Should I say, “I’m fine thank you, how are you?” like a cog in the greased wheel of social graces that grinds on and on, tamping down the dust that gathers upon the ruins of human connection?

Or should I say, “Actually I’ve been dreaming of my bones turning to liquid every night and I miss my mother so much that sometimes I cry when the rice cooker goes off because it reminds me of her, so on a 1-10 scale adjusted for pandemics and fundamental threats to the fabric of our society, like… a 6? What about you?” like a person who doesn’t have an aversion to prolonged awkward silences.

Honestly, at this point, neither of these options is doing it for me. The first one makes me feel like a ghost in a shell, the second is exhausting, and neither is adequately absurd or surprising enough to rise to the occasion of another Wednesday Zoom meeting. As a community service, I have devised a few fail-proof alternatives to “How are you?” to make your weird and stressful interactions in a weird and stressful world, weirder than they already were— but, like, in a fun way.

For the guy who says workweek platitudes like “Hump Day!” aloud in a way that he thinks is ironic, but actually he’s reaching that age and level of personality ossification where it’s not really ironic anymore:

To the co-worker who talks about the genuinely truly terrifying news as if it were E! News because she is either materially or psychologically insulated from catastrophe but you’re not and you wish she would just stop:

For the cool person you see on your daily dog walk that you want to be friends with, but you’re not quite sure how to break the ice:

For the manager who knows better than to tell you to smile but you can tell he really really wants to:

For the child of your friend who you must occasionally interact with and who is probably going to turn out okay but right now is just kind of “meh”

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post Never say “How Are You?” Again! 5 Alternatives To Shake Up Your Small Talk Repertoire appeared first on Repeller.

See you there & love you so much already,

– Sarah Panlibuton Barnes, Senior Editor, Book Club Host, and The Friend Your Mom Would Totally Love, at Repeller.

Chapter 1

Mother

Journey to the West (I)

Or: A Story of Warning for My Only Daughter 

Moral: Don’t Bury Anything.

Ba doesn’t know where he buried the gold. Ma chases him around and beats him with her soup ladle. You’ve never been to a funeral, but this is what it looks like: four of us in the backyard, digging where our shadows have died. A shovel for Ba, a soup ladle for Ma, a spoon for me and Jie to share. We dig with what we don’t want—piss buckets, a stolen plunger, the hands we pray with. We even use the spatulas gifted to us by the church ladies, after their days-long debate about whether Orientals even used spatulas. It was decided that we didn’t but that we should. Hence our collection of spatulas, different sizes and metals and colors. Ma mistook them for flyswatters. She used them to spank us, selecting a spatula based on the severity of our crime. Be glad I use only my two hands on you.

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.

You’ve never been to this year, so let me live it for you: 1980 lasts as long as it rains. It rains the Arkansas way, riddling the ground like gunfire. Years after this story, you’re born in an opposite city, a place where the only reliable rain is your piss. You ask why your grandfather once buried his gold and forgot about it, and I say his skull is full of snakes instead of brains. He’s all sold out of memories. One time, he pees all over the yard and we follow his piss-streams through the soil. Pray they convene at the gold’s gravesite. The gold in his bladder will guide us toward its buried kin. But his piss-river runs straight into the house and floods it with fermented sunlight.

When the church wives come to give us dishes of sugar cubes and a jar of piss-dark honey, my ma tells them that Orientals don’t sweeten tea. Don’t sweeten anything. We prefer salt and sour and bitter, the active ingredients in blood and semen and bile. Flavors from the body.

Ba says he’ll find the gold soon. Ma beats him again, this time with a pair of high heels (also a gift from the church wives). Ba says the birds will tell him where he buried it all. Ma throws a flowerpot at his head (seeds via the church wives). Ba dances the shovel too deep and hits water. Except it isn’t water, it’s a sewage line, and the landlord tells us to pay for the damage. The rest of the month, we wade the river of everyone’s shit, still convinced Ba can remember, still convinced memory is contagious. If we stand close enough to him, we’ll catch what he lost.

The gold was what Ba brought from the mainland to the island. That’s how soldiers bribed the sea that wanted to steal their bodies. He paid his passage with one gold bar the width of his pinky and swallowed the rest, the gold bleached silver by the acidity of his belly.

In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: in gold we trust. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

After twenty years of gambling on the island, Ba lost all the gold and tried to win it back and back and back again. When they met, Ma already had three children and one dead husband who returned weekly in the form of milk-bright rain. The local men said she was ruined from the waist down but still eligible from the waist up. She wore a heavy skirt that tarped her like a nun. Ma donated her three daughters to her parents and birthed two new ones with Ba.

I’m the second of the new ones. We’re the two she kept, brought here, and beat.

When Ma married him, he was twenty years older. Take the number of years you’ve lived outside of my body and plant them like seeds, growing twice as many: that’s the thicket of years between your grandmother and grandfather. Except Ma doesn’t measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields where she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in the Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar. Once, Ba asked her to teach him to write the Tayal alphabet she learned from the missionaries. But she said his hands were not meant to write: They were welded for war, good only for gripping guns and his own dick. Jie thought this was funny, but I didn’t laugh. I have those hands. When you were born, I saw too much of your grandfather in you: rhyming hairlines and fishhook fingers, the kind that snag on my hair, my shadow, the sky. You made a moon-sized fist at every man, even your own brother, who tried to bury you in a pot of soil and grow you back as a tree. You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.

Decades ago in Yilan, Ba shat out his last bar of gold, along with a sash of seawater and silt. He buried it here, in this yard we never owned and that you were born far from. Ma liked Arkansas because it sounded like Ark, as in Noah’s. All of Ma’s words are from the Bible. Most are single-syllable: Job, Ark, Lot, Wife, Smite.

The only way we’ll find the gold is if we shoot Ba’s skull open, extract the memory of where he buried it. Ma tried it once. She pointed the shotgun at Ba’s head and stomped the floorboards while saying Bang, believing the memory would evacuate from his head. Instead, Ba wet himself and Jie had to mop the floor with a dress. Apparently Ba needs a war to motivate him. Ba won’t unbury anything unless there’s a boat to be bought and married. We have a week to hire a war to come to our house. Or else, Ma says, the gold will stay buried and we’ll have fed all we own to the trees that grow moss like pubic hair.

Jie suggests we hang Ba by his feet, upside down, so that all his memories flee upstream and pool in his skull. We’d have to unscrew his head somehow. I tell her it doesn’t work that way, but Jie’s been taking anatomy lessons at the high school ten miles away, meaning she knows how to diagram a body, meaning she’s drawn me a penis with veins and everything, shown me a hole or two it could go in. She pulls down her pants so I can see. I ask her to show me where all my holes lead to, and she says if I dig into the dark between my legs, I’ll find a baby waiting to be plucked like a turnip. (Don’t worry, I didn’t scavenge for you. You were conceived the carnivore way.)

Ma shaves soft wood from our birch tree and skunk-sprays the strips with perfume to make incense, burning it in bunches. The smoke keeps mosquitos from marrying all our blood.

We pray to god and Guanyin, in that order. Pray for Ba’s gold to fall as rain or grow a hundred limbs and shudder out of the soil like metallic shrubbery.

We consider other strategies: If we borrow a bulldozer, we can flip the whole yard like a penny. But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body.

Excerpted from Bestiary by K-Ming Chang. Copyright © 2020 by K-Ming Chang. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post Here’s an Excerpt From Repeller Book Club’s Pick ‘Bestiary appeared first on Repeller.

In August, three Black trans women were attacked by two men as they waited for an Uber in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Bystanders heckled them, rather than helping. Between the initial arrest, release, and the final charges brought against their attackers, murdered and missing trans women have continued to trend on Twitter. 

I spoke to Aurora Lloyd, a D.C. singer and songwriter who works with True Colors United and A Way Home America; Khai St. Lawrence, a wardrobe stylist in West Hollywood; and Kameron Davis, from New Orleans—three Black trans women who reacted to the violent story with their own accounts of safety and passing, allyship and acknowledgement. 

Thanks so much for doing this, everyone. We know about terms like “intersectionality.” What is it like to be at the intersection of your race, gender, and trans identity? 

Kameron: I’m a proud transgender woman, but the first thing you will see from down the street is the color of my skin. For Black trans women in particular, we have to protect ourselves from bigots on the street and bigotry in our own community. Many Black families are deeply rooted in Christianity, with strict taboos on homosexuality, which makes the concept of transitioning from one “gender” to the next so hard to accept and understand.

Part of transitioning that I believe isn’t spoken about enough is the change to our place in the social hierarchy of the world. Being assigned male at birth, we were born into privileges that our cisgender counterparts do not have in society: more power, more respect, a higher “value,” a higher glass ceiling. Transitioning to female flips that on its head. Now we have to deal with the objectification, the constant critique of every move we make, condescending men who find us inferior and less intelligent because we’re women. 

Aurora: “Intersectionality” is such an interesting word because it plays on the concept of dealing with multiple levels of impact. But I always wonder, whenever someone feels they are experiencing some level of intersectionality, which area of their identity is impacted first, or most?  When I was a young boy, before understanding anything about the world, race was most prevalent to me. As I grew into my trans womanhood, my gender became the most prevalent. 

Khai: Personally, I identify as gender nonbinary, so I express my gender identity in different ways, at different times, in a much more fluid sense. While that term is very misunderstood by those outside of it, I feel very much a part of the trans community, as I present and express myself as female very often. However, I acknowledge that there are still instances when I present male, in ways that many of my trans sisters do not, and often cannot. So, for me, the intersectionality that you mention is key, and I recognize that there is a privilege in my being able to present, or perform, masculinity when I choose.

How do each of you feel about the Hollywood attack on those three trans women? 

Kameron: I’m actually Instagram-friendly with one of the girls who was attacked in West Hollywood. The footage was brutal, but hearing the story was horrifying. Three trans women were attacked, tormented, and chased, and one was knocked physically unconscious. A group of men laughed and recorded [the incident]. “Innocent” bystanders stood by and watched. Among all of the bystanders, no one responded to their screams for help. 

The attacker being released is hardly a surprise. If people on the street don’t care for trans lives and safety, how can we expect the police force or state attorneys to care?

Khai: It was particularly jarring for me because I often frequent that area for work. In Los Angeles, there’s a false sense of safety because it’s a pretty open-minded place—but being on the wrong street at the wrong time can leave you in great danger. West Hollywood, which is often referred to as a “gay mecca,” is only 10 minutes away. Ten minutes can cost a person their life.

Have you experienced violence as a result of being a trans woman of color? Have you been afraid in situations because of your identity?

Khai: I have, thankfully, not been the target of physical violence, but the threat is very real. Just last month, I helped a friend move from Hollywood to West L.A. When I Ubered back to my car in Hollywood, my driver dropped me at the wrong spot. It was about 4 a.m., and I decided to walk to where my car was parked. In the 15 minutes I walked alone through Hollywood, I was approached by several men in cars cat-calling me or asking me to “join them.” When I refused, I could feel one of the cars following me down the street. My mind was racing before I heard him speed away: What can I defend myself with? Could he overpower or kill me? 

Kameron: I’ve also luckily never been a victim of violence, but I agree, the threat is there. Living in the Deep South as both Black and trans is terrifying, point blank. I carry a knife and pepper spray and have tasers within reach at all times. It’s a near constant stream of anxiety.

Aurora: I have actually experienced violence. When I first moved to D.C., I was raped and robbed. I was new to the area and thought I could take the bus home because it ran until 3 a.m. This was before Ubers, and my attacker was a college student, like me, who [said he would] direct me to the nearest taxi home. Instead he led me to a park, where he began to come onto me. When I disclosed who I was and told him he had the wrong idea about me, he said it was “going to happen anyway.” Then he hit me and forced me down on the grass. After it was over, he ran off with my things and left me there. It was one of the worst nights of my life. 

I walked the streets of D.C. alone, crying for help. Cars drove past me. When I made it to a main road, a taxi driver saw me and offered to take me home but, as I was directing him, I felt his hand on my leg. I told myself as soon as I saw an area I was familiar with, I would get out and run, and that’s what I did. 

I am afraid every day of my life. I am afraid every time I have to step into a room where I don’t know anyone. My bedroom is the only place I feel 100% safe. I pretend to be confident, and sometimes even aggressive, because I’m like a creature in the wild doing everything in my power to avoid and scare off a predator.

Thank you for being so open with your experience, Aurora, and for trusting us with it. I am so, so sorry that happened to you. 

Thank you for listening and being open to hearing it. 

How much do you think Black Lives Matter has shed light on these issues? 

Khai: Black Lives Matter, in my opinion, shed a light on issues of violence against cisgendered Black people, but it never felt like it was big enough to encompass issues that face trans people.  I remember seeing the video of Iyanna Dior, not long after George Floyd’s death. Seeing that happen in the same place, less than two months after, sent a very clear message that “Black lives matter” doesn’t apply to trans people. 

Aurora: I agree. Black Lives Matter is such a problematic group because though it was founded by queer-identifying Black women, as the movement grew, its core foundations got lost.

Kameron: Yes. Black Lives Matter is an amazing movement for Black people, but for Black trans people, our existence is largely invalidated. It’s not a competition, but for every Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, we have a Brayla Stone, a Merci Mack, a Shakie Peters, a Draya McCarty, a Tatiana Hall, a Bree Black. Trans women have been lynched in public. They have been pulled by cars down dirt roads with nooses around their throats. There are stories that need to be told that just don’t get the same attention. 

Plus, if you don’t fit the mold of what cisgendered people find to be “passable”—”masculine,” or “feminine”—you may not have the same value to outsiders looking at you. But a human doesn’t have to look a certain way to deserve to live.

How can people show up as allies for trans women of color?

Kameron: Do more than tweet support. Donate to our GoFundMes. Volunteer at shelters. If you know a Black trans woman, something as simple as a compliment and a smile goes a lot farther than you could imagine.

I also have to implore everyone to vote. If you’ve seen the way our country is going and you’re scared, please vote. There are numerous problems with both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, but not voting at all, because it makes you “feel better,” endangers people who aren’t as privileged as you. 

Vote for the LGBTQ+ community, the BIPOC community, people both rightfully and wrongfully incarcerated who have lost their right to vote. Vote for people whose voting process is sabotaged or altered by the postal services not delivering ballots. Times are scary, but never give up hope. You cannot get to the rainbows without flying through the clouds.

The post 3 Black Trans and Non-Binary People on Violence, BLM, and the Future appeared first on Repeller.

If you’re convinced, step one is to get the book! This month we’re reading Bestiary by K-Ming Chang. 

K-Ming Chang

Bestiary

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In Chang’s debut novel, three generations of women, Grandmother, Mother, and Daughter, live at the center of a multigenerational, transnational story of family, memory, and desire. The novel itself is mostly narrated by Daughter, and is, in the most reductive sense, about her family, which immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan and now carves a life out of the margins in California. The novel weaves myths from Taiwan into the narrative of her family’s past, and into her lived experience in the present. We learn early on that in this novel, no single life is an island, and all bodies are permeable. Daughter lives in her own body as one presence among the many competing forces, including Hu Gu Po, a tiger spirit that wants to live inside a woman’s body. Daughter’s evolving sense of self is tied to the hopeful, gorgeous queer love story that begins when a girl named Ben spits a plum pit at Daughter’s feet, and a new thirst, for intimacy, for revelation, emerges in her body. 

These are the bones of the novel. However, the story’s breath and blood is made of Chang’s totally unique language. Chang offers us language at its most ecstatic, its most lyric, the whole world of the novel populated by impossible images and sensations that feel like the kind of truth I need right now, a truth that exceeds the literal without sacrificing its integrity. Right now, I crave the kind of truth that is not concerned with rendering the things of this world as they are right now, but instead is concerned with shaping beasts and heroes and heroic beasts out of the shadows that form in the silences of our lives—the silences of traumatic history, of queer desire, of diaspora and immigration and the particular form of violence and intimacy that passes from one generation of women who survived the unspeakable to the next generation of women who must live with the gravity of their history. 

Bestiary has been described as magical realism, a style in which the fantastical lives within a world recognizable to those of us stranded in the drab, predictable landscape of reality. I’ve always thought that this description misses the mark when it attempts to describe novels like Bestiary, in which the supernatural elements do not feel like they’re pulled from the thin air of artistic license or a fable-weighted imagination. Magical realism as it appears in this novel, and in the great examples of the style, is not a simple injection of fantasy into real life, but instead is the transformation of erased, abject, forgotten things into characters and phenomena that refuse to be buried, that insist on their place in the world.

I chose this novel for us because, right now, I crave stories that do not try to confine the wilderness of our lived experience to tight linear arcs. I crave stories that are expansive, ferocious, elegantly feral. I want to read stories that do not attempt to tame the world, but instead lead us further out into whatever lies beyond this. 

You can order the book from Bookshop.org and get started on this month’s Book Club expedition right now. If you can’t afford a book right now, keep an eye on our Instagram—we’ve got something special coming for you. 

If you’ve been here before (the virtual Repeller Book Club secret tree-fort clubhouse), then you know that this is not just any book club. I don’t care if you finish the book on time you’re not expected to show up to the meetup with a concise analysis of the major themes in the book and questions about the protagonists motivations. We’re here to connect, to reflect, to shift our perspective, and to expand our lives creatively. This mission (obviously) requires grand whimsy, mysteries, activities, and experiments. So here is this month’s experiment to get you out of the daily drudge and into a sweet moment of wonder.

Experiment #1: Cloud Watching

Do you remember laying in the grass or on a blacktop or on a park bench as a kid and watching the clouds form themselves into animals and monsters and faces as they moved across the sky? When is the last time you went cloud watching? Can you even remember?

Well, the next time someone asks you that, you will have an answer. Go outside—the beginnings of autumn are ideal for cloud watching. Find somewhere to recline where you can see the sky.

Next, set a timer for ten minutes. For these ten minutes (longer if you are an advanced daydreamer) do nothing but watch the clouds move and the creatures emerge. This is the start of your own bestiary. Let your mind wander and freely associate the billows and streaks into creatures or scenes. You don’t have to be able to explain why that nimbus cloud definitely looks like a shrimp or that cirrus is the Nile. 

When the timer goes off, or when you see a cloud creature that is too good to miss, take a picture. Post that picture on social media with a description of what you see and tag Repeller and use our #RepellerBookClub hashtag. At which point, you will receive instructions for the next experiment.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post Buckle Your Mary Janes! Book Club’s Back and We’re A-Going Cloud Watching appeared first on Repeller.

My mixed feelings stemmed from a history of both lived and observed experiences. I have witnessed Black women being placed under glass ceilings and trying to live up to unattainable standards that are set up to make them fail. For instance, a close friend of mine was hired for her first management job, and she was the only Black manager at the retail store. No one told her that she would be expected to fix managerial problems that she wasn’t even trained to correct. She was blamed for things that weren’t her responsibilities, she has been set up. In my own life, there have been similar struggles. I have felt the frustration of being treated like a diversity hire, instead of a valuable employee. While working in education, there was a specific job that used me as a Black face to illustrate diversity, but when it came to receiving help, no one seemed to care about me. I would have people steal my teaching supplies and gossip about my natural hair texture. When I was an undergraduate, I had a white professor tell me that I should be content with a lower grade than I earned. They believed I would fine because our school had a repeat and replace system, and that I should strive for less when it came to academic achievement that semester. With each of these experiences, there was so much ambition and tenacity that was met with contestation and erasure. It’s been frustrating and exhausting at the same time. Like many other Black women, it feels like I have been expected to sink, instead of being encouraged to swim. 

I also know that Black leaders, sometimes even those with good intentions, are not immune to oversights that contribute to anti-blackness. I’ve witnessed Black leaders overlook intersectionality and Black womanhood as well as Black leaders in police departments that make excuses for white officers that brutalize unarmed Black people that are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. This includes Harris, as her approaches to leadership have not always been successful in advocating for the Black community. 

Clinical social worker Ayana A. Ali works with patients who are struggling with race-related trauma and believes that one of the reasons Black women are loyal to Harris is because they identify with the way she has been vilified by the media, in much the same way I have. Ali explained, “Because Black women are often stereotyped and maligned, especially in the media, many may feel that speaking publicly about criticism of Harris is a betrayal, only serving to further perpetuate those societal tendencies, even if they support her. However, if we truly want to have opportunities like everyone else, we have to be willing to allow our candidates’ records and platforms to be analyzed and critiqued like everyone else’s. We don’t need Black women to be treated with kid gloves, we need them to be treated fairly.”

Misogynoir is sexism that is directed specifically against Black women through racist, gendered aggression and rhetoric. In this campaign, it manifested in the way complaints about Harris have gone beyond political issues, and critiques that intersect with race. Harris has also been portrayed as an aggressor, rather than a passionate leader. It is gaslighting to suggest that Harris is ridiculously or inappropriately angry when she is tackling issues with as much zeal as white male candidates do. 

In the same way that Donald Trump and his supporters labeled Michelle Obama “angry,” they have begun to use the same language and imagery when referring to Harris. Obama was described by a West Virginia county employee as an “ape in heels,” and former Univision host Rodner Figueroa said, “Michelle Obama looks like she’s part of the cast of Planet of the Apes.” Both of these people fed into the vicious trend of racist, gendered attacks on Black women leaders. 

The Trump campaign has already claimed that Harris is an angry Black woman and accused the Oakland, California-born candidate of being illegal. The same claim was made about President Obama. 

Though I do connect to the racism that she’s experiencing, my opinion of her as a candidate is still complicated. She’s made big claims in the past about supporting Black Lives Matter and even advocating for police reform, but her actions have not always translated accordingly. She has a track record of being the “Top Cop”, as a prosecutor in a criminal justice system that has come down unjustly on Black people, specifically Black men.

Harris may have perpetuated out-of-line law enforcement tactics that have been deadly, possibly even contributing to instances of police brutality and prison overcrowding with a majority of Black men. She has also been accused of either doing nothing when it comes to cases of police violence or has even increased it in some cases: “While serving as attorney general in 2016, for example, [Harris] she opposed a bill to investigate deadly police shootings following the death of a stabbing suspect — shot 21 times by police — that sparked huge protests.”

I also know that, for years, Black people have been forced to make unfair trade-offs when working in an inherently anti-black system. There is a degree of self compromise that Harris, and so many others, have to reckon with. I don’t know how much Harris will lead the Democratic shift or merely be one of Biden’s passengers, but I do know that as a Black woman, it’s okay for me to feel a multiplicity of emotions when it comes to Harris.

Harris isn’t just a Black woman, she isn’t just an Indian woman, she’s not just a woman, or a candidate, or even a wife, she is an intersection of identities that all come together to make her a masterpiece of complexity and humanity. I love that she has flaws because those imperfections make her who she is. Black women voters don’t want to be reduced only to our Blackness or our womanhood when it comes to our political beliefs, and the same is true for Harris. 

When people see me, I don’t want to be a monolithic conceptualization of what a Black woman should be, I hate feeling erased in that way. There have been too many unbearably painful moments in my life in which people have labeled me worthless because of my Black womanhood, instead of trying to get to know me. 

As theorist and professor Kimberle Crenshaw has asserted in her studies on intersectionality, “I center Black women in analysis in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences.”

I think it’s my right to both support and challenge her candidacy for vice president. It doesn’t make me part of the opposition or an unconditional supporter—simply an informed voter, which is something Black women rarely are allowed to be. We are often pigeonholed, forced to choose between loving a Black candidate and criticizing that candidate’s reputation or policies. It’s not a matter of who’s right or wrong when it comes to Harris, it’s about Black women deserving the autonomy to unapologetically feel what we want to feel about Kamala Harris, for better or for worse.

Feature Image via Getty Images.

The post How I’m Holding My Complex Feelings About Kamala Harris appeared first on Repeller.

Where did you net out? Do you see yourself in the critical mass or has your 2020 been something else entirely?

The post Here’s What Changed for Repeller Readers This Year appeared first on Repeller.

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Today, I talked to Vivek Shraya, a creative multihyphenate (writer-musician-visual artist) hard at work on a new non-fiction book and adapting her debut play as a TV pilot. A tenth-anniversary edition of her book God Loves Hair is coming out this fall.

How has your writing process changed since the pandemic?

My main writing project at the moment is a new manuscript and for a book that’s supposed to come out with Penguin next fall. When the pandemic first hit, I was relieved to have something like that to keep me focused, but over time I have found that my creative energy has really dwindled. Writing has felt a lot more challenging and cumbersome because I don’t have the same ability to focus. I’m also missing the spark I used to get from the other aspects of my work–touring and performing and connecting with people. Without that, I’m finding that the artistic process is suffering.

The amount I’m writing day to day ebbs and flows as a result. First drafts can be painful even in the best of circumstances, but I try to keep the perspective that I’m fortunate to be at home and do the work that I’m doing in the first place.

Have you felt more pressure than usual to write/create during this time of isolation?

One of the unusual things about this pandemic is that the think pieces about it–and about productivity during it–are being written in real time. The way I manage my anxiety tends to be through creativity, so my response to this initial feedback loop on social media was to be like, “Oh OK, well I guess I better use this time to write three books and 16 songs.” And I started making a list of all these projects that I needed to work on in order to really take advantage of this time. I feel really grateful to the amazing writers and thinkers who quickly pushed back against that kind of thinking and reminded everyone that a pandemic is not the same thing as a writing retreat. That’s been important for me to acknowledge when my writing doesn’t feel particularly strong or fluid right now. I’m trying to write during a time when my mental health is not in the best space.

How and where have you been finding creative inspiration these days?

I’ve been watching a lot of TV. I felt very guilty about it at first, but my friends who are super generous told me it counts as “research,” because one of the other projects I’m working on right now is a pilot script adaptation of my play. Having given that connection more thought, I’ll also say that watching TV helps me think about chapters I’m writing as scenes. I’m more attuned to considering what the scene I’m writing looks like, and what I’m trying to convey with it. I never thought about writing from that perspective before, so I credit TV for the inspiration.

What’s something you’ve written recently that you’re especially proud of (even if it’s just a sentence!)?

I managed to finish the first draft of my new book of nonfiction for Penguin. I can’t say that the writing is extraordinary at this point–it’s very much a first draft–but any writing feels like a huge accomplishment right now. It feels nice to be like, “Well, at least I did this one thing.”

What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?

Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo, which was inspiring while I’ve been writing just because of the way her style is so fragmented, and how she pushes against the expectations of the sentence.

A book of poetry that just came out by Amber Dawn called My Art is Killing Me, which examines the connection between art production and capitalism in a really beautiful way.

And finally, Our Past Matters: Stories of Gay Calgary. Here in Canada I feel like so much of queer history or the LGBTQ history is rooted in Ontario or Toronto, but there’s gay history everywhere. It’s been really interesting to read about the history that’s taken place in my home province and where I’m living right now, especially because Pride season here is in September.

What advice would you give to young or aspiring writers who are trying to write something right now?

I think the biggest advice I would give is the same advice I’ve been trying to give myself: It’s okay not to write. It’s okay not to be creative. There’s so much pressure right now to be doing something, and I think it’s important for us to push against that as much as possible. So constantly remind yourself that it’s okay not to write, and it’s okay not to be creative, and it’s okay to watch TV and for it not to be inspiring.

The post How to Write (or Not!) During a Pandemic #3: Vivek Shraya appeared first on Repeller.

Maybe it’s because I have, at best, only a vague understanding of how computer viruses work. (Apologies again to all of my previous employers, I swear I didn’t know downloading files from a site called Very.Legal.Bootleg.Movies.com would cause any problems.)

But also because, in a way, Spam Emails are a symbol of optimism. Despite the fact that so few people actually open them, scrappy little online criminals continue to send them out daily, hopeful that at any moment, an unsuspecting person will click the link and send over all of their personal banking information. (I’m not saying they’re good people—just that they’re optimistic.)

So, in the spirit of being a good samaritan who once (almost) took a webinar on email marketing, and something of a Spam scholar, I’ve decided to share my deep dive into my four favorite varieties of unsolicited Email.

The Instant Millionaire

Someone—typically a foreign dignitary—claims to have millions of dollars that they need to pass off to somebody else ASAP, and after finding you online (presumably through your long-forgotten Xanga entries and a 2009 newspaper article about your high school’s production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), they’ve realized that you’re their only hope.

The scammer claims that they’ll transfer the money into your bank account for you to hold onto for a little bit, like some sort of financial version of the Baby-Sitters Club, and, in turn, you’ll get to keep a chunk of the money. But! When you send them your bank account information, they’ll just completely drain it instead—all $14 of it, in my case.

(My heart goes out to any real prince or princess in distress out there, who’s desperately trying and failing to find someone online to take their $11 million.)

Who would fall for it: This is one of the oldest scams online, so it’s tough to find anyone who isn’t aware of it. The Spammers should corner a market of people who are new to the internet—like time travelers who haven’t done their research, or people who just woke up from a coma they’ve been in since 1995.

How could this be improved? If they really want to fool people, the Spammers should better tailor their emails to each recipient. For example, nothing about me says that I should be trusted with their money, so it’s immediately clear that it’s fake. However, if they emailed saying they needed someone to send some overly complicated 90 Day Fiancé fan theories, then I’d be more likely to believe that I really am the best person for that.

Hot Singles In Your Area

This Spam Email promises that hot young singles in your area are looking for a good time—and they want to meet you! (Apparently all the hot young singles in my area are looking for someone with a strict 9:30 pm bedtime and a freezer full of Bagel Bites?)

Sometimes these Spam Emails get weirdly specific—like “Sexy_Hot_Chick_89 has sent you a message ;)” These ones are especially panic-inducing, because they make me wonder if, in some sort of fugue state, I made an account and messaged her that she has the same name as my Grandmother.

Who would fall for it: Men.

How could this be improved? Sexy_Hot_Chick_89 seems nice, but a little lost. While it’s sweet of her to keep asking strangers if they’re “looking to video chat with beautiful women in their area,” maybe she should take a step back and find herself through the 2020 version of Eat, Pray, Love (that’s when you Postmates a large pizza, do the first 10 minutes of a Yoga with Adrienne video and watch a full season of Love Is Blind in a day).

Magic Weight-Loss Pill

These Spam Emails claim that, through the power of science, they’ve created a pill that will make you lose 50 pounds in the span of two weeks, without any diet or exercise or annoying #Fitspo hashtags from your cousin’s new wellness Instagram account.

It’s embarrassing, but as a millennial woman who is easily influenced by society, I have Googled this, every day of my life, several thousand times over. (In fact, I’m searching it in another tab right now.)

Who would fall for it: Me, after I bought a size small bridesmaids dress thinking I could fit into it by the wedding, and now we’re three days out and it doesn’t even go over my head.

How could it be improved? It’s 2020 and the world is finally embracing body positivity, so maybe they should ditch the boring weight loss idea, and go with something more fun—like a pill that makes you understand what your 15-year-old cousin is talking about when asks you to film her doing a “Cottagecore Dance to a Charli D’Amelio Soundbite” for TikTok.

College Fundraising Committee

Your alma mater’s hitting you up for a donation, yet again. While it may not technically be a Spam Email, it does have a lot of things in common with them, like an overall tone of desperation, constantly requests for more money, and me deleting both of them right away.

Who would fall for it: Overly optimistic new graduates, rich retirees looking to get their name on a building, and very few people in between.

How could it be improved? If they’d promise to turn my super tiny liberal arts college’s American Studies degree into something useful—like economics or biochemistry (is that a thing?)—I’d send them $20 right away.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post My 4 Favorite Types of Spam, Examined appeared first on Repeller.

Today, I interviewed Shenequa A. Golding, who’s currently crafting the sample chapter for an in-progress book proposal and weighing the benefits of maple syrup entrepreneurship against the vicissitudes of the writer’s life.

How has your writing process changed since the pandemic?

Ever since Big Rona pulled up everything is different, but fortunately for me, it’s different in a good way. I underestimated how much mental space simply commuting to work actually took up. Now, I can wake up 30 minutes before a Zoom meeting, make my bed, brush my teeth, throw my locs in a bun, and “be on time” for work without being sleep deprived. I write more now than before, but that’s because I’ve got more side projects going on (all of which I’m thankful for). And due to quarantine I can focus on them.

This is going to sound crazy, but I’m a homebody. While a lot of people feel like they’re missing out on a free trip to Disneyland, ya girl is chillin! I have no desire to cross paths with Big Rona so I stay at home. I take early morning walks sometimes and that helps set the tone for a good day, but other than that I’m cool. I don’t need to go outside. As far as my attire, I haven’t consistently worn a bra in a few months and you know what? I feel like this is a small victory.

In March, a tweet went viral about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear when he was quarantined with the plague. Have you felt more pressure than usual to write/create during this time of isolation? (If yes, how has that manifested? If no, how have you avoided falling into the insidious trap of hustle culture?)

Well listen, William and his King Lear can go kick rocks! What they don’t tell you about writing is that the words come when they come. It doesn’t matter how disciplined you are, the real words, the words that light the page on fire, they show up when they’re good and damn well ready, at least for me they do. There are times when I sit at a blank Google doc and the blinking cursor is just staring at me. Then there are other times when I can write 1200 words without breaking a sweat.

What partially drew me to this occupation was the solitude. I’ve always been able to get more done alone than I can with groups, and since quarantine, yes, I’ve completed a lot, but not because I wanted to compete with Shakespeare—not all, bro.

Also in March, GQ staff writer Zach Baron wrote an essay entitled, “How Do You Write About People When You Can’t Be Near Them?” This question applies to his line of work quite literally since he writes a lot of profiles, but given that all writing–to some extent–stems from being out in the world and observing it closely, how and where have you been finding creative inspiration these days?

Inspiration is like, whatever to me. Yes, you need something or someone to ignite that creativity. I won’t dilute that, but if your writing is solely based on inspiration then I think that’s going to make things harder for you. Writing, I think, should be about storytelling and (personally) an unflinching curiosity. My creativity comes via conversations with brilliant folks, or reading books. I don’t really search for inspiration much. Instead, I try to turn question marks into periods. It doesn’t always work, but I try.

What’s something you’ve written recently that you’re especially proud of (even if it’s just a sentence!)?

I have a literary agent now, which is bananagrams to even say, and I’m crafting my book proposal, which is a lot harder than I originally thought. Anyhoo, I’m putting together a sample chapter and my agent said it was a good first pass, which is code for “Yeah, no, this isn’t going to cut it,” but that’s fine. For me, being able to write about something that was so hurtful (and something that I’m still dealing with) was a huge part of my healing. So yes, it wasn’t great, but I’m proud of myself for even vomiting up those words.

What’s the best thing you’ve read recently?

Without a doubt, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. I want to fight Stella and I know she’s not a real person.

What advice would you give to young or aspiring writers who are trying to write something right now?

Don’t do it. People don’t read like they used to. They don’t value the written word as much. It’s all about pageviews, catchy headlines, and viral tweets. Being a writer is a lost art. Be smart. Go to law school. Go to med school. Drive a bus. Become a vet. Develop an app. Marry rich. Start a maple syrup conglomerate. Do something that’s lucrative. Being a writer is thankless, and there’s no real way to ensure that you’ll make it or make any real money doing it. Save yourself the hassle.

And if you believed any of what I just wrote, kick yourself. If you want to be a writer you can do it. All you have to do is… write. You got this!

The post How to Write (or Not!) During a Pandemic #2: Shenequa A. Golding appeared first on Repeller.