no. 3

right about here is when I always wonder how long we're gonna keep this up.

Apr 24, 2023

from the after/hours archives: DAMMIT [February 5, 2022]

My days are not my own. Like most of us, I'm knee deep in op-eds about the state of the world and my plight within it, (and yes, those are eight separate links), but when I lay me down to sleep, I'm acutely bitter about the by-products of stolen lifetimes. Mothers, young people, Black folks, women generally, just whole swaths of communities and humanity with hours and hours and hours and days and years and lifetimes, whole generations, stolen.

I'm well trained by this nation, and so I look for a hierarchy, and can easily spot a million souls (and that feels like a low-ball estimate) “worse off” than me. As if this comforts or heals or softens.

I don't know why, ‘cause this transition isn’t smooth, but I'm thinking about a field trip.

In 2016, my last semester teaching in New Orleans, I took my fifth graders to StudioBE, a project so beautiful and dynamic that it's better if you just read about it. It wasn't just the immersive space or the funny kids or the Black creativity that I call back to when I revisit the studio in my mind's eye, so much as the community that embraced its presence and the schools that prioritized it in learning activities.

Oh, that's why I'm remembering that field trip.

OK, but it's pretty impressive I found this in the bowels of my Facebook.

I've been thinking about the intimacy of art gatherings, of learning, of travel together, of creation; I've been thinking about how certain I was in that moment that I was where I needed to be. We were in a bold place and we were engaged and it felt like power. We owned the moment. I miss the confidence permeating in the air that day, and it turns out: like the selkie, that river beneath the river is my home, and I've been on dry land too long. Listen, my life needn't have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to qualify me for a life I love. I am made for a lifetime of moments that taste as sweet and chasing that truth isn't war games against anyone who isn't/can't/won't/did/might/hasn't/should/could/will. I am my ancestors' wildest dreams.

All that to say, yes, I did apply to grad school.

Q: HOW WILL YOU USE YOUR MFA TO HELP FURTHER YOUR CAUSES OF JUSTICE AND JOY?

If we’re gonna talk grad school, then you know it’s gonna be bigger than that, but let us first establish that the issues of justice and joy have never been mine and have never been ‘causes.’

This past week, Pipeline closed its run here in town. (As an aside, if you aren't reading plays, short stories, and essay collections, I want to gently encourage you to have better taste.) As a Board Member for the organization, where I’ve volunteered for twenty years, I have celebrated the audience response and the play’s season inclusion in every conversation – we deserve this play. What has had me tied up in contemplation since reading it a year or so ago, and seeing it a couple of weeks back, is this:

Do we want this world to *feel good* to people, or do we want people to function well within its systems?

Students in our schools are ripping the buildings apart, calling in bomb threats, and generally railing against the literal physical building; that’s not a trend for which I have a relevant link (lies). My point is that this behavior is a justifiable response to institutionalized oppression and the actual reality in my school system. Students do not see schools as relevant, conscious, or joyful. A-DOI.

Name me the leadership that soulfully dominates?

I am my only safe, and most loving, place.

I loathe how petty this sounds (because I’m a Sag, not a Cancer, so petty isn’t really my brand [raw commentary and ghosting is my brand]), and there’s no way to write this that isn’t sounding like a rant..

Y’all, if I educated my students like I am “educated” to by social media, I’d have a justified revolt on my hands.

Truly, I sorta dare content creators to walk into a classroom today and lead it with the same energy, summarization skills, and aesthetics they bring to our screens. Ever tried to shut down the comments in a classroom? Ever presented slides and have your kids just “get it" in a single lesson? Ever tailor the curriculum to (exclusively and reactively) respond to current events without context and find yourself having connective, sustainable progress toward.. anything?

I don’t care to outline my pedigree and education, and I doubt you do either; and I don’t share about my public school work often because I built these realms [is a homemade digital weekly newsletter a realm?] for my spiritual calibration.. but suffice it to say I know what I’m doing and I’ve got a keen eye and rich experience when it comes to antiracist, culturally sustaining pedagogical practices, and curriculum development, specifically. I won't speak for everyone, but simply showing up online anywhere means, for me, inundation by a “pics or it didn't happen” ethos, and I can't hang. Transgressive learning spaces must. not. be. performative.

People do not learn where there are not safe, and spoiler: the internet is unsafe AF.

If the summation of learning or teaching is only the public-facing deliverables, we will always remain beholden to the influencers, loudest parents, and brashest politicians. If the summation of our lives are the filtered feeds and follower counts, we will always remain bound to the flavor of the month.

I have never been what the internet, school systems, or narratives have asked of me, and I promise you my students are better for it. I'm not asking an MFA to give me access to justice or joy; I carry them with me into the spaces I occupy, spaces decidely not built for me.

Yes, I am daring academia to deal with me.

Hear me:

Authority, even loving and maternal and compassionate authority, even culturally responsive authority, even woke and well-read and theoretically antiracist authority, even artsy-fartsy authority, even gentle and conscious authority seeks to command. Schools are a microcosm of society, and we can’t be better or different than the worlds we represent or the people who realize their potential. Our biases revert to desiring comfort and oversight even if our version is radical to some; a question we must be asking is,

“What do I wish to harness within myself and on behalf of others so that I may, without rigidity, be a participant in the transformation?”

& the answer, for me, has been words.

I want to harness words.

I want to hold them and mold them and shape them and gift them and manipulate them and wield them and welcome them and celebrate them and use them and acquire them and smooth them and learn them and twist them and unearth them and free them and design them and arrange them.

I want to do that all that time. It’s the thing that makes me feel most in my (unimaginable and seriously kind of flowy) power, and it’s the thread that ties a neat, butcher-shop-cornered, plain old bow around everything else I do:

I build words into worlds + it is the very most

and the very least I can do, every day, every time.

.I Just Want To Dance via Spotify and according to me, every morning.

Q: I WANNA KNOW MORE ABOUT YOUR GRAD SCHOOL JOURNEY.

I hope to speak from the scar, not the wound; I mean, it’s a way I move through the world and its violence/s and its splendor. The scar speaks of the after, of the continuation. The scar is a healing process now and forever, and that to me invokes tending. Every dream about my tomorrow’s creations, be they art or within my child or as a by-product of some very 3-wing energy I’m riding, lives in a hope that I might make it make a kind of loving, soul-sense for understanding someday.

One week in, and I have nothing to say about Black History Month that hasn’t been said more eloquently, more succinctly, more poetically, more radically, more dynamically, more humbly, and a couple million times over since its inception. There are no new notes to make. Moreover, I am tired. I am not a teachable moment and, even if I survive this one day or interaction or city or nation, I am not responsible for teaching why my life is a triumph. The only place I’ve ever owned that mission has been in public education, and now a tip line wants to hang me for the divisive content I bring to the classroom (and, to be clear, I stay bringing divisive content to all rooms, for which you are welcome).

I’m no good at hot takes, but then, I do not try to be. Folks better than I are sorting and cataloging history + humanity in real-time, and even when I bemoan it missing the mark (see.. well, above..), I am here for the long haul, for the remnants we leave behind in order to be counted, for the dangerous domestic and accidental altars. I am here for the buttons found beneath excavated land and the names carved beneath stairways; I am here for nurture and imagination. I will admit I worry that sounds unsophisticated, homely, forgettable, naive, even.

But tell me: What, on earth, has lasted? What have we made in all this time if not art, war, and children?

I am not absolved of this work in my lifetime, and I hold no vision of justice that isn’t fluid, recalibrating its equilibrium with every new generation, persistently seeking to serve the most vulnerable amongst us. That’s forever work.

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What justice we seek now
must include the preparation
of our spirits + our children’s spirits
for the mutability of power
+ the joyous work of liberation.

So I cannot exhaust myself on being seen doing on the internet when my gaze is steady-focused on being seen having done generations from now.

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I must do what work is mine.
& I’m built for kitchen table work.
for side-by-side on the couch work.
for late night talk work.
for scribbling in journals work.
for classroom work.
for dark theatre work.
for snarky commentary in the corner work.
for knowing glances across a room work.
for soul-bearing work.
for fireside work.

So, yeah, shit!

My days this week have not been my own + that truth delayed more than just this letter; it has left me daily preoccupied with the the ties that bind me, and that's not a good look. I operate with peacefulness and joy with my people when I hold it within myself and, frankly, it shouldn't be so hard to, like, feel good. I'm saying: We get better at what we practice, so if we ever wanna do this joyful life routine maybe it starts here.

I’m single, so I hear a lot about privilege from men at various dives and bougie shops.

(Aside) My problem with NFTs isn’t that I don’t give a shit and these men don’t notice. My problem with NFTs is that I don’t idolize capitalism and measure my value according to variable innovations designed to monetize the very thoughts passing through my synapses. My problem with the NFTs is the same problem with slide-posting as education; it may be an algorithmically successful model for distributing finite goods, but I do not long to deliver products.

I like the intangible. That’s where the glory lives.

I want the long, winding, frustrating, misunderstandings, hungover-from-motherhood-and-late-nights kind of hungry. I like when confusion ends in hugs. Not exactly like, “yay, friends!”, but like closing a circle, where the fight wasn’t the mark of the friendship or mothering or collegial exchange, but the deep understanding making space for egg-soaked morning conversation over the awkward kitchen table tomorrow.

These men say I’m refusing to seize the moment (and there’s a digressay I could write here about what it is to stand before a woman like me and not choose me, but sure, it’s me that lacks courage); a friend says, and I agree, that when we lean into the current time and make art from that specific moment, we solidify a kind of timelessness.

Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. I am not here, by prophecy or choice, to do anything more than what a moment asks of the most + least of me, and it always comes back to words, and words, for better or worse across eternity, are timeliness.

So, OK.

The short answer is: I’ve applied to grad school for an MFA in creative writing because I want to study and investigate the evolution of words and word-makers and word-weavers, and I’m fucking over the systems I toil within, so I refuse to spend the next several years doing anything other than creating, consuming art in all forms, and generally delighting in my own potential.. even as I recognize the only real freedom is within me.

The long answer:

I just finished Close To Me, a psychological thriller about a woman who has suffered a traumatic brain injury following a horrific fall down the stairs. She loses a year and, with it, some sense of herself. The series subtly hints at her menopause, another debilitating and uncontrollable force in her life, leaving her body vulnerable from every angle. Perhaps a weird mind-jump, but the show reminded me of the (thousand sing-aloud car hours since) my first listen to Adele’s new album.

What is it to be seen by yourself as your entirely fucked up,

perfect self, and not hide? Isn’t that the maturity I’ve sought to uplift

within myself all these many years?

The women I am drawn to these days are not afraid of their trauma, their hurts, their hugeness, their beauty, their history, or their futures, and they refuse to persist in presentations of themselves or engagements in their lives that are anything else than honest, healing, and creative.

I think that means claiming as loudly in our days and lives the shit we shout in teacher workrooms, random IG threads, and the middle of the night. I might not even get accepted, y’all, but I didn’t apply for that.

I merely decided to match the ‘me’ on paper to the ‘me of my wildest dreams.’

h o m e / w o r k

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