Drunken Boat #14 is live!

I'm thrilled to share that "The Shape Love Takes" found a home with Drunken Boat in their second edition of the fantastic /slant/sex/ folio (issue #14). I am honored to be a part of such a great folio and among such incredible artists, which I am discovering one by one. I'll leave you with the words of one, Melissa Febos, who, in "Manginalogues," writes, "We just want to feel less alone in the world, and to make honest work. All of us. I have spent my life running towards all that was strange and scary and intoxicating, trying to prove my invincibility and finding my humanity instead." It's a wonderful sentiment that draws together the diversity of the folio and, indeed, the whole Drunken Boat issue.

It's also a reminder of why some of us write at all and an offering of my tiptoeing attempts to find reentry into this space. As Febos suggests, we write to feel less alone, to be honest, to tell truths. We often fight our own egos to do so: that desire to present a shiny and admirable surface to the world. And sometimes it is in our fumbling attempts to show the shiny that we are at our most flawed, our most human. So I spent the better part of two years very publicly flailing my way through miscarriage and fertility treatments. So an anonymous troll shined a diamond-hard light on this, providing a million reasons I should, in essence, get over myself. So I stopped writing publicly and drew inward. So I slowly came to see those hurtful and hard statements as what they were: proof of someone else's vulnerability as well as perhaps a glimmer of another truth--that as publicly as I had mourned, I was still carrying a lot of anger and anxiety around. Am I cured? No. Do I feel this to be my space as safely as I did before? No. But I am reminded that I don't write so I can sit alone, reading my own words and having my own thoughts, I do so to be in conversation with others. A wonderful reminder to be given, and another reason to be thankful to Drunken Boat.