Big Cat, Middle Cat, and Little Cat have been roommates with Human-Mom for quite some time. How do they live together when their values are so different? Human mom’s idea of a good time involves tea and maybe waffles and maybe sitting down together (over Zoom) to do some writing. The cats’ idea of a…
Category: Another World Within
From Pride 2022 to “Don’t Say Gay”
Yesterday marked the end of Pride 2022. All of the corporate rainbow logos will go back into the closet for another year and whatever rainbow capitalism items were in the stores will be marked down. Remember to stock up for next year, okay? Pride has been unusually challenging for me this year. I’ve been going…
Comfortable Dancing: The Importance of Sex Ed
I grew up in a suburb of New York City, which is widely known as a bastion of tolerance and liberality. But as far as I knew, there was only one queer kid in my grade. Out of a class of some 250. Which is to say the others did not feel welcome. This of…
Queer Pride and Self-Care
I’ve written a number of pieces for this website about my experiences as a rape survivor. I’ve written about how important it was for me to change my own language about my experience–to use the word “rape” instead of “sexual assault.” And I’ve written about consent and mental health, I’ve written about the way we…
Self-Knowledge (Sunday Summary)
There are weeks when it’s easy to find a common thread in the pieces we publish here. And then there are weeks like this one, where each piece stands out for what it says but it seems quite separate from the other pieces we’ve shared. Each piece this week shines a light on something important….
Roe v Wade: News into Art (Caturday Questions)
We had a cartoon prepared for today. Then Roe v Wade got overturned and now it doesn’t feel right to do the same kind of piece we usually do. Still. Here’s the comic right at the top if you’re looking for a quick smile. CONTENT WARNING (if you continue below the comic) discussions of sexual…
Lockdown Culture in Public Schools
On the last day of this school year, we had a lockdown at my school. I teach at an elementary charter school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Albuquerque has no shortage of gun violence, and I hardly even flinch anymore when I hear a sound that could be a gunshot, or a firework, at night. I…
Patience and the Writing Process
I have a reputation among my writing colleagues as someone with a lot of patience. Which is weird because I spend more time with myself than I do with anyone else [citation needed] and I don’t think I’m particularly patient with myself. It’s something I’m working on. And (again, ironically) one of the things that…
Coming Out: That Lightbulb Moment
A note on language. This story about coming out is being told through the prism of memory. So the scenes that take place in the late ’80s and early ’90s contain some language that implies a gender-binary. We have allowed that language to stand to reflect the author’s understanding of the world in that era,…
The Body (Sunday Summary)
We’ve asked questions. We’ve sought answers. And we’ve given instructions for “how-to.” This week it seems that most of our writers turned to poetry as a way to share what’s going on. And each of our writers finds a different way consider the human body through their words. As Jeanette Winterson said in Written on…