〰️〰️ IN 〰️

These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

kiln build

The second week of June I logged off my computer, and spent my days building a wood fired kiln in the Laney Community College art department kiln yard. The kiln we built was a railroad style designed by Simon Levin, and we were luck enough to have Mike Tavares come to Oakland from Illinois to guide us in construction. And the whole thing was organized by Mary Catherine Bassett who teaches all the classes I take at Laney and is an incredible artist in her own right.

It's hard to sum up the week, honestly. It was fun, fascinating, messy, and at times challenging experience. I've never built anything like this before! I spent half a day drilling bricks. I learned that I have a weirdly good eye for whether something is level, but am terrible at guessing weights. I got to make something with a community of people who were all curious, engaged, and thoughtful. It was just overall really fun. Here are a ton of photos:

In August I get to return to this kiln and fire some stuff, which I'm really excited about. Wood firing is really special, and often extremely expensive and hard to access. Which makes having this kiln on the community college campus extra amazing.

things I read and liked

• "Give all your fucks to the living." This piece by Mandy Brown is a classic for a reason.
• "The thing I’m always looking for—in art, in life, in general—is something that cuts through the noise. In art, it’s when I feel the asynchronous presence of another. Someone was really there, alive and present, when they made it and when I look at this work, or read it, or listen to it, I’m really there too." I've been thinking about this a lot (and will write something longer about it for subscribers soon) and so this Joanne McNeil newsletter really hit me.
• "The terminal on San Pablo Avenue is one uniquely visible structure among many dotting the downtown cityscape that once served an essential service but is now defunct. Why is this distinctive Oakland fixture sitting vacant, policed, but unusable, while people wait outside for their bus?" Great piece on an iconic, troubled piece of Oakland.
• What Should You Do if ICE Comes to Your Restaurant? Jaya Saxena is one of the best food writers out there and her work on this is essential.
• "On Monday, July 14, the first professional women’s basketball team in San Francisco will finally be reunited in the city where it all started." You know I love a sports history piece!

I also

• Attended a training on how to help with route safety for protests and actions.
• Attended some protests.
• Went to a cricket match at the Oakland Coliseum.
• Went to some soccer games.
• Started watching (on the recommendation of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders) a show called The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy. Fun!
• Watched a whole lot of volleyball (happy Volleyball Nations League to all who celebrate).

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

COYOTE

You got an email from me about this already, so I'll keep it brief: I'm helping start a worker owned coop for local journalism in the Bay Area. It's a ton of work to start a new publication, let alone a worker owned coop. We rely entirely on reader support at the moment, and we're in the final throes of our crowd funding campaign. Please consider becoming a supporter!

Errata & Corrections
Thanks to a few readers of this newsletter, I want to point out two things I could have done better in my email to you all about COYOTE.

1. COYOTE's name is an homage to many things, including a sex workers rights organization with the same name (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) that was founded in 1973 by an activist named Margo St. James. In my email to you all, I didn't say enough about that organization and I should have. COYOTE did amazing work — including a hotline, legal assistance, classes, an advocacy to change laws and norms around sex work. COYOTE also helped found a clinic called the St. James Infirmary that offered healthcare services for sex workers. St. James died in 2021, but her legacy lives on and our COYOTE hopes to share even a sliver of the magic that her organization did. Here are some places you can learn more about the original COYOTE:

• A Vindication of the Rights of Whores by Gail Pheterson (Editor), Margo St. James (Foreword)
• Margo St. James
• Saint James Infirmary
• Remembering Margo St. James

2. I was imprecise in my language when I claimed that there were "no alt-weeklies in the Bay Area." This is an impossible thing to measure (what counts as an alt-weekly) and not necessarily even a useful metric. And, as one reader pointed out, might be misinterpreted as a slight to the other amazing outlets that are operating in the area. I certainly didn't mean it that way! In fact one of my first pitches to COYOTE was to write a weekly "Best Local Reads" column in which we highlight the best work being done by other reporters and writers in our area. Here are some excellent local outlets that I read weekly:

• Oaklandside: https://oaklandside.org/
• Berkeleyside: https://www.berkeleyside.org/
• Mission Local: https://missionlocal.org/
• 48 Hills: https://48hills.org/
• KQED: https://www.kqed.org/
• KALW: https://www.kalw.org/
• The Citizen: https://peraltacitizen.com/
• Oakland Review of Books: https://www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/
• Bay Area Current: https://bayareacurrent.com/

Unbreaking

I don't know if you heard, but there was a big national budget thing in the news recently?

For Unbreaking, I followed a small piece of the sprawling and terrible budget bill very, very closely over the last few weeks: the specific provisions in the bill that would restrict gender affirming care. The good news is that both pieces of the bill that would have hurt access to care were removed from the final version. The less good news is that I now know a lot about the various intricate and disgusting ways that Republicans cross the country are attempting to limit life saving healthcare for trans folks.

You can find the current state of attacks on trans healthcare on our page here. I'd love it if folks shared this page (and the other Unbreaking ones) with their communities. If you have any feedback about what we're doing, we'd love to know. The point of this project is to make a complicated, terrible thing a little bit more understandable.

Unbreaking has also been tracking the administration's attacks to Medicaid, food safety, equality in the federal workforce, the postal service, and medical research funding.

first art show!

I showed my art for the first time in a gallery this month! Huge thank you to Rena Tom for including me in her show I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. I had originally intended to submit a different piece for this show, but my spray foam experiments did not go according to plan (as you may remember) and I'm still struggling to figure that material out. So instead I submitted something smaller — one of the pieces in my HUNCH series. (Calling something a "series" sounds so artistic doesn't it?)

The other pieces in the show were really amazing and I feel really lucky to have this be my first official show!

PROJECT CUBENSIS

I got notes back on my novel from my agent in March (which I talked about here) and spent most of May and June working on actually executing on them. There are whiteboards. There are sticky notes. There are spreadsheets. I am going to write more about this process for paying subscribers this month because it's been a struggle. But I wrote 5,181 words in June and edited another 18,431. My goal is to have a v2 on this project to share back with my agent by the end of this month.

As I work, I'm starting to think about titles. In the newsletter I've been calling this novel PROJECT CUBENSIS (as is my way with these code names, because I like code names) but eagle eyed readers probably know that the title I submitted the draft to my agent with was "Theodora." This is not a good title. It certainly will not be the title of the book.

So inspired by Monica Byrne, who did this for a recent book with her patrons, I'd love to do a little poll. Which of the following titles catches your eye most:

Ideally, the title grabs you even if you don't know anything about the book itself. But in case it helps to know: the book is a historical novel (ew) set in the early 1900's in Boston about a mother and a daughter navigating the worlds of science and spiritism. But really it's about family, mental illness, and escape.

I have a favorite among these, but I'm not telling you what it is. What do you all think?

I also:

• Went to Brooklyn to talk about environmental justice and the future with some absolute geniuses: Vann R. Newkirk II, Emily Raboteau and Mary Annaïse Heglar.
• Submitted my short story PROJECT PECKII V to yet another outlet.
• Published a story about the state of professional women's volleyball for Defector, and then went on the Volleyball State podcast to talk about it.
• Started playing soccer again for the first time in 10+ years.
• Got our new place setup and mostly organized the way I like it.
• Stripped and repainted a cabinet for our record player.

Okay, that's it for this one. This one is a little less long than usual! I spent a lot more time in meetings this month than I have in a while.