I tend to divide my creative life into head-up periods and head-down periods. When I’ve got my head up, the work is primarily outward-facing; less time is spent writing than talking about writing. 2025 was quite the head-up year—a victory lap after publishing Redundancies and Potentials, and another one after Amplitudes: Stories of Queer & Trans Futurity dropped. I got to do a lot of cool events and readings. I got to share what I had made.
But when I’m doing the making, that’s the head-down work. Deep focus, with my eyes on my own paper—and no one allowed to look over my shoulder.
June has been a very head-down month. I hope July will be, too. And though I regret nothing, an unfortunate side-effect of this head-down period is that I have not read a single book this month. I’ve watched two movies, one of which I recommend below and one of which was Obsession. (I loved Obsession and intend to see it again, but do not recommend it unless you like feeling bad on purpose.)
Allow me to recommend …
watching I Love Boosters. I had so much fun with this movie that I saw it in theaters two days in a row. It’s colorful, it’s maximalist, it’s anticapitalist. It’s got stop motion animation! It’s got incredible costumes, hair, and makeup! It’s got sci-fi shenanigans powered by dialectical materialism! If this is still playing in theaters near you, I strongly suggest you see it on the big screen. (Baltimore folks, I know it’s showing at The Charles until July 2nd.)
playing Anthropeum, a daily game where you match ten artifacts from the Met’s collections to their time period and location of origin. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it over the past couple weeks. I’ve gotten very good at nailing the time period, but occasionally have huge errors on the location.
listening to “Africa” by Toto, which I truly believe is one of the top 500 greatest songs in all of human history. Yes, we’ve all heard this one … but have you heard it recently? If not, go fix that!
Dominique Dickey 