Dec 20: Noam Dorr, Tzupzik

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Tzupzik

 

Noam Dorr

 

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The slushies are neon green and neon pink, they have been churning in the two machines for many hours, at least since we got to the miniature park, but it could have been days or even weeks. Does sweetened ice ever go bad if it keeps turning and turning? Turbulence, constant refrigeration, an overwhelmingly high sugar content ensures it stays preserved. The day is impossibly hot—one of those khamsin days when the sun is set to destroy. A breeze only makes the heat worse and no amount of sunscreen creates a barrier that prevents the feeling that one is annihilating oneself simply by being outside. It is the first time my children are seeing the country I am from, and it is our first time in this park, which is a miniature of the country I am from, but do not live in anymore, not for years. The park’s website shows a shiny representation of the country, as if every high-rise is new, every monument to modernity is always gleaming, and every ancient religious site is well-kept and preserved, its ancientness frozen in a state that is a ruin kept back from disintegration, forever poised in such a way for endless visitors to enjoy.

But the miniature park online is not the miniature park we are in. This park has been through 1,000 days of neglect, is post-COVID empty, and the structures show it—the miniature Red Sea has evaporated completely leaving behind calcified rings on the shocking blue attempt at approximating the color of the Great Rift Valley, leaving behind the miniature models of tourists staring in the direction of the missing coral reefs. Layers of dust cover the produce on display in the model of the main city market, the tiny shoppers knocked over by the desert winds. My children do not want to be here. We are here for my research, to find a miniature model of the juice factory I worked in when I was a child, so I feel responsible for their suffering. They are tired and hungry and, more than anything, overheated. I know it will be worse once we find the factory and the excitement of discovery is over. Even the promise of a freezing cold neon slushie at the end of our adventure is not enough to keep them going. So we come up with a game: Find the Seams. Find the part of the miniature that tells you it is a miniature because you can see the edges. To find the seams is to discover where time—armed with wind, and heat, and UV rays, and sometimes rain—pries open the weaknesses in the models’ surfaces. And the surfaces appear to have many weaknesses, and the seams are many, and one might be tempted to utter the accusation “shoddy craftsmanship” and blame the artists and builders for a rushed job, but the truth is that COVID has given time lots of opportunity to do its work. And so my children have many opportunities—they call out: “Seam!” “Seam!”“Seam!” and pull us by the hand, sweaty palm to sweaty palm, to show us their discoveries.

Giant weeds grow between tiny grain silos tipped over in the model train station, full scale vines have taken over the miniature plastic plants in the model greenhouse, a roughtail rock agama has turned the top floor of an apartment building into its own dragon lair, miniature machinists are on their backs next to their workstations seemingly taking a nap or just plain dead, and every model airport and bus station looks like every scene in a post-apocalyptic film—the cars abandoned mid-road, the airplanes orphaned on the tarmac. And at the very end come the full-sized slushies—cold and sweet—which poison all of us in what will become a different kind of misadventure.

My children will not see most of these sites in real life this first visit. We always leave my parents’ house too late, the sun already too strong, and our family already excelling in ambivalence toward what we call “organized fun.” I am a horrible tourist in my own country. The miniature park, with its tiny models, its miniscule simulacra, its fabricated utopic intentions does not capture this place, my childhood. It might be tempting to point to the disintegration, the abundance of seams as the reason why the park fails to convince, but the truth is that its overall decay actually brings it closer to my experience of this land—the way everything, even the very new, feels like it is at the edge of falling apart and the story it’s trying to tell about itself collapsing at any point, the door to the factory floor knocked over to reveal no factory, no hands moving juice bottles down the line. 

On this first visit to my country my children have a tiny window into my past and it’s about to close, our trip too short, the various barriers—language, culture, jet lag—in the way of understanding. How then do I bring them in? How do I capture a whole? When we are home, every night my children ask me to tell them a childhood story. Two or three or five minutes long, ten minutes if they are extra chatty and ask questions, a short journey into my past—the desire  to elaborate and go into greater detail always at odds with the need for them to go to sleep. My partner jokingly suggests calling this kind of story a tzupzik, a handy word describing anything tiny, a small addendum attached to something larger, and that maybe telling these stories will make it possible for me to connect the now and the then. 

Coming up with these stories is hard. After the initial obvious set of often repeated tales it becomes increasingly difficult to pull apart memories into convenient short compartmental narratives—how do I extract from the mundane and where do I choose to sidestep the more memorable plethora of family injury, or illness, or communal pain, and of course war. All of these unfit as a precursor to a dream. Sometimes a story arrives only for me to realize, once I tell it, the flaws and incongruities:

 

Listen to The Coin Story

 

Only as I share this story, sitting in the top bunk illuminated by glow-in-the-dark stars, do I realize the obvious false memory that was always there—the children’s pool serves the entire community, and is large and deep and would hold an impossibly immense amount of coins, far too many for a community of seven hundred who swore off private property, and therefore currency. Instead, it becomes clear that my father only meant the coins were collected at the pool, probably in a large barrel, probably a castoff from the factory, not that the coins filled the pool itself. A childhood memory revisited and revised. What sense of place I give to my children through these tiny things, these minuscule tzupziks, between over there and over here, is unclear to me. No idea what whole is created there for them. If their unanswered interrupting interrogations have pried open another seam. What I do know is that, as I sit oversized in the dark of the top bunk under a canopy of miniature glow-in-the-dark stars I do not tell them the pool was never full of coins.

 

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Noam Dorr is the author of Love Drones out from Sarabande Books. He is an Assistant Professor of creative writing and Literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

Dec 19: Jason Sepac, Becoming Nostalgia

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Becoming Nostalgia

Jason Sepac

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Is this the 20s or 1999? Every morning when I take my daughter to daycare, we pass the neighborhood teens waiting for the school bus. They wear loose fit Levis, white Nikes, and draping sweatshirts a size too big. And for a second I’m back in high school starting my own fashion voyage with clothes just like them: knockoff JNCO jeans, RUN DMC Adidas, and some boxy button-down in a garish patten. The kids I pass in the morning would look at home in my yearbook (2003). And knowing their penchant for nostalgia, maybe they would sort of enjoy that. 

Lately, my social media has been feeding me clips that look a lot like the videos I made as an AV geek in the early 2000s. Shot on a VHS, they’re sort of washed out, people wave at the camera a lot. There is too much zooming. The audience—based on the comments—is a mix of elder (or “geriatric”) millennials, like me, recognizing a favorite old binder or t shirt and Gen Zers romanticizing the era’s vibes. Many of the videos (seemingly created by teens) are edited with music that doesn’t exactly match the era and are covered with over-the-top period-inspired graphics. Others feel like they’re aimed at millennials and use some of the most nostalgia-soaked tunes from the time that are basically made for graduation videos. 

One commenter writes, “Born to be an emo/scene teenager in 2005 Forced to be a teenager in 2024.” 

Another writes, “It’s so nostalgic and I wasn’t even born yet.”

Another: “Help, why is this kind of what my school looks like?”

Some viewers point out that no one is on their phone. I see that comment a lot. The idea that only one person would have a camera on them feels novel, even for those of us who spent most of our lives in a pre-smartphone world. Some viewers wish they could go back to that time and ditch their phones. 

I get that. “I need to spend less time on my phone” is the new “I should work out more.” Everybody says it, usually with little intention of ever doing anything about it. Still, it’s a nice thought, and reminiscing over videos from the beforetime can feel sort of magical. But as someone who experienced those years at life’s most awkward ages, it also conjures a lot I’d rather forget. 

When I noticed the kids at the bus stop, I had flashbacks to being fourteen—maybe the fist time I was aware of making a fashion choice. It was one that felt entwined with presenting a persona to the world. My tastes were incoherent. I obsessed over the boxes of my dad’s old clothes I found in the attic. Think polyester bell bottoms and flowered shirts with butterfly collars. I wanted to wear it all, head-to-toe—but also desperately wanted to look like I was on Dawson’s Creek, or maybe like I was in Blink 182, or maybe Nirvana, or maybe I should bleach my hair like Eminem, I thought. I was a sucker for a good Gap advertisement, too. I owned at least one vest, an article I felt was an especially bold fashion choice. If I was presenting an image to the world, I’m not sure what it was, aside from a kid who just liked to play dress-up. A friend who had seen too many 90s teen comedies, once tried to explain to me all the cliques at his school. “You don’t really fit in to any of them,” he said, but then added, “Actually, you might be a freak or a geek. Have you seen that show?” I had.

Maybe that’s why I was less than thrilled to see some of those styles making a comeback. These were the clothes I felt most self-conscious in. It probably didn’t help that this coincided with my 40th birthday, opening a portal to a whole other kind of insecurity. The feeling of being too young and clueless meets the feeling of being too old and out-of-touch. The two felt eerily similar. 

Most of all, the return of these styles meant that I was now part of someone else’s nostalgia. What felt like a not-so-distant past to me was, in fact, a chapter in a high schooler’s history book.  Nostalgia always represented a passing of time, but to me that meant traveling back in time. But now I found myself on the other side—instead, finding someone else looking back at me. 

So I did what poorly aged 90s movies taught me you do in the face of aging: I bought some dumb shit. I started spending a lot of time on eBay and other resale apps searching for my current vintage obsessions: a 1980s Pittsburgh Pirates jacket, accessories for a 70s Canon rangefinder, vintage flash bulbs for a Polaroid folding camera, early 90s Simpsons t-shirts. The list goes on. I indulged my inner geek. I avoided 2024 and instead looked for a connection to times I could barely remember and to times I never knew. 

Like the kids wearing the styles of my adolescence, my own nostalgia pre-dates my life. Some extend into my life—usually the first five years or so.

Every generation feels that kind of nostalgia for times before them or for times they can’t quite remember. At least I think they do. I can recall my siblings and I going through a phase of obsessing over disco and sitcoms of the 70s. It’s sort of a version of FOMO, or in this case a Fear Of Having Missed Out (FOHMO?). “If only I could have been alive to experience that,” we think. But like everyone who was alive to experience it, we wouldn’t have appreciated it either. Because it was just the style at the time, and as humans, we’re incapable of living in the moment. By the time our senses reach our brains, we’re already perceiving the past. So we’re left trying to reconcile our forward moving bodies with our backwards looking minds.

Our phones cater to the latter. 

One of the joys of the internet age is the ease with which you can find the ephemera of the past. Without it, how would Gen Z discover the enlightened pre-smart phone era? It would be hard. Which is to say they’d have to find the past the old-fashioned way—by catching reruns on Nick at Nite, browsing dusty magazines and J. Crew catalogs, and rewatching stacks of their family’s VHS tapes. Somebody is still doing that work, but they’re also uploading it to the internet for anyone to find. And with the help of an algorithm, a nostalgia-curious wanderer could encounter all of that within a minute of scrolling. 

The Preppy Handbook was the closest thing to this in pre-internet times. And even if it was meant to be tongue in cheek, plenty took it literally and menswear types still reference it today. But unlike the handbook, which served as not just a guide for how to dress but also how to act like a monied elite, style nostalgia is less about fitting into a past culture and more about gathering ancient artifacts to remix into something contemporary. 

Since finding that box of my dad’s old clothes as a teenager, I’ve obsessed over all things vintage: clothes, technology, furniture. And it seems to have only intensified with age. Like my scattered taste as a fourteen year old, I still love seeing the merging of past and present and the melding of disparate styles. 

So, while I cringe at the return of early 2000s fashion, I’m honored, really. And relieved. Honored to become nostalgia—and relieved that another generation is looking back and blurring the style boundaries that we thought actually meant something. 

At the time of writing this, my daughter is fifteen months old, and it’s impossible to predict what fashion she’ll like when she’s a teenager. Maybe it’ll be what we’re wearing now…which, you know, is what we were wearing twenty years ago. Or maybe styles will stick around in little pockets of culture just waiting for their moment in the sun again. Maybe fashion cycles will reach a speed at which no trend ever really gets a chance to stick, and instead all styles coexist with varying degrees of visibility. Maybe butterfly collars, JNCO jeans, and laceless Adidas will be the look. Could it be that my teenage daughter will one day help me realize that my teenage style was just ahead of its time? Probably not. 

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Jason "Jay" Sepac is an essayist and visual artist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His visual essays and nonfiction have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Normal School, and others. One essay, “Watch This,” was a finalist for the 2021 Fourth Genre Multimedia Essay contest, judged by Kristen Radtke. His artwork has also appeared on the cover of The Iowa Review. He is currently developing a collection of linked visual essays that considers nostalgia and how it intersects with the image-based technology of particular eras (Polaroids, Super 8 Film, VHS, early cinema, etc.). He earned an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University, where he also currently teaches.

Dec 18: Steven Church, Signs of Something Else (in conversation with Lia Purpura’s essay, “Sugar Eggs: a Reverie”)

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Signs of Something Else (in conversation with Lia Purpura’s essay, “Sugar Eggs: a Reverie”) 

Steven Church

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(All italicized quotes are taken from Lia Purpura’s fantastic essay, “Sugar Eggs: a Reverie” from her collection, On Looking, which everyone should read immediately before midnight. )

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Let me crawl up to the light for a moment with hands and pockets full . 

When I was growing up, my family owned a cabin in Winter Park, Colorado, a twelve-hour drive from our hometown in eastern Kansas. We often spent Christmas and my birthday there combined with yearly trip in the summer to escape the midwestern heat and humidity. My dad and my uncles built the cabin by hand in the 60’s and, for decades it was a welcome retreat for my extended family as the resort town grew around it. It sounds fancy, but it was a rustic place with tiny bathrooms, dirty carpet, and old lumpy beds. The washer and dryer were in the kitchen/dining room. The kitchen cabinet doors and drawer faces were painted in colors of red, orange, yellow, green, purple and blue. All the furniture was old or broken or both. But I loved the place like you love a dream. 

A house lit from within at a distance—no. A house lit from within at a distance, in winter—yes.

We are a family of signs. Kitschy sayings and silly jokes, dad jokes. Language humor. The humor of puns and word play, mostly innocent and often dumb or just confusing. For example, if we were staying at my grandparents’ home, when I’d awaken in the morning and emerge from the basement bedroom I favored, my grandfather would always nod and say, “Good morning. Son’s up.” 

Regarding light: fireflies—not in a jar, traditionally, but their bodies in air. Leaning close, looking fast makes the whole yard a jar.

Above the doorway to the staircase at the family cabin hung a wooden sign that said simply, “Quit yer bellyachin’,” which was something of a catch-phrase and zeitgeist for my grandfather—though it strikes me now that I’ve made a career out of bellyachin’ and navel-gazing. I pretty quickly shed those family expectations, making noise where there’d been so much silence. The staircase in the cabin was wallpapered in maps of the United States and the World; and my family had traced their various road-trips and vacations on them, drawing red paths over the highway lines, x’s marking the sites of settling and exploring. As a child, I loved to linger on the cabin stairs, tracing the lines of family history, all the journeys, all the stops and starts. Somehow these maps spoke more than most of my decidedly stoic midwestern family. It told me where they’d been before they got here.

It is colossally extravagant, of course, yet intimate, the way the sadness at the heart of any family is jeweled over.

But the sign I remember most from the family cabin, perhaps for its odd visceral surprise, for the way it shouted at me. The one that never failed to delight me was the warning sign, printed in a sans serif font on a black background with a bright red border. It hung on an orange cabinet door, next to the kitchen sink. 

In big bold red letters, it said, “Dry Paint.” 

And there it is. Like a sharp intake of breath, a gasp of thought. Every single time. I’d read that sign and pull my hand back from the cabinet. I’d feel a delicious confusion, a tingle at the base of my skull, like losing your mom for a minute in the supermarket when you were a kid. Both familiar and frightening. It’s not funny. But it’s something. I’d feel myself drifting in a liminal space between sign and sense, that ineffable gap between what we read and how our brain and body respond. I think this is part of what made me a writer. Chasing that confusion, that wilderness of language, that flinch of consciousness at some simple word play. It is not necessarily a physical space, though you can feel it in your body, too. You register it subconsciously and respond physically, almost like a laugh or a sneeze. 

Not crystals, but geodes. In a geode’s split, crystally center: that jagged, purpled cave where you could live with tiny crampons and ice picks, hunkered down, the light exploding all around. 

In the Fall of 1996, much of my days working at the Meteor Crater Natural Landmark in Northern Arizona were largely spent standing behind a counter in the gift shop or the rock shop where I’d mostly just let my mind wander. When they banned me from reading at work (unless I read books from the gift shop) I started journaling and doodling to pass the hours. When things got exciting, I might get to crack a geode for a kid with the weird chain-winch contraption. We never really knew what we’d get inside a geode. There were no guarantees of beauty, so it was actually pretty fun to open up those stone orbs, each one a tiny planet, and see what was beneath the surface. It was definitely better than having to refill the nacho cheese at the snack-bar. 

     If I was really lucky, I got to spend a few hours a day guiding tours along the rim of the largest meteor impact crater in North America, delivering that odd mix of fact and fiction that so enthralled the tourists and got me outside, from behind a counter and out of my own head. But it was now Fall and starting to get cold in the high desert above the Mogollon Rim. The days were getting shorter. Fewer and fewer tourists were making the drive from I-40. One slow day, when my manager offered me the job of painting all of the handrails outside and the pedestals inside the museum, I jumped at the opportunity. 

     I gathered my painting materials—the brushes and tape and drop cloths--and quickly made up my signs, “Wet Paint,” and “Dry Paint.” As I moved around outside and inside the museum, working on my job and avoiding talking to the few tourists who milled around, I moved the signs around, taping them in easy-to-see places. The “Wet Paint” sign would hang near whatever I was painting while the “Dry Paint” sign would hang on anything I wasn’t painting; and, as I did my work, I’d watch people approach the signs and I could see their brains working in real-time. 

     No matter what was written on them, they’d usually flinch and pull away or take a step back, afraid of the paint, whether it was dry or not. They’d read it as a warning and their bodies, too, seemed to respond independently of their brains. I felt like I was conducting field work as I watched them flinch and tumble into the gap. What is it about the form, font, and style of a “warning” sign that causes our brains to skip the content, to react simply to form and design, to the interplay of color, negative space, and positive space? Or perhaps more to the point for this essay, what is that peculiar delight I derive from reading and making such signs and how does it sustain me?  

In the head? No. That won’t do. I mean to be literal here. I mean the actual space between mind and work and how that slows, how that constitutes when one is at work, is working in the space. And I mean, too, the space art clears for us all—that place of density, interiority. 

My father told me recently that he thinks I’m “constantly processing the world around you,” as if this is something that other people don’t do. He said he thinks that’s part of what makes me a writer. I think he means that I’m constantly reading the world around me, looking for stories or signs of something deeper. I think he means I distrust the surface of things. This is true, I suppose. I’ve already written one essay inspired entirely by my trying to understand the ubiquitous “No Loitering” signs we see in our everyday lives and rarely think about. I feel like we’re constantly awash in puzzles of language if we only pay attention. 

Ships in bottles. 

The upstairs bathroom in the family cabin, tucked in under the roof between two large bedrooms, had a bathtub but no shower and a small electric space heater built into the wall. There was a sign above the tub that read, “Save water. Bathe with a Friend” and above the space heater was another small handwritten sign that read, “Do Not Touch Heater While in the Tub. Remember: Water and Electricity Mix Very Well.” The word “very” was underlined.” This was my family’s way of warning you and keeping you safe from death by electrocution. By making a joke. And it often had the same effect on me as the “Dry Paint” sign. I remember sitting in the tub, reading that sign over and over again, and still having the distinctly irrational urge to touch the space heater. It was the words. The warning wrapped in dry humor. Like a tug at my gut. 

It needn’t be pleasant, the space. And it is not necessarily beautiful. Connoisseur, you know it when you see it . . . Not a neat scar, but a boil, inflamed. 

I think one that started it all for me, one of the first safety signs to really confuse and, frankly, excite me was “No Standees Permitted” emblazoned in Helvetica font across the inside top of the school bus. It seems to be a requirement, a warning against a dangerous and forbidden identity—that of a “standee.” I found it both confusing and exciting. 

     I knew enough to know that “standee” wasn’t a word I’d seen used in any other context besides the school bus, though it is indeed a word in the dictionary and all of that. It, perhaps unsurprisingly, refers to someone who stands, typically in a place where they would otherwise be expected to sit--as in a moving vehicle, a dentist’s office waiting area, a therapist’s couch, a roller coaster, a surgical procedure or a school bus. Standee is an identity, an embodied behavior. Most of us can’t help being a standee. And it is a person, not the activity, who is forbidden. It is also an identity that, as a perhaps overly observant child, seemed to me to be entirely dependent on the contextual space of the school bus, a space fraught with its own hierarchies and conflicts. On the bus, you could be a standee. But as soon as you stepped off the bus, you were no longer a standee. You were just a person who is standing or walking or sitting. I remember sitting there on my green vinyl seat, puzzling over the sign, tumbling into the gap again, and trying to imagine the opposite of a standee and whether they’d be called a “sittee,” as in “Sittees Permitted.”  

Bubbles. Only, briefly. 

Perhaps in the 70’s, schools were worried about a recent trend in nonviolent protest and how it might play out in the barely controlled and already chaotic environment of your average school bus. What if everyone was just standing around all the time? It would be a breakdown of the social order. They had to reach us when we were young and impressionable, easily wooed by narrative authority and oddly comforted by sans serif fonts. So, someone made the decision to put that warning sign in every school bus. Someone took that word, “stand” and turned it into something else. I felt as if they were speaking directly to me, inviting me into that space again, that language space where “Dry Paint” and other signs lived, a place I often liked to visit.

     I could take that sign and turn it into something else, something like a fever dream. I could imagine that, in our kindergarten classrooms, to further indoctrinate us on the dangers of standing on school buses, we were made to watch one of those classic 1960’s-era safety videos featuring twin brothers, Stanley and Andy Standee, a couple of misbehaving children, bad boys who suffer all matter of wounds and indignities because of their unruly and rebellious behavior on school buses. The Standees are inevitably shunned by society, not allowed on buses or hay rides or in theaters or standardized testing because standing is dangerous. 

     But that one time, the Standee boys managed to sneak on to a school bus with the other normal children. It was a day like any other in middle America. And then the movie voice, the voice of Helvetica if the font had one, interjects to tell us that in this scene we will see what happens to the Standees when the bus has to brake suddenly for a child chasing a ball into the street or an elderly woman slowly crossing an intersection with a cart full of groceries or perhaps an opossum prostrate on the pavement. And this is when the space opens up and my mind runs wild, romping over the possibilities.

Pressing a knuckle into a closed eye for the bursts, as I did when I was a child before sleep, so all kinds of time would collapse.

Sure enough, when the bus driver hits the brakes, Andy Standee rises up from the rubber matting, flies down the aisle in slow motion. I see his face twisted in horror, his arms pinwheeling all the way until he slams into the bus dashboard like a bug hitting a windshield. Then the film speeds up and time follows. And right behind him Stanley Standee, the brother of the damned, comes sailing past the horrified faces of seated children, over his brother’s crumpled body, and he bursts through the front windshield of the bus in a cataclysmic climax before landing in a crumpled heap at the feet of the child with the ball, the old woman and her groceries, or the opossum possuming. 

     The Standee boys are dead. Again. And all the children are all screaming. The bus driver has fainted over the steering wheel. And we’ve long ago left the form and content of a safety film and the rhetorical context of a school bus behind and drifted into the unruly territory of my imagination, that kind of place, just beneath the surface of things, where an odd boy on a school bus in Kansas often lost and found himself, a place conjured by language, born of a simple sign, as he habitually and obsessively processed the world around him. 

What is gazing into a sugar egg? . . . A way of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page. Finger eclipses over the words.

Tomorrow, or the next day, I will drive to my favorite coffee shop and I will pass a small square building not far from Fresno City College. I will note the colorful plastic playground equipment behind a tall fence and the cartoon characters painted on the windows. It has a sign, too. But I will try not to look too long at it this time. I’ll try not to fall again and drift into that gap when I read the words, “Hansel and Gretel’s Daycare,” because I’m sure there is a perfectly simple explanation that I can barely imagine. 

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Steven Church likes Chex Mix and raccoons and the way he and his daughter can imitate the BBC radio guy, Jonathan Frewin in the mornings on their way to school. He's also a founding editor of The Normal School and teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State. 

Dec 17: Matthew Morris, Cosmic Brownie, Zone Bar

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Cosmic Brownie, Zone Bar

Matthew Morris

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My high school tennis teammates and I have never forgotten the bus rides: we’d be on the road from Yorktown, home of the Patriots and just around the corner from the house where my folks raised me, to some other school in the Northern Virginia suburbs, Wakefield or (J.E.B.) Stuart, Edison or Mount Vernon. Some of us would be playing (at minimum talking about) Pokémon or Yu-gi-oh!, and my oldest friend, Justin, would shake his head at our nerdiness, and sometimes, Ben Martindale would (or did this only happen on the basketball bus, a cooler set?) begin to beatbox, Aidan (who later lost his eligibility, though he was our most talented player, light on his feet, consistent in his ball-striking) maybe rapping along. At one point or another as we neared our destination, Coach Barton, who’s also just Coach to us now, would break out a box of Zone Bars, an energy bar that tasted almost as good as a Snickers if your head was in the right place, and start chucking the singly wrapped protein pick-me-ups into the seats behind him—to his players, his team. Or that’s how I want to remember the Zone Bars making their way to us. 

     Coach had an old-fashioned tennis game, the flattest of flat strokes, ball skidding low off the court, some underspin but never top-, and taught at a university in D.C., but we knew (or thought we did) he’d once been in the intelligence community. He combed over his white hair to cover the top of his head and was still very fit in his mid-to-late sixties, hitting every day of the week with the teenagers who were his after-school charges. During our matches, Coach would waltz the perimeter of the Bluemont Park courts, watching us serve and return and make and miss through the fencing. At practice, he never drilled us or put us on the white lines to run, instead produced his hoppers of balls and told us to hit, and hit we did, among ourselves and with him, every afternoon of the school week and on Saturday mornings, too, as joggers and dogwalkers took the trails beside the courts and others drove into the old-folks’ community above the park. 

     Coach died today, or at any rate I learned of his death today, just past his eightieth and six years after he’d suffered a heart attack or a stroke, or maybe both. I remember visiting him at his home with two of my closest friends during his convalescence, all of us in Arlington during Christmastime, the days before the day itself. (Advent, the church a good walk away from where I live now, in Missouri, a college town, still a student, a more devoted student of tennis than ever I was then, is a season of peace.) We stayed for perhaps an hour, catching up, my friend John, whom I tried to call earlier, at lunch, and who played the sport in college, talking about hitting with him at the local YMCA, whose longtime owner, Mel Labat, had recently passed. (Coach Labat drove a Bentley, red, and had once taken Yorktown into the upper reaches of the D.C.-area basketball scene, and he had Parkinson’s the whole time I knew him, but I didn’t know what the disease was, then, just knew that his hands shook when he talked to you, which disconcerted teenaged me.) This was the same house where Coach would have us over to celebrate the end of each high school tennis season, where we would play ping pong and once, if I remember accurately, played basketball. The house where I told Coach, at the end of my last season on the team, the end of the last high school tennis season for most of my buddies, that I would miss all this, would miss it very much. He said that the memories would be good ones, that I would have them in the years ahead, that this would be a gift (he did not use this word): the pleasure of recollection. 

     I know that to recollect is not in every instance healthy, that sometimes the past must be put away in order to proceed forward in one’s life, to not become frozen or stuck in a room where you no longer live (that’s what a tennis friend in Arizona, one of my best friends in Arizona, once said to me, the language he used: the room). And I know that memory can be painful, because there are memories that pain me, songs I have tried not to listen to for their associations. But I know, too, that what Coach said has proven true. John (who’s a poet) and I have camped at the Grand Canyon, where my mother’s mother wants her ashes spread, because there she met my mother’s father, had the most joyful years of her life, even if he later left her, in each of the last four years. We hike down into the red rock during the day, always ascending faster than we’ve descended. Before we start back up toward the rim, we each take out a Little Debbie’s Cosmic Brownie, white sugar straight to our veins. On occasion, to really hype ourselves up, we’ve been known to yell into the sacred space of the canyon, Yu-gi-oh! In the night, we talk about tennis and trading card games and Pokémon and our parents and writing and love, or we sit around the fire and watch the wood crumble to ash, an otherworldly confluence of stars above. We remember so much, play the old hits, tell the same stories, cover the same ground; we only see each other, after all, once or twice a year, especially now that my folks’ve left Arlington. The remembering is the ritual that makes us cognizant of the gift of our lives, lives lived in parallel. 

     Coach told me, after my last high school singles match, that he loved the way I’d played that afternoon, attacking the net, moving forward again and again. I can only imagine him playing that way during his college days (he played Division 1 like my folks, at Dartmouth) and know that he would’ve smoked me. Another friend who never played tennis but came to our matches and so was made an unofficial member of the team took a photo of Coach years ago while he, my friend, was watching C-Span to kill time. He didn’t expect to see Coach there, on the TV, talking about a foreign policy predicament. He showed me the photo a few months ago (I can’t remember why), and I said, I’m going to text this to myself. I did. We, my friend (who later became my four-years’ college roommate) and I, have the easiness of brothers and can bicker, our other friends’ve said, like an old married couple. I remember sitting on the balcony of an Airbnb in San Diego with him late into night during another friend’s bachelor weekend, getting very cold but not wanting to go inside, not wanting the moment to become a memory, for it to end. 

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Matthew Morris is the author of The Tilling, an essay collection exploring questions of race, identity, family history, and love. He is a Ph.D. student in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri – Columbia and holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. 

Dec 16: Jaric Sarmiento, On the Show that Saved My Life: Ping Pong the Animation

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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On the Show that Saved My Life: Ping Pong the Animation

Jaric Sarmiento

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It's 2016, Trump is about to be elected, I'm reckoning with the fact that maybe being an asshole wasn't as cool as I always thought it was, then I receive two acceptance letters: one to go to San Diego State University for computer science, and another to go to University of California, San Diego for creative writing. I also applied to them for computer science but I guess they liked my essay. Anyway, it didn't really matter, I'm at home contemplating dropping out of community college, all my friends have moved on, and all I want to do is spend the rest of my days sitting at home and watching anime. So I do. First on the docket: from 2014, directed by Masaaki Yuasa, about five high school athletes: it's called Ping Pong.

Yes, it really is about Ping Pong.

Well, of course it isn’t actually. We writers know that the thing a story is about isn’t really what the story is about. Moby-Dick isn’t really about hunting whales and surely a story must be about something more significant than Ping Pong for it to be able to save a life. And so maybe that’s what it’s about: insignificance.

It’s about Smile asking himself what the point is in wasting blood and sweat on an after school game. Shit, isn’t it just supposed to be for fun? It’s about Akuma coming to terms with the fact that all the work he’s put into the game is worthless in the face of talent. What can someone with slow limbs and really bad astigmatism do in the face of absolute monsters? It’s about the monsters like Dragon and him torturing himself every night with practice so that he can never be as insignificant as his father, or China desperately trying to prove his worth to a country that treats him like he no longer exists. It’s about our Hero, drowning in a river, asking himself why he’s spent his life chasing around a ball that weighs 2.67 grams.

But, of course, you don’t produce an eleven episode show about a game if you really thought it was insignificant. So that can’t be it. In that case, maybe it’s about what sports shows are usually about.

Like, something about friendship. Like the way skill and talent can divide us. The way the coaches of our protagonists all haven’t talked in years despite being good friends in their youth because their skill at the game all took them to different places. Or the way Smile has been waiting for his best friend to catch up to his skill level so that he can finally have fun playing the game he loves again. Or the way Dragon has been completely isolated at the top, spending all of his downtime at a tournament in bathrooms alone to avoid the crushing weight of the stadium. Or the way China was deported from his home country because he simply wasn’t good enough at the game to stay. Or the way our Hero falls into a depression because coming to terms with his actual skill level gave him an identity crisis. How can a game just be for fun, if the trajectory of our lives and relationships are completely dependent on our skill and talent? 

So maybe it’s that: it’s about how our abilities define us. There’s a reason they’re all given nicknames. Smile is called a robot because of his analytical and deliberate approach to the game, and maybe he plays like that because of the cold and emotionless way he carries himself in life. Or, you know, the other way around. Sure, they nicknamed him China because he’s from there, but it’s not just that: every bit of the way he plays is defined by his home country. He uses a chinese penhold paddle, he utilizes lots of drives, and he has a lot of experience in mind games. Every time he plays, he broadcasts it: I am from China and I deserve to be back there. And, of course, Dragon is named as such because he’s the strongest. The one to beat. No one else can even come close. The world of ping pong treats him like a legend and he lives up to it. And maybe our Hero is called that because he’s the one that’s capable of slaying dragons.

If that’s what you think being a hero is about. The show opens with the words: “here comes the hero,” and the adage gets repeated throughout the show. So maybe that’s what it’s about: being a hero. But what the hell does that even mean? Especially in the context of fucking ping pong. Is it someone who’s just really good at the game? It can’t be, because Dragon is really good at the game and he’s portrayed as the opposite of heroic. Is it someone who has a lot of fun in the game? That’s a good guess because a lot of sports shows are about that: the virtue of having fun. But that can’t really be it because Smile, who’s obsessed with trying to have fun with this game, is depressed. Maybe it’s being a really good teammate, that’s another thing sports shows are obsessed with, but unfortunately this is about a one-on-one sport so that can’t be it either. Besides, we can go ahead and call these qualities “heroic” and we can pat ourselves on the back for stretching the definition of the word so we can make Ping Pong seem more epic than it is, but it would be quite dishonest, wouldn’t it? None of these really make a “hero.”

No, heroes are people who save lives. So the question is obvious: how do you save lives by playing Ping Pong?

Let’s go back to our Hero, drowning in the river. He gets physically saved by Akuma who encourages him to go back to playing Ping Pong, but this doesn’t do much in terms of lifting our Hero’s spirits. He’s still depressed. This was just a failed suicide attempt but there’s really nothing stopping him from just trying again. Nothing has changed until he goes back to the dojo and sees an old picture. The music lifts, our Hero smiles, and he looks for his coach and begs her to start training him again. And from here, he saves four lives.

First, he saves China’s life. It’s their first time playing since China beat him 11-0 in the first episode. The Hero doesn’t even register as a threat to China. It should be easy. Just the second round of the tournament, and China is one of the contenders for the trophy. But of course, it doesn’t go as expected. Of course, within the first round, all eyes are on the match. Everyone’s thinking it: shit, is a nobody about to take a round off of one of the tournament’s favorites? Dragon starts to watch to analyze the emerging opponent. Smile leaves because he already knows how the game is going to go. He says, “welcome back, Hero,” as he exits. And China, he’s panicking. This is the guy he destroyed just a year ago and now he can hardly keep up with him. Losing to Dragon is one thing but losing to a random kid? How can he ever face his home country again after that? China holds his necklace and images of his childhood flash before his eyes. Our Hero thanks him for “teaching [him] how to fly.” China smirks. It’s 10-7 on game 3. Match point for our Hero. China hits the ball back and sees a vision of his mother welcoming him home. The ball hits the net and our Hero advances to the next round. China holds his paddle in a praying position, looking up with his eyes closed and smiling. There’s no other word to describe it, he looks serene. China will never go home and for the first time, he’s at peace. 

Second, he saves Dragon’s life. Before the game begins, our Hero makes a promise to Dragon: he’ll show him that human beings can fly. Dragon sees the image of his father standing by a cliff again. He assures our Hero that human beings cannot fly. The game starts and for the first two rounds, Dragon is dominating our Hero. It looks like a lost cause. Beating a contender for the trophy like China is one thing, but beating the actual best player in the country is an entirely different thing. But when all looks lost in the middle of the third round, Peco hears Smile singing inside his head. It’s the Hero’s theme song. And from there, he starts flying. Suddenly the game is much more even. Our Hero is able to hit the ball back, our Hero is moving at blistering speeds, our Hero is putting the Dragon on his backfoot. And as Dragon chases the ball around, as he desperately tries to return the ball, each becoming more difficult than the last—he realizes something: he’s having fun. The ball hits his paddle and flies into the air, Dragon looks up and sees a bird flying right above him and smiles. It’s match point. Dragon accepts his defeat. He looks at our Hero and asks him if he’ll take him back to the skies. Our Hero doesn’t answer. They both smile at each other. The Hero doesn’t need to, because people can fly. 

Third, he saves his best friend’s life, Smile. They call him that because he used to always smile when he would play ping pong. That’s what our Hero remembered when he saw the picture of Smile the night he was drowning in the river. He hasn’t been smiling lately because our Hero started taking the game for granted. He hasn’t been a good player in a long time. Our Hero arrives late to the match and  Smile says “you’re late.” Our hero says “I got here as fast as I could.” And for the first time in a while, they play a real game of ping pong. For the first time in a while, Smile doesn’t play like a robot. For the first time in a while, Smile smiles. 

And the final life he saves is mine. Because like the other three lives, after watching our Hero play, I got it. If you want to be a hero, all you have to do is to find something you love and love it completely and sincerely. If you can do that, you will save lives on your path of loving that thing. Of course, it’s not that easy. There are thousands of things preventing us from fully loving something. From expectations, relationships, skill, talent, economics, identity, and everything else. And it’s hard to say what it even means to love something. What does it mean to play ping pong like you love it more than anything else? You can’t just play to win, because it’s not love if you’re expecting something out of it. You can’t just play to have fun, because it’s not love if you’re not giving it everything you’ve got. But if you stick with something and continue to profess your love for it over and over again then maybe you’ll be able to fly. And so I decided to stick with writing. Maybe one day I’ll write something that will save a life just as this show saved mine. But that’s not really my goal, of course.

Because this show isn’t about being a hero or saving lives. It’s about ping pong. 

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Jaric Sarmiento is a multi-genre MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and co-creator of 108webnovel.com, an interactive multimedia digital novel. His writing is featured in No Contact, The Other Side of Hope, Southword, and A Velvet Giant. You can find him on Instagram @anflowcrat

Dec 15: Katherine Cusumano, Please Welcome Hardcore Santa to the Ring

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Please Welcome Hardcore Santa to the Ring

Katherine Cusumano

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By now, Mick Foley’s beard will have grown just long enough. If he has done it right, he will have bleached it three times to achieve the downy white of a true Santa Claus. He will have laid out his custom-made burgundy coat with its curly ivory trim and gold sash, and he will have cracked his cricked crocodile spine in preparation to don the suit.

     And if he has done all this, Mick Foley, the first-ever World Wrestling Entertainment Hardcore Champion, will take his seat beside a tree strung with lights and hung with big reflective orbs. A child will sit on his knee, and it will take everything in Mick Foley not to let out a big HO-HO-HO, but he won’t do it because he knows it’s simply too much. No, Mick Foley will listen, quiet, as the kid tugs on his beard (it’s real, but one must be certain) and leans toward his ear to reveal his one Christmas wish. Mick Foley, who has become an enthusiastic Santa impersonator since his retirement from professional wrestling, has come to receive communion of this small joy.

     What it comes down to is this: Mick Foley wants to believe.

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It has been almost exactly a year since I stumbled into professional wrestling, which makes me just about the last person in the world to have discovered professional wrestling. I entered a bar and a group of my friends were watching an All Elite Wrestling broadcast on a TV overhead. I knew nothing about it, but I was strangely transfixed. It was the pageantry of it, the punches pulled and slick sweaty bodies in spangled singlets bumping against each other — combat as cooperation rather than competition. It was the erotic, operatic excess. Why isn’t the whole world talking about this? I wondered, before realizing that, in fact, they were, or at least, at one point they had been. I wondered how something so big had existed beneath my notice for so long.

     Most of all, it was the fuzzy, unstable boundary between what is real and what is not, between what happens inside the ring and outside of it. Because, yes, professional wrestling is not real in the manner of other sports, in that the outcome of each match is, yes, generally decided in advance. If you know even just a little bit more about professional wrestling than I did at this point, then what you probably know is: isn’t it fake? Wrestlers execute high-flying gymnastics that are choreographed like film stunts. For this reason, it has a hard time dodging the allegation that it is not real, but to say that it is fake is to miss the point entirely. Professional wrestling is theater. The guys in the ring are flesh and blood and bone.

     There was no better illustration of this than Mick Foley. Foley, who performed alternately under the names Cactus Jack, Mankind, and Dude Love, was not a great technician. He was not particularly nimble. But he would do nearly anything to get over. Mick Foley dropped shoulders-first onto concrete floors. He leapt out of rings rigged with explosives. He sprinkled thumbtacks over the surface of the canvas and asked his opponents to throw him down on their glittering points and then do it again. It’s not that he sought gratuitous punishment. It’s more like he wanted so badly to believe in his own theater that he made it true through sheer force. If wrestling is about selling an illusion, then Foley was attempting to bring reality and illusion into closer alignment. “I did think to myself, what if I created a style that had no loopholes?” he says in one documentary. “Where no one looking at a VHS tape, no matter how many times they fast-forwarded, slow-motioned, they couldn’t find the secret? The secret was, I was really getting hurt. Like, ta-da.”

     This man, I thought, is playing the game on a whole different level. Instead of trying to elide the performance, make its seams invisible, he was tearing them out entirely.

     This man, I thought, is … a genius?

     And I suppose this is how I ended up reading Foley’s 735-page-long autobiography, HAVE A NICE DAY! A TALE OF BLOOD AND SWEATSOCKS — a book so thick that when I picked it up at the library I thought, Surely, there has been a mistake. Surely this tome is not the memoir of one Michael Francis Foley. But there it was, in all its exhaustive glory. At the time of publication in 1999, he was 34 years old and just a few months away from his first retirement.

     He opens with an account of losing most of his right ear in an in-ring accident during a match in Munich; shortly after, he tells us there’s nothing like “White Christmas” on a hot July afternoon. It’s delightful, this apparent lifelong joy he’s gotten from both wrestling and Christmas, hinting that maybe what he loves is executing a certain kind of magic trick. “It’s strange how often in this business I juxtapose beautiful images with brutal acts,” he writes later. He gleefully describes feeling blood run down his face, and he also has a room in his house devoted to Christmas all year long. During breaks from touring, he made regular pilgrimages to Santa’s Village; he describes riding a ferris wheel with his daughter, whose name is Noelle, and contemplating delivering a well-placed chair shot. (Noelle’s due date was December 25; he says she arrived a little early, on December 15.) For most of his career, he played the heel, the bad guy, the one the crowds rooted against. And then, in his retirement, he decided to play Santa Claus — if not the ultimate good guy, the ultimate arbiter of who’s good and who’s bad.

     Unlike the literary memoir, the celebrity memoir promises an unvarnished, unmediated account of a typically inaccessible self. But of course, this is not necessarily what you get. None of us are reliable narrators of our own lives. This promise gets muddied in professional wrestling, which already traffics in its audience’s uncertainty about what is performed and what is legitimate, and especially when you’re talking about Mick Foley, who made more of that uncertainty than most. Again and again, he pulls back the curtain to remind us that when he enters the ring, what you see is real, in all the ways that matter. The point is not to shatter the illusion of his performance in the ring, but to demand that you suspend whatever remained of your disbelief. Because in the end I wasn’t sure that real and fake were the poles that matter, or at least not the only ones; I suspected they might instead be belief and doubt. 

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In 2014, the year after his induction to the WWE Hall of Fame (where he was joined on stage by Santa and Mrs. Claus), Mick Foley starred in a documentary called I Am Santa Claus. It follows five Santa impersonators as they prepare for the holidays, alongside Foley’s own transformation into a Santa Claus.

     “The whole thing is, can you tell a fantasy and look like you’re telling the truth?” one veteran Santa Claus instructs Foley. And doesn’t this sound so much like professional wrestling? You slip into the costume and start to feel the physical contours of this new self. You construct a persona, only you start to find that you can’t quite tell where you end and your persona begins. In one scene, Foley attends a fitting for a custom Santa suit. “The guys who have real beards, they hurt themselves for the craft,” the shop owner tells him, acid bleach burning their skin in the service of achieving the ideal shade of facial hair. But these guys say whitening their beards also transforms their personalities. They become more patient, more good-humored, quite simply jollier — more like how they imagine a Santa Claus would be. Like they are telling a fantasy and believe they are telling the truth. One of them went down to the DMV and changed his legal name so his driver’s license now reads “Santa Claus.”

     This isn’t to say these men actually believe they are each the one true Santa Claus, of course. True belief, in this case, has an expiration date. I was in elementary school when I found a box of letters on a high shelf in my mom’s home office that proved what I was starting to suspect: All this time, she had been Santa. But the trappings of Christmas were real, like the giddy thrill of tumbling down the stairs in the too-early morning light to see our tree’s contents suddenly multiplied, as though by magic. I didn’t grow up in a religious family, but we attended a nondenominational church service on Christmas eve for the ritual of it, as though by going through the motions, we could conjure some other feeling in the place where we should have found our belief.

     Maybe belief comes down to the point where real and fantastic converge. In wrestling, Foley argues that developing a psychologically fleshed-out character is way more important than “breaking tables, chair shots, and barbed wire.” (His gimmicks, he maintains, “were simply an amplified extension of a certain part of the real-life personality.”) You could execute the most insane moves night after night, and no one would care if they didn’t care about you. This was the contract: The crowd could suspend their disbelief if you provided them someone to believe in. Then, if you’re Mick Foley, you provide them with something they can’t quite believe. The violence wasn’t the point; it was a means to escalating the stakes for your character. “These days, it seems that hardcore matches have become an excuse to go all over the building and hit each other with cool stuff,” Foley writes, “but in my mind, it takes away from what these things should really be about — intensity.” 

     There’s this one match that Foley’s fans revisit each summer on its anniversary. It’s called Hell in a Cell, named for the 16-foot-tall steel cage that enclosed the ring. I couldn’t wait to get to this episode in the book. If I’m being perfectly honest, I was skeptical of wrestling in the beginning — frequently, despite my fascination, I still am — and then, watching Hell in a Cell for the first time, I think I started to understand. But for all its capaciousness, here, the memoir draws a blank. Mick Foley does not remember this match because he blacked out just a few minutes in, concussed after falling through the ceiling of the cage and crashing onto the canvas below.

     Because he didn’t remember what happened after he landed, Foley watched the tape over and over to reconstruct the events. “I felt kind of like a private eye trying to put together the mystery of my own life,” he writes. It strikes me that this is so much like a memory, to be transformed by its telling. And I’d like to make a larger point about memoir, and about assembling a narrative of your life, an exercise in mythmaking not unlike constructing a gimmick, but I think there’s a more literal point to make here, which is that this is a man whose use of his body has almost certainly undone his brain: (After taking so many bumps, Foley cannot wrestle anymore — or even ride roller coasters or look too long at a screen. So instead, Santa. "You have to find something that makes you feel the way you felt in the ring," he has said.)

     But I should say that the match is unbelievably good. I love watching it. It’s also basically impossible to watch. Foley twitches gruesomely when he lands. He spends most of the match with a punched-out incisor in his nostril. When the announcer calls out begging to suspend the fight, it’s not part of the theater — he really means it. And I am not here to judge whether Foley should have battered his body like this, truly; I’m just not sure if I should be watching it. Or if, instead, watching it is the only thing you can do.

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For only the second time, Mick Foley slips on the Santa suit. He’s not sure this is such a good idea — if anything is the opposite of making the season bright, it’s for Santa to get run over by a car on live TV. He’s not sure he can sell it. But, hey, he’s a Santa Claus whose repertoire also includes a character who lives in a boiler room and mutters to himself. And if a wrestler is going to appear on WWE as Santa Claus on this night, it has to be him. No one else can wear the suit.

     He’s making his way across the stage. He’s passing out candy canes. He’s so freaking jolly you wouldn’t believe it. So then a white sports car pulls up behind him, and he goes for it — he lunges across the hood as if struck and rolls to the ground.

     The crowd greets this with absolute silence. They don’t buy it.

     And then the Christmas tree, garlanded in silver and topped with a star, teeters and tips over, pinning Mick Foley beneath it. It’s not clear whether the tree was supposed to fall, but he kicks limply and fumbles to grab hold of its branches, his expression obscured behind pine needles and ornaments, and it’s this moment that the people can get behind. YOU KILLED SANTA! they scream. YOU KILLED SANTA! 

     The thing about belief is that you have to opt into it. You sit in the darkened theater as the performers unfold a story. You cheer and chant as the rivals face off in the ring. You imagine the faint sound of bells in the distance. The point, I think, is this: What form of disbelief are you suspending?

     And so you wait. You wait to be transported. You wait and watch for the moment that makes you believe, knowing that it might never come.

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Katherine Cusumano is a journalist and essayist. Her writing about culture and the natural world has been published in the New York Times, Outside, Literary Hub, and others. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and lives, writes, and teaches in Portland.