Reading update 6.25.24…

In an effort to post more regularly and stay actively reading, I’m hoping to do weekly updates from my reading list. As you’ll see in what follows, there’ll be some overlap between books, and some repeated discussions perhaps, but I feel there’s no real way to avoid that. Plus, one thing I noticed when I keep a reading journal, which is sort of the vibe I’m going for here, is that your perspective about a book can change as you continue to read through the book. Yes, this should be obvious, but even the most avid readers (myself included) often make the mistake of judging a book by its cover.

And I think this might be the best space for me to process what I’m reading (and hopefully pick up a few reading recommendations, too).

So let’s start with what I recently finished: Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. This is probably the fastest I’ve read through a new book and that’s because it was hard to put this one down. Starting in Ein Hod, the story focuses on one Palestinian family in the years leading up to 1948, when Israel began its aggressive occupation of the land. And as the Zionists become more violent, life for this family becomes a living hell. The descriptions are vivid and thorough, and there were points where it felt as though I were reading a current event out of Gaza or the West Bank. While the events this family faces are frequently horrifying and occasionally catastrophic, their devotion to each other and the dream of a free Palestine make this a tragically beautiful read.

Next up are my current reads. I’m still working through The Hundred Year’s War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi, but it’s honestly been tough. Every day since October 7^th, 2023 has brought a new hellish story out of Gaza. It’s impacted my reading trends where I feel drawn to reading more novels rather than non-fiction stories. It seems easier to wade into the realities Palestinians face when I read Palestinian novels; it’s not as easy when reading non-fiction accounts of Israel’s atrocities. It’s like I need a narrative structure to tether me through the hellish world forced upon Palestinians. All this to say it’s been difficult to read Rashid’s historical account because I might read a chapter, then open Instagram or TikTok and see that Israel has yet again committed war crimes and advanced their blood-thirsty genocide. That things have only grown worse. But yet it’s still a critical read for those who’d like to deconstruct the US/Israeli propaganda and learn how Palestine is being systematically erased from their homeland.

I’m also making good progress with Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty. This is quickly becoming a book I can’t put down. It’s a collection of Morgan’s own short-stories (kind of like Never Whistle at Night where Talty also has a short story), and they’re not all horror, either. Some are just depictions of everyday life for Indigenous people, and that’s what makes the horror elements that much more chilling. Talty uses subtle little details to carry a lot of weight in turning an everyday event – walking to the store and back, hanging out with your friend at the bar – into a flashpoint where the story shifts to a thriller. But by the end of each story (so far), I’m also left reflecting on the painful realities that inspired these stories.

Lastly, I’ve got one more book queued up called The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens & Ghosts by Tiya Miles. This was a recommendation from a professor I had during my MFA program and I’ve been meaning to read it for a while. I had actually kind of forgotten about it until I saw it on the shelves behind a BookTok creator I watched a week or so ago. The professor I’d had recommended it after I had asked for books that blend the discussions of Critical Race Theory with discussions of Indigenous identity. I may not get to this one right away, but I’m quite excited for it.

In light of my last post about how I miss studying theology, I’m also contemplating dusting off one of my books from seminary that’s probably academically outdated, but might stir my curiosity. Blending in something that keeps me reflecting on my time as an evangelical should definitely help with my own novel I’m working on – I’m aiming for psychological thriller that doubles as a story of deconstruction from evangelicalism. Thus, it’d be autofiction, but with a psychological thriller flare.

Upon mentioning keeping a reading journal, I might make that another blogging series where once a week I take a single text I’m reading and I work through the questions I developed for the reading journal I kept through my MFA program. Generally speaking, the journals were intended to get us to connect what we were reading with what we were writing. And I think that might stir some helpful discussions here.

That’s all for now. If you’ve got reading recommendations similar to the ones I mention here, please let me know in the comments. Or if you want to share what you’ve been reading, feel free to comment with that as well.

Keep calm and read on!

Side effects of going rogue…

I miss studying theology.

Evangelical nostalgia – the kind of longing for a specific way of living out the Christian lifestyle – has been hitting hard lately. I find that when I’m most stressed or anxious, this longing for the way things used to be increases drastically. Early on in my deconstruction process, I had often forced myself to stay within the confines of the theological paradigms of evangelicalism so that I didn’t have to deal with that sense of waywardness wrought by questioning everything. I didn’t want to feel adrift, which is what happens when the beliefs that shaped and guided your day-to-day start to unravel.

But knowing what I know now prevents me from going back.

What I’ve noticed this time around, though, is the nature of the nostalgia has shifted. This isn’t merely a desire for the sense of comfort and safety (both of which are conditional within evangelicalism), but rather for the sense of purpose I felt when I studied theology. As an evangelical, it felt like I was feeding my soul – not just reading the bible, either, but rather connecting certain verses and passages to specific beliefs. And when I got to seminary, it felt like I was learning new ways to better understand God – feminism, womanism, liberation theology, etc., were all couched in the framework of understanding the image of God and what practices we might adopt to honor God’s image.

The theology I’d study actually meant something beyond getting others to agree with me. In fact, it was the opposite. Studying theology helped me navigate the biblical text in such a way that challenged my thinking and/or my behavior, which then compelled me to challenge others. The deeper I’d dive into the text, the more of a “woke liberal” I’d become – and for no other reason than believing I was following what God was teaching me.

On the outside of evangelicalism, though, there isn’t always that shared sense of purpose, let alone having a similar upbringing. Many that I know now either had a healthy religious upbringing where beliefs were taught, but never forced, or had no identifiable religious influence at all. Talking about Jesus now often introduces an entirely new concept where I have to double-back and summarize bits of the bible just so whatever point I’m trying to make has a chance at being understood. In a lot of ways this can be a good thing – it allows a fresh perspective on long-held beliefs or ways of understanding, which can then further the deconstruction process.

And yet at the same time it was nice to have companions on a similar theological journey. It made me feel connected to something bigger than myself, which in turn kept me from retreating within myself and/or pushing everyone else away. With all that’s been going on for the last 9 months, I guess I’m just afraid that I’ll reach a point where I’ll choose to close myself off, where I’ll choose callousness over connection.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in these last 9 months it’s that Islam is not a religion for the individual. Every Muslim I’ve encountered is deeply enmeshed in a community – where everyone’s fed, everyone’s clothed, everyone’s housed. Everyone’s connected. I’m not saying I’m interested in converting to Islam (or reverting? I don’t know, I’m still learning); I don’t think I can convert to any religion anymore. But I do think that if at its core, evangelical Christianity hadn’t been so tied to capitalism and harmful ideologies, I wouldn’t be feeling the side effects of having gone rogue.

Any other former evangelicals feeling this? Or something like it?

In the Bag 6.11.24

May ended with a little bit of chaos and so far, June hasn’t promised much else. But I was finally able to get some rest this weekend and really dive into a few books, and now I’m feeling refreshed – both physiologically and creatively. This week I’m trying to take advantage of this and work on a few projects – the first of which is this sort of newsletter-like post.

And I thought I’d start with a reading update. While the quantity of books I’ve read in the last month or so have has been low, the quality certainly has not. I think it’s precisely because I haven’t pressured myself to a read a lot that I’ve been able to absorb what I have read. Both of the books I’ve recently finished provided direct inspiration for my largest project – turning my MFA creative thesis into a novel.

First off was Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology, Edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. This is an incredible collection of stories with a wide range of sub-genres: psychological thrillers, mystical/fantasy, historical fiction, and even some have a little humor laced throughout. A few even read like the prologues to novels all their own. Normally, horror isn’t my preferred genre, but after reading these stories, it’s definitely up there.

The second book I finished was The Removed by Brandon Hobson (who has a story in Never Whistle at Night). One of the key aspects to my creative thesis was non-linearity in storytelling and Brandon’s first novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was an influential part of my own work. His second novel is an even better example of how to bridge the past and the present in such a way that you feel like you’re getting multiple stories from one. It is a hauntingly beautiful read.

Inspired by these last two books I went out looking for more like them, and one recommendation was Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (who also has a story in Never Whistle at Night). And sure enough, when I scouted the back cover, I saw an endorsement from Brandon Hobson, which essentially sealed my need for this book (honestly, though, the real thing that sealed it was finding a “used” copy that looked hardly even touched. It saved me like $6). I haven’t had a chance to jump into it yet, but it’s now highly ranked on my TBR pile.

I’m still working through The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi, and oh my word has it been eye-opening. Given the nature of my Master’s theses, I had already known some of the main bullet points of what’s happening in Palestine, but Khalidi goes into greater detail of how Israel took over Palestine. And while it is a dense read in the sense that there’s a lot of information, Khalidi has made it feel less academic, as if you were having an informal conversation with one of your professors over drinks after the last class of the semester. Heartfelt, but thorough, and an essential read for anyone who’s trying to learn more about Palestine.

While Khalidi does a fantastic job of painting the socio-political landscape throughout the last century, I recently came across a novel that, while the characters themselves are fictional, has provided a palpable narrative context for the apartheid in Palestine: Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa. Her storytelling is wonderful and while the story is set in one point in time right now, there are allusions to future events. For someone who defaults to non-linear ways of writing, I’m looking forward to the rest of this novel.

And of course, the more I read, the more I become inspired for my own projects – novels, podcasts, comics, etc. This in turn fuels the desire to quit regular jobs and become a full-time content creator, which is incredibly unwise given the current political and economic turmoil. But it is still my long-term goal. If you’d like to support this goal tangibly, hop over to my Ko-Fi page where you can buy me a coffee.

Lastly, in light of the on-going genocide in Palestine, many content creators are advocating for Palestinians who are trying to raise funds to survive. Someone I know in my real life runs his own falafel place and we’ve been going to for years, but only found out a few months ago that he is from Palestine. His name is Samir, and he has several family members still in Gaza who are all trying to get out. So far as I know, they’ve all been able to survive the bombings. But the longer these goals go unmet, the worse the odds get. Please consider helping out Samir if you can.

That’s all that’s in the bag this week. Thanks for reading.

May 12th, 22 years later…

Twenty-two years ago last Sunday, I was baptized at the Pacific Baptist Church at the south end of Lincoln City, Oregon. May 12th was Mother’s Day back then as it was this year, so the little church of roughly 15 total members was packed with nearly 50 people that day. Had I known there’d be a crowd, I might not have gone through with it.

But back then I was struggling. I know now that it was depression – deeply seated as if it were clinging to the marrow in my bones – but back then I genuinely didn’t see a way forward. I felt like my friends weren’t really my friends, my family was only tolerating my existence, and that there was nothing special about who I was. As an introvert, I cherish my alone time, but this was an unshakeable loneliness. And in the wake of a trip to Portland, Oregon for a Christian concert, I suddenly felt not only seen, but needed. I felt like I had a purpose, that I was meant for something more.

On the surface, getting baptized was simply the commemoration of the journey I had already started. I was reading the Bible, learning who Moses was, who the different Apostles were, and learning what God wanted for me. But deep down, I believed getting baptized was going to take away that lonely feeling. I thought that if I just got baptized, I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep anymore, and that everything would turn around.

On Sunday I spent a little while thinking about my time in seminary, and how all through each of my classes, I felt a similar sense of purpose. Seminary was supposed to be a steppingstone to a PhD program, which would then lead to a job as a professor. I had a few professors in my undergraduate days who taught with such passion and expertise that I hardly remember what they were saying, but I definitely remember wanting to be like them. I wanted the balance of giving lectures during the day, grading papers during the night. I’d daydream about having several books published on my particularly-niche area of interest, so niche that you probably wouldn’t know what it was, which of course would allow me to give countless mini lectures on the importance of… whatever my area of expertise might be.

Seminary fueled this desire even more, but it also brought forward a different set of challenges that I had never expected to face. You see, in my deconstruction process, seminary gave me all the skillsets I’d need to not only form my own opinion on a subject, but to do so with such conviction that no one could possibly persuade me otherwise. But I always thought I’d be still involved with some type of Christian community.

One of my favorite books from my life before seminary is called A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and in that book, Vanauken writes a poem that depicts a gap between faith and un-belief. Essentially, knowing what he learned about faith prevented him from turning back to the life he had before he started asking questions. For him, it was a leap toward faith. For me, the learning I had in seminary prevented me from returning to the simplicity of faith – the kind I was expected to accept for my life by virtually every evangelical I’d met.

Yet with every question I’d ask, there was a greater distance between the evangelicalism I had come to believe in and where I felt compelled to go. There wasn’t a shared reverence for the mystery of God anymore; my evangelical “friends” wanted to correct me, to reel me back into the acceptable form of faith. Their acceptable form of faith. And I couldn’t turn back with them.

The “gap” that I had first encountered way back as a young teenager was one that many teenagers experience. It wasn’t a gap between un-belief and faith, though I had been convinced that it was. Instead, it was between isolation and community. It was between believing I didn’t belong in this world because I was a mistake, and believing that regardless of how I was brought here, I was meant to be here. It would take years to deconstruct the manipulation that occurred in this 8th grade paradigm shift, but I think there’s still something fascinating about the whole experience. Because while it was a manipulation of my insecure emotions, it was also my own narrative construct that brought me through it.

When I came up out of the baptismal water, I immediately started to shiver. Though everyone assured me that they did their best to heat it up, it was hardly above room temperature. But the 50 or so people in the church cheered, and then prayed over me as I huddled myself into a giant towel. I don’t remember what anyone said in that prayer, but I remember thinking, This is it. I’m finally going to start feeling better.

It wasn’t magical like I had hoped it would be – like the switch from Peter Parker to Spider-Man, but on a smaller scale. In fact, there wasn’t really any physical sensation at all (beyond the shivering). Instead, I was now constantly reflecting on my role in life. I was constantly engaged with the question of meaning and whether or not I was living up to it.

Little did I know that this would be an existential awakening that arguably saved my life. Truthfully, it wasn’t God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, despite how many evangelicals told me it was. Rather, it was the act of embracing the existential struggle of finding my own meaning. It got mirky at the beginning because I had to borrow the rhetoric of evangelicalism to articulate things a little better and find my footing. But this journey has only ever been my own since getting baptized.

This is why I think it was so easy to walk away – because in actuality, I had always only ever been on my own journey. I followed the longing for purpose and meaning into the church, then followed the teachings of Jesus out. Then came seminary, August of 2014 (IYKYK), a Trump presidency, and a whole slue of things where evangelicalism kept showing its true colors (or rather, a lack thereof). What started as questions about meaning and purpose as a teen led to questions about inerrancy in college, which turned into questions about feminism while in seminary, then questions about liberation theology, then questions about critical race theory, and now here I am, two decades later, still engaged with the existential.

My podcast idea, “Existentially Speaking,” is intended to tap into that same questioning, that same sense of meaning-making. Twenty-two years ago, I had a limited imagination about what a meaningful life might look like, and only really presented with one possible answer. What I think about now is how I was led to believe that there even had to be an answer – that this sense of wonder I had about the world could never be satisfied with simply a deeper understanding of the biology of life. “This universe was created, thus there had to be a creator,” I was often told. But in my time away from evangelicalism, I’ve met countless people who have either believed in a different God or no god at all – and all of them treated people better than what evangelical culture tends to allow.

Deconstruction has only ever allowed me to see life in a healthier, clearer lens than what I had as an evangelical. Unlike what evangelicals might say about deconstruction, it isn’t a slippery slope into godlessness. Some who’ve deconstructed have remained within Christianity, some have found other religious practices more fulfilling, and some have embraced a limbo state of belief, which is where I find myself. For me, deconstruction has not been a single event, or a fixed process that I went through once and now I’m done. It isn’t past tense; it’s ongoing.

May 12th used to have a huge significance in my spiritual journey. It was a mile-marker for my faith, my commitment to Jesus. But that sense of “faith” was only ever self-serving. I didn’t learn better ways to process my emotions, like I have through deconstructing. I didn’t treat people better, I didn’t seek to learn someone else’s truth, I wasn’t comfortable with mystery, I had no sense of awe for the gentle things in life, I internalized a toxic masculinity, and I had a pathetic sense of love.

My 2002 self would have been horrified at who I’ve become, but deconstruction has helped me see that who I might have been had I tried to stay is far more horrifying to think about.

And maybe this clarity can help heal what that kid was going through.

Staying engaged to survive…

Several weeks ago, Jon Stewart warned The Daily Show viewers that no matter who wins the presidential election this fall, we’re all going to need to be ready. It wasn’t said with a fear-mongering tone; he wasn’t saying things will be bad if Biden loses, so you better vote for him. Stewart recognized that even if Biden is re-elected (and that’s a big “if”), the populace will not be settled.

Fast forward to today where I got lost in the comment section of a “Gen-Xer’s” hot take about voting third party. Scrolling past would have been better for my blood pressure, but this creator was regurgitating the same bullshit we’ve heard before; that things will be worse under Trump, that it’s effectively pointless to vote third party, and that this is just the political reality we’re in. I consider this “bullshit” not because it isn’t true, but because it’s always leveraged in order to maintain the status quo.

I tried to curb my frustration when I commented saying, “Counterpoint: What if voting for Biden perpetuates the same political complacency of the masses, thus allowing someone like Biden to disenfranchise more people without them noticing?” It wasn’t taken lightly. He responded by saying my point was invalidated by the fact that I’m not offering a viable solution (though in his video, he dismissed “revolution” as ridiculous, so I don’t think he’d be ready for a conversation around the Land Back movement, which I pointed out later on), to which I responded by saying essentially that surrendering to the status quo wasn’t a solution either. I also pointed out that expecting a well-thought-out “solution” in the comment section of a TikTok with fewer than 200 views was probably more ridiculous than hoping for a revolution before November.

That didn’t seem to sit well. We exchanged a couple insults and then I blocked him because I don’t actually have that kind of time to argue in comment sections. And since he only seemed to be looking to attract people who already agreed with him, it wasn’t going to go anywhere.

But it’s not that I’m okay with a second Trump presidency. There are so many things that will get immeasurably worse if he’s elected again. Roe v. Wade getting overturned was the tip of the iceberg of the conservative agenda; so many human rights are now on the chopping block. And with the way Republicans were able to pack the courts at all levels through Trump, those human rights will be fast-tracked to the ultra-conservative Supreme Court. A second term under Biden might stop the bleeding and prevent another fundamental right from being overturned.

But I honestly don’t believe Biden will win – whether I vote for him or not. Democrats seem to forget that hardly anyone wanted Biden in the first place; he just happened to have more money in his campaign fund. And in the lead-up to the general election in the Fall of 2020, there was a lot of political chatter about Biden embracing the role of a one-term president. So why should I waste the energy trying to rally support for him when I don’t believe he’ll win, and even if he did, I’d rather have someone else as president?

Because I cannot support genocide. And Biden bypassed congress to send military support to Israel to help with their genocide against Palestine.

At this point, the only thing I feel compelled to support is a total overhaul of the entire political system. And not in the sense of trimming away a few bad branches, no; I’m talking about uprooting the whole fucking thing and starting new.

It’s wildly impractical, yes. But it’s what I want.

No more dead Palestinians.

No more billionaires hoarding land and resources while the rest of us side-gig our way through survival.

No more colonial states.

No more corporate pollution that leaves us with “Boil water” advisories for decades.

No more capitalism at all.

Like I said, it’s impractical. There are too many people who’ve internalized the false promises of the American Dream and still think that it’s a matter of small adjustments here and there before we achieve Utopia. As if individualism has been the right answer all along, but with the wrong implementation. Like the guy I argued with this morning, these are the folks who occupy the middle voter block; not in total agreement with either major party, but still obsessed with a capitalist mindset.

There’s a reason the phrase is “Two sides of the same coin,” in reference to the American political system; the real God of the US is money. It’s the most bipartisan cause in any Congress.

And that’s why the whole thing needs to go.

It was built by stolen labor on stolen land, and they’ve been trying to recreate the same thing in Palestine thinking we won’t notice. Thinking that we’re just immature, rebellious kids who don’t want to work.

And yeah, I don’t want to work. I want to write novels, learn how to grow vegetables, build my own furniture, cook meals for loved ones, and spend my nights reading. But none of that matters if it means Palestinian babies are bombed, to say nothing of the men and women who are tortured, raped, and murdered in front of their families. Some get their heads blown off by snipers while others are targeted by a drone strike – all while Israeli soldiers laugh and mock them.

I don’t want to work under these conditions.

When the spectrum of death goes from an infant victim of a drone strike to a man slowly run over by a tank (and whose only identifiable feature was a hand with a zip-tie around it), there’s no spinning this as a positive thing.

Israel is thirsty for blood and we keep empowering them to take it – the primary enabler of it all is none other than Joe Biden, the one who thinks he deserves our vote in the Fall. The one who thinks he’s better than Trump, when the reality is he’s no less violent; the violence is just being out-sourced instead of Made in America like an Israeli bomb.

In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, in response to Trump’s popularity, the Democrats embraced the strategy of “harm reduction.” The idea was we “vote Blue no matter who” as a means of minimizing the damage to Americans – reducing the numbers of COVID casualties and keeping the economy from becoming completely unstable. Whether or not we were successful is irrelevant at this point; Biden failed at many promises and created a monster in the Jordan Valley – one that he has been unwilling to control.

And I am simply one among many who think it’s time we have a system in place that can prevent genocides, that can roll Israel’s expansion back while granting Palestine its own statehood. We have too many elected officials who are, arguably, dead inside and okay with the colonial state of Israel because it helps protect the colonial united states here at home, which keeps them in power and the rest of us “working” ourselves to death.

We genuinely don’t know how long we have left on this planet. I would love to see my nephews and nieces go through college not for the false promise of a good job, but for the experience of being exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. I want a revitalization of Indigenous communities that requires land being returned to its original occupants, and not as some gesture of charity for some politician, but for the replenishment of life to the land and its people. And I want to be able to live a healthy life well into my 70’s or 80’s instead of having to make sure my will and testament is in order whenever a new apocalyptic event looms on the horizon.

I want us all to dream beyond the limitations of capitalism. Sure, it’s unlikely in the next six months. But if not now, then when?

Jon Stewart was right. No matter who we are or how we vote, we’re going to need to stay engaged beyond November. And there’s no better time than right now.

Free Palestine.

Getting back into the groove…

It’s weird how one can have a set schedule week to week, yet feel so disjointed and aloof. It feels like I’ve been in near-scramble mode for the last couple of months – trying to stay engaged with what’s going on in the world, but also trying to live the life in front of me. It feels like the bullshit never ends. If it’s not more bombs being dropped on Palestine, it’s debt collectors applying a tighter grip to get at what little money I have. If it’s neither of those, then it’s the fact that I’m working a job I like, but don’t necessarily love, for meager pay and an extensive commute. All while our government aids a genocide, rolls back protections for under-represented people, and seeks to dismantle one of our more effective means of communication and organization (TikTok).

So yeah, my brain feels scattered.

But I thought I could take a minute to walk through what I’ve been working on (very slowly), and maybe kick up a little excitement for myself to get back into it. First off, if you don’t follow me on TikTok, I’ve been writing haikus every day for the month of April (National Poetry Month), but I have some catching up to do. There may not be much time to really invest in a TikTok community, but feel free to follow me there for what we have left. Second, May and June look like they’ll have a lighter workload at my day job, so I’m hoping to finally launch my podcast, “Existentially Speaking.” I’m also working on a new blog site to go with it, but haven’t yet ironed out the design. Third, I’m setting up a paid subscription site that’ll house my more creative projects – stuff beyond podcasts and mere blogs.

While I’m at it, I’m also aiming to be more active within the reader communities – on TikTok, YouTube, and maybe Instagram as well. I’ve often struggled with vlogs – something about how I look and sound on camera vs. how I look in the mirror and sound in my own head – so these projects might take some time. But given the way the government can just clamp down on these platforms, I might push through to use them while we have them.

This week I’m working on a longer blog post that reflects over the role of sound in the reading experience – comparing audio books vs. physical books. It’s a post I’ve been working on for a few weeks, but again, because I’ve felt so frazzled lately, it’s hard to tie it all together and feel confident that it’s actually making sense (sort of the same vibe with this post, too). But I think it’s almost ready to post.

In terms of what I’m reading lately, I’ve been loving Never Whistle At Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. I’ve loved it so much that I’ve dusted off my MFA creative thesis and started to re-write it. After a few years, it feels like it’s meant to be a horror novel rather than whatever I have it as now. I’m also working through The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi, and I hope to pair it with The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said soon.

Anyhow, that’s all for now. If you’d like to “get in on the ground floor” as they say in the business, feel free to hop over to my Ko-Fi page and buy me a coffee (i.e. help get this paid subscription thing started). My pipe-dream is to fully switch over to content creation as my “career,” but I’m going to need some help generating momentum. Every little bit will help!

A Decade Apart…

April 11^th, 2024 marked 10 years since my Grandpa’s passing. There are times where it’s easy to accept the reality that he’s gone, but there are times where it’s not. And those moments seem more frequent lately.

His passing wasn’t a surprise even if it was sudden. His health had been declining for several years and in January of 2014, he was rushed to the hospital because he had trouble breathing. That’s when they discovered a mass they believed to be cancerous. Based off of its perceived growth rate, the doctor gave a timeframe of 1-2 years of life left. But the cancer grew faster than they predicted and not even 3 months later, he was gone.

For many people, the passing of a grandparent is still sad, maybe even tragic, but not necessarily devastating. For my siblings and me, though, our Grandpa was one of the few stable father figures we’ve ever had – and for my older brother and me, he was the only father figure. It would take years to sift through the emotional turmoil I was thrust into in the wake of his passing, and I don’t think I’ll ever be done with the process. It’s like an injury suffered years ago that still requires physical therapy to manage the pain.

But I think I have the cause of the turmoil mostly figured out. For many orphans, there’s the stigma that we all have abandonment issues that cause us to become possessive and controlling over the people we love. Or we totally close ourselves off from the people around us so that we don’t get hurt again. All of this, we’re told as orphans, is because our parents left us and now we have this deeply seated insecurity, and we’ll always struggle with relationships.

Hardly any of this was ever true for me. Evangelicalism compelled me to internalize that narrative; that I’ll only ever find true fulfillment in God as my “real Father.” But the more I tried to believe it, the less emotionally stable I became. For a while I rationalized this as the Spirit “convicting” me and that to find true healing, I just had to have these emotional breakdowns a bunch. Eventually I’d be healed and living a full life dedicated to Jesus.

When you’re in the thick of evangelicalism, it’s not the community that holds it all together. It’s the cognitive dissonance. It’s the compulsion to believe a particular narrative regardless of the evidence in front of you. Starting with the base assumptions of the Bible being perfectly true and everything being within God’s plan, one could confidently reject any contradictory evidence because God does not mislead His children.

Watching my grandfather’s skin turn from a dusty pale to a ghastly yellow as all the air left his body and he became eerily still – this obliterated any cognitive dissonance I may have had. There was no going back to what I had left behind. Because it hadn’t been any abandonment issue that caused this pain; it was an all-encompassing loneliness. It was like I couldn’t breathe because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next. Grandpa was supposed to live long enough to see me graduate my Master’s program and maybe even see me get married. He wasn’t supposed to go this soon.

When you don’t have what most of your classmates have in the way of parents, you cherish what you do actually have. But there was a part of me that, because everyone else’s dads were a key part of their adult lives well into their 30s and 40s, believed I’d be able to have that, too. Despite the orphan part. In my mind, because he had been there through pretty much every key event any normal kid might have, I didn’t really think of myself as an orphan. And then he was gone, and I was reminded all over again, and alone all over again – just like that time when I was taken from my birth mother in the back of a cop car and dropped off with some stranger whose kids were bullies.

That was the core of the turmoil. My Grandpa had been my anchor when I was left adrift and his passing, though expected for literal decades, was like the tether snapping apart and I was immediately sucked into an emotional maelstrom. If it hadn’t been for my older brother, I don’t really know where I’d be right now. But I know that if I had tried to stay within evangelicalism, I would never have escaped that maelstrom.

I also know that whatever turmoil I may have suffered in the immediate wake of my Grandpa’s passing was far better than the absolute shitstorm he kept me and my siblings from. All things considered, he gave us a sense of peace and stability, which enabled a relatively normal childhood. We never went hungry, always had clothes (even if they weren’t always new), and we never had to wonder where we’d sleep each night. Through meeting these basic necessities, my Grandpa gave us a chance to dream.

And being able to dream feels like a superpower in a world of nightmares.

Reading “Diversely”…

I always feel late to whatever’s trending on TikTok. Admittedly, it’s an app that overwhelmed me when I first created a profile because it seemed like the videos just never stopped playing. But once I got the hang of things, it hasn’t been so bad. And recently, because I’m challenging myself to try different creative things, I’ve been watching a lot more of them to get a sense of how different people will try different things.

An interesting thing, though, is that my “Following” tab is still showing me videos from 4, 5, and even 6 months ago because I just simply hadn’t been using the app for a long, long time. So the discussion around reading diversely is by now old news for most avid TikTok users, it’s been fairly fresh for me.

And yet at the same time, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had this conversation – a person who occupies more than one privilege (cis, white, abled, etc.) suddenly feels threatened because they’re being required to consider a vastly different perspective. Happened in my undergrad days, in seminary, and even in my MFA program from a supposedly “progressive” school.

In this recent TikTok (or rather, #BookTok) discussion, creators were responding to a racist rant from another creator (who might also be an author?) who basically said that she doesn’t feel the need to actively engage with books outside her own demographic. Of course, she did not respond well to the pushback and showed her true colors – that her critics were obsessed with race, which is usually only said when one doesn’t know anything about racism or how it works.

Now, nearly every response video I had seen dissected these comments effortlessly because, like I said above, it’s nothing new. Cis, abled white folks have been saying things like this for decades – at least publically; privately they’ve probably been saying it for much longer. Some talked about the practicality of reading from more than one perspective to enhance your own, even if race isn’t a factor. Others highlighted that “diversity” should never equal “non-white”; there’s diversity amongst queer writers, disabled writers, non-Black people of color (hi), etc. It’s actually been pretty nice to see so many allies step up and educate bigoted folks about all these issues while not talking over marginalized creators. It’s taken off a lot of labor for these creators.

Yet what I have a hard time wrapping my mind around is the fact that this person (and people like her) was never placed in a situation where she had to imagine herself into the story. Somewhere in one of my journals from middle school (between the ages of 12 and 14, mind you) is an entry of where I wrote about making the conscious decision to no longer daydream about myself as a white person, and that I would imagine myself from then on as the person I saw in the mirror. And when I think back to what could have possibly influenced my imagination to only depict myself as white, I was obviously only ever exposed to white media – TV commercials, TV shows, books where every character was assumed to be white (because any non-white character who might have been mentioned was always written with a stereotype), and the fact that we had been taught almost exclusively white American history.

Even now, over 20 years later, I still struggle to cast myself into my own imagination. More often than not, I have to literally look in the mirror as I’m having a daydream just to get the right sense of myself in my imagination. And yet there are people out there for whom this isn’t a necessity – that they can simply read a story knowing full well that it was made with them in mind. The first time where I didn’t have to do this was when I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony… as a senior in college.

At 22 years old, I had encountered a book with characters who looked like me for the first time.

My hope for those who are genuinely reading diversely not for the sake of scoring brownie points for being seen as “progressive,” but because they want to broaden their understanding of what it’s like to be in a space that wasn’t made for them, is that you don’t make it a tourist stop. Read diversely so often that it’s no longer a novelty that you’re reading a Black author, or an Indigenous author, or a disabled author, or a queer author, etc. Because many things can change; publishers can start publishing more stories from under-represented demographics, educators can switch up their curriculums to include more diverse voices, and fewer books would get banned because of someone else’s bigotry.

But more importantly, there will be fewer kids who have to grow up like I did (and, all things considered, I had it relatively easy). And maybe more of our stories can get told.

My Weekend Reading 2.23.24

In an effort to de-stress and quell my anxiety while also refocusing on shit that actually matters, I thought I’d share what I’m reading this weekend.

Or at least trying to read.

The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin
After binging through her Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin has quickly become one of my favorite authors. Two days ago I finished The Killing Moon, the first in her Dreamblood duology, and immediately plunged into its sequel. There are many things I love about Jemisin’s world-building, but she has an incredible way of tying the lore into the current narrative and from multiple perspectives and expressions. Not only do you get the mythology told from different perspectives, but you also get multiple interpretations of the mythology even within similar expressions. Mix this with prose that’s almost lyrical in points, dialogue that makes you feel a part of the conversation, and character development so rich it’s like a freshly cut onion because it leaves you crying from its potency, and you get a series of stories that you feel sacreligious in putting down. So yeah, I’m hoping to get lost in this book.

Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
This novel has been so vivid in detail that I’ve often had to reread portions to fully saturate the setting. It’s been a slow read for that and the fact that its content brings back some memories of my early childhood. But at about 100 pages in, it’s good. If you’ve ever listened to the story told in Tracey Chapman’s song “Fast Car,” this novel feels like a longer form of that song.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
I made the mistake of speed-reading through this during my MFA program, so I’m reading it again, but allowing myself to absorb his words. Baldwin’s prose is often poetic, but always incising through the bullshit of white supremacist societies. It’s hard to read his works and not come away thinking differently about everything.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis
Like I said at the start, I’m trying to refocus and pay greater attention to the things in life that actually matter. Davis’ work has always disrupted my thinking in tremendous ways, and while I don’t expect too much of that from this book, I look forward to being refreshed with wisdom from a veteran in liberation struggles. The subtitle reads “Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundation of a Movement,” which should stand out to the self-described allies who continue to balk at showing support for Palestine. If you only became an “activist” after George Floyd, I’m glad you’re getting involved, but trust that there’s more to learn. I can already tell that this book is a great place to start.

Taking advantage of a coupon and a sale this week, I also picked up a couple more books that I don’t think I’ll get to this weekend, but I hope to read soon: You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (a Palestinian author) and Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (with one of the coolest book designs). I don’t know if I’ll write reviews for any of these books just yet, but I imagine I’ll be writing about them for some time.

A quick update about my own content creation projects; I’ve fully removed everything from Substack because of their hesitation to de-platform Nazi content. Since I hadn’t really gotten going over there, it wasn’t much of a loss to leave. But I am hoping to build a whole new site dedicated to a weekly newsletter as well as sharing many of my projects. If you’d like to find out more, please subscribe to this blog so that you can catch all my updates. And if you’re looking to financially support my work, I have a Ko-Fi page set up as well. My long-term goal is to make the switch from regular, hourly wage jobs to doing creative stuff full time, and I have so many project ideas. Your support is greatly appreciated!

(Feel free to let me know what you’re reading in the comments, too!)

Quick thoughts on Deconstruction…

The first time I encountered the concept of deconstruction was in my Intro to Literary Theory class during the summer of 2009. I forget what we were reading, but I remember the class discussion vividly. It was the first time I ever willingly spoke up during class, and that was only because… I was a devout evangelical.

Deconstruction, which is essentially the process of critically analyzing language of meaning (e.g. religion, philosophy, politics, etc.) in order to better understand its assumptions as well as its impact, invaded my evangelical brain as a demonic force. And if I hadn’t spoken up to highlight the obvious contradiction that you can’t say, “There is no meaning,” without assuming meaning to each of those words, I would have failed my church, my faith, and my God.

Or so I thought.

During May of last year, I went with a group of friends to float the river, and I was naively ill-equipped with what could generously be described as a pool floaty. For most of the trip, we were fine. We hit a couple shallow spots and scraped a few rocks, then got stuck once along the bank, but overall, it was an enjoyable ride. But eventually we came to a bend in the river that caused my floaty to capsize and I flipped backward into the river, and because our floaties were tied together closely, I was sort of trapped under the water.

The actual time elapsed with me under the water was probably no more than 20 or 30 seconds. Surprisingly, I never panicked while submerged, but my legs had cramped so severely that I couldn’t kick anymore. Thankfully, one friend found me, pulled me up, and in no time at all, I had my floaty around my waist. Not even 10 minutes later, we were pulling ashore where I could start to warm up. Every muscle in my body was exhausted and in pain. And as I sat within the little sunshine left to the day, I reflected back on the several articles I had read the week before about the dangers of floating or swimming in rivers in the PNW during May, when the river water is cold with freshly melted snow. I was mere moments away from becoming a statistic.

Near death experiences have the tendency to cause people to have existential crises – moments where we either question the way we’ve been living or realize that way of living hasn’t been enjoyable or meaningful in any way. These experiences are a visceral lesson in deconstruction. That Literary Theory class left me just as jarred as when I had emerged from the river, and I started to question what I believed to be true.

It started with inerrancy, a doctrine that states the Bible is literally perfect because God breathed it into existence. My own specific church did not value inerrancy as an essential doctrine and not long after this became public, our church had to close its doors. But once I started critically engaging the text, inerrancy fell apart like a sandcastle at high tide. And while I could have just kept rebuilding it, there was no motivation to do so, because at that point I had already discovered that its importance was fictional. Its foundation was sand.

Leaving evangelicalism altogether still took some time, even after our church shut down. I was still convinced that we were onto something good where we focused on actually loving our neighbors as ourselves and building a viable church alternative to anything evangelical. But convincing yourself that you aren’t evangelical while operating only amongst evangelicals within evangelical culture might be possible, but no one’s going to think you’re doing anything different. Of course, the most logical thing I could do was go to seminary.

I write all this for several reasons, but mostly to keep the term “deconstruction” where it belongs: in a positive light. Recently I watched a TikTok where someone in their evangelical fervor was “declaring war on the deconstruction movement and its founder,” whoever that is. The person who stitched the video highlighted that instead of addressing the valid reasons people are leaving the church, this “war” is being declared on the people who left and the means by which they did so.

But this “war” assumes that everyone who deconstructs from evangelicalism is now an atheist or agnostic, that we’ve conspired with the Devil by renouncing our faith. The reality is that there is no singular outcome for those of us who deconstruct. Some turn to atheism or agnosticism, yes, but many choose to remain within the Christian faith, just not evangelicalism. And some find other faith expressions to be more meaningful for them, based upon how they’ve deconstructed from their evangelical upbringing.

Deconstruction is not a movement; it’s a method of critically engaging what we believe to be true. It allows us to see our realities with more clarity where we’re less reliant on theological or political presuppositions (these can still exist, though, in a white supremacist society). And it enables us to decide for ourselves what we value in life and what kind of communities we want to be a part of. It breaks things down so we can build something better.

That Literary Theory class wound up becoming one of my favorite classes I’d ever taken. It changed the way I read, wrote, and engaged the world around me. For me, deconstruction is not something that’s going to end. It informs the way I do everyday things – eating, sleeping, drinking, working, voting, living. Because once you acknowledge that we make our own meaning, you only have the time and energy to do just that. We don’t have to accept the premise that there’s only one intended purpose for our lives – or that there’s a purpose at all. Deconstructing allows us to knock, to ask, to seek… even if we never find.

And I think that’s what makes it worthwhile. It’s an ever-expanding horizon, compelling me to keep going.