a few minor updates, Rebecca Solnit + ancestry stuff

Babes and bots, 

Time flies when you're working 50 hours a week, doesn't it? Happy Tuesday. Can't wait to retire. 

Here's what I've been up to the past month: 

1. phone fell in pee pee toilet, it worked for a while, it broke a while later, I have a working phone now. call me?

2. not crying 

3. working with children. screaming children. angry children. adorable children. sneezing children. pooping children. lots of children. so cute. 

4. the bachelorette (Michelle and Joe forever) 

5. running (my mileage is dwindling) 

6. staving off an epic depression with the help of my cat 

7. everyone has cancer? stop it. 

8. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit--found this on my dad's bookshelf and decided to give it a chance. it's awesome. more on this later. 

9. I got a tattoo! it's a jack pine! it looks badass! 

10. more children

11. Poets & Writers magazine has this awesome article: "Nonfiction Book Proposals: The Fine Art of Crafting a Literary Business Plan"

12. a cup of coffee can, in fact, burn.

13. Brandi Carlile came out with a sick new album called In These Silent Days. bless your ears.

14. remembered this epic playlist my sister showed me ages ago (hint: read the song titles in order): For Having Sex

15. a few New Yorker cartoons that conjured laughs 





as promised...

Dear Rebecca Solnit (except not really), 

Let me start off by saying there are too many books in the world. Too many good books in the world. And every few years, you genius art fucks have the nerve to write another one! I was in the bookstore the other day buying some last-minute Christmas gifts (fuck Christmas; I love this shit) when I happened upon your NEW BOOK. I mean, seriously? Let's move on. 

So, a little backstory: I am obsessed with family histories. I considered saving all my money and moving to Jamestown, VA for 6 months to conduct genealogy research. So when I read this...

Things in my family have a way of disappearing. When I was much younger, my father's baby sister showed me a whole box of family photographs, and the blank wall that lay behind my own beginnings gave way under a cascade of cardboard-mounted formal poses and strange unnamed faces in all the range from sepia to gelatin-silver gray. My aunt and I sat for a long time with the cardboard box in her living room cast into almost perpetual gloom by redwood trees, turning over images while she recited names I knew and names I didn't.

it felt personal. Why am I so fascinated with family history? Why have I failed to pursue it? I know this much: my family "acquired" some land in Missouri, Kansas, and Virginia at various points in history. Some of that land is under my mother's name. Both maternal and paternal sides of my ancestry were directly involved in the trade and ownership of people whose names I do not know. These are the genes I belong to/that belong to me. 

My best friend and I recently discussed family histories, more specifically that we could conjure ours. The not-so-simple act of uncovering images and birthdates and names for one's ancestors is as valuable as it is mysterious. What do we inherit from the ancestors we don't meet, and yet know? How do we know them? 

When a family's history is maliciously erased, what joys and despairs does inheritance bring? What realities? What of that inheritance is known in the body, or in the land? 

Consider: Toni Morrison writes in The Bluest Eye,

Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

Consider: the legacies of trauma, all trauma. 

Consider: the families we are not genetically tied to & know nonetheless (i.e. Transcestory/the ancestors of trans people, religious history,  histories of empowering women, histories of musicians, histories of painters, the list goes on...). 

Consider: Back in March, at the Reading Series, when Natalie Diaz said, "everything that has happened you can see on the land." I wonder, what might I see on the family ranch in Kansas? Or rather, what might I see if I knew what to look for? 

I suppose A Field Guide to Getting Lost reminds me of family, the ones we inherit, the ones we make, the ones we adopt, the ones we witness, the ones that can't be found. Exactly how much of a life can one resurrect? Or, to reference the title of Solnit's book, what are/aren't we losing? 

Well, folx, thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me. 

xoxo BLT

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