, patriarchy, misogyny, cisheterosexism, white supremacy, violence, abuse, and intersexness, written from the perspective of someone who is not intersex; brief references to blood, gore, illness (cancer, dementia), surgery, bombings, murder, and gender dysphoria

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1

Still of Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey, a young brown-haired white woman, in the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy, in a brightly lit OR. The show’s subtitle reads, “I’m screwed.”

You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death. The blood, the guts, the gore of injury and trauma: it fascinates you more than it upsets you. In a way, you feel at home. A scalpel making its way through someone’s body is the perfect metaphor for how you feel inside.

Plus, you’ve just been accepted into the country’s top-ranked high school. Dr. Webber’s speech in the pilot episode is repeated many times throughout the series, and will repeat in your mind as you navigate a world of incomparable wunderkinds. “Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave.” This ratio is about right, both at your high school and at the prestigious institutions you’ll all spend four years working to gain entry into. Mostly things like depression and substance abuse will take your peers out. What you accurately diagnose as your alcoholism, and what professionals separately misdiagnose as bipolar disorder, will be the culprits for you.

But then this isn’t House, M.D.; your journey has little to do with the puzzle of diagnosis, or even with the process of treatment.

What matters on Grey’s is emotional interplay—between doctor and patient, doctor and doctor, medical case and personal life, personal life and the desire for so much more.

Desire, ambition, metaphor, melodrama: this is the lifeblood of Grey’s Anatomy.

You’re a brilliant young trans girl.

Of course you eat this up.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense. At your age, your jumbled trans girl brain—not yet on hormones, but not by choice—can’t comprehend your gender, nor your sexuality, let alone why you, an aspiring creative writer, are so drawn to a show about cutthroat surgical interns. At your age, you mostly just like that the soundtrack is all cute indie music, and that there’s a member of the ensemble cast who’s a sensitive, effeminate buffoon.

Also, that the main character is sad.

Unlike the other main characters of the other shows you watch (the only possible exception here being Courage the Cowardly Dog), the main character of this show looks like she’s always on the verge of tears and is always being forced by her circumstances to hide them. This is new to you, and appealing: it is a joy to see someone on TV who’s as perpetually devastated as you.

8

Still from episode 8 of Grey’s Anatomy: a young white female doctor is telling a concerned-looking white male patient, “I brought the consent forms again.”

When you’re 14 years old is when you’ll start talking to yourself. When you’re 14 is when it’ll become a habit, a survival mechanism. Technically, it’ll keep you away from the thing you need most—a good talk therapist—but then that’s the paradox built into every survival mechanism.

At first, it is a rehearsal. Sitting on the floor of your bedroom closet, rocking back and forth, you’re preparing yourself to meet with a professional, one who will ask you all sorts of questions—hard questions. Abuse is neither simple to endure nor to share, and you can hardly do either. You’re certain your unedited answers would get you uprooted from your life; you need to be able to give the answers the professionals would prefer. You want care, you do—but only the kind you believe you’re capable of surviving.

Your imagination is so vivid that this imagined therapy, undertaken in stolen moments of utter privacy, satisfies your need to be heard. The only person hearing you is you, but you in someone else’s skin: alone in the closet, you don the costume of a caretaker, nodding at yourself with kindness, genuinely invested in your own suffering.

You’ll return to school to take your seat beside future Fulbright scholars, tech giants, Ivy League professors; you’ll watch them ingest the science and engineering curricula that will take them where they want—or have been told to want—to go. Lost in your thoughts at school as often as at home, you’re learning instead the value of roleplay, of acting—of benefiting from a semblance when you lack access to the real thing.

In the penultimate episode of Grey’s Anatomy’s inaugural season, a stubborn patient believes he’s clairvoyant, and is told this is an illness. The show is young, so it employs a silly trope: the patient mysteriously knows things he absolutely shouldn’t, with no logical explanation. It’s a suspension of believability the show won’t pull again without cues clearly indicating, for example, a tumor-induced hallucination.

The so-called clairvoyant does not have a tumor, but he does have an arteriovenous malformation. He puts off surgery partly for fear of death, but his bigger fear is losing his supposed gift.

You’ll put off therapy partly for fear of Child Protective Services, but your bigger fear is losing your supposed gifts. You’ve been marked since age five as “gifted and talented,” and even at 14, you already suspect this refers to something like clairvoyance—an invisible external force dictating the future to you from afar. You’ll contextualize this psychosis with logical explanations, like the vivid imagination of an aspiring writer. Whatever it is that makes you “special” (and you feel so different from everyone else, you build your identity around the idea that you, in fact, are), you don’t want to lose it to the medical industrial complex; to diagnosis and treatment; to talk therapy.

In the show, after much cajoling, the man is talked into having surgery. He wakes up to find his gift survives too.

As will soon become another habit, you’ll refuse to learn the lesson provided.

22

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. George O’Malley, a young white male doctor with scraggly hair, is saying, “What, am I just supposed to lie to her?”

The ninth episode of the show leans on another silly trope. Dr. Burke’s supposedly virile friend turns out to be sterile and (surprise!) intersex. Literature has a long tradition of treating so-called sex/gender variation as a plot twist—for the person who’s the supposed variant, for the people around them, or else for the unsuspecting audience. The patient rages the rage of indignation and disgust pioneered and perfected by trans people, but mostly because his sterility indicates that his pregnant wife has had a secret affair.

The 22nd episode does trans rage a bit more justice: the patient is a kid with the killer name of Bex, who looks to the doctors (and presumably the audience) like a moody, tomboyish girl. Bex turns out to be intersex too. Their parents take up too much space for Bex to get to rage; instead, Bex quietly stews, pouring themselves into their comic art. The sensitive, effeminate buffoon’s arc also takes a twist when he defies his superior, refusing to conceal Bex’s diagnosis because, as he empathetically proclaims, Bex just wants to know why they’ve always felt so different. The episode never uses the word “trans,” but it’s implied at the end that Bex will transition, the first thing to happen during their storyline that makes the character smile. (At 32 years old, you’ll rewatch the series for the first time since beginning to transition, and this will be one of many scenes that will make you cry nonstop.)

But if the show’s going to go any further than surprise intersex diagnoses, it’s going to need a reason. (Remember, these episodes are premiering in 2005 and 2006—a veritable century ago in terms of “progressive representation.”) The answer is the most stereotypical plastic surgeon Grey’s Anatomy creator and showrunner Shonda Rhimes can muster: a self-described “man-whore” whom the characters call “McSteamy,” who’s defined by his abs, his jawline, and his propensity for sexually harassing his subordinates. He’s so distasteful, his character’s unforeseeable twist is that, when an out trans person arrives in episode 43 (played by an out trans person, the splendid Alexandra Billings), it’s shocking how kindly he treats her, chastising his colleagues for misgendering her, and respecting all of her demands, even when they run the risk of killing her. This melodramatic plotline leans on one more silly trope: the character turns out to have breast cancer. The episode’s formulation is that what makes her a woman will kill her. Her trans rage is that she’d rather die than stop taking hormones or be forced to put off indefinitely her impending vaginoplasty.

I’m sorry to say that this scenario will someday be more relatable than anyone could possibly bear.

27

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. Bex, a white teenager wearing a beanie, looks out at their parents through the gridded rectangle of an exam room window.

“Intersex” is one of many diagnostic categories the medical industrial complex simply cannot handle. “Neurodivergence,” another. Youth, writ large—yet another.

You can replace “the medical industrial complex” here and elsewhere with “Western medicine,” “settler colonial conceptions of health and wellness,” or any number of equally pejorative but accurate phrases.

Your first dealings with the medical industrial complex revolve around your asthma. You’re hospitalized for it for the first time when you’re age 5, or 7, or maybe 8 years old, all of which would be good times for the doctors to ask you about your mental, social, and familial health.

They don’t.

Instead of meeting with a social worker or child psychologist (either of whom would make your life tremendously better or tremendously worse, with no possible in-between), you’ll be sent home with inhalers and a cool little rubberized tube, clear in the middle, cerulean at the ends. You might imagine a pinkish equivalent given to cis girls, but you’d only assume this because the rest of your dealings with the medical industrial complex will be so fucking gendered.

You’ll start seeing mental health professionals when you’re age 19, or 20, or maybe 22 years old (you’ll spend those years so intoxicated, you’ll remember too little, though the uglier truth is it’s maybe psychosomatic—a word/concept you’ll come to consider hopelessly out of touch). For over a decade, you’ll see more therapists than you can count, and almost every single one will be a straight, cisgender white woman. To them, you’ll be something of a sensitive, effeminate buffoon—well, that’s the gender you’ll be performing at the time. (Buffoon can be a gender, though the medical industrial complex has no place on its forms where that could possibly be noted.)

Because they’re cishet white women, and because the stories you’re drawn to up until that age are written by white gay men who portray cishet women as both enviable and irreparably damaged, or else by women of color who portray white women as both malevolent and sympathetic, you’ll simultaneously envy, distrust, pity, and want to heal them—these women who are supposed to be helping you heal (heal your mind, heal your brain, heal your heart; the medical industrial complex doesn’t have a decent metaphor for this; you’ll eventually prefer something like “soul”). You’ll always feel this way when you meet white, or cis, or straight people, which is why you’ll need to avoid them at all costs.

You’re trans. I.e.: you have too much empathy, and yet you have no choice but to conserve it.

Still, these women won’t be the reason you’ll be unable to tell your story.

They simply will not know any better.

Nor, at that point, will you.

By the time you get to therapy, you will have had more access to educational resources than most adults whom you encounter. You’ll have been given the opportunity to familiarize yourself with more theories, more histories, more information and analytical tools than most people on Earth. (This is not an asset: the well-known graph showing that personal happiness plateaus—and, in fact, decreases—beyond a certain threshold of income probably maps one-to-one to formal schooling. Trust your intuition here; people with/earning PhDs do not, on the whole, seem particularly thrilled to be alive.) What this means is that the people who are supposed to help you do not have the capacity, as you do, to detect invisibility—to know the future, to manipulate time and space as a storyteller can.

Heterosexuality is a perceptual cage from which you’ll have already escaped, but it is a cage enclosed by another cage (cisness) enclosed by another cage (whiteness). It will take you decades to escape these and other cages, and still, one foot will remain entangled in the bars—the price of making it out alive at all. When you do finally make it out, you will understand what it is to be gifted and talented. It is to know better, and for this to be a hindrance. Self-awareness, as the Book of Genesis implies, is the original, ultimate prison.

43

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. A white male doctor seated across from Donna, a white trans woman, looks down as she tells him, “I've wanted this since I can remember. I've waited forever. I'm not stopping now.”

At 31 years old, you’ll thank God that the parking area for UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center is underground. It means you’ll only be visible to the public for a short half-block walk, dressed awkwardly in a tight, purple V-neck sweater; a fluttery, ankle-length skirt; your favorite pink New Balance sneakers; your cherry red Ray-Ban eyeglasses, your fingernails painted to match; your face and arms shaved; your lips colored pomegranate by a makeup brand called Fenty (you haven’t heard of Rihanna yet, but you will, later in life, refer to her as our lord and savior), though your lips won’t even be visible under your N95 (you haven’t thought much about pandemics yet, but you will, later in life, whether you want to or not).

Your breasts will be small, your hair short, so to you, you’ll still look like a cis man in dress-up, and not in a good way, despite the string of cis celebrities who are now awarded brand deals and public praise for what would get you pilloried and pariahed in elementary school and junior high. Really, you’ll just look like a crossdresser (or, in your more self-deprecating moments, a brick), but crossdressers (and bricks) still fall under the trans-with-an-asterisk umbrella, and besides, there’s no one way to be trans. Forget this at your peril. Coming out as trans-with-an-asterisk will, thankfully, be the last time you’ll deal with feeling not [insert identity marker here] enough. But this is not yet your concern.

Outside UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center, your concern will be safety. This is a fucking joke. There are few places safer than the journey to the Center’s esteemed Gender Health Program, cradled by the shell of your partner’s Mazda, your meals at this time in your life assured, your care at this particular place certain to be excellent. There’s a paradox to this, too. Your suicidality will always be entangled with survivor’s guilt. You’ll feel less suicidal, for example, when you start hoarding some of your estradiol, to give to any stranger who wants it, and you’ll feel more suicidal when you realize this isn’t particularly helpful unless you hoard your testosterone blockers too—which you can’t because your body’s not supposed to contain high levels of both hormones at once, and which you won’t because testosterone is what you’re most afraid of (the thing around which, completely irrationally, you feel least safe). As has already become another habit, you fear the things inside you more than anything outside.

This fear is misplaced, of course: there is nothing inherently wrong with testosterone, nor anything especially holy about estrogen either. The fear you will identify is the fear of ill-gotten gains, of the bargain you have made in order to transition.

You will be forced to tell a story, as many trans people must, in order to earn the medical designation of transgender. That story will have needed to include a neatly legible tale of persistent gender dysphoria and, wherever possible, indications that you exhibited signs of the diagnostic criterion at as early an age as possible (you’ll share with your doctors a childhood affinity for American Girl books, and how, when your mother unhelpfully used stickers to relabel them as American Boy books, you understood even then that she wanted you to paper over your idiosyncrasies, when what you wanted instead was affirmation that you were, indeed, an American girl). That story will not have room for facts like that, at my age, you like the look and feel of your beard, particularly the centimeter-length it stays at once you commence your hormone therapy; that you like to wear your old boy clothes sometimes, in an Avril Lavigne, tomboy punk, intersex Bex kind of way, which means you sometimes pass as male (and which is why you cannot wait for your breast augmentation, the clearest sign to any onlooker that they’re not dealing with someone cis); and that you don’t feel particularly strongly about any pronouns and only choose she/her upon transitioning because it seems powerful politically. In truth, if pressed, you’d identify as an imp, the way trans-with-an-asterisk legal scholar and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray did at the end of her/his/their/imp’s life.

The version of your story that omits these things, the version of the story you initially tell: it’s dangerous because it is compelling. Narratives always run the risk of ossifying upon their telling. We don’t yet have adequate technologies for presenting texts as malleable, ever-changing fluids. Whiteness, for example, cannot function without the rigid persistence of stories of superiority; cisheterosexism cannot succeed without the deceptively timeless fable of the nuclear family; colonialism cannot conquer without the infrastructure for disseminating narratives that justify dispossession at all costs.

You, like so many before you, will be tempted to offer up counter-narratives in response, to write the same old stories replacing the people at the center with people like yourself. You will feel the pressure to claim that representation matters, because it will feel good to finally be at the center of things. When you make this awful bargain, you will in the process justify the utility of story as a weapon, as a means for positioning yourself as superior to those whose lives and experiences cannot fit the mold of a story that’s neatly legible—to anyone, but particularly to our proliferation of industrial complexes, medical and otherwise.

You will someday suspect that if every art form were valued equally—if they all offered the same amount of pay—most people would not choose storytelling. Maybe no one would choose it at all. Language is a tool of communication, of interaction. When transmuted into an art performed in silence and solitude, it runs the risk of calcifying, and even the least capable doctor among us knows that calcification, in the wrong place at the wrong time, will lead to certain death.

52

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey lies on a gurney, intubated and surrounded by medical equipment, pale and presumably dead.

Whenever you visit a doctor, there is risk.

Your doctor may fail to diagnose you, may misdiagnose you. They may prescribe the wrong medication, or the incorrect dosage. They will likely ask the wrong questions, fail to consider the appropriate conditions. They are nearly guaranteed to fail to ask you about your home life, about the meaningful parts of your family history that have nothing to do with your internal organs. Even the doctors who are supposed to ask about these things will do it wrong (and you can replace the word “doctors” here with several equally pejorative but accurate phrases).

It is sensible, then, to be afraid. To feel unsafe. Watch enough episodes of Grey’s Anatomyand you will understand how often small amounts of wrong decisions can lead to certain death.

In episodes 25 and 26, Meredith Grey, the show’s titular character, nearly dies while helping surgically remove unexploded ammunition from a patient’s body cavity. Seconds after the explosive device is removed and transferred out of the operating room, it goes off—just a few yards in front of her, launching her in slow motion away from the member of the bomb squad who has become a cloud of pink mist. The ultradramatic two-parter during which this plotline unfolds is responsible for turning the show into a primetime juggernaut, and is bookended by oblique references to Meredith’s suicidality, which lie just beneath the surface of the show. They’re hidden under what looks like, to the casual viewer, the stress of having your abusive mother succumb to Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. (You, suicidal to varying degrees from ages 9 through 31, are not the casual viewer.)

Meredith states, at the beginning of episode 25, that she doesn’t want to go to work because she feels like she’s going to die today, her premonition prompting concerned looks from her friends, all surgeons. These are the kinds of looks you’ll become inured to after receiving them enough times; clairvoyance, since at least the time of Salem, has always been dreadfully suspect.

Still from episode 27 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is looking disdainfully at someone off-screen, her eyes flooded with tears.

In the section labelled “27,” you’ll write about your excessive educational privileges, and the resulting curses this lays at your feet. You’ll skip over what actually happens in episode 27 of Grey’s Anatomy: how Meredith’s near-death experience compels her to visit her estranged father, who is at least partially at fault for the abuse Meredith experiences throughout her life at the hands of her emotionally tortured mother, and whom she visits in order to make this clear. In both 27's, someone is being centered at the expense of another—a practice for which there is always an unbearable price.

In episode 52 of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith is unwell in every sense of the word. Her mother is in the hospital, suddenly lucid and desperate to inflict abuse on anyone who enters her vicinity—particularly Meredith, with whom she is disgusted and disappointed, in part for not having simply let her die and thus sparing her the indignities of dementia. Meredith—distracted and morose, attempting to save a man’s life at the scene of a chaotic mass casualty incident—accidentally falls into the sea. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator and the episode’s writer, gives Meredith the opportunity to drown. Meredith elects to take it.

Technically, Meredith dies; her doctors take extreme, extraordinary measures; ultimately, she is miraculously revived. The episode never uses the word “suicidality,” but many characters, including Meredith, finally recognize that it would be appropriate.

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, in blue scrubs, is looking down and despondent, crying while saying, “I stopped fighting.”

Over the next several episodes, Meredith’s father and his new wife will use the newly clarified depths of her depression as a reasonable excuse to grow closer to her. Their daughter and newborn grandchild were, after all, successfully operated on by Meredith’s friends in episodes 46, 47, and 48. Meredith’s second near-death experience finally grants her a more positive outlook on life, and a chance at building a healthy relationship with her father and his family.

Because of this silly chain of events set in motion seasons prior, when Meredith’s father’s wife can’t stop hiccuping in episode 58, they will opt to visit Meredith’s hospital, where—in episode 59, after some rare but plausible complications—Meredith’s father’s wife will die.

Neither Meredith nor her father will ever be the same.

Over the course of the rest of the series, at the rate of about one episode per season, Meredith’s father will succumb to the bodily toll of alcoholism, of trauma that has ultimately been accumulated over the course of an entire lifetime.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if Meredith does not visit and accost him in episode 27, making their estrangement about her and her alone (forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse). It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if, in episodes 46 through 48, Meredith does not take the neonatal surgery needed by her father’s child as an opportunity to reconnect, rather than recusing herself as a doctor, or distancing herself as a relative stranger, as would have been ethical and appropriate (but then Meredith does not see things in black and white, hence her surname, and the title/premise of the show). It is possible, perhaps likely, that some or all of the preceding is Meredith’s fault. At least this is how Meredith’s father sees it, giving him a supposedly good reason to drink himself to death.

These kinds of plot arcs make for what we consider a good story. The trajectories of the new century’s most well-received TV shows embody this kind of seamlessness, like a puzzle that can only be put together one way. Every decision affects everything that comes after. Sometimes these shows are called “TV novels.” They employ the literary technique of making every plot point matter, a departure from a time when continuity on TV was an afterthought rather than the norm. On TV, as in novels, it effectively clarifies for the audience characters’ development over time. It’s effective because it’s how we perceive our lives.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is drowning, barely able to keep her head above water.

When you write this, you’ll be in episode 52 yourself. The metaphor you’ll use to describe your transition is the murder of your body’s prior occupant and his replacement with the woman you’ll become. You’ll give that man the opportunity to drown, then you’ll make him take it.

Other things will be out of order.

You’ll reconnect with your father before the quasi-death you’ll think of your gender transition as, in which you kill your father’s son and birth him a daughter.

You will, upon reconnection, make your estrangement all about you, thinking him at least partially at fault for the abuse you experience throughout your life at the hands of your emotionally tortured mother, but forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse.

Your mother will, at this point in your life, have become estranged too, so she will not yet have succumbed to dementia, at least as far as you will be aware of.

As for your father’s wife, she will not be dead; nor will he have blamed you for her death; nor will he have subsequently spiraled into alcoholism.

But if or when these things do happen (because they are possible, perhaps even likely), you will have remained at such a frustrating emotional distance that you will blame yourself—for being incapable of imparting whatever it is you possess, for being unwilling to listen to them tell their own stories, for failing to recognize that the trauma they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes has taken a lethal toll on their bodies. There are no doctors they would be willing to see capable of alleviating or addressing their pain. Sometimes what stands between injury and health is the decision-making of a relative stranger.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, mid-drowning, looks resigned. The show's subtitle reads, “There's more I have to say.”

It is always easy to talk about how you were failed. It is much harder to talk about how you failed others. There is no amount of pain large enough to make self-reflection a desirable alternative. You will hurt people, harm them, fail them, wrong them. You will too many times prioritize the inert, immature ideas in your writing over the living, breathing organisms in your orbit who need more than to simply watch you work. You will condemn those who care about you to emotional destitution because you will think your gifts so critical to your species’ survival, you will fail to realize this is one of the most inhuman things a person can possibly do.

You are a star, but you are not the star. At your age, you may be told you are the best and the brightest, but everyone around you is as good and bright as you. You’re a kid. I’m sorry everyone around you will fail you so many times. I’m sorry you will go on to fail everyone around you so many times. There’s no such thing, in real life, as a subplot; as a side character; as a filler episode. There are few things more dangerous than what your contemporaries call “main character energy.” I know why we draw on it as a power source. People like us have been denied at every turn everything we deserve: life, love, respect, dignity. For a queer and trans woman of color to center herself in a white supremacist, cisheterosexist world is a form of resistance.

A form. A semblance.

An acting-out. A roleplay.

Practice. Rehearsal.

Not necessarily the real thing. Not necessarily the thing you need.

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. A doctor uses scissors to cut Bex's long hair short, as Bex looks into a handheld mirror with a hesitant, careful satisfaction.

Jules Gill-Peterson proclaims, in Histories of the Transgender Child, that no human being on Earth has earned the responsibility for the trans children in their care. You will read this and immediately concur, though it would take you at least as many words as contained in her book to argue this idea successfully to anyone outside your immediate vicinity, anyone who has not lived the childhood of a trans kid. You must find a way to bridge this unbridgeable gap. Transness, like queerness, can lurk in anyone’s future, and thus in anyone’s past. A childhood can become a trans childhood at any moment, the moment a trans adult comes out to themselves and/or those around them. Your story does not belong to you alone. It belongs to everyone whose story might become yours. Your story, after all, is only mine because you will become me. The right to care for a trans child is earned in the aftermath. It is forged in the making.

Right now, your father is likely sitting uncomfortably at a table too small for his liking, on the first floor of the last home he may ever inhabit. He will someday die but may beforehand undergo some kind of quasi-death too. He may become, for you, another mother, or a parent of some new and indeterminate gender.

Right now, his wife is likely thinking of and troubled by the uneven trajectories of her children, distracting herself with another novel, downloaded onto the e-reader you will gift her on one memorable, abundant Christmas. She will someday die, but may also someday undergo the same kind of quasi-death too.

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. Donna, a white trans woman patient in a flowery, monochromatic robe, is saying, “My name is Donna.”

Their stories are not to be dismissed as footnotes in the story of a younger, nimbler, more formally educated relative/stranger. Their stories may be no different than your own. They may only be able to become themselves if you are willing to share your story—to contextualize it with care, as you will someday do for yourself with the story of Meredith Grey. This is the only value of knowledge and experience; this is self-awareness minus the self; this is the reason you exist at all.

If the people you care about are to be trans, they will have also been trans children. If you will someday become me and reach back through time to who you are right now, then reach across time towards the people around you when you get here—in other words, now, before the moment has passed.

You are, for better or worse, as much doctor as patient.

Look around you.

Say hello.

53

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is sitting cross-legged in blue scrubs on a hospital floor. Her head is down, and she's surrounded by a growing pool of water.

There is an arrogance to the writer’s life mirrored in the attitudes of the surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy—of cutthroat flesh-cutters, hungry to rearrange muscle and bone so their patients might survive the special maladies that afflict them.

The person you will someday love—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl, will get to be loved before it’s all over—calls writing a weapon of mass destruction. He is right, though when we refer to destruction en masse, we miss that a bomb is just an accumulation of scalpels. Open up the bodies of the bombed and you’ll see the same kinds of cuts a doctor might make.

This means that you—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl—are dangerous. Your gift—the ability to know and change time and space as only a storyteller can—is and will always be dangerous.

Sometimes women—white women, cis women, women of all kinds who’ve amassed their little share of power and choose to wield it unquestioningly—will look back five, ten, or twenty years later, and see how much they’ve healed. They will count the ways in which oppression wounded them; they will touch the scars and wonder how it’s possible for such soft, fading marks to metaphorize what was once life-threatening damage. Really, the amount that they’ve healed equates to how much they leaned into the winnings of apartheid, of a world order that will give anyone who wants it a reasonable excuse to believe themselves superior. Sometimes what looks like healing is a compromising of the soul.

Young girl who is me, you would do well to acknowledge the danger you pose. Every choice you make matters. Your suicidality—the thing that draws you to Meredith Grey, the thing that draws you and me together through time—may yet be a glory.

Learn from what’s happened. What will happen. If you’re to survive the special maladies that afflict you, it is your duty to review. To be reviewed. Your show. Your story. Give it—sacrifice it, share it—freely.

If you do it with care, it may even someday serve as your guide.

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This essay is part of an in-progress book project tentatively titled The Trans Girl's Guide to Modern Television. A version of this essay was published by Under the Sun in May 2024.