happy new moon, loves

how a reading made me cry, & also gave me permission to free myself

Ya’ll, it’s been a fall. As the kids say, and as I say, it was not cute.

After being so careful for so long, I contracted COVID while I was overseas bringing UNWIELDY CREATURES to the UK (the first time I’d ever traveled that far for a book! The first time I’d been to Scotland! The first time I’d been to London since I was 22!). I did the Virgo math and that means I basically began developing symptoms on my 44th birthday (RUDE). But, my 44th return around the sun was interesting in other ways. I felt incredible anxiety about turning 44 as someone who had always believed and dreamed I would have a child of my own, that I would experience pregnancy to term. Something about 44 doesn’t feel so “early 40s” anymore, and so I told my therapist before I traveled abroad that I was worried I would feel a deep loss at the window of time to have a child rapidly shutting. As usual, tears began to fill as I said even this. And then I said in the session, See! I know this is still a thing I need to work through until I can say it without crying. She nodded, with love and compassion.

And then COVID, which brought up a slew of emotions, none of which related to pregnancy or parenting. It was probably a good thing I didn’t have the stamina for a deeper well of anger or frustration at having been so careful to get sick at truly the worst time, when I was already coming back home rushing headlong into teaching with little preparation. I sweated, I slept, a friend brought me soup and cake on my front porch. My brain swam through a Zoom class symptomatic, unable to land on a thought, but somehow I made it through. I watched the entirety of Jane the Virgin (yes, I know, but I don’t watch it for her, ROGELIO 4EVA). I took Paxlovid and inhaled my weight in menthol and citrus-flavored cough drops to overcome the metallic taste. Luckily I didn’t have the Pax rebound. Luckily I began to test consistently negative after five days. But again I say, it was not cute.

And then my dearest friend of three years, who had really been there for me during the hardest part of the divorce and the aftermath that should never have been (when my ex-spouse and the only person I have ever deeply loved as a romantic partner who I believed was a true friend emailed me “Dear COVID (because you are China Virus as a person)” and who also taught in the same department as me, forcing me to report him to Title IX, and then appeal the initial investigation when the institution first declared my complaint didn’t “rise to the level of determination” and then, after I won the appeal, seek accommodations to never teach on campus again because of how painful he had made an institution where I had first enrolled in college classes at 17 and then taught at for 15 years, and then, finally, finally, to flee Texas once and for all). She had also been my partner at just femme & dandy since its inception, who just … decided to completely blow up our platonamourship when I addressed a single conflict in our working relationship but one that had been brewing for a long time. Just around this time, I signed letters in support of Palestine and against genocide, faced right wing and other forms of backlash I won’t get into here. So, yeah, Fall was a time. One I’m glad is behind me.

But, in between then and now, I spent an extraordinary weekend in DC hitting up DC’s Zine Fest to get some ideas for just femme & dandy with my platonaspouse, the wondrous jj rowan, who is also jfd’s sew what editor (after I gasped with shock and awe at their sew what contribution in a previous issue) and also our trusted and crafty co-captain. We were relaxing in the Airbnb jj had found for us for the weekend. They were lounging on the sofa in their immaculate dirtied blonde ringlets, their black denim jeans, and their black, white, and grey striped short-sleeved button down. And somehow, it just came up naturally. As jj’s someone I tell most things to, the kind of totality where you don’t remember whether it’s a thought you’ve indulged or something you’ve shared of yourself to a person, they, too, knew that I had neared my 44th birthday nervous about how much deeper the wound of being unable to be pregnant or have my own child would be now that the window was closing more swiftly. Tendernesses around that tenuous balance of the right time, the right access to money and home, and the materiality needed to be able to get pregnant is one of the earliest connections jj and I shared, so they understood this more deeply than perhaps others have in my life. I can’t remember what caused us to begin talking about it, but I said something like, You know, I don’t need to have my own child anymore, but it would be nice, one day, to have a durational relationship with a child somehow. They looked quizzically at me. I’m always one for intense self reflection, but even I didn’t realize what was remarkable about that moment. jj looked over at me, and they remarked on the lack of sadness I expressed in my statement about not needing to experience pregnancy, and reminded me of the anxiety I held about turning 44. Yes, they acknowledged COVID disrupted what might have come up instead—but also here I was, talking nonchalantly about being okay with not ever having my own child. I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t resisting the tears, I was just in the present, in this new reality, and more than okay with it. Anyone who’s able to get pregnant and has had any desire for it (especially if the circumstances that led you to not have that experience weren’t chosen or intended by you) knows how unwieldy the desire and the many scenarios of what ifs. And so I’m old enough to know that it doesn’t mean that wound is closed, never to re-open. But I’m proud of the journey this body and mind and heart and spirit have experienced. Over the years, I think I’ve realized how much nurturing is in my heart to give. I no longer see my own child as the only relational parenting that will happen for me. I see all my students, but especially those that I have developed that deeper bond with, as part of my legacy. We’ll see what the future holds, but I’m excited to let go of these traditional ways of seeing family, and to expand the way I envision my own caretaking in the world.

But wait. That’s not what I came here to say.

My brain loves to take the long way in these posts. I went to New York as I often do during the holidays as it’s my favorite place to be an adult “orphan,” where I can be alone or with others, where there’s not so much pressure or expectation or talk about all the stereotypical obligations one performs over the holidays. It was exactly the sustenance I needed after such a hard fall. My friends who generously put me up were vacationing in Mexico when I arrived, so I had a wonderful few days mostly alone in the apartment, where I worked a little on the novel and wrote many poems, poems I think will become the THIRD manuscript in the last year? WHAT. Damn, writing is wild. Remember when I was wondering how to shape dance on the page? Well, my brain figured it out, at least in one poem! Very exciting. There are more poems I know I want to write, but too much to handle at the moment with catching up and trying to re-envision my courses in the next two weeks. You know me, casual. I saw beloved friends, some incredible art, and I bought SO MANY POETRY BOOKS. I took my dear friend Ty to see the Rockettes for the first time (even though it wasn’t the first time I’d seen them, it was my first time to see them, or anything, really, at Radio City Music Hall)—what a fun cheesy time! Ty missed that whole watching movies with old school 3D glasses, so it was an extra special treat watching Ty respond to the 3D like a little one. I saw a fascinating one woman dance theater piece by Jenn Freeman called Is It Thursday Yet? about a woman’s coming to terms with her autistic diagnosis. I saw some wonderful (& also one absolutely dreadful) films across the city. I participated in the largest protest I’ve ever been part of before, the silent processional, which moved me to tears about Palestine that had been brewing for a long time. And of course, I got my Asian food fix (thank god, Richmond really needs to step up the Asian cuisine). I felt rejuvenated by my time in New York in a surprising way.

While I was in New York, I opened Twitter and saw that Randolph’s low-residency MFA (a program I’d been eyeing for a while as my dream low res to teach at) was hosting a few public readings in Lynchburg, just a two hour’s drive from Richmond. In order for me to attend, I’d have to basically run home from the train in the early evening, hit the ground running with unpacking and laundry, get my oil changed and my tires pumped, and get on the road in the early afternoon. I was able to get a deal on a hotel room for a couple of days, and off I went! At first, I thought, is this unwise? To go from two weeks in NYC to immediately driving two hours to go see some readings, even by those whose work I adore and who I’ve never had the fortune to see in person? But, I’m so glad I did. I felt inspired by so many of the readings, but I was so taken by the loving spirit of the program itself.

Just a few months before, I’d finally sent in my resignation letter to Goddard’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. I’d quit for a lot of reasons, but it had all come to a head when I was put in a position to hold a lot of emotional space for the queer, trans, and nonbinary students during the program’s on campus residency when almost all faculty and many of the students began to repeatedly misgender them. This, of course, took its toll on me also. When a student who had not been protected appropriately by their advisor in a group meeting requested that they swap advisors with me, they were told they could not work with me because of faculty hierarchies. A couple of years ago the administration created two levels of faculty positions—core positions, which required advising 7 or 15 students a semester, and affiliate positions, which basically got whichever students were leftover—which, because of the way low residency programs are structured, was an incredibly self-defeating decision to make. One of the core faculty members who had been a dear friend (and I believed, ally) also told me that the reason I couldn’t work with this student was because, due to other circumstances that aren’t worth getting into, my working with them would prevent a position from potentially opening up to me or others in the future. Given the way this “ally” had always expressed her politic, this moment was deeply devastating for me, which only increased over the months after that led to my resignation. Further shocking was the implication that I would ever want a position created on the back of a student’s being harmed. But, I digress.

It was incredibly validating not only to see how connected the students were—so much love and celebration of one another!—but also how happy the faculty were. When you’ve been around academia, in multiple forms, as long as I have, you learn how to tell when students and faculty are happy in this very organic way. It tells you something about how they’re treated, how they’re advocated for. No, nothing is perfect, but you can tell when programs are toxic and unsafe. It made me feel even more certain that the choice I had made to center my own safety and integrity by resigning from a program where I’d advised such incredible students and had such life-changing experiences was the right choice.

But, also, that is not what I came here to say. If you’re still with me after all this, thank you! I love you!

I tell students that lessons often happen between learning. I feel this way about attending a reading, too. Jane Wong told a story at the podium before she began her reading about being a bad Cantonese student in her adult Zoom class. She made a joke about how speaking with the wrong tone gave the word she was attempting to say in her class a very different, unwanted meaning. The audience laughed with her. Learning Mandarin has been on my mind for many years. In some ways it never leaves my mind, but especially right now. I’m working on the “sort of sequel,” as I like to call it, for UNWIELDY CREATURES. The current title at the moment is UNWIELDY LOVES, and it, too, deals with how the past can teach us about the future, but through a reimagining of historical figures rather than fictional texts. It’s certainly going to be the most ambitious novel I’ve ever written, but one of the most difficult aspects of the novel is that it is not based in the United States. It will be set in Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and England. OOF. Can I do it? Remains to be seen! Much of it will take place in Taiwan, and so I’m really trying to find ways I can spend some real time there, hopefully through some sort of fellowship. But, Mandarin remains a block for me, and I really want to be ready if the opportunity to visit Taiwan falls in my lap. I don’t want to feel terrified or ashamed that I don’t know even a dash of Mandarin. Although I know a handful of Mandarin words, and learned Mandarin in high school, I’m mostly not fluent. It’s the kind of situation where I can recognize the words in a film but only with the English subtitles. I definitely understand more than I feel comfortable speaking. I’m naturally introverted, but it’s even more intense at the thought of speaking Mandarin to other fluent speakers. It brings back all sorts of ways I’d been teased by my father’s friends and their children, my stepsisters. The number of times his friends pointed at us and laughed, knowing that they spoke words at us we couldn’t understand. The mixed race vibes of having the Chinese students call me slurs for white people under their breath as I passed by them in the halls. My father made a decision early in our life to stop speaking Mandarin to us, while isolating us from the American world outside, so that we were surrounded by Mandarin we weren’t really given access to. I have layers and layers of shame and fear around speaking the language. But, as I listened to Jane Wong laugh about being scolded speaking Cantonese as an adult, and then read the poems on the screen she projected while she read them that were influenced by her slowly acquiring her ancestral language, I felt emboldened to let this be the year that I eradicate the distance between me and my own ancestral language I’d never been given permission to claim, that was knowingly kept from me. As I texted jj about it that evening, I began to cry in my hotel room, flooded by all the feelings and the determination beginning to grow in my body around this huge complicated relationship. I wrote Jane about how changed I felt witnessing her as a bad Asian student—yet another thing that is so difficult for us!—and we quickly formed a connection. I really did love all the readings I witnessed at Lynchburg, and treasured further developing a budding friendship with my pal Maurice, where we connected on deeper levels that were so enriching for me, and I got to see many online friends for the first time in person studying writing in the program, but this remained the key moment for me, you know, the ones where in the future, you’ll tell the story, and say, that, that was the moment where I witnessed someone else’s courage of this one hardship we both share and I decided to change my life.

Sending a happy new Capricorn moon to you all, and sending crossed fingers to all your transformations in 2024,

Yrs always in spirit and fight,
A.