On Writing #156 : LM Rivera

THE RULES OF

THE GAME

LM Rivera

I.

Often, when a writer bears upon writing itself, we (the reader) find ourselves afflicted—unless, in the most unusual of cases, the writer invents a fiction so consummate that a new kind of authorship is born.

&

There’s another way to bear upon the writing: write unto significance. Overpraise and bow to the proper name. Homage is an unequivocal way to confine the mistake of bad writing.

&

An author should live in Sicily with changed name.

&

Read Kafka. Read O’Connor. Read Antonin Artaud in Acireale.

&

Writing is agonistic. If there’s no blood, you aren’t doing it right. A smear on every page you send out into the world. Please, hold the pen like a just sharpened dagger.

&

A book is made up of screams. If you can talk, you aren’t doing it right. You can’t walk into a library with your eyes open, heart laid bare and bleeding. Platitudes are the kind of things that will get you killed.

&

When you send your work out into the wild, expect repudiation. If nothing happens: expect suicidal thoughts. Without a proper theology, you’ll be just another dumb detective.

&

I am irregularly Gregor Samsa.

&

A good detective will have a depleted and threatened family. How did we end up in this place? From my balcony, I have a palatial sense of minor and major verse.

&

And a godlike harmonics…

II.

She failed to write ideologically and, failing to do so, the end came near. Writers avoided her whenever they had the opportunity to.

&

She reads French fluently but the French writers she reads have fallen out of fashion.

&

She stops writing altogether. Quality of life promptly proliferating.

&

She possesses an intrepidity—she had never before been capable of.

&

She vanishes, now and then.

&

She felt the love a very young poet—a dialogic totality. One fine day, the young poet vanishes. He was not seen nor was he heard from again.

&

She tried to track him down, for a short time. But the attempt was half-hearted and incoherent.

&

She became, to other writers, an icon of each and every defect existing in the domain of poetry.

III.

He chose to write poetry in the same way we choose to defend our house against an intruder. You left the window slightly open and the masked man slipped inside—hushed and constant. You know the sound of your own house. You know the floors don’t make that noise of their own doing. You reach for the locked box underneath your bed. Your pregnant wife, in the deepest of sleep, next to you. The box is unlocked and, now, you are ready.

&

He continued to write, despite the fact that the work was quite bad. He read an immense amount and only what he believed to be the best of it.

&

He knew only other writers and wanted only to know them and them alone: exchanging poems, exchanging gossip, arguing many nights away, and ecstatically discussing literary futures and forthcoming subversions.

&

He wanted children but a poet can’t have a child, with the strange acquaintances coming and going—with trips to Rome, falling in the street, and people disappearing. Every now and then he thought of suicide as a romancing of the edge: to be hanged, by your own hand, by the neck till dead.

&

He grew older and grayer, at that very moment, a child appeared. He looked into the face of himself and was reborn—having, himself, done very little.

&

He writes a novel when the child sleeps—another contented insolvency.

&

Banality isn’t evil—banality’s a vulgar sleep.

IV.

I should like to attack another writer but this is simply not done anymore.

&

A famous writer insulted me at an academic soiree. My plans for revenge were thorough, meticulous, mendacious. I later came to find out that the famous writer was paid for the act—no surprise in the unearthing. The famous writer has an enormous readership. Financial goals are always met for a man of letters.

&

Two writers meet at the crossroads—neither believe in the validity of the other. At the corners of the four angles: a marble block, un-carved; a floating red sphere; an antique music box, golden; a rain thrashed wooden chair.

&

In Unamuno’s A Tragic Sense of Life, the writer dies with his pants on. If that isn’t blatant sentimentalism, I don’t know what is. Unamuno is the kind of great writer who might, given the right moment, poison your tea.

&

In our current climate, a writer’s meant to know where they are but seldom is this true. I opened the book and was disallowed from future party meetings. I was, after all, only there by happenstance. I’ve been incapable of moralism from a young age—as a young girl with a shaved head pontificates to a room full of aging painters.

&

Later, I called the famous writer at his home. The maid answered the phone. I told her what the writer had done. She took my name and number and said she’d like to speak to me again sometime alone.

&

I know that I am obsessed with writers, that I will continue to be, and its done me no good. A lunatic’s dreams restate themselves and no one knows why.

&

A book with no violence and a writer who doesn’t succumb to melodrama:  uninterestedness itself.

V.

When you use the word love, use also the word suffering. You’re disfigured from devotion, a being scrubbed of pleasurable particulates.

&

You get on a train. You sleep on a train.

&

In the desert of small pain, you cover yourself in melting ice—that does not last but for a moment. Wet clothes slows movement. But the slow comfort was preferred to that which soon materializes. The desert interminably arrives with a solid beam of burning light. The burns become signatures of the sun.

&

You love someone seemingly forever, then no longer there forever. One day, in the company of someone else, you’ll love them again forever. A demon rests in the relative concept.

&

You write a crazed murder ballad.

&

…The night collected their revolting dreams / Knives, glass, animals, and steam…

&

When you’re questioned by detectives, you realize you’re the prime suspect.

&

You start to resemble the desert when the frenzy takes hold. Memories collide with one another and roll themselves into dunes. Creatures, once tame, are now rabid, armored, drooling, and attack anything that moves.

&

The only cure for the desert is drinking. And you drink—drink till you vomit and back into the desert you go.

&

The detectives find a frenzied one with most of the incriminating evidence. It confesses to the crime.

&

You are left alone, innocently writing.

LM Rivera lives in Santa Fe, NM. He co-edits Called Back Books with his partner Sharon Zetter. His work has appeared in Alien Mouth, FUZZ, Mannequin Haus, DUM DUM Zine, and elsewhere. His chapbook THE LITTLE LEGACIES is available from Glo Worm Press and his first full-length book, The Drunkards, is available from Omnidawn.

On Writing #155 : George Bowering

Poly Oana craquer

George Bowering

            Each morning the first thing I do is to read some poetry before going downstairs to the daily paper’s prose. A lot of the books I have tried lately do not disresemble the latter enough. But the work (and play) of Oana Avasilichioaei has raised my hope for the future of our art. We do not really need poems that tell us what the poet saw and how he can make figurative language to give us his view of those things. We do not really need language that is passed over the counter by its baker. Ms Ovasilichioaei is environed by language as she is by any world she enters, and when you read you don’t read her version––you are too busy negotiating the pleasant difficulty of her pages. If you run into one another from time? Well, what a nice thing to experience first thing in the morning. This poet offers no Frostian conclusions, but possibilities leading in all directions. Judith FitzGerald was right when she wrote that you can’t really read the poems, but you can sure experience them––and if you do not want poetry to lull you, you will want that experience.

            Oana Avasilichioaei’s name is usually preceded or followed by the words poet, translator, editor, collaborator––and you always feel as if all those people are with you while you are experiencing her text. That text can make your eyes jump, maybe into the future. That translator makes you realize that your role is not to consume an English-language text that has replaced a French or Romanian original, but to engage happily with the difficulties of both languages. The poet is not here to enclose but to compose, i.e. to put something beside something. I think that she will continue the work of poets such as Fred Wah and Erin Mouré, to waken our ears and imaginations that have been stuffed up with the ordinary.

George Bowering’s 2018 books: Some End from New Star (poems); No One from ECW (fiction); plus in Nov., my biography by Rebecca Wigod, from Talonbooks.       

Aeolus House Press launch Sept 9, including The Undead by Colin Morton

Toronto-area poet and published Allan Briesmaster returns to Ottawa for a launch of new books and readings by Ariane Blackman, Stanley Fefferman, Thomas Gannon Hamilton, Penn Kemp, Brian Cameron, and Colin Morton. 
Admission free. Books for sale. Pressed's usual great menu.

Sunday, September 9th 4:00 – 6:00 at Pressed, 750 Gladstone Avenue Admission free. Books for sale. Pressed's usual great menu.
Sunday, September 9th 4:00 – 6:00 at Pressed, 750 Gladstone Avenue www.pressed-ottawa.com free admission – books for sale. One of the books being launched is The Undead by Ottawa’s Colin Morton, who describes his book at his webpage: https://colinmorton.net/2018/07/21/preview-of-the-new-chapbook/  

The Undead

They gave us their hearts

with leaky valves.

The tools they fashioned

hang on our walls

though we no longer reap or sow.

They lumber through our dreams

murmuring of blood

till morning mist rises

and we wake

wearing their faces, our voices theirs.

The Undead in the title of my new collection of poems are the ones who came before us, who in part made us the way we are, who defined the limits of our hopes. It’s spooky, but it’s not supernatural. Our collective history on this continent has been misrepresented, misremembered and, most often forgotten. Our settler ancestors have been too busy transforming the environment to really know and understand it, with consequences still to be seen. Some say the past is best forgotten, or better, repudiated. But not so fast. With no sense of the past behind us, the fast-approaching future haunts us.

Most of my forebears emigrated from England and Ireland directly to Canada in the 1830s and 1840s, but very soon, as they married the locals and became Canadian, their children and grandchildren had ancestors, through their Canadian spouses, who had been Champlain’s filles du roi or, like mine, had been Puritans and Separatists seeking religious freedom in New England in the 1600s. Even now immigrants from, say, Taiwan or Syria settle in Canada and before long, some of their children or grandchildren will probably be able to trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower. That’s part of our story, and it holds some of the answers to how our country got to be the way it is. Faulkner said “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”

Anyway, how about my book, The Undead?

Beginning with a family history compiled in 1927 and presented by his sons to my great-grandfather Eli Morton on the shores of Lake Simcoe north of Toronto, I try to follow the path Mortons and the neighbours they married trod from the northern States to the shores of Lake Simcoe (in what was then the Home District of Upper Canada). That was home to my great-grandfather Eli’s grandfather, Elder Squire Morton. An itinerant lay preacher, Squire ranged widely on his twice-yearly missionary trips, between Niagara in the west and Oshawa in the east, and he gave a corner of his farm for the first Methodist (“Christian”) church in the district. His grave marker in Unionville cemetery quotes New Testament scripture about having “fought the good fight” and continues with ever smaller, more cramped and illegible scripture, indicative perhaps of the sermons the elder gave in kitchens, school rooms, and on hillsides “from Sharon north to the lake.”

That evangelical streak, which continued well into the 20^th century in parts of the family, was deeply grounded on the other side of the family too. In my poems I’ve focused on only a few of them, because I have an idea of how quickly such stories get boring. Also, I don’t look only at my direct forebears – my interest isn’t about blood lines or even DNA, the family tree is wide. It’s the cultural baggage we carry (sure, white privilege, in my case) that I’d like to understand and, if possible, influence. In this I guess I’m like the radical preachers in colonial New England. Like Obadiah Holmes (actually my wife Mary Lee Bragg’s direct ancestor, as well as Abraham Lincoln’s), who took his thirty lashes at the Boston whipping post for false preaching and afterward said they felt like rose petals. Like Jonathon and Richard Dunham, alias Singletary, whose wanderings and rantings brought him charges of witchcraft in Salem (and whose descendant Barack Obama became president).

The Puritans arrived on the continent not so much as invaders but as refugees from religious discrimination, wanting to be left alone to create their new Jerusalem in peace,

where dwelt “none of contrary view”

Neither Quaker nor Baptist

nor vagrant nor vagabond.”

This sounds wrong to us now that diversity has replaced piety as a social virtue, and the Puritans’ wish to remain separate from the rest of the world was as doomed as that of the native peoples. But I’m afraid that their conviction they were saved and everyone else was damned got in the way of peace and respect and shades of the attitude still linger in some minds today, hindering us in getting to reconciliation. Just one of the ways the “undead” continue to haunt us.

A breaking point came in 1676 with what has been called King Phillip’s War. The war ended terribly for King Phillip, the Wampanoag chief who tried to take back the land he had sold. Many died in the fighting, but more from disease or starvation after being driven out of their villages. The rest were taken in and absorbed by neighboring tribes. English settlers suffered badly too: in proportion in the population, King Phillip’s War was more devastating than the Civil War two centuries later. A third of English towns and villages were destroyed or abandoned, including the “frontier” town of Groton, Massachusetts, where two of my direct ancestors (John Nutting and his son John) were killed, and another (Major Simon Willard) led the militia that raised the siege of the town. In the kind of collective punishment that I decried when practised against Sitting Bull’s Lakota in my book The Hundred Cuts, the Wampanoag and their allies attacked English farms at random, including the home of my ancestor Thomas Eames, who left an itemized account of every lamb, wagon, blanket and sack of corn he lost, beginning with “a wife and nine children.” The compensation awarded him by the colonial government after the war was “200 acres near to Mount Waite”; coincidentally “near to Mount Waite” in Rhode Island is where King Phillip’s home village had been located, the last piece of land he did not sell.

Working back through time, the way researchers do, my series attempts to wind back the centuries to the moment when a Wampanoag walked out of the forest and said to the Pilgrims, “Welcome English, let us help each other.”

Then I step back to the present, with the future careening toward us at a terrifying pace. We face tough challenges, steep odds. But then, so did they, the undead.

The Future

Have we all now turned millennial?

Après moi, you say, the year of the flood.

But we’ve seen the world end before, on the big screen,

and we feel helpless. Hopeless.

For each of us the future is brief.

Maybe that’s why imagination

turns dystopian. Without us, we say

the world will be empty, desolate.

Look back. They had so much

to look forward to then –

ourselves, strong and free,

wearing their faces.

We Who Are About To Die : Alyse Knorr

Alyse Knorr is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and editor of Switchback Books. She is the author of the poetry collections Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013), as well as the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Epithalamia (Horse Less Press 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press 2014). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.

Where are you now?
I live in Denver, where I teach English at Regis University.

What are you reading?
I recently finished Monica Youn’s “Blackacre” and now I’m reading “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin.

What have you discovered lately?
Lately I’ve been discovering the beauty of mathematics. Growing up I was always pretty afraid of math, since it didn’t come easy to me and I often felt frustrated that I couldn’t understand the simplest of concepts. But my colleagues in Regis’s math and chemistry departments have helped to show me the elegance of mathematics and the imagination and creativity involved in this discipline. Math is very similar to poetry, in its use of symbols and metaphor. I love to hear my colleagues talk about the beauty of their favorite equation, or the revolutions of geometry.

Where do you write?
I usually draft on my laptop on my living room couch and revise by hand on print-outs. Occasionally I also write on my desktop at work.

What are you working on?
I’m currently at work on two projects: an opera libretto about the life and work of Christine de Pizan, the world’s first professional woman writer, and a poetry project called “Wolf Tours” about a pack of wolves that runs a wilderness touring company in Colorado. 

Have you anything forthcoming?
Yes, I have a few poems forthcoming at print and online magazines, including a piece called “Epistemology of Wolves” that will be  published by Alaska Quarterly Review.

What would you rather be doing?
I love video games, baking, and running, and often wish I had more time to do all of these. I also really enjoy traveling and working on my new house. I’ve been learning how to tile and how to do basic plumbing and electrical work, but there’s never enough time to do all the projects I want to do!

Two poems

“Floating Epithalamium” at Alaska Quarterly Review

“Genesis” at Requited

On Writing #154 : Natalee Caple

What Makes a Good Gift in a Gift Economy[i]? Thinking about Selfhood and Responsibility in Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene

Natalee Caple

In my last book of poetry, The Semiconducting Dictionary (Our Strindberg), I wrote a poem in which I imagined being an August Strindberg imagining being the artist J.W. Turner, writing his will. The poem was loosely based on Turner's actual will but it was an exploration of what one person sees in another and, more specifically, what one artist, knowing themselves in all of their failings, sees in another artist who they admire. Although the point of view in that poem is nested (Caple as Strindberg as Turner), my favourite lines of that poem are in first person: "I did not paint the sea I painted / What the sea painted in me.".

I wondered if it was that feeling of the chaos inside made visible that I felt looking at Turner's paintings that might have drawn the notoriously ill-tempered, perpetually embattled Strindberg to the seemingly generous (but secretive) Turner. In that book I performed a kind of feminist occupation of the playwright (who I imagined as a woman living as a man and his famous misogyny as part of the disguise or else self-loathing) that became loving but was always attuned to using a character, one that was, in many ways, performing a life and the experiences of a historical person, but who was clearly layers of me thinking about that life and the gendered political themes of the age. I was both Strindberg and his cruel director. It was me who pinned Strindberg to Chekhov, Marx, Darwin, and a train. It was me who never gave him a heroic moment, a cure for his ailments, or even a bathroom break. I may have come to love a Strindberg, but my love benefitted neither the character nor a lifeform once named August Strindberg. 

When I wrote my last novel, In Calamity's Wake, I did something similar (but perhaps feeling closer identification) with Calamity Jane and numerous historical contemporaries. In that book I explored voice and I tried to restore voice to many, but I also explored the damage that celebrity and cultural use of a figure do to any chance of locating or fixing a stable understanding of personhood or selfhood behind a name. Of course, I wanted to acknowledge that a name can have expansive social meanings the name-haver has no control over, can become symbolic in ways the embodied does not choose. As in Our Strindberg, the character of Calamity Jane is shown to be a vehicle for the fantasies and concerns of many. I also wanted to restore a sense, however ephemeral, of a living breathing woman obscured within the twisty puzzle of mythmaking -- a puzzle that did not provide the literal woman food, shelter, money, or protection. I wanted to see her life valued, beside countless unnamed others like her (the working poor), and understood as precious simply for having been.

With my new book of poetry, Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene[ii], I ruminate publically on the way I hide myself in every character, in every poem. What I show is never the real world (the sea) or people as they are, but it is a world made in me by sharing place and time with others (what the sea painted in me). I wondered about my ethics in animating long dead figures who have no chance to protest my politics (though I still love those characters). I decided to deliberately and consciously explore the productive nature of lively literary friendships and/or influences and to offer my explorations as gifts that could be directly accepted or refused. I also decided to speak more directly and more often as myself. At first, I began this with wholly positive intentions. That book would have been my love letter to CanLit. I held the concept of community in inestimable esteem without considering that "communities" also do terrible things.

Many of the poems in the book are still loving and fun and meant to affirm the receiver in the way that gifts can say, Iin all of what happens in life I want you to know that I see you, I believe in you. I am invested in believing that fun poems matter and teasing poems matters. Happiness is a profound emotion worthy of exploration. However, because things in my life and various communities complicated themselves, and that is what happens (the writing of every book is a part of one's life), the resulting content of the book was affected by the conditions under which it was produced in ways that I think are more visible because there is no historical draping, no hiding in costume to say what has happened. These conditions included both personal joys and tragedies as well as global news in which I heard echoes from the lives of other women across time, specifically in relationship to the #MeToo movement, but also to people living, loving, and dying together in complex relationships. The result was a book of poems I wrote as gifts that externalize the effects of other people and their work on me and my work as well as processing my experiences (especially) as a woman prior to and during the writing of the book.

  

Several thinkers deeply influenced key parts of my thinking around the ethics of this project: Donna Haraway's concept of "tentacular thinking" about finding "kin" in the world, in animals, and the environment, as well as with each other, to live and die together profoundly (she says "potently") in an age that is not all about humanity.[iii] Haraway follows after Hortense Spillers, who talked about "kinship" and survival for Black women as early as 1985. Sarah Ahmed's thinking about feminist living, and Margaret Christakos's term "influency," were important to me as well. Christakos coined the term "Influency," for her reading series where writers reflect at length on each others' work. All of these thinkers helped me to imagine how reading and writing together might be part of a fluent exchange outside of capitalist economies, part of a way of acknowledging that we make each other and that we must figure out how we will "be" together.

Anthropologists, philosophers, and literary theorists have considered the gift and gifting at length (Marcel Mauss, for example). For me, thinking about gift processes and how they might differ from citation illustrated the many ways that citation and gifting are both part of complex social relationships that rely on fuller contexts. Citation and gifting are not identical processes with identical obligations. Neither can ever be neutral processes. Both are entangled in histories. Both also reflect privilege and have social outcomes. Reading and writing are themselves privileges as well as social outcomes, with social implications, and consequences. Citation carries with it responsibilities to tracing origins in ways that are both necessary for respectful discourse and dangerously patrilineal (as well as white) in design, given the ways that origins have historically been traced in Western Eurocentric culture. In academia, we cite as if we need not ask, and sometimes poor use can be made of another's voice. Worse, a failure to cite, particularly ideas that originate outside of recognized genres of publishing, amounts to erasure[iv]. But if citation carries certain perils and limits, so too does gifting. The good gift in a gift economy relies on complex listening and consent, ongoing relationship, and a willingness to accept that what was a good gift in concept may not be a good gift in fact.

Much more important to the good gift than the intentions of the giver, is what actually does happen, or could happen as a result of the gift, as well as the context and mode of gift giving. For example, a private gift is a very different thing from a public dedication with permission. To ask permission of a much more famous person, or a stranger for a dedication, might ask for or pressure endorsement for my own book (whereas citation carries no obligation of acknowledgment). To ask permission for public dedication of a very close friend for a poem that is about #MeToo or grief or cancer or orgasm may have other emotional pressures attached. The receiver may be made vulnerable by such a gift. And there are good reasons why accurate citation or elision are better practices for some works in terms of authorial freedoms. For example, if one chooses to write about current events using the names of public figures, or to write back to writers one disagrees with, then the freedom to be critical in print or to participate in public discourse without asking permission to disagree is important as well. Agreement has little value where disagreement is not allowed. Or, perhaps one wishes to speak frankly of one's own experiences and not violate the rights of others by naming them. One may choose elision over citation at times for practical reasons, for example if one does not want to be sued over a poem.

In the case of most of the poems in Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene I gifted poems to people as they were written, and then, in advance of publication, I asked for permission for public dedication. In some cases, across the process, I wrote poems that people said they did not want and those poems were deleted from my hard drive – they will never exist in any form because that is not a good gift. A giver must consider the impact and implications of their gift and people must be able to refuse for any reason or none. This is particularly true when thinking about privilege in a world where historically some "gifts" have had devastating consequences.

An unanticipated part of the process was that I had to consider that I did not think as well in new forms about my ethics and I had to adapt. When I first began drawing or making prints of people, such as the ones that appear in the book, I did not always ask for permission or think about the ethics of reproducing a face because I thought it was only for myself, a way to cope with deep depression and loneliness by conjuring beloveds on paper when I did not feel capable of bringing myself to their persons. Not being a visual artist, I did not give the thought to drawing that I would give to writing about a living person. Later, when I saw a connection between the poems and pictures I asked permission for dedication, showing each person the context in which their likeness would appear in the project. Now I ask permission before drawing anyone and understand better the responsibility of the visual artist to consider what constitutes acceptable use of their own vision (as a literal sense as well as a metaphor).

In a very few cases, (for example, Leonard Cohen and Taliesin) I knew from the beginning that I would be unable to obtain permission for my work without a time machine and it should be considered that those poems exist without permission (for now). I'm not saying that is OK but it is the choice I made. In some cases, I was no longer in contact with people whose work I reflected on, things change rapidly in charged times, but at the time of the poems' creations I had notified those people and obtained their approval. For the sake of history, I chose not to erase those people or poems – I kept those poems in. I felt it best to still say how it was / who it was I considered. My intentions may be received, as I hope, as respectful, but they may not be. My choices come with the consequence of potential criticism, and criticism, even harsh criticism, is the right of all readers.

I tried with Love in the Chthulucene / Cthulucene to think critically about how we make each other, how to be together ethically, as writers and as people and on the planet. This will be an ongoing practice. There were many influences I was unable to adequately capture. I didn't come up with a plan for the world's future. I used reading and writing to learn about selfhood, to learn how to speak as myself and to recognize my privilege, and to explore new forms and ideas and push back and participate, and all of those are lively processes that change. I am not a model reader or even a particularly good person (I know myself in such excruciating detail). But I did and do experience thinking on and with others' work as a gift for which I am grateful in my marrow. In the light of that gift, I go on. I go forward thinking about myself as one of some, and considering my enmeshed obligations as a friend, a person, a writer, a professor to make and keep space for others past present and future.

Natalee Caple is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. Her latest book of poetry, Love in the Chthulucene/Cthulhucene (from which these poems come) will be out with Wolsak and Wynn in Spring 2019, and her chapbook Love/Wildness appeared earlier this month with above/ground press. Natalee is an associate professor at Brock University.

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[i] Gifts and Gift economies have been widely studied and theorized in anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism and elsewhere (by Marcel Mauss and many others). This essay is a personal essay about my own recent experience and thinking on that experience and does not claim to have discovered anything for the first time.

[ii] Haraway explicitly distances her concept of the Chthulucene from the literary monster Cthulu. It seems very likely she would not approve of my own letter reversal that lets the monster back in. I say this to note that it is me who let the monster in and could not leave off thinking about an age of monsters and/or monsters as expressions of human and/or authorial guilt, even as I knew that is not what Haraway wanted or meant when she coined the term Chthulucene.  

[iii] I feel ambivalent about my privilege when attempting to think outside of humanity, or even outside of oneself, in that, though I do believe it is necessary thinking for our planetary survival, I also think that it is not a privilege that all people are in an equal position to consider.

[iv] It's worth noting that I have performed such an erasure as I mention here by skipping to my personal essay instead of setting up my use of "The Gift" or "gift economies" within the scaffolding of broad citation.

Ahmed, Sarah. Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2017.

Haraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2016..

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2011. (reprint of 1954 American edition)

Spillers, Hortense. "Kinship and Resemblances: Women on Women": Review essay: Feminist Studies; Spring 1985, Vol. 11, p111-125.