Happy allergy season! Despite the itchy eyes and occasional sinus headache, I am so relieved it’s spring. This past winter in the mid-Atlantic felt meteorologically cruel. I’m looking forward to late sunsets and time spent outdoors with friends (armed with zyrtec, of course).
Come see me at Proxima Arcanum!
I’ll be reading at Proxima Arcanum on the evening of April 16th. This is a super fun queer/trans reading series at the Current Space in Baltimore. It’s outdoors, there are always cool vendors, and the cocktail menu is killer. Hope to see you there!
Amplitudes longlisted for the Otherwise Award
Amplitudes: Stories of Queer & Trans Futurity made the long list for the Otherwise Award (formerly known as the Tiptree Award). I continue to be awed by how well this anthology has been received. The past year has been such a ride, y’all.
A Locus Awards reminder
Have you voted for the Locus Awards? The deadline is April 1st, the process is super quick, and you can vote whether or not you’re subscribed to Locus Magazine. My novella Redundancies & Potentials is on the ballot, as are two (two!!) anthologies I’m a part of: Amplitudes and The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Vol. 1.
May I recommend …
watching/listening to MUNA’s appearance on the straight diva podcast? MUNA is one of my favorite bands (and its members are the hosts of Gayotic, one of my favorite podcasts). To keep it real with you, this group does not often interview “well” by traditional metrics. They talk over each other. Digressions turn into unrelated anecdotes which spawn yet more digressions. There is so much ADHD (and so little media training) in the room. They are, in fact, gay and chaotic.
But all of this charms me immensely, because the rough edges make it clear that these are best friends and longtime collaborators shooting the shit, chatting about artmaking. The conversations I have with my friends sound and feel a lot like this. And sometimes, something profound emerges.
Around the 8 minute mark (timestamped link here), Naomi says something that felt like getting kicked in the chest:
Katie is a very prolific songwriter and has a lot of songs, and we call some of them “fake songs” … Maybe you’ve been trying to write a song that speaks to some topic or uses some metaphor for like years and years, and you finally … The real song is when you’ve finally written all the fake songs … and you get to the real one at the end.
I have never had a unique experience, huh? We’re all—all of us artists—going through the same struggle. Repetitively gnawing on concepts and motifs, trying to get at the true thing underneath.
reading Blair Braverman’s new essay in the New York Times Magazine (gift link)? Like many, I became a fan of Blair’s storytelling on twitter, and from there read her memoir (Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube, 2016) and, eventually, her novel (Small Game, 2023). And, like many, it was through Blair’s words that I became interested in mushing.
After nearly a decade of following Blair’s adventures with her dogs—and yes, forming intense parasocial attachments to a gang of Alaskan huskies—this longread was such a bittersweet sendoff. I can’t fucking wait to see what she does next.
Dominique Dickey 