Hey! Someone I love had an abusive, fat phobic experience recently with a "doctor" and we're pissed off about it. Please comment below with the names of any fat-positive and fat-acceptance newsletters and information. We're going to send them to their office.

Please repost.

I glance out the upstairs square window, which has an old-looking gold latch and would swing out toward me if my work table weren't packed tight with jars of baubles and buttons, fabric scraps and books stacked in a lopsided pile. This room is mine, cluttered and full of potential. I sit on an unforgiving chair, knees to chest, press my face near the cool glass to squint and absorb the sun as it sets.

I wish it were closer.

This morning in the shower, I noticed the sharp bone that protruded from the side of my knee this summer, gone. Looking down, the curve of breast and thigh. I'm sure that desire and appetite are lovers. Sure that reading is a hunger for connection. Sure that writing is the best way to be real. I feel real and fragile and brave, like I want to cry or call out or uncurl, relax gut and neck and legs, let go.

I am not fast-thinking enough to capture this time in stories. Instead, I want snapshots, or poetry strung like vines winding around an image. Sometimes I use words like bricks. Sometimes I use them as a type of nakedness. My muscles are coiled like ropes. Unwind me. Learn to find me in these words.

How do we learn to look at ourselves? (Practice in the mirror).

I also really like men who are self-deprecating.

So, I'm taking this nonfiction class and in the beginning we're focusing on comedy. Yeah, me? Funny? What's funny is actually how not-funny I am, serious since I can remember. "Have a sense of humor!" I can hear my Gemini mother exclaiming, even now. How would I describe the things I think are funny? Dry. Things that aren't actually funny at all. Puns.

I don't really like slapstick, remembered that last night as I fell asleep to a special about comedy on PBS. Watching Larry, Moe, and Curly with my dad, I tried to like it, the violence, the one-liners. The thing is, I just don't think watching people get hurt is that funny.

Clearly, I need to loosen up.

I laugh at moments that are absurd, like Casey seeking shelter from an inevitable August rainstorm inside a gigantic vagina tunnel at the Festival. No one was hurt in that scene. If anything, just a little wet.

Lean into this letter. Read it like a memory, an invitation, an incantation.

Eight years ago, you and I met. You: young, reckless and insecure. Me: your mirror image. We believed writing could connect us, shape us, make us real. We believed, like early loves do, that love meant symmetry and disclosure, rather than seeing the god in each other, and the fear. Oh, how we played at love then: revealing too much, then retreating to silence, making a sideshow of our pain. Here, I am busted up and brokenhearted. Here, I am lonesome. Here I am alone.

Is it something I wrote? That's probably self-centered, but really, do you miss the desperation with which I loved you then? The hunger? We were fierce in our love, if unpracticed. Please don't go. Pleading is uncharacteristic and probably unfair, but baby listen, I gave you so many of my sentences. I typed until my fingers ached and I will.

Sure, there's nothing more poetic than an ending, but don't leave just for the sake of art. Don't leave for the sake of lesson. You don't gotta promise me forever, just stay awhile, let me emboss these words on the curve of your hip, make you forget you ever thought to go.

Love,
Katie

Holidays: let us all: gather, rejoice, consume, remember, capture, depart.


"Welcome Home"


January: the month and its virtues: crisp, not as grey as February, movement between chill and thaw.


Right shoulder, I-96 east, entire tree uprooted. I am a person who depends on putting down roots.


To Do:

1. Mail thank you
2. Buy books
3. Get massage?
4. Write more.


Pain Level, a comparison: Muscles like ropes, like fists, like rocks.

The pain didn't come till this morning, not a searing pain, but a dull, deep throb. I strained my trapezius, the large muscle that begins at the back of your skull and connects to your shoulder blade and the end of your upper spine. The incident in question probably occurred while attending C's overdue birthday Ikea blowout, where I reached for a seven-foot-long box containing a bright red bookcase in an overhand, pulling fashion, an unfortunate mistake. I've always been the one who carries the heaviest things.

A phone call with my father, his voice creaking up at the end of his sentences, strained: They'd better not take my pension, Kal. I gave them 35 goddamn years of my life. News of the auto bailout came in today, complete with a heroic picture of Mr. Bush announcing his "rescue plan.

My bookshelves are pitching forward, bowed in the center. This semester, I'll find the money to buy seventeen new books, stack them to the ceiling, curl up underneath, looking up.

Goodbye first semester fugue state. Hello crocheting scarves and plans for sewing a hoodie and waking up without a furrowed brow. Dear Diary, why do all the women I know in grad school feel not good enough? And the men talk too much about their theories because there is so much pressure in knowing everything and needing to inform the rest of the world. Maybe I'm being unfair.

Dear Patriarchy, screw you. I'm gaining weight for the winter and I've never looked hotter. I wrote two notebooks full of essays and I'm only going to keep writing, getting stronger and more fierce and sure all the time. Mondays I will make art and Tuesdays I will write and repeat this pattern until I find the spirit I thought I lost. (Remember her sounding out the word "CUNT" onstage?)

Let's be real: there are so many reasons to survive, one of them being the way my hip curves out into space when I look over my shoulder to catch myself in the mirror.

If HB-6341 is to be enacted and become the Michigan Anti Bias Crime statute,
we need your help!

To date, Senate leadership has refused to allow a vote to take place on this legislation. The only remaining scheduled date in the present Senate term is Thursday December 17th. If there is no vote on that date, the bill will die. New sponsors will have to be found to introduce the bill to a mostly newly elected House membership.

The new House members will not have the understanding of the hate crimes issue that the current group has. It was in large part this knowledge of the issue that resulted in the current members voting 81 - 18 in support of the bill. There is no good reason for the Senate not to vote now. We believe that if Senate members were free to vote, they would support the bill in proportions similar to the House. After all, the bill is already supported by everyone from the Prosecuting Attorneys Association to the ACLU.

So, if you want to see Michigan's hate crime law become comprehensive, inclusive, and effective tool for law enforcement and the courts, NOW is the time for you to send that message.

CONTACT SENATE LEADERSHIP TODAY:
Michael Bishop Majority Leader SenMBishop@senate.michigan.gov (517) 373-2417
Alan L. Cropsey Majority Floor Leader SenACropsey@senate.michigan.gov (517) 373-3760
Wayne Kuipers Judiciary Committee Chair SenWKuipers@senate.michigan.gov (517) 373-6920

CONTACT YOUR SENATOR TODAY:
You can determine who your Senator is, and get his or her contact information, by going to the Senate’s web site: http://senate.michigan.gov/

Tell your Senator:
This legislation is important to us!
We want them to vote on this bill this term!
We want them to vote yes on HB 6341!

Homofactus Press will offer 28% off each Femmethology pre-order for the entire month of February. A coupon code will be provided in the February Homofactus Press newsletter.

To get a code, you must use the automated newsletter sign-up address (newsletter@homofactuspress.com) to subscribe to the newsletter.

Please share the automated newsletter sign-up address with friends, family, and anyone who might like to purchase one or both Femmethology volumes at a discount in February. Customers must be newsletter subscribers to receive the discount.

Why do you keep a LiveJournal? Do you keep a paper journal, too?

You might have guessed I'm writing an essay.

does the internet separate or connect us?

"Do you ever worry about human isolation?" I asked her like it was no big deal, such a heavy question for the day before holiday break. I'm not talking just about my own loneliness; but about the part of being human that makes having deep relationships with other people painful and so we avoid talking to one another.

I read an article recently that said social isolation makes you cold, literally. My hands have always been frozen in the winter, fingernails purple, blood gone inward to hibernate. I'm trying not to read too much into it, but my hands have been so cold that I have to rub them together to feel, scritch scratch, my skin dry from the indoor/outdoor contrast of heat and chill.

This woman I know asked if I know many people in Lansing, said I'm probably lonely, matter-of-fact like it's a perfectly human thing to be. There's only one person who knows me in this town; and about three I want to know. One of them is my age and I'm forming a friendship with her both slow and fast, the kind of friendship where we talk about feminism and plan direct actions for the December break. I miss the community center so much that I could cry; and I miss activism even more. I wonder if there will ever be balance between teaching, classes, writing, relationships, and activism. I want to weave them all together but don't yet know how.

I am making a quilt with fall colors and writing an essay about loneliness or community or something. Yesterday, C and I had dinner at my family's house; and for the first time in many years I felt something like family. Still, even that isn't without pain. Like when I cut my father off when he used the word, "ghetto" in relation to the city of Detroit. Later, my mother came in and said, "You know, you might have listened to his experiences with the race riots in the 60s. Those are memories a person can't forget, a history that will be lost if you don't listen."

Last night we drove on icy roads to Ann Arbor, where Elizabeth and I talked at Cafe Ambrosia. I like her voice, the way she isn't afraid to use it, how she was never taught not to. I like her mother's androgynous gender, her nature-lady spirit. I think she will like B, Elizabeth's new love interest, the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, how they smile at each other.

I've been careful of my time lately, protective, remembering to surround myself with people who have joy, artists and people who grow things and those who lend me their books. I've been thinking a lot about identities, the places in us that are tangled, or woven maybe, intentionally. I've been writing about whiteness and racism and institutional structures that make speaking hard (or impossible), about the ways that silence is a privilege and sometimes an act of resistance. I've been wearing a lot of layers, intentionally gaining weight for the winter, determined to weather it.

I met a woman whose name is Erin and she has interesting glasses and feminist politics and ideas that jump off the screen. She is a vegan. She is an Aquarian. I've never been friends with one before and maybe this means I'll have to wave my arms a lot, but I'm willing to try.

I'm glad October is over.

Early November snow has sucked the warmth right out of the air and covered the fall colors on the ground. I've been watching my plants out front, unreasonably worried about their survival. They will weather the snow same as they always do. I will remember how to relax.

This weekend is a study in Michigan fall, from sunny t-shirt weather, planting a Mum in the front yard, to chilly and damp, nestling into my sweater and complicated system of coats. I am determined not to have a winter like last so am intentionally gaining weight, in the hope that it will keep me warm.

I filled an entire composition book on my first essay. Thumbing back through it, I find myself reckless, sacrificing many sentences, some floral, winding, convoluted, others just too close. Before I wrote this essay I felt safe, brick by brick built a fort, the entrance blocked by a persona that exhausted me too much to keep up. I am not my essay. But I am also not always brave, certainly not without fear.

I am reading a lot, trying to understand a context and history that is big and old, began before I could even read. It's not that I don't like theory. I'm cautious, afraid that I will start to talk like that, in a way that the people I love the most won't understand. I'd like to learn to move within and between all of these worlds, to make theory out of the everyday, to take myself seriously enough to be oblivious when others don't.

Sometimes I am very serious.

I feel lonely, like I can't relate or am having a hard time getting to know people. I can be hard to know. My hair dresser asks me, "You going out tonight?" and I just laugh, say, "Nah. I'm more of a stay home and read sort of girl." I have always been mostly introverted but hungry for connection. I've met a few people I'm interested in getting to know. But how do I get to know someone without revealing too much? How can they ever know me if I conceal everything?

I'm finally coming out of the fugue state produced by the first two months of school and bam I'm desperately lonely. My emotions have impeccable timing.

I love the false hope of the day immediately post-election. My students were all smiling and chattering with excitement. Apparently, the student apartments/dorms were hopping last night, people dancing and cartwheeling in the streets and cops there to "keep an eye on things." I've heard a lot of talk about the political climate mobilizing young people to vote.

I like that we get at least the illusion of democracy through voting, though I don't believe the two-party system will ever create meaningful social change. It is comforting to know that the political climate for people who are marginalized - queers, poor people, people of color - won't likely get worse. If McCain had won, I would have stayed in bed this morning.

Beginning an entry with "should" is not productive. I should be writing an essay about the move between silence and speech right now. I'm not. I should be patching multiple voices together so they make something beautiful.

Sometimes I worry that if I start to talk like the people in my program no one will understand me anymore. If I start using words like "discourse" and "genre" in the everyday, you'll call me on it, right? I'm afraid I need to learn to talk like that to be heard in this space. I'm afraid I'll start saying things like, "in Foucault's discussion of blah blah blah."

I've been crocheting again, tying knots, hanging on. I have found a few feminists, several people who are generous, and at least one friend. Some people assume things about me based on how old they perceive me to be but that's probably a function of their insecurity. I'm not ashamed to be young as I am and I'm not afraid of getting older.

I should get back to this essay but wanted to pop in and say hello.

Graduate school is a curious mixture of pleasure and pain. Supposedly, October is the month everything falls apart. Things have certainly fallen apart in the fall before, but I'm trying to remain optimistic, to remember that the university can be a space of both resistance and survival.

I'm lonely, so far in my head. At times, I feel like I'm being split open, remembering how much noticing and recording can hurt. There are some people who believe that "literary nonfiction" is a lesser form, but perhaps they're afraid to be vulnerable. I don't know the norms of "academic" writing in this space. Or, they depend on who you talk to.

There are days where the dishes pile, winding toward the ceiling precariously. There are others where I relish washing them just to be doing something with my body rather than my mind. Still, I never fool myself into believing that work is anything but work. I'm fortunate to be working with my mind, being challenged daily, observing the landscape.

The man next door has been sexually harassing me like it's his job because, well, it is. Yesterday, feeling vulnerable, having revealed myself perhaps a bit too much in class, I walked to the front yard to let Ruby out.

He said, "Baby, why don't you take that hair down and look sexy for me?"
I said, "Not really into looking sexy. Just came from school."
"You look like a fucking librarian."

First of all, many lesbians find librarians very sexy. Second, it really freaks me out that he only talks this way when other people aren't around. I will make a point to never be alone with him.