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Not what I looked like in 2021-2022. This is me when I was 14 years old. I found this photo when I was cleaning out my mother’s home after she died.
The beginnings of Wunderkammer: 2021 - 2022
When I first began this Substack in 2022, I was just about to publish my second essay for Nevada Humanities about my mom. She died in December 2021 from skin cancer that had spread to her bones. At the time, I had a Tiny Letter that I used to occasionally write to about 20 friends and acquaintances that I knew in person. After launching this Substack, I moved those 20 friends on over and began using my Substack to write through grief by turning my attention to things that provided a sense of wonder to me.
2022 was a very turbulent year. My family didn’t handle the loss of my mother very well and I was unfairly accused and blamed for my mother’s death, as if there was anything that could be done to save someone from terminal cancer. Grief can make people very unwell and very irrational. It isn’t only about feeling sad. Families that are already fractured from divorce or other issues can easily fall apart under the stress of loss. When my mom died the family that I knew collapsed.
At the end of 2022, a year after I lost my mother, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. I was writing essays here about grief when suddenly I was dealing with yet more grief. This loss was also difficult because of the ugly behavior of my family that I mention above, which had contributed to an estrangement between me and my dad who I was fairly close to prior to my mom’s death. They were long divorced and the fissures from their divorce opened back up.
Basically, I lost my dad when I lost my mom. He lived another year, but because he was being manipulated by other family members, he stopped speaking to me after an argument I got into with his wife. It happened very suddenly. There wasn’t much I could do. I knew things were bad when he refused to say hello or greet me at my mom’s funeral, even after I said hello and asked him for a hug. After the funeral, I never saw him again in person. It was all incredibly unnecessary and cruel. It made it very clear to me that we are living in an era of unprecedented cruelty and insanity.
When I think deeply about what happened, when I don’t look away from the loss of my mother and the sudden loss of my father, both within the span of a year, and both during the height of the pandemic, I can’t help but imagine that I’ve been transported to another life. There is a massive rupture there that isn’t easy to traverse. The only way to accept all of this is to live this life as if it were a new one. If I had tried to fix the old life, tried to hang onto it, I would have suffered so much more. It was clear to me that I had to let go.
When I look back almost all of the years of this decade so far have been extremely upending, sometimes on a macrocosmic level (2020), and sometimes on the microcosmic (2021 and 2022). It makes me long for a time when American culture was less chaotic and things weren’t so difficult. A time in my life when my family easily got together for dinners and parties and enjoyed being around each other. Perhaps you feel similarly?
Looking out at the world in awe
I started this Substack to heal myself through writing and to find a community at a time when I had lost so much. I was frustrated in not being able to publish my work as easily as I wanted to. I felt this sudden urgency to find a way to put my writing out into the world, to no longer hold it back.
As I began to focus on writing and creativity as a source of wonder, I started to want to interview others. I wanted to understand what other people are driven by and how they’ve created a life filled with art and literature. A desire of mine was to get out of my own head and to go beyond just writing a Substack that focused on what I was dealing with. To look out at the world in awe again.
Here’s what I publish here:
Conversations with other writers and artists
Essays about loss, grief, writing, poetry, film, theater, performance, art, beauty, philosophy and…
A creative manifesto that I’m working on
Poems
A novelette called 21st Century Leviathan - about the insanity of the 21st century American workplace
Room for other musings
I love Substack because every single day I learn something new here. I meet new writers and thinkers from all over who I would never have had the chance to meet before. I enjoy their writing very much. Some are extremely gifted writers whose work humbles me. Every day I read something so well written that it renews my hope in humanity. There is depth, creativity, and critical, independent thought within us still despite what social media and the Internet have done to language and our attention spans. The human spirit hasn’t been vanquished. It is very much alive. So there is hope.
The OG (wannabe)
Recently, I discovered Charlotte Dunn’s Lagoon. She re-introduced herself to her readers (as well as new readers) in a post with a questionnaire. I decided to piggyback off this (she’s aware) and am going to introduce myself to you all (for the first time) via the questions Charlotte created for her self-interview.
Who am I…
In short, I’m a multi-disciplinary writer and artist. I currently focus most of my energy on the written word. My work tends to interrogate metaphysical philosophical concepts and I also tend to veer towards surrealism or magical realism.
I was an editor for the literary magazine Interim. You can read the issues I edited here and here. I was also a reader for Witness.
For most of my 20s and part of my 30s, I focused my creative work on performance rather than the written word. I did write experimental performance, dance theater, and performance & video art. I have some of these performances in an archive online.
It took me a very long time to give myself the permission to be a writer, despite writing since I was a child. Maybe some of you have also struggled with this?
I wrote the choreopoem Echoes [1928 / 2005] Through, which was a finalist for the Lark Playwrights Week in 2008.
I founded the performance collective TASK 沖縄 with three others, where we created bilingual Japanese-English language experimental dance theater as well as some dance theater videos greatly influenced by Pina Bausch’s work. Here are two from our collection:
Siren Call (I will tell you something you do not want to hear) was screened at the Toride International Film and Video Festival in 2014.
A Trace of the Echo was presented at the 2013 Japan Writers Conference in Okinawa, Japan.
I have lived in Germany (near Heidelberg), England (London), Viet Nam (Saigon) and Japan (Okinawa), New York City, Tampa and Jupiter, FL. I currently live in Las Vegas.
I speak/read/write in German at the B1 level. I originally spoke it at the C2 level but am rusty. I speak/read/write Japanese at the JLPT N4 level (probably closer to N5 now, though I am still able to read katakana and hiragana and some kanji).
I am happily married to my husband and we share our home with two bulldogs.
I’m most proud of…
My resiliency. My integrity.
My creations often begin with this...
An image, an intriguing thought, a dialogue in my head around a philosophical question or issue, the sound of words. I’m also really interested in other people’s writing and ideas. I always look to engage in dialogue with work that moves me.
My Morning routine…
I’m NOT a member of the 5 a.m. club. I can often barely drag my ass out of bed to get to work on time.
My flow-state soundtrack…
Anything by Boards of Canada when I want to spend hours writing.
My style and dress…
Comfortable but stylish.
My workflow…
I approach work as a necessary task. It feels rewarding to complete work. Small steps every day.
My dream home…
A home with a beautiful lush garden near the ocean. If there are mountains involved, even better.
A few of my favorite things…
Island life, Hawaii, Florida sunsets, English gardens, Japanese gardens. Art. Poetry. Novels. Reading. Watching films or good TV. Delicious, healthy food. Relaxing with my husband and dogs.
Movies and TV shows that inspire me…
The OA (both seasons)
One Day (TV series)
Dune (2021)
La Chimera
2046
The English Patient
Ad Astra
Nocturnal Animals
also…this isn’t really inspirational but I love The Devil Wears Prada.
A memorable trip…
When I was 16, I flew by myself to Germany to live there for a year. It was the first time I traveled overseas and I didn’t know any German, nor had I ever visited the country. It was a life changing year. I suppose I could say that entire year was a memorable trip. But the journey itself to Germany, or what happened that same night as I was journeying, was very memorable.
While the flight to Germany was uneventful, I remember finally getting a chance to call my mom after landing and settling into a youth hostel with a large group of other exchange students. We were all going through an orientation before heading off to various assigned host families around the country. I was heading to Schwangau, a Bavarian village in the Alps that had the perfect view of Schloss Neuschwanstein.
When I finally called my mom she was relieved to hear my voice. She asked if I knew what had happened and I told her I had no clue. I was feeling very jetlagged and I remember wanting to go to sleep at 4 p.m. that day but was told not to. This was prior to smart phones, so information flowed much slower than it does now.
So she told me that there had been a terrible plane crash. While we were all on flights to Germany, TWA 800 had suddenly exploded midair. It was also heading to Europe and it also had exchange students on it (though they weren’t going to Germany).
I remember shrugging it off and not really understanding the impact it had on my mom. It wasn’t until years later, when I could finally grasp mortality that I understood.
Something I’ve wanted to do for a while, but haven’t done yet is…
Finish a novel and publish it.
Direct a film and enter it into festivals.
Something that holds me back is…
My job gets in the way of having enough time or energy to write. But I need to be able to pay the bills and eat.
Advice that lives in my head rent free…
Life is good. Have fun every day.
If I wasn’t me, I’d be…
A celestial being.
My favorite TikTok account is…
I don’t have TikTok and don’t go onto that platform.
Books I love…
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
Eva by Carole Maso
Jazz by Toni Morrison
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
God’s Ear (a play) by Jenny Schwartz
Dance Dance Dance and A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
The Body: an Essay by Jenny Boully
Nadja by Andre Breton
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell
An addiction…
Chocolate.
I’m in a complicated relationship with…
Gluten. I can’t eat anything with gluten in it but crave bread (esp. garlic bread), pasta, pizza and baked goods. I have to deny myself loads of delicious foods because of this. Gluten free versions are mediocre replicas.
A favorite poem or quote…
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. I continue to roll the last three lines around in my head on repeat lately. They have become a kind of mantra.
And here’s one of my favorite renditions of this poem. Soooo beautiful!
A few favorites from my camera roll, meme bank, or mood board….
Our doggies Bowser and Quinn
I invite you to take this same questionnaire as well and answer it in a post. Feel free to tag me and I’ll be happy to interact with it.
Thanks for reading!
- Autumn