Dear you,

It’s April, which means National Poetry Month, which means the weather does who knows, which means we’re out of Pisces season and into the more go-get-em Aries (thank god).

I spent March actively sitting with things that scare me. On a work trip to teach patient advocacy at a university in Las Vegas, I used my free time to confront the ways my brain creates problematic patternings that come from hurt, trauma, loss, and scarcity.

Obviously, changing the way one functions, copes, and metabolizes is not something that is done in just one month. Nor should it be. However, the last six months of my life have been full of grief, endless rain, physical pain, stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness; I was ready to work on the common denominator of myself.

So I approached it the way I approach everything: as a scholarly pursuit.

This decision to start actively sitting with wounds and things that frighten me isn’t an entirely new one; I first felt the need to move into another level of therapy and healing last May, while reading Yosa Buson on a park bench in Los Angeles. I was nearly at the end of my tour, I had lost two friends to unspeakable things (one to an accident, one to a long and painful illness), and my dream of having a book in the world had come true. I was strangely undone by the juxtaposition of those two things.

“Coolness – the sound of the bell as it leaves the bell.”

Reading this poem struck me, much like a large piece of resonant metal would, and I’ve never forgotten it. It is always the poem that starts and ends my meditation as I hear the bell chime. “If you ever find yourself wandering off in your practice,” Tara Brach once said, “Just follow the sound of the bell as long as you can.”

I started sitting with the things that scare me (abandonment, not being good enough, social anxiety, grief) because I had reached a place in my healing where it seemed possible to do so without damaging myself; through somatic therapy, talk therapy, EMDR, writing, books, and community (and yes, sometimes even medication) I’ve built a strong base.

I also started meditating because I wanted to be less afraid of dying.

While the death of my maternal grandmother seemed sudden, comparatively, the death of my paternal grandmother was a long, long goodbye. Visiting her was always a practice in sitting with death and dying. At a point, she had been dying for so long that I stopped seeing her hands as they were when I was a child; I gave manicures to nails brittle and aware of time passing.

I’m currently working on translating a collection of poems by an obscure-even-in-his-time Patagonian poet. Today, translating an epitaph on infancy, I came across this line he wrote:

“It is good to understand that we are made of memory,
that time grows without listening to us.
That there are many things we do not understand.”

I turned to a kind of spirituality known for practicing robust and sacred understandings of the rituals of loss and dying, and this was a wise instinct; despite my relatively young age, I’ve experienced more death than most I know who are in a similar station and generation and citizenship in life. It makes good sense to need something larger than our Western framework can hold — and our Western framework does poor work of containing the complex shadow lives of death, dying, aging, grieving.

The white static that happens for people who can’t bear children after they pass their child-bearing years. The solitude of a person who outlives their friends. What to do in the face of a long illness. What to do when your nicest friend is battling terminal illness way too young.

Things that helped change these confront my damaging patterns, my loss of people I love, my creeping self-doubt and bone-tiredness with grey:

• sound meditation (whatever you like, even music, but binaural beats and Tibetan singing bowls worked best for me) 
• visualization (my favorite included imagining being inside of a dirt devil of all of the things I am obligated to do, and then stepping through it to the other side, where a field — in my case, due to my upbringing, cotton — waited for me) 
• disrupting my thoughts with breath* 
• getting right with taking naps (and understanding just exactly how complicated sleep is — for example, we’re the only animals on the planet who force ourselves to get all of our sleep in one fell swoop) 
• active journaling 
• anything & everything by Tara Brach, who combines psychology with mindfulness better than most anyone I’ve seen (and whose voice sounds exactly like my therapist’s, which is comforting to me)

It’s true that your brain cannot be reprogrammed in a month. However, I just went to the same, massive writing conference I go to every year—I just returned last night. It’s 15,000 people who all extrude their loneliness and observative introversion and careful natures and breakup baggage and book deals into the bowels of convention centers at rotating cities every year. It’s a conference I need to go to for my career, and in the past it has filled me with all of the aforementioned toxins, but has also been a beautiful, overwhelming mix of seeing massive amounts of people I love all crammed into bars and coffee shops and libraries and public halls to hear just a few lines of their favorite authors. To click their tongues and shake their heads and say “damn”.

Going this year endowed with the ability to disrupt my body’s anxiety response with breath was life-saving. I felt like I imagine Kevin does in Home Alone, when he seeing the glowing red face of the furnace in the basement and yells I’M NOT AFRAID OF YOU ANYMORE!

It didn’t hurt that Portland was falling all over itself in magnolias, and the sun shone for three days straight at 70 degrees, that I had champagne in the sun with friends, that I got a few freckles and got my cheeks kissed by beloveds, that I overheard two young poets I’d never met before talking about my book in glowing ways, without knowing I could hear them. It didn’t hurt that I came home laden with books that I immediately dove into, and that this week, though it’s raining, I have Spring Break and I am only one day in and have felt so inspired that I’ve already written four new poems.

It doesn’t hurt that my life has been here, beautiful and shining, the whole time. When I need reminding, I can just follow the sound of the bell, leaving the bell.

I love you,
July

Let’s guess if the feedback below came from Great British Bake Off Judges or my editor:  

1. Underbaked
2. Raw, totally raw
3. The layers are there…at least
4. Good idea but not executed as well as it could have been
5. Crispy all the way through
6. This isn’t finished
7. It’s a bit boring
8. Not enough proofing
9. A work of art
10. Definitely a mouthful
11. Very rich
12. You had so much time to work on this. What happened?
13. Not bad
14. This batch is inconsistent
15. How whimsical
16. Disappointing
17. I could picture this in a Parisian shop
18. It’s perfect
19. Way too sweet
20. I expected more from you, to be quite honest

‘Sometimes I get to use writing to shape other people’s worlds, which is a tremendous privilege. Words, man. They’re a whole thing.’

Stereotypes can be (and usually are) odious, but goddamn if Andrea Grimes doesn’t feel like the very best of the Texan myths. Therein this “Texpat” lies a giant personality—a swaggering, red-lipsticked raconteur unrelenting in her ability to be seen and heard.

But more importantly, Andrea Grimes also defies one of my least favorite stereotypes on the planet—women aren’t funny.

Andrea, in fact, blows that stereotype right the fuck up like one of those circa 1945 photographs of nuclear bombs being tested in the Nevada desert; there ain’t nothing left of that bullshit by the time she is done. Nada.

Her column, “The Bad Advisor,” is funny. Really, really funny.

And you don’t have to believe me — just ask the droves of humans who clamor every Tuesday for the column, demanding, where the hell is it?! if delayed by just a few hours.

And it’s not just funny. Like the very best of satire, it’s also scathing, smart. It takes aim at our pettiness, our ignorance, our shitty, most selfish selves and wraps it all up in a glorious snark-package that will make you a better person.

It’s a kind of alchemy really.

Oh, and she’s also the executive producer of an amazing podcast—”Traitor Radio”—an aural wonderland designed to “engage entry-level social justice warriors, and to mobilize people at their points of privilege,” so we can all feel less hopeless and make our communities bigger, brighter, and more beautiful.

In short? We’re lucky as hell to have her brilliant mind-scrawlings here on The Establishment. This is what she had to say for herself.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Andrea Grimes is going to be reading at our December 14 event in San Francisco — HOLIDAZE! It’s gonna be a-m-a-z-i-n-g.
GET YOUR TICKETS RIGHT THE HELL HERE.]

You can generally find me writing in apocalyptic despair, on a tear on Twitter, while drinking cheap whiskey.

The writers that have most influenced my life are Joan Didion, Ann M. Martin, Abigail Van Buren, Bill Bryson, David Sedaris, Mark Twain, Samantha Irby, Roxane Gay, Mallory Ortberg, and Sarah Vowell.

The TV character I most identify with is Louise Belcher.

I think “paying writers in exposure” is…The answer to this question will cost you $500.

The coolest thing I’ve bought from money made writing is my mortgage. (Runner up: groceries.)

My most listened to song of all time is “Friends in Low Places” by Garth Brooks.

If I could share one of my stories by yelling it into a megaphone in the middle of Times Square, it would be one of my Bad Advice columns, because you know there’s always some worthless ass-bag tottering around wondering if he can disown his gay son or out his trans niece or tell his boss she’s fat or buy his kid a thong and those assholes need to get a what-for, in public.

My 18-year-old self would feel very confused and conflicted about where I am today.

I like writing for The Establishment because being an advice columnist is real good but getting paid for it is better.

If I could only have one type of food for the rest of my life it would be sushi, all day, every day, please someone make this happen.

If I could give the amazing people who sponsor stories anything in the world to express my gratitude, it would be…another good-ass story. I mean that’s what they want, right?

The story I’m working on now is my NaNoWriMo project about ghosts who are fed up with ghost-hunters.

The story I want to write next is the true tale of two princesses who orchestrated a 5th-century nun revolt in France, joined up with a band of thieves, and took over their own abbey all because they thought the abbess was a complete asshole for making them make their beds and shit.

Writing means this to me: Writing is the one thing I am good at, the thing I can do almost effortlessly even when I hate it and don’t want to do it and can’t really stand to do anything. I can always write. It’s my comfort food, my therapist, my partner, my pet. It is the way I shape myself and my world. Sometimes I get to use writing to shape other people’s worlds, which is a tremendous privilege. Sometimes I just write the word “fuck” a lot and yell about shit that pisses me off. Words, man. They’re a whole thing.

If I could summarize writing in a series of three GIFs, it would be:

WE CAN’T WAIT TO MEET YOU AT OUR SAN FRANCISCO EVENT!

TRUE STORIES TOLD BY SOME OF THE BAY’S BEST WRITERS!

WELCOME TO HOLI-DAZE!

DECEMBER 14 AT MATTER.

GET YOUR TICKETS BEFORE IT SELLS OUT!

Oh hi.

In lieu of everything I’m scared of — nuclear war, the internet, so many men, conservatives, my ever-wrinkling knees and face, my parents’ sadness, never being close to my brother’s son, dying alone, anyone who doesn’t cry once a week due to general existential malaise . . .

I am trying instead to be excited. I have been talking about being a “country mouse” for a year . . . years longer in my mind. I lived in Brooklyn for five years and now Oakland for four — my life has been a lot of cement, squalor, screaming tire wheels, exhaust, roommates, the urine-y wafts of public transportation, and the general compulsion to do something every night because there’s always something fun to do.

City life is invigorating, smelly, intense, noisy — a bus-stop lives outside my door and the squealing air breaks are busy squealing as I type this — and I’d like for a little while to simply not be
. . . intense.

I’ve rented a house in Guerneville — it’s about an hour and a half away by the Russian River; it’s an incredible community, a mashup of gay bears, hunters and pseudo military folk, and crunchy yuppies who alternate their time between the redwoods and wine country.

It’s a little red house sitting quietly in a shadowy grove of trees. I haven’t been there yet; I’ve just poured through the photographs about 100 times squinting my eyes at all the rooms that looks like someone’s Gran decorated.

But within those four walls I’m hunting too. Solitude. A resting heart rate. I’d like to drink less and sleep more. I’m going to try and finish a play I’ve been working on for years. I’ll bring my guitar, and my art supplies, and my giant Norton Anthology of Poetry which I haven’t poured through since grad school ten years ago.

These things are literally dusty.

There is so much that’s been lost in the hustle, in what I call City Life, but perhaps what has been lost is my own ability to create space.

And so, off I go today to Country Life — to air, to space — back to my own mind. This section of Walt Whitman’s poem felt prescient to me today as I finish packing …

“The question, O me! so sad, recurring — What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here — that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

Without space, there is no time to contribute anything. I hope you have space. In your mind. In your room. At your desk. In your heart. I hope that you let yourself breath once in a while — in and out, in and out — and know that this is enough, at least for a moment.

With love + rage,
Katie Tandy
Co-founder | Creative Director

Due Process Is Needed For Sexual Harassment Accusations — But For Whom?

By Ijeoma Oluo

I ended the call with USA Today and just sat frozen in my chair for a few minutes. Did this really just happen? Was I seriously just asked by the third largest paper in the nation to write their “feminazi” narrative to counter their “reasoned and compassionate” editorial?

Was I just asked to be one of the excuses for why this whole “me too” moment needed to be shut down? Was I just asked to be their strawman?

‘I Thought I Was Lazy’: The Invisible Day-To-Day Struggle For Autistic Women

By Reese Piper

New research is shedding more light on how EF affects autistic people, especially those socialized as girls. It’s presumed that autistic girls adapt better in life since many display stronger social skills. But a five-year study published this year in Autism Research unveiled a different layer — autistic girls are struggling in their ability to function in daily life, perhaps even more than their male counterparts.

“Our results indicate relative weaknesses for females compared to males diagnosed with ASD on executive function and daily living skills,” the report noted.

In other words, autistic girls might seem better at communicating, but that’s not bleeding into their ability to function at home.

How White Journalists Keep Getting Punked By Nazis

By Katherine Cross

It’s a fact that some Nazis have good manners and like binge-watching Netflix or eating with chopsticks. The problem is that the media lingers on those facts with an almost pornographic languidness, until they overwhelm every other fact about the person in a story that’s already too personal to begin with.

White nationalism and its related forms of right-wing radicalization are a social, structural problem, wired into systems so vast that any narrow focus on one man, by definition, misses what’s most important.

So why the fixation? We can only be blunt here: white, middle class journalists appear to be at once frightened and fascinated by the apparent niceness of some Nazis and white nationalists.

For Many Freelance Writers, Food Stamps Are The Only Way To Get By

By Emily Zak

Erica Langston went on food stamps after finishing a yearlong teaching fellowship in spring 2014. Twenty hours a week working at a ranch — and 15 hours writing — couldn’t pay the bills for the full-time grad student. Langston, a freelance journalist who was previously a fellow at Audubon and Mother Jones, says she couldn’t have focused on writing without government assistance.

“That upsets a lot of people,” she tells me. “The ability for me to step back and say, ‘I’m going to focus on writing. I’m going to continue to pursue writing.’ I don’t know that I would have been able to do that without food stamps.”

Save Your Apologies: Here’s What Women Need From Men Right Now

By Julie DiCaro

Women are the keepers of the misdeeds.

It’s the women, not the men, who catalog and remember which men to avoid, which men to run from, which men never, ever to be alone with. If you want to know if a Hollywood actor, pro athlete, or politician has a history of sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking, or harassment, ask a woman. We are the archivists of the wrongs.

Women don’t need your insipid apologies, faux shock, and awe at things you’ve known about for years, or explanations that you understand so much better now because you have a daughter. If you, man who has been a creep in the past or has stood by and laughed while his friends were creeps, really want to help change the world, here’s what we need from you…

Ho-Ho-Ho HO-LY SHIT

WHAT A COOL T-SHIRT!

Hello dear comrades,

Establishment co-founder and editorial director, Nikki Gloudeman, is teaching a class on the (complicated) essence of the pitch. Just how the hell do we choose the stories we do, you wonder? How can you stand out and craft the perfect pitch for editors when they’re largely grumpy, overwhelmed, and wading through the beautiful shit-storm of ideas writers are sending every. single. day?

Wonder not dear writers, for Nikki has all the answers!

OH! You’ll also get personalized feedback on pitches, as well as a detailed guide to pitchin’ post-seminar.

What are you waiting for?! Tune in, get published.