December 9, 2019
So…seems that Bumblemoth has not been updated in a long, long, long time because I was to busy experiencing to report back from the field. Now it is winter, and I ruminate. Updates coming soon! In the interim, my facebook feed has been relative active. Other activities include a residency at Yaddo; participating in a visionary new LP DISEMBODIED by Jen Kutler on the female-embodied orgasm; three new publications in Conjunctions and Barely South and other journals; tours of the Oratorio of the Earth opera with Pamela Madsen in St. Petersburg RU and Amsterdam; various conference seminars and lectures including AWP and &NOW regarding CPTSD and literary innovation; a good bit of visiting artist teaching in NYC at City College and in Seattle; a book cover for a children’s book in Croatia regarding children’s concentration and detention camp experiences; readings and performances around being taught to be a drag queen in Seattle and Bushwick….I mean, I was taught in Texas and San Francisco but the performances….new work performed at the AudioWork Festival in Krakow, Poland…
I’m launching the notoriously peculiar SCRY MAGAZINE again after an 18 month residency within a particularly disorienting supernova. It involved a badly broken arm (mostly healed, but I seem to have a third bicep). www.ScryMagazine.com
A new performance-and-literature ensemble called MURMURATION is shaping up under my directorship – an out-growth of the seemingly dead rhizome of FLASHPOINT NYC. Since most of the decent performance venues in NYC are shadows of shadows, this is the candle in between.
And new work is happening. My one manuscript – OUT HERE DEATH IS NO BIG DEAL – is now two nearly completed manuscripts: THE BLUE AT THE BASE OF THE FLAME and SLAUGHTER PARTIES. Stay tuned for excerpts in various journals, and public readings on the west and east coast of those pieces.
There’s something happening via my brain in the hybrid-arts called THE SHIELD BIRD. It’s coming along. If you see a shield bird, please email me and let me know.
I’m also developing UNRULY RIDES: performance rituals for Uber rides involving discussion of sexual assault. A companion performance work is UNRULY ROADS: a performance ritual for crying while walking public streets. Both projects are more fun than they seem. Truly.
I’m working on a text-based project of unseeable proportions with the Kiwi Craig Foltz, with whom I have appeared in various anthologies and publications including They Said on Black Lawrence Press and Conjunctions.
I have enjoyed brief but unforgettable face to face conversations with General Mattis, Susan Rice, Rebecca Brown, and Jeff Vandermeer. They talk about the future in ways that the rest of us don’t. That’s the short version. Longer version: Wait in line long enough until someone who interests you is ready to talk in a fog of exhaustion away from the hordes and a complex being typically emerges to surprise you with an eerie brain glow.
Related projects have involved an ongoing series of social media based DISCOMFORT INTERVENTIONS: publicly-ignored but privately-eventful (so, you won’t click like but you’ll call me on the telephone to talk about it/him? Hm. This is intriguing) posts that will eventually coalesce in a guide to protecting oneself as a whistleblower of convicted sexual predators harbored in institutions run by our colleagues and even those we thought were friends. It’s posts like this one: I post to great silence about the conscious harboring of predators in arts and social service institutions AND YET I wade through copious back-end correspondence that supports, offers tactics and strategies, and is all done underground, as it were. Yet the public FB silence suggests erroneously that I’m isolated – much to the pleasure of perpetrators – but know this: you/we are legion. And even if publicly I stand alone, I am privately representing hundreds of survivors whose predators have are guilty in courts of law. The predators have already received due process, and are nonetheless enabled by our peers. Our employers, our curators, our service providers, our funders. Who are we, truly, in this cosmos that we cannot stand up and say truth against the machine of people we all know?
I’m developing a teaching module and testing it out at various universities – I’m teaching workshops on enhanced security, complex ptsd, and multivalent sustainability for trauma survivors who are also conflict zone human rights workers. Secondarily it’s a training for institutions and communities to improve their efficacy by developing healthy non-exploitative relationships with survivor leaders rather than only those with theoretical knowledge and little direct experience. I’m in the second of two 1-2 year programs of treatment and education so that I can shift my activism even further towards well-being of conflict zone workers.
In other news, I have begun a cormorant sanctuary. My dog speaks a decent version of Dutch-accented German. In my dreams, the city I built for 15 years has been replaced with a mansion that leads to an underground bunker that’s actually a school for…well, that’s enough information already. The clouds in the northern latitudes are spectacular at all times of day and night. May you navigate your seas with surprises small and large, ever expanding like the universe that may or may not care.
Happy Solstice!
Quintan