April’s Book Mixtape
One quarter into 2025 and the same into the brutal process of submitting my book and excerpts to lit agents and magazines put me on my knees. During this timeframe, one of the Brevity Blog’s daily guest contributors Darlene P. Campos reminded me “...the average person would not consider any venture with a 91 percent chance of failure, and this is reasonable.”
You know it’s bad when I pull the Pema Chodron off the shelf.
I’ve been training my whole life for this challenge. I am here now because I CAN be here now. I read a few pages of Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change each day and reminded myself of the cruel joke of always wanting security in a world that offers no such thing. I reminded myself of how to be with feelings instead of trying to escape them. I remembered to practice feeling a feeling and not attaching a story to it. I do know what happens when I attach the story: it can outlast a lifetime. Supposedly the feeling passes in 90 seconds without the story. I’ve found it to be true. And I’ve had an opportunity to get curious about my stories.
As the attack on trans people and my media blackout continues, I also pulled Kit Heyam’s Before We Were Trans off my shelf. A deeply researched and heavily annotated account of gender nonconformity across time and cultures asks as many questions as it answers which is just good practice in inviting (the very real threat of) individual expansive thought (which I love), and ultimately petitions for timeless “respect….care….(and) love” from the practice of considering history in shaping a future.
A process of puzzling out why I seem to be being asked to tell a queer story in a conventional way put my hands back on Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran. I will just say this is my single favorite book ever written (that I currently know of). It is poetic, provocative, and spiritual, and I will say nothing more of it except that as I read the final page again, I did not reshelve it: it is here at my elbow as I turn back to page one to board the ride again.
I also revisited an old favorite, Twice Sold Tales in search of A Moveable Feast, which I did acquire, and then distracted myself a moment with the Henry Miller shelf to discover a delightful transcript of a (circa 1970-ish) conversation between my man Hank and his French translator, Georges Belmont. 103 pages of Pure Joy. Our very different understandings and experiences of gender aside, I found such tender accompaniment, resonance, validation, and shared humanity in reading Henry Miller in Conversation. It seems he spent his whole life trying to be me. LOL.
And because spinning thought sculptures out of words in an unconventional way isn’t a way to count on getting paid, I got a job. This month of near-desperate introspection and joy invoking forced me to make a list of the things in the world that I love. A list that began with “black tea” ended up with a realization that I never wanted to leave the restaurant business when I did. I believe many people know this about me, and sometimes I’m just the last to know! That’s a whole other story for another book entirely, but this development has me thrilled to be brushing up on my wine knowledge in my second favorite* reference: The Oxford Companion to Wine.
Cheers!
May we all trust our paths and continue the creation of what we are here to contribute. Especially if others cannot figure out what it is we are doing.
*first favorite: Larousse Gastronomique
