I’m finally settling back into my skin and into the city where I live. There were so many tiny, glittering moments that I don’t even know where to begin. Thank you, Toronto. Thank you, New York. Thank you, Baltimore, including everyone who came in from DC. Thank you, Chicago. Thank you, Madison. Thank you, Calgary. Thank you, Vancouver. Thank you to everyone who helped support and arrange these events, especially everyone at Arsenal Pulp (the absolute best!). Thank you to every person who read with us, hosted us, and interviewed us. Thanks to everyone who showed up, who bought books, who asked to get things signed and/or who had kind words or smart questions. There are too many people to thank individually, but I have love and gratitude for all of you. Also: I admire and adore Casey Fucking Plett, who is a stellar writer and a phenomenal person. <3

Songs of Love, Death, and Pleasure

Last month, Publication Studio Vancouver released Songs of Love, Death, and Pleasure. It contains lyrics for 31 songs by lo-fi lioness, Certain Women, and Static Saints, a band helmed by Tracy St. Cyr, the main character/co-author of Any Other City.

I love this slinky, slender book, which was designed by Kay Higgins!

Here’s Publication Studio Vancouver’s description, which I appreciate and endorse: “Songs of Love, Death, and Pleasure hovers between music and writing, and between ‘real’ and fictional worlds. Accompanied by a richly evocative bibliography, this attractive volume stands well on its own or paired with its narrative cousin [Any Other City].” As with the project Miscellaneous Kisses, the songbook can be seen as a moon orbiting a planet called Any Other City. (Clearly, I love artsy satellite projects.)

This songbook can be ordered directly from Publication Studio Vancouver or via the main Publication Studio website.

Audiobook

I finished recording the audiobook for Any Other City last week. It was such a wild experience to read the entire book aloud to my director (Severn in Toronto) and my engineer (Chris in a separate room in the studio). (Thank you both!) I’m glad that I did it, but omg it was more exhausting than I’d expected. (If you record your own audiobook in a studio, bring a Granny Smith apple to each session. Trust me.) It was tiring, but it was also a lovely way to release this book into the ether, so it can take on a life of its own, untethered and unfettered. I’ll probably still have to record pick-ups in a month or so, but I’m delighted to know Any Other City will come into being in audiobook format in the near future.

Seattle

I’m super excited to be doing an event in Seattle on June 23rd at Elliott Bay Book Company with Corinne Manning, author of the brilliant, hot, and hilarious story collection We Had No Rules (Arsenal Pulp, 2019). If you are in Seattle, I’d love Love LOVE to see you at this event!

Instructions for Eating a Donut (a postcard)

At events I’ve been doing for Any Other City, I’ve given away hundreds of postcards with Sadie Tang’s piece “Instructions for Eating a Donut.” Perhaps you mailed one to a friend or stuck it on your fridge or use it as a bookmark? If you haven’t seen me on tour (yet), you can peep the postcard below.

Buster Keaton

A few days before Any Other City was launched, I gave a talk at the Shadbolt Centre for the Performing Arts with my bff Onjana Yawnghwe about Buster Keaton and how his films have inspired our own writing projects. (I even read from the in-progress time travel romance novel that we’re writing, which involves Buster Keaton!)

After our 30 minute talk, two of Buster’s films were shown: the short The Balloonatic (1923) and the masterpiece Sherlock Jr. (1924). The films included a wonderful live (!!!) musical score by the Róisín Adams (piano) and Barry Mirochnick (drums).

Okay, I think that’s it for now. Sending love to you from across the distance, friends! <3

I’m getting ready to fly out tomorrow for a book tour with Casey Plett. (Yay!) We’ll be visiting seven cities: Toronto (May 8), New York (May 9), Baltimore (May 10), Chicago (May 12), Madison, WI (May 14), Calgary (May 16), and Vancouver (May 17).

You can find the details and links to get tickets on Arsenal Pulp’s website. I’m thrilled to be bringing Any Other City to life alongside Casey Plett, a writer I adore and admire. I’m so thankful to everyone at Arsenal Pulp, as well as the venues and other readers who will be joining us. I really, really hope you can make it to one of these events. <3

“Let It Go”

One of the spots we’ll be visiting on the tour is A Room of One’s Own, a spectacular queer feminist bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. In the late stages of editing Any Other City, I cut a scene from the novel that mentions Madison, Wisconsin. The scene felt connected to a few strands of the book (and to my own life), but it felt extraneous. One issue was that I’d mentioned Pigment Vehicle’s obscure song “Let It Go,” which inevitably evoked the song of the same name from Frozen, a film I’ve never seen. (When Sarah Polley published her wonderful memoir Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, I noticed many overlaps with my own novel, some of which I mentioned in a piece I wrote for 49th Shelf. Plus, I noticed she’d quoted the song “Let It Go” from Frozen. Ah, synchronicity.)

I love demos and outtakes. In fact, one of my very favourite albums is the Stooges’ The Complete Fun House Sessions, which includes several takes of every song from their vibrant, visceral masterpiece Fun House. I particularly love the first 15 takes of “Loose,” with Iggy Pop singing possibly the greatest, goofiest, and gayest lyrics ever:

Well, I’m flying on a red hot wiener
Yes, I’m riding on a big hot dog
It’s a thing that’s slick and greasy
It’s a thing that’s big and long
I’ll stick it deep inside
I’ll stick it deep inside cuz I’m loose!

After singing those lines 15 times, Iggy changed the lyrics to something far blander. Those original lines are solid gold. (You can hear the first 15 takes on most streaming services. Or you can hear “Loose (Take 2)” here.) Oh, speaking of lyrics, I *just* published a small songbook with Publication Studio Vancouver called Songs of Love, Death, and Pleasure, which is an adorable, gorgeous book. (I fucking looovvve it!) Songs of Love, Death, and Pleasure has lyrics to thirty-one songs (including the ones in Any Other City) and a bibliography. I’ll probably write about it after the tour.

In the interest of outtakes, I’ll end this post with a scene that I cut from the final version of Any Other City. Here’s my note I wrote on July 27, 2022 to my editor Catherine Chen: “I cut out the entire ‘Let It Go’ section with the Pigment Vehicle song. It had some nice moments, but it didn't feel essential. So, out it goes.” If you have a copy of Any Other City, this scene would have started on page 165, right after the section that ends with the sentence “I deleted the note.”

Maybe I will see you on this book tour. <3

For what it’s worth, here is the deleted scene:

At some point, the phrase “let it go” started looping in my head. I knew it came from a song, but I couldn’t remember which one. Those three words turned into a tiny, thorny earworm. Let it go. Let it go. Let it go. And then, like that, I recalled the source: a demo cassette I’d bought in high school by a local band called Pigment Vehicle. Sometimes I can eventually dislodge an earworm by listening to the full song on repeat. It’s sort of like exposure therapy, I guess. I dredged the internet for the song, but it wasn’t there. So, I was left with “let it go” looping in my brain.

I’d first heard that song through a kid named Bobby Puke, who had befriended my friend Aaron. Bobby Puke had recently moved to our school from Madison, Wisconsin. I never knew if Bobby Puke was a name he’d given himself or one that someone had bestowed on him and then stuck. Either way, Bobby simply nodded at his name when we were introduced. He loved noisy college rock, had a horny, smelly Irish setter named Fergus, and lived with his dad, who was always at work, which meant we could drink beer when we visited his house. Bobby was a nerdy, nervous guy with a wispy moustache. Besides beer, the main draw at his house was his unbelievable record collection. He had albums I’d never even seen in record shops, and he didn’t mind letting you dub a copy for yourself while hanging out. He loved to spin records from weird Wisconsin groups, especially Killdozer. He worshipped that abrasive band. I remember he made me a mixtape that opened with the one-two punch of “King of Sex” by Killdozer and “Hot Cock Annie” by the Frogs. I thought the songs were terrible, but I could never tell if Bobby thought they were genuinely terrific or so terrifically bad—like the Shaggs, another band he loved—that they transcended taste, magically turning awfulness into awesomeness.

One day after school, Bobby and I crammed into Aaron’s beat-to-shit brown Mini. As soon as the doors were shut, Bobby popped a cassette into the stereo. Since falling in with us, he’d started riding shotgun and commandeering the tape deck. A song I’d never heard blasted out of the speakers. It was intense and angular. I remember Bobby shouting along with a repeated refrain at the end of the song: “It looks like sperm on the living room floor!” That line squicked me out, but the music sounded so fucking good. There was something magnetic about the interplay of instruments, with bursts of beauty here and there. The next song was “Let It Go.” And now I’m remembering that at some point the song slows down and the vocalist says (rather than sings) something like “one day a woman came to me and told me to let it go.” I think there was a hesitancy to his delivery, as though these are lines from a poem: “one day / a woman came to me / and told me / to let it / go.” Then, the music plods for a few bars before going into overdrive as he yells “Let it go!” over and over.

When we got out of the car at Bobby’s place, I asked him what we’d been listening to, and he handed me the cassette: Hockey Night in Saskatoon by Pigment Vehicle. Even though he’d only lived in my city for a few months, Bobby somehow already seemed knowledgeable about the local music scene. The next time I went downtown, I picked up my own copy of the demo cassette at Funhouse Records. Right now, I’m looking at a pixelated image online of the distorted face on the cover of that album. I must have listened to that tape hundreds of times, and I know my copy is somewhere in a box in the storage unit in my apartment building. It’s maddening that I can’t listen to it. I’m so used to instant gratification.

It’s eerie how my brain unearthed a phrase from a song that I haven’t heard in over twenty years. Somewhere inside me a subliminal DJ decided to spin the deepest cut. But DJ Brainiac read the room when she served up a dance remix of that brief phrase from a demo tape by a forgotten punk band. Let it go and the rest will follow.

I think you can glimpse flashes of that wonder by watching footage of the Smile performing on NPR’s Tiny Desk. At the start of “Skrting on the Surface,” I love how Thom Yorke lets the music move through him. He opens himself to Jonny Greenwood’s sly arpeggios and Tom Skinner’s subtle snare and cymbals. At first, he sings without words, just sounds. His falsetto wavers, and his hand waves in time to the music.

One way to hear the opening lines of “Skrting on the Surface” is “When we realize, we have only to dive, / then we're out of here.” This feels like an acknowledgment of everything glimmering below the surface, the mystery and beauty beyond what we can see. We live most of our lives on the surface, but we might see flashes of the expansiveness beyond the surface.

I’ve been a “good enough” Zen Buddhist for about twenty-five years. (Here, I’m riffing on D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough parent.” I meditate daily, know a handful of Buddhists, and dip into teachings and talks when I feel pulled to do so.) During meditation, I often have a sense of the flimsiness of the surface, its impermanence but also how it connects to everything else. I find something beautiful in that flimsiness, impermanence, and interconnectedness. It reminds me of a haiku by Issa that I read in my early twenties:

This world of dew

is only a world of dew

and yet

(Translation by Sam Hamill.)

When another Buddhist asked me what type of Buddhist I was, I quoted this haiku and said it encapsulated my sense of Buddhism. And, honestly, this sparse poem has informed my worldview since I read it in the late 1990s. I want to live in the “and yet.” (If you’ve read my novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), you might recall that I included a poem that hinges on the phrase ‘and yet,’ which is an homage to this haiku.) I think “Skrting on the Surface” also gestures towards Issa’s “and yet.”

Indeed, scientists have discovered that less than 5% of everything in the universe is observable matter; the remaining 95% are composed of dark energy (~68%) and dark matter (~27%). Clearly, we are ontologically and objectively skirting on the surface.

Last year, I released a song called “Ontology Blues” that also points to the “and yet”-ness in Issa’s short, incandescent poem:

What is this?

What even is this?

The mystery, the trembling, and the beauty

At the time, I was often meditating on the koan-like question, “What is this?” This universe is so weird. What the actual fuck is it? When I’d go for a walk in the morning along the seawall, I’d look out at the water, the mountains, the sky, the clouds, the distant skyline of my city, the people ambling around me, the trees, the water birds, the harbour seals that sometimes surfaced and gazed at me with their dark, round eyes. “Hey, friend,” I’d say softly as we exchanged glances. Like, what the heck is this goddamn fucking place where we’re living? When “Ontology Blues” tumbled out of me, I think it conveyed some of my sense of wonder at finding myself alive, a vulnerable, wide-eyed creature with consciousness, in this unfathomable universe.

In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about the harbour seal, which can slow her heartbeat from 120 bpm to three or four bpm when she dives under the water’s surface. Gumbs adds:

When she is underwater, the oxygen she needs is the oxygen she has. Her blood breathes for her through her muscles as she descends as deep as 1,500 feet. Deep enough for what she needs to do. She slows her heart and listens, reaches, knows.

What if you could hear the world between your heartbeats? Slow down enough to deepen into trust. How can I learn the skill to tell my heart slow down? The pressure is coming. Slow down and we will have the air we need. Slow down and trust the ocean underneath you.

Another way to hear the opening lines of “Skrting on the Surface” is “When we realize, we have only to die, / then we're out of here.”

More than one person I cared about died unexpectedly in 2022. We never know how long people in our lives will be here, just as we don’t know how long we’ll live. I sometimes meditate on my own death. I know I’m going to die, but I don’t know when. What should I do? (To be clear: I want to live as long as possible. That said, I’m not afraid of dying.)

I love Scout Nesbitt’s song “Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death,” which I hear as a meditation, an incantation, a warning, and a celebration:

We're all gonna die

We're all gonna die

We don't know when

We don't know how

We're all gonna die

We're all gonna die

I was talking to another queer writer recently, and we both admitted to weeping constantly throughout 2022. I experienced deep loss, but also found myself so grateful for having known and been changed by people who passed.

Fifty years ago, Yoko Ono wrote the following in a New York Times article called "Feeling the Space":

The odds of not meeting in this life are so great that every meeting is like a miracle. It’s a wonder that we don’t make love to every single person we meet in our life. We take meetings like riding a cab. You know that you would probably never meet the driver again. Yet if the car crashed, that driver is the person you are going to die with. In fact, your life is in the driver’s hands while you’re in the car. But when you get to the destination, you give a bit of metal and slam the door behind you.

I’m reminded of acoustic biologist Katy Payne’s description (on the On Being podcast) of the absolute delight elephants sometimes take in seeing one another, even if they’ve only been separated briefly:

“When a group of elephants that has been separated even for a few hours comes together, we would see members of the group on different sides of the clearing, and we would say, ‘Oh, they’re soon going to meet,’ so we would focus our cameras and our attention on one of them. When they met, it was the most marvellous show of total New Year’s Eve, family-reunion excitement, as if they’d been apart for years. But actually, it was only since ten o’clock in the morning. They rush together, twirl their trunks together, roar, urinate, defecate, flap their ears, and the whole thing says that each individual is overcome with excitement.”

When I mentioned this description recently to a friend I hadn’t seen in person in a couple of months, she said that she’d felt some of that elephant-like, trunk-twirling joy when she came down to meet me in the lobby to go for lunch. “I get to spend time with Hazel!” It’s so sweet to be able to tell people that we adore them and appreciate them. Since the pandemic hit, I’ve been telling people in my life much more openly that I love them.

At the end of 2019, I decided to try writing a memoir. It was going to be kaleidoscopic and would take the form of a triptych, touching on three aspects of my life. I soon realized that it hurt too much to write about my life, especially from the ages of six to twenty-six. For that entire span, I was so angry, anxious, and afraid. It felt like I’d been born without skin. Everything felt like too much. I hid inside myself, like a hermit crab. While trying to write, I remembered Harry Crews talking about writing his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place: “I thought if I could relive it and set it all down in detailed, specific language, I would be purged of it.” But the writing process proved harmful rather than helpful. “It almost killed me, but it purged nothing,” he wrote. “Those years are still as red and raw and alive in my memory as they ever were. So much for good ideas.”

After a month or so, I abandoned my memoir and wrote Any Other City, the fictional memoir of a trans femme musician, a book that allowed me to transmute some of my own recent and distant trauma through the cushion of fiction.

Tracy St. Cyr, the narrator of Any Other City, writes a song called “Broken Open,” which is about the space that sometimes appears after you experience something devastating. Eventually, new things start to emerge after an interval of anguish and blankness, just as small green stems grow from a nurse log after a forest fire.

In “Skrting on the Surface,” Thom Yorke sings “When we realize that we are broke and nothing mends / We can drop under the surface.” I keep thinking he’s reminding himself of the energy thrumming below the surface, the way everything is interconnected below this fractured facade. But it’s also true that some things break and can’t be mended. Last year, I lost my centre of gravity and found myself unexpectedly unmoored. It felt like the sutures on a deep wound, one that had never truly healed, had unravelled overnight. I became a gunmetal grey cloud formation bucketing rain. I became a tippy row boat on choppy waters. I wept constantly. I felt alone and adrift. Lines from two songs swam through my mind for several months:

From Scrawl’s “Story Musgrave (At the Piano)”: “Disintegrate and move on.”

From Neil Young’s “For the Turnstiles”: “Though your confidence may be shattered / It doesn't matter.”

These looped lines proved to be good company. Day after day, I disintegrated and moved on. Month after month, I kept disintegrating and moving on. I let myself feel shattered and saw that it truly didn’t matter. As Pema Chödrön writes in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, “To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that’s life.” I was definitely awake.

And perhaps there’s something beautiful in that, like the final stanza of Jane Hirshfield’s "For What Binds Us":

And when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

I find that last line so barbed and so beautiful.

And, as Alexis Pauline Gumbs reminds us in Undrowned, our scars are merely scratches on the surface:

And your scars are not all I know about you. And my scars are not all I want you to know. And your name is made where life makes itself in me. And your name is medicine over my skin. And our kinship is the kind of salve that heals whole oceans. And love is where I know and do not know you. And love is where we began and where we begin.

One of my favourite people in the world died last year. She was the first person who came to mind whenever I did loving-kindness meditation. She was a lovely, loving presence in my life for over twenty years, even after I transitioned, even when I inadvertently broke the heart of someone she loved, even when her memory started to fade. She always surprised me by telling me how pretty I was, even with my shaved head and my lack of makeup. I loved her so much, and I’m profoundly grateful that our lives overlapped for so many years.

I think about those people who come into our orbits and change our lives. These catalysts are often people we’re close to, but sometimes brief encounters can shift our trajectories. Another person who died last year, someone I only knew briefly, changed me. We went on four socially-distanced dates in August 2020, when the pandemic felt particularly intense. (For context, this was a few weeks after the B.C. Centre for Disease Control recommended lovers “Use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact.”)

We were both wary of getting involved, but we were queer women who enjoyed spending time together. I was thrilled when she invited me to her apartment for cocktails; the windows would be open, the fan would be going, and we’d keep our distance. I even agreed to go on a beach date, and I’m not a beach person. I remember how hard it was to tell if we had chemistry. I’d never dated when it felt risky to sit side-by-side, let alone when kissing felt riskier than oral sex. In the end, we didn’t wind up dating. Everything felt too fraught, and we drifted back to our usual lives, agreeing to be friends. We texted occasionally, mostly about books.

But she changed my life in a few small ways. She was one of those rare people with a clear, calm sense of self and no fear of missing out. I only know a few people who I consider wise, but she seemed wise. I’m hesitant to say much about her because she was a private person, intentionally avoiding all social media platforms. (When I searched her name online, only a handful of work-related things came up.) I keep writing sentences about how she affected me, but I keep deleting them. Perhaps meaningful changes are tricky to track. It’s easier to describe the visible surface than the invisible undertow.

In “Skrting on the Surface,” Thom Yorke sings, “We have only to click our fingers, and we’ll disappear.” For me, those lines are tinged with sadness and magic. Yes, we can disappear in an instant. We can vanish from the thin surface of this life into thin air. Like watching a magician turn a donut into a smoke ring. For me the magic is that we get to live at all. At one point, the narrator in my novel Any Other City thinks to herself, “There are countless ways to coexist on this pale blue dot, and yet humans are choosing to create this cockeyed world. How strange. How disheartening.” We tumble into this unfathomable universe in these glorious bodies, and we keep choosing the most myopic and shitty options available. What the actual fuck?!

I wonder if an underlying problem is thinking of ourselves as separate. We see our thin film of skin as delineating the tiny cosmos that we live in, forgetting we’re connected to everything else.

Indeed, the two songs that spun in my head for months on end — Scrawl’s “Story Musgrave (At the Piano)" and Neil Young’s “For the Turnstiles” — kept reminding me that it was my puny ego that was disintegrating, that was shattered. Over time, I found a new centre of gravity. It was somehow heavier and airier, located lower and less tethered to my ego. Maybe the thin surface we’re skirting on is ego, which keeps us separate, obscuring the interconnectedness of everything.

Before being released by the Smile, this song had been played in different versions over the years. At an Atoms for Peace show in 2009, Thom Yorke played a lovely solo piano version of “Skirting On The Surface”, which has an airy, unfussy feel. (Right before playing the song, he chided someone in the crowd, “Hey, loudmouth: shut the fuck up, alright,” which is an inauspicious segue into the song. But he soon finds his footing at the piano. As Nigel Tufnel says in Spinal Tap after being besieged by disappointing snacks before a gig, “I’ll rise above it. I’m a professional.”)

When Radiohead played it live for the first time in 2012, Thom Yorke said, “This song is called ‘Skirting’ or ‘Skating on the Surface’; I’m not sure.” The Radiohead version has a surprisingly clunky arrangement. It’s like a plane that never takes off. It taxis on the runway for five meandering minutes. I’m puzzled by how every aspect of the song seems to be so wrong. Somehow none of it works: the bass line, the backing vocals, the tambourine, the guitar parts, the lumbering tempo. Towards the end, Thom Yorke starts dancing, and even his dancing feels fucked up. I’m not sure what to call this dance. The Funky Puppeteer? The Tipsy T-Rex? I think he was just embracing the energy of fucked-up-ed-ness that overtook his song. I imagine him thinking, “Why not dance like a goofball while my band flounders around inside this song?”

From my late teens to my early twenties, I released several lo-fi albums under the name sparse. I wrote and recorded hundreds of songs. It was how I kept myself afloat. Often the writing process happened during the recording process. I’d find a few chords and a few words and hit ‘Record’ and just fumble through the song, letting words come out of my mouth before I could consider them. Some of the songs were good. Some of them were not so good. But they helped me keep my head above water.

At the start of 2023, I found myself rereading Jimmy McDonough’s biography of Neil Young, Shakey. While discussing the recording of Tonight’s the Night, Neil Young says to McDonough, “I don’t worry about the permanence of the record. That’s what’s good about it. You make it, you got it, that one’s too late to change, you do another.” That’s so perfect. Treat songs like snapshots. Elsewhere, he talks about adapting the idea of cinema vérité to the recording studio: “The original thought was audio vérité. Why not make records like that? Capture the moment.”

At times, Neil Young seems intent on capturing the mercurial moment of when the band discovers the song. You don’t really know how to play piano? Perfect, you’re on piano for this song! And there is so much magic on Tonight’s the Night. (I’m not sure I’ve ever admitted this before, but “Albuquerque” is a song that I listened to endlessly in my early twenties. I felt it in my body. Ben Keith’s steel pedal playing is dolorous and delicious. The lyrics are so spare and evocative. And I adored the drawn-out way Neil Young sings “Albuquerque,” turning it into a hilarious and glorious ten-syllable-long melody. I was so angry at having been born and desperately wanted to disappear or escape or transmigrate, and this song soothed me. For four minutes, the clouds cleared and everything felt spacious. For the last few years, I’ve often turned to Alice Coltrane’s “Om Shanti” when I need a sonic balm.)

One of my favourite moments in Shakey is when Denny Purcell describes Neil Young playing back different takes to Nicolette Larson, who sang harmony on a song: “Neil’s got three faders of her. And he said, ‘Now, Nicolette, this is the best vocal you did’ – pushes up the fader – ‘and now here’s the next best one’ – pushes that fader up – ‘but here’s the one we’re gonna use, ‘cause we like the feel.’” I hope Nicolette Larson was okay with the take they released, but I agree that music is really about capturing the feel of the moving moment.

During the pandemic, I noticed that I missed releasing music. In mid-2019, I’d started playing music on and off with a couple of friends, but I sensed we wouldn’t be releasing anything for a while. In September 2020, I found myself making songs how I used to in my twenties, writing and recording them the same day with one or two takes. Any flaws became part of the song. My first album, which I released when I was 18 or 19 years old, was called Flawed Beauty. (Fun fact: It was 90 minutes long! I wrote most of the dozens of songs on it while taking classes at Camosun College or during my long bus commute.)

At the time I recorded this batch of new songs, I was enamoured with “Too Small to Fail” by Forgetters, which includes the line “I’m a lioness when it comes to you.” I called the project lo-fi lioness. So far, I’ve released twenty lo-fi lioness songs.

My band, Certain Women, has also started releasing music. The first song we released is a recording of the first time we played the song “All the Pretty Ghosts.” I think it was one of those rare moments of capturing the song while we were inside it.

Earlier this month, we released a four-song EP called Useful and Beautiful. The title track is one of my favourites, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the third track, “Hold Me Like I’m Not on Fire.” Its title comes from an illustration by my talented writer/artist pal John Elizabeth Stintzi. It’s a song that I didn’t fully understand when I wrote it. That’s often my experience with art: it’s wiser than the person who made it. In retrospect, I can see how much this song had to teach me about hurting and healing. I don’t always love my voice, but I like how vulnerable I let myself be when I sang the repeated line “Hold me.” And I like the feel during the lines “Can you feel it? / There’s a power,” how I stop strumming my guitar and Jay’s bass throbs below the surface.

My songs often orient me. At the end of 2022, I found myself writing a song called “The Opening,” which felt auspicious. As with many songs, it started in one place and kept meandering, blooming into something wilder than I’d anticipated. I often think about the National song “Pink Rabbits,” which is a nearly perfect song, aside from its “lightning” / “frightening” couplet. When I write a song lately, I’ll sit with each line and each word. ”Is this a lightning / frightening couplet? What word doesn’t work?”

Like many of my songs, I think it’s about love, death, and pleasure. As “The Opening” started tilting towards death at the end, I was a bit surprised. At some point, I felt the line “cradle my skull in your hands” emerge, which paired nicely with the earlier phrase “lay your head in my lap.” Ending “The Opening” with death suddenly felt inevitable because it begins with conception and birth (“We all begin with an opening”). The final lines of the song quote D. T. Suzuki’s final words on his deathbed: “Don’t worry. Thank you, thank you.”

I think my favourite moment in the song starts by evoking Rainer Maria Rilke and Fred Moten and ends by exalting sexual pleasure. (Rilke: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” Fred Moten: "Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of that terror, is wrong.")

I’ve known beauty, and I’ve known terror

I’ve felt empty, and I’ve felt pleasure

So praise your hearts and praise your lungs

Praise your fingers and praise your tongues

I hear myself sing these lines, and I want to laugh. But, you know what, I have known beauty and terror, emptiness and pleasure; I’ve lived several lives, and I maybe it’s okay for me to be wise and whimsical — and wanton.

In the early days of the pandemic, I listened endlessly to “New Town” by Life Without Buildings. I find that song so soothing, elliptical and beautiful. I’d often listen to Sue Tompkins when I needed a burst of energy. (In particular, I think there’s something so mesmerizing and sexy when she sings again and again and again about looking in your eyes. She’s repeating; she’s insisting; she’s here, facing you, looking in your eyes. You’re staring at each other. This is happening. I also need to mention that I recently discovered there is live footage of Life Without Buildings, and it is amazing.) When I started writing a novel, I gave it a placeholder title that I’d cribbed from Life Without Buildings’ only album: Any Other City.

Dear friends, I have held Any Other City. She is gorgeous. Now is what I’m considering “the pregnant pause,” that span of time between knowing she exists and when other people get to meet her. That will happen in April. Yay! (By the way, if you want to review my novel, email marketing@arsenalpulp.com to get a print or a digital copy.)

I’m so excited and delighted to be bringing Any Other City into the world in the near future. Maybe when we see each other, we can roar and twirl our trunks (in our N95s, ofc). I fucking love you. <3

Upcoming events

January 25, 7pm (Pacific): Queers in Winter with Oliver Baez Bendorf, Michael V. Smith and Hazel Jane Plante. UBC School of Creative Writing event. Hosted by Sarah Leavitt. Mode: Online via Zoom.

February 26, 4pm (Pacific): I’ll be reading with five other writers. I’ll post details on the events page of my website when I know them. Mode: Online.

April 15, 8pm (Pacific): Music, Words, and Buster Keaton at the Shadbolt Studio Theatre, Burnaby, BC. Featuring two Buster Keaton films (The Balloonatic and Sherlock Jr.), a live musical score by Róisìn Adams, and a talk by Onjana Yawnghwe and Hazel Jane Plante. Mode: In person.

When I practice with my band, I sometimes ask my drummer to play more gently. I love my drummer so bloody much, but she tends to bash her kit. The two drummers I mention most often as role models are masters of minimalism: Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground and Mimi Parker.

Last year, I started making notes for a future novel. It would be about an intense long distance relationship during the pandemic between two women, Mimi and Shasta. Low’s music conveyed how I wanted the novel to feel, and the name Mimi is clearly a nod to Mimi Parker.

The book was tricky to structure. Finally, I found a form that might convey how the distant lovers’ lives converge and diverge, a form that might show how time can stretch and twist like taffy.

But I struggled with point of view. At first, I tried writing both characters in the first person. Then, I tried limited third person. When I interviewed Megan Milks earlier this year for my podcast, I mentioned that I’d recently diagnosed a work in progress with having point-of-view-itis. I was talking about this confounding, Low-inspired LDR novel.

I chipped away at the novel for several months before eventually realizing that it hit too close to home. It hurt too much to try writing this book. So, I set it aside.

But I kept listening to Low.

_

At one point, this was the opening of my abandoned novel:

She’d always loathed her name. It was the epitome of narcissism. Mimi. A name for a smirking girl with a perfect French braid, her arm held aloft, straining towards the ceiling, imploring her teacher, pick me, pick me. It was a name like a pendant on a necklace that dropped just above the cleavage, see me, see me.

When she introduced herself to strangers, Mimi sometimes glimpsed a suppressed snicker, as though she’d said, Hi, I’m Dumdum. Oh, they would say, Nice to meet you . . . Me-me.

Mimi learned to find sanctuary in that ellipsis. She listened and nodded at the bodies around her, hiding behind her flimsy name. She became a scholar of silence. A wisp of a woman. A cumulus cloud. A paper cone of cotton candy. A mannequin in a pink tulle dress. But behind her airy exterior, her gears were always turning. Never underestimate a Mimi.

_

On her walk this morning, Mimi saw a seagull with a starfish in its beak. The purple arms of the starfish were pristine and pointing in all directions. The seagull swiveled its head towards her – appraising her with its gaze – and flew off with its purple prize.

A while later, two ducks (buffleheads?) performed a brief synchronized routine. They landed on the water, submerged in sync, suddenly surfaced, flapped their wings, paused, turned to one another, and quacked in unison. Mimi felt a burst of joy.

I love the span of Low’s career, but I adored how their most recent albums were getting more beautiful and more chaotic, messing with our sense of signal and noise. I’m reminded of Rilke writing, “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” So much is happening in the staticky songs on Double Negative and Hey What. There’s a moment in my next novel when the narrator is thinking about recording a new song. The guitars, she writes, needed to sound deeply distressed, almost as though the speakers were blown. Here, I was thinking about songs like “White Horses” and “More” on Hey What. There’s a too-much-ness to the distortion, but it’s also so fucking stunning and stirring.

When I met with Arsenal Pulp’s book designer to talk about cover designs for my next novel, I had a handful of book covers in mind, as well as the cover for Low’s Double Negative. It’s the perfect cover - with the perfect title.

Mimi Parker died on the same day that my favourite tree in the city shifted from yellow-green to full-on yellow. A burst of joy.

On social media, Alan Sparhawk wrote, "Friends, it’s hard to put the universe into language and into a short message, but / She passed away last night, surrounded by family and love, including yours. Keep her name close and sacred. Share this moment with someone who needs you. Love is indeed the most important thing."

The next day, he added, “Friends. Your love is perfect and overwhelming. Spread it. Thank you.”

And, of course, he’s right.

We live for a spell, and then we get folded back into the cosmos.

I love you, friends. <3

Thanks for being here with me. I’m assuming the focus of my talk may seem strange. When I was invited to give a talk, I had a few different ideas for what I might do. But my gut kept telling me it might be time to revisit Yoko Ono.

I’ve decided to not use slides and to resist playing any audio or video today. I’m just going to talk, mostly about Yoko Ono. I’ll read some of my work and some of her work.

At the same time I was thinking about Yoko Ono, I was thinking about the writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs. (Here, I’m going to quote the first two sentences of her bio from the ‘about’ page of her website: “Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings. Her work in this lifetime is to facilitate infinite, unstoppable ancestral love in practice.” I love a good bio, which to my mind is, ideally, more than a list of places where you’ve published your work.)

So, okay, back to Alexis Pauline Gumbs. She recently published a triptych of poetic books inspired by Black feminist theorist ancestors:

• Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (inspired by Hortense Spillers)

• M Archive: After the End of the World (inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander)

• Dub: Finding Ceremony (inspired by Sylvia Wynter)

In each of these works, she pays deep (read: book-length) attention to a specific writer as her own writing unfolds “infinite, unstoppable ancestral love.”

Her latest book (which I recommend very highly) is Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

I was moved and inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ approach.

My work is deeply indebted to dozens of artists, and I wondered what would happen if I tugged on one of the threads of influence that runs through my work. So, for this talk, I’m going to focus on Yoko Ono. (I now realize this could be a two hour talk. I’ve cut so much material to stay within the time frame.)

~

I googled terms like “fearless artist” and “fearless musician” and saw the names of people nowhere near as fearless and ferocious as Yoko Ono.

If you went to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s show on her work, you probably saw the Maysles brothers’ short film of her performing “Cut Piece,” a work she first performed in 1964.

Here is how Yoko Ono described “Cut Piece” in 1966 in a series of instruction for John Cage:

“Cut Piece.

“Cut.

by Yoko Ono

“This piece was performed in Kyoto, Tokyo, New York and London. It is usually performed by Yoko Ono coming on the stage, and in a sitting form, placing a pair of scissors in front of her and asking the audience to come up on the stage, one by one, and cut a portion of her clothing (anywhere they like) and take it. The performer, however, does not have to be a woman.”

A recent New Yorker piece included the following description of the work: “In ‘Cut Piece,’ the performers are unknown to the artist. They can interpret the instructions in unpredictable ways. It’s like handing out loaded guns to a roomful of strangers. Ono is small (five-two); the shears are large and sharp. When audience members start slicing away the fabric around her breasts or near her crotch, there is a real sense of danger and violation. In Japan, one of the cutters stood behind her and held the shears above her head, as though he were going to impale her.”

I can’t imagine performing “Cut Piece.” No offense, but I don’t think I trust people enough.

Once she became involved with John Lennon, Yoko Ono attracted more hatred than I can imagine. She was Japanese and she was a woman. People thought she broke up the Beatles. But she kept making art, and she started singing. I recently watched videos on YouTube of her performing with Frank Zappa and John Lennon, as well as Chuck Berry and John Lennon. Based on the most popular comments, people still hate her guts. Fifty years have passed and people are still pissed. (The funny thing is she studied composition and could read and write music, unlike any member of the Beatles.)

In Reaching Out with No Hands: Reconsidering Yoko Ono, Lisa Carver quotes a few descriptions of Yoko Ono’s voice, including “pig squeals,” “tortured cat noises,” and “fuck donkey” (99). Then, Carver writes about the jam session between Zappa, Lennon, and Ono in 1971 as follows: “I think you have to be musically illiterate to believe that she got in the way of these two rock geniuses with her animal sounds. I thought the whole purpose of rock was to wake the animal within? Her animal was wide awake. Anyway, her contributions certainly shook up an otherwise rather pat and solid jam, this animal spirit crashing the masters’ meeting” (99), adding that finding “herself onstage with two giants, icons, rock gods, she was not intimidated by their body of work, their history, their belovedness. This was just another moment, another chance to capture something new before letting it go” (100).

Sometimes when I’m writing a work of fiction or a song, I’ll find myself wondering if it’s too much. And then I’ll think about Yoko Ono performing “Cut Piece” for the first time in 1964 or I’ll picture her standing in front of tens of thousands of people, making something happen with her voice; she knows millions of people on this planet seem to hate her, but she’s still somehow present, singing into the moving moment. So, writing a sex scene that lasts a dozen pages doesn’t feel daunting; it feels fine, maybe even freeing. I can cut it later if I need to. Yoko Ono doesn’t worry if a sound she’s making is too weird or if a piece isn’t immediately understandable.

In fact, my understanding of my own art and my own life keeps shifting. We can’t really see it from our own (always limited, always limiting) point of view. Our view is always static and fixed; the moment is always fluid and unfixed.

In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard jotted the following in his journal: “Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause — that it must be lived forwards" (Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Volume 1:A–E IV A 164, p. 451; entry 1030).

So, we live our lives forwards, and we understand our lives backwards. It’s only in the past few months – I’m in my late 40s! – that I’ve started to get a sense of how deeply Yoko Ono has influenced me.

I didn’t take her work seriously until 1992, when I bought a compilation album called Walking On Thin Ice. I think I bought that album because there was so much attention being paid to her work because of a 6-disc retrospective box set called Onobox. The internet didn’t exist yet. Cell phones didn’t exist yet. I lived on the outskirts of Colwood, which was over 90 minutes away from downtown Victoria, a 30 minute walk to the nearest bus stop. During my long commute home after buying the CD downtown, I read an essay included in the Walking On Thin Ice booklet, which Yoko Ono had originally published in the New York Times in 1973. Her essay knocked me out. It was so incredibly smart and good. In retrospect, that essay changed my life, and I can now see at least a few things in it that morphed years later into bits in my first novel.

In fall 2019, I published my first novel Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) with Metonymy Press. It’s an unrequited love story between the queer trans femme narrator and her recently deceased straight trans femme friend Vivian. The narrator works through her grief by revisiting Vivian’s favourite TV series, Little Blue, which leads to her writing about their relationship through the lens of encyclopedia entries about the TV show.

When I’ve done readings from Little Blue Encyclopedia, I’ve often started with the following extract:

After a few months of emptiness and anger, I felt the urge to sift through the boxes in my closet that held remnants of Vivian. The first box I opened contained a tailored houndstooth trench coat that she adored. I tried it on. It was a little snug, but I felt good in it. Standing in the coat, I felt so intensely that Vivian was still alive, somehow. I imagined a hummingbird trapped inside my heart, its tiny wings vibrating against my rib cage. I imagined it quivering and expanding and, finally, folding in on itself. I put my hands in the coat pockets, where I found an old tube of lip gloss. Viv was a fiend for lip gloss.

While preparing for this talk, I realized that somehow the kernel of this scene came from three sentences in Yoko Ono’s 1973 essay: “Don’t leave me words, they haunt me. Leave me your coat to keep me warm. I like secondhand clothes because they are like wearing a person.”

Here’s another extract from her 1973 essay: “When I'm on the stage, I freak out thinking about the strangeness of the gathering. In four hours or so all the seats would be empty again. In ten years nobody would remember that these people were here, or it wouldn't matter to anybody. In a hundred years, they would all be dead.”

I remember that idea being so potent and so freeing when I read it in 1992. “In a hundred years, they would all be dead.” Reading that, I felt calm. I felt less pressure. A few years later, I’d read the Tao Te Ching and be beautifully unmoored by the sentence “Accept being unimportant,” which turned an existential microscope into a telescope.

I found it really hard to be alive until I was in my late 20s. I felt like I’d somehow been born without skin because being in the world just felt unbearably difficult. After reading Yoko Ono’s 1973 essay, I frequently calmed myself down when fear, anxiety or panic hit me by reminding myself that in a hundred years everyone around me would be dead - and I’d be dead. I don’t know if this is morbid. It probably is. But it was also incredibly helpful to weather the wear and tear and weight of daily life.

Here’s an extract from Little Blue Encyclopedia where the narrator uses that same ‘one hundred years from now’ technique that I derived from Yoko Ono’s 1973 essay.

Viv expanded my orbit. She didn’t school me on any reductive rules of femininity. She just let me see how she was able to be strong and femme and trans.

She also said early on that I could ask her anything . I’ve always been shy and never want to cross any lines. I’m the sort of person who will get cozy in the bathtub and never want to get out. Even making friends has always seemed like magic when I’ve seen it happen or it’s happened to me. But it’s never felt like a magic that I have any control over. When I try to make it happen, I always do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing. So, I didn’t want to ask Viv the wrong question, even though she’d said all questions were acceptable.

After a few too many drinks one night, I finally asked her via text message how she remained so confident and unflappable. I sent the text and immediately regretted it, but I couldn’t take it back, so I just had another glass or two of Malbec, brushed my teeth, and went to bed.

The next morning, I saw she’d replied with a cascade of texts:

oh that

it’s gold dust + glitter

it’s a perfume i call Defiant Beauty

it smells like FUCK YOU, I AM PRETTY

i dab it on before i go out

it’s yours if you want it

let’s pancake for breakfast, ok?

I wish I could say that I’ve gotten to a place where I can dab a little Defiant Beauty on me before I go out, but the truth is that I’m still far too self-conscious. Around Viv I felt more calm and confident than I’ve ever felt on my own. Small talk stresses me out terribly. I wish I could calm my mind, but no matter how much I meditate it doesn’t seem to translate into making it easier to navigate the real world. One technique I sometimes use to calm myself down is to remember that everyone around me will be dead in a hundred years. So, eventually, no one will remember the time I accidentally bumped into that older woman behind me in the supermarket and apologized and she looked at me with complete contempt and I suddenly felt so uncomfortable and crummy that I had to put down my shopping basket and rush home to curl up in bed with my cat Whisk. Sure, it’s morbid to remind yourself that everyone around you will die, but at times that reminder feels comforting and necessary. The stakes are suddenly lower. Sometimes just walking into a restaurant by myself and sitting down can feel terrifying.

I think of Vivian’s phrase “defiant beauty.” When people ask me what kind of music my band plays, I sometimes say our genre is Defiant Beauty.

One of the things I love about Yoko Ono is her defiance. After I sent in the title and abstract for this talk, my best friend texted me a snap of an article that had just been published in the New Yorker called “Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance.” I wasn’t surprised by the coincidence; it just felt synchronous, like a breadcrumb confirming that I needed to pay attention to Yoko Ono.

The title of this talk is “‘Yes, I’m a Witch’: Lessons on Writing (and Living) from Yoko Ono.” In 1974, Yoko Ono recorded a batch of songs that weren’t released until 1992. Her song “Yes, I’m a Witch” was recorded during the year when she sent John Lennon to Los Angeles because she needed space. (When I told queer friends about this talk, I told them I was going to try to resist talking about Yoko and John’s D/s vibe. D = dom / s = sub. I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about power. Yoko was pretty clearly in charge. In that 1973 essay, Yoko wrote, “Actually, I’m a Lenny Bruce married to Greta Garbo, if you must know.” And I think that checks out.)

Okay, back to the song “Yes, I’m a Witch,” which is such a defiant song from a woman who was not beloved, especially a few years after the Beatles broke up. Even the title feels like a performance piece.

WITCH PIECE.

Yes, I’m a witch.

I mentioned the song “Yes, I’m a Witch” in Little Blue Encyclopedia as a possible trans femme anthem and I stand behind that reading. And now I’m going to read you the lyrics of “Yes, I’m a Witch” from 1974:

Yes, I'm a witch,

I'm a bitch

I don't care what you say,

My voice is real.

My voice speaks truth,

I don't fit in your ways.

I'm not gonna die for you,

You might as well face the truth,

I'm gonna stick around for quite awhile.

We're gonna say,

We're gonna try,

We're gonna try it our way.

We've been repressed,

We've been depressed,

Suppression all the way.

We're not gonna die for you,

We're not seeking vengeance,

But we're not gonna kill ourselves for your convenience.

Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying.

Each time we close our minds to how we feel, we're dying.

Each time we get to do what we wanna do, we're living.

Each time we're open to what we see and hear, we're living.

We'll free you from the ghettos of your minds,

We'll free you from your fears and binds,

We know you want things to stay as it is,

It's gonna change, baby.

It's gonna change, baby doll,

It's gonna change, honey ball,

It's gonna change, sugar cane,

It's gonna change, sweetie legs.

So don't try to make cock-pecked people out of us.

Now here’s the scene from Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) that mentions “Yes, I’m a Witch.”

Vivian’s sister Dot invited me to karaoke at her favourite place. She got a babysitter for Teddy. When I arrived, she was waiting for me with two shots of Chartreuse. We hugged and clinked glasses and downed the shots. I’d forgotten how herbal and potent it was. She led me to our own little karaoke room. Dot handed me the song list and I quickly discovered why she liked this spot. It specialized in punk and new wave songs.

“Pick a song,” she said. “C’mon. Pick. A. Song.”

I flipped through the pages. It had been a while since I’d been to karaoke and I was overwhelmed and suddenly nervous to sing in front of her. We’d never been to karaoke together. I asked her to go first, pleaded with her to go first.

She selected a song, took the mic, and launched into “Identity” by X-Ray Spex. She went from standing in place to bouncing around in just a few seconds. It was impossible to take your eyes off her while she sang. She was a whirligig. She was free and having fun. As the song ended, she collapsed into her chair.

“We need more Chartreuse,” she said, a little out of breath. “And you need to choose a song, princess.”

I chose a song and grabbed the mic. It was “Yes, I’m a Witch” by Yoko Ono. I wasn’t that familiar with Yoko until Ruby sat me down one night and introduced me to her music. Her band Vulva Death Grip covered “Yes, I’m a Witch,” which should be a contender if we ever have a trans femme international anthem. It’s so obscure that I didn’t expect to see it at a karaoke joint.

When I finished singing, Dot said, “Yoko Ono? That was SO good. You have to do that one again later, okay?!” I smiled, shrugged, and rolled my eyes. It’s the kind of gesture Shirley Temple might have done, but I’ve heard it’s kinda cute when I do it, so I probably do it more often than I should.

We went back and forth singing songs, drinking more Chartreuse. We even sang one duet. Dot said we had to sing the song “Stumblin’ In” by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman. I was confused. It was a cheesy classic rock boy-girl duet from the seventies. But she even got on her knees and said something like, “I beseech you, m’lady.” It was weird. I told her I’d do it, but only if I could do the Suzi Quatro part. I’d had a crush on Suzi Quatro from the time I was about ten. I mean, she was cute and wore a leather jacket and leather pants and played a character named Leather. Even when I was in elementary school, I was a little dyke tomboy. Dot agreed, saying she’d never ask me to sing the boy part. It felt surreal singing a corny love duet while locking eyes with my dead friend’s sister. I was sure Dot and Viv had probably sung this song into hairbrush microphones together a dozen times.

I remember listening to Miranda July on a KCRW show. She talked about a moment in her film The Future when the two main characters decide to have a song in case something happens to them - like amnesia or a car crash - this song will cut through all that and sort of bring them back to each other. In the end, she went with a Peggy Lee song, but she initially wanted to use the song “Stumblin’ In.”

Miranda July: “And because it was this special song between my parents it was very resonant to me, but I began to realize that for other people it was just…funny. And I was like, ‘oh no, this is one of those terrible things where like it's not going to work, it's only me’, and you're trying to be somewhat universal, especially with movies. So I had to find another song …”

But, no, Miranda July didn’t have to find another song. “Stumbin’ In” is pretty perfect, and it’s a super resonant song from my childhood, so I borrowed it for this scene in my novel. (I’ve never told anyone that before. Sometimes being a writer is also being a magpie and picking up stray bits of twine to weave into your own fictional webbing.)

After writing my book, I remember reading Tom Cho’s book Look Who’s Morphing and seeing his references to Suzi Quatro. I now realize there’s a pocket of queer folks and trans folks who really gravitated towards Suzi Quatro. I had no idea at the time.

And I think of Tom Cho’s blurb for Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), where he mentions that “a life recalled can be both encyclopedic and enigmatic.”

And this leads me back to Yoko Ono’s 1973 New York Times piece, where she wrote:

“In the evening I watch the city lights from my apartment that hangs in the air, and become overwhelmed with the incredibility of it all. Behind each shining dot, there is a room, an apartment, a person or people who are all having a life show of their own. Every person's life can be a book thicker than an encyclopedia and still you couldn't explain all that they took to survive.”

I literally wrote a novel in the format of an encyclopedia that focused on one person’s life. I’m struck by how Ono describes each person as “having a life show of their own,” largely because the encyclopedia woven in my novel is for a TV show that doesn’t exist called Little Blue.

~

Yoko Ono’s work is often rooted in possibilities. For example, her book Grapefruit (1964) includes a series of instructions for pieces you create in your mind. I’ve had so many people tell me they’re disappointed that the TV series Little Blue doesn’t exist. Typically, I tell them that it does exist; we made it exist together because I included enough detail for them to conjure the show. And I think Yoko’s work is the same. There’s space and generosity. There’s a conjuring that happens.

“Snow Piece” [1963 summer, from Grapefruit]

Think that snow is falling

Think that snow is falling everywhere

all the time.

When you talk with a person, think

that snow is falling between you and

on the person.

Stop conversing when you think the

person is covered by snow.

Yoko Ono often revisits ideas. So, “Snow Piece” several years later will become the song “Listen, the Snow is Falling,” which is one of my favourite songs of hers.

I mentioned her song “Listen, the Snow is Falling” in Miscellaneous Kisses, a project that I made during the pandemic. Last year, I published a tiny artist edition of around 50 copies with deluxe packaging for a Blu-ray. The packaging includes screenshots and a long essay I wrote about a non-existent film called Miscellaneous Kisses directed by an artist named Sadie Tang, who is a character in my next novel. I commissioned my brilliant writer/artist friend John Elizabeth Stintzi (JES) to do the design work. It turned out nicely.

(If you’re interested, you can read my essay about the film Miscellaneous Kisses on a gorgeous page created by a beloved friend who helped bring this project into being.)

Yoko Ono invites you to imagine snow slowly covering the person talking to you. I invite you to imagine a film that doesn’t exist. In fact, there’s even an instructional piece in Miscellaneous Kisses that also appears in my next novel. In Miscellaneous Kisses, this piece (called “On Donuts”) appears as the voiceover for a short film. In my next novel, Any Other City, it appears as part of an art installation that includes actual donuts. In this piece, you need to conjure all the actions in your mind.

1. Put on a pair of latex gloves. Put gloves on both of your hands. Enjoy the snap of the gloves on your wrists.

2. Select a donut. Don’t think too much. Just find a donut. A donut is a donut.

3. Pick up the donut.

4. Look at the hole in the middle of your donut.

5. While staring at the hole, think about the last time you had an orgasm. Keep thinking about your orgasm. Don’t talk about it. Try not to be embarrassed.

6. Take a bite of the donut. Just one bite. Chew it slowly.

7. Close your eyes.

8. Think about the person you love most in the world. Picture their face.

9. Open your eyes.

10. Look at the donut in your hand. Imagine the donut is full of magic and pleasure.

11. Take another bite of the donut.

12. Look at the half-eaten donut you are holding. Imagine the remaining half of the donut is filled with love and kindness.

13. Eat the rest of the donut.

14. Imagine the donut inside your body is nourishing you with magic and pleasure, love and kindness.

15. Remove the gloves from your hands and put them in a trash bin.

16. Enjoy your life.

When the song “Listen, the Snow is Falling” was recorded, Yoko Ono didn’t like how some of the musicians were playing. She wanted it slower. And she was right. She told Nicky Hopkins, who may be one of the most accomplished studio pianists ever, to play as if "snow is melting from your fingertips, not that banging."

I don’t think she was saying that out of ego. I think she was trying to bring the song into being, to give it room to breathe. I find myself thinking all the time, “What does this thing want to be?” I ask myself that question often when I’m writing. How can I get the fuck out of the way and forget my puny ego? I think most of the best things I’ve created feel beyond me. Parts of my work are smarter and wiser than I am and that pleases me.

So much of what I love about Yoko Ono’s work is her willingness to be simple and to leave space.

Here’s a brief, telling exchange from the podcast Recording Artists on an episode about Yoko Ono:

Catherine Lord (an artist): She is very, very, very smart.

Helen Molesworth (podcast host): She is very, very, very smart. But her intelligence is really deceptive. ’Cause she won’t perform her intelligence as intelligence. I mean, she’s letting people cut her clothes off and she’s putting a great big bag over herself onstage, and she’s produced a book of instructions for things that can be misconstrued as humorous or impossible or a kind of foolishness.

Catherine Lord: She’s stripped away all the pretention, all the jargon. She never uses jargon. She writes in the simplest possible language.

Grapefruit was one of the first books I read that got me thinking about spaciousness and the page. My main metaphor for thinking about Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) during the several years of writing it was a rice krispie square. I knew my novel was dense with so much information about a non-existent television show, but I tried to leave space for the reader to spend time with it, to make it as airy as possible. So, there are illustrations for the 26 letters of the alphabet and each letter starts on a recto page to leave more room. I think Yoko is always thinking about space. The title of the New York Times article I’ve been quoting is the same name she gave to an album also released in 1973: Feeling the Space.

When I’m editing my writing, two words that always come to mind are emotional and expansive. Is it emotional? Is it expansive? If it doesn’t make me feel things in my body and it doesn’t feel roomy, I’ll often cut it. I’m tired of being clever or being funny. I want to leave space for readers to think and feel. I’m leaving gaps because I want to trust them.

I have so many more things to say about Yoko Ono, but I’m running out of time and I want to leave space. So, I’ll say in passing that her work is full of lessons about desire and sexuality and embodiment and repetition and beauty.

I interviewed the writer Ryka Aoki a couple days ago and at one point she said that all of her work is pretty much saying one thing: “I love you.” And I needed to hear that because things feel so heavy lately.

And in so many ways “I love you” is also the message of so much of Yoko Ono’s work. I’m going to end this talk by quoting from a passage from her 1973 essay that I found myself reading and rereading and trying to let myself feel into it. It feels like the sort of thing that will possibly percolate into work I’ll write in the future, as her work has been doing since 1992.

This is Yoko Ono from 1973: “People say that for the last five years I had been a hate object of the world. It was sort of fashionable to put me down. You don’t hurt me though because I know you and I love you. I can take hatred because I don’t believe that people are capable of real hate. We are too lonely for that. We vanish too quickly for that. Do you ever hate a cloud? [...] Hate is just an awkward way of love. We spit on people when we want to kiss them. We hit them when we only want to be held. [...] All we have to do is admire each other and love each other twenty four hours a day until we vanish. That's what we really want to do. The rest is just foreplay to get to that.”

Thanks.