〰️〰️ 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.
East Bay Print Sale
This is one of my favorite events of the year and one that is most likely to drain my wallet. Just wall to wall prints piled on tables everywhere. Thousands of them! I love local artists, I love weird prints. Here are the ones I got. Sadly, three of these have disappeared from my office which is a very unsettling mystery that I'm feeling a way about given that I can't replace them easily.
I also went to:
- East Bay Open Studios
- An Oakland Review of Books event at Local Economy
- SO MANY holiday art markets (more on that below)
- The Mad Hatter holiday parade in Vallejo
- A NoBAWC event at Tamarack where I met some extremely lovely fellow co-op workers
- A community rock breaking ceremony at Esther's Orbit Room
Dumb Feeling by Mei Semones
I liked this song enough when it came on the radio (KEXP) that I took a photo of my car's stereo so I could look the song up later.
NCAA Women's Volleyball
A few years ago I got really, really, REALLY into women's volleyball and I watch a lot of it. This December was (as usual) the NCAA tournament and it was a good one! Nebraska and Pitt both managed to shoot themselves in the foot and crash out. Texas A&M peaked at the perfect time and crushed their final three games. My beloved Louisville went further than I expected but not far enough. It was a wonderful time! If you're in any way interested in volleyball hit me up, I am always looking for people to talk to about it.
And, this week, both women's professional volleyball leagues in the US start their seasons! (I wrote about the situation with women's pro leagues last year for Defector, although things have changed a bit since then.)
additional reading
- "The work severs its connection to any signifiers of a specific locale or identity in service of commercial omnipotence. A KAWS object can be whatever you want it to be — except fine art." 〰️ Max Blue on the KAWS show at the SF MOMA.
- "The paradox of imagination is that it's fundamentally self-centered: it happens in the privacy of your own mind. But your private, cloistered reveries turn out to be one of the best ways to create that shared, inclusive space that can shelter other people." 〰️ I will read anything Charlie Jane Anders has to say about creativity.
- Ingrid Burrington's newsletter Perfect Sentences is a must read, always.
- "I picked up my sketchbooks daily, saying to myself: 'what will I learn of myself that I didn’t know'" Pablo Picasso wrote. 〰️ This Jillian Hess piece about his incessant, compulsive sketching is really interesting. In particular, I want to send this to every person who sees abstract paintings and says "I could do that" or "how long could that have even taken?"
〰️ OUT 〰️〰️
This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.
I did a lot this month!
We Will Rise Again was published!
And we had a really cute event for it at Booksmith in SF. You can get a copy of the book here, or at your local bookstore.
awoooooo
At COYOTE, I continued to lead our calendar of events, and also published a couple of fun pieces:
- This Oakland Community Destroyed a Wall to Preserve Black History 〰️ a little report from that rock breaking ceremony, which was a follow up to the piece I did about the facade a few months ago.
- Bay Area Sports Mascots Ranked by the Ultimate Experts: Furries 〰️ a very silly and fun piece in which I asked a panel of furries to react to and rank all the Bay Area sports mascots. You can decide for yourself if you agree or disagree with their evaluations.
- The COYOTE Guide to Bay Area Holiday Art Markets 〰️ over 70 different markets in the Bay Area, all mapped for folks to be able to find and (hopefully) go shop at.
- Medium Rare: The Beefs That Rocked the Bay Area in 2025 〰️ our team-wide list of our favorite petty feuds, including some illustrations that we did that are terrible but delightful.
in more depressing news...
For the last six months or so I've been helping the team at Unbreaking try and make sense of how the current administration is destroying key pieces of our lives — from the postal service, to medical research funding, to immigration. The page I spend most of my time on at Unbreaking is our page documenting the many, many attacks on gender-affirming care for trans folks.
Last month, our team did a huge rework of the explainer and published a corresponding timeline of events. All told, the page is 20,000 words, 150 footnotes, 100+ timeline events.
It's bleak. So bleak. But I think that this page offers a really good and understandable (if still overwhelming) picture of all the ways that this administration has tried to destroy healthcare options for trans people as part of their broader attack on trans people more generally. I'm proud of it, and so fucking angry that I had to make this in the first place.
short stories
One of my big goals for 2025, that I did not hit, was to write and publish more short stories. I failed to sell one story that I really like, but can't find a home for. And I only wrote one complete new story (which you can read here).
But in the waning hours of December, 2025, I did manage to start working on a few stories that I've had kicking around in my head, and I revised a few that I've had laying around for a while. It felt good! In 2026, I'm re-upping this goal and trying to reorient my work time around writing more fiction.
PROJECT CUBENSIS
A few months ago I got some really great notes from my agent on my novel. Big things need to change, but she thinks that it's worth continuing to revise. I started trying to figure out how to change these big things, and then I realized that I need to actually sit down and read the novel closely. I haven't done that in over a year, because I've been tinkering with bits and pieces here and there.
So this month I sat down to read the book. Which was both heartening and frustrating as hell. Because I've been working on this story for many years on and off (for several years I chipped away at it three morning pages at a time) there is a lot of inconsistency in the pacing, language, and characterization. There is also some nice stuff, but the close read really hammered home the issue of attention to me. I haven't been able to pay close attention to this story, for more than a few weeks at a time, ever. I'm constantly jumping between this and ten other things. I'm constantly putting it down and then picking it back up. And that is not just inefficient but also leads to me having to fix things later.
This year, I want to reorient my time so that I have more focused attention that I can put towards some of the big projects I really want to finish this year.
2026
I mentioned this in my 2025 recap (ish) post but I didn't hit any of my 2025 goals. I didn't sell the novel, or the novella, or the non-fiction book proposals that I have in the works. I didn't finish any of my various sculptures that I have in the works. I didn't read as many books as I liked. The list goes on.
Some of this is because of what I mentioned above. I'm jumping between too many things. I joined a few new projects this year unexpectedly (which I don't regret, but which do pull my time and attention away from the other work). My time and attention is divided — constantly pulled in simply too many directions to be able to get Big Thinking done. And Big Thinking is required if I'm going to finish this novel, or novella, or book proposal (let alone the book itself if I can sell it).
If you've been here for a while you know I'm a sucker for annual reviews and recaps. I love a mood board. I love to reflect (a nicer word for "beat yourself up about all the things you didn't do) and I love a plan. I often orient my years around words of concepts. Here are some of the recent ones:
- 2022: Pupation
- 2023: Magical Farm of Wonders
- 2024: Transition // Mutation // Superposition
- 2025: Cardiac Serpent
This year, as always, I spent some of my time in December doing a lot of free writing in response to prompts about what I want to be doing; what I liked about last year; what I want to leave behind; what I want my work and my life to be like. I won't share most of that with you because, frankly, it's embarrassingly emo.
But I will share one snippet of melodramatic free-writing, which was in response to the prompt: "What do you want? What matters to you? What doesn’t matter?"
I want to feel excited about the work I do. I want to look forward to doing it, to feel like I'm working towards something that has meaning and feeling and velocity to it. I want to be making stuff -- books, articles, art, THINGS. Not just thinking about them but actually doing them. I want to make work that makes people feel something, that makes them understand or look at the world in a new way. I want to make things that are beautiful but in a kind of disgusting way — stuff that you can't look away from but you don't actually like exactly. I want people to feel gross or uncomfortable or mad when they read my work. I want them to feel like it's forcing them to think in a new way. Rewiring their brains. Changing their minds about something, kicking and screaming.
This little graph made me think about an application I wrote a few months ago for an artist residency I didn't get. In it, I wrote:
I'd like to utilize the materials, time, and resources at Recology to create a series of sculptures that explore the idea of containment and what happens when things break free. How much can a person twist, expand, or contract before they burst through the walls of their container, whether they want to or not? What happens when the system cannot hold? And can there be beauty in the rupture? As an artist, I'm interested in exploring these questions and themes through playful, strange, and surprising sculptural work.
And the word that keeps coming to mind for me, for some reason, in this moment, is extrusion. Pressure builds up and something either pushes through, or oozes out. It's gross, it's a little painful, it can be harnessed to construct carefully, it can be a big fucking mess. It requires sustained, constant, focused pressure. This year, I'm going to take all the stuff I've been noodling on and gathering and shoving into the tube of my brain, and see what I can extrude.
This is the last in/out for 2025. You can see all of them here. I really like doing these, as a little record of what I've been doing and seeing, so I'm going to keep writing them. Paying members get additional ~monthly(ish) blog posts about things like:
