grab bag!
what to do + read, etc!
Dear friends! It’s May! April was…WHOA! It’s true that I can really thrive in a whirlwind, that I genuinely enjoy the activity and energy of lots of events and lots of human interaction. And it’s also true that I need to recover! This past week I’ve been back home just kind of trying to remember how to be. I listened to Lena Dunham narrate Famesick (highly recommend!), I watched numerous episodes of Alone with my kid (Arctic! Pine martens! So many fish!), I watched a middle school track meet and multiple Little League games and I took care of my mom after a fall (she’s bruised and sore but OK!), I helped my daughter study for her AP Bio test, I puttered in my yard, I read, I snacked, I emailed. I stood and walked a lot because my low back is very angry after all the travel, and sometimes I just laid on the floor with my cat. My brain still feels all over the place, so in lieu of a coherent dispatch, here’s a picture of fresh baby geese near my house, followed by a Grab Bag of Important Things!
Writing Wednesdays are going strong: Join us! We have a lovely little crew of regulars, we begin at 9am PT, and I offer a prompt. Then we write for like 50 minutes, and then we wrap up, and by 10am PT we’ve all done more writing than we’d done at 9, and we go on with our days. See you tomorrow, 5/6?!
What You Can Dooooo: Last Saturday I spoke at the Las Positas Literary Arts Festival with my buddy and collaborator W. Kamau Bell (whose Substack you should absolutely be following). We talked about our book Do the Work (which you should absolutely own) and during the Q+A an audience member asked for advice/guidance on what to do in the wake of the devastating SCOTUS decision to eviscerate the remaining power of the Voting Rights Act. There is SO MUCH to say about it, but when it comes to DOING something, Kamau and I had the same response: IF YOU CARE ABOUT VOTING RIGHTS, EQUITY, AND JUSTICE THERE ARE GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATIONS DOING THE WORK, ON THE GROUND, RIGHT NOW—AND THEY NEED YOUR HELP! They’re not stopping just because six judges sided with good ol’ American racism—in fact, they’re ramping up their efforts. You cannot stop or reverse this heinous decision—but you CAN do all you can to support the people on the ground busting their asses to register, empower, support, and organize Black voters across the South. There are MANY great orgs but BLACK VOTERS MATTER is where we recommend you start. Give them your money, follow their calls to action, sign up to write postcards for them (honestly, if you’re gonna postcard, do it for them!). Text FAIRMAPS to 25225 or go to blackvotersmatter.org. This is a Black-led org based in the South who’ve been building community, trust and strong coalition for years. They know what they’re doing, and they know that it’s working—look how terLook to them.
AND ALSO ABORTION! More shitty court decisions, more gutting attacks on our rights. The best resource for immediate, trustworthy reproductive rights journalism is Jessica Valenti’s Substack Abortion, Everyday In addition to reporting on what the hell is going on in the courts right now when it comes to decisions restricting the mailing of abortion pills, she offers guidance and resources like this:
“If you want to help make sure that people know how to get abortion medication, consider spreading the word about I Need An A, PlanCPills.org and YouAlwaysHaveOptions.com. Aya Contigo is also a fantastic resource.
Something else to remind your communities of: informal networks of accessing medication abortion also remain in place regardless of court rulings. Shout Your Abortion’s Amelia Bonow tells AED that “a significant number” of abortion seekers access medication abortion through “alternate routes,” like online pill vendors and international organizations like Aid Access.
And this:
And while SCOTUS’ order means that there’s no question mifepristone can be mailed, it’s worth reminding folks that this legal fight is only about mifepristone—and that you can have an abortion with misoprostol only. (Medication abortion is typically comprised of two different kinds of medication, mifepristone and misoprostol.)
Miso-only abortions are safe, effective, and have been used across the globe for years. That said, they can be more painful and take longer to complete. As Massachusetts provider Dr. Jodi Abbott told The New York Times, “We have no concerns about its safety or efficacy, but we also know it’s not optimal.”
If you are outraged/concerned/frothing with rage as well, follow Jessica, and check out and support the orgs she mentions (Shout Your Abortion has THE BEST MERCH. Get an abortion necklace and be matching with me! It starts great conversations, it really does. Like the young dude at CVS the other day who leaned in, squinted, and said “Does that say abortion?” “Yup.” “So, you’re all about women’s rights and stuff?” “Absolutely.” “Cool! Me too!”)
You can also get these stickers FOR FREE (but please make a donation). Shout out to my friend Jenny B for posting about these on IG!
Speaking of SCOTUS and the courts, I really really recommend that you follow the brilliant Lisa Graves. Her work documenting and monitoring and researching deep-diving into the billionaires behind the Roberts court is remarkable. If you want SCOTUS deep dives, follow Grave Injustice. Here is an absolutely ridiculous photo of Lisa and I on a panel at this year’s Conference on World Affairs in Boulder.
OK, onto some BOOK STUFF! But not about my book! (which, omg, has been out for two whole months!!!) There are some NEW books by people I really adore and respect and I give them my heartiest recommendation:
My Mother’s Daughter by Tracy Clark-Flory. This memoir comes out today and it is so beautiful and smart and full of heart and care and curiosity. It’s deeply personal, it’s feminist cultural critique, it’s about adoption and shame and secrets and mothers and grief and DNA tests and chosen family and being a relentlessly inquisitive daughter. Listen to Tracy on Modern Love!
our books are such good friends! Tracy and I got to talk about them at Book Society in Berkeley last week Questions 27 and 28 by Karen Tei Yamashita This book is called “a novel” but if you’ve ever read Karen—AND IF YOU HAVEN’T, YOU MUST! I Hotel, Tropic of Orange, get them now!—you know that she is never bound by genre. You know she’s playful, witty, brilliant, that she mines histories and the depths of human experience, specifically the experiences of immigrants, Asian-Americans, and her family, who were among the hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans rounded up and put into concentration camps in the 1940s. Karen is a national treasure and she was once my Creative Writing professor when I was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz. Her class on Research Methods for Fiction Writers totally changed how I thought about and understood my writing, and I’m thrilled for this new one from her, and ecstatic that she got this gorgeous New Yorker profile. Also, this is a lovely conversation between Karen and my new pal Miwa Messer.
Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel This is one of the most surprising, charming, bold, quirky, and seriously fucking timely novels I’ve read in a long time. It’s also incredibly radical while being super cozy and kind of mainstream-y—a combo that I, shocking surprise, really appreciate. The premise is hook-y as fuck: A 77-year old woman named Pepper is forced into a old folks’ home in Texas by her kids, where she meets a charming man, begins a late-in-life love affair—and gets pregnant. With that premise, it could clearly go in so many directions, and to some degree it does—it’s a comic romp about sex and aging, it’s a poignant meditation on grief and death and life, it’s about motherhood and medicine and memory. And it’s also about the incredible complexities and nuances of abortion, agency, law, and choice in ways that I’ve really never seen. It’s heartwarming and funny, but it’s also infuriating and fiercely pro-choice. Frankel pulls this one off, just in time for our latest round of anti-choice political assaults.
AQUA by Chiara Barzini Full disclaimer I am extremely biased because this is my best friend’s book and I am actually a character in this book and we just did a bunch of events together and also I LOVE THIS BOOK SO SO MUCH!!!! Read it if you like Los Angeles histories, California histories, hidden histories, road trips, Hollywood, water, Italians, and anecdotes about three middle-aged best friends who love each other so damn much. I will say much more about this book in a future dispatch but for now, just trust me!
Ok! More soon! To close, here’s a photo of Malala, who I got to see speak in Boulder a few weeks ago! Let me repeat that: MALALA! Amazing. Want to know something about Malala? SHE IS HILARIOUS! And she LOVES women’s sports. And she is just the best.
