Blog

On ‘Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco’ by K. Iver
Book #4 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. Trans. Born that way? Maybe. A genre unto ourselves. Listen to the Bronco crunching the gravel driveway outside the brick house in the past. Impossible.

On ‘Hall of Waters’ by Camellia-Berry Grass
Book #3 in my Trans Rights Readathon week. The book about Excelsior Springs, Missouri is grounded in “collective experiences” and narratives about water. Grass aspires to help other trans writers.

Here is how we do the 2023 ‘Trans Rights Readathon’
Read trans books and support trans people. Read trans books, donate to trans orgs, and support trans people. If you do it the week of March 20, 2023, you get to say you participated in a readathon.

Climate change, predicted (three decades ago)
Returning to an environmental classic: ‘The Ages of Gaia’ by James Lovelock. We don’t yet know what it will be like when the forests are gone. But we should live in a way that prevents this outcome. We must support our own survival.

The Industrial Revolution: All of it has to change again
Trains represent where we’ve been & where we‘ll go next. Steel, aluminum, concrete; fossil fuels; electric light; transportation, communication, refrigeration, medicine. Do we know what we have to change?

Tadpoles teach us in Kern’s ‘Real Sugar’
Stories for those who feel ‘fragile about frogs’. We can grieve “all the frogs that aren’t.” Some of our stories going forward, though, have to be about the frogs that are. Which will those be?

How we’re here now: Poems of California
Poems in ‘Rift Zone’ and ‘Last West’. We know in our bones what being is. Because we are. ‘To be’ is to exist in a place, to grow, to break off, to feel how this ties us to past and future.

We know who’s responsible for orange sky
We need to hold them accountable. It’s Exx-smog and Shell-smoke. The big orange cats must be held accountable, and there’s more than one. Each of us has a role to play.

Designing a town people can get around? Repeat this exercise.
Anna Zivarts reminds us how we can take an hour to try harder. Sometimes we lack empathy for each other’s transportation needs and preferences. We have no idea because we haven’t stopped to try.