Four years ago today I walked into a mammography suite in Skokie for a scan of a weird lump and walked out with cancer. There was a mass the size of an nice green grape in my left breast, and subsequent testing determined that it was malignant, and that its cells had escaped containment and traveled from my breast tissue into at least a few nearby lymph nodes. Within a month I had started a course of aggressive chemotherapy. This included infusions every three weeks for four and a half months of two drugs that made my hair fall out and left me nauseated, dehydrated, and exhausted, plus two more immunotherapy drugs that were less visibly toxic but that I had to take for a full year. During my first round of chemo I got covid, whose only benefit was that it made the remaining months of infusions mildly less terrible. That November I had surgery, followed by four weeks of targeted radiation, and somewhere in there I also fell down the stairs and broke my ankle, cementing the summer and fall of 2022 as my personal season in hell.

I am by all objective metrics fine now, as far as I know, with a full head of hair and a healthy appetite. I have a checkup next week, and this time next year, if all goes well, I will hit the hoped-for five-year mark and be declared free of both cancer and semiannual monitoring.

But I’m thinking about all this now not just thanks to the cancerversary. Because you know what? I think about it more than you can imagine; I think about it all the time. Right now I’m thinking about how to talk about it in the context of a book project that is not “about cancer” but to which the embodied experience of this season in hell is central. I keep messing around with chronology; should I bury the lede? Should it be a third act reveal? Or should I just rip off the Band-Aid and get it out there on page one? I can’t figure it out, this thing that is everything and also so not what I want to be talking about, this thing I desperately want to place in the past even as it informs so much of my present.

I’m also thinking about my confusing experience of diagnosis, which I wrote about here, because Chicago writer Nami Mun gets into the shame of it all in a stunning essay about her halting path towards a diagnosis of ovarian cancer published last week in the Atlantic (gift link). In it she connects the dots between the shame of illness and the shame of being a woman in pain, a woman with needs, in the world that still, forever, eternally, tells us to shut up and stop making a fuss.

Like Mun, I downplayed my symptoms, blew off the weird lump for a while. I considered rescheduling my mammogram, which was scheduled for two weeks before my wedding. It seemed like a hassle for something so clearly minor; there was no way I had fucking cancer, right? In the end only the vagaries of health-care scheduling — who knew how many months I’d have to wait to get in again? — forced me to follow through.

Echoing Sontag, and her friend Aleksandar Hemon, Mun likens the experience of diagnosis to the erection of a glass partition separating her from the rest of the world. “My old self lived on the other side of the glass,” she writes. “That version of me was sturdy.” On the shadow side of the glass, she felt fragile, isolated and exposed, and decided the best way to protect herself was to keep quiet about her diagnosis to all but a few close family and friends.

Here in Chicago I’ve met Mun several times, undoubtedly at least once while she was undergoing treatment. I, obviously, had no idea. She concludes her essay thusly:

Being private can be empowering; you get to decide which lockboxes to open and for whom. Self-silencing pain and allowing it to be silenced, however, had not served me well. It took a cancer diagnosis to break this habit, this inheritance, this other silent killer. It was not just endometrial luck that saved me. It was also the decision to believe my body, to turn up the volume a notch and let it be heard.

Before cancer, I too was generally a private person. I kept a lot of secrets. But crossing to the other side of the glass forces such an intimate reckoning with corporeal fragility that questions of embarrassment and shame quickly come to feel silly. Who has the energy to be ashamed when there’s so much else to worry about? When turning up the volume — getting the test, pushing for help, sharing the story — can be the thing that saves your life?

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I’ve now told the tale of the season in hell so many times that it too feels unremarkable. Perhaps you’re heard it all before! And yet, it doesn’t go away.

Sometimes, I think I need to find a new way of telling the story. In this version, I wonder aloud whether the ongoing fatigue is a remnant of chemo or a byproduct of menopause, and then conclude that really, does it matter? Maybe, as a storytelling experiment, I’ll get into the other annoying effects of the yearlong medical marathon, such as the cording of my left pectoral muscle that impairs range of motion, and the erratic muscle spasms that wash through my irradiated chest wall at a level of pain that leaves me breathless. And maybe, someday, I’ll be able to talk about vanity. About the fact that the hair on my legs and armpits has never grown back, and my eyebrows have become so thin and fair as to be invisible. Maybe I’ll be able to be honest about how crushed I am to know that thanks to radiation swelling and lymphedema, the muscle mass lost in my once-solid arms will never fully return, no matter how many tricep dips I clock.

interruptions

Beauty isn’t something to possess

Losing your beauty as a result of illness can sometimes lead to an encounter with a truth that the discourse cycles about beauty norms can’t touch. Beauty isn’t something we can possess; it’s only something we participate in. Sometimes that participation looks like we’d imagine it to look. Other times it appears to be the very giving up of beauty to embrace the contours of a life, a body, a world we very much don’t prefer that grants us complete access to Aphrodite’s gifts…

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a month ago · 53 likes · 32 comments · Cameron Steele

’s most recent essay (above) reminded me of a portrait Paul shot during the depths of chemo. For a long time I didn’t want it anywhere on display. It was a painful reminder of all I had lost. It took some time — and work — for me to learn to look at it with gentle eyes and see it as simply as a portrait of a human. Cameron’s essay captures the grief and glory of the loss of beauty to illness with unsentimental clarity. Cameron’s words remind me to see Beauty “in the bald head, the eyelash-less face, the inclusion of its opposite as proof that it had absolutely nothing to do with the aesthetic manipulation of the body at all.”

If you’re a woman on the internet in 2026, you cannot avoid the onslaught of beauty content. It is so incessant and, like shame, so irrelevant to the project of staying alive in the fullness of our humanity that I feel I am watching the chatter from behind Mun’s glass wall. When I try to voice a dissent, it is as though the glass separating me from health and youth renders me inaudible to those on the other side. At this remove I don’t try very often, but I do try to hear the chatter with gentle ears. They’ll figure it out once they dip behind the wall themselves — or maybe they won’t. Either way, really, does it matter?

On a lighter note, some dance-adjacent content.

I am currently obsessed with the Bandsplain deep dive into Madonna, now in its second four-hour installment, with two still to go. I am loving the close read of it all! We’ve made it to the early 90s the era that brought us “Vogue,” the Blonde Ambition tour, and Truth or Dare — an era that, as host points out, made stars of Madonna’s backup dancers. Here’s my brush with that stardom.

I was 23 in 1991, and working my first job out of college, at the Joyce Theater in New York. I was an administrative assistant, and among my varied responsibilities I was in charge of managing house seats — the seats held on reserve by the theater to accommodate VIPs. House seats are why celebrities and rich people can always get a last-minute ticket — or almost always.

The Joyce’s program director at the time was dating a big deal downtown photographer, and through that connect had access to Madonna’s dancers. He was so pleased the day he announced that they’d accepted his invitation to that night’s Feld Ballets/NY performance, and I obediently put in the house seat order for his special guests.

Now, there are two kinds of house seats (or, maybe there are more, but this was how we did it then): standard and guaranteed. Tickets for standard house seats are released by the box office to be sold to the general public if not picked up by a certain point — 15 min? — before curtain. Guaranteed house seats are just that: guaranteed to be available, no matter what.

Guess who didn’t remember to guarantee the house seats for Madonna’s dancers?

Guess whose dancers showed up at 2 minutes to curtain?

Guess who still feels the quiet seething fury of the program director, as she stood frantic and sobbing in the lobby, trying to make amends, while a half-dozen staggeringly beautiful young men of varying degrees of fabulosity looked on?

Whoops.

I can’t say this was the final nail in the coffin of my arts administration career, but I sure never made that mistake again. Thank you Bandsplain for reminding me of a fuckup I hadn’t thought about for 35 years! Looking forward to episode three.

The trade paperback edition of Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O’Connor Means to Us drops August 25. Twenty-six writers, 26 incisive essays, each tackling a song from O’Connor’s epic career, for just $19 American dollars. Preorder it today!

When you no longer get carded on a regular basis, it’s easy to overlook things like the fact that you’ve been driving on a expired license for three months because yours expired in January, on your birthday.

It took a nice 24-year-old at the Enterprise rental office to apprise me of this fact, as he politely refused to release to me the car I had reserved for a work trip until I remedied the situation. It was 8 am and I was supposed to be in southern Ohio by 4, so after frantically calculating that taking the train was inadvisable, I set off on foot to the DMV along the unpaved shoulder of Green Bay Road.

Two hours, a vision test, and a written test (!) later, I was on the road to Ohio in a tin can masquerading as a Mitsubishi Mirage.

It was my second trip to southwest Ohio in three weeks: in early April I went to Yellow Springs as the stage manager for Theater Oobleck’s remount of Mickle Maher’s 2015 play Song About Himself. There, in a gallery on the Antioch College campus, we put up three performances of a Whitman-inspired satire of a dystopian future in which the internet has been overrun with AI and human communication has all-but collapsed. When not at the gallery we trawled Yellow Springs’ used bookstores, hiked in the muddy glen, and ate delicious hippie breakfasts at the Sunrise Cafe.

Now I’m in Oxford, on a work trip, at Miami University. Two towns, two colleges 62 miles and a cultural ocean apart.

Here in Oxford, there’s a Buffalo Wild Wings attached to my hotel and a Chipotle across the street. Where Antioch’s campus is in extravagant, mossy disrepair, Miami’s is an expansive rolling plain of red-brick Georgian buildings and pay-by-app parking. Antioch has less than 100 students on campus, most of whom seemed concentrated in one rickety three-story dorm where rusty lawn furniture clung to the edge of the parking lot. In Oxford students who don’t live in the dorms live in a battery of off-campus houses, the names of which are emblazoned on signs affixed to the front and establishing character. There are sporty houses (“Endgame”), classy houses (“Cheval Blanc”), and houses boozy (“Absolut Angels”) and slutty (“Afternoon Delight”).

At Antioch, 70% of the students identify as gender nonconforming. At any given time a large chunk of them are not in Yellow Springs at all but out in the world doing internships, a core part of the school’s revamped curriculum. When you see one in the wild it gives you a start. At Miami, students are everywhere. They hold up traffic as they drift across the street. They cluster in the student union, taking up all the tables at the Panera Bread. Downtown, squads of young women roam the streets, as if preparing to square off in a turf war: the strappy-dresses-and-nude-pumps vs. the miniskirts-and-cowboy-boots. At the houses, West Village girls in training, swathed in yards of light wash denim, hover around the perimeter as boys face off over red Solo cups across picnic tables and porches. Last night a party at the house across the street from my hotel (“Melee”) blasted aggressive hip-hop at a level approaching my pain point — and then shut off promptly at 10 pm.

Being in Ohio in the spring, surrounded by 22-year-olds, I can’t help remember being 22 in the Ohio spring myself — a time of singular happiness, poised on the brink of the unknown. Oberlin was far closer in ethos to Antioch, though academically more structured, something I realized, after visiting Hampshire in 1985, would probably be a good idea. Our off-campus houses had names — Blue House, Banana House, Ministry — but they were pieces of lore, passed down through the generations, not spelled out above the front door. (I could make some comment here about how kids these days need everything signposted for them but I won’t. Except I guess I did.) Conformity was anathema, our hair scruffy, cropped, and Manic Panicked, our fashions pulled from the thrift store behind the diner or excavated from bins outside Canal Jean on spring break trips to New York.

Still, walking around Oxford I feel tender toward these girls. I see myself in their open-faced enthusiasm, the way they both cling to each other for safety and assert their adulthood, chicks about to hatch. Oh boy, I think, as yet another tangle of long tan limbs and flat-ironed hair emerges shrieking from a bar. World, here they come!

I’m of an age where my friends’ daughters are in college or on their way, and I see these girls as the babies I once held. That’s part of it. I’ve also been deep in the feelings of another young Oberlin grad launched into the world at 22: Lena Dunham, whose memoir Famesick is a brilliantly argued manifesto for being gentle toward your inner 20-something, no matter how painful she is. I finished the audiobook while on the road, and two days later her voice echoes in my head.

I’m not a millennial, and I remember being sort of befuddled by the hysteria over Girls when it came out. When I finally watched it I thought, “Oh! It’s a sitcom!” Nothing more, nothing less. I thought it was funny, but maybe not for me, Gen Xers being already irrelevant to popular culture, and tapped out after season two. I came back to binge-watch the whole thing last year, though, and realized it was brilliant.

I was alarmed by the vitriol with which Dunham was met in the years that followed. I thought the public dissection of her body was appalling, a level of misogyny I idiotically believed we’d left in the past. And maybe she said some dumb things sometimes, but did she really deserve the relentless, years-long assault on her person, her brain, her creativity, her family? Obviously no. But I did not follow the ups and downs of her career or personal life with close attention, so much of what is revealed in her memoir was news to me (Jack … who?). I was not invested in her “redemption,” whatever that means, but I am buoyed by it.

Of course you don’t need me to tell you about Famesick. It’s a NYT bestseller, as ubiquitous this week as a Miami undergrad. But here’s what I will say: The book is laugh out loud funny, a little infuriating, fiercely intelligent, and both heartbreaking and hopeful. I can’t get enough lately of young artists finding their voice — this month I also read and loved ’s whip-smart memoir On Eating and Lily King’s 2020 novel Writers and Lovers, both of which mine gold from this vein.

Listening to Dunham as I rolled through the cornfields of Indiana, was to listen to a woman taking stock of her life halfway through and coming to terms on the page with all of its promise, failings, and disappointments. I ached for 23-year-old Dunham as I ache for my younger self, naive and hopeful and wrong and ambitious and trying and fucking up — and as I hope my friends’ children, the iconoclasts of Antioch, and the well-scrubbed girls of Oxford will all live long enough to do themselves some day.

Near the end of the book, after an extended medical crisis, an eventual hysterectomy, and a battle with IVF, Dunham is forced to come terms with the loss of her dream of motherhood. She will never have a baby, she comes to understand, nor see that baby grow up to roam the streets of an Ohio college town in spring. “The loss of my uterus was, ironically, the thing that made me qualified to be a mother,” she says (I paraphrase). “After going through this, and coming out the other end, I finally had something to teach a younger person.”

Stab me in my heart, why don’t you?

Like this post, it’s a book that starts one place (New York, brash youth) and ends in a place far away (London, slightly less brash maturity). Like this post it’s just about getting older — so old that you forget to renew your driver’s license, because the 20-something in your head is finally someone you are happy to hang out with again.

Been doing a lot of dancing and not much writing! In one month I’ll be performing again with Visceral Encore, June 6 & 7 at the Ann Barzel Theater inside Visceral Dance (in Chicago). Tickets on sale soon, soon.

This past week I also reviewed the proofs for the paperback of Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us, out August 25. (My mom’s birthday! Happy birthday mama, I got you an affordably priced trade paperback edition.) Promoting a paperback is challenging — traditional media is rarely interested in a book beyond its pub date — but this is a project that I do think could find a long life and many new readers in this format. It is a book for music lovers, 90s nostalgists, angry women … all the best people, in other words. If this sounds like you and you’d like to have Sonya and me on your podcast or Substack, please get in touch.

Three years ago today I walked into a ballet class for the first time since I was 22. Borne out of frustration with my cancer-compromised body, the decision to go back to class continues to ripple through my life, health, and sense of self in endlessly generative ways. It has been healing, on many levels, and you can read more about this journey in the essay I wrote for magazine last year, if you haven’t already.

Oldster Magazine

How Dance Can Save Your Life

Two years ago I placed my left hand on the barre and, as the pianist plinked out a 4/4 refrain, sank into a demi plié—something I hadn’t done in thirty years. It was April Fools Day. What better day, I thought, to embarrass myself in public…

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a year ago · 230 likes · 91 comments · Martha Bayne

Over these past three years I’ve taken many more adult dance classes, across a range of genres, including ballet, jazz, modern, and contemporary. Most of them have been great. Some of them have been too technically difficult for me, a solid “intermediate” dancer, and I’ve crawled away trying not to feel defeated. Some of them have been too easy, which can be a fun, chill time and nice for the ego but physically unsatisfying. A very small handful have been insulting, or alienating, or otherwise red flagged.

Often, when I mention “dance class” to someone they perk up, ask questions. Many people are prompted to share their own complicated history with dance. Maybe they were a young dancer who didn’t keep it up. Maybe they were sidelined by injury. Maybe they internalized toxic messages that told them they were the wrong shape, size, color, or gender to dance. Maybe they just believe themselves to have two left feet.

I don’t usually do service pieces but it’s all got me thinking: What is “adult” dance? What should you look for in a class or teacher? What do I look for? What turns me off? Here’s a start at answering some of those questions.

(There are plenty of social dance forms out there to be learned in both traditional class and community contexts — ballroom, salsa, swing; line dancing, square dancing. But I’m focused here on the standard studio offerings: ballet, modern, contemporary, jazz, hip hop, etc.)

What is adult dance?

An adult dancer is a dancer who is not a child, obviously. But beyond that, adult dance classes vary wildly. Some of them are for professional dancers; those will generally be labeled on a studio’s schedule as “advanced” or “pro” or just “closed.” They’ll probably be at 10 am on a weekday. Adult classes that are full of recreational dance students are usually beginning or intermediate level, and will be labeled “open” or maybe “mixed level.” They will more likely be at night. Some pros may show up to these, and so may some teens — my Saturday morning ballet class is full of them — but these are the classes I’m talking about when I talk about adult (or recreational) dance, a field that is exploding across the country.

While children’s dance programs are usually highly structured, designed to advance a relatively homogenous set of students from level to level along measurable benchmarks, adult dance classes are more flexible. Students may be (like me) returning to a regular dance practice after some time away, or people who have retired from performance careers but want to keep dancing. They may be cross-training from other movement disciplines, like circus, gymnastics, or figure skating. They may have started at 30, 40, or 50, having never before danced beyond the club or the wedding. In beginning classes, they may be starting that day.

What makes a good class?

A good class is a class that makes you feel welcome, full stop. Does someone greet you at check-in? Does the instructor notice that you’re new? Do the other students say hello? This is all just vibes-level stuff, but it goes a long way.

Diversity and inclusivity are also important to me, and hopefully to you. It’s not uncommon for adult classes to include students across a range of ages, but in ballet in particular they are often all still thin, cis, white women. The classes I seek out and return to are the classes that also draw dancers of color and dancers across a spectrum of gender expression and body types. Does the teacher have cultural competency? Do they not call out “let’s go, girls” to a group of gender queer dancers? Sign me up.

These are all basic elements of any good class, studio, or teacher. But as a 58-year-old dancer, I’m also looking for a class in which the 50-year-olds are not all hiding in the back of the room, ignored. A good teacher will draw older dancers to the front, and will spend as much time on offering corrections/showering praise on them as they do the bendy 17-year-old perpetually front and center. A good teacher will take the committment of an older dancer seriously.

At the technical level, a good class is one that is pitched to the mean skill level of the students, but that still allows more advanced dancers to be challenged and offers less-experienced students a chance at mastery. The teacher may offer modifications — double pirouettes if you’re able, a passé relevé if you’re feeling wobbly about a turn. I’ve been in classes in which the teacher also accounts for possible injuries, providing options if dancers can’t jump, for example. It’s all just good pedagogy.

As much as we might try to deny it, older dancers do run up against challenges specific to aging bodies. Knee braces are common, and balance can be an issue if you’re dealing with anemia, low blood pressure, or hearing loss. For me, I’m perpetually surprised by how much harder it is to get up from and down to the floor than it was when I was 20, and I’m always grateful when that is recognized, without judgement, and alternatives are offered.

Another piece of good pedagogy across the board, but particularly when students are new and might be feeling vulnerable, is the ability of a teacher to observe individual student behavior and then extrapolate to offer corrections to the whole class. Rather than saying “Martha, stop leaning so far back in your turns!” they can say to the whole class, “When you’re turning, there’s often a tendency to lean back, which will pull you off balance. Try to keep your weight pulling up and forward.” This takes the focus off the individual failure and places it in the group context of body mechanics.

What’s not great

In some spaces, older dancers are invisible; in others, they are in the spotlight. I’m not a fan of either.

Invisibility manifests in some obviously problematic practices when older dancers are ignored or marginalized in class. But even classes ostensibly geared toward older dancers have their blind spots. I went to one modern class that marketed itself as good for “mature movers” that was taught by a thirtysomething dancer who kept up a running patter to the group of 40-60 year old students about how her own “old” body was constantly failing her. Negative self-talk is the kudzu of dance, but this was a wild case of not being able to read the room. I didn’t go back.

The flip side is more subtly problematic. As has been amply documented, many dance communities have recognized and are working to correct destructive and exclusionary traditions, and open the gate to dancers who previously had been locked out. Classes and performance opportunities for older dancers are one space of great growth these days, as the change in dance culture dovetails with a surge in understanding of the health and mobility benefits of regular exercise as people age. I look forward to a day when everyone can find a place for themselves in whatever dance community they desire — and I hope that one of the things that happens in this new dance utopia is that older dancers are no longer seen as novelties, deserving of a pat on the head and a participation trophy.

I actually see this more on the internet, and less in reality, of course. It’s one of the reasons I don’t post videos of myself dancing on Instagram. As a dancer, I want to work with teachers, coaches, and choreographers who are invested in my capacity to grow as an athlete and an artist. I don’t need or want praise for being brave enough to bare my elder body in the mirror, for daring to be over fifty in public.

In a performance context, the plain fact of being old on stage is not, in itself, an artistic statement I find compelling. Ageism is the most universal “ism,” as a friend noted recently, and the most unremarked upon. I don’t want to be trotted out as inspiration, to tick a box on a grant application about diversity, or to model proof for the unbelieving that older dancers can still be limber, still be beautiful, still be artists. Because of course we can. I’d like us all to get past being othered, in other words, and make some art about something real.

The voice in your head can be your friend

For many folks returning to dance, or just trying to learn something new, the inner critic is loud. Dance — especially ballet’s — culture of perfection is hard to shake. I talked with Chicago dancer Tuli Bera about this last year, and her words are a balm:

You have a different body, you're not going through puberty. You're not a teenager. You can be in great shape, but you still have a different body. So go in with a true beginner lens and rediscover what that movement feels like on you. Like, “Oh, wow, I'm bending my knees. Okay, now I'm stretching them!” It is kind of childlike, like you’re experiencing something for the first time.

What works for you? What do you look for in a dance class? What makes you feel welcome? And how do you calm the critic in your head?

I had a great time last weekend in Joshua Tree/29 Palms at the Hi-Desert, Lo-Fi Lit Weekend! It was extremely hot and I was battling dehydration the whole time, but it was great to get out into the desert and meet some wonderful people. I sat on two panels: one, about music writing, with a diverse array of other writers and editors, and one on “women’s rage,” with Nothing Compares contributors Madhushree Ghosh and Gina Frangello as well as Monica Drake, contributor — with Gina — to Lidia Yuknavich’s new collection The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause. I also saw Mike Watt perform, pushing 70 and still iconic, and bought a necklace from a shop run by Rich Good, guitarist in the current iteration of the Psychedelic Furs. And I sold a bunch of books to excited new readers of Nothing Compares to You, several of whom told me after the panels that it was exactly what they had been looking for.

Is it what you’re looking for? The paperback of Nothing Compares to You is out August 25, and available for preorder now at the low, low price of $18.99 — and I just noticed that the hardback is currently discounted to less than one dollar more.

Friends: Preorders affect how the stupid algorithm surfaces your book on Am*z*n. And you know what else helps? Reader reviews. I went on Goodreads the other day, something I never do, and discovered a bunch of new and shiny reviews of Nothing Compares and it was a startlingly nice, and unexpected, dopamine hit. If you’ve read it and loved it, please take a moment to drop a note at the consumer reviews platform of your choice. It makes a difference, it really does.

Thanks!

Getting the show up and running has entailed a lot of daily commuting to and from Chicago, which means a lot of time to listen to podcasts. I’ve got two going at once right now, both of which have yanked me out of this moment and straight into the past. The first is Adults in the Room, produced by Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW, in particular KUOW managing editor Isolde Raftery, and details events that took place at Seattle’s Garfield High School, my high school, in 1999-2000.

Back then Raftery and her bestie Ella Hushagen were seniors and reporters on the school newspaper when they heard, and started reporting on, a rumor about a popular and charismatic teacher. Chaos ensued. From the show description:

Seattle, 1999. At Garfield High School, Mr. Hudson is a legend. With a thundering voice and imposing stature, Mr. Hudson — or “Tom” as select students call him — teaches biology and leads an elite outdoors program. But when teen reporters at the school paper start exploring a rumor that he sexually abused students, all hell breaks loose. Adults close ranks, and schoolmates turn on the young journalists. And then one day, a voice on the school intercom announces that Mr. Hudson is dead.

Isolde Raftery is one of the students who first hears about and reports allegations against Mr. Hudson. Three decades later, she is an investigative journalist in Seattle. In Adults in the Room, Raftery re-reports the story to understand what really happened in 1999. Was a whole school community groomed by a charismatic predator? Or was she part of a whisper campaign that cost the life of a great teacher?

There’s only three episodes so far, but I am riveted. I’m older than Raftery and was only vaguely aware of these events — by 1999 I was living in Chicago and not really keeping up on news from home. Besides, I’d only gone to Garfield for five semesters, transferring in as a 10th grader and then graduating early, halfway through my senior year. And even during those 2.5 years, my school spirit could be charitably described as “dim.”

But this podcast is kicking up some intense memories about not just high school but the larger cultural context of the 80s. I’m forever grateful I came of age before location tracking because no one should be surveilled 24/7, and I had some incredible, and indelible, experiences wandering unsupervised through the city. But as a friend said to me a while back, it’s sort of amazing we made it to college alive and relatively unscathed. When I look back on a few episodes from those years I too sometimes wonder, “Yeah … where were the grownups?”

The book project I’m working on is not a memoir, but it draws on personal experience. Working on it, and listening to this show, has me thinking a lot about the contradictions of being a young person — the tension between a necessary belief in your right to agency and the need for guardrails and mentorship. The need for someone to say, “Hey, actually, you’re in danger” or, on a more basic level, “I hear you and will help you.” None of this goes away when you get older! But the patterns you learn as a kid impact your ability to navigate hazardous situations as an adult.

Raftery and Hushagen (now a civil rights attorney) were on Lindy West and Meagan Hatcher-Mays’s podcast Text Me Back earlier this month. West and Hatcher-Mays also graduated from Garfield in 2000, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole of wild millennial high school memories, this podcast will deliver. It’s relevant to note that a dozen years after the events of Adults in the Room West was one of the first people to write about the horrifying case of a Garfield student who was raped on a 2012 wilderness trip, and whose story was obfuscated, denied, and minimized by pretty much every adult in every room she entered in the aftermath. Far from an isolated incident. the story of Mr. Hudson exists on a continuum from benign neglect to abuse that spans decades, and stretches from Seattle to Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

But, as I said, we didn’t WANT the grownups around back in the day. Because when authority figures did get involved in our business, we wound up with bullshit like the Teen Dance Ordinance, the subject of my other podcast.

I first listened to Let the Kids Dance, another KUOW production, when it dropped a few years ago. But I’m trying to write about the TDO as part of said book project, so I’ve been revisiting it these past weeks. The TDO was an ordinance that from 1985 to 2000 effectively banned all-ages dance clubs and shows in the city of Seattle. As the podcast details, it sprang from a moral panic sparked by an early 80s all-ages club called the Monastery, which operated out of a converted church on the edge of downtown. A sanctuary for street kids and queer kids, the Monastery was open all night long, and was both a dance club and a nexus of drug dealing and (probably) sexual exploitation. In an era when LGBTQ kids were routinely kicked out of their homes by their parents, the Monastery was both a necessary safe space and at times not the safest place for kids. Both things can be true.

A crusading city politician whose son was a Monastery regular took it upon himself to get the place shut down as a public nuisance, and eventually he did. But the city fathers had tasted blood, and they weren’t stopping there. From the death of the Monastery rose the TDO, a piece of public policy that imposed such crippling fees and regulations on any all-ages event that it made them impossible to produce. Bands were forced into basements and the suburbs, and a generation of teenagers who just wanted to rock out found themselves incessantly policed, harassed, and at times beaten up. Episode 4 of Let the Kids Dance, on the TDO’s impact on the hip-hop scene, is particularly brutal.

Despite the ridiculous, Footloose-adjacent name, the TDO wasn’t really about dancing. It was about controlling young people’s bodies in public spaces, and about forcing teens exploring complex and age-appropriate questions of identity and agency to hide themselves away. We got the message: our bodies, our sexuality, our efforts at self-expression, they were all shameful and dangerous, a nuisance to the public perception of Seattle as a safe, clean, boring town then best known for its timber and big airplanes.

It’s one of the more head-shaking ironies of the era that the Seattle music scene, which was incubated in all-ages clubs in the 80s and which in the 90s brought both a blazing global spotlight and oodles of money to the city, was actually on life-support the whole time thanks to the city’s misguided decision to crush youth culture. Here in Chicago in 2026 the city is currently arguing over whether and how teenagers should be allowed to exist in public; this podcast makes it clear how little anyone has learned.

I never really got into the teen dance club scene. I think I went to the Monastery twice? But shortly after I transferred to my new high school I fell in with a group of new friends who seemed to have landed in my dorky, ballet-dancing life from the planet Cool. Through them, I was introduced to the Metropolis, and my mind exploded. The Metropolis was a short-lived all-ages punk club in Pioneer Square. It only existed for 11 months, from April 1983 to March 1984, and its demise predated the TDO. I can’t remember all the shows I saw there, but I remember the almost physical thrill of discovering a new way of being in the world. Of standing on the edges watching the scene, trying to figure out how I might fit in.

It is confusing sometimes to have your youth become the stuff of cultural legend. I feel protective of these memories, and also unsure if I’m entitled to them? The books, movies, and podcasts about Seattle in the day keep coming — just today Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready announced he’s writing a “grunge opera” — and with every one I’m thrust back to a time that was undeniably formative, but also kinda alienating. I moved to New York in 1990 because, as the TDO was making clear, Seattle was a dead end. I loved my friends and my family, but I wanted more.

I don’t know Jonathan Evison, an accomplished writer who also has a fun podcast called , but he went to the Metropolis too. When I saw that he was making a documentary about it, my heart initially sank. Here we go again. But watching the trailer brought back that thrill of becoming someone new thanks to the realization that there was, in this small and unique space, run by a benevolent adult, room for a 15 year old to grow and fuck up and freak out. I gave him some money and now I’m hungry for more.

One last thing! Mark your calendars because Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us is coming out in paperback August 25. Yay! I love a hardback, but paperbacks are so much more portable and accessible. Preorder your copy here.

And thanks for reading — this wound up a lot longer than expected. Youth, man.

I vowed to write at least once this month, so here I am grinding this out under the wire. Given the current conversation around the collapse of books sections, book reviews, and reading I thought I’d share some thoughts about a two-year-old book I read in January. Celebrate Black History Month and save literary culture by buying a book! (ETA: I added some additional thoughts after I first published this, so this version differs some from what was emailed to subscribers.)

One February day in the late 2010s, Lydia Abarca’s granddaughter came home from preschool confused. Assigned to do reports on Famous Black Americans, four of her small classmates had chosen Misty Copeland, anointed as the country’s First Black Ballerina, as their subject. But while Copeland had indeed become American Ballet Theater’s first Black ballerina, in 2015, she was hardly the first Black American ballerina, something Hannah knew if the history books didn’t. “But what about Grandma?” Hannah reportedly blurted out at dinner. “Where’s your name?” cried her mother, Lydia’s daughter Danielle. “Where’s YOUR name?”

What about Grandma, indeed. What about Lydia Abarca, who danced in both Swan Lake and The Wiz, who toured Europe, and who appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine — the first Black ballerina to do so — way back in 1975, eight years before Misty Copeland was born? Where was her name?

Abarca and her friends — Gayle McKinney-Griffith and Sheila Rohan and Karlya Shelton and Marcia Sells — were dancers with Dance Theater of Harlem, the groundbreaking Black ballet company cofounded by former NYCB dancer Arthur Mitchell in 1968, in the cataclysmic wake of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The story of DTH is most often told as the story of Mr. Mitchell, as he was universally known — genius, visionary, taskmaster, authoritarian, who, fed up with being Balanchine’s lone, exoticized Black dancer, picked up his shoes and moved uptown. But Karen Valby’s Swans of Harlem, published in 2024, is less the story of Mitchell and DTH, full of drama though it is. What it is, and why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, is the story of how women get erased from history and how, by coming together and breaking silences, they can claim their proper flowers. It is an astonishing act of legacy reclamation, deeply ethical in both its narrative purpose and its editorial process.

All five of Valby’s main characters had careers of equal parts grit and glamour. They were elite, celebrated dancers, but they also were subject to Mitchell’s whims, typical of the era when male patriarchs ruled both ballet companies and ballerinas with iron slippers. And, of course, subject to the racism of ballet culture which held that despite the cultural upheavals of the Civil Rights movement Black girls just had the wrong bodies, wrong attitude, wrong “lines” for lily white ensembles. It was an era when even Mitchell — himself rebelling against the homogeneity of the ballet world — was guilty of colorism, elevating lighter skinned dancers like Abarca to star status and casting darker dancers as peasants. Despite his pride in building a Black ballet company, he had no patience for dancers whose bodies didn’t conform to a white, bone-thin Balanchine ideal. One by one, ground down by injury, low pay, Mitchell’s body shaming, or just the desire for something better they left DTH and went on with their lives.

When the company went on hiatus from 2004 to 2012, just as the internet rose to redefine history, its dancers were left behind, written out of the digital record, while Copeland’s star rose, anointed as the One. The same white supremacist myth of Black exceptionalism that drove Mitchell away from NYCB elevated and isolated Copeland, who — late in the book — tells the DTH dancers how envious she is of their shared experience and sisterhood. (Copeland, I should note, blurbed this book and has been nothing but immensely supportive of the ongoing work of reclamation Valby and the DTH dancers are pursuing.)

At the start of COVID, Abarca (now Abarca-Mitchell), McKinney-Griffith (who died in 2023), Rohan, Shelton, and Sells came together on Zoom to share stories and affirm their place in history — if only to themselves. Calling themselves the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council, the women ranged in age from 63 to 81. Their time in the spotlight had been relegated to dusty scrapbooks and increasingly tenuous memories, unsure if they truly had been important. “I did the ballets. I did Broadway. I did movies. I did everything but stand on my head,” says Abarca. “And it all just went away?”

“I find myself questioning my own past,” Shelton says. “Was I really a principal dancer?”

Varby alternates a straight narrative history of DTH and these and other dancers with their own first-person accounts of the time. The Swans shared the dreams and sacrifices familiar to so many dancers, longing to be seen, jockeying for parts, trying to balance family and career. They know that they are talented, and special, and that for all Mr. Mitchell’s caprice that they are part of something unparalleled. Varby recreates the joy the Swans feel at their peak with such care that their later struggles with the toxic effects of erasure are all the more heartbreaking: heartbreaking: alcoholism, depression, self-loathing, confusion, despair.

Abarca struggled with drinking for years, locking herself away with bottles of rum to numb the emptiness left after she stopped dancing. Shelton did too. Marcia Sells became a lawyer and rose to dean of students at Harvard Law School, but for decades never talked about her life as a dancer, believing it would make her seem “unserious” — a shame I also carried for a long time, though I was never so accomplished, and which feels ridiculous to me now.

Valby, a white woman with two Black children taking dance classes, was invited by the Council to sit in on their Zooms and first told their story in the New York Times in 2021. I came to it via Erika Lantz’s podcast on cults, The Turning, the second season of which was devoted to ballet. What I find so remarkable about the whole body of work is the clear decisions that have been made to fully center the dancers’ stories — their hopes, hard work, triumphs, and disappointments — not just as individuals but as a collective. The Swans share copyright with Valby and has its own acknowledgments page in the back of the book. The cover of the book features not one striking image but small, equally sized photos of all five dancers.

This commitment to asserting a collective history feels radical. We are awash right now (always) in material documenting the degradation and silencing of girls and young women, in videos of people of color being violently disappeared. In a cultural moment determined to deny anyone but white men agency and authority, I found in this small book a light of possibility. Community is what will save us, we’re told, and the Swans offer a moving model of just how true that can be.

Valby writes, in her introduction:

“May this book be a literal binding of the the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council’s lives as artists and pioneers and wives and mothers and friends. May it acknowledge their intrinsic value as women as much as it celebrates their achievements as ballerinas. May it free them of plaguing thoughts so that they can release themselves of grievance and shame. May they find peace in the telling of their stories, and in the fact of our finally paying attention.”

Speaking of writing about dance — I reviewed the Joffrey’s “American Icons” program for the Chicago Sun-Times last week.

Elsewhere, I really loved this essay by , on returning to playing the double bass and what we regain when we return as adults to youthful practices abandoned in pursuit of some false understanding of maturity. “There are versions of ourselves we imagine we have left behind,” she writes, “only to discover they have not gone anywhere at all—that they’ve been quietly waiting, humming beneath everything that came after.”

The Isolation Journals with Suleika Jaouad

On Quitting, and What Remains

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4 months ago · 1039 likes · 243 comments · Suleika Jaouad

Last: If you’re in Southern California next month, come out to the desert to join me and Nothing Compares to You contributors Gina Frangello and Madushree Ghosh the weekend of March 20-22 for the Hi Desert, Lo-Fi Lit Festival, produced by Frangello and friends in and around Joshua Tree and 29 Palms. I’m speaking on two panels, one on writing about music and a second celebrating both Nothing Compares and the new collection The Big M: 13 Writers Take Back the Story of Menopause. It’s free!

I realized the other day that much of what I’m working on right now is about effort, in one way or another. I’m interested in what it means to try — what it feels like, why we do it, and how it looks to others. Obviously, I’m curious about the physical effort of dance and movement, and the function of joy and seemingly frivolous pursuits in times of crisis. More broadly, of course, I’m thinking about the effort involved in fighting fascism, and also about the grinding work involved in just plain holding the ground — whether that be in journalism, in publishing, in teaching, or any of the countless fields currently under attack from racist ideologues backed by global capital. In my private writing I’m trying (there’s that word again) to connect the two. It’s hard! But still I chip away at the words.

In working on a longer essay about all of the above I also realized this is not a new area of inquiry. Because we are who we are, even if our own internal consistency only reveals itself with time. I came back to this piece, which was published in 2015 at the Rumpus, the other day, and thought I’d share it here. It was written when I was 47, nursing a bruised heart and anxious about the future, even though back then the possibility of a Trump presidency was still preposterous. I had started taking aerial circus classes a year earlier, and was still in the throes of a nice beginners high.

I’m back in regular aerial classes now, after training was interrupted for almost three years by cancer treatment and two consecutive broken bones. I’ve lost a lot of hard-won strength and have slipped back two levels, back to “advanced beginning” status. It’s a lot harder; the high has worn off and my 58-year-old body is just not as resilient as it was in what I now see to have been the prime of my 47-year-old youth, which I stupidly believed nine years ago to be ancient. I have spent a fair amount of time lately wondering just what I’m trying to prove. But still, I’m trying. It was nice to find this essay.

Here’s a teaser:

I worried that I was escaping into my body—that I was running away from age, running from ambition, from engagement with the wider world. Derided since Juvenal as pap for the masses, or children, circus still gets a bad rap as both art and practice. But, as a friend pointed out, the circus always flowers with the end of empire—in Rome, in Russia, in Britain and France. Here and now, in a season of mass degradation, the culture stupefied by clickbait and terrorized by war, my own city perpetually under fire and up for sale, and my body ever-more alert to the end of its own empire—its fertility, its beauty, its strength—it felt curative to turn away from the public narrative toward some private spectacle stripped of words but heavy with sweat and risk. Can it really be escapism if you’re working so hard?

There’s an ongoing debate in performance circles about whether circus can communicate narrative and emotion—about its potential to tell a story rather than deliver a spectacle, or, aspirationally, do both at once.

Typically, the circus is short on meaning, and long on showstopping display. The aerialist hooks onto the trapeze and all but the spotlight dims. The peripheral activity—the other rings under the big top; the story being told on stage—stalls and all eyes turn to the tumbler in the air, breathless, until the act is over with one final flourish. When the applause dies down, the rest of the action picks up again, as though nothing ever happened. Plus, the physical restrictions of circus performance—both the grueling demands on the body and the technical requirements of rigging and padding—are a problem when it comes to creating theatrical narrative. The aerialist can only stay aloft so long before her body breaks, and it’s hard to maintain the suspension of disbelief theater can require when there’s a four-foot-thick mat on stage.

Still, the physical stakes of aerial work in particular—the ever-imminent risk that an artist will fall from the high wire, will fail to catch a trapeze partner by her ankles—give the form an immediacy other forms of performance can’t channel. “You cannot perform a 5-meter drop towards concrete or throw and catch seven objects without complete investment in what you are doing,” argued an article on the website Circus Now. “And this investment has a quality of honesty and proximity in that the artists themselves are in a position where failure is as real, non-negotiable and tangible as the possibility of success.”

It’s that immediacy of failure that kept me coming back to class, week after grueling week. When the story I’m trying to tell doesn’t make sense, when the narrative is stuck in the mire, bogged down by the weight of its own ambition, its preposterous dreams, the circus, in all its nonsense, offers clarity: up or down?

You can read the full essay here. Original art by the brilliant Liz Tamny.

As part of the Soup & Bread community meal project I run, my friend Sheila and I created these cute “SOUP MELTS ICE” t-shirts as a fundraiser for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights — a group that is doing the work. The online pop-up shop is open only through Sunday, February 8, so get your orders in now. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Available as short- and long-sleeved tees as well as a crewneck sweatshirt, as modeled below.

Pertinent to my interests:

Alicia Kennedy, incisive as ever, on the practice of attention.

“Life is, though, of course, a balance of crying at the state of things and enjoying our breakfast. In between, we figure out what to do. Ideally with a deep breath.”

Nothing Compares contributor , in a beautiful essay on, among other things, trying, no matter how half assed it feels.

“Sometimes you watch someone die on your phone and you can’t do anything for two days but shake and cry. You go to the protests. You send the money. You join the Signal group. It’s not perfect, this stuff, but it’s real.”

on getting over her fear of group exercise classes.

“Their bodies had been objectified, sexualized, and disregarded, yet here they were, claiming their bodies back with each swish of their hips. They had made it another year, another day. And now, they were here dancing.”

And of course, , calling it like is is and holding her ground.

“What the fuck is this, Peggy? The pedophile’s ball?”

In Seattle the other day, walking the shore of Lake Washington I was stopped by a confounding sight. A raft of coots — darkly feathered, with characteristic red eyes and white beaks — floated en masse, just offshore. I’m terrible at estimating numbers but let’s say there were 200 of them, at least?

They moved in concert, north, and then south, coalescing into a clump and then stretching out into a long line. Some birds expressed their individual natures: flapping wings, diving, paddling off in the wrong direction. But on the whole they were one body, serenly sailing along in unspoken communication. It was riveting: a murmuration of waterfowl, the coots shaping and reshaping their flock in endless iteration.

“Oh yes, the flotilla,” said my sister, when I reported back to her house in wonder. “They do that.”

A flotilla. A raft. A murmuration. It was all those things, and it also reminded me of an image in the public discourse these days: the “teamwork" image that depicts many small fish coming together to defeat a larger, more menacing fish. It’s used as a visual metaphor for the power of community, a cute gloss on the serious work being done by activists, community leaders, legal observers, “walking bus” volunteers, business owners, clergy, and just plain human beings terrified for their neighbors and the future of the nation who are out on the daily in the streets of Minneapolis and across Minnestota. A school of little fish, working together to chase the big fish away.

I don’t know where to start with it all — which articles to link to, which testimony to share, as though that would make a difference. This, in the Atlantic, is quite good. But so’s this, by my former trapeze teacher, and this, by Alex Pretti’s childhood friend. I could go on for hours. I suppose I’m heartened that Greg Bovino is gone, that Kristi Noem may be on the ropes. But it’s about a system not individual sadists. It won’t bring back the dead, or heal the hurt. It won’t restore a sense of safety to preschoolers choking on tear gas, or help get food to families scared to leave the house.

Coots are very territorial, I’ve now learned, and can be quite aggressive when their eggs are threatened. Also known as mud hens, they are (thanks Wikipedia) “common and widespread, and are sometimes even considered a pest.” Their aggression sometimes makes them reckless, and out of nesting season they are vulnerable to predation by larger animals such as alligators and great horned owls. They are — you can’t make this up — popular prey for the bald eagle, comprising, in some regions, 80 percent of the diet for the bird that anchors the presidential seal. Yet they persist.

If you’d like to support the ongoing fight in Minneapolis, the site Stand With Minnesota offers an extensive list of organizations large and small that need your help. At the recommendation of a friend, who himself has a friend who is a minister in Minnesota, I just donated to the Casa Maria Food Shelf at St. Nicholas Episcopal Church. From my friend’s friend, a few days ago:

It’s just palpable tension. There’s a vigil over on Nicolette Ave where the second killing happened yesterday and we’re going over there this morning. The response at the site has been a reverent silence.

People are hiding in their homes. The key is not so much ample food shelves, it’s food shelves that will deliver. People are too afraid to leave their homes, even for food.

They normally serve 50 families per week, but the number of families requesting deliveries are now over 500.

This is a trusted program. Your donation will go directly to human beings.

Closer to home, I should note that we at Soup & Bread have reactivated our online T-shirt shop, to make our “SOUP MELTS ICE” shirts available again through February 8. All proceeds benefit the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Because you know they’re coming back, right?

Here is that link again.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note and relevant to every single one of my interests: A stage show based on the life and legacy of Sinéad O’Connor opens in Manchester this summer. Titled “The Surge: An Ode to Sinéad O’Connor,” the dance-driven show is the brainchild of Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning director and choreographer of Moulin Rouge! The Musical. It is a “meditation on voice, protest and the courage to live a life that defies the norm” (!) and will feature older dancers whose “collective presence challenges conventional ideas of ageing in dance.” (!!!)

It is coproduced by the Joyce Theater, where I worked in the 90s. I am gobsmacked and can’t quite understand how this is happening but I think I have to go to England? Or maybe it will come to New York?

In any case, something I’ve been lax about doing lately is sharing the obligatory link to Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us in this newsletter. Sonya Tayeh! How can I send you a copy?

“The Martha Graham Dance Company regrets that we are unable to perform at the Kennedy Center in April.”

With this brief January 16 announcement the Graham Company became the latest in a cascade of artists and arts organizations – from Bela Fleck to Issa Rae, Hamilton to the Washington National Opera – to decide that the costs of a cancelled gig are worth it if it keeps the stench of the Trump administration at bay.

The four-night run at the Kennedy Center has presumably been on the books for a while, one of a handful of multinight engagements on an international tour that is taking the company to Italy, Latvia, and Cleveland in celebration of its 100th anniversary, a remarkable achievement for any arts organization let alone one dedicated to cryptic, mythic modern dance. I have to imagine that at one point the company was looking forward to performing on the Kennedy Center stage. One of the works on the centennial program is En Masse, a new piece by Hope Boykin, the former Kennedy Center Artistic Adviser for Dance Education, set to Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, a work commissioned by Jackie Kennedy (with choreography by Alvin Ailey) for the inaugural 1971 gala at the center that bore her murdered husband’s name.

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That return, with all its resonance, is not happening – and the reason can be found embedded in another work in the centennial repertoire, the antiwar epic Chronicle, which Graham created in 1936 in response to the rise of fascism in Europe. From the Graham website: “Chronicle does not attempt to show the actualities of war; rather does it, by evoking war’s images, set forth the fateful prelude to war, portray the devastation of spirit which it leaves in its wake, and suggest an answer.” Danced by an all-female cast, just 16 years after women secured the right to vote in the United States, the hourlong work was hailed as a rare vehicle for female political expression and empowerment, and a call to rise up and fight back against oppression. You can watch a few snippets here.

That same year, the company was invited to perform at the Berlin Olympics, an invitation Graham famously declined. Ninety years later, her words are alarmingly of the moment. She wrote:

“I would find it impossible to dance in Germany at the present time. So many artists whom I respect and admire have been persecuted, have been deprived of the right to work for ridiculous and unsatisfactory reasons, that I should consider it impossible to identify myself, by accepting your invitation, with the regime that has made such things possible. In addition, some of my concert group would not be welcomed in Germany.”

I’ve never seen the Graham Company in person. The group performs Chronicle and En Masse, along with 1948’s Diversion of Angels, in Chicago on Saturday, January 24, but I can’t go, as I’m currently out of town. So earlier this week, in a fit of frustration, I pulled up the tour schedule to see if I might be able to make a field trip and write it off as research. Pittsburgh and Cleveland aren’t an option, and I don’t think I can make it to New York, where they’re at City Center for five whole nights, either. But the company performs February 7 in Minneapolis. Chronicle and En Masse are on the bill, as is Appalachian Spring. Graham’s 1944 classic, set to Aaron Copland’s Pulitzer-winning work built around the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” evokes a sense of community resilience and postwar possibility. In this story of a frontier couple meeting and overcoming hardship to build a life together Graham used traditional motifs – religion, populism, the pioneer spirit – as cover to deliver a bundle of pacifist lefty messaging. To see the three performed in a city inflamed by injustice, powered by fury at the murder of an innocent woman, modeling resistance … it’s so on the nose I might have to go bear witness.

Ugh, it’s so stupid to write right now. There is so much misinformation and propaganda, so many hateful words, such a flood of lies that it feels immoral to pollute the infosphere with anything beyond establishible facts – and those are so hard to nail down with any confidence. How many kids did Renee Good have? Was she married? Does being on the school board make you political? What credentials permit the media to take the “so-called” away from “poet”? At what point does “fucking bitch” constitute a hate crime? Is there a way to figure it all out without watching snuff films??? I can see the holes and misdirection, because you can take the jobs away from the journalist but you’re stuck with the bullshit meter for life. But it’s also not my day job now and it’s too much to do right by after hours and so I am defeated.

But here’s a nice piece from the Chicago Reader, on the Graham Company at 100. Also: did you know that Isamu Noguchi, sculptor and set designer for Appalachian Spring, self-incarcerated at an internment camp during the Second World War? He went on to be a lifelong antifascist, antiracist activist, was investigated by the FBI, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts. The Japanese-American dancer Yuriko was incarcerated too. She joined the Graham Company after she was released in 1943, and danced in the premiere of Appalachian Spring. She danced with Graham for decades and then taught and restaged her works when she could no longer dance them herself. She lived to be 102.

After Graham’s own passing in 1991, at 96, the company she founded almost died as well, brought down by a leadership crisis instigated by an unqualified man (honestly a fascinating saga that I won’t get into here). For more than a decade, the company limped along, hemorrhaging dancers, reputation, and money, until new artistic director Janet Eiber took charge, and the company was reborn, creating new works, teaching new students, and returning Graham’s legacy to the international stage.

Rather than write, I spent this past weekend in a three-day dance workshop, the launch of the next iteration of Visceral Encore, the dance program for “older dancers” that I’ve been part of for the last two years. I also turned 58, and on my birthday (Saturday) I left the workshop early to perform in a circus show for the first time since I was diagnosed with cancer in 2022. Since then, between treatment, two broken bones, and seemingly endless rounds of rehab, it’s been hard to train. I’ve been trying to regain the upper body strength I had three years ago, but that clearly isn’t going to happen without a level of discipline that is beyond me. I also moved an hour away from my beloved circus gym and the commute to the city is a giant pain. But still, there I was: rickety, but flying again. It was so good to be back.

I have to keep believing in the capacity to rebuild this muscle, just as I have to keep believing it’s important to make this space for joy and beauty. The fundamental element of Graham technique is the cycle of contraction and release. It is an expression of breathing, the life force, and a metaphor for conflict and resolution, oppression and liberation. I have to believe this is fact as well — that we have the collective ability to flex our bodies in contraction, whistles blaring, so that there might come the release of an Appalachian Spring.

Earlier this week I went to a valedictory event at which a dozen or so local authors celebrated the ten-year run of Chicago independent bookstore Volumes Bookcafe. The impetus for the event? The bookstore’s imminent closure.

I’ve been a Volumes patron since its early days in a prior location on Milwaukee Avenue, and the store hosted a launch event for my Rust Belt Chicago anthology back in 2017. You can read about the event in this nice Block Club Chicago writeup (that’s my blonde head in the lower right corner of the photo at top).

Co-owners and sisters Rebecca and Kimberly George are stalwart literary citizens, engaged and outspoken members of the local community of writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, journalists, and mentors that keep the scene healthy and diverse. But bookselling, with its infinitesimal margins, is never a space to make millions, and since the arrival of a large Barnes & Noble up the street in 2024, it has not been, for the Georges, a space to make a living. In announcing the store’s closure, the sisters note that “Since the arrival of B&N just two blocks away, our sales have been down between 20-30% each month since they opened in October of last year. Our last holiday season was the worst in nine years.”

At the event, Rebecca wore a black t-shirt that declared, in bold white lettering: VOLUMES IS A F*#@ING INDIE BOOKSTORE. The shirt might have mystified any attendees not following the Volumes story, as it was obvious to all that they were sitting in a bookstore. There were books on the shelves, and displayed on tables that had, for the moment, been pushed back to make room for the guests. There were novels, biographies, romantasy, mysteries, history, and self-help. There was a children’s storytime space in the back, and a small coffee bar across the hall, by the bathrooms.

But the shirt was in response to the repeated claims by Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt that Volumes … was not a bookstore. From the Daily Mail:

It’s pretty clear James Daunt has never been to Volumes. If he has, perhaps his definition of a bookstore only includes establishments with more than 100,000 titles in inventory? It’s unclear, and I don’t care. What is clear, and what I do care about is this:

People in power lie to serve their interests, even when the facts of their lie are plain to all.

You know where I’m going with this.

The velocity of the lies this week is destabilizing and disorienting. We’re being told Venezuela is about drugs, that red meat is healthy, that kids don’t need vaccines. We’re being told that murder is self defense, that retreat is attack, and that a neighbor bearing nonviolent witness to federal brutality — with a smile and a “dude I’m not mad at you” — is a violent threat. It’s coming so fast, so furious that I have come to doubt my own grip on reality.

Even McSweeney’s agrees.

They lie because they can. They lie because they know you can’t keep up. They lie to make themselves feel powerful. They lie to keep you guessing. They like to keep you frightened, wondering where the next lie will land. Will it land on something you hold to be true? (Here’s where I should point out that everyone is vulnerable to the easy validation of the lie. Please, if you can, teach your kids, or your dad, or the well-meaning lady in your book group, how to tell if a photo or video has been generated by AI!)

For me, the only thing to do is stop and look around. I remind myself that I can see and hear and feel, and that I have enough (thankfully, still but fraying) critical thinking skills to draw informed conclusions.

The day Renee Nicole Good was murdered happened to be the day of my monthly Soup & Bread dinner at Chicago’s Hideout. I felt torn, but rather than join the thousands protesting downtown, I joined 80 or so people for a shared meal in community with one another — and I felt my grip on reality tighten. I have to keep believing that it’s important to create small spaces for care and kindness, where we can gather together for sustenance. Without them we are just robots fueled by outrage and fear.

At the Volumes event, Bill Ayers read a little bit from his 2024 book When Freedom is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer, and urged the assembled to keep making the effort to gather together in third spaces like Volumes, or the Hideout. Isolation distorts perception, and allows lies and propaganda to thrive. In coming together to share stories and break bread you build collective strength, and affirm a shared evidence-based reality that can support positive action.

You could also (here’s the pivot) dance.

Want to Have a Better Year? Dance

My 2026 goal is to recenter this newsletter on dance and movement. And books. So, not doing so well so far, but I’m trying.

Here are a few more links of note:

From the Wall Street Journal: Suddenly Everyone is Scared to Dance in Clubs. A fascinating read that doesn’t really address the underlying issue: Why is being embarrassed the worst thing imaginable?

From the NYT: In “Ann Lee,” Dance is the Fuel for an 18th-Century Godly Rave. Cannot WAIT to see this film.

And a heads up, coming to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in April: “Dancing the Revolution,” a multimedia exhibition on reggaeton and dancehall as “a revolutionary practice for collective liberation rooted in the struggle against colonial oppression.”

A few months ago someone I like a lot but doesn’t know me well asked, “So how long have you been obsessed with Sinéad O’Connor?” And I was, like, what? Obsessed? I’m not obsessed with Sinéad. I am interested in her — she is a globally significant artist with a rich catalog, bracing values, and a complicated personal history. Working on Nothing Compares to You over the past two years has been a fun and rewarding project; I’ve learned a lot, made a little bit of money, and worked with two dozen incredible writers. But I’m not obsessed.

These days, though, obsession is the coin of the realm. Kids are encouraged to follow their passion; writers online gush about their compulsion to write; influencers chronicle their consumerist hauls, declaring undying fealty to lip tints and puffer coats.

(There’s some misogyny at play here of course, because where isn’t there? Nobody asks Peter Guralnick how long he’s been obsessed with the King.)

But, still. When did plain intellectual curiosity become inadequate to justify creation? Can’t the genesis of art just be the search for an answer to a question only the artist thinks to ask? I think so. I’m enrolled in a yearlong writing workshop that uses the critical response process developed by Liz Lerman — a dancer — to structure feedback. Step two of this process? The artist asks questions about the work.

Despite the Sinéad hyperfocus of this newsletter in recent months, what I’m truly interested in, as a long-term project, is dance and movement. The question I’m trying to answer, “Why, if every child instinctively bounces along to music and if millions of adults dance in class, at weddings, and in the clubs, is dance still such a marginal pursuit, the impoverished relation of both serious art and popular culture, the embarrassing purview of the girls and the gays?”

I’m working on an essay collection that orbits this and other questions. It’s getting there, but there’s much still to do. This is my project, my obsession, for 2026.

And in the name of end-of-the-year lists, here’s my catalog of obsessions, interests, and mild curiosities from the year now slipping away, with the glaring exception of the one overarching obsession on everyone’s mind, namely when will our ongoing national nightmare of idiocy and cruelty — and its international accompaniment of genocide and starvation — end, and what can we do to help it happen?

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In aggressively random order:

• Sneakers that aren’t Sambas*

• Trader Joe’s “Nuts About Rosemary”mixed nuts

• Just how many tomatoes can nine plants in a tight bed yield? (Answer: Too many.)

• Classical ballet as a form of gender-affirming care for cancer patients, a loose thread in a larger essay I wrote for “Bodies of Work,” a collection on dance and health forthcoming in 2027 from West Virginia University Press.

• The effects of Seattle’s notorious Teen Dance Ordinance on the mental health of said teens (coming soon)

• Dying For Sex as a dance show

• The Union Pacific-North Metra schedule and its imperiled budget

• My ridiculous cats

• This stupid visible mending loom

• Buying tickets to expensive shows months in advance so that I have to go to them when the day comes around and I’m tired. Those box seats for Tortoise and the Chicago Philharmonic were a sweet gift from August me to November me.

• The Lilith Fair movie

• The dosa hash at Chicago’s Superkhana International, which has the nicest staff

• Shade-friendly native plants that will transform the weedy turf of our backyard into a prairie wonderland.

• The elusive location of my lost-to-cancer upper-body strength (my one allowed vain complaint**)

• Related: why is weightlifting so hot but dance is not?

• Tatiana Schlossberg’s stunning New Yorker essay, RIP

• Why is Waukegan’s lakefront so intractably terrible?

• What does it mean that my most popular post of the year was about AI and journalism, not dance or Sinéad?

• Elder care

• Finland. Hope to go there this summer.

• Jen Percy’s “Girls Play Dead.” I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so seen by a book. I hope to write more on it soon. One thought tho: in her oddly optimistic concluding chapter Percy discusses how in some non-Western cultures the pain of sexual violence can be shared and absorbed by a community. It made me wonder if, here in the West, the much-maligned confessional essay could be understood an attempt to recreate this ethic of community care.

• Yoko Ono “Music of the Mind” at the MCA. If you ever wondered just how utterly, wondrously ahead of her time Yoko was (is), this show will put the question to rest. Genuinely obsessed.

• The ever-deepening understanding that old friends are the best friends. I turn 58 next month and there is nothing that makes that better than knowing that there are people in the world who have known me for 40 years already. I love you all.

I could go on, but that’s enough for one Wednesday morning. I leave you on the cusp of a new year, with a snippet of one glorious moment from the old: Angela James singing “Jackie,” with Julie Pomerleau on improvised violin and L. Wyatt on backing vocals, at our final Sinéad event of the year. This concert, at the Hideout, December 17, raised $932 for the Illinois Commission for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. If you are looking to get your 2025 giving in under the wire, I can think of no better cause.

*One of 2025’s resolutions was to not buy any new clothes, and except for a few things I bought in Ireland (travel shopping doesn’t count!) I succeeded. But now, I find myself longing for cute sneakers, something I’ve never been into in the past.

** The other resolution this year was “stop whining.”

In the mismatched sock drawer that is my ongoing list of potential newsletter topics, “Sinéad birthday post” has been at the top for a while. Surely, went the thinking, if I can just spend the time to craft the perfect newsletter that ties together Sinéad’s life story and legacy, making the case once and for all that she is the model of courage and conviction we need to meet the present moment, everything will click together and our book will soar to the top of the charts, with all ensuing good things.

Of course, I didn’t do that. I spent yesterday shoveling 7 inches of snow out of the driveway and helping Paul organize our record collection (now with categories such as “Exotica,” “Rhumba,” and “Difficult listening”). Later we went to an ornament exchange party a few blocks away and I ate so many cookies I think it affected my sleep.

But I do want to take a moment this morning to recognize the day: Sinéad Marie Bernadette O’Connor, later Shuhada’ Sadaqat, also known as Magda Davitt, was born December 8, 1966 in Dublin and went on to shake the foundations of Irish society — for everyone, but for women in particular. As Irish journalist Una Mullally, who moderated our launch events in Dublin and Brooklyn, wrote two years ago in the New York Times, on the occasion of her death:

There was no MTV in my house, but for some odd reason, my grandmother’s television set, on the other side of the country, in Galway, provided this magic portal. I would stay up late when visiting her, and O’Connor would drop in. “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Her open, searching gaze. The tear. You could do that, too? You could shave your head? Dye Public Enemy’s logo on the side of your head? Be an Irish woman wearing ripped denim on television? Go on an Irish chat show dressed as a priest? Come out as lesbian, and later declare you were “three-quarters heterosexual, a quarter gay”?

In any society at the time, this stuff was radical. But in Ireland, it was revolutionary.

As Una notes, at the time of her death — just 56 years old — Sinéad was having a bit of a renaissance, with the publication of her memoir, Rememberings, and the release of Kathryn Ferguson’s documentary Nothing Compares. She was reportedly working on a new album. And she had just received the RTE Choice Music Prize for Best Classic Irish Album, for I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, itself a classic at just 33 years old. She was also at long last being recognized as having been ahead of her time in speaking hard truths about the long tail of abuse and trauma, and in her advocacy for women, children, and the LGBTQ community. So far ahead that no one could see where she was going.

Who knows what she would have done next?

I wrote about a lot of this — in particular about the ways Sinéad inadvertently helped develop the now ubiquitous vocabulary around trauma, and about why the oft-scorned framing of art as therapy should be taken seriously — this past summer, on the anniversary of her death. That piece is here:

But what I really want to talk about is the story I never got around to telling in that long entry from July. I want to tell you the story of the magic necklace.

On the day of our Dublin book launch, my sister and I went to meet up with at the pub around the corner from the bookstore before the event. I found her immediately, because of course I had seen her photo but also because she was wearing a dazzling, four-inch, intricately patterned medallion around her neck, in the center of which was a portrait of Sinéad O’Connor.

“Oh my god, where did you get that necklace!?!” I think I blurted out in awe.

She told me, and she showed me the back, which bore a portrait of Kate Bush, and I was appropriately doubly impressed. So much so that I followed the artist, Ciarna (Kiki) Hackett on Instagram and when a week later, on our final day in Dublin, I saw that she was selling at a Sunday flea market, my sister and I trudged through the morning drizzle to go find her.

At the market, she was just setting up, a bit behind schedule having been out all day and night previously at one of Dublin’s massive rallies for Palestine. But I introduced myself and explained about the book and Sinéad Gleeson and what I was looking for and she was excited. She had an array of Sinéad necklaces, as well as medallions featuring other iconic Irish women, both historic and fantastic: Mary Robinson. Molly Malone. The dread pirate Grainne. Enya.

I settled on one, after some dithering, and as I was paying a neighboring vendor approached.

“Did she tell you about the book?” she asked.

Book? What book?

It turned out that Ciarna and her own sister, Sorcha, had recently published a book, Womná: a collection of poems celebrating iconic Irish women, written by Sorcha, paired with Ciarna’s psychedelically detailed illustrations. But Ciarna didn’t have any with her, Sorcha was bringing the books later, and we couldn’t wait, but promised to go look for it in the bookstore.

Later that evening my sister and I went out to dinner at L. Mulligan. Grocer, recommended by a friend as his favorite restaurant in all of Dublin. And it was, truly, extraordinary — a cozy pub setting but with elevated farm-to-table takes on Irish classics, locally sourced ingredients, all the things. As we pondered the menu, trying to decide between the vegetarian haggis and the fish and chips, chef and owner Seáneen Sullivan popped out from the kitchen to say hello and we looked up as she approached and burst out laughing.

“You’re wearing the necklace!” exclaimed my sister.

Reader: She was. Her necklace bore a likeness of Constance Markievicz, revolutionary Irish nationalist, suffragist, and socialist, a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising and the first woman elected to the UK parliament. But, she added, she had two more necklaces at home. In fact, she liked Ciarna’s work so much she had commissioned her to paint a mural in the restaurant’s back garden.

We promptly all trooped out to the back garden to take a look.

“Have you seen her book?” Seáneen asked?

We still had not so, after a moment, she returned from the kitchen with a copy to peruse.

Maybe 20 minutes later, as we tucked into our haggis and fish, and a flight of locally brewed beers, she was back.

“I just texted Ciarna, and she says you should keep that copy and she’ll give me a new one. Enjoy!”

And thus was I initiated into the secret sisterhood of the coolest women in Dublin, a story, a book, and a necklace I cherish to this day.

Happy birthday Sinéad! And thank you to everyone who made this summer so special.

PS: Hey, our Dec. 17 celebration of Sinéad at the Hideout is ALMOST SOLD OUT. Get your tickets now, local friends. I can’t wait to see you there.

Tis the season of gift guides and best-of lists, and so I humbly offer the above: The perfect gift for the GenXer, the Sinéad lover, and the personal essayist in your life. Buy it from Bookshop and put a few coins in the pocket of your friendly neighborhood independent bookseller!

I spent two hours Saturday morning cursing at my laptop as I tried to teach myself how to use Canva. “It’s so easy!” people keep telling me and yet, for me, it is not. As you can see from EXTREMELY BASIC results above. And still I pressed on, when I could have been writing, or cleaning, or reading, or staring out the window at the snow, because this is what we do, we are all marketers now.

Nothing Compares to You has been my first experience working with a Big 5 press. Though I have been working in media and publishing for 30 years, all of that was with alt-weeklies, independent presses, and, now, the university press world. So, in other words, I thought I knew the drill but can now report that some things took me by surprise. One of which being the apparently common knowledge that unless your book is a front-of-the-frontlist title, the moment the clock ticks past midnight on your pub date, your publicist and marketing team melt into a bubbling puddle of goo, burbling out one last gasp of “we’re including you in an … influencer … mailing …”

It’s not all bad though, and in the spirit of giving publishing transparency, I thought I’d share a bit more about the journey, as it were.

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Getting a book deal for Nothing Compares was … not that hard? The project had its genesis in a Facebook post Sonya, my co-editor, made a few days after Sinéad’s death in 2023.

Note the 162 comments. Once Sonya realized this idea had legs, she recruited me to help — we had worked together previously when she contributed an essay to my Rust Belt Chicago anthology, and her memoir had been published by Belt, though I was not involved in that process. As the note above indicates, we asked writers to submit pitches — some folks who had responded to this initial post, and others who we recruited through other channels. We stuck to our idea of “one writer, one song” and further narrowed the scope to be a book of essays by women and nonbinary writers only. But we broadened the scope far beyond Gen Xers, a decision that yielded some great results, like ’s essay on “Daddy, I’m Fine.”

Sonya has an agent, the amazing Mariah Stovall at Trellis Literary Management. We sent her our proposal, and she helped fine tune it until we had a package that included a project overview, a nice set of comps, a provisional list of committed contributors, and three complete essays. By this time it was November — barely three months from idea to finished book proposal. For once, timeliness was on our side. We had a good hook and a high-profile subject. Mariah sent it out on submission and we sat back and waited while the “no’s'“ rolled in. And rolled in. We didn’t get a nibble on that first round, but when she went out a second time in January, Nick Ciani at One Signal was interested! I was in New York doing research for my own slow-poky book project at the time, and taking that first Zoom meeting with Nick in the common area at the Library for the Performing Arts, with all of Lincoln Center spread out in the window over my shoulder, was one of the more glamorous moments of my life. (If you’re interested you can read more about the development and submission process at Sonya’s newsletter, here.)

Our original title for the book was “So Different Now: What Sinéad Taught Us,” a riff on her song “Feels So Different.” This changed several months into the process, and we wound up going with the title marketing was pushing for. This is very common, and I wasn’t put out at the request for a change but had some hesitation (I still do tbh) that “Nothing Compares To You” was overused, Nothing Compares being the title of Kathryn Ferguson’s 2022 documentary on Sinéad as well as, of course, the title of the song. Also, it’s a Prince song, not an original, so an odd choice for a book celebrating Sinéad’s artistry and agency. But, marketing. And, it does sum up the book perfectly — though my Google alerts are a hot mess every time Dua Lipa or another pop star covers the song.

The cover process was remarkably painless. We didn’t have a clear vision in mind, but we asked that they not use a photo of young, dewy Sinéad — we wanted something that showed her in full maturity as an artist and woman. They sent us the mockup that became the finished cover (below) and we looooved it. All we asked was that they tweak the color of the subtitle text, which was originally more orange. As orange is the color of the unionists and the Protestant North, we wanted to avoid any unintentional political statements. I like the pinky-mauve that they landed on.

Interestingly, rights to publish a large-print edition of the book were sold to a group called Center Point, and their cover for that edition is below. We were given a heads up that there would be a different cover, but no rationale. I’m pretty curious to know the thinking behind the change, and grateful to the One Signal design team for honoring our request.

We turned in the manuscript for the book in August of 2024 and it went immediately into production. Like, maybe a week later. No edits, no notes. I know they were trying to hit a July 22, 2025 pub date — the second anniversary of Sinéad’s death — but still I found this surprising, as I was expecting at least a little back and forth. Perhaps this is testament to the amount of work Sonya and I put in to deliver a solid manuscript, but to this day there’s a corner of my mind that wonders if anyone other than the thoughtful copy editor and the lawyer who did a wonderfully thorough legal read on it have actually read the book? In any case, we were off!

Working with One Signal’s editorial and production department was brisk and professional. Sonya and I laughed at some of the ridiculous turnaround times requested for various proofs and galleys, which were uncannily timed to coincide with vacations, finals weeks, and various personal emergencies.

We learned so much about permissions — the bane of every pithy epigraph. The entire concept of our book rests on close reads of song lyrics, so there was no way around including them. But while I consider myself relatively well-versed in the dark art of permissions, the music industry is notoriously litigious, so every line from every song in our book was scrutinized to see if it held up as fair use. The rule of thumb is that 2-3 lines of song lyrics (or poetry) in the context of an analysis is acceptable as fair use, or “transformative use,” meaning that the quoted material is being used to bolster an original argument made by the author. What this meant in practice is that many essayists were asked to rework their use of quoted material, to break a large stanza up into smaller 2-3 line chunks, with the text woven between. This was, no lie, kind of a pain. But like many interventions, I think it actually made the work stronger, forcing the writers to really dig into their own interpretative reads rather than relying on Sinéad to make the point for them.

I mentioned publicity up above, and I don’t want to dig too far into the weeds on that here, because honestly, I’m still healing. I will just say MY GOD it is hard to publicize a book these days, what with the disappearance of reviewers, a splintered social media ecosystem, and the casual misogyny of it all. We had some frustrating moments, such as when it turned out that the first round of advance review copies had never been mailed. That was rough. Also, our house publicist seemed to put a lot of energy into soliciting coverage from LGBTQ media, but not so much the music media — something that prompted a friend of mine, a former music industry publicist and also gay, to remark, “Well, she may or may not have been gay, but you know what she undeniably was? A musician.” In any case, few of those efforts in any direction panned out, as is the case with 99% of all such efforts these days.

In time-honored fashion, publicity came down to who you know. The book got terrific coverage in Chicago, where I have media contacts, and in Connecticut, where Sonya same. And in Ireland, contributor Sinéad Gleeson was indispensable in connecting us with writers and radio hosts. Outside of that, we saw very little media action.

But it’s not too late! Just today, published a wonderful appreciation of the collection along with a short Q&A jointly authored by Sonya and me. Give a read here for more glimpses behind the curtain.

Bookish

An Artful & Addictive Anthology - Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us

A preview of November’s agent list is accessible here. Next week’s post will be December’s agent list. Bookish subscriptions are currently 30% off…

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6 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Christine Sneed

Our publicist tried to dissuade us from bookstore events, saying that no one comes out to nonfiction book events anymore. Well, we proved her wrong on that front. This is the secret sauce of the edited collection, IMO, in that any event with multiple contributors will exponentially increase your audience. And, also, they’re fun? The sold-out live events we did in Ireland, New York, and Chicago (and Sonya in Connecticut) are the juice. Talking in real spaces with lovers of books and of Sinéad has been the best part of the launch experience, hands down. So nourishing; so joyful. Truly indispensible.

On that note, we’ve got one more event coming up! So many folks who couldn’t make it to our July Chicago launch party asked if we would consider doing it again, so we’re getting the band back together for ONE NIGHT ONLY. On December 17 at the Hideout in Chicago I will be in conversation with contributors Gina Frangello, Megan Stielstra, and Zoe Zolbrod, and glorious moderator Chicago Tribune music critic Britt Julious. After that, stick around for a musical tribute to Sinéad by a supergroup of Chicago singers, including Janet Beveridge Bean, Nora O’Connor, Angela James, Jeanine O’Toole, Julie Pomerleau, Marydee Reynolds, Amalea Tshilds, and L Wyatt. Plus! A special surprise in honor of what would have been Sinéad’s 59th birthday on December 8.

This is a ticketed event: $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Proceeds will be donated to the Illinois Commission for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who are out here doing indispensable work. And if you haven’t bought a book yet, those will be available for sale from our friends at Women & Children First.

Here’s Lea Tshilds singing “I Am Stretched On Your Grave,” from July, to take us out.

For the past 17 years and counting, my winters have been about soup.

Not an unusual statement, sure — who doesn’t like a nice bowl of soup on a cold and dreary day? But I’ve taken it a bit far. Since January of 2009 I have organized and hosted a community Soup & Bread dinner in the back room of the Hideout, the Chicago bar and music venue where, when this all started, I was tending bar.

Back then, I was working the early evening shift on Wednesday. It was the height of that era’s dismal recession, and it was generally pretty dead. I had a few local regulars, and the occasional group of friends meeting up for happy hour in a bar where they knew the music wouldn’t be too loud and they could get a seat. Dan Blue, the metalworker and sculptor who lived in an industrial building across the way, held down the end of the bar. Some of my similarly marginally employed friends from my former journalism job would also swing by, and one night we hatched a plot. What if we served some soup?

The first night of soup it snowed, and a gas main broke at the end of our block. But some die-hards made it through the bad weather and the confusing mess of emergency vehicles to warm their bellies inside the bar. The soup was made by friends, and served out of thrifted Crock Pots, along with end-of-day bread from the nearby Whole Foods. We took pay what you can donations — I don’t remember how much — and gave it all to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. And we were off.

For 12 years we did this every Wednesday night from January through March. Sometimes there were 30 people; sometimes there was a line out the door. We served soup made by artists, musicians, farmers, community gardeners, grocers, writers, caterers, and restaurateurs, including some pretty fancy names. We got better bread, from friendly bakers all over town. We saw spinoff events blossom in Milwaukee, Madison, Cleveland, and beyond. We published a cookbook. We took it on the road. We had so much fun.

Covid derailed the party, of course, and when we came back in 2022 we didn’t quite have the juice for weekly events. We had (finally) full-time jobs — no more bartending — and we were getting older. We no longer hung out drinking until 2 am with the jazz guys who followed us every week in the late-night slot. I got cancer, and then I moved away, an hour north of the city. But once a month each winter we still re-convene, plug in the Crock Pots, and see who shows up.

Now more than ever, community-driven projects like Soup & Bread feel urgent. We have spent the fall blowing whistles, as federal thugs have menaced our streets, and while the Border Patrol may have packed up and taken its brutal showboating blitz to warmer climes, they will be back — and if anything they say is to be believed, they will be back in force.

Right now Chicago needs space to regroup and reset. With Soup & Bread we do what we can to provide that space. As organizer Kelly Hayes says, “Let’s make this a winter of fortification, of learning, and bonding together like the winter snow that federal agents are so afraid of. Let’s hold onto each other, and become even harder to move.”

Soup & Bread starts again December 3 at the Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia in Chicago. If you are a local, we would love to see you. And whether you are from around town or far away, you can help support our work by buying a T-shirt or a cookbook. They make excellent gifts! Order by December 7 and they will ship before Christmas Day. See the links below for more.

SOUP MELTS ICE T-SHIRT: White shirt with light and dark blue design, available as short-sleeved T, long-sleeved T, or crewneck sweatshirt. Proceeds benefit the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. Please note: “Soup Melts” text prints dark blue, not black as shown in image.

SOUP & BREAD COOKBOOK: This is the revised and self-published 2020 edition of the 2011 edition published by Agate Publishing. When the rights reverted to me, I added a new preface, bringing the book into the Covid era. It includes more than 100 time-tested recipes sourced from Soup & Bread cooks, as well as essays on the ways soup can be used to build community and make the world just a little better. With text by me, book design by Sheila Sachs, and illustrations by Paul Dolan.

I write these notes wound up by the belief that if I can only provide enough links, use enough clear language and declarative sentences, it will make you care. It will move you to action. I’ve become fascinated by the psychology of proximity — how we respond to the urgency of a threat to our group, our friends, our block, with so much more immediacy than the threat to a vaguely defined “other.”

On Friday Operation Midway Blitz came back to Waukegan with a vengeance. I was meeting with a prospective author in Chicago when the notifications started coming in: ICE buying snacks at Jackson and Belvidere. ICE creating chaos at College of Lake County. ICE on North Avenue. ICE on Poplar. ICE on my block, at Cribb Foods, the little grocery store on the corner where I buy milk and toilet paper and eggs. They abducted several workers from the store. When I got home later the lights were off and it was locked up tight.

That same day Waukegan Alderman Juan Martinez was on his way back to work from lunch when he was stopped by a traffic jam. It was unclear what was happening, so he beeped his horn. Like you do in a normal society.

“I waited two or three minutes, and a man wearing a mask came up to me with his gun drawn,” Martinez told the Lake County News-Sun. “It was a rifle. He said, ‘Put your hands up or I’ll blow your f—–g face off.’ I told him four or five times, ‘I’m the alderman.’” Three more agents quickly surrounded the car, guns drawn.

“My life flashed before my eyes,” he said. “All I could think of was my family was going to be planning my funeral.”

This is happening, every day, in Chicago, Waukegan, Evanston, Skokie, Wilmette, Berwyn, and beyond. If you don’t believe me, listen to J.B. Pritzker, quoted here in the New Yorker.

The way Trump has organized ICE and C.B.P. now, they are like a secret police. They wear masks. They do not carry or show their badges or their names. They are in unmarked cars. They’re grabbing people without telling you who they are and throwing those people into their cars and taking them away. And like I said, later, you find out that that wasn’t somebody who was undocumented and certainly most often was not somebody who has a criminal record or has committed a crime.

This hasn’t happened to you yet, but it could.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, time for one of the disorienting pivots that have come to define being online in our time. How about that Sinéad O’Connor book! This month is, I’ve learned, both “Nonfiction November” and “National Life Writing Month”— according to whoever creates such designations. For those who celebrate, may I suggest a copy of Nothing Compares to You? Look we even made a cute 3-D graphic. The best gift for lovers of Sinéad, of personal essays, and of people standing up for what they believe in, no matter the cost.

We also have a few fun events on the horizon. If you are in Chicago, come out to one of all of the following!

On November 20 I’m joining my friend and University of Illinois Press author Rob Miller to celebrate the publication of his memoir The Hours Are Long but the Pay Is Low. Rob and I have been working on this book together for the past few years and I am so excited to help bring it into the world at last. We’ll talk about music, books, Chicago back in the day, and why now more than ever independent arts, media, and communities of like minded weirdos are the only thing that’s gonna save us. That’s 6:30 pm at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, 4736 N. Lincoln. There’s wine!

On November 22 I’ll be talking about all things Sinéad with journalist Alison Cuddy and contributor (and my good friend) Zoe Zolbrod at the Irish American Heritage Center, part of the two-day Irish Books, Art, and Music festival. Alison was one of the first people to cover the book, with a radio piece that ran on Chicago Public Radio in July, and a print story in that same week’s Chicago Sun-Times. I’m so excited to revisit our conversation in the wake of my own trip to Ireland to promote the book, and this is the perfect venue to do just that. There will probably be beer!

@martha.bayne#sineadoconnor #sineadtribute #newbook #sineadoconnornothingcomparestoyou #booktok

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And last but not least, there will be all sorts of drinks on hand on December 17 at the Hideout for a reprise of our sold-out July launch party at Gman Tavern. So many of you who couldn’t make it to that event asked if we would consider doing it again, and here it is. We’re getting the band back together for ONE NIGHT ONLY. Because honestly what we all need right now is to sing “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” to Greg Bovino at the top of our lungs. I will be in conversation with contributors Gina Frangello, Megan Stielstra, and Zoe Zolbrod, and glorious moderator Chicago Tribune music critic Britt Julious. After that, stick around for a musical tribute to Sinéad by a supergroup of Chicago singers, including Janet Beveridge Bean, Angela James, Jeanine O’Toole, Julie Pomerleau, Marydee Reynolds, Amalea Tshilds, and L Wyatt. Plus! A special surprise in honor of what would have been Sinéad’s 59th birthday on December 8.

This is a ticketed event: $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Proceeds will be donated to the Illinois Commission for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, who are out here doing indispensable work. Books will be available for sale from our friends at Women & Children First.

Stay safe out there, friends. I hope to see you in person soon.

I’m home at last, and fighting off the dregs of a bug that bit me as soon as I got off the plane. I haven’t done much since returning to Waukegan but work, sleep, and mainline Mucinex, but on Monday night I rallied to go to an emergency City Council meeting called to vote on a resolution banning ICE and border patrol agents from operating on city property. The meeting was packed, and more than a dozen residents spoke — and shouted and cursed and choked up — during the public comment period, railing at the impact the ongoing assault on immigrants is having on the community.

The resolution passed unanimously, to no one’s surprise. Here’s an article about it. It seems a toothless gesture, as these thugs do whatever they want anyway, and it’s a resolution, not an ordinance or an executive order., which many in the room were calling for. But I guess it’s something. After weeks on the west coast I was just glad to be in that room with my neighbors, and to hear so many of them exercise their First Amendment right to speak and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I was hoping to write something more, but this week has kicked my ass. Instead, I thought I would share some of their words. Some of the speakers are public figures, leaders of immigrant rights groups and activists; others are (as far as I know) concerned citizens. Since I couldn’t ID them all, I’m just letting their words speak for themselves.

“Just this Saturday, the rapid response team confirmed a kidnapping right here in Waukegan. We also know that many community members ran away, and were able to seek refuge in homes and businesses. I am part of a community chat, and in that someone was asking for help for two community members who were able to get away and were seeking refuge at a business. We deployed one of our rapid response team members to help provide them safe passage. I don’t think we’ve lived in these moments in history. Many immigrants come to this country to seek safe haven from their own countries. And what this current administration is doing is deplorable. This is a good step forward. I’m really grateful to the city of Waukegan, but would invite you all to think about what legacy you’re gonna leave to your children. What can you say that you did during these moments when immigrants are being persecuted and they’ve provided so much to this country?”

“My great uncle Willie fought the Nazis in World War II. My dad fought Stalin and the communists in Korea. And I never thought that I’d be at the crossroads of having to stand and say, I need to figure out a way to fight these fascists. … This is not just impacting the people in the immigrant community. As a business owner. I’m getting rocked by this, ‘cause people aren’t coming out and people are scared. I’m getting involved with some people. Deliver groceries to people who are afraid to go outside. How is that okay? How do any of you say you’re leaders unless you draw that line in the sand tonight and say, no, we will not stand for this. We will not stand for ICE violating people’s civil rights, their First Amendment rights. We will do something about it. Let’s start a fight. That’s what my ancestors did. I’m ready to stand up as well.”

”If you look around, we are all so different, different colors, different cultures, different beliefs. Yet the pain we see in our community has brought us together. All I ask is that we remember that this is not about any one of us individually. This work is about people who are hurting for their families, who live in fear, leaving their homes to work, to seek medical care, to go to school, or simply to live as who they are. Those are the people that we here for tonight. Let’s never forget that I say that in great love, because I ain’t confused. See, I’m an older guy. I know before they started coming at the immigrants, they was coming at Black people. Okay? So now what they did different this time is they not using any due process. So if they get away with it, guess what? My Black brothers and sisters, you’re next with no due process. So it ain’t just their fight. It’s all our fight.”

”I just wanted to ask the mayor, what is the plan to do since we had the peace walk? Nothing really has been done since then. So I just feel that we need to have action because it’s really hurting businesses. It’s hurting people going to work, schools, their appointments. A lot of businesses have been closed and people are living in fear. So I just wanna know, mayor, what do you plan to do? That’s it.”

”I see these signs: Let’s Rebuild Waukegan. Rebuild it — how? How are you gonna rebuild Waukegan when people need to be saved from these criminals? … I’m up here today because this is my future. This is the future for my children. And I will not go backwards now or ever. I will die defending my people and my rights. So this is where I step up today. And I ask you guys, when you go home tonight, think about yourselves coming to work. How would you feel somebody asking you for your ID and takes you away from your family and your loved ones? That is what, that’s my concern here. Put yourself in everybody’s shoes today and every day because we voted for you. … This is serious. We’re not going backwards. Our ancestors fought too hard to go backwards. So the question is today, are you going to help? Before we build, while we can rebuild it, we need to save our community.”

”The community’s been doing a lot to try and spread the word and do whatever they can. I mean, it’s so beautiful, honestly. You see people picking up groceries, giving rides, picking up kids from school. Our communities really, really come together. And I’m really hoping more than anything that can inspire you there [the council] to see what we’re doing and want to be a part of that. I know you’ve been a part of that as far as marching with us, you know, stepping out on the streets, doing that stuff. And you can’t tell these people that you’re doing everything you possibly can until you do everything you possibly can. And that includes signing an executive order. … That’s what I’m calling for now, because you can look your people in the eye and say, I’m doing everything I can do. And if we don’t keep showing up to these meetings and pressing you to do this, then I can look at these people and tell them I’m doing everything I can do.”

”This adversity has really, really brought us together. I applaud all the people who are downstairs [the No More Deportations group] down there. Just to let you know, those are Waukegan Warriors, those are volunteers, residents. They’re out there every single morning from the crack of dawn till late at night, patrolling the streets of Waukegan for the safety of all people. Not only immigrants. You can be a US citizen and be in the crossfire and something happens to you or they take you, they try to deport you. It’s a collaboration among the residents because if we don’t protect each other, there ain’t nobody else’s going to do it.”

“I’m talking in Spanish because those are the people this message is for. [In Spanish and then in English] I want to thank the aldermen for supporting us. I also want to greet those that do not support us. You see the people that are here, you’re the real people of Waukegan, not the ones that always come to the meetings. A lot of those that are here is their first meeting. They beat the fear of ICE just to come and talk to you. We are tired of walking, working, going out with fear. The simple act of putting gas in our cars is a fear that they’re gonna separate us. We want it to stop.

“We want to thank [the mayor] for taking the time to help us. The African-American population also suffered what we’re suffering now. We need the support of everyone to keep. Let the moms not go out to feed their kids, and with what’s happening, a lot of them are being stopped just for taking their kids to school. That’s not being covered by the news. But the people that are armed with a cell phone are recording every step of immigration. That’s why we ask that everyone that’s here, being documented or not documented, help do something so that we are no longer persecuted. We are the group No More Deportations. We were downstairs in the cold showing that the people can be united. We are the people that work for the people. Thank you.”

Today in Evanston, where so many of my friends live, federal agents made their biggest push yet, kidnapping landscapers and other workers off the suburb’s leafy streets. Residents who got in their face with whistles and chants of “SHAME, SHAME” were shoved, thrown to the ground; at least one was tackled and briefly choked. Several report having guns pulled on them or being threatened with pepper spray.

One of my pet peeves is when folks on social media complain that “no one is covering” whatever subject it is that they think isn’t getting enough air. Usually, it is being covered — you just have to know where to look. I know that ICE brutality is being covered, locally and nationally. You can find it if you look. But I don’t think people outside Chicago quite get it yet. This is happening all over town — in Latine neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods; in hipster Logan Square and in conservative Edison Park, home of cops and firefighters; and in the suburbs: Evanston, Skokie, Wilmette, Waukegan.

My friend Julie is documenting life in Chicago under federal occupation in an ongoing series of short, to the point Substack posts under the header “ICE OUT.” Sober and grounded, they are the opposite of histrionic virtue signaling. Here’s the most recent:

Julie Pomerleau

ICE OUT: Their Helicopters Shake Our Homes

The helicopters hover overhead for hours on end. On Thursday morning, they were hovering just west of my house. When I visited a friend in Little Village last Sunday, they hovered just south of his home for the entire afternoon. My friends in different parts of the city have complained about hours and hours of helicopters overhead. The low hum, the ratt…

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7 months ago · 1 like · Julie Pomerleau

Have you watched the Lilith Fair documentary? I know; it dropped on Hulu the same week we were cancelling Disney/Hulu en masse. But, bunny? It is the feel-good positivity injection you need RIGHT NOW. You should see it, by any means necessary.

Produced by Canadians (of course) Dan Levy and Christina Piovesan along with many others – including music critic Jessica Hopper, who cowrote the Vanity Fair oral history of the festival that launched this whole project, and who I used to edit at the Chicago Reader -- Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery tells the long-ago tale of the late-90s traveling festival created by Sarah McLaughlan to showcase a murderer’s row of female musicians. It was ambitious, exuberantly feminist, radical, and queer, at a time not so very long ago when programmers refused to play two women back to back on the radio, let alone put them onstage together, for fear men and their money would spontaneously combust.

Over the course of three years, seemingly every woman making music in the English-speaking world rode the Lilith bus for a time: Bonnie Raitt, Missy Elliott, Natalie Merchant, Erykah Badu, Jewel, Tracy Chapman, Queen Latifah, Suzanne Vega, PATTI SMITH, Emmylou Harris, the Indigo Girls, and, of course, Sinéad O’Connor, who after so many years of misogynist mistreatment by the American music industry and its sycophants in the press, found the tour to be “a major boost to my confidence and self-esteem.” As she says in the film, “In the very male world [of the media and music] you can often feel unheard as a female artist. But I actually realized, I have been heard. It’s a very healing experience.”

Check out this clip from a 1998 VH1 interview with Sinéad.

I did not go to Lilith Fair when it happened. I was a fan of many of the artists but I was still very dug into the underground, and just not into big festivals? But I *sobbed* when I watched the film. And I sobbed again just now watching the trailer for the 95th time.

So much vision, so much potential, so much adorable 90s hair. The fair was dismissed by established men and cooler-than-thou indie rockers, then on the cusp of the era of Vice and indie sleaze. It was also boycotted by the likes of Jerry Falwell, for being named after “a demon” and for giving Planned Parenthood a platform. A 1998 performance in Atlanta received a bomb threat. But it helped launch the careers of younger artists, like Christina Aguilera and Nelly Furtado, and hired and trained up so many women in backstage production roles, many of whom still work in the industry today. At the end of every performance all the women came out on stage to sing together. Watching the film I wanted to stow away on their bus forever, in this now-improbable space of solidarity and support, something we took for granted as our birthright.

As much as the documentary is a nostalgia trip for my generation, its most wrenching scenes are those featuring young artists like Olivia Rodrigo, just children at the time, marveling at how the promise of the moment has been squandered; how twenty-five years later ,young female musicians are still being cut into pop-starlet cookies to be spat out when they grow stale.

Or as this young artist says of the film, on TikTok: “I really thought I had made peace with and worked through a lot of internalized misogyny but I realized I still have a lot of room to grow. … I’m watching this now at 29 years old thinking “holy shit, this could be my life … and it’s not. We don’t have this now in 2025. And it’s heartbreaking.”

@mickeylooniLilith fair doc got me fucked up

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Speaking of Sinéad, Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O’Connor Means to Us, has been out for three months now, so the other day I logged onto the Simon & Schuster author portal to see how it was doing in terms of sales. We’d had such good press, both at home and abroad. A social media pro told me I was doing everything right. We had packed houses at events. Enthusiastic feedback. Word of mouth. Surely, I thought, the book was finding its audience.

Reader: it is not. There, on the screen, was a number I found comical in its lowness. I’m well aware that essay collections are a hard sell, and I never expected to land on the NYT bestseller list. But Sinéad is a beloved and iconic figure with a worldwide following. How could this be?

I’ve parsed the dashboard, reminded myself that this doesn’t include sales in Ireland, where we were on the cover of the Sunday Times magazine ffs. But also, like many authors this year, I’ve been grappling with the cold truth of the market: “Earned media” (publishing-speak for reviews and off the book page coverage, like author interviews) is harder to secure these days than an affordable apartment in Seattle and, more importantly, even if you DO get good press, as we did, it doesn’t move units. Substack publishing discourse has been consumed by the cruel logic of this of late. If you’re interested, you could read Kathleen Schmidt’s take here. (Related, I also recommend this behind-the-curtain explanation of how bookstores decide what to stock, by , the frontlist buyer for a Midwest indie bookstore, here.)

I don’t know how to fix the system. I don’t know where the disconnect between media and sales lies. I don’t know what was happening in-house at One Signal with marketing. I can say that I had a wonderful time working on the book, meeting so many sublimely talented writers and allies along the way. My time in Ireland promoting it was, no lie, life altering, and I would not trade that for a million book sales. I do know that come fall I hit a wall in terms of my own ability to promote the book and also do my day job. And then a family emergency derailed everything. But watching the Lilith Fair doc gives me hope.

Film is a different medium but I don’t think I’m delusional to believe that every GenXer nostalgic for the lost promise of this feminist moment, and every GenZ-er wondering what the fuck happened to their future, could find themselves in our book. If you are that person, or you know someone who is, I urge you to take a chance on a $28.99 hardcover that will reward you for years to come. As Caryn Rose said of it, in Salon:

If this anthology feels like something meant for you, you will read it in chunks, you will go back for re-reads of certain passages, you will read a paragraph and need to put the book down and stare out the window for a few minutes, trying to find some sky or a tree or a bird to clear your mind. You will underline sentences and circle entire paragraphs. You will feel like you have walked into a room where friends and other people who might be very different from you are united in your admiration for an artist who was full of talent, fire, drive and pain. It is specific and personal, but it is also overarching and universal in how it pays tribute to Sinéad O’Connor’s life, work, and ultimate impact.

While I was in Seattle I stopped in at Elliott Bay Book Company to see if they had the book. By sheer happenstance, the staffer I asked to point me toward it was the same staffer who had reviewed the book for the store’s in-house newsletter, calling it “a major, must-read body of work.” I think I scared him when I hugged him. Thank you Shawn! You are a champion. Back in the 80s, even before Lilith Fair, I worked in Elliott Bay’s basement café, back in its old space in Pioneer Square. To come home, full circle, to this was one of the moments that makes this whole ridiculous endeavor worth it. If you buy the book direct from Elliott Bay you might even get one of the copies they had me sign.

Anyway, I am finally back at my other home in Waukegan, after three weeks on the West Coast, and ready to gear up for a new round of book promotion for the fourth quarter, aka “holiday season,” aka the two-month period between Halloween and New Year’s when 75% of all books are sold.

I am also thrilled to announce a few upcoming book events in Chicago:

On November 20 I will be in conversation with my friend Rob Miller, whose hilarious and acid-tinged memoir of his life in music as co-owner of Chicago’s legendary Bloodshot Records I acquired and edited. The book is as wry and brisk as its title, The Hours Are Long, But the Pay Is Low, and I am so excited to be at long last bringing it into the world. Booklist called it “rollicking!” We will talk about the Chicago we came up in in the 90s and 00s, regale you with stories of dive bars and diners gone by, and ponder seriously whether we are the only two people left standing worried about “selling out,” and whether that is serving us well. That’s at 6 pm at the Book Cellar in Lincoln Square. RSVP here!

And on November 22 I will be at the Irish Books and Music Festival at Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Center, to talk all things Sinéad with moderator Alison Cuddy and Nothing Compares contributor (and good friend) Zoe Zolbrod. This festival sounds so fun, and I’ve never been before. And there will be beer (I assume). Come out! Saturday at 3:30 pm at the IAHC, 4226 N. Knox.

More to come soon.

The great thing about a ballet class is that it is so damn boring. All around the world they start with gentle knee bends at the barre and then step through progressively more complicated activity, within an extremely codified and unnatural movement vocabulary, to finish up with big jumpy jumps across the floor. Within this fixed structure, of course, lies the possibility of infinite variation: Every ballet class is, to paraphrase something I said a while back, uniquely the same.

As I do most Saturdays, this past Saturday morning I went to a 10 am class. What was remarkable about this particular class was that I and it were not in Chicago but in Seattle. I’ve been out west for a week now, having flown out last-minute due to a family situation that involved a hospital for many days and now does not. The situation has, happily, improved a bit since then, enough so I was able to take the time Saturday morning to go and dance.

I was grateful for this. For the exercise, for sure, but also for the mundanity of it all. I needed those 90 minutes of routine movement, of just knowing what to expect, after a week that has been unexpected and unpredictable and downright terrifying at times.

The weekend I left Illinois federal immigration agents ramped up their campaign of chaos across Chicago. To try and summarize the daily onslaught of abductions and assault – including shooting priests with pepper bombs, zip-tying kids in the middle of the night, and slamming journalists to the ground—is an overwhelming task, even just for one person trying to aggregate some links you might or might not click. Things are moving quickly, despite some recent wins in the form of temporary restraining orders barring both the use of chemical weapons against nonviolent protesters and journalists and the mobilization of the National Guard or the deployment of the U.S. military to the state over the objections of local authorities. If you are not in Chicago and want some reliable on-the-ground information I recommend following Block Club Chicago. Small outlets like Unraveled (especially via their BlueSky account), South Side Weekly (covering the South Side), Cicero Independiente (a bilingual media outlet covering Cicero and Berwyn), and Borderless (focused on immigrant communities across the city) are all also doing great second-day work.

Meanwhile, up in Waukegan, my Facebook feed – the most reliable source of information in a town without Chicago’s rich bench of independent media – lit up with reports of ICE activity. I watched, thick headed and underslept, from a hospital room as Mexican restaurants shut down and drag trivia was canceled. Local grocery stores are offering free delivery to residents who don’t want to leave their homes. On October 6, outside City Hall, a woman was dragged by masked men from a car that bore a Mexican flag, prompting Waukegan mayor Sam Cunningham to intervene – an episode that made national news and which, it turns out, looks to be the handiwork of the same agent involved in the violent detention of a Chicago city councilperson at Humbold Park Hospital a few days earlier. Noted Ald. Jesse Fuentes, “It seems that he’s a bit unhinged.”

Despite the legal guardrails ostensibly, if temporarily, in place, nothing seems to be slowing down much. A few days ago my favorite coffeeshop Drip & Culture posted to Instagram about a local man who had been abducted from the street outside the store.

“We are living in a different reality here in Waukegan,” wrote owner Adam Carson. “It is unconstitutional to kidnap people off the streets without the appropriate warrant and documentation. It is illegal to detail someone against their will. And it is inhumane to support any effort to treat our fellow humans in the manner that they are. … All our liberties and freedoms hang in the balance. Are you willing to stand in solidarity now?”

There was a peace march Monday in Waukegan, and I missed it, just like I missed the City Council meeting last Monday, and I’ll miss the No Kings rally on Saturday. That I cannot be there to stand with my neighbors in solidarity against this crisis is giving a sick form of FOMO, even though I know that I am attending to an urgent, more intimate crisis here on the west coast. It’s the grossest main character syndrome to think that by being in one home where thousands of strangers are under siege I could do more good than being in another where a single loved one is, and yet the guilt persists. This jarring disconnect is I assume of a piece with the broader disconnect experienced by anyone not at immediate risk, as we scroll through a stream of atrocities broadcast to social media in the same breath as another hot take on Taylor Swift. And, also, of course, the disconnect of engaging in acts of solidarity and mutual protection while also still going about the daily work of living, working, and caretaking.

Out here I’m not just missing out on hometown protests and the chance to blow whistles in community defense. I’m missing friends’ book release parties and their Halloween circus acts and their tributes to Ray Bradbury and their last minute tickets to Neko Case. I’m missing the end of the tomatoes and the arrival of the serviceberry tree that Paul ordered the day I left. I’m missing leaf pickup day and the mulch we need to put down in the yard so that better things can grow next year. I’m missing all of this and every other manifestation of art and beauty and home that are the reason for continuing to fight and bear witness.

And yet, it’s a beautiful October here in the Pacific Northwest, where the trees are turning blazing reds and yellows against a crystalline blue sky. I wake in the dark and watch as the sunrise glows over the neighbors’ rooftops, past the lake, beyond the tech-rich suburbs, and against the peaks of the Cascades. I did not bring enough warm clothes, because when I left Illinois it was still 80 degrees, so I jam a borrowed knit beanie on my head in the mornings – a blue whose brightness evokes the sky, whose contrast with my yellow scarf turns me into a walking Ukrainian flag.

It’s all so familiar and also so strange, the city where I grew up, that still feels like home, that perpetually pulls at my heart. For the first time I can remember, Chicago and Waukegan exert an equal pull.

The same day we came home from the hospital I Zoomed into the first night of the yearlong writing workshop I’m now enrolled in. Torn between two homes and two crises, staring at the screen through a dense veil of fatigue, I dumbly made my introduction, noting the bare bones of the story. “Frankly,” I said. “I’m a little overwhelmed.”

Who isn’t, really.

Our assignment for the month is to pay attention to our writing practice, whatever it may be. To find a way to bring it into some regularity. But because I’m unable to commit to one home, one medium, one practice, I had to go dance before I was able to write.

I go to boring ballet to ground myself in this ritual that bridges my Seattle childhood and my Chicago maturity. I wrote this, in snatched breaths over ten days, as practice toward putting words to that bridge, because what else is the point? I hope wherever you are you’re able to find your own boring practice, uniquely the same as all the others, in the midst of it all.

Last night Paul and I took chairs to the cemetery — Chicago’s Bohemian National Cemetery, where Godspeed You Black Emperor was playing an outdoor concert. It was a perfect night, clear, with a warm, mild breeze. We were early enough to snare a patch of lawn with decent sightlines, and I took my sneakers off and sank my bare feet deep into the grass. Yes, I touched grass.

Godspeed is an instrumental post-rock chamber ensemble whose live shows are epic experiences of sound and vision: ambient waves of drone and distortion laced with samples and field recording build to crescendo and crash over the listener; live 16-millimeter projections warp and dance behind the musicians. They are anticapitalist, anarchist, Canadian. They don’t do social media, or have a website, and the few interviews the band has done have all been collectively answered. They freely allow taping at their shows, and describe their work as protest music. With the cemetery’s crickets providing powerful counterpoint to the glorious noise onstage, the difficult beauty of it all was kicking up big feelings commensurate with the bigness of the band.

Today is the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, so the brutal timing of a night in the cemetery was right there for the taking. I’ve written about my dad, Duncan Bayne, who died one day after his 76th birthday, in the past, and still feel myself turning the words over to make them all click just so. I don’t think I’ve gotten there yet, but last night one of the big feelings — next to all the big feelings about how we carve out space for art amid the horror of the world, and about alternative communities and the glorious tonic of seeing so many weirdos gathered in one space for an evening, sharing an experience that by its very principles resists commodification and branding, and about how I need to get the fuck off social media — was a reflection on how these family stories don’t ever really end. We keep telling them, adding and subtracting and reworking — like a semi-improvisatory sound-and-light spectacular —at least until we ourselves end and become part of someone else’s neverending story.

In my peer group I was relatively early to the father-losing story, though by no means the earliest. But in the past year or two many of my friends have lost their fathers too. I was thinking of all of them last night, and the communal experience we now share, with varying degrees of violence, with fatherless children around the world. I see you, my mind-rays transmitted from the lawn, Bohemian’s massive mausoleum looming, lit with red, beyond the stage. I see you, with your messy relationships, your expectations and disappointments and love and thoughtlessness and they ways our dads shape us in the strangest ways, the losses we carry.

One thing I’ve come to realize these past ten years is how much my father worried about me, my erratic career and lack of stability, my solitude. I didn’t really see it clearly when I was younger, more defensive and flailing. I’m glad he has been spared the national nightmare of the past decade but I do wish he could have stayed with us a little longer just to see that for the most part I turned out OK.

Case in point: last night, near the end of Godspeed’s set, I discovered that my drivers license and debit card had fallen out of my coat pocket. Perhaps hypnotized by the sonic magic, I didn’t panic. Instead, while it seemed unlikely that in this massive crowd someone would have noticed my identity lying on the ground, I made my way through the back to the entry gate box office, to see if there was a lost and found. And there, to my surprise, sat my cards, which had been retrieved and turned in by some eagle-eyed Samaritan, people looking out for each other like we’ve been led to believe was some Luddite fairy tale.

Thank you fellow art freak, whoever you are. Thank you. I see you.

Here are a couple of things I’ve written about my dad in the past. I have a lot of thoughts on the events of the moment — things I think you should watch or read, takes on the current discourse around book reviews and the lack thereof, updates on various activities. But I’ll save those for another day.

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Do you have Calm (tm)?

Calm, the mindfulness and relaxation app that reminds you to “take a deep breath” every time you open it on your pocket rectangle. Calm, which offers a menu of audio programming under headings such as “Sleep Frequencies” (ambient soundscape playlists) and “Daily Calm” (meditation prompts). Calm, where you can load up an eight-hour-long, EMDR-inspired “bilateral stimulation soundscape” that bounces a beat from one earbud to the other. Calm, whose “Sleep Stories” category offers the soothing murmurs of Rita Moreno or Greta Lee telling you a bedtime story. Too much? You can also just get plain old “Rain on Leaves.”

I downloaded Calm at the airport in July while my sister and I waited to board our delayed overnight flight to Dublin. I think she heard about it from our other sister, or maybe it was the other way around, but in either case I was, as usual, late to the Calm party, and frantically — not Calm! — got it loaded up on my phone before we had to hustle into line at the gate. I’m not a good plane sleeper so I thought it might help and, in truth, it did. I listened to those EMDR beats all the way across the Atlantic, and even with a seatbelt buckle digging into my hip I did, if not sleep, enter some sort of meditative dreamstate.

We shared rooms with two twin beds barely 18 inches apart for the next eight days and at night we’d each pop in an earbud and try to ignore the other’s snoring through meditation prompts. I found that Cillian Murphy’s quiet/boring Sleep Story “Crossing Ireland by Train” knocked me out every time. I still don’t know how it ends.

I first started having trouble sleeping in 2019. Thanks to a magic convergence of perimenopause and heartbreak, I sweated through months of insommniac nights, silently perseverating, an inner monologue of regret and rumination on endless loop. Eventually, I saw a doctor and she gave me some drugs. And they worked, where attempts to visualize the objects of my anguish floating away like leaves on a stream, disappearing around a bend in the river of life did not.

I’ve slept pretty well for the past five years. I suppose cancer helped with that, oddly. I don’t really have any more time for regret. In the mental health realm I just want to get on with it. There’s so much to do, so much to accomplish and experience and witness. so many people and other animals to cherish in this river of life before it’s over. It makes me sad sometimes to know I’ll never be able to do it all, but (mostly) I can accept our mortal limits, the collective failure to live up to our potential that is baked into being alive.

But the other night I shot bolt awake at 2 am. Something was off, something in the air. I smelled smoke, but our ordinarily hyperactive fire alarm wasn’t going off. What was it? The cats and the human slept soundly in the bed, but I was on high alert. I lay there for a long time, trying to figure out if the house was on fire until, having ascertained that it was not, my amped-up mind turned instead to the burning world.

I’ve been trying to write a newsletter for three weeks now and I keep starting and then abandoning ideas, hollow gestures toward making sense of the nonsense. It’s all such an impossible project! The fascist turn has been so fast, and it’s getting faster, as self-righteous idiots untethered from facts or conscience spew a firehose of hatred and violence across everything I know to be good.

The boot of the state is crushing the First Amendment into dust, menacing broadcasters, filing specious lawsuits against the press, sowing chaos and disinformation whose spread is accelerating faster than anyone can keep up thanks to the AI that nobody asked for, nobody wants.

Israel is destroying Gaza City, killing hundreds by the day, the death toll now as children starve to death daily. Across the world people march in condemnation but the US remains stupefied into submission even as the UN affirms a genocide.

ICE agents are teargassing protesters in the nearby suburbs. They have been spotted in my neighborhood; they are staking out our local schools. In Chicago, a man — Silverio Villega-Gonzales — was shot and killed by these masked thugs during a traffic stop.

I could link to all this, but where to even start and for god sake the last thing you need from me is more links.

How do these people sleep at night? How have they grown to adulthood to rest secure in the certainty that theirs is the true and righteous path? That the horrors they defend are a common good? Are we really in a post-morality world? Where are their parents? And, to a selfish point, how soon will the opportunities for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness they are wantonly abolishing for so many land on my doorstep? Will it be when my cancer comes back and there’s no funding for a cure? Will it be when I lose my state-funded job? Perhaps it will just be when I’m walking down the street and a car with tinted windows pulls up to cut me off because I said something truthful about Charlie Kirk on the internet. And when this happens, whatever potential I have to achieve any goals for myself or my community will end as well.

Calm (tm) is not cheap. The free version is pretty useless so you have to pony up to get the full suite of options, which puts more money in the pockets of what is now a “$2 billion mindfulness company,” a business model for our time. I was going to cancel my subscription after Ireland, but at 4 am the other night I loaded up “Sleep Frequencies: Ambient 528 Hz” and at long last attained a few hours of oblivion.

• Here’s what else I’ve been up to:

  

• I had a great time talking about Sinead O’Connor’s legacy of activism at the Printers Row Lit Fest two weeks ago and really love this photo of Zoe Zolbrod, Gina Frangello, myself, and moderator Britt Julious. I feel like it really captures something unique to each of us. I’ve said it before, and I said it at the top of this newsletter: Sinead is the model of resistance to authoritarianism and corporate control that we need right now. I like to think that, in some small way, our book can help spread her light in the deepening darkness.

• Speaking of Sinead, here’s a lovely review of the book, from Laura Watson, reprinted by RTE from Ireland’s Journal of Music. I very much appreciate this review because, while it is critical of some aspects of our collection, Watson seriously engages with the work on its own terms, and makes a good case for her critique. The book was also recently reviewed by rock critic Greil Marcus for his Substack newsletter, but while he and Watson touch on some common ground, his (paywalled) take is grounded in a strange resentment, seemingly offended by the fact that our collection of personal essays is … too personal. (Or, as I put it to a friend: “Women be talking!”) Given the larger conversation about the state of book reviewing, I’m grateful for any attention, really, but doubly grateful to Watson for being so thoughtful.

• On Sunday Paul and I went to Waukegan’s Mexican Independence Day parade. It was gorgeous out, a perfect fall day, and here at least there did not seem to be the chilling effect on attendance that was reported in Chicago. I loved seeing the marching bands, the horses, the teen beauty queens throwing candy, the mariachis tootling away on flatbed trucks. In the photo above, you can see that hundreds of these marchers were wearing black face paint. At the time my reporter’s instinct failed me, and rather than asking someone I figured I could just look up the meaning when I got home, but the internet has been unhelpful. While I like knowing that some answers cannot be found online, I also feel like a dope, and am so curious. If you can provide answers, please do.

• On Tuesday I taught the first in a five-week series of free OncoBallet classes for people who have experienced cancer. I was so nervous! But it wound up being very fun and my three students all said they had a blast. The classes are very basic creative movement and ballet for anyone at any stage of cancer treatment and recovery, whether in active treatment or twenty years out. The series I’m running right now is a private pilot program in anticipation of launching a more robust public series this winter, and runs for four more weeks. If you’re in Chicago and think this is something that would benefit you, please feel free to reach out to me.

• I am excited to announce that I will have an essay in this book. Now I just have to write it.

• Speaking of: This week I also was accepted to Story Studio Chicago’s “Essay Collection in a Year” program. I applied because (see above) I have goals, and no time to waste. Honestly, I cannot afford this and it feels insane to take on another commitment, but everything is unaffordable and insane right now and if this is what it takes to move my writing needle, so be it.

• Lastly, I dyed my hair blonde. It’s Very Blonde. I am channeling my favorite look from high school (of which there were many) and, also, belatedly realized that I’m channeling Ireland’s other lost icon of the 90s, Dolores O’Riordan. Have you ever watched the video for “Zombie”? It is brutal and timely. It might not help you sleep.

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Hello! Throwing this up here at the top as this seems to be what the influencers do? Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us, a collection of 26 women and nonbinary essayists reflecting on the life and legacy of a singular artist and icon, coedited by Sonya Huber and myself, is out now from One Signal/Atria Books! Click the link for purchase options, or look for it at your local independent bookstore. And if you like it, spread the word! Drop us a note, tell your friends, have us on your podcast, or leave a review on your (problematic but unavoidable) online book retailer of choice. Thanks!

In early June I performed with a group of 30-some dancers on the stage at Visceral Dance Center’s Ann Barzel Theater, to two sellout crowds. We’d been working for months, rehearsing hours every Sunday. It was an act of faith and creative exploration and it was exhilarating. This is what I want to be doing I said, over and over, to anyone who was listening and also to myself in my churning monkey mind. This is where I want to be — in class, on stage, in my body.

Since then, I’ve danced three, maybe four times.

Instead, I’ve traveled to South Bend, Seattle, Dublin, West Cork, New York City, the Hudson River Valley, and Minnesota’s glorious Boundary Waters Canoe Area. I’ve launched a book, made new friends, hugged my mom, been awed by art, and sipped campfire coffee at dawn on the stillest of lakes. I have pounded miles of city pavement, ridden various trains and planes, and hauled a 75-pound food barrel down a rocky North Woods path.

Once I got home from the last trip, I turned to the garden. We have a paltry two raised 4 x 8 beds, one in the full-sun of our side yard and one in the shady back, but they’ve been yielding astonishing riches. After being ignored for a month the chard and kale have bounced back to robust levels of deep leafy green that should keep us in vitamin K well into the winter. The choi has bolted but we’ve collected the seeds, and the borage crop has just this weekend been turned by Paul into ale. I’ve been harvesting flying saucers of tender patty pan squash and sowing fall turnips and daikon. And, most significantly, I am engaged in daily battle with the tomatoes that threaten to take over the entire side plot. They’ve smothered the basil and the carrots and are menacing the delicata. One conical cage has collapsed and now the entire mass lists to the south, spilling over into the walkway between our house and the very tidy yard of the next. My tolerant neighbor rolls her eyes and gently chides me for not pruning earlier in the game.

Every morning I go out to assess what has become the Tomato Situation. I ruthlessly lop off dead ends and scoop up handfulls of the fallen, fermenting fruit that has started to attract flies.I greet the grasshoppers who perch on the Cherokee Purples and search under the thick matts of ropy vine for new hidden clusters of gleaming Sun Sugars and Yellow Pears.

I have put up endless pounds of these tomatoes, dehydrating them and storing in oil, cooking them down into sauce, chopping them into salsa, and just popping them fresh into the freezer. And still they come.

In the meantime, I don’t go to the city, I don’t go to the gym. I don’t go to class.

Here’s where I insert something about rest and resilience, about touching grass. But to be honest this denial of something that feels foundational has started to feel a little aggressive, a little dangerous. As though these past few weeks I’ve been trying to see just how far I could disconnect from the markers I’ve been carefully planting the past three years around my sense of self and my post-cancer body. As indicated by the focus of this newsletter of late, publishing a book and going to Ireland this summer detached me — and my writing practice — from the identity I’d constructed as “cancer-patient-who-started-to-dance-again-a-little-obsessively.” It’s been so thrilling, an unexpected expansion of the possibility horizon. But now that I’ve maxed out my 15 minutes as a jet-setting literary microstar, what happens next? Do I go back to the old self, the old material, or do I get to try something new? These tomatoes are a lot of work. Do I even like tomatoes anymore?

Meanwhile, just down the road from my home in Waukegan, the Great Lakes Naval Station is being prepped to welcome 200 ICE agents — and the National Guard? Unclear — for a much-hyped month of aggressive anti-immigrant action in the lawless hellscape that is Donald Trump’s racist fantasy of Chicago. Information is scant, as no state or local official has heard a peep from the federal government and, it goes without saying but I guess we have to say it anyway, has not asked for this.

You can go here to listen to Illinois governor and our next president J.B. Pritzker read Trump and his lackeys the riot act. I am so grateful and proud to live in Illinois at this moment, when Pritzker and his administration are doing the forceful work of resisting with leadership and moral clarity, without the spotlight-hogging hubris of some other governors whose names rhyme with “blue gum.” And it is understandable that with Chicago as the declared site of this looming blitzkrieg, Chicago is bracing and preparing for whatever comes next. Chicago activist Kelly Hayes, another leader I look to for moral clarity, created this very helpful spreadsheet for how to prepare for a military crackdown at the neighborhood level, and I recommend following her for links and good medicine in general.

But up here in Lake County, we are also holding our breath. Chicago is 33 miles from the base; Waukegan is six. Waukegan is a working-class city, majority Black and Brown, with an estimated 57% of the 90K population Latine or Hispanic. There are a lot of immigrants here, and there is very little political capital. Waukegan won’t give Trump the sizzle reel he craves of tanks rolling past the Picasso, but our supermercados and taquerias are alarmingly closer to hand.

On Friday, Waukegan mayor Sam Cunningham and North Chicago mayor Leon Rockingham joined local immigrant rights advocates, faith leaders, and other elected officials outside Veterans Memorial Park in North Chicago (which sits between Waukegan and the base) to decry the arrival of federal agents and possible troops at the base.

“ICE raids do not make us safer, they make us afraid,” said Rockingham. “These raids aare not law enforcement, but instead they are fear enforcement. I cannot go quietly into the night and allow our cities to be staging grounds for inhumanity.”

“The idea of a convoy of armored vehicles rumbling around Lake County for political posturing is straight out of a dystopian novel,” Lake County Board Chair Sandy Hart told the Daily Herald. “And yet, here we are.”

The night before, Chicago musician Al Scorch, who I’ve been friendly with for years, made the trek to Waukegan to play a free concert at downtown’s Jack Benny Plaza. Accompanying himself on banjo and guitar, he sang protest songs for a crowd of maybe three dozen. “Look at this,” he mused, during a tuning break. “We’re out here exersizing our constitutional right to public assembly. Isn’t that great?”

Turning back to his banjo, as the small crowd cheered, he continued with grim wit, “Can’t believe I’m out here celebrating the existence of basic civil rights, but here we are.”

Later, at the Ray Bradbury-themed brewpub across the street, we talked a little bit about the challenfges of working for progressive change in a city that reliably votes Democratic, but where turnout is abysmal. Where there’s almost no money, save for the largesse poured into pet projects like the Genessee Theater by the Uihlein family, business supply titans, election deniers, and billionaire Trump donors.

“I’m not under any illusion that my tiny business can change much of anything,” said Mike, who owns the bar and who had posted outraged and at length on Facebook when the news about the base broke on Wednesday. “All I know is that at this point we can’t stay silent.”

These events of the past few days are not good, but they helped shake me from my late-summer stupor. Ready or not, the other shoe will drop in the days to come, and we’ll have to figure out how to meet the moment, in Chicago and up here to the north. Who will we become?

This past week I did finally dust myself off and go to dance class — twice — and met a friend in Chicago for dinner, all of which restored me to myself a bit. Tomorrow I’ll be at Indivisible Western Lake County’s Labor Day rally for working class power to stand against rising fascism and for so many other crucial, precious, threatened things that they barely fit on the graphic. And next weekend I will be back on the book beat at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest, repping for the University of Illinois Press in Tent E all day Saturday, Sept. 6, and then switching hats Sunday, Sept. 7 for an excruciatingly timely panel on Sinéad O’Connor’s legacy of dissent. Chicago Tribune music critic Britt Julious will join me and Nothing Compares contributors Zoe Zolbrod and Gina Frangello to close out the festival at 5 pm on the Center Stage.

I’ve said it before but here I am again for the back row. Sinéad, with her uncompromising commitment to her ideals and her vocal advocacy for the most vulnerable among us — for children, for trans folks, for immigrants, for Palestinians, and for all who have been colonized, abused, and oppressed — is the role model this moment demands. She never stayed quiet and neither can we.

Until next time, here’s a recipe for my friend Sheila’s delicious tomato pie. Eat up — we’re going to need all the strength we can get.

Tomato-Cheddar Pie

PIECRUST
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
3/4 cup milk

FILLING
2 pounds plum tomatoes (about 10), peeled and sliced
1/4 cup fresh basil or oregano leaves, chopped
3 scallions, chopped, or 1/4 cup chopped chives
1-1/2 cups (about 6 ounces) shredded sharp Cheddar
1/3 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

For the crust, place the flour, baking soda, salt and butter in a food processor fitted with a knife blade. Pulse until the butter is cut into small bits. With the motor running, slowly add the milk through the feed tube until the dough comes together and sits on the blade. Remove and divide in half. On a lightly floured counter, roll half the dough into an 11-inch round. Use it to line a 9-inch pie plate.

Layer the tomato slices, basil and scallions in the pie shell. Top with half the cheddar. In a small cup, combine the mayonnaise, lemon juice, salt, and a few grinds of pepper. Pour over the tomatoes and top with the remaining cheddar. Roll out the remaining dough and place it on top of the filling, folding the edge under and crimping it to seal. Cut three or four slits in the dough so the steam can escape. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until bubbly. (Cover lightly with foil if the crust begins to get too brown.) Remove from oven. Cool 10 minutes before cutting into wedges.