threshold

threshold contains 4 essays, originally written in Brian Blanchfield's Advanced Nonfiction workshop. For a few weeks after the class ended I worked and reworked the essays, attending to critique, tying threads between the pieces, and fixing all sorts of mistakes. I printed some 900 pages in the top floor of the UofI library, carried them to a basement with a papercutter, dragged them home, aligned the pages, clamped, punched holes, and bound them with various threads. I posted about them on my instagram and a very lovely bunch of folks have bought nearly all of them. Every copy got a special scribble and/or message in the front and back. I wrapped them in brown paper bags, addressed them and distributed them by mail or through friends or on foot.

The essays, in order of appearance, are:

○ backyard birthday or new moon passing from Virgo into Libra:
I start off processing my mom's death when I was 8, moving for the first time in my life toward a solid and tangible memory of my childhood. I talk about embodied spatial memory, comfort in the esoteric, the moon, and absence.

҉   rhizome : toolbox:
This was my first essay in the class and I think it shows a bit. It's taking on a bit too many topics at once, but mainly: my relationship with my family (my mom dying, my dad living and teaching me from his experience of loss, how I as a sterile trans person fit into the paradigm of lineage, an intimate read of my mom's journals). I think it's about growth & inheritance.

⁖ HUNGER NETWORK:
Here I move out of childhood and into an exploration of trans becoming. I try to trace the thread of how I got to my then-current formulation of myself. This is primarily through 1) gleaming soul connections to other gender non-conforming people and 2) works of media that I read very closely and obsessively.

- still:
I deliberately had a much tighter focus for this essay, the final one for the class. It exists within the duration of my final pose for a life drawing class.

I still have about 3 or 4 copies left to sell, but unfortunately for the time being they are boxed away in a storage unit in Moscow! I guess I have to come to terms with what it means to have a limited run... Sorry!