Last year, I read Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain. I love Merton, and his work, and have always felt an affinity for the Columbia-grad-turned-Catholic-convert-turned-monk/lifelong-yearner. The book is an autobiography of his youth—a childhood in France and England, the joy of collegiate friendship, a longing for writing, and takes you to the moment he joins the monastery at Gethsemani.

I put Merton in the same category of writer as E.B. White: a kindly, midcentury uncle who loves nature and beauty and is unafraid to look evil in the eye and rebuke it, someone who can appreciate both the absurdity and the solemnity of life. There is something about Merton’s work that feels approachable and kind, rendering these big, thorny ideas in the same way your favorite professor does.

When you’re reading Seven Storey Mountain, the idea of conversion is looming over the first half of the book—it approaches and circles and feels close to landing before flying away. Merton is hungry, is thirsty, yearns, longs, kicks rocks in increasingly dissatisfied circles. It is all a very familiar texture—down to the buildings near Columbia University where I also did my undergrad, the hunger, the thirst, the yearning, the kicking rocks in your early twenties as the world seemingly gets scarier.

When I am reading, I am usually after knowing the texture of a thing. There are all these experiences—having a kid, falling in love, finding God—that have all this rote language that completely glosses over the experience. “You’ll never be the same again,” or “It’s a total transformation of the self” or whatever. I am not after that. I am after language that gives you the texture of it, the fine grit, the language for how your brain is rewired or rewritten, the ways that your life or your selfhood changes, concretely. This is both impossible, and also, it should seem, doable. I trusted in Merton to tell me, this is how it feels.

And you get moments of it. Merton worrying about the eucharistic fast and whether brushing his teeth or smoking a cigarette counted as fastbreaking and so omitting both the morning of his baptism. You get book titles and New York street addresses I am eminently familiar with, churches I have been in as a weird little undergrad. And then, at the critical moment, a veil gets dropped over it, everything gets filmy and flat.

This is how he describes the change wrought in him by his baptism:

In the Temple of God that I had just become, the One Eternal and Pure Sacrifice was offered up to the God dwelling in me: the sacrifice of God to God, and me sacrificed together with God, incorporated in His Incarnation. Christ born in me, a new Bethlehem, and sacrificed in me, His new Calvary, and risen in me: offering me to the Father, in Himself asking the Father, my Father and His, to receive me into His infinite and special love—not the love He has for all things that exist for mere existence is a token of God’s love, but the love of those creatures who are drawn to Him in and with the power of His own love for Himself

Brother. Respectfully and lovingly…what do you mean? Actually and truly what do you mean you have just become a Temple of God? What does it feel like?

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I have read more mystical theology than your average bear, I know the tropes and the cadences. For all that I can draw meaning from this passage, for all that I love his image of the conversion of a Christian as a sort of microcosmic retelling of the Christ journey, the birth and death and resurrection all in a moment, this feels like the same kind of rhythm and language used by Catherine of Siena and Benedict of Clairvaux and Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart. I do not mind it when Simone Weil does this, it is what I go to her for. I mind it when the kindly, practical, avuncular Thomas Merton does it, when we, within the space of a page, go from wondering about a cheeky morning ciggy to this. These two forms of expression don’t feel like they belong in the same language, in the same book. How dare he, when I most want clarity, give me language that, in its beauty, in its liturgical reliance, obfuscates rather than clarifies. I am left on the outside of it, peering into a fogged-over window like some kind of pervert for the holy.

I’ve written a lot about this standing-outside-while-longing-to-see inside. Being a regular writer for not one but two and occasionally a third Christian magazine means this is an object I have tested the weight of many times, that I know the scope and the feel of in my hand, in my pocket, I could list out its properties, but it still remains fundamentally unknowable in a lot of ways. My husband, who I have known for ten years and literally sat next to me on the couch for the reading of 98% of said mystical theology, told me recently that he still doesn’t understand my relationship with Christianity. Danny Vazquez, the editor for Rivermouth, who again, read my entire book cover to cover multiple times at one point also gently asked me where I stood on God. It’s an evolving answer, and one I don’t fully understand, but I’ve tried talking about it a lot, in a lot of different ways.

Declaration was a chapbook I published with the now-defunct but extremely beautiful Guillotine Publishing (having as one of my first grown-up editors remains an unbelievable gift).

I would maybe describe it as a spiritual autobiography, written by an angry, sad 22 year old. There’s a reason that there’s no link to it, which is partially because it’s a print-only object, no longer available, but also that I spent a lot of time cringing while I re-read it in preparation for writing this. In it, I write about my parents’ evangelicalism, my bitter, misogynistic youth pastor in high school, my grandmother’s deep faith, my desire for faith and the enduring silence of God in my life. All of this is couched in the story of Our Lady Queen of Angels, a group of women who spent 10 years having informal services outside their church after the Archdiocese of New York closed it down, and the time I spent with them.1

Here’s a clip from it:

I tried so hard to love Jesus for such a long time. When I was seven, I remember closing my eyes in Sunday school and not knowing how to pray, instead squeezing my knuckles, one by one, until we all said “Amen.”

In middle school, I went to church twice a week—Wednesday night for teen devotionals, Sunday mornings for regular service, and sometimes the second youth service later in the day. I tried reading the whole Bible and made it as far as the begettings of Kings I. I tried St. Augustine’s trick of letting the Bible fall open to what God would ensure was the perfect passage. Nothing worked. I declared my faith over and over, to myself, to my family, to youth leaders and pastors, to anyone that would listen.

I declared my faith even when I could tell the declaration was stretched thin over a lie.

We went to a Vineyard church when I was a kid, white-people-California-hippie pentecostalism, and I could see, visibly manifested in people crying and screaming and laughing, what faith looked like, what it meant for God to talk to you. It was scary, but it was also definitive—no still quiet voice, this was exuberant and triumphal and overwhelmingly powerful.

It never happened to me.

And so between an ongoing silence, and a general disenchantment with what church was to me (see: bitter, misogynistic youth pastor, see: Bible church in Texas, see: baby liberal), I fell off of trying.

And that’s where it stayed for a long time. Not trying, not wanting to try, because trying and failing is embarrassing, because I hate being bad at things, believing in God included.

And yet, also, sort of trying. Sliding myself in sideways, putting myself in places God might show up like I was a middle schooler with a crush, but not, like, in an obvious way. I mean, I went to divinity school. I ended up in the immigration rights movement, which at least in the U.S. is chock-full of some of the most rooted Christians I know. I didn’t go to church though, which, when it comes to middle-school crush behavior is like happening to read a book on the sidelines of the soccer field during practice but stopping yourself short of lurking around outside their house.

You will not be surprised to learn that my time in divinity school was not without emotional/spiritual incident, but I was honestly so happy there that it all took a while to sink in.

In 2023, nearly four years after graduating, I wrote a piece for Christian Century about one of these revelations that felt like I finally was able to explore.

I was probably halfway through divinity school when I turned to my husband and said, “I think I have a very fundamentally Christian mind.”

My husband, raised in an almost completely secular home, looked over at me, eyebrows raised. “What on earth does that mean?”

The piece, delightfully titled “The brine of Christianity” (I came up with the metaphor but not the title) is about feeling like growing up Christian had, in some fundamental way, altered me as a person, even though I no longer believed or practiced. I think this is, in a lot of ways, my threshold-of-the-church manifesto, swinging my legs off the front steps without going into the building. I still stand by a lot of it. In essence, the essay says, “Look, I’m probably Christian, but in a cool way, in an outsider way.” Very Simone Weil.

But then, a few weeks ago, Commonweal magazine asked me to write a reflection for the third Sunday of Lent. The reading I was responding to was Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well, one of the freakiest passages in all of the gospels2. The woman walks away from her encounter with Jesus, saying that he told her “everything she’d ever done.” Frankly—terrifying. Jesus as all-seeing eyeball, Jesus as the kind of daddy/cop I was raised with, an incarnation I could only shy away from.

I have spent much of my life stubbornly at the threshold of faith. Raised in the Church, moved away from it, and yet returning, now and again, like a comet pulled in by some greater gravitational force. There are many things I have loved about the Church and its rhythms and rites, and equally many things that have kept me out—a lot of justified critiques, I think, but also just a personal hesitation. I did not want to undergo the mortifying ordeal of being known in order to be loved, did not want to be changed by this love I have so carefully avoided.

In the weeks leading up to Lent, I had been watching a lot of sermons from Harvard’s Memorial church and crying, sitting at my desk with a wobbly chin. On the day the reflection was due, I couldn’t think of anything to write, I was kicking myself for once again draining my car battery like an idiot, and I had three bond payment requests rejected, one after the other. As I was thinking of what to write, I had this ongoing paranoia that I sometimes get, writing for my beloved lefty religious mags, that the (largely religious) audience for my writing would read my clearly depressed, anxious rambling and my protestations against faith, and would gently and kindly shake their heads and say something along the lines of “oh God, this poor little lamb needs Jesus,” in the same way that sometimes I look at my dog and think, “Oh, God, he’s freaking out over the mailman existing.” It was one of those days where 18 small things happen and you feel stupid and hopeless, and angry at yourself for feeling that way over 18 small stupid things instead of one big real one.

And it struck me. Sitting in the back of an Uber on the way back from the mechanic replacing my car battery, feeling sorry for myself, something clicked. If I could imagine some kindly stranger reading my anxieties and just shaking his head and accurately diagnosing my neuroses and their fix, if I could feel deeply moved by sermons and religious writing, if I longed for it, if I was so unhappy and lost without it, I could just say yes to it.

And so I did.

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I think if you’ve been reading me and my work for a little while, this will not be a huge surprise, but I, somehow, managed to be surprised. Not quite struck blind, but surprised nonetheless.

Let me try some texture here, a little grit for you to roll between your fingers. It’s just a little bit, because frankly, it’s hard to discern the texture of an experience when you’re in it, (sorry, Thomas Merton, I was too hard on you) but here’s my best shot.

Accepting Jesus into my heart was a deeply embarrassing experience. I do mean humbling, but I also mean embarrassing. I cried in therapy the next day, when they asked what about this felt significant to me and I had to move my mouth to say “the promise of everlasting life, and the world being bright and shining and fixed, the end of all suffering,” and like, truly honestly mean it. I cried because it was beautiful, and I also cried because it was embarrassing. I felt, for the next few days, like I was walking around with one of those very delicate membrane-only eggs in the middle of my chest, kind of tender and raw and unshielded from the world. Un-cynical, maybe? I was worried this feeling would last forever, but I’m honestly glad that it has faded somewhat. Thinking about God brings the feeling back.

Beyond this, nothing very much has changed. I still feel like myself. Having belief in Jesus has not liberated me from snark or pettiness or made me cuss less. I don’t go to church, I do watch sermons on YouTube and cry. I recognize that this is not perhaps the optimal way to experience the body of Christ, but I’m ok where I am for now. If I had to guess (and I do, I can’t pinpoint it), I think the sermons make me cry because they just keep pointing towards grace and moral beauty, two things I am continually hungry for. I still feel despair, a lot, about the state of the world, and myself, but that despair doesn’t feel like the event horizon beyond which all other things fall away, it feels like a passage through which maybe other things are possible. I know enough to know that things will, inevitably change, that I will.

Where I’ll Be:

• April 16-18: Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids!

• May 1: Broken by Design immigration symposium at DePaul University in Chicago

What I’ve Written

• Most of it is linked above, so just read the newsletter.

• Also, I wrote a book. Rivermouth is about immigration, and language, and what it means to try to reach beyond yourself. Honestly, if you liked this newsletter, you will probably like this book.

What I’m Reading

• I’m reading Gramsci’s Prison Letters, which so far is reminding me of nothing so much as Natalia Ginzburg’s Happiness, as Such.

• I also just finished One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston which a) not available on bookshop.com and b) is the rare romance novel that was published in the last five years, set in the late medieval period, has Cathars, Beguines, and heresy as a kind of backstory, and is deeply fun and hot. If you read this please slide into my DMs, I wanna yell.

Last April, I wrote a post for on two immigration headlines that seemed to hit at the same time and pointed, directly, at the same idea. ‘

The first was acting ICE director Todd Lyons saying he wanted to build an Amazon Prime for deportations.

The second was the Trump administration moving lists of TPS recipients onto the Social Security “death master file”—the massive database the Social Security Administration uses to track people who have died and whose social security numbers have been deactivated, a move a prior commissioner of the SSA called “financial murder.”

You can read the post, but I’ll also summarize the main point.

The Injustice Report

Immigrants as Prime Deliveries, Immigrants as Financial Ghosts

A few weeks ago, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told the crowd at the Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings…

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a year ago · 12 likes · Alejandra Oliva and Injustice Report

I saw these two events as indicative of the necrocaptialism that underlies our immigration system, our political system as a whole. Necrocapitalism is, in the words of it’s coiner, S.B. Bannerjee, “contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death.” In other words: a form of capitalism where wealth is accumulated due to dehumanization and death, the one feeding into and encouraging the other like a horrible ouroboros.

In both of the cases from last year, we had an accumulation involving dispossession, a capitalist system profiting from death, counting on death to perpetuate itself. If you dedicate yourself to finding the necrocapitalist thread running through things, you will never stop unraveling. This administration literally loves to make money off killing people. To be fair, our country was built on necrocapitalism and continues to thrive on it—but this administration gloats in it, laughs at it, bathes in it.

And so, as this administration has progressed, it has come time once again to take a headline down from the papers and again remind ourselves—this is necrocapitalism, at work.

This time, it’s the warehouses.

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ICE has reportedly been buying up warehouses in cities across the U.S. These are the hulking, empty sites of e-commerce, the half-million-square-feet of empty building you see by the highway as you drive out of any major U.S. city.

I don’t know if the warehouses were built in anticipation of future need, or if they were emptied out by the slowly crashing economy or the lack of U.S. based industry or the tariffs or what, but these warehouses are being brought up by ICE not to store trucks or guns or Temu special forces gear and punisher masks but to store people. These sites will be retrofitted to have bathrooms and beds, and be used to jail people in the thousands, as they await deportation.1

People will suffer and die in these warehouses, in these massive caverns meant to be a holding place for goods. To be clear, there is no world in which people were not suffering in these warehouses—ecommerce and Amazon workers have died year after year while laboring under conditions that are often not illegal but usually inhuman.

But there’s something that hits a little different about human beings taking the place of warehoused products, kept not even as deeply exploited labor (although sometimes, yes, also that), but as products themselves. Something that feels like the culmination of these horrible systems of capitalism and racism—and also something we have seen before, something we have built this country on this. What is a slaver ship if not a floating warehouse of people turned into capital?2

There’s another thread I want to tug on today, Ash Wednesday. For months now, clergy here in Chicago have been fighting for the right to enter Broadview, the so-called “processing center” (language and logic of capitalism, again) where folks are briefly held after being arrested by ICE before being shipped off to an out-of-state detention center. They have been asking permission to give communion to folks held in detention, scared and isolated.

After literal months of back and forth on whether people detained by ICE deserve to have the sacrament (the actual argument was more along the lines of operational security, but came down to sacramental access for the people who arguably need it the most), Catholic priests were allowed access to Broadview. Today. To minister and administer ashes to those in immigration detention.

Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent, a season of fasting and penitence. This is the reminder of death before the resurrection, the ashes on the forehead a reminder that life is finite. From dust you came, and to dust you shall return. I think under normal conditions, there is something kind of beautiful about the reminder. An old professor of mine, an episcopal priest, talked about the beauty in giving the ashes both to his youngest and oldest congregants, the span of a life and the end of all of them. But, as with all things, context matters.

I have talked to enough detained people to know that detention is a condition where the fragility of your own body, the fragility of your aliveness is not something that is easy to forget.

I made this video for work about a client I interviewed last fall. This is only a fraction of what she went through.

Why is it that out of the whole liturgical year, it is this sacrament that people in detention are being allowed. The one that reminds them of the finitude of life, of the fragility of the body? Why not the more ordinary comforts of communion, the joy of a Christmas mass? I’m glad that these folks are finally being given access to their religious freedom and rights, but cannot help but read into it.

Here, then is my Ash Wednesday prayer: these systems, these institutions came from nothing. May they return to nothing.

I did it as part of my work with the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund. We can usually pay bonds online, but this time for some reason or another, we had a handful of bonds that needed to be paid in person, and I thought, “oh, I don’t have a lot on at work at the moment, I’ll take the morning off and go take care of this,” despite never having paid an immigration bond in person before.

As it turns out, paying a bond in person is not hard. It involves, yes, carrying your person and your paperwork and probably a book or some knitting into the federal building at 101 W. Ida B. Wells, just south of the Loop. You go through metal detectors, and into some elevators, and you get spit out onto the 4th floor, into this small, kind of gross waiting room, like a doctor’s office but worse. There are only unpadded rolling chairs to sit in, and no windows to the outside, or tables to rest a coffee on or anything.

You take your paperwork over to the people behind the service windows, and they take it and your REAL ID, and they give you some forms to fill out, and you do it, and then they give you your ID back and tell you to sit, and you do that. Paying bonds in person usually takes around 3 hours. I don’t really know what they do behind the window with all the papers that you give them, or why this process takes three hours, it just does.

So I show up at this strange, windowless waiting room a little past 9 a.m., and I fill out the forms, and I sit down and play on my phone for a while, because I’m not very interested in the book I brought. And the whole time, other people are coming in and doing the paperwork and sitting down and waiting, and there’s a fair bit of interesting people watching you can do, sitting on a rolling chair in the ICE Field Office waiting room, so some of that is happening as well.

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I was worried that the waiting room of the ICE Field Office would feel emotionally heavy, that these were people waiting for check-ins where they might be detained, or that there would be people in uniforms watching us all day, that the mechanics and horror of immigration enforcement in this country would be visible to me as I waited, but nope, not really. There were maybe little snatches of conversation, half-overheard allusions to deep sadnesses, but the overall feeling was like the DMV but worse, little family units entertaining themselves and chatting, the kind of exhausted waiting of bureaucracy, the blank-faced stares of people trying not to make eye contact, office workers doing stapling and customer service (with the added bonus that a lot of it involves arguing with lawyers who show up with their clients—a deeply deserved kind of customer service hell in my opinion).

At around noon, they said they were having system failures, and to go get lunch, and to come back after, to see what was going on. So I left, and I had a sad little fast food lunch and told my boss I might be out for the rest of the day, and then I went back into the ICE field office and sat back down to wait.

In a weird kind of opsec failure, you could see what was on the screens of the workers quite clearly from many places in the room, and so I spent a good portion of my day squinting at a computer screen some 25 feet away from me. One of the workers, from the moment I came in that morning, had, full screen on one of his two monitors, videos of a woman cleaning.

For hours, one monitor was email or web portals, while his other was an uninterrupted stream of an anonymous, faceless woman, wiping down surfaces. Table tops, electric stoves, phones, decorative bowls, screens, and a soft cloth methodically moving across all of it. Lifting up the phone receiver, wiping it, setting it down. Cut. A hand moving across a table, back and forth. Cut. One drawer pull after another, left shining. There was no visible dirt in the video, just visible cleaning. A thin, white, blond woman in athleisure, doing the endless labor of cleaning clean things.

I don’t know if this was some kind of a kink thing, or ASMR, or comforting, or relaxing or what, but I did find it profoundly sad. There’s a number of things you can read into it, project given the context. A desire for human touch and contact, running down every surface, instead sublimated to the endless touching of consumer goods. A longing for some kind of racial purity, a white woman endlessly wiping away dirt. A Lady-Macbeth-like desire to clean the invisible moral stain permeating the place, the computer, the man’s brain, but instead of hysterical (out, out damned spot!) eerily, methodically calm. Wipe. Wipe. Wipe.

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Also, at my back on the wall were an extensive set of pencil drawings, clearly doodled by one of the many bored children that must pass through this waiting room. A big spiral, an attempt at letters. There were a lot of kids in the waiting room while I was there, sitting quietly while their parents bonded out their loved ones. These kids were good at waiting, at being quiet, but I can see (I could feel in my own body) the way that waiting like that has to, eventually, give way to naughtiness. Hence, a little scrawled pencil spiral on the wall, doodled while a parent was distracted. An illustration of how slow time goes, an expression of a very old impulse to say “I was here, I passed a while staring at this white wall, and I wanted it to look more like me.” I have seen the same thing in immigration detention centers, graffiti marking days passed, hometowns, prayers. Marking the human on the inhuman wall.

I was both surprised it was still up, that it had lasted over night and into the next morning, and also not—this is not a room that is cared for, it is just a room that exists. The only woman that exists to clean with the kind of detailed, loving attention required to erase out pencil markings is on a computer screen behind a glass partition, trapped in an endless cycle of performing.

Time ticked along, and I signed two of the three bonds I was there to pay, but the last one got stuck, somewhere in the system, and then it was 3 p.m., and the office closed and I went home. On my way home, I got a call that I had, somehow, managed to leave my wallet at the ICE office, and the final pending bond got approved, but they were closed, could I please come back tomorrow. And so the next day I got out of bed early, and I took myself back to 101 W. Ida B. Wells Drive (deep, awful, American irony, that an anti-lynching advocate gives her name to the street where ICE lives in Chicago) and I went through the metal detectors and took the elevator to the fourth floor, and was greeted, again, by videos of endless clean counters, getting cleaner.

The people behind the service windows are very nice, interpersonally, actually. (Nice is different than good.) They were very concerned about my wallet, and gave it back to me, and we all kind of laughed, and I asked if I could pay the last bond kind of quickish, and they said yes. I spent another hour waiting to sign the final bond agreement and then I went to work, only a little bit late. Here I am in clown shoes, an imperfect person who loses her wallet kind of a lot, trying to do good by people.

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I write all this yes, partially to kinkshame the ICE employee—I am but a simple woman, and I personally don’t think you should be consuming weird, sad, vaguely porn-y content extremely visibly at your government job, and that goes double if your government job is evil, actually, even when you get me my wallet back—but also to show that just as much as evil is banal and kind of stupid, fighting it can be too.

I keep waking up to dread, both in the mornings and periodically throughout the day, like I’m walking around only for the sidewalk to open up in front of me into a yawning chasm. I see the news, and I am both scared, and wonder if I should go put myself in the way of things, if I am doing enough. If it is time to put my body on the line. And every day I get up and I check my emails and I look at the news, and I see how bad things are in the world and the chasm opens up, and every day I look at the chasm and I say, I am doing everything that is within my power, everything that feels useful and that I am good at. I am working at my day job at an immigration legal service provider, recording videos and writing reports about the growth of the detention system and translating things. When I am not at work, I am working with the bond fund to pay bonds and answer ten thousand anxious emails from people who need our assistance and make content that makes people say “oh yeah, I should give them some money!” or “oh, man, the immigration detention system is fucked up, let me call my congressperson.” I am someone that, til now, panics in a crowd, but by god I can write a sentence. So, for now, I do. Even so, when I am called to do more, different things, I will do more, different things.

Even when I am doing a thing that feels scary to me (going, in person, to the ICE field office, giving them my government ID) I am still myself (a person who leaves said ID in said scary office, along with all her credit cards and such). You do not have to be good to do good. In the same way that you can be doing a tremendous amount of harm while watching infinite weird videos of a woman cleaning, you can also do a tremendous amount of good while being scattered and a little clumsy. Do the thing that you are good at, but that is real, that puts you in touch not only with your own virtue but with your failings and your neighbors, and honestly probably your neighbors failings too. Keep asking yourself if you are doing enough, make it a muscle you work until what you do seems easy and then do more.

Where I’ll Be:

• CHICAGO (2/27): Book talk with Betsy Rubiner, author of Our Diaries, Our Selves

• GRAND RAPIDS (4/18): Festival of Faith and Writing, various panels etc.

What I’ve Written:

If you liked my last newsletter, Back in the Saddle, I wrote a recap to our campaign to free hundreds of people from ICE detention for Christian Century. Spoiler: the 7th Circuit sucks, community is amazing.

I also wrote a review of The Autobiography of Cotton for America’s Quarterly.

Also, I wrote a book. Rivermouth is about immigration, and language, and what it means to try to reach beyond yourself. Honestly, if you liked this newsletter, you will probably like this book.

What I’m Reading

Ways of Eating by Benjamin Wurgaft and Merry White. This is my second or third book on like Civilization and Cuisine and I don’t know that I’m getting a ton out of it that feels new, which is, to be very clear, my fault and not the books’.

I’m also in a real head-empty-hands-full spiral prevention mode, which means, to me, audiobooks and cross-stitching, so right now it’s Wolf Hall.

I did just finish Melissa Lozada Oliva’s Candelaria, which is about a Guatemalan grandmother at the end of the world, and is truly deeply delightful and weird.

A little over a month ago, I started my old job at an immigration legal service provider nonprofit back up again. I’ve been doing press releases and social media posts, explainers and briefs, talking to people recently released from immigration detention on the phone to help us convince people that what’s going on is wrong. I liked my old job a lot, I like the new version of it also—even if it has me feeling like I’m moving backwards in a lot of ways. What do you mean I’m at the same place, during another Trump administration, witnessing escalating horrors from behind a computer screen?

It’s been a particularly cursed time to do this work in Chicago—from the first week of September up until last week, we were basically under occupation from federal immigration agents. Every time I logged into social media, I’d see people thrown to the ground, protesters teargassed, all in front of places that are my everyday fabric. I spoke on the phone with a woman who had just been released from detention and still had night terrors. I spoke on the phone with another woman whose husband had been arrested at a Home Depot a few days prior—as soon as I asked her if she wanted to talk about it for a congressional briefing I was working on, she started sobbing and didn’t stop for our entire 45 minute phone call. People are picked up without warrants, without cause—citizens and non-citizens alike—but almost never without violence. There are threats and intimidation, there’s the mandatory stay at Broadview, a “processing center” that is desperately overcrowded and dirty, where they have banned religious services, where they act with violence against protesters. A lot of people are signing voluntary departure orders just to get out what seems like endless detention.

And then, last week: a judge ordered that 615 people must be released from ICE custody, each on a $1,500 bond. These 615 are just a part of what could be class of thousands, a list of names the government should be providing any day now.

In my spare time, I’m on the board of the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund—there’s 15 of us, and we do everything from make the Instagram graphics to actually literally posting bonds. I found out about the ruling in this case because someone DMed our Instagram account on my lunch break, asking if we were fundraising for it. He was the first, he was certainly not the last.

Even though the next week was full of carefully hedged language (“we are working with the litigating attorneys in this case to find out where we can most be helpful,” rinse, repeat), people started donating to us, a lot. Most of these donations were under $100—from real, regular people who saw a glimmer of hope and pulled out their wallets—but they poured in. A lot of us cried about it—I did. All the while, we were scrambling behind the scenes, writing press releases, making landing pages, creating a campaign out of thin air and collaborating with partners to make sure everything met with everyone’s approval, crafting logistical plans and trying to get everything in place so we could make this work. Folks on our bond team were figuring out if we could literally physically get the number of cashier’s checks we would need.

Again: 15 of us. Again, all of us with day jobs.

Today, we launch that campaign. I am so proud of this work—of the people I get to do this with, of the late night and deep discussions that have gone into it, of the brilliance and expertise this represents, and the hearts of all the people I get to do this with.

get someone out of ice today

also: if you don’t have money to give right now, lord knows things are tight, reshare our post, with the link to donate, and you will be doing us a real solid. also: every little bit helps.

Donate Early, Donate Often

I found out, moments before pressing send, that the 7th circuit stayed the original judge’s decision, with further arguments on December 2nd. This is infuriating—we know that ICE agents make the rounds at detention facilities regularly, coercing folks to sign voluntary departure orders, whispering that their situations are hopeless. They now have longer to do this, longer to convince people to give up. But it also means we can build stronger, better coalitions and community so we can be ready to meet the moment when justice actually prevails.

There is nothing that can undo the damage that has been wrought on our families and communities by the federal occupation. People don’t come out of immigration detention the same as they go in. It is a system designed to break you, to make you feel subhuman. But this, at least, gives them all the opportunity to start healing.

Help us bring Chicago home.

have you not donated yet?

I have two upcoming events that I’m really excited about—please come!

tonight, virtually, register here

Jill’s book is such a powerful read—about growing up undocumented, food, and family, and mythology and colonialism. Order Dirty Kitchen here, and come hang out with us tonight.

december 2nd, at pilsen community books in chicago:

I have talked about Mac Loftin’s book before, you will probably get a whole newsletter out of it soon because I think it really shifted and reframed a lot of things about the religion I grew up in for me in ways that made me feel grounded and like these texts were for this moment. Mac and I met, if not in a class on Sacramental Imagination, then definitely in a class on Women & Mysticism, and both should be pretty illustrative of the places where we overlap. Buy Mac’s book at PCB in two weeks :)

I promise that you will have a good time in this conversation even if you don’t know theology, or you aren’t particularly religious.

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Last Wednesday night, when my husband got home from work and was greeted effusively by our dog, he noticed a quarter-sized somewhat crusty and oozy lump on Chico’s back. We called the vet, got an appointment, and the next day, at his office discovered that this was not a small cyst that had burst (my initial assumption) but rather a palm-sized burn, hidden under the fur, that had become infected.

I left the vet an hour later having experienced my tiny dog screaming in pain, and with a good, heart-shaped chunk of his fur shaved from his normally glossy, thick coat with a horrible, oozing mess of skin in the middle of it.

This month marks 10 years of my knowing Chico (and also my husband, I guess) and earlier this year we celebrated Chico entering his teen years. He is a perfect dog—lazy, deeply affectionate, so charismatic it is sometimes difficult to focus on other things when he is in the room, breath bad enough to melt a truck, particular and individual and slightly crotchety, excellent at throwing his butt against you and leaning his whole 15 pounds into your side when he wants attention. I love him wholeheartedly. The last few years have been a process of understanding that he is, like the rest of us, experiencing the ravages of time. He’s almost entirely deaf now, and we think getting a little blind, stairs give him (more) trouble (than usual, he’s really never been a fan), he sleeps more of the day (seemingly impossible), and he will occasionally lose us when we are all on the same couch and run from room to room looking for us. This is both sad and also just the way the world works—I, too, am a little stiffer, a little more unwieldy than when I met Chico when he was 3 and I was 22.

The way the world works is not, however, huge, gnarly injury appearing out of nowhere. Except for when it does.

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Neither my husband or I has any idea how or when he got this burn—could he have gotten splashed with boiling water or hot oil when nosing around in the kitchen, even though we try to keep him out? Could it have been an accident at the groomers’ last week? We both feel kind of insane—a week ago we had a perfectly healthy, beautiful dog with all his fur, and now we have a tiny, half-bald guy with a giant, oozing wound, with seemingly no precipitating event in between. Just one day he woke up and his skin fell off. It feels like a horrible dream, complete with horrible dream logic.

Chico, for his part, now that he’s being given painkiller-glazed meatballs every morning, is seemingly unbothered. He’s been spending his days like he usually does1 and other than when we’re putting salve on the burn, seemingly unbothered. But salve we must, twice a day, and I can’t figure out how to explain to him that we are doing this horrible thing to him for his own good. I feel like he knows, given the absolute stoic patience with which he has submitted to me carefully and gently patting goo into his [many texture adjectives here, all of them bad] skin. I am more upset than he seems when his skin flakes away onto my gloved hand.

I am not a person who has ever been good with….the body. I have thrown up a little bit from picking up totally normal dog poop, a thing I do literally every day. The worst part of being sick for me is very often not how I feel but having to deal with the various substances my own body produces. But when it’s Chico, and when it’s my husband, who is better about body stuff than I am but a thousand times more anxious about causing Chico pain, it’s me who is donning the latex gloves and peering carefully at the topography of a burn, gently wiping away grime and dabbing on antibiotic ointment. I am, in the midst of this, worried that it is hurting my relationship with my dog—he knows, already, what it means when I put on blue latex gloves, I watch him snuggle into my husband and avoid me, it hurts my heart.

Of course, we can’t go any farther without bringing in Euripides, trans. Anne Carson2:

Pylades and Orestes are that particular Ancient Greek combo hit of cousins/best friends/lovers. Orestes, still under the particular doom of the house of Atreus, is facing down the barrel of gods-induced illness/madness or a murderous mob. Pylades, although his cousin, is not narratively doomed in this same way, and could choose to walk away, could choose to distance himself from his matricidal cousin, and instead says that he’s not only going to stay, to face Orestes’ fate with him, he will shoulder some of the burdens of Orestes’ condition.

Tumblr user troubledtmesis did some literary analysis of a bunch of translations and of the Greek, and the word that Anne Carson translates here as “care” has some implications around not only tending and tenderness both physically and emotionally, but around ensuring someone has a good death and a proper burial—a duty, an embrace of care that goes beyond life.

I know the context and kind of received meaning of this quote has to do with queerness (remind me, please, to write an essay on my Theory of Queer Chivalry and Courtly Love please, this quote being fig. 1) but I also think this is just what you sign up for when you love someone, particularly a small creature with a shorter lifespan than your own. You sign up, knowing that it’s rotten work. Everything from like, very regularly handling his poop and denying him things he very badly wants because they will make him sick, to making difficult decisions around his health and wellbeing, to some day, in all likelihood, watching him die. But also, it’s not so rotten, after all—what else can you do but tend, but care, but perform the work and fret about it, but do whatever you can to ensure this small creature is happy and lives the longest, most luxurious life the two of you can manage, even if it is, occasionally, marred by discomfort.

My dog is not dying, but I’m also not going to lie or sugarcoat it—it is absolutely, truly, rotten work to care for him right now. It is bad in nearly every way it could be bad—I feel nearly frantic at seeing my dog in pain, I am repulsed by the stuff his body is doing to heal itself, I am constantly worried that I’m going to mess it/him/our relationship up somehow, I hate that I can’t explain to him why I am causing him additional pain and discomfort.

But also, its him, and its me.

Dia itself is gorgeous—an old Nabisco box factory with huge windows to let the printers ensure that their work was correct, huge rooms once filled with tons of industrial presses and now with acrylic and canvas and barbed wire and glass and fabric and latex and dirt and beeswax and wood and metal. I loved many of the things I saw there—I’m going to think for a long time about my encounter with Meg Webster’s Wall of Beeswax, and I love seeing On Kawara’s date paintings whenever I encounter them—but I think the piece(s) I want to think through today are Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses.

There are three of them, taking up the entire basement level of the museum—concrete floors, reinforced windows that begin ¾ of the way up the walls, towering overhead. It was a hot day when we visited, sunlight streaming in, playing over the walls of Serra’s leaning, rusted steel behemoths.

The photos don’t really do it justice, but they start giving you an idea of what it might be like to encounter these pieces. I think a photo of my friend standing inside one of the ellipses might be better.

Each piece is an open/enclosed space, inviting and forbidding at the same time. You are invited to interact with the pieces by walking around and into them—they guide you, through passages, into inner chambers, alternatively pushing in on you and granting you space. The walls are patterned and scuffed and marred. They look like the things they are, which is steel sheets, curved and bent to create internal spaces and external angles. In these sculptures there are traces of shipyard and border wall and canyon—curved and rusted, human and industrial. Inside, our voices resonated—there was, when I went, a dad also visiting that blew a small shrill whistle inside each one of the Torqued Ellipses, just to hear the sound of it, but the less said about that guy, the better I think. When I walked into one, the air got warmer, took on that tinge of slightly metallic smell—blood or mineral. These are pieces with a presence that goes beyond the mere physical.

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There are two distinct approaches in understanding the divine. The first is cataphatic theology, or the via positiva. The word comes from ancient Greek—kata- is an intensifier, and phanai is to speak. An intensive, affirmative speaking of the divine, speech so intense as to encompass God. You’re familiar with it if you’ve ever been to a worship service. “How Great is our God,” “God is Good, All the Time,” “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” even “Amazing Grace,”—all these songs uncover a corner of the divine by naming it and praising it—the fountain of blessings, the greatness, the grace, so amazing that it saved even a wretch. I think a lot of our more mainstream, church-y religion belongs to a cataphatic tradition. We gather in churches to see, to understand, to experience the divine in some way, and we usually do it by accreting language, words, images to it, by trying to encircle it and pin it down.

There is another kind of theology, apophatic theology, the via negativa. Apo- in Ancient Greek means “other than,” and “apophasis” was a denial, but I think it’s fascinating to think of apophatic theology as other-than speech, about happening in some register outside of words. It recognizes that language cannot possibly begin to describe the Divine. It’s common in the mystical traditions—I’m thinking about The Cloud of Unknowing, The Mirror of Simple Souls, the work of Simone Weil. All of these describe approaching a miracle, approaching God and finding mystery, absence, something uncontainable or unknowable. This theology I think resonates far more closely with me than the affirmative, often buddy-buddy God of my childhood, feels truer to the way I understand both God and the world. It’s the God of Annie Dillard’s “Expedition to the Pole,” foolishly approached by Victorians in light wool uniforms and an out-of-tune worship band, too strange and holy to be comprehended but here we are, hat in hand, trying anyways.

This is not to say that I don’t love the occasional cataphatic bubbling over—what else is something like, say Sagrada Familia, if not an exuberant affirmation of the names and faces and aspects of God? Most cathedrals—gilded altarpieces, niches and relics and plaques and paintings—belong to a cataphatic tradition.

Richard Serra was inspired by a church to create the Torqued Ellipses—a cathedral called San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, dating to the 1600s in Rome, in a Baroque style—cataphasis at its most exuberant. While standing in the nave, Serra mistakenly thought that the nave and the dome above it were offset from each other, putting the entire structure on a slant. The Torqued Ellipses are an exploration of that idea—the monumental, offset—but I would argue also, of the idea of a cathedral.

When you step into a church like Notre Dame or Sagrada Familia—these soaring stone creampuffs—the air has a smell (a thousand years of smoke), and is cool against your sweaty skin. Your eyes are flooded with color and light, you might hear an organ or a choir thundering through the space. It is meant to make you feel a certain way, to put your body in a certain relationship to space and God and majesty. Serra’s small cathedrals also are designed to put your body into a certain relationship, to make you feel alternately crowded and spacious, large and small, to overwhelm your senses. It’s not so simple as magnifying and echoing you, the human standing inside it, although there is some of that—your voice echoing, the smell of metal which has a distinctly dirty-clean human element to it (not clean skin like your favorite rice-note perfume but rather clean blood, warm and nourishing even as it is horrifying), the warmth emanating from the steel echoing the warmth of your body. But also—rusted metal, void of decorations, reminiscent of the factory and the battlefield and the border, no marks but those of accident and industry, the inorganic straight line and hard, smooth wall. This is a church where an uncomfortable, discomfiting God lives, one that goes beyond simple assurances.

I recently finished reading my friend Mac Loftin ( #onhere2)’s book, In the Twilight of the Christian West: A Theology of Mourning and Resistance. It’s out in November, and I have to say—you should just go ahead and place your preorders. It’s about how a theology of absence and grief, drawn largely from medieval mystics and the apophatic spiritual traditions of World War II, should shape our reactions to the world, as we know it, coming to an end, and why Christianity calls us to stand in solidarity with the ending of the Christian West. I had to read it fairly quickly3, and so am mostly, at this point, a jumble of impressions and feelings about it, but I think it centered for me the importance of grief and uncertainty as central to both Christianity and for just living a moral life in the midst of strife.

There is a lot in this world of late that has left me full of uncertainty and grief and powerlessness—from the increasing militarization and frequency of ICE raids, arrests and deportations to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I do not know how to understand these experiences and events, how to begin to reckon with the fact that harm is being done now that cannot be undone. I feel constrained and hampered by my own body, by the extent of my disempoweredness. I am not looking for the comfort of worship, for the accretion of language to a grief I can barely begin to understand. I am in search of something barer, something that matches the way I feel, the way the world feels. Serra’s Torqued Ellipses feel like they are containers for this uncertainty, cathedrals for the absence of an understandable God.

Note: Another good way to combat anger, powerlessness and uncertainty is to get involved in your community or the world. If you’re still struggling to figure out how to get involved, this is perhaps the right time to look for a Know Your Rights workshop, a bystander intervention training, or some other way that goes beyond your money or your clicks so you feel prepared to step in when you see injustice in action.

Where I’ll Be:

• Nothing coming up immediately, BUT if you’re looking for a good speaker for your organization, a teacher for a class or workshop, or a convo partner for your book event, get in touch!

What I’ve Written:

• For Christian Century, a piece on cooking at the end of the world, and the role that the quotidian plays in anchoring me to life

• For America’s Quarterly, a review of Daniel Saldaña Paris’ new novel, The Dance and the Fire, which thrilled my little medievalist weirdo heart—would recommend.

What I’m Reading:

• Kathleen Norris’ Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writers’ Life. I’ve been on a mini-Norris kick of late, and while Amazing Grace didn’t totally resonate, this book is (un)fortunately ringing me like a bell.

2

I actually think his latest newsletter is probably of interest if you liked this newsletter:

Staurology

Where is theology's avant-garde?

It’s been almost a year since I’ve written on substack, mostly because at the start of this year I was brought on as a columnist at The Christian Century, and so if I have an idea for a short essay I’d rather send it to them and get paid than write here for free. I had been planning on using this substack as a place for half-baked ideas, or things I don…

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9 months ago · Mac

I was going to write a post today, something kind of light and lovely, about getting the flowers yourself, about making a home and a space for light and beauty, on having and creating the material conditions necessary for others to connect, on being porous to the world, Clarissa-Dalloway-as-Queen-of-Pentacles. It’s the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s novel ostensibly about a woman throwing a party, said to take place “on a Wednesday in mid-June.” I love Mrs. Dalloway—I’ve read it a number of times, most meaningfully in grad school, for Stephanie Paulsell’s class on Virginia Woolf and religion, have thrilled to the way it leaps from character to character, the way it seems to mimic the best parts of living in a city, the way it makes room for everyone to have a voice and a mind.

I’ve been re-reading Mrs. Dalloway to prepare for writing this, and have ended up instead with my phone propped between the pages of the book, watching reel after reel, reading article after article about the increasingly violent, brazenly illegal ICE arrests in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and also, the increasing state violence against protestors who are rising up to defend their communities. When ICE patrol cars are rightfully being set ablaze, when families are being torn apart, what does a Wednesday in mid-June 100 years ago matter?

I don’t have a great answer to this question, other than to think about time.

Mrs. Dalloway is obviously not only about a wealthy woman throwing a party. It’s a novel about aftermaths, anchored very concretely in time—we hear the clock chime at every half-hour, we know the day of the week and the month and the year (1923). It is a novel of building anticipation set in a variety of nested aftermaths. Clarissa Dalloway is in the aftermath of an unnamed illness (in all likelihood the Spanish flu) that has left her thin and pale, all of London is in the aftermath of the first World War, and we see it touching on characters—Miss Kilman is bitter and lonely, shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith feels himself to be guilty of a great crime. You could even argue that the novel is about the aftermath of youth—all the great patterns set in motion, and nevertheless the youthful ambitions and loves and dramas rising back up to haunt our characters.

In a lot of ways, Mrs. Dalloway is a book that looks around a shelled, shaky version of the world and asks “…what now?”

We are not currently in an aftermath, we are in the emergency. Things are happening now in our neighborhoods and our cities, in our governments and on our streets that have implications for generations. Some of us are better insulated than others—no one is knocking at our doors, some of us can afford the party, afford the brain space to think about the party.

There’s a sense in which Clarissa is porous to the suffering of Septimus Warren Smith—she feels the moment of his death in her body, she goes up to her little attic room and away from the light and glitz of the party to really feel it, to be more present. However, she also basically stamps her foot, feels like this news has ruined her party, resents the intrusion.

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I have read this book generously before, have listened to Stephanie Paulsell describe virginal, contemplative Clarissa as a nun, praying for and taking in the world from her little slice of London, have read her porosity as care. This time, I was short on generosity—I found myself impatient with the flowers, impatient at the gossip, at the willingness to let the generative, argumentative friction of youth go in favor of a soft, supported adulthood. I’m impatient with her hand-waving dismissal of the Albanians or Armenians or whoever and their suffering, infuriated at her daring to feel Septimus’ death on a kind of coequal footing. I suspect this impatience, this anger has more to do with how I feel about myself than how I feel about Clarissa Dalloway.

I feel alienated and disempowered, tired and angry, unsure even of how to speak out about this, how to clear my throat just to say the obvious thing, the thing I’ve been saying all along. People deserve safety, deserve our care, deserve not to be picked up and deported. Immigrants do not get their value from their hard work, from their being mothers or children, from following the laws and jumping through hoops. And yet: I’m packing tonight for a trip to the west coast to watch my sister graduate and my friend get married, I’m going to hand over a REALID at the airport and board a plane like it’s nothing, I just got my nails done to match my outfit for the wedding, I’m wondering what earrings to pack. The flowers are well taken care of.

More vulnerably: I wrote a book about immigration and about getting involved in your community and I find myself strangely wordless, feel like a cheap poser activist more attached to the label than the work in this moment. Yeah, I’m doing work with the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, but I’m mostly at home, sending emails. I wonder if this whole newsletter isn’t me hiding behind, say, needing to re-read the entirety of Mrs. Dalloway and pack for a trip rather than trying to get my feet on the ground. It is so fucking easy to stay complacent, to fuss about getting ready for the party and obsess over my own comfort than stay in these places of anguish and heartbreak, and its easy to retreat into this little shell of yourself. It’s one thing to feel the death, the suffering of another person in your body, to pull yourself away from the party, it’s another entirely to put your actual body on the line, to plunge into the heart of it.

I’m not ready to discard Mrs. Dalloway—there’s something there, something I’ve written about before that lives at the heart of all Virginia Woolf books—she writes, ultimately, about care, about the little flame of subjectivity and personhood that lives at the heart of everyone. She sometimes fails in her writing of people that are very different from her—those in different social classes, races, religions—but there’s also a kind of deep understanding of personhood at the heart of her work.

There’s also a way to read Mrs. Dalloway as a book about creating a space for care—she says she wants her party to be the kind of place where people go beyond themselves, where their every need is met and they can attend to….something else, something beyond the spiritual realm. I got asked, once, very insistently, by a panel moderator why I had made a book about such ugly things so beautiful, and the answer then, as it is now, is that beauty does not cease to be a human need, even in difficult conditions. The thing we fight for when we fight is not just survival but the right to beauty—to determining what beauty is, and to laying a claim to it for ourselves, the right to build a beautiful life. But I think, right now, that should not be the focus. We are not in the aftermath, where building a new world seems possible. We are in the emergency, and we need to fight like hell to make sure we bring as many people as possible with us to build that new world—that people and families stay whole and unbroken.

This is all to say (and I say it to myself here, primarily) : by all means, go get the flowers yourself, but also, perhaps, throw a brick or two on the way.

Midwest Immigration Bond Fund is having to close their application for the first time this year. We only close when we run out of funds, and this year has been tough. The rise of electronic monitoring has meant it is tougher for people to fulfill their bond conditions (ankle monitors running out of battery, glitchy apps to report to, rapidly changing rules and regulations), and showing up to immigration court isn’t exactly a safe thing for anyone right now, so we are understandably getting fewer bonds back. In addition, bond amounts have been going up substantially—we’re now regularly seeing bonds between $7,500 and $15,000, as opposed to the median bond for FY 2024 of $5,000. Donations from individuals and our community are the main ways that we’ve been able to get 38 people out of immigration detention this year, help us make it 39 by giving us a few dollars.

A quick note to remind you that my workshops are coming up:

Dear Diary: Building a Sustainable Journaling Practice is a class where we’ll talk about how to get the most out of your journal—and how to make it a flexible, beautiful part of your day-to-day life that grows and changes as your needs do. I’ll be offering it on Saturday, June 28, 2025 from 11-1 ET, and on Sunday, June 29 from 7-9 ET.

Translation as Obsessive Re-Reading is a class where we will be exploring translation as if it were a form of obsessive reading: a way of personally creating and recreating those texts that fascinate us. Using the reflections of authors/translators such as Kate Briggs, Mireille Gansel and Rosario Castellanos, we will investigate how to create a translation practice that coexists with reading and writing. Class will be Saturday, July 29th from 3-5 pm E.T.

Paid subscribers get a 25% discount, so subscribe today! HOWEVER IF YOU DONATE AT LEAST $10 TO THE MIDWEST IMMIGRATION BOND FUND AND SEND ME YOUR RECEIPT, I WILL ALSO GIVE YOU THAT DISCOUNT CODE. Paid subscribers: Discount codes can be found at the foot of this email.

May started out beautifully—I received an alumni award from Harvard Div, and got to go back to Cambridge and see the lilac bushes and my parents and many of my favorite professors, got to experience the absolute wonder of a ceremony organized by a committee of clergy and people who understand the power of ritual. I think most importantly to me, I felt seen and loved by a community that matters to me so, so deeply. I cried literally the whole time, for a lot of reasons that I’m still teasing out, but that had a lot to do with the marked contrast between how I felt here, and how I felt in my day to day life.

Am I romanticizing my grad school experience? Almost certainly. Should I expect to feel like I’m winning a deeply meaningful and affirming award every single day? No, I guess not. But I think the thing that most hit was how good it felt to be understood and appreciated for the work that matters the most to me. My calling is not anything particularly complex or obscure—I make nice sentences that try to uphold human dignity. That’s kind of it, that’s my whole deal. But I was in a workplace that either passively or actively devalued all of that, while also saying, “no, no we really care about these things, we love art and also human dignity.” And I think that contrast was what really became plain that day in Cambridge.

And so, after spending a weekend with being coddled as I got an absolutely horrifying fever/cough combo on her couch, I came home intent on changing my life….

Just as soon as this big fundraiser at work was over.

And I did it! Two weeks later, I worked the fundraiser, watched the organization raise a ton of money, coordinated 13 visiting artists, bound programs, orchestrated a ludicrously successful paddle raise, did the kind of logistics work that makes my brain go brrt….and then three days later, got laid off.

And so, for the last two weeks, I’ve been unemployed.

I’m ok—I have healthy savings, an active freelancing vibe, I have health insurance through my husband, I’m applying to new things which was a thing I meant to do anyways, and, best of all I’ve felt healthier and clearer in the last two weeks than I did any day at that job for the last nine months. And now I’m in a space of figuring out what comes next—a PhD? another comms job? Trying (again) to give freelancing a full-time go while working on another book? I feel a little bruised and uncertain, a part of the normal human experience and yet, such a uniquely humbling time whenever I experience it.

All of that being said—I’m coming back to this newsletter with renewed meaning and intention, it’s a great time to become a paid subscriber (hint hint)

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and not just because of that, but because, at long last, I’ll be offering my journaling workshop, as well as some other fun things on Zoom for the first time, and paid subscribers get a 25% discount (check the footer of this email if you’re a paid subscriber!)

Dear Diary: Building a Sustainable Journaling Practice is a class where we’ll talk about how to get the most out of your journal—and how to make it a flexible, beautiful part of your day-to-day life that grows and changes as your needs do. I’ll be offering it on Saturday, June 28, 2025 from 11-1 ET, and on Sunday, June 29 from 7-9 ET.

I’m also trialing a new-ish workshop called Translation as Obsessive Re-Reading! I first taught this as a bilingual English-Spanish workshop for Lit & Luz Festival back in October, and you’ll notice that this one is at a discount—mostly because it’s my first time teaching it as a language-pair-agnostic workshop, and I expect there will be a few bumps! This is the only time I’ll be teaching this class at this price, so if you’re at all interested, please do sign up. Class will be Saturday, July 29th from 3-5 pm E.T.

Beyond that—if you’ve ever wanted to hire me to talk to your org, bring me in for a class visit, write for your publication, buy my book, whatever—this is a great time to get on the books.

The next newsletter is going to be on the 100th anniversary of a certain Wednesday in mid-June, and we are going to get the flowers ourselves.

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Where I’ll Be:

• “Following the Thread: Well Researched Writing” - Thursday, June 19, 2025, 7 pm CST, ZOOM—The Writers League of Texas invited me to participate in this fantastic panel with Eiren Caffal and Isa Arsen, to talk about our research practices. For me, research falls into one of those “I always want to ask 800 very nosy questions about people’s processes” so this will be very fun.

• “Dirty Kitchen: A Virtual Reading and Conversation” - Wednesday, June 25, 2025, 7 pm CST, ZOOM - Jill’s new book, Dirty Kitchen, is a fucking incredible memoir of growing up undocumented in the U.S. that weaves in food and myth and theory. Here’s what I said about it in my blurb: "Jill Damatac brings together myth and memory, history and hauntings, colonialism and catharsis and seats them around her table. Any reader of Dirty Kitchen is in for a feast when they pull up a chair." It’s good, we are going to have a good chat.

What I’ve Written:

• I wrote about my post-Marilynne Robinson Reading supercharged protestant molecules for Christian Century

• for Presbyterian Outlook, I wrote about Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, and nonviolent resistance

• For Injustice Report I wrote about art and community and the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund.

  The Injustice Report

  Community & Poetry & Liberation

  At the end of April, on Independent Bookstore Day, I had the absolute honor of helping to pull together an event—a teach-in and reading for the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund at Pilsen Community Books here in Chicago…

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  a year ago · 6 likes · Alejandra Oliva and Injustice Report

What I’m Reading:

• A bunch of things I can’t talk about (yet), between applications for orgs, books I’m reviewing, and books I’m blurbing (all I’ll say for now is…you had best preorder ’s forthcoming Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History). Between all of that, I’m listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry and reading Adriana Herrera’s Las Leonas series—Caribbean heiresses take Paris, in a very fun, queer, sexy way.

I’m in the midst of a re-read of Rebecca May Johnson’s incredible book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen. Ostensibly, this began because I wanted to write an essay about it for one of my regular columns at the Christian Century, or at least an essay that glanced off it in some way. I’ve written about Small Fire and feeding The Other before—for Presbyterian Outlook1, in one of my favorite essays2, but this is the first time I’m re-reading since about a year and change ago.

The real reason I think I’m re-reading it is because I’ve been a little disenchanted lately. Part of that is with my reading—in the last 6 weeks or so I have worked through 21 books for CLMP, 35 applications for Chicago’s Individual Artist Program grant, 2 books for a Q&A I’m doing this weekend, and while many of the things I read were incredible, they were also…not really my choice to read, and there was a certain kind of pace I had to hit to get all of it done before the various deadlines. Reading as a(n occasionally joyful) chore. However, the feeling goes beyond that. Lately, I feel a mounting sense of dread any time I have to grocery shop or pick recipes, feeling exasperated and exhausted, idly wondering about crossing the Soylent rubicon. I went to the doctor’s for my annual yesterday and filled out their little depression screening, looked down at it when I was done, and said, “oh, yikes.” Things are weird and bad right now for reasons both internal and external to my life, and it’s time to look for more sources of enchantment.

This week, Small Fires has been that source of enchantment. If you’re not familiar—Rebecca May Johnson brings the tools of literary criticism to bear on the idea of the recipe, and you end up with essays on cooking as performance, as translation (if you’ve ever read anything else I’ve written, you can see the sparks going off in my brain here), as gender, as kink, as play, as negotiation, as care. I’m someone who cooks dinner every night, and I’m also someone who theorizes the everloving shit out of well, everything, and Johnson’s book is an invitation to do just that.

The thing about Small Fires is that it itself feels like a recipe, like an invitation to play. I want to, in Johnson’s own framing (!!!), perform the book in my own kitchen, walk my own food autobiography through the steps of her reasoning, re-examine my own hands and habits under the lenses she provides throughout the book. I want my disenchanted sigh at my refrigerator doors, to be transformed, under her sparkling vision, to a questioning head tilt—what is the source of my dread, why do I need to feel enchanted with myself as a home cook? I want to think about the chilaquiles I’ve made since college in the same way she does the red, hot pasta sauce that threads its ways through the chapters of the book.

Back in grad school, I wrote an essay about the eucharist as a translation. The very origins of the practice are “translated” four times, once through the eyes of each of the four evangelists. It’s every repetition is a translation, with all the same holes and bagginess through which meaning escapes and enters the translation of any text—the “misfires” as Amy Hollywood puts it, through which possibility and play enter the ritual. Into this essay I brought Annie Dillard (“Expedition to the Pole”) and Anne Carson (Decreation)—in other words, I made it my own, populated it with my own greatest loves. I wanted, in it, to suggest that the eucharist, like a translation, was both a site of grave importance and a site of play, that the Holy Mysteries of what happened at the altar were subject to other, very earthly mysteries. In the words of Annie Dillard: “A high school play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one… Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter.” I got a B on it, largely because my theology was bad, but I still think of it often as an essay in which I wrote a true thing that I believe, which is to say: that real life is holy, and playful, and that mistakes and refusals and misfires, that the reality of our human bodies engaged in these holy mysteries—this is what allow that holiness to come through, rather than blocking it.

I think Small Fires more than anything, reminds me that the things that we do every day are worthy of the most attention, that our hands among ingredients and among our friends change the world and our tastes every day. It’s one of the first books I’ve really read that affirms this idea, that honors the desire and the hunger of the everyday.

Where I’ll Be:

Tomorrow is a doozy!

April 26th, I’ll be moderating an event with the INCREDIBLE Marcelo Hernandez Castillo at Chicago Public Library—he’s keynoting their Poetry Festival, and I’m just lucky I get to yap with him.

Also April 26th! I’m taking part in a reading and teach in to support my beloved Midwest Immigration Bond Fund at the incredible Pilsen Community Books—come thru, buy posters, buy prints, spend a little cash!

May 1st, I’m going back to the old stomping grounds of Harvard Divinity School for the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors. I’m one of the honorees this year, which has me absolutely geeking out, but I think there will be a public component to the program that you can sign up for.

What I’ve Written

I wrote a Lenten reflection for Commonweal about losing faith in institutions to protect us and finding a new way forward.

I wrote a review of We Are Green and Trembling for Americas Quarterly—it’s the story of a former Spanish nun turned swashbuckler in the New World—a really beautiful weird story that nevertheless glosses over some historical issues that deserve a little more consideration.

And finally, for Injustice Report—I wrote about Necrocapitalism and the immigration system—a consideration of the remarks and actions of the administration from the last week or so.

The Injustice Report

Immigrants as Prime Deliveries, Immigrants as Financial Ghosts

A few weeks ago, Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told the crowd at the Border Security Expo that he wanted to see a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings…

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a year ago · 10 likes · Alejandra Oliva and Injustice Report

Since I’m on a tight deadline this week, and also, I love this piece, I thought I’d send out the keynote lecture I delivered for October’s Lit & Luz Festival. I love Lit & Luz so much—it’s a nearly perfect, very weird, bilingual literary/arts festival. It is also biannual: Chicago in October and CDMX the following March, and includes cross-border collaboration and conversation between Chicago and Mexican artists. I’ve loved attending and participating whenever possible, and I was thrilled to be offered the opportunity to keynote the festival in Chicago last year.

While it very clearly is angled towards a specific time and place and audience, I stand by it, even now, after the election, after everything that’s happened since October.

This year’s theme for Lit & Luz is the idea of saturation, saturación. It’s a theme inspired by what it feels like to be a person alive and sort of absorbing media during an election year, the absolute overwhelm and inundation that comes along with it. While Mexico has gotten theirs over with, here in the US we are just about a week and a few days out, and things really feel like they’re reaching total saturation, and that saturation is intense! It feels like every election I’ve been able to vote in has been described as “the most important election of our lifetimes.” And the worst part is—that they are! They have been!

There is so much to care about, so much at stake, both for ourselves and our safety and peace of mind, for our friends and families, but also for the lives of thousands of people we may never meet. Here in the United States, our election season has included discussions of immigration, and whether or not this country should undertake mass deportations of undocumented people, whether we should close our doors to migrants, to people at our doors, asking for our help. There are also questions of resources. How, as a nation, are we spending our money? Are we spending it to make the lives of the people that live here easier and kinder, to provide necessary services to everyone who calls this country home, or to buy bombs that have killed men, women and children across the globe in Gaza?

In Mexico, the issues people voted back in June on were, among others, also questions of migration and of resources—would they continue collaborating with the United States to militarize their borders, to turn back migrants, often violently? Would they continue allowing multinational corporations to use Mexican resources extractively, leaving behind decimated ecosystems, uninhabitable places that in turn displaced people from their homes?

These are not light questions, they are questions of survival, they are questions that ask us, at a deeply moral and personal level, to think of people other than ourselves. The promise that elections make us is that we, as a citizenry (and more on that in a minute), get to answer those questions—but that’s a promise that rarely, if ever, gets borne out. Every cycle, elections involve a tremendous amount of organizing, of activism, of demanding better from our disque representatives within and without the system—and also a tremendous amount of frustration as the understanding sinks in that there are limits to our voices in political systems that, in both countries, are saturated with money, with greed, with the detritus of capitalism.

Let us stay here, for a minute, on this idea of the citizenry. “Citizenship” as it were, in this country, is a highly conditional state—conditional on your birthplace, the amount of money in your bank account, on your arrest record—and therefore often on the color of your skin. This citizenship that voting promises grants you a voice in our electoral system is already a narrowed, limited view of who lives in our neighborhoods, who makes up our families, who sits around our tables and makes up our community.

And I think with all of that in the air this year—these limited, hamstrung ways in which we’re given a voice on issues that matter en nuestras entrañas, down to our bones— the main feeling I have, what I am saturated with, if you will, is grief. Is this the best we can do? To argue for, not the flourishing, not the health, not the growth but rather the bare-bones survival of our fellow humans? Of the earth itself? To continually place questions of capital in opposition to living beings and watch as time and time again, the system decides in favor of finance? These are questions that are so lacking in care and compassion and imagination that I can only feel grieved that this is where we are.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact, I feel like every time I talk to someone about, you know, everything that’s going on there’s denial, there’s anger, there’s bargaining, there’s depression. There’s a lot of depression.

What I am not seeing—and this is probably more down to the caliber of my friends and loved ones than an overall mood—but what I’m not seeing is acceptance. I’m seeing people continuing to fight, continuing to protest, continuing to make their plans for liberation despite this huge, hugely expensive political machine grinding its way to election day. And I’d argue that that, too, is a different kind of saturation.

In an essay written in the aftermath of 9/11, the philosopher Judith Butler argues that grief—that desolation at the loss of the other, at dispossession from a community or place, perhaps at the feeling that your country itself has lost its way—that grief shows us the ways and places in which we are entangled with each other. “Let’s face it,” they write. “We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

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We are undone by each other, but in that, we are also made up of each other. I am made up of my dad’s curiosity, my mother’s stubbornness, my sister’s honesty, my sibling’s righteousness, my husband’s tenderness, my teachers’ lessons, my friends' humor and their creativity and their care. I am made up of, my politics are made up of the countless conversations I’ve had with folks who came to the US to find safety for themselves and their families, of the long talks with colleagues and comrades who are working to make the world a better place, of the people who took the time to correct me when I was ignorant or misinformed. I am made up of all the art that’s moved me and the artists who have made it, the books that have changed me and the people who wrote them. To zoom out even more: I am made up of Lake Michigan and the trees in my front yard and the squirrels that live in them, the Skokie Lagoons and the blue herons and the muskrats I saw every week this summer. I would be undone without them. I would guess that you probably have your own list of beings that you are made up of too, maybe overlapping and intersecting with mine, your own list of characteristics you borrowed or inherited or learned from the people you love the best, ideas you cribbed from conversations and art, places and people and creatures that feel like home.

This, in itself, is another kind of saturation. It’s an acknowledgement that we are permeable, that everything we are we owe to other people, that we exist in webs of if not love and community then at the very least mutuality. An acknowledgement that we are undone by each other—that without the other we would be lost to ourselves. This is not always an easy acknowledgement, particularly when we live in such an individualistic society, one that elevates self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your boot-straps, one that tells us that someone who can’t stand alone is weak. But if I can convince you of anything this afternoon, it is to lean even farther into that saturation, to not just acknowledge but to celebrate the ways in which we are entangled and porous, in which we are woven one into the other.

Take language—I’m a translator, I work between English and Spanish, transferring one to the other and back. There’s something all-encompassing about translation—it takes your whole brain, obviously, in making connections and deciphering new ways to say the same thing, but it also takes your body—gut feelings and the memories so deep they’re stored in your bones.

When I speak Spanish, I’m speaking the language of Cortez and Malintzin, Sor Juana and Gioconda Belli, Cervantes and Marquez. It’s also my own language—the words taught to me by my mother when I was just learning to ask for what I wanted, the made up language composed of malapropisms of my siblings and I as we were learning to talk, the borrowed words from English, the patterns of sentences and 1980s slang I unknowingly absorbed from my parents ways of speaking and made my own.

This language is the water I stand in, the well I draw from. There are tributaries feeding my spot in the river, both above and below the earth. This same river, a little further upstream, is the one the 17th century poet nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz drew from, and when I say the word “mujer” or the word “fe,” these are words that have been fundamentally altered by her having written about them some 300 years ago. The Spanish she wrote, in turn, was as influenced by her time in the Viceroy’s court as a lady-in-waiting as it was by the Nahuatl she learned from her mother’s household staff as a child; as influenced by the Spanish of Hernan Cortez who had first come to Mexico just 129 years before her birth as by the language of Malintzin, the Nahua woman who served as his interpreter, his slave and the mother of one of his children. This was the water Sor Juana drew from, and what she returned to the river was forever altered by having passed through her hands.

When I speak or write, my words flow out from my own little eddy to rejoin the wider stream—my turns of phrase become part of the Spanish that exists in the world, just as Sor Juana’s did, able to be picked up and passed around, drawn up to drink from and to be appropriated by another wader. In this way, language is made up of the personal and the cumulative—each of us standing in our own space, absorbing the words around us and contributing to the greater stream. Like the waters of the river, it’s an inevitable, inseparable commingling of the collective and the individual. Language would not work if we could not share it, but the individual impressions we leave and the baggage we bring with us on each word we say matter too.

Language, and writing, this thing I’ve given my life to, this thing that permeates me, is the result of this same kind of interweaving, allows us to bring into our minds friends and strangers alike, the genius of Sor Juana and the equal, if different, genius of whatever teen girl first gave us, “pero, like.” All this language is all the more powerful for having been co-created—every conversation a miracle of individuality and collaboration.

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Literature and art are places where that interrelation is easier to celebrate because we have practices for it, names for it. We can call it citation or acknowledgement or collaboration or reference or homage, and art gives us language to be deliberate and generous in pointing out the places where our work shows the way we are saturated in the work of others.

And that is, essentially, what we are here to celebrate this week, during Lit & Luz—the building of relationships, the artistic interdependencies between two countries, the celebration of the ways we have, despite borders and politics and distance, wrapped our minds around the same questions, made the world clearer by using each other’s work like lenses.

It is a very specific kind of acknowledgement of who we are to one another. The collaborations that this festival makes space for highlight the ways that our passions and talents and interests fit together to create a more coherent, more vibrant whole, shows us that engaging in this kind of togetherness can lead in surprising new directions. And so then what is left to us, as artists and audience (if such a distinction can be made) but to take these lessons and carry them out into the world, into what remains of this election year and beyond it.

I have talked a little bit already about how difficult and frightening it can be to acknowledge that we are reliant on each other, and I think that fear is over and over again reflected in our isolationist, nativist national policies. Big beautiful border walls and mass deportations and, for that matter, sharply curtailing asylum and not acknowledging the presence or the human rights of the millions of undocumented people who already live in this country—these are all reflections of that fear.

I think that the grief that I opened this talk with, the presentiment of loss that many of us are carrying around these days is, in fact, an absence of that fear. It is an acknowledgement of how much we have to lose by the separation and fragmentation of our communities, an acknowledgement of how much we have already lost. It can be so easy to let this version of the story be the one that sinks into you, the one that shapes your actions. There are so many ways that the system is set up that lets this grief and these losses feel inevitable, that lets you get saturated with the bad rhetoric and the sadness and the anger. And these are not feelings that are useless—this anger and sadness can take us to the streets, it can push us into demanding change, but they are also unsustainable feelings.

What I am calling you to is not just to vote as interdependent beings but to live like them. To let yourself be saturated not by fear but by the relationships that sustain you. To find ways to use artistic practice of citation and borrowing and referencing and homage in your day-to-day life and name them, even if just to yourself.

“I am making coffee in the way my mom taught me.”

“I am at this protest to honor my friend who can’t come out.”

“I am looking after my neighbors in the way my grandmother looked after me.”

“I understand this issue differently because once, I watched someone online share their life with me in a video and it changed my mind.”

This, too, in its own way, gives us a reason to fight and change things, reminds us that our voices and our actions are strongest when they are collective and embodied, re-embeds us in the communities our political system seek to alienate us from.

We live in a world that seems intent on saturation—whether it’s the TV in the doctor’s waiting room or the doomscroll that’s always a few clicks away on our phone or the endless meaningless political coverage but I think there’s also something of a choice in what kinds of saturation we let in. We can choose instead to fill ourselves up with the people around us, with sun on changing leaves, with favorite books and new ideas and art made by people and not machines. To take the grief and honor its origins in everything beautiful around us. I can’t promise that I’m 100% there, that I’ve figured out to be this completely fearless and politically enlightened figure because again—it’s so hard not to be scared these days, hard not to act out of fear or scarcity or anxiety, but I do think, in joining the world of immigration advocacy, in finding out how to turn a language that binds me into my family and home and safety into a language that I can use to help usher other people into that safety, I took a step in that direction.

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Where I’ll Be:

I’m teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know—I’ve gotten some feedback from you all already, and am tentatively looking at this summer for online, but I will say that teaching this class in person has been really lovely not just for the class itself, but for getting to sit with a bunch of people who are earnestly thinking things through. Next date is April 26th, and there will be another in May!

Also on April 26th, I’ll be moderating an event with the INCREDIBLE Marcelo Hernandez Castillo at Chicago Public Library—he’s keynoting their Poetry Festival, and I’m just lucky I get to yap with him.

May 1st, I’m going back to the old stomping grounds of Harvard Divinity School for the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors. I’m one of the honorees this year, which has me absolutely geeking out, but I think there will be a public component to the program that you can sign up for.

What I’ve Written:

For , I tried to wrap my head around the “deportations” to El Salvador and all the reasons they’re really bad news:

The Injustice Report

Yes, the El Salvador “Deportations” are Really Bad

I’ve been wrestling all week to get my head around the story of the U.S. government deporting non-Salvadoran suspected gang members to El Salvador, against a judges’ orders. I knew I wanted to write about this, but I like to have a different angle on these newsletters beyond “wow, this is really bad, huh?” and my thoughts on this particular series of ev…

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a year ago · 18 likes · 2 comments · Alejandra Oliva and Injustice Report

What I’m Reading:
Still going strong on the CLMP titles for judging the Firecracker Awards—it’s been really fun and also just powering through a LOT of books.

Also still working on Much Depends on Dinner and have started a re-read of Jenny Offil’s Weather, a book I first read in 2020 and feels worth revisiting in these strange days at the turning of a too-warm spring.

I’m not even primarily an embroiderer when it comes to textiles—it’s too hard to do it while reading, so I usually knit (textiling-while-I-read serves the dual purpose of creating sweaters and socks and keeping my hands too busy to pick up my phone). But still, there’s something about identifying myself as an embroiderer—I like the mental image it produces, I like nestling it alongside my literary practices as something else that is at once ornamental and strengthening, that distracts from its own labor with beauty.

A few weeks ago, Tatter Library, a textile archive in Brooklyn, put out a call for volunteers to embroider the names of each of the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire for a memorial banner for the fire’s 114th anniversary, March 25th.

I signed up, and was given the name of Gussie Bierman, a 22-year-old who worked at the factory.

We were given dimensions, and some color ideas (inspired by the colors of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union) and set loose to create our own tributes. I started embroidering Gussie’s name—in a 3-stranded blue chain-stitch, taking up most of my allotted canvas, all the better to stand out—and also started reading. Jason had taken a class that covered the fire back in grad school at NYU, so we had a copy of David von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire that Changed America on our shelves. The book came out over 20 years ago, but I think it’s still one of the most definitive accounts of the fire, based on court testimony and records believed to have been lost in the intervening 90-odd years.

In it, he gives context to the fire—the grueling shirtwaist workers’ strike that had happened the year before, the pogroms and social unrest that many of the Russian Jewish workers had fled, the opportunity a job at the shirtwaist factory might have been for a girl living in a Lower East Side tenement, the factory owners’ greed, the jam-packed, fabric-filled conditions across three floors of a “fire-safe” building with a single available exit.

He gives a minute-by-minute, accounting of the fire, from multiple perspectives—needed because the whole thing lasted no more than a handful of minutes. The fire was started by a careless workers’ cigarette butt in a too-infrequently-emptied scrap bin full of light cotton shirting scraps. Only one door to the outside was unlocked, because the owners wanted to ensure that workers leaving had their bags inspected for stolen product.

He tells about the mounting panic, the dash from one end of the workroom to the other, only to find locked doors. The daring escapes from a rickety ladder on the roof, the crush to get into the elevators, the mad dash down the fire escape, only to have it wrench off the side of the building and send panicked workers into the cellar and the wrought iron fence below. The women trapped against the windows, escaping death by flame with death by free-fall, the women who tried to jump onto the roof of a moving elevator. The sacrifices and the bravery and the sheer, unnecessary horror of it all, compressed into mere minutes of time.

There are so many ways that the stories of the young people that died in this fire fit into the questions we are still facing today—as consumers, as Americans. The Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Bangladesh happened 12 years ago, killing 1,134 garment factory workers—men, women, children. There’s an old Michael Hobbes article I think about all the time about the absolute impossibility of following our clothing manufacture all the way to the end to ensure it’s ethical.

But I think the thing I was most closely thinking about while I was sewing was the work of . Alice’s latest book, The Life and Death of the American Worker takes on the workers at Tyson poultry processing plants in Arkansas. Many of the workers there are undocumented, people who have fled gang and cartel violence, people who are trying their best to make a living but don’t have many options to speak up, to organize because of the fear inherent in their immigration status. The book essentially opens in 2011 with the kind of horrifying industrial accident that is of a piece with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire but also too modern, too low-key to make the news, to change policy—a worker, not properly trained in a language he could not understand, accidentally mixes two chemicals and creates a cloud of chlorine gas in the factory. Workers pass out, sustain permanent lung damage. The company shrugs it off.

Nine years later, during the COVID-19 epidemic, these workers begin to sicken and die. They are dying because of the dangerous conditions imposed on poultry plant workers during the pandemic—the lack of protective equipment, the close quarters, the too-fast speeds, the disincentives to stay home when sick, the precarious employment and immigration status and all of it. However, they are even more susceptible to these issues, faced by all poultry processing plant workers across the U.S., because nine years ago, they survived a chlorine gassing and did not receive adequate medical care in the aftermath. Alice reports all of this—she and her subjects speaking out with incredible bravery against the kind of large, greedy company Sinclair Lewis’ nightmares were made of—and in reporting it, shows that we are facing the same problems now that we were back in the Gilded Age.

One of my favorite podcasts, 5 - 4, has dubbed our dawning administration The Age of Diarrhea thanks to the quickly loosening regulations to benefit corporations. While we are all likely to, uh, experience these deleterious effects, no population will bear the brunt of this deregulation more strongly than those in industries already cutting costs at the expense of their workers.

Even prior to his nomination to the cabinet, Eugene Scalia, Secretary of Labor under Trump’s first administration (and Large Adult Son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin), was part of a long-term plan to discount repetitive motion injury as a question of worker safety—leaving millions of workers across the country with devastating, disabling injuries spanning from carpal tunnel syndrome to chronic pain and inflammation. Workers—many of whom are immigrants and refugees, fleeing their home countries because of fear of violence—come to the U.S. to face potentially deadly and disabling workplace conditions, all in the name of survival. Very little has changed since the day Gussie Bierman first walked into a shirtwaist factory.

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Let me tell you about Gussie Bierman. When she died, at 22 years old, she had been in the United States for 4 years, and was a Russian Jewish emigre, fleeing the pogroms that had shattered her community. She was a union member. Her family identified her body by the watch chain she often wrapped around her neck, and complained that the rings she usually wore were missing. In his book, von Drehle frequently describes her as “matronly in her pince-nez”—a description no 22-year-old would love, I think. In addition to her name and her age, I gave Gussie her signature pince-nez, a needle and thread for her trade and mine, and a sheaf of wheat and a rose—the bread and roses that the striking textile girls of Lawrence, MA would popularize a year after her death. Sustenance and beauty, solidarity and resistance. All of it, all at once.

If you want to support workers’ rights, worker safety, and immigrant rights, there are so many ways and places to do that. Unionize your workplace, and find an organization in your area that does the kind of work towards labor rights that you support—for me, here in Chicago, it’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, for you, it might be someplace else. This is a program that as much as it is federal, is also hugely important on a local level.

Where I’ll Be:

I’m teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know! I have taught this class once before and really loved it, so come through! The first class is on March 29th, and there will be another in April, so sign up now!

What I’ve Written:

For : a piece on Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping and how it follows a pattern of ICE behavior that we’ve seen up until now.

The Injustice Report

Mahmoud Khalil’s Kidnapping is Nothing New

Earlier this week, Jess wrote a fantastic article on the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University student and a Palestinian activist. In it, she covered all the ways in which Khalil’s arrest was a violation of free speech, in which it went against everything we know about our immigr…

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a year ago · 4 likes · Alejandra Oliva

What I’m Reading:

I’m currently reading for CLMP’s Firecracker Awards in nonfiction so the answer is just…a lot of very cool indie-published nonfiction books that I am not at liberty to talk about, just trust and believe that the media landscape outside of the big five is wider and weirder and cooler than you can even imagine.

Still working on Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser, and (re)reading ’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds like a particularly rich and strange ice cream—in small, savoring bites. Delightful.

I’m part of a letter writing project for ICE detainees through the Boston Immigrant Justice Accompaniment Network. Every few months, I’ll get an address for a new pen pal and will sit down to draft a letter to a complete stranger. I only ever know one, maybe two things about this person. Their name, sometimes their country of origin, and always, always, the fact that they are in immigration detention, awaiting court dates that never seem to get any closer until finally, they’re here.

My last pen pal got deported a few weeks ago—I heard from the program coordinator once that he liked hearing from me, but I never got a letter from him. Stamps are expensive, writing is harder for some people than others, any number of reasons, but I tried to write him back whenever I thought about it. Less than was probably good for him. And now he’s back in a country I can only imagine it took him a long time and effort to leave, a place he probably wasn’t ready to return to. I didn’t really know anything about him, but I at least know that, and that makes it hard and awful.

And so this week, I got another new pen pal.

There’s always something terrifically awkward about starting a letter to an absolute stranger. This is just part of the process—every time, I sit in front of a blank note pad and agonize a little bit. How do I hit the balance between talking about myself, and asking questions? What do they want to share about and what questions would fill them with dread? What would be meaningful to them—a poem or a note of solidarity or pretending like the building they’re in doesn’t exist? The answers are different for every person I write to, and ones I often suss out through trial and error, but there’s always that first letter, a blank slate.

And so I start like I always do. “Hi,” I say. “My name is Alejandra, and I live in Chicago with my dog and my husband.” I write my letters by hand because I think it makes them look more human, a step that is maybe only halfway worth it, considering that even when I’m writing to guys in detention in Massachusetts, I’m mailing their notes to a Securus P.O. box in Tampa, where it will be opened, analyzed, and scanned for delivery on a janky, shared, prison-issue iPad. There’s something desperately sad about this new mail system to me—one more step of dehumanization, of isolation, and studies show that incarcerated people feel the same. Of course, it’s theoretically a “safety measure”, but in reality, it does little to make jails safer and instead works to push people towards more expensive forms of communication like costly phone calls and iPad visits. So I hand write my letters, black ink on gridded blue-and-white paper as per regulations. This is so that, even if they won’t get to see the fun envelopes I pick for them, or get the tactile sensation of thin, crinkling notebook paper, or get to see what I might have doodled for them, the colored inks I favor in my own writing, they’ll at least get something out of my round, half-print-half-cursive handwriting, get an idea of a person behind the letter.

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And then what? What does a woman who lives, free and at home, with her dog and her husband in the city of Chicago, who is writing this letter at her work desk, surrounded by her knickknacks, for whom delicious fresh food is a few steps away, who is not afraid of deportation—what do I have to say to a person who has none of those things close at hand? I am not a loved one, who knows what to say to call them back into themselves. I am not a lawyer with helpful information or data on their case. I am a stranger.

This is where my experience helps. I went to an immigration detention facility, privately owned, back at the tail end of 2019—five years ago now, somehow—on a work trip to gather information about these places. It was a good one, as these things go—clean-ish, not overcrowded, and yet, also, indisputably, a prison. High ceilings, nearly no windows, horrible incandescent lights everywhere, no privacy. We were shown the yard, a scorched-looking piece of grass and black top surrounded by chain link, the warden joke that it was hotter n’ hell out there in the summer, so the guys preferred to stay in the gym—a room nearly identical to the dorms except for the fact that it swapped out bunks and showers for a basketball hoop.

Talking to the men incarcerated there, later, they told us that they rarely got any rec time, much less outdoors, even in the more temperate winter. Maybe once or twice a week, depending on whether the guards were in a good mood. They were supposed to get it every day, according to ICE regulations. They missed the sun.

And so, when I pick up my pen to write to someone in immigration detention, I tell them about the weather. When I wrote to my new pen pal last week, we were in one of those dopamine-euphoric days known in a lot of overwintering states as “false spring,” where the sun is shining, it’s only cold if the wind is blowing, and it feels like there’s hope in the air again. And so I told him about it—I told him about the smell of mud out on the prairie, the sort of faint fuzz of green you almost want to see out of the corner of your eye when you look at tree branches, about the sun actually warming you for the first time in months. I told him that I knew it wouldn’t last, that it would be snowing again by next week, but that the sunlight on the leaves made spring feel at least possible. I asked him what he was looking forward to when he got out of detention, asked him what his plans were, told him to stay strong, but the bulk of the letter was just that—stillness and soil and the smell of things being reborn.

This, in short, is nature writing, but not for insight or for beauty, but rather to provide the most ersatz form of connection with the outside world, with the changing of the seasons, in the same way a grainy black-and-white digital copy of my nervous, handwritten note is an ersatz form of connection with me. What I really want to do is not send them a note, not describe to them what spring looks like when it comes, but rather, to let them experience it for themselves, to give them the real thing—human connection and sunlight. Our world isn’t set up for that right now, so instead I keep writing letters, and keep fighting to make them unnecessary.

If you want to send your own letters to incarcerated folks, I don’t know if BIJAN is currently accepting volunteers, but I’d recommend them, or reaching out to Letters for Liberation, which is a really supportive and well-thought-out letter writing project for folks in both immigration and regular lockup.

You can also, always and of course, help pay someone’s immigration bond. The average amount of a bond is around $3,000—an amount that can be out of reach for individuals or families, but becomes achievable when a community comes together. I’m part of the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, but if you want to donate more locally, check out the directory at the National Bail Fund Network.

Where I’ll Be:

I’ll be at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 15-16–you can find my full schedule here!

I’m also teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know! I have taught this class once before and really loved it, so let me know.

What I’ve Written:

For Commonweal, I wrote about the visibility and invisibility of ICE “enforcement actions” and of migrants in and around our cities.

My latest for Christian Century is a love letter to the prairie behind my work, and the community of artists it sustains and that sustain it.

For , I wrote about the cruelty of deporting migrants to the Darien Gap.

The Injustice Report

Panama All Over Again

If you’ve spent time reading about immigration in the last few years, you may have heard about the Darién Gap as a kind of near-mythological hell-on-earth…

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a year ago · 9 likes · Alejandra Oliva

Reading:

Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David von Drehle—I’m embroidering a name for Tatter Blue Library’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory memorial banner, and thought I should do more reading around this. Tatter is making a conscious effort to tie their memorialization of the people who died in that fire to present-day lack of worker protections, so I’d pair this book with ’s incredible The Life and Death of the American Worker.

Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser — I can’t remember if I went out and bought this book after reading about it in ’s newsletter or ’s (both are incredible both readers and writers and I follow their breadcrumbs whenever I can), and I’m so immediately charmed by Visser’s voice here—delightful!

When I first smelled the perfume Fathom V by British perfumer BeauFort, it clanged in my head like a bell. Before you go clicking on that link to read the perfumer’s description of their creation, let me tell you what I smell. To me, it’s a drowned flower shop, all rotting green stems and decaying flowers, tulips drooping in the vase, something bitter and odd down at the very base of it. But as the day goes on, it kind of morphs and shifts into something you’re more likely to smell on the cleanest man you ever dated—a sort of bog-standard, slightly damp and salty cologne, but with a hint of indolic white flowers whispering beneath it all. It smells like civilization, overtaken by nature, like rot and growth and renewal, like a wild beauty you have no hope of understanding. (As a side note, once you do click the link: I hate the bottle design. It looks like a title card for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and might make you distrust the bottles’ contents. Don’t: they are sublime, despite the packaging.)

And then you get to the name of it: it’s taken from a snippet of mocking poetry sung by the spirit Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

I don’t know what it is about these few lines, but they fall into my head at odd moments—the kind of thing I memorized almost by accident, the ways the rhythm and the meaning fill some kind of gap in my brain.

It wasn’t until my ArtHum class, my freshman year of college, that I saw the painting above. I loved the class, but it was at 3 p.m., and almost always in an over-warm, darkened room, all the better to see the slides, so I also napped through a great part of it. By the time we got to the modernists, we were towards the end of the semester, and I can almost imagine myself, straining towards a sunny, May day, a copy of To the Lighthouse in my bag (LitHum was also covering the modernists, believe it or not). Sweating lightly and fidgeting at my desk, and then this painting is displayed on a projector you have to crane your neck a bit to see. It’s a Jackson Pollock painting, any kid raised on a steady diet of PBS could tell you that much. You see the flings and drips of action painting, the way that the work itself became an archive of Pollock’s actions as he walked around the canvas. What you can’t see, not from this pixelated re-creation, are all the other things that are a part of this canvas. The materials list for the painting reads: “Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, key, coins, cigarettes, matches, etc.” It was not just the paint, falling onto the canvas, but the very detritus of Pollock’s life, the contents of his pockets, the nails from the barn he painted in, all transmuted into this canvas.

Art historians often refer to “Full Fathom Five” as a “transitional” piece of Pollock’s—begun on an easel with a palette knife, finished on the floor, paced around and earthy. You get the sense of depths, of things settling to the ocean floor—the blues and greens and whites and blacks, the small objects of everyday life that have come to their final resting place on the canvas. However, the transitions this painting represent go even further: X-ray analysis reveals that, under the sedimentary accumulation of paint, the under-layer contains “a figure, standing with parted legs, whose pose ostensibly determines the placement of the found objects across the painting’s encrusted surface.”

The figure buried beneath paint on Pollock’s canvas takes on an even stranger, wilder significance—humanity subsumed into something far stranger and more natural, breaking loose from body and bone to reflect a different kind of truth.

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I think when I first started this newsletter, I thought I’d be writing a lot more about perfumes—I’m kind of a magpieish collector, I have a neurotic way of choosing my scent in the morning, I journal daily about whatever I’m wearing, but for all I love it, I often don’t have a whole lot to say about it. (The amount of times the word “lovely” appears in my perfume journaling should frankly get me disbarred as a writer.) Fathom V is different. When I first started wearing it regularly, I joked that it was a true nonbinary perfume—I don’t mean gender-neutral, the perfumer’s word for something woodsy/musky and floral/vanilla-y, I mean nonbinary. I don’t totally know what I mean by that, other than: gender but rot it a little bit, make it something, well, rich and strange.

When I made this perfume recommendation/joke to my friend Kat, (who long, long-time subscribers will remember as the author of this perfect essay on Woolf and Thomas Merton and divinity and selfhood), they said: “Oh, like in Orlando!” To which, I, of course, replied “WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY THAT????”

This is what they meant. Orlando is full of moments in which the main character, a seemingly-immortal, gender-swapping poet, throws themself down on the ground in a kind of loose-limbed thrill. Part of it is out of a very British sense of belonging to the land and the trees of your ancestral estate, but some part of it is something stranger and wilder still. Take this bit, most of the way through the book:

“Then, some strange ecstasy came over her. Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while the rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her. She quickened her pace; she ran; she tripped; the tough heather roots flung her to the ground. Her ankle was broken. She could not rise. But there she lay content. The scent of the bog myrtle and the meadow-sweet was in her nostrils. The rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded laughter was in her ears. “I have found my mate,” she murmured. “It is the moor. I am natures’ bride,” she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her load in the hollow by the pool. “Here I will lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. These are wild birds’ feathers—the owls, the nightjars. I shall dream wild dreams. My hands shall wear no wedding ring,” she continued, slipping it from her finger. “The roots shall twine about them. Ah!” she sighed, pressing her head luxuriously on its spongy pillow, “I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life—and behold, death is better. I have known many men and many women,” she continued; “none have I understood. It is better that I should lie at peace here with only the sky above me.”

This moment comes when Orlando is feeling the weight of the ages crash onto her head, all the detritus of having been alive for an age, and being alone and unsure of her art for most of that age. Just around the corner is Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando’s eventual husband, and someone whose nature resonates with her own so deeply that they can communicate without words and across distances—but he has not arrived yet. All we have is spongy bog and resignation and a kind of wild joy in that resignation.

Because it’s not a resignation to nonexistence—Orlando seems to understand that she will go on, even if she stays in the bog, ankle broken, for an age and another age. Instead, what she is consenting to is change. To become as the bog, to be married to it, entwined in it, to become one with the birds and the roots, to find peace after a lifetime of questing. Orlando has just come through the Victorian age, has found her writing purpling and her ring finger itching for lack of a Very Victorian and proper Spouse, and has spent 100 years trying ever so hard—and in this moment, she shakes it all off, a kind of grand and joyful resignation that is also an acceptance of her true nature.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about this sort of resignation, lately, for reasons that I think are probably obvious to a lot of people living through the right-now. But to clarify: My job is frequently frustrating in a kind of life-un-affirming way, the country outside that job is honestly terrifying in a way that feels so huge and unimaginable I cannot wrap my head or my arms around it, and just out back behind my office is a little corner of remnant prairie.

I got to work early the other day, and there was a thick blanket of fog that had settled over everything, making it easy to forget that the prairie is just a wedge of land, ensconced between mid-19th century McMansions. Instead, it felt wild and endless. And so I left my backpack and my coffee thermos in the car and I walked out, looking at grasses and seeds and mud and ice and ghostly trees in the distance. I walked until I could no longer see the building in which I work, until I could no longer see anything but prairie and mist and my own breath pluming out in front of me. I did not throw myself to the ground because it is February in Illinois, but the impulse was there, to feel the grasses close over my head, to sit so still a deer approaches me.

I wanted quiet, I wanted space, yes, but I also wanted to feel like I belonged to this place more than I belonged to my office building, to my computer, to my car, to my phone, to be able to place the responsibilities I have to places like the prairie and to my own body, and those of other people at the center of my life.

It feels as though this moment in time is demanding more from us, from me, than I personally know how to provide, especially because as I fret, the ground shifts beneath me day by day. Gender, in particular, feels less like a comforting, if lightly tossed-on, garment and more like a stranglehold—not because my relationship to it within myself has changed, but because the political realities around it are profoundly different and dangerous feeling. What does being a wife mean in an age of tradwives? What does motherhood mean in an age of forced birth? What can being a woman mean in an age when the government defines your gender as existing before you are even born? I want, not to be resigned to this, but to resist it, to stake a claim for a kind of womanhood that is richer and stranger than the one that dominates the current discourse, for an experience of gender that is weirder and wilder than that which is encoded in our laws. (It always has been, but these stakes feel particularly important these days.)

This is not a time for resignation, but it is a time to consent to change—not the change foisted upon us, but the change we need to enact to resist it. I have a contentious relationship with the Christianity I was raised in, but I think there’s something to the idea that when you become a Christian, you die to the world and to your old, pre-converted self, and become reborn in the church. We have a choice, these days, to be reborn into these times, to consent to change with them not in resignation to the fascist values that feel as though they are permeating everything with so little resistance, but in resignation to our truer, wilder selves, to shake off the mores of our time and to walk into the prairie.

By this, I mean not abdicating responsibility, but rather becoming the people we need to be to survive this moment and to rebuild the next one. We do this by surviving, by beginning to build, by holding fast to what is most beautiful and strange within us and letting go of all the rest. There is some grief in that—for the lost world and the lost lives we may have led, a little twinge of nostalgia for a life that, in all likelihood, never existed—but it also lets us see, clear-eyed, the work that needs to be done.

There is not some better, more radical version of me that is coming to save me, no version of me that will do all the work of organizing and safeguarding and keeping in touch that is not also the me that’s is living through these days, one by one. There is no version of me that is better at resisting the cop and the youth pastor in my head than the one that resists them day by day already—and no version of me better at resisting them outside of my head. I am already that person, and I also need to consent to becoming her, more fully and full-throatedly. I have everything I need in my pockets, I just need to figure out how to take the canvas down from the easel.

I’ve been debating the kind of writing I need to be doing in this time, and I think this newsletter needs to stay a place of books and perfume and beauty, but if you’re interested in a more news-centered approach, I’ve also been collaborating with the amazing Jessica Goudeau and on a new, shared newsletter: . So far, I’ve written essays on the repeal of the Sensitive Locations Memo and ICE raids as well as changes to the NEA, and Jess and Lauren have covered topics as diverse as Elon Musks’ long history with USAID and the focus on Afrikaners in refugee resettlement. Please go check it out, or if you came here from there, welcome!

I’m also committing more wholeheartedly to my writing, and particularly this newsletter. On that note, I’d love to make it more sustainable for me to work on—I usually read a couple of books and spend several hours across a few days or weeks working on these essays, and right now I’m in it for the love of the game.

I also want to acknowledge that things are about to get a lot weirder and harder out in the world for people with my occupations, my identities, and my publicly stated opinions, and I want to keep writing things that feel risky-in-the-current-climate but true-to-who-I-am, and a paywall makes me feel safer doing so. I think the last letter I sent out is a good example of the kind of behind-the-paywall writing you can expect.

All of that said, I’m turning on paid subscriptions. There won’t be a lot behind the paywall to begin with, but that might change as I go. Any support is helpful, but no pressure.

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A few weeks ago, Christian Century published my interview with Martin Dickinson, a leader at the National Cathedral’s Sanctuary Ministry, on what lies ahead for the immigration movement, and on the Migration with Dignity framework recently adopted by the Episcopalian Church.

And as always, my book is available for purchase wherever books are sold. Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration is about translation, God, immigration, and how to change your own life.

At the end of last year, I saw and almost habitually reposted this screencap-of-a-tweet about the best Christmas gift of Harper Lee’s life (presumably):

People replied: “That’s incredible!” “I wish!” and honestly, me too. A secret, stupidly optimistic part of me posted just on the off-chance that one of my limited number of Instagram followers would be like “oh, great idea” and simply venmo me $50,000 (newsletter readers: feel free!), but another part of me, I want to say knows better, or rather knows differently. Not just about the availability of $50k getting thrown about like loose change, but also about what that money means or does. The thing that this tweet gets at, the thing that I’ve been thinking about is this idea of time and space, and it being a gift, and it always having to come in these big kind of grand gestures. I think I’ve been stuck on it in some ways because I had it (sort of) and now I don’t (sort of) and I don’t know how to feel about either. But first, let’s get back to Harper Lee’s Christmas.

There are two parts to the gift, two parts to the myth. The first is the year of financial support, the time. When this gift was given, Lee was living in New York, working at an airline ticket counter and more or less spinning her wheels. What would it be like, then, if she didn’t have to ride the subway all the way out to god-knows-what corner of Queens every day, handling then-immense sums of money and watching other people on their way to places when she was stuck in New York. I am guessing she was doing a lot of the thing that I do, which is to say, complaining that if only xyz was true (she had more time, she had more space, she didn’t have that goddamn commute) maybe she would be able to write more, to actually turn and face this little itch at the corner of her brain, to sit down with the words that kept whispering past. I know that feeling well, have been trapped in that cycle of if only.

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I think all the time of that Alexander Chee essay, “Impostor” which orginally ran in Catapult (R.I.P.) but was reprinted in his book, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. In it, there’s the miracle of a cheap apartment in a lovely part of New York, Chloë Sevigny as a neighbor, and financial windfall—a kind of secret fairytale just for writers. And here are the lines I think about all the time:

I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion. In a room full of writers of various kinds, time is probably the only thing that provokes widespread envy, more than acclaim. Acclaim, of course, means access to money, which then becomes time.

This is, of course, a kind of exaggeration, at least to me—I have many things (not a mink, not a Lexus, not a mansion, but like, nice things), which I love dearly, and also a shared life, with someone I love, that also necessitates the accumulation of things I would not sell for more time, compromises where love and practicality and stability have won over the quest for a spare hour, but I know and understand that hunger for time, for quiet, for pushing things aside in this pursuit to just for one minute, shut the world down. He’s also right that every time I have gotten even a shred of acclaim, there’s always the hope that this is the thing that will break me through, that will make everything else I want to do possible, that I never again have to think about my material needs. When I went to the Whiting Awards ceremony a few years ago, the morning after the party many of us sat around in the hotel’s coffee shop, exchanging kind of relieved gasps at how much this acclaim, this money, this time opened up for us.

The second part of the gift is, of course, To Kill a Mockingbird. A classic of modern American literature, the kind of shining novel most writers can only dream of writing, one that Lee barely dreamt of writing herself. Lee signed with her agent in November of 1956, got the gift in December of 1956, and by spring of 1957, after a frenzy of writing (up to 50 pages a week, for several weeks in a row) had a completed manuscript that her agent sold before the end of the year. Just a few short months of funding made time for writing, for the sale of a manuscript, which led itself to an advance, which in turn led to yet more time to work on and refine the book. We know now, because of the contested, (and in my opinion, unethical) publication of Go Set a Watchman that To Kill a Mockingbird was not always the book it became—that Lee’s original vision for this story was one not of racial reckoning in a town but of racial reckoning within our families, of what it means to discover that the people we love are hardly people to look up to (I do wonder how a more polished version of that book would have fared in 1960s America, how its similar success would have changed the way we talk about race while also knowing that a more complex book, one without a hero, would not have fared nearly as well.) The lesson here being that Lee’s original draft was so thoroughly reworked that it could eventually be published as a completely separate book some 50 years later.

And then, To Kill a Mockingbird—a success so wild, so flagrant, so everything that Harper Lee never again needed to worry even for one solid second about her material needs, that took her on a semi-painful publicity tour and led her to become friends with Gregory Peck, even as she nearly lost her friendship with Truman Capote. This success wasn’t unmixed—Lee never again wrote another book, and instead retreated to a kind of hermitism, refusing interviews and further publicity, bitching grandly about her taxes (a pastime I also enjoy, freelancer taxes are the pits), and refusing to talk about past and current writing with many people. Her post-Mockingbird output consisted of 3 short essays (including the one where she describes her marvelous gift), 2 profiles as a favor to Truman Capote around the publication of In Cold Blood, a satirical recipe, and maybe a handful of other short pieces and lectures.

Casey Cep’s incredible book Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is an account of the only other book Lee ever tried to write, a journalistic account of a serial murderer in Alabama. Lee struggled mightily with the book for years, wrote and rewrote chapters, fussed with changes, interviewed locals, paid out $1000 (the same as her advance for Mockingbird) for a trial transcript. In other words, she worked on it, she labored over it, but she never finished it. Cep provides a few different alternatives for why this is—difficulty wrestling a complex real-life story onto the page, an over-reliance on alcohol, too many notes and sources and threads to tug on, but I think the one that resonates with me the most comes from a note Lee wrote to Gregory Peck. Here it is as cited by Cep:

With her first novel, she told Peck, “nobody cared when I was writing it; now it seems that my neck is being breathed on, but I refuse to let this thing go until it approaches some standard of excellence.” Her new mockingbird was starting to seem more like an albatross, and it weighed on her more heavily the more people knew about her work: “My agent wants pure gore and autopsies, my publisher wants another best-seller, and I want a clear conscience, in that I haven’t defrauded the reader.”

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Now, I don’t mean to really compare myself to Harper Lee, nor am I working on anything even close to a true-crime-y kind of book, but this feeling of stuck-ness, of audience, of not feeling like the person who wrote the first book, of not wanting to defraud people is one that is sticking with me.

I don’t know that I wrote Rivermouth particularly fast, or particularly intensely (I certainly have literally never, even once in my life, had a 50-page week) but, as wild as it sounds, I don’t really remember writing it. I remember being kind of pleased as it was coming, having the feeling on really working on A Book, I have photo evidence of my index card piles and notes in my journals, but like, I don’t know how it happened. It’s also, somehow been about five years since I finished a first draft of the book.

I was having drinks with Laura Marris over the summer, when she was mid-book tour for her incredible essay collection The Age of Loneliness—her debut. She had that kind of half-dazed, half thrilled look I am sure I had on my face for my book tour, and another author was telling her that her entire first year post-pub would be kind of unreal. Book tour is unreal, and then you get home and you end up processing feelings about book tour for about a year and that’s unreal, and unreal emails and invitations will sometimes show up in your inbox as a consequence of this, and the whole time you’re also like, getting eggs at the grocery store and trying to get another book off the ground and maybe working a job, and all of those things feel a little less real also, because you’ve got this big cloud of “what the fuck just happened” hanging over you. You need time, and space, to unwrite the book too.

I think part of the mistake of my Year of No Job Just Book was trying to write a book immediately post-pub when I was deeply, profoundly sick of the sound of my own voice and unclear on whether I would ever have another original thought again, but I see now that I had a weird relationship to money and how that came in, and other writers and their successes, and to people who were reading my book, and to people who had or had not reviewed the book, and to the book itself. I am also, let’s be clear, very self-conscious right now of engaging in the kind of self-indulgence that means the sophomore album is all about how hard being famous is. I’m not famous, but I still have this feeling of a lot of people standing between me and the page.

I think the thing that made that Christmas gift so valuable wasn’t just the money itself (although, again, the money did not hurt). It was being ready for it—being brimming with energy and ideas and just actually, truly, not having the time to set them down. It was also this bit, which I’m going to let Lee herself tell you about:

“It’s a fantastic gamble,” I murmured. “It’s such a great risk.”

My friend looked around his living room, at his boys, half buried under a pile of bright Christmas wrapping paper. His eyes sparkled as they met his wife’s, and they exchanged a glance of what seemed to me insufferable smugness. Then he looked at me and said softly; “No, honey. It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.”

That insufferable smugness, the certainty in the face of your own doubt, is also the real gift. If that trust, plus an agent who believes in you, and a year’s salary in your pocket is all the wind in your sails when you sit down at your typewriter, you’re going to circumnavigate the fucking world before you hit a doldrums. Harper Lee also eventually knew that your book being public is, if you’ll let me stretch this metaphor a bit more, ballast in the hold. Some of it is good, some of it complicated, some of it bad, but all of it needs to be sorted through, hauled overboard or stored away safely, and all of it weighs you down a little more, makes things just that much more complex.

But these gifts don’t always come in these huge grand financial gestures—it’s my husband taking on a lot of extra household chores (on top of the many he already does) when I’m on deadline, my work giving me a little extra PTO so I can do ~*book stuff*~ and still manage to eventually take a vacation, its my professors in grad school taking on independent studies with me and reading my manuscript and providing feedback when it was 70 disorganized pages in a Google Doc. I think the cost of supporting another full-grown adult for a full year has gone up a shocking amount since 1956 and giving a pal a full year of their salary feels…impossible at this point, much less with two children and living in Manhattan, which Lee’s friends were, but I do think it’s possible to recognize this same kind of energy in more everyday sacrifices, to let these things fill my sails and lighten my load. My work matters to me, and it matters to the people we love. Everything else is so much styrofoam, taking up space but not weighing me down.

Having a job again, particularly an in-person one, makes finding the time and the space to write more complicated, I won’t lie. But I wrote one book like this, sneaking drips and drabs of time whenever I could, going to bed bleary-eyed, and as I stay up late typing out this newsletter, it feels…familiar in the best way. I’m not sitting down to write a book, but I’m making time and space for myself, for this, in a way that feels approachable and friendly. A quiet house, a few carved out minutes in my day. Between that and the fact that I’ve been feeding on new things and old favorites like a whale shark, there’s more coming, and soon.

Reading List

1. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

2. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee

3. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee Casey Cep

4. The Age of Loneliness Laura Marris

Note that I make a small commission from any purchase you make from these links, please do!

Reading/Writing/Lady About Town

Right now I’m reading bell hooks’ All About Love and Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh, so some very different vibes from those two.

My latest Christian Century column is about monasticism, a cabin in Maine with my friends, and a vision of what life could be like. You can find it here.

As always, my book is available in bookstores and online—I think it’s a good tonic for the days ahead, especially with regards to immigration. It’s called Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith and Migration, and it’s about my experiences translating for asylum seekers, translation theory, and what we owe to one another. Also, God, kind of.

Also I’m going to be at Tucson Festival of Books in March! My schedule is up, if you want to come hang out/bask in the brilliance of the many incredible writers I’m paneling with, I’d love to see you!

As always, if you liked this email, forward it to a friend, post about it on social media, drop me a note.

Hello again. I’m working on figuring out a more sustainable, helpful way for me to send out this letter that should hopefully launch in the new year, and it will likely be one that deals with the challenges and horrors that the new year brings, but for now, there is nothing to react to, nothing specific to prepare for beyond the promised horrors, and so instead, I wanted to make a little space for something else.

If there’s something I learned in the first Trump administration, it’s that it can and will be all-encompassing if you let it, and there has to be room for art and beauty and the rest of it. This is not to say that I’m not angry, despairing, grief-stricken, but just that I think there’s a difference between preparing for bad things and giving them space in your brain and your life before they arrive. This is the time to donate some money, to go to a meeting, to have conversations with your loved ones—it is not yet the time to pull focus and fight this particular evil. Fight other evils, save your energy for when it counts, spend these next precious few months filling your tanks and finding your people again. And on the subject of finding people:

Over a year ago now, on another platform, I wrote a newsletter on Emma Craufurd, the translator for Simone Weil’s first publications in English. It starts like this:

“I've had a version of this essay kicking around in my head for quite some time now. That version of the essay is, to be quite humble about it, a masterpiece of archival research, one of those triumphant excavations of a long-lost literary figure, pulling a life out of some forgotten margin and into a well-deserved limelight. The figure in question here is Emma Craufurd, the English-language translator of two of Simone Weil's best and most accessible (?) works: Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace.”

Humble, I know. Even more humble, is that, in the last few months, I have actually written that version of the essay, or at least one that goes much farther than I could for a newsletter. I wrote it for Commonweal, for their 100th anniversary issue, which is its own pleasure and honor.

You can read it here.

Despite not publishing all that much, I do feel some kind of bashfulness around writing an entire newsletter just to point out that I wrote an article that got published somewhere else, and I probably wouldn’t be writing this newsletter if I didn’t feel, to some degree, that writing this essay changed me. Let me explain.

I’ve spent the last year in the swamp of writers’ block, just ramming my head against my own dry well, my own determination to write a book I don’t think I actually wanted to write, as evidenced by the fact that I have not written even a single word of it. I was “freelancing,” which is to say, sitting in my home office, hanging up a new piece of art in a Goodwill frame at a rate of approximately one a week until my office looked like a deranged 18th century gallery (yessss) and drowning under admin labor and assignments that weren’t paying enough, but then also making a ton of time to read things that I felt like I was supposed to read but did not, in any way, make me feel anything, and instead feeling the whole time as if I ought to feel lucky or at least productive.

And so when my editor at Commonweal reached out and asked me for a piece, I said yes, and pitched this biographical exploration that I had sorta-kinda-wanted to write for a couple of years, and just kind of gave myself permission to go all-in on it—to do the research I wanted, to spend a little cash in doing research, to just…do it, to write the piece I wanted to write. And in doing so, I spent some time with these books that had meant a tremendous amount to me in graduate school and while working on Rivermouth, with books that had, critically already inspired in me a book.

And as it turns out, that was all I really needed to set me off to the races. Between Weil’s strange, oblique prose and Anne Carson’s blunt, equally strange prose, and Brigg’s winding, meditative sentences I found the stuff I’d been looking for during the past year, and the ideas, again, set my hair on fire. I realized I’d spent the last year reading inert stuff, things that meant well but were more interested in explaining or teaching or treating the reader like an earnest undergrad rather than someone who was there to fuck around with new ideas, to follow the writer into experiment or strangeness or brightness. As it turns out, I needed the latter far more than the former, a kind of writing that was not tight, that did not gather in the ends but that led me instead down a thousand productive rabbit holes. And for this essay, that was exactly what I needed. Well, that and the archival research.

The archives ended up being the best and worst parts of this project. I started with ancestry.com, working forwards on her family tree to see if, possibly, I could find someone who remembered her who was still alive—a grandchild, a niece, a nephew. She does have a living nephew, a baronet in his late 80s. I couldn't figure out how to get in touch, or if he'd remember a spinster aunt well enough to be worth it. From there it was trying to track down the kinds of relics that live on newspapers.com: obituaries (no dice), essays, interviews, notes that she attended the village jam contest, anything. I'm not an expert in this kind of research, no better than anyone who has spent some time on Google.com, but it still felt strange, that a woman who had died in 1967—a year during which my own father was alive!—and had by all accounts a vibrant career working with some of the key texts of the century could now be basically vanished.

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But where it got weirder was when I compared the extant two translations of Gravity and Grace in English. Basically: I decided to compare the Craufurd and the Wills translations to see how they held up against each other. They were…word-for-word identical, no matter what page or section or passage I opened both books up to. No variation. This, for those of you who don't translate, is about as likely as TWO monkeys on typewriters creating word identical copies of Hamlet. Translations of the same text should in theory be similar, should point back to their identical sources, but there's no way two minds, working in separate spheres, should make identical choices, associations and grammars to produce identical translations. I did end up figuring out that the Craufurd was published before the Wills, making hers the older, “original” translation, but was not able to find which version had, theoretically, overwritten the other.

This was largely because when I tried to chase down an older, pre 2004-reissue-edition of the Craufurd (mostly because I suspected my own copy of a certain kind of fishiness due to wonky spacings and Craufurd being rendered as “Crawford” on the title page,) all the old versions were lost or missing from their institutional libraries, lost to time, or unable to be accessed thanks to a lawsuit against the Internet Archive. I felt conspiratorial, the red yarn and corkboard about to displace all my goodwill frames.

And then my deadline came, and I reached the limit of what I was able to find out about Craufurd in the time I had. I'm proud of that piece as much for what I was able to uncover as for how I was able to talk about what I wasn't, the ways I was able to link Craufurd’s disappearance not just to her own biography but to bigger ideas set out by Weil and Briggs.

So now what? The answer is, once again, trying to write something. But this time, I want to set out from the things that set my hair on fire, the things that light me up, not the things I want to or ought to care about. This was the feeling I’d been chasing all year, and that had eluded me all year

The next book won't be a continued exploration of Craufurd’s life, in part because I suspect I'm at the end of what's possible for a Yank with internet access and no current ability to knock on pensioners’ doors in the UK, but the lessons of this essay and the mysteries it still holds will stay with me for a long time. (Although—if you have insights, clues or ideas about Craufurd or Weil, or you want to pay me money to keep investigating this in a more boots on the ground kind of way OR you want to give me this particular book deal with a massive research budget, GET IN TOUCH).

If you want the turbo-charged version of reading my Commonweal article or are just a regular amount of curious about any of the texts I mentioned, here’s a list of books I read and links to purchase them. I make a small commission if you choose to purchase from these links!

• This Little Art, Kate Briggs - a book I recommend so often and with such fervent passion, I ought to just add it to an Ojos de Santa Lucia Best-of List

• Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil - Bookshop only carries the Arthur Wills version which is FINE, I GUESS, because it is WORD FOR WORD IDENTICAL to the Craufurd and I do regretfully admit this cover is way better than the weird red balloon Routledge went with BUT it does feel sort of weird to recommend this one given all that you’ve read.

• Waiting for God, Simone Weil - probably where I’d start for a Weil newbie, this is also where her essay on attention that I’ve written about several times before lives

• Decreation, Anne Carson - I’ve been putting off reading her latest because I love her so much, but this is a classic for a reason

I’ve done a fair bit of publishing in addition to the Craufurd essay, but I think the main thing I want to spotlight is actually this talk I gave as part of Chicago’s Lit and Luz festival. It was about two weeks before the election, but their theme was Saturation/Saturacion, inspired by the feeling of living through an election year in Mexico/the U.S. If you opened this newsletter wanting to hear me think through the election and another 4 years of Trump, I think that this is my answer.

Finally, you may have noticed the newsletter facelift we just got—everyone thank , the incredible author of and an incredible artist in their own right bc now my newsletter looks good. I think my favorite part is the little red thread dangling from the sleeve, a nod to the cover of Rivermouth, which, hey, you should buy if you haven’t yet!

In that letter, I also briefly talk about Margery Kempe, another (absolute favorite) 14th-century British mystic and the author of the first English-language autobiography. She visited Julian of Norwich, and writes about it in her Book. Margery was 40 and just setting out on her spiritual journey, Julian only about three years from death.

Let me tell you more about Margery. She was a middle class medieval woman, born and raised in Norfolk, and for the most part, led an absolutely normal life. She was married, to the long-suffering John Kempe, had 14-ish children, had a failed business as a brewer and with a grain mill, was illiterate and, if her biography is anything to go by, plain-spoken and rather funny. However, after the birth of her first child, something happened: the 8 months following his birth, she was plagued by visions of demons, a disappointed Christ, and suicidal ideation. From there, her life pulled her along in the tidal flow of childbearing, keeping a growing family alive, a loving relationship with her husband—it’s plain between the lines of her autobiography that she’s plagued by lust for her husband—able to put off her desire for increasing closeness and devotion to God, or at least subsume it into everyday life, until once again, Something Happens. In 1413, shortly after the death of her father, Margery decides to do two things 1) Negotiate a chaste marriage with her husband John and 2) Go on pilgrimage. It is on the first leg of this first pilgrimage that she encounters Julian, who affirms her visions, her desire for a more pious life, while cautioning her that all her work had to be in the service of all of Christendom, not just her own faith.

This is the point where Margery’s life explodes into possibility—she travels to the edges of the known world, spending time in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Assisi, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Gdansk, Aachen, Calais, and various holy sites in and around England itself. She hires a scribe to help her set her wild and blooming life down on the page, to give herself the power to explain her visions and her devotion. Her life is not without peril or difficulty. Throughout her travels she often gets in trouble for her preaching, for her sobbing and emotional reactions to Christ, for being a woman, for being plain-spoken, for interpreting scripture, for heresy, for impersonating a nun, for believing she could make an intercessory prayer. When John Kempe gets sick in the 1430s, she returns to him and nurses him until his death, a period she describes as tender, if difficult. After his death, she hits the road once again on pilgrimage. Her life was greater, and wilder, and stranger than the life we might imagine for any medieval woman, especially one that was not wealthy.

But let me go back to 1413, this year that feels like the hinge in Margery’s life, the moment of meeting between these two incredible mystics whose words have somehow survived centuries. Julian’s world was constricted to the walls of her cell, even as war and plague raged outside. Margery’s world was as wide as she was brave enough to make it. It feels like this month is that point of meeting between these two women: we are just emerging from a tremendously difficult winter, full of isolation and challenge and loneliness, and we are emerging into a spring full of promise and hope but also a lot of strangeness and wildness and untrod paths.

I got my first shot a week or so ago in an empty K Mart, I’ll get my second shot in two weeks in a hospital in the suburbs. The woman who gave me my first dose of the vaccine was named Queen, the vaccination center was packed at 10:30 on a Saturday morning, everyone calm and kind and patient, masks over their noses and anxious eyes, whatever our last year had looked like. I cried a little bit before I got my shot, a little bit after, in the observation period.

Just as the shape of my life today was unimaginable to me a year ago, the shape of my life in a year is unimaginable to me now. This year has been exhausting and traumatic and strange for all of us, lined by grief and loneliness, and now our doors are ever so cautiously swinging open, revealing the entirety of a changed world to us. It’s been pointed out over and over again that “normal” is not what we are, or what we should be aiming for, but I do know that these open doors, a tenderly reopening world, represent an opportunity to build for ourselves, for each other, a better world, space for each of us to have beautiful and blooming lives in the aftermath of our loss.

I’m not going to lie—this is an opportunity that feels far away in a way the end of the pandemic doesn’t. We, collectively, every single one of us, failed so many people so profoundly, we let our government fail so, so many people, we have been failing people, collectively, since the beginning of this country and none of the news out of Washington is making me feel like that’s going to stop. But I also look at my local mutual aid, I look at all the ways our communities have stepped up, all the ways person to person we have figured out how to take care of each other, all the weird wonderful art that happened, the different ways we learned to be with ourselves.

It’s kind of a div school cliche that apocalypse comes from the Greek for “unveiling.” The price of this new knowledge, like so much new knowledge, came at a high price, but it will be a higher price still if we try to forget this hard-won lesson. As we stand here, on the hinge of the world, it’s time to visit our mystics and elders, time to reach for wisdom to ensure that as we rebuild the world, find new shapes for our lives, that we build it in ways that serve all of us and not just ourselves. We need to allow ourselves to have been changed by this strange, terrible year as we venture out, pilgrims into a new world.

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Reading List:

As a reminder, I make a small commission off these sales:

1. The Book of Margery Kempe I honestly would just recommend reading this, cover to cover. It’s so strange and funny and has such a voice, coming from hundreds of years away.

2. Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck. Extremely different vibes, and yet this book showed me what I’ve been trying to do with the saints all along.

3. Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard. I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about this book a lot lately, it’s very short and strange and maybe what it looks like to be a mystic today.

4. Joyful Militancy: Building Active Resistance in Toxic Times. A good book on how to do the people parts of building a better world, which, let’s face it, are very fucking difficult.

I’m also going to throw in the entire list for the Julien of Norwich letter, just for kicks.

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A small housekeeping note—this will likely be the last edition of Ojos de Santa Lucia that occurs on Substack. It’s increasingly apparent that this platform, like so many others, has chosen to make vague handwaving notions about the idea of freedom of speech rather than protecting trans women from absolutely despicable attacks. Unlike other platforms however, they’ve given transphobes ENORMOUS advances on their newsletters, legal protection, etc. and that’s really not ok. I need a moment to gather my wits and figure out how and where to migrate, but I’ve done it before and will do it again! It’s important to note, again, that I don’t make money from this newsletter other than the occasional commission from Bookshop purchases so this is largely a symbolic flouncing off, and yet, off I flounce.

I’ll be sending another note thru Substack when the change goes through to let you know and let anyone who falls thru the cracks have the opportunity to jump back on the bandwagon.

No new writing from me this month, turns out it is very difficult to write things.

As always, feel free to forward, share, tweet about, email me, literally whatever—I cannot tell you how much I enjoy hearing from people who read this newsletter!

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Lopez, who passed away last year, was a writer known for his careful eye and deep reverence for the natural world. I had heard of him, but hadn’t read him before, and the outpouring of love and memorials from other writers I deeply admire made me put his books on hold at the library and work my way through them over the course of this month. I spent about half of Horizon being vaguely disappointed that Lopez was not, as I had thought, Latino—I hadn’t realized how important the idea of an older Latino man, puttering around the margins and extreme climes of the world was to me. This was kind of compounded by Lopez’s sympathies throughout for colonizers like Capt. James Cook (he insists throughout that he didn’t really mean it, it being I guess the exploration that would lead to colonization attempts across the Pacific), but by the time I got to Arctic Dreams, one of his earlier and most famous books, I was ready for reading Lopez. It’s a lot of careful analysis of biology (narwhal’s tusks only spin counter-clockwise, this is what a polar bear’s year looks like) and history (here is the camp of one arctic explorer or another, here is how he met his hubristic doom not far from this spot) punctuated by moments like this one:

There is a word from the time of the cathedrals: agape, an expression of intense spiritual affinity with the mystery that is “to be sharing life with other life.” Agape is love, and it can mean “the love of another for the sake of God.” More broadly and essentially, it is a humble, impassioned embrace of something outside the self, in the name of that which we refer to as God, but which also includes the self and is God.

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Yes! All this, of course, put me in mind of one of my favorite essays on both God and Arctic exploration, Annie Dillard’s “An Expedition to the Pole.” I can’t find a version of it online, but you can find it in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. In it, she compares early British expeditions to find the North Pole to a church service in which we are seeking to find “the Absolute.” Both are encumbered by these silly little oddities we are fully convinced we need: a priest’s creaky knees and an out-of-tune worship service leader or sensible, thin wool coats and silver with the family crest on it. In either case, we are absolutely unprepared for the sheer terrifying scale of what we are setting out to find. Of the explorers (and of us, in church) she writes “they man-hauled their frail flesh…their sweet human absurdity to the Pole.” In a landscape so often described as austere and sublime and eternal, here they were, the Brits, putting on plays and getting sick and writing spare, dignified letters where there was barely room for survival, much less dignity.

As I mentioned, we are in the snowiest Chicago in some 40 years, and after we got some 2 feet of snow the weather did not rise above freezing for a week so, of course, we stayed inside. It’s a moral imperative, you might know, and we’d been doing pretty well at it, but you don’t realize how much you come to rely on your little trips to Walgreens for the snacks or on letting the dog haul you halfway around the neighborhood on his morning walk (which he somehow doesn’t feel like doing when the snow comes up to his little puppy chin). There’s been a lot of talk of hitting the pandemic wall lately—my own bout with COVID was a year minus two weeks ago, ditto the last day I went into an office—but for me those facts tumbled over and alongside the weather into an annual crisis that was worse than most years.

Every year, I swear to myself I’m prepared for it, I know what’s coming, I dutifully eat my little salmon toasts and take my vitamin D supplements and park myself in front of a SAD lamp like a recalcitrant houseplant, and somehow, every February, I feel like I’m simply going to explode if I don’t escape from my whole entire life and go into the desert until every part of me that is cold or sun-starved just evaporates into mist. This year, I literally planned trips to the desert—applying for funding for research trips to take me to the Arizona desert around Tucson, looking at artist residencies in Ajo for the fall, when I am hopefully vaccinated—and when that failed, just played Candy Crush without blinking for about a week straight.

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I can’t believe I haven’t written about Annie Dillard here before—she’s one of the authors that someone once described as one of my two cathedrals of Ann- (Anne Carson is the other)—but I’m glad I’m doing it today. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard’s debut prose book and a Pulitzer prize winner, was written when she was my age, 28, and living in a Virginia suburb with her husband—none of which make it into the book itself.

In her accounts of her walks around her neighborhood, she is a lonely roving eyeball, looking for God in the emptiness and fullness that is nature. She was worried that no one would be interested in the memoirs of “a housewife from Virginia named Annie,” so she became a pilgrim, an anchoress, a monk in the woods, leaving out all her domestic trappings, giving in literature her life a shape of loneliness and quiet and . The book is structured through the seasons, but also has a theological structure: first, a cataphatic spring into summer, in which life multiplies and evolves into millions of wriggling creatures, the ooze and the skittering legs enough to make your shoulders creep up around your ears, and then into the apophatic fall and winter in which life is pared away into silence—a silence like the Absolute, a silence that is God, a God she finds, once again, in “sharing life with another”—the natural world, that is.

Here’s the lessons I take from Dillard in this apophatic season as things get pared away, when the stuff that makes up my life feels uninteresting and tired and constricting, like the only way I will ever make anything of myself is to jet off into the wilderness: there is enough here to build a life, enough creeping skittering things in the empty lot behind my apartment to remind me that spring is coming, enough wildness in my own four walls to contain me.

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Reading List

FYI—I get a small commission if you order these books from one of these links!

1. Horizon Barry Lopez

2. Arctic Dreams Barry Lopez

3. “My Midlife Crisis as a Russian Sailor,” Andrea Pitzer, Outside Magazine

4. Teaching a Stone to Talk Annie Dillard

5. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Annie Dillard

6. For the Time Being Annie Dillard

7. Holy the Firm Annie Dillard

No new writing from me this month—trying to learn lessons from British polar explorers and focusing on survival, not sending dignified, spare letters back home (also, my book).

As always, feel free to drop me a line, tweet, text or forward this email to your 10 best friends, hit me up if you want me to write for you (or if you want to write for me!) If you want to more directly send me a few dollars, feel free to drop a tip here.

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Penelope is Odysseus’ wife, and the entire time he is at Troy and then traveling slowly home again, she puts off the houseful of suitors, telling them that she would marry one of them when she had finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law.

So these men urge on my marriage, and I wind a skein of wiles. First some god breathed the thought in my heart to set up a great web in my halls and fall to weaving a robe—fine of thread was the web and very wide…Then day by day I would weave at the great web, but by night would unravel it, when I had let place torches by me.

There’s so much here to love on the language level alone—Penelope’s “skein of wiles,” like a skein of yarn, the weaving described as a web, and Penelope in the center of it, weaving and unweaving.

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She held her suitors off for four years in this manner. I don’t know much about weaving, but if it’s anything like knitting, like embroidery, the unmaking is just as much work, if not more, than the making of it, requires just as much of your mind to stay focused, just as much attention.

I’ve been endlessly preoccupied with textile arts this quarantine. I’ve picked up and put down weaving, started a blanket, finished a sweater am about eight inches of sleeve away from finishing another sweater, started embroidery projects, made a dress and re-lined a coat. I do my fair share of un-making, not to will away suitors but to fix mistakes, reeling back row after row of embroidery, using my needle to pick at diminutive stitches. I’ve switched my reading habits to be almost entirely Kindle-based so I can knit furiously while balancing the gadget on my knee, deploying a pinky to jab the page over every minute or so.

While in normal times I made a few things a year, I would also put them down for long stretches of time, let my hands be idle, stretch my fingers, let myself recuperate from tendinitis with rest. These days, I cannot let my hands be idle. I churned out my first pair of socks the tense week of waiting for election results, if my wrists or forearms begin to complain I’ll simply switch crafts—knitting to embroidery until my thumb pads are callused, embroidery to knitting until my hands tense up, paint-by-numbers when I can’t take either, hand-stitching if I have a day I don’t know how to fill.

What isn’t visible in that little clip from the Odyssey is what Penelope’s house looked like, as she wove and unwove. The men that occupied it were boorish and loud, demanded her hospitality, used up her resources, had an aura of menace and death about them. And to keep this looming menace at bay she used women’s work—weaving and unweaving, the creation and de-creation of an object to keep herself and her son safe, to mourn a great man. There’s something about her needing to be seen as busy at her loom to keep the suitors away, something about the performance of progress that needed to be carefully unraveled every night. I set up these comparisons and I almost don’t want to finish them because of how embarrassingly self evident they seem. You know what the suitors are and stand for, you know what it is to be stuck behind your loom making and unmaking your work, you know what it is to wrap up grief in the threads of your weaving. But here: let me finish this for you.

I keep my hands busy because it keeps anxiety at bay. I finish projects, plenty of them, because there’s a mind-emptying performance of busyness that my work allows. There’s a deep pleasure in finishing a beautiful, useful object I barely had to think about save to count and measure, which has something to do with the blankness your mind takes on as you’re counting the stitches for your lace. I’ve been knitting and sewing and embroidering because what else is there to do but push yourself through fabric, to anchor yourself to existence with a thousand tiny stitches, to send little gifts to friends in the mail.

In some ways, this letter pairs well with November’s letter on cooking and care and love, but it feels really important to say that unlike cooking, the process here is infinitely more important than the product. It’s a practice, like so many people have taken up lately of contemplation. The body in repetition so the mind can empty, the hands busy so the feet can be grounded in the moment.

Winter ends, eventually, but for now we can wander out into the snow, wrapped up in handmade scarves.

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Reading List:

1. The Odyssey, Homer, trans Emily Wilson

2. Visible Mending, Arounna Khounnoraj

3. The Geometry of Hand-Sewing, Natalie Chanin

4. Vogue Knitting: The Learn-To-Knit Book

As a reminder, I get a little cut of whatever you buy through these links on Bookshop! If you want to look at previous recommendations, or browse books I’ve got writing in, you can see the entire shop here.

If you liked this newsletter, please share with a friend, forward along, or post about it on social media!

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Biblical smash cut, new chapter, new verse, new scene.

On its face, the message here is clear: if you choose material things, you will be anxious, if you choose Christ, you have chosen the better portion for yourself. This starts getting complicated and gnarly and uncomfortable when you add in things like: gender roles and expectations, this idea that we should help and love others, wives submit to your husbands, the fact that someone needed to fill the wine glasses and deal with all 12 (!!!) of the disciple’s bodily needs like sitting and eating and where they would sleep, and all the rest of it. It’s one of the passages that deflects my desire to understand it, not letting me do anything but glance off the top.

If you like me, were raised in a church-y setting (nondenominational evangelical, here), you know about Marthas and Marys—these two women’s choices on one day abstracted out into personality types: Marthas are active, busybodies, load-up-the mini-van-ers, Marys are dreamy and passionate and focused on God and the contemplative life. Even now, if you google “Martha and Mary,” you’ll see articles like “We need Marys and Marthas: An Evangelical Egalitarian Take” and “Maybe Mary’s Right but Martha’s Me” and “Martha and Mary: When Life Gets Too Busy.” All these horrific headlines get at this: the ideal woman is both a Martha and a Mary, and only women are expected to be these needed Martha’s at all.

But there’s something else that bothers me about this story, which is that the work Martha has done, and is doing, isn’t recognized as a form of love or devotion, isn’t valued at all. In the book of Luke, Jesus has his feet washed by a “sinful woman” who uses a perfume of great cost, and Jesus praises her for giving up her expensive oil for him, while chastising his host, a man, for not greeting him adequately. There’s a complicated calculus between the material and the divine presence and what we ought to give up or not depending on how sinful we are or aren’t that Biblical scholars have likely teased out or argued over the years, but today, I want to argue for the material being the best care we know how to give right now.

I’ve been cooking dinner nearly every night for the last 8 months. We have a weekly(ish, sometimes more, very rarely less) takeout escape hatch, and a few cheats (a freezer full of Trader Joes’ perfect chicken gyoza, $2.99 for a bag that is good for at least one meal for two, some frozen ravioli jammed in there between the bags of dumplings), but other than that, I’m making a full dinner for two just about every night. To avoid getting bored, I rotate in new recipes every week: citrusy grilled pork in lettuce cups, vegan turkish kebabs, vegetable paella with chorizo, toasted to a crisp in a cast-iron pan. I cooked dinner a lot in the before-times too, but this kind of dinner-making, planned the week ahead, executed to avoid wasting ingredients or trips to the store, careful, lavish, is something that’s come about because of the pandemic.

I love doing this. This is not to say that there aren’t times that I would rather…not, that I don’t get crabby or despairing or weird when a sauce won’t gel or the chicken dries out, or the bread I was planning to do goes moldy. This is to say that I love setting down food in front of my little family every night, that when my partner compliments me on a meal or better yet trusts me enough to try something new (really pushing mushrooms this season) that it feels good down to the bottom of my feet, that I feel like I contribute to this house and the way it runs by cooking regularly.

If anything, this year has shown us that the food we eat comes from deeply entrenched networks of care, and labor, and calculations that ought to make us at least as uncomfortable as the Martha and Mary story: from managers at a Tyson plant betting on how many line workers would end up with COVID-19 to the ways that farm workers have been placed at the intersection of horrific COVID-19 policies and horrific immigration policies. My placing meals on the table is just the last link in a chain that is otherwise full of exploitation and harm, and the extent to which my cooking is done with care and love for people I already care for and love does not mitigate the harm it does. And yet: we need to eat, and not just occasionally, but daily (our daily bread), and it can be incredibly difficult to do this ethically because of access—financial, logistical, knowledge.

I don’t know how to resolve any of this. I’ve been gently poking at issues of food justice in correlation with parts of my book, and this month’s newsletter is just basically me dredging up that whole mess and trying to look at it through a slightly different lens.

I think what it comes down to is also the way we handle things in my house: what if everyone had helped, and Martha was not the only one running from place to place, filling wine glasses and seating dusty disciples? Washing up the dishes after the meal? Would everyone have been able to sit and listen then? Would everyone have had enough to eat and drink? My point is that there is plenty available if you take what you need, if you help your neighbor, if you make sure that you can trace the provenance of one or two things on your plate, if you plant a garden, if you share the load—not just of the cooking and the washing up, but of the planting and the keeping and the knowing about things, if you step outside the way things have always been.

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Reading List:

As a reminder, all links here lead to my Bookshop.org affiliate profile, and I’ll earn a small percentage of anything you buy! You can also browse the full booklist here, I’ve thrown in a few of my favorite cookbooks in addition.

1. I read this Deb Perlman interview about halfway through the writing of this newsletter and it made me strangely emotional for reasons I can’t articulate. I’m a regular reader/cooker from of her incredible blog, Smitten Kitchen, and own both her cookbooks, and her voice is a kind of comforting presence in my own kitchen. To see that voice full of anger or despair or uncertainty is just one more reminder that this thing we’re living through is extraordinary and scary and in short, it is ok not to be ok.

2. Having Samin Nosrat’s ray of sunshine voice cut through my mornings has been lovely, if you don’t listen to Home Cooking yet you ought to.

3. M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf is a kind of guide to wartime rationing cooking, but a kind of cooking that begins with finding abundances even within restrictions

4. James Salter Life is Meals. A year in foods, both simple and grand, mostly just about pleasure.

5. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies by Seth Holmes. An ethnographic look at the real conditions under which your produce comes to your table.

6. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter is a fantastic and more regular deep dive on many of these themes.

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Not a whole lot from me this month. October was nuts and went by in a blur. Earlier this month, (on election day, natch) Best American Travel Writing came out with my essay in it! You can buy it here.

As usual, if you loved this newsletter, please forward, tweet, email me, whatever! I love hearing from you.

On a more logistical note, I’m contemplating some changes to the structure/frequency/type of newsletter you get from me: something more regular, perhaps these essays interspersed with recommendations, or shorter snippets. What would you like to see or read from me? Is there a figure you’d want me to cover? Feel free to drop it in the comments, or to reply to this email. I get those in my inbox!

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I’m also still (always) taking pitches for your friends of a newsletter, and taking donations for both the work I put into this newsletter and for payments to folks like Laura, who wrote a gorgeous letter about weeding and contemplation for us in September.

I like them because they’re familiar, predictable and sweet even through the hijinks— (the imaginary Scotsman our shy heroine has been writing letters to for years in order to keep her family off her back about marriage is not only real but knocking at her door. Will they find love? Yes, duh.) (A real life African prince shows up in a PhD students’ inbox, claiming she’s his royal betrothed. Will they find love? Yes, duh.)—something that feels rare and brilliant and incredibly soothing in these unknown times.

I was not an English major, don’t know enough about fiction to talk about The Marriage Plot as like, a social or emotional or whatever device, but I am someone about to be married, in a pretty socially conventional way, and as a result maybe have something—not particularly interesting or new—to say about how my own life and marriage non-plot fits into the Big White Cultural Narrative.

Austen’s books famously end at marriage. Or not even at marriage, but at accepted proposal, the pinnacle of romantic experience because a man has to ask a woman, with his whole chest, to spend the rest of his life with her, because in some way—either because the state of marriage is pleasing to his patroness Lady Catherine DeBourgh, or because he’s half-agony, half-hope, as in love with her at 27 as at 19. After the proposal, we get a gentle sketch of life thereafter: usually pleasant and lovely but nondescript. A lot of the more contemporary novels are similar—we end with the proposal, or with long-married people saying “I love you” or renewing promises after years of lovelessness, or with a wedding previously cancelled: some big declaration, some big speech, a man finally saying, with all his words, that a woman matters. Matters in general, sure, but also matters to him.

Often the engine of the plot comes from a previous inability to do just that—Anne Eliot is unable to say, decisively, that she picks Frederick Wentworth and so she loses him for eight years, Mr. Knightley remains kind of a dick (even at the end of the book!) for only criticizing Emma instead of saying he loves her, Mr. Darcy is only accepted when he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that what matters to him is Elizabeth alongside her unfortunate relations rather than despite them. This works best when it’s both partners being intractable rather than just one of them, but we always end in the same place: a big declaration of love, words previously withheld coming down like confetti.

And this both is and isn’t how it goes in real life, isn’t it? It’s the same cycle, of rubbing along together, very often just two people living in the same space, negotiating grocery and laundry and like, keeping each other and the dog alive, and it’s all fine and regular. And then there’s some little thing—making dinner or doing the dishes, a little touch as they brush by, a split Reese’s after a trip to the drug store for more toilet paper, whatever—that works as this reminder. There’s no big declaration because you’re not saving it for a special occasion, just this one of being on opposite ends of the same couch, or having woken up in the morning. There’s the occasional nights where you forget to turn on the TV and talk instead and it feels like a third date in the best way possible, the text you send in the middle of a crappy work day knowing it’ll have somewhere to land. You also have the big moments: a proposal, a couple interstate moves for each other’s goals, writing vows and reading them, eventually. None of this is particularly enthralling fiction, though, and so we have Austen, and the hundreds of others who have followed in her footsteps, writing stories about love or sex that are actually stories about being seen and understood, about being valued and accepted and loved that all come shining through in one big moment when misunderstanding is cleared away and Love carries the day.

Anyways, I’m due for one of these big white verbal affirmations in just a few weeks, although it’ll be happening in a courthouse, fully masked, following a simple script set ahead of time by some judge. This isn’t how I pictured it happening (nothing about this year is, hence: romance novels), but there’s a reason that the marriage vow is usually used as an example of effective speech: the act of saying it makes something real in the world that wasn’t there before. So we’ll go into the courthouse, and by the time we come out, regardless of how weird and COVID-y it is, by the time we come out, we will be married, and have told each other, with our whole chests, what we mean to one another, and maybe there will be confetti.

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Reading List:

As a reminder, anything you buy from here not only doesn’t go to Amazon, but I do get a cut of the proceeds! I’ve thrown in some Austen, and some of the romances mentioned above, plus a few bonuses if you click through to the list itself, but also, if you want a private recommendation, we can make that happen. You can also find previous newsletter’s reading lists here.

1. Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen.

2. When a Scot Ties the Knot, Tessa Dare.

3. A Princess in Theory, Alyssa Cole.

No new writing out in the world this month from me, busy drafting, but as always, if you loved this newsletter, share it with a friend, tweet about it, or whatever! I also love getting notes from folks, which you can do by replying to emails!

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