It's time for me to yell about Pride!

I am the keeper of secrets 🤫

And I’m not going to share them yet! So just keep your eyes peeled on my Instagram for the day when I can actually tell you what’s up with me.

In the meantime! I did something so fun this Friday night — I went to sapphic literary speed dating at Barnes & Noble! It was a rollicking event with more than 50 people and I got to meet and chat with 12 really cool peeps! It was such a weird, loud, liminal space where I found myself sharing a really funny conversation with one person then getting unexpectedly deep with the next…I love queer people, and need more queer friends, so this was great!

Tripping right along, here’s what you can expect in today’s newsletter:

1. From the heart: it’s PRIDE BABY!! (tw: homophobia)

2. From the shelf: a book I’m excited to read soon

3. From the page: we’re back on that community kick, y’all!

As ever, hope you enjoy! Let me know if you did in a comment, by hitting reply, or just by sending some good vibes my way ☺️. And feel free to share with a friend! We love new friends here 😉

From the heart 💗

It’s PRIDE 🌈

If you don’t know, let me be the first to tell you: I’m queer! I first came out on Twitter in September of 2021 in what I must humbly confess to be the FUNNIEST TWEET I’VE EVER TWOTE, which unfortunately did get deleted later1. Then I came out to some of my family in March of 2022, and that was terrible, and then I did my Insta coming-out post in June of 2022! And now I’m just…here. Queer. Happy.

It took me a long time to realize I was queer, which is probably why I want to celebrate it so much. I went at least 25 years without knowing this integral part of my identity, and that’s really devastating to consider. I often wonder who I would’ve been had I known in high school or even college that I was queer.

Would I have been proud, or would my deep faith and involvement in church activities have led me to feelings of intense shame and despair? I was already living with suicidal ideation just from having depression, and I wonder what knowledge of my sexuality would have changed in that equation.

Sometimes I regret missing out on this part of myself for so many years. And sometimes, in a sick and twisted way, I’m grateful. Grateful that I survived those years and reached a point in time and space where I’m safe to come out and live authentically as I am, pursue the relationships that interest me, and join a community that is so vibrant it astonishes me.

Coming out, for me, was joyous. Pride is joyous. And yet.

And yet over every pride I’ve experienced as an out queer person is the shadow of homophobia, transphobia, and people who would take away not just our rights to marriage and public existence, but existence, period. As I walked to sapphic speed dating on Friday, there was a voice in the back of my mind that wondered if someone who hates queer people might have heard about the event and decided to do something to stop it, something to stop us.

Pride can be terrifying, when you live in a society that hates both queerness and pride2. It can be heartbreaking. I woke up Saturday and saw news of protestors outside Disney World (to be clear, they were antisemitic and racist in addition to homophobic), people so propelled by their hate that they felt the need to physically leave their houses and go intimidate people. That level of hate breaks my heart, and it fills me with fury.

So pride can be rage3.

Whether pride this year looks like celebration, heartbreak, rage, or any other emotion, I hope you take space to feel and honor yourself and your feelings. I hope you stay safe and celebratory. And I hope, next year, I don’t have to use my pride post to talk about homophobia, because I just want to fucking celebrate, y’all.

From the shelf 📚

Let’s talk about books, shall we? Or more specifically, a book. A book that I’m dying to get my grubby little hands on and devour.

Today, I’m looking forward to Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix, by Caleb Roehrig.

As you may know, I have been obsessed with the Remixed Classics series by Macmillan since 2021. I’m also obsessed with all things queer, and I do love me a good Romeo & Juliet retelling, so this book, about two boys who fall in love in Verona in the midst of a long-standing family feud (the Montagues and Capulets, of course), is right up my alley.

While it’s not out til August, I do have an eARC and plan to read this as soon as humanly possible!

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From the page ✍️

We’re back to screaming about community! Writing community, to be clear. Turns out that I didn’t get it all out in my last post, so I wanted to share some more thoughts on community.

Basically, on Friday I got my feedback for my final packet of the semester, and my advisor, the inimitable, incredible, truly-so-talented-and-uplifting Kari Anne Holt, wrote some words that moved me to tears. And I was just reflecting on how lucky I’ve been in my three semesters at VCFA to have more than one advisor who just…saw me, believed in me, and uplifted me constantly.

I will talk for endless days about how my first-semester advisor literally saved my life. I was deeply depressed when I started at VCFA, with very little faith in myself and my ability to write and succeed in this industry, and then life got harder, and Jasmine was always there for me, to cheer me on and tell me that I mattered — that my stories were going to save lives. I needed that.

And on top of that advisor experience, I was building friendships with my peers. I won’t call them out by name because I don’t want to miss anybody, but there are so many people from my program who changed my life, whether we’ve been friends since day 1 or since a little later. I wrote about my experience in January at residency for LitReactor, and that piece still rings true. These people poured into me with an intensity and a love that shocked me and refilled me.

So this weekend I was thinking about all of this, and realized that somewhere over the past 30 years, I built up a wall inside my soul. This was a protective wall that ended up choking me. I have such wild & big dreams and I’m so scared of the hurt I’ll feel if they don’t come true, so I protected myself by repeating the refrain that I don’t deserve to have my dreams come true; that I’m not talented enough; that I’m not good enough as a person; that no one believes in me.

And over the past year and a half, my community — at VCFA, in the grove, and my non-writer friends — have taken a big ole battering ram to that wall.

It’s starting to crumble. Which is terrifying, but beautiful, and I can’t wait to see what comes of living in the world without this wall up.

So to my community: whether you’re a VCFA peep, a Grover, my roommate, or one of my friends from other parts of my life, know that I love you and am grateful for you and you’ve changed my life, saved it, improved it 🥺