#sestinas if they're good

[scribefindegil]

I mean this in the ace-est possible way but Dimple-in-Reigen's-body is really hot. sorry.

[ecc-poetry]

"TERF Wars" notes and recs

Before you read the sestina, if you indeed do, I urge you to check out these creative efforts from fellow LGBTQ+ zillennials:

"I'm Done with JK Rowling" Jessie Gender (The biggest direct inspiration for this piece. It's 3.5 hours long, so if you love long Youtube videos like I do, you're welcome.)

Trans Witches Are Witches (Get this bundle of LGBTQ+ games, zines, music, and other creative goodies! It's 80% off until 02/24/23.)

"A Brief Look at Harry Potter" Lily Simpson (Yes, my favorite Harry Potter/JKR retrospectives from trans creators get even longer. This one is 10 hours, I've watched it twice, if you start now you can be done by the weekend.)

Harry Potter Rebind Laur Flom (Separating the art from the artist by rebinding the Harry Potter books without JKR.)

And then some navel-gazing from me under the cut.

As a member of the Harry Potter generation, I've been thinking about my relationship with JK Rowling and her work. I never actually finished the Harry Potter books, and while I remember participating in fannish activities (midnight screenings and book release parties, fanfic-reading and -writing, a letter to JK Rowling that I don't think I ever actually mailed), Harry Potter as a world never became one of the ones that really grabbed me and shaped me. In hindsight, I'm still not sure why. It didn't offer me what I think I wanted then, which was a deep understanding and empathy for my internal state.

Speaking of understanding and empathy.

Many trans creatives, from video essayists to writers to visual artists, have spoken movingly and with moral urgency about JKR's transphobia and the threat it poses. But they shouldn't have to do all the work. Transphobia is an attack on all women--and all people--because bigotry is intersectional. I wanted to write something that would come from my own experience as a queer cisgender woman and repudiate the idea that transphobic rhetoric serves me in any way. To whit: There is no conflict between the rights of women and the rights of trans people (they're overlapping categories). There is no trans debate--a human person, with dignity and feelings and inalienable rights, is not to be "debated."

I hope that this poem serves as one more pebble of resistance against the forces that seek to undermine our rights. Trans liberation now. <3

P.S. I owe big thanks to my bestie Anthea Carns, author of the musical "The Devil and Sarah Blackwater" as well as other stuff that is good! Without her this sestina would have been (even more) tortured and (even less) focused.

Also, a big thank-you to my family. We watched all 7 Harry Potter films over the winter holidays, and seeing my parents raise many of the critiques I've seen over the years, in real time, was fascinating. When Hedwig died, my mother turned to us and said, "This is cruel. You don't do that to children." And that really stuck with me.

[wilheminalibrary]

11/09/2023

Bedrooms and the Best of Intentions: Week 1 of November Writing Challenge

I love November. There's something alluring about the month before the end. It commands in equal measure the pitched mandate of disaster preparedness and a decadent sort of Masque of the Red Death need to party before the end. Few things in life delight me like cognitive dissonance. The air changes, the night gets thick with darkness as early as 5:30pm, and something in me wants to get all my shit together and ride the missile into the end of the year like the end of Dr. Strangelove.

How fitting then, that all my friends are cracking their knuckles and getting busy with the reason for the season: National Novel Writing Month. Thirty days of committed work and thirty days of my group chat blowing off steam and complaining about their word counts. I'd laugh and sip my lemonade from the Porch of the Unbothered but, here's the thing: I love a challenge. I love writing to a brief. Give me an assignment, a deadline, and a small chance of success and I'm sold. I see my friends mounting up like the Regulators and I long for a horse. But how do I ride beside them?

I've attempted to write long form before with minimal success. This is what I can best manage: thirty poems, thirty days. A poem a day. This keeps me apace with my peers and gives my November that essential doomsday feeling I need to feel alive.

So that's what I've been up to all week. So far, the process has been rewarding. Funneling my work into the bottleneck of a messy procession of days, forcing first drafts that must be edited later, I can feel these habits barnacle-ing onto my craft. It feels good to look at the past week and see seven little sprouting plants poking out and leaning towards the gray sun. It feels like accomplishment. Like progress.

Of course, the most daunting part of wrangling poems at this pace is that age-old writer cliche: Where to get ideas. Some of my poetry peers can swan dive into the month wihout a plan and trust the universe to give them 30 things to write about in as many days. I love these people. I envy these people. I am not one of them. I need structure. I need buckets. I need a project. I need to iterate. That means forms. It means scaffolding. I love scaffolding.

When pulling inspiration for series poems, the two main roads I've had any success with are variations on form and variations on theme.

I write mostly free-verse, but occasionally feel the call of a sestina or villanelle or pantoum. Perhaps it's the lapsed Catholic in me, still clutching her rosary with frail hands, but I find immense power in repetition. Repeating lines, repeating words, they build momentum and magnify intention like spells or prayers or music. Each repeated line takes new weight from its predecessor, forcing the reader to see the same thing but suddenly different.

Thematic writing or motifs help to tackle larger concepts a moment at a time. I think of the way my transition has changed me, so I start with the media I grew up loving that changes with me as I look back. I'm obsessed with the idea of home and the ways we build it, so I start with people's bedrooms.

These works can feel like the parable of the blind men and the Elephant, grasping at the too-big whole of a thing and coming away with pieces. Bedrooms have such significance. They're solitary spaces that we define by our living in them, but the mere mention of them conjures intimacy, sex, and connection. In her book, The Letters of Mina Harker, Dodie Bellamy writes that "1,000 bedrooms couldn't solve my problems." The line immediately made me think of all the bedrooms I'd been in, and the legend of a thousand paper cranes.

Maybe they would solve everything. Maybe there's value in the work itself. It suddenly became meaningful to attempt it. And so a healthy portion of the month's poems are going to a series about Bedrooms.

The first week has gone by with minimal incident. A couple of skipped days here and there but I'm on track. I'm happy with the poems and excited to write more.

I'll be putting up posts like this one weekly to reflect on my process thus far. A week of poems in. I feel pretty good. I feel like I'm working towards something significant, even if it's just the sense of accomplishment I feel looking at all the sprouting plants poking up from the garden so far. I put in the work, for no other reason than the work itself. I'm eager to see where the rest of the week takes me.

The world may be ending. The year may be shuffling towards a terrible, cold end, but I will work the winter until its soil freezes into bitter stone. I will tend to my hardy crops as the sun dips low and blue as metal. I will work.

And then, as the blue goes black and the last day has nothing left to say but "I'm sorry" and silence, I will look down at my table, my bounty of growth and smile. Piled on my table will be all my efforts, steaming and lovingly transformed from hard work to art.

And then, in the dark hall of December's shadow, proud as a parent, I will pull all my poems toward me with a satisfied sigh and I will do what December was made for.

I will feast as the world screams its last breath all around me. I will bite down on all my heard work and taste its blood in my red mouth.

I will smile.

I will feast.

Yours with an open mouth,

-B