I’m back, but not exactly "better.”

Awash in little notes to myself. Things to remember.

Books read so far in this cursed year 2026 include

• Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, trans. Sophie Hughes

• A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken (left off my previous list by accident—it was the first book I read this year)

• Mega Milk by Megan Milks

• Girls Play Dead by Jen Percy

• How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley

• Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund

• Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund

• This is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith by Darcy Steinke

• Thresholes by Lara Mimosa Montes

• Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg

• The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

• Pathemata or The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson

• Emergency: Stories by Kathleen Alcott

• When We Were Outlaws by Jeanne Córdova

• Dog Days by Emily LaBarge

• Empire of AI by Karen Hao

  (Bolded titles are my favorites this year.)

  Among the notes I wrote myself:

  Thinking of my mother’s care for me, a laser focused gaze toward my success in as many ways as possible, though our ideas of success differed greatly. 

Today I saw my therapist riding a bike around the neighborhood. Two days ago I sat in her backyard once again. I hold onto her words, after she listened to me tell the story of the last six months (my mother fell on December 12th; my mother died on April 10th and everything in between):

You could just stare at a wall for a year, if you want.

I might want.

More notes to myself:

Watched the entire new season of Couples Therapy and cried a lot.

And:

The “dead shark eyes” the woman says about her husband when he dissociates.

My mother’s deadeye focus on helping me no matter what. Without a second thought. 
Buy it. I’ll help you.

I can’t even begin to tell you how wild it is to have finished Karen Hao’s Empire of AI in the midst of everything currently happening in the world. The book reveals so much, despite every effort to conceal the harms being done by ai.

Reading it also grounds me somewhat, existentially.

Meanwhile, I am currently reading Residual by Tisa Bryant. I didn’t know the book was going to be about grief, the loss of a mother, and a home. It’s hitting very close to the bone over here. In this case, I slow down my reading. Marvel at the number of times I feel like, This is describing something I know, am going through, have been through.

Though I’m not yet finished “going through.”

A friend gave me the sweet gift of an hour-long tarot reading. The question I brought was along the lines of, Where is my creative energy? How do I call it back?

The reader gently reminded me, The grief is still fresh.

My therapist gently reminded me, This loss is still very new.

My sense of time is altered.

I said yes to facilitating a writing workshop this summer, before my mother died. Now my mother is gone, and my energy feels depleted every day.

Am I done sending copies of her death certificate? No, I had to send one yesterday.

Opening up each submission to the workshop I find that the eight participants are writing about grief in all of its forms. It almost makes me laugh! How steeped we will be in grief, together.

As I prepare a lecture, I think about how my sadness will enter into it. The lecture is ultimately about finding one’s way back into one’s work. Where is the opening when you feel swallowed?

How did I get this far without mentioning my reading of Dog Days by Emily LaBarge? It felt like reading inside a whirlpool, somehow staying balanced inside a sucking vortex. Here are dozens of ways to consider writing about lived trauma. Here are dozens of ways of interrogating the self amid trauma. Here’s how to think and talk about it, with the help of various books, films, studies. Here’s how to not talk about it. To one’s detriment.

I feel like I’m in the dark, touching the furniture and walls, to find my way back to something that gives off its own energy, an energy I can hopefully siphon into my being.

As I considered how to express the loss, and the lost feeling in this post, I thought of the friend who told me he reads this newsletter “religiously.” This feels like high praise.

But I also know that some weeks I don’t have it in me to read all the newsletters I subscribe to, and it helps to think, sometimes, that no one actually reads this.

Which is why I barely post publicly about this newsletter.

I think of it mainly as a secret reading community.

Which aligns so well with what I know about myself!

I know, from my experience of grieving my father’s death 12 years ago, that this, this couple of months after my mother’s death,

is just

a drop

in

the bucket.

Buy Excavation, Hollywood Notebook, and Bruja from Bookshop.org for a discount, plus support your local independent bookstore at the same time.