Difficult to find room for joy this week, if we are all being honest here. I found this helpful in taking care of yourself and/or keeping in solidarity with Black and API+ communities as we as a community try to find joy, peace, or action. I encourage white readers to follow the lead of the resources and organizers abundant to you, and to please be mindful of what you put on your channels at this painful time. Capitalism combined with the brute speed of the news cycle has tricked us into resuming “normalcy,” and *poof* our feeds status quo again despite the pain of the communities you may not necessarily be in community with. Anyway, I hope today’s letter brings some healing, whoever you are.
My therapist has insisted I need to go on more “walks.” This is a directive I’ve historically been resistant to, but if I’m being honest with myself, I know she is right.
The recommendation comes at a time when my schedule could not have fewer slots for a “walk.” I wish y’all could see the psychosis of my calendar blocking process, but I will say those who have seen it have physically gasped. Not something I’m trying to glorify or value. *Bimini voice* not a joke, just a fact.
Back when I was studying poetry (Yes, that’s yet another life I’ve lived), I had the privilege of working with the ineffable Mary Reufle, who is kind of like the Björk of the poetry world. Brilliant and irreplicable. Reclusive and ethereal. Weird, but doesn’t try to be. Produces work en mass and then disappears for ages. Has little desire for fame, recognition, or commercial success — in fact she hates it. And she notoriously doesn’t own a phone or computer; she corresponds with all her students through handwritten letters from her isolated home in Vermont. For an intro to her work I recommend Madness, Rack, and Honey — particularly, her essay about the moon.
I was lucky enough to sit in person with her for a workshop at my beloved Tin House years ago. Over the course of the week learning from her, we had built enough of a rapport that she started to pick up on my little neurosis and vices — among them, my addiction to my phone/emails.
I don’t remember what the context was, but at some point when we were all out to lunch together with other students in her class, she said to me (and I’ll attempt to emulate her manner of speaking here):
“Fran, I have homework for you. When you go back to New York — when you go back to the busy grind of your life running your magazine and going to parties, between your various engagements riding a crowded subway, I want you to take out your headphones and just look up.”
She paused for dramatic effect here. “I want you to simply look up. Take stock of your environment, and notice the things around you.” This is a piece of advice I think about all the time, and some of the best advice I’ve ever received. It’s taught me self-instated rituals: leave my phone in the other room when relaxing, put my phone in my bag not on the table, and now, every time I take a car from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I put my phone away so I can look out the window and feel emo about the magical city I still call home.
And yet, I still suck at “looking up.” I’m hideously addicted to my phone, more than the average person I’ll admit, and this is an addiction exacerbated by the Trump era, exacerbated further by the sociocultural trauma of last March-June, and only worsened by the fact that I moved across the country for a job that separated me from my Brooklyn family — a family whose intimacy is, for now, relegated to my phone.
Marie Howe, another poet I adore, has been known to walk into the first day of her classes and task her students with this challenge: From the moment you walked out your door, to the moment you got to this classroom, write down ten observations of the actual world.
Ten observations of the actual world. Could you do it?
Howe says that at first, this exercise is very hard for her students. If it were me, I’m not actually sure I would be able to remember ten. But as the students progressed and she asked them to do the exercise each week, they learned to *notice things* more. As I’ve grown in adulthood, I’ve discovered that noticing things is a skill set you learn, one I still have not acquired, though I practice when I can.
I thought about both Mary and Marie’s teachings last week when I went on a 3-hour walk with my heart Chani, who is much better at walking and noticing things than I am. As we were strolling, venting, decompressing, she stopped to reach up for a piece of fruit off a tree in my Los Feliz neighborhood.
“Have you ever had loquats?” she asked. I hadn’t. Gently picking through the clusters of fruit, she identified a ripe one and picked it off for me. If I’m being honest, I was skeptical. It did not look particularly appetizing, and as a kid my mother has instilled the fear of God in me for foraging and eating unidentifiable things in nature.
Peeling back the peachy leather of skin, she revealed its sunshine-colored cushy apricot-like insides. Juicy flesh surrounded large red pits, and slurping it up, I literally could not believe how delicious it was — the subtle sweetness of a cantaloupe crossed with the bright acidity of a cherry. It was so yummy, I wondered if it was actually one of the best fruits I had ever tasted.
“Who taught you these were edible?” I asked with the shocked incredulity of a child.
She told me she was walking around one day, noticed them, and intuitively decided to try one. An observation of the actual world.
In a lot of modern gardens, loquat trees are purely ornamental — but the underappreciated fruit they bear is so rich, abundant, and distinctive. In Chinese lore, carp would eat loquats and develop the strength to swim upstream where they would then transform into dragons. (This is just cursory research, and I would love for a Chinese botanist or mythologist to add more context to this storytelling if they want to slide into my DMs.)
I guess I’m telling you this story because I would love for you to look up and notice some things today. I know this is a very woo-woo mandate about grounding yourself and practicing mindfulness and being present — all those buzzwords, eye roll emoji. But beyond that, I will say I have found it very healing to simply take stock of or find refuge in something small and beautiful, even if I forget it an hour later.
“Healing” is another one of those words that is both building and losing its meaning at the same time during this unique cultural moment. Sometimes it triggers my religious trauma and the ways my church family used to lay hands on me or others to protect them from dark forces or “fix them” from some malady. But in understanding healing, I’m not really interested in knowing or understanding a higher power.
And I think that’s because the closest thing I ever get to a higher power is the sublime, everyday joy of something like discovering a fruit you’ve never heard of, feeling its softness, and taking that risky nibble to surprise and delight.
Or something like noticing the pale outline of the defiant moon on your morning walk, or the distant sound of a wind chime. A little brown baby smiling from their stroller when they look up at the sky. The softness of your new sweatshirt. A waft of fresh waffle cones from the ice cream place down the street. A palm tree branch that suddenly drops right in front of you as you walk, like an ancestor trying to get your attention. A beetle making its way across a patch of dirt. The rapid buzzing of the phone in your pocket and knowing it’s your family group chat laughing about today’s best meme. The way the air just *smells* good, like fresh juniper, ocean, and earth.
Those things, I guess, are the highest powers I can think of.
Love you,
Fran
some things that brought me joy this week
HOUSEKEEPING NOTE: I am *really* trying to grow my paid subscriber base as a birthday present to myself (next week) — I’m only a few more paying readers away from hitting my belated Q1 goal, and I would love for the income from this letter to become substantive enough to help me pay for some mental-health related things as right now, it’s not even enough to pay my health insurance premium. The most important thing you can do to help me is share the newsletter on your story, forward to your wealthy friends, or tweet with the link fransquishco.substack.com telling a personal story about why you like it. If you tag me, I’ll share and engage, and will be incredibly grateful. xx
1. The Nanny* is finally streaming after being mysteriously inaccessible for years. As a Fran, we stan other Frans in this house and Ms. Fine is no exception. Something a lot of people don’t know is that Fran Drescher was not just the star, but also co-wrote and directed many episodes, and created/executive produced the franchise as well. It’s funny how cultural misogyny erases that fact within the show’s larger popularity despite the very anti-misogynist message the show attempts to address: Just because someone “looks like a Bimbo” doesn’t mean they are not smart, excellent at their job, and capable of helming any operation.
2. As supplementary reading, I also recommend the archival work of What Fran Wore.
3. It also brings me joy that Fran Drescher is evidently a comrade?
4. I’ve added a new podcast to my roster, and I will say I am very picky about the podcasts I subscribe to. Soul Balm is a show that is what it sounds like — a space held to take stock of the things that heal us. (I discovered it on the latest ep of Las Culturistas.) What makes this podcast great is the hosting style of Miss Clark Moore who balances sentimentality and pragmatism with ease, along with his ability to get guests to unexpectedly share something deep and personal they wouldn’t normally share. Not to mention, a *ton* of research goes on behind the scenes of each interview, an effort I wish more podcast hosts would take because some of y’all hop on that mic without readin’ a damn thing and it shows. As an entry point, I loved this interview about epigenetic trauma, but Bowen’s interview about forgiveness is a standout as well.
5. I loved this portfolio of friends in good company, and what friendship means among identity-based bonds. Many of my loved ones are featured, and the essays are great to get lost in — especially Rio Sofia’s.
6. I finally took an evening to read the book version of adrienne maree brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us following the article she released last year. If you don’t know the context, there was a wave of feedback and intracommunal issues taken against some of the language and tactics employed by adrienne that she has reset with more context. If you’re curious about that background, she highlights that feedback as a preface for the book and adds more to the text from other organizers. It’s a lil book too so you can read it in one bathtub sitting.
7. This weekend, I made myself a tuna melt. I’m including it in this letter because I think it is a polarizing meal that gets a lot of flack, but eating it was actually quite nostalgic, comforting, and easy! I adapted my tuna salad from Alison Roman’s.*
1 can of caught tuna packed in olive oil & salt
A few tablespoons of Greek yogurt
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
Big squirt of mustard
A few thin slices of onion, diced
1 fistful of fresh dill, roughly chopped
Big squeeze of fresh lemon
A few shakes of good crushed red pepper
Generous amount of pepper
Maybe a lil salt
A drizzle of olive oil (to cut the tang of the yogurt)Grill that bad boi on some whole grain bread with lots of butter, and 4 slices of your preferred cheese (I chose Swiss), putting 2 slices on either side of the tuna. I also made a wedge salad on the side with my favorite chips and a Topo Chico. It was truly divine.
8. It made me so happy to see The New Yorker pay respects to The Rosemont, a local Brooklyn bar that cultivated a community in a way that only the real ones know. In a stroke of genius, the bar tried a drag-on-the-go service where the mononym and Brooklyn fixture Magenta can be ordered to your house like Seamless to perform for you.
9. I am struck over and over again by the words of Alok Vaid Menon, an artist whose thinking on nonbinary identity has been very formative to me. This post hit me big time and felt so clarifying and healing. “Shame is interrupted joy.” Whew, I will think about that forever.
10. Awaiting my vaccine gestation period, I did find an outdoor manicure that gave me a quasi-cow moment. My first manicure in more than a year. If you don’t know, pre-pandemic I kept a regular manicure because A.) I try to wear my faggotry everywhere, B.) it prevents me from looking at my phone for an hour, C.) I love a hand massage, and D.) manicures prevent me from chewing my cuticles — an anxiety disorder I’ve suffered from since childhood. For those in LA, I go to the extremely talented technicians at Pampered Hands.
11. I turn to the work of Jessica Dore often — not just as a tarot reader but as a social worker whose readings of each card really transcend mysticism and ground me in tactile, real-life advice. She pulled the three of cups yesterday, one of my favorite cards in the deck, and her words on it felt perfect for the current moment we are in.
12. Enby Spoken Histories is a project helmed by Coyote Park and Angel del Solar, and I’ve been loving their account recently. They host a book club as well and will be reading Ocean Vuong’s essential text for their next event on April 25th. It will be the day after my birthday and I will be far away from my laptop, but I hope my enbies fall in!
13. Though I am a huge Rina Siwayama fan in the ways she talks about how her queer community has supported her through her work, I was tbh not a fan of “Chosen Family,” a track on her indie-hit album. On the lyrical level, I found it corny and a little too ham-fisted, lacking imagery or poetry of any kind — eesa skip for me. But this new ballad redux featuring Elton John fits the pathos of the song so much better, and I have had it on repeat since it dropped.
14. To spare you the details, I thoroughly enjoyed the sexual benefits of a leather whip for the first time this past week. I have a simple, brandless one gifted to me by the bois at Boy Smells, and I think they are a fun accessory to own, even if you’re just whipping yourself for a giggle. Savage Fenty has a cute one, as a place to start.
15. The Other Two now streaming on HBOMax is a show many missed because it was on Comedy Central and most of us don’t have that cable money. I watched screeners of it when it came out in 2019 and (no exaggeration) it is one of my favorite pieces of TV comedy I have ever watched. Its fluency in insider-baseball queer jokes is a testament to its very queer writers room. Not to mention, Molly Shannon is a triumph, per yooje. I wrote more about it for Out when it came out.
16. One of my fave textile artists restocked parts of their shop and I will say I love my throw so much I had it framed. Support a WoC-owned business!
17. Since I started with Marie Howe, I’ll finish with one of my top-five poems, The Gate, which is about the loss of her brother to the AIDS crisis. I cannot get through this poem without crying, but I will say it’s worth it to hear her read it out loud.
The Gate
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
this week’s action
My friends and organizer fam put together this gathering in solidarity with Black and API+ communities, taking place tomorrow in New York. I encourage you to show up if you can and share the flyer if you can’t.
*The show, of course, is a product of its time, and that sadly comes with jokes here and there that are misogynist, fatphobic, antisemitic, transphobic, homophobic — and that last “-ic” is particularly rich given the fact that the show was created by Fran Drescher and her then-Husband who later turned out to be a closeted homosexual. As ever and always, with cultural objects like these, I’ve found that there are ways to appreciate SOME art so long as we also make sure their problematic contexts stick to them.
*For the TLDR-ICYMI on Alison Roman, I’ll direct you toward her thorough apology for an episode of harm she caused last year.