The dog is snoring with his eyes open. I wanted to ask if I snore with my eyes open. It was really freaky when I first woke up and saw his eyes were open and he was snoring.
I used the baby dolls in my metaphor about consent because baby dolls have their eyes open, and we really don’t know if they are sleeping or not. You have to check, I said. You have to flash a light back and forth in their eyes. I think it was the sharpie somebody had scrawled on one of their foreheads that said ‘this baby doll is alive.’
Gene cooking meat on the stove, something he does for stress-relief
Sia has this song called “Alive” in which she sings about being on a one-way track to the place where all the demons go, no hope, just lies.
That’s what I think of institutions
for people who deal with PTSD
She was probably talking about Rehab
Little Sia is doing karate in the music video
Wax on, wax off
Little Sia is a dancer
I think of all the articles about how queer night clubs have lost their place as a staple among our community and wonder why and what has taken its place. In Minneapolis, there is a thriving artist scene. Is that what has stepped up to fill the shoes of the prodigal, or is it just the circles I am in? Either way, it’s hard to find your own people. I’m sure you just got to keep doing the damn thing until something clicks.
Rorschach Buttons
Sometimes, I think objects work like one giant Rorschach test.
Yesterday, I used a clip from a preview for Peripheral to help my female friends understand when they are viewing my Story on social media they are in essence playing in a simulation as me. In the clip from the tv show, the brother is given a beta VR headset to test but wants his sister to play as his avatar since she is much better at it. In the clip I play, they are counting back from ten, and she is going on as his avatar before I transition into pictures from my life from my POV. I want them to understand as they view, since sometimes I feel their strange reflections are an attempt to interpret 'me.'
In the tv show, the brother is psychically linked to others in his combat squad by a piece of tech called 'haptics.' They can tune these and know how each other is feeling or what they are experiencing. This is a little like trans people, especially those of us who have had the modifications. The mods really fuck them up and not just physically, though, but knowing what each other feels.
Today, the song that I used to accompany the simulation of my POV, "Something is Happening and I May Not Understand But I'm Happy to Stand for the Understanding (Awakening)" by André 3000 from Transa, started playing just as I got in my vehicle. It's a song my mom said sounded like a videogame, and I realized that some force out there was trying to flip the script and pretend like I was the sister Flynn playing as the brother in my life as a virtual reality that is actually the future. It tripped me out for a second - only a second before I recalled that my hands are the same size as the Muslim man's at work - M, then my hands went right back to the way they normally look. They're an artist's hands, but I had imagined them frailer and smaller than they actually are.
It's interesting how people perceive things- as if I had perceived women or the essence of femininity as frailer and smaller than me. This is such a masculine way of viewing.
Today, I got the little "Senorita" cigars by Ashton because they were cheaper and had the most in the pack, and some man said he had not imagined the power of the force, and all I could think is, sure, dude, at least now I'm smoking a woman. It's funny how we must justify things in our heads. I would never buy these cigars normally because of what they are called. They were just good quality and cheaper, and maybe that is what makes me a man.
At home, there are two items in my living room that I find perpetual amusement and irritation with in my living room that always seem to end up in pictures: my broken vacuum and the cat pole my friend bought for Lucy. There really is nowhere to put the vacuum but the trash, yet I think of the Rorschach test, and vacuums and vacuuming make me think of the vacuum process in abortions. It's odd really; I'm not sure how that association came to be in my head. And every time I see Lucy on that cat pole, I'm like, baby kitty, what did daddy tell you about climbing stripper poles! Then, I laugh, and am just happy that she is not tearing up my leather couch.
I think of Getrude Stein's Tender Buttons and her poems on objects and wonder if she laughed when she wrote that lily whites who exhaust noise and surface and dust and dirt any surface for no necessary reason need a catalogue.
1st Generation Internet Kid
“You’ll have a chance at true freedom—of body and soul.” --Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
In 1981, Jean Baudrillard postulated that we were creating a “hyperreality” where simulations of reality precede and define the real, rendering the real and original indiscoverable. He suggested that had replaced reality with symbols, signs, and media representations.
In 2012, Instagram rose in popularity, and like many by 2014, I became a pretty heavy user of it and witnessed the creation of this “hyperreality.”
At what point did we just stop giving a damn about our friends?
In the 2013 film Ender’s Game, child prodigy Ender Wiggins is recruited with a bunch of other youngsters and trained into fighting what he is led to believe is a formidable enemy, an alien species called the Formics. Ender is chosen because he is neither too violent nor too kind. Much of their training proceeds through simulation. During his training, he starts having visions that lead him to believe that the Formics might be an intelligent species with a desire for communication. Too late he realizes that the simulations are real and that he has ordered the genocide of an entire species.
I’m not sure what I like so much about this film. Maybe it is that due to the conditions of my upbringing I can relate quite a bit to Ender. Because I had a very inquisitive brain, I was constantly put in new situations and presented with new challenges. My team existed before Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok when a generation of kids discovered each other through message boards, game chats, and revealed their stats. I’m not entirely sure what a 1st generation Internet kid has to say about the simulacra we have created now.
I think about my upbringing and this idea that life is a game we are training in and how often we are presented with the idea of wiping out the alien species that ‘poses a formidable threat,’ and I think of another piece of entertainment, the banned book An Ember in the Ashes. In it, the jinn have sought their vengeance on the Scholars by giving power to the Martial Empire to lord over them after the Scholars tricked the jinn and lesser creatures into giving up their mystical secrets and wiped them out. Yet Aspirant Elias has no desire to become powerful or cruel like his mother and grandfather or rule over the Scholars. He wishes to be free of his fate or imagines if ruling the Martials would live as equals with the Scholars. When put to the test of loyalty, he is unable to kill the Scholar spy and only wishes he had chosen his own death before killing his own men to prove his strength. As he steps into the darkness, escaping into the catacombs with the Scholar spy, he realizes those are his first steps into freedom.
Applying as ‘Out’: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Still, I recommend it.
You are writing a cover letter or grant proposal, trying to pitch a book, or hot damn, just want to take somebody out on a date, and you are gay or trans and sitting there thinking to yourself, Do I tell them? For some trans people, concealing transness, whether because they can go stealth or because they have weighed the cost of passing as the wrong gender and still can and think it is worth it, seems plausible; while for others, this option is not even possible. Although I cannot stealth, I have fully transitioned socially, legally, and physically, and this blog entry is going to be an insider’s composite wisdom on how workplaces have reacted to me at various stages in my transition.
Coming out while Working
Whether you are coming out as a new gay or later as trans, you may think that your coworkers are going to be happy for you and celebrate you, but they are not. If they did not know already, you are probably going to get fired. Have a new job lined up. Same goes for entering a new relationship if you started the workplace as a single queer person. Have a new job lined up if you plan to tell them that you have entered a new queer relationship.
Changing Names while Working
Sometimes, it may seem safer to start in the closet in climates such as ours. It’s not. When people find out (and they will) that you have a preferred name or different gender identity, they will start harassing and bullying you based on information associated with the wrong gender.
I have entered the workplace under a former name and a preferred name. When I started with my preferred name, it was more just that the employer was concerned that it was too slow going for me to be always correcting customers and vendors with the saying, “Me llamo es Gene. Mis pronombres son ellos/aquiellos.” The other employees were mostly okay or thought it fun and like working with a trans person was a trick of magic. When I started with the wrong name at another place then changed it, my fellow employees were insistent upon deadnaming and misgendering me. They would make excuses like, ‘oh, I forget,’ 'or ‘I’m sick,’ or ‘you have boobs, though, that’s so hard to remember with what I see in front of me,’ even the queer ones.
Physical/Legal Transition While Working
It’s worth it, but they will fire you since they now cannot legally get away with misgendering and deadnaming you and must actually change their behavior.
Applying While Out
You are mostly respected if you get hired. However, there are bizarrely different standards for you than other people. It’s really hard to find work as a transsexual, and I’m not sure if federal law is really what is holding them back, but transphobia.
As of Tuesday, 1/27, I resigned from my job at FedEx out of principle. It’s not that there were not also good people there; it’s that I could not continue to stand by a company that did not even reprimand my coworkers for clearly racist remarks. This clear racial profiling amongst my coworkers of the communities we served and defense of their right to collaborate with ICE on these matters demonstrated poor judgment and a misunderstanding of the peoples of and lengthy history of emigration in Minnesota. I am still new to learning this history, though I was born and raised here, but I am not new to the racial demarcation.
Because my resignation was more of a swift blow to me than The Man, though hopefully quite the statement I intended it to be, I was forced to be reliant upon my community for support. They came through.
Today, I am not without my vice/habit (tobacco). I was able to get a haircut and put food in the fridge. & I will not be defaulting on my mortgage payment this month with threat of being put out on the streets in winter shortly thereafter.
Eugene’s 2026 Reading List
I’ve had more time to read.
I hope that by following my ethics on these matters and doing what I believe was the right thing to do that more doors will be open to me.
This Entry Will Be Entirely Too Personal
I need an oil change and a haircut, but I am almost out of money. I have not been paid by my job since December, though I am technically still employed. They say I have been on an unpaid medical leave, but according to Minnesota’s Paid Leave Law, I should be being paid 55-90% of my wages. I am on leave because I requested an accommodation for a disability in October, an accommodation which was originally denied, then offered an unfair accommodation or the choice to try to seek unemployment. While doing on site work, I reported several instances of sexual harassment and racist remarks, specifically against the Somali communities we service. Shortly thereafter, my approved accommodation expired, and they put me on unpaid medical leave until further notice, and I would later learn that they are collaborating with ICE.
I need another job.
Not only have they been violating my rights as a worker and patient, but they are collaborating with ICE. I have a right to remain silent and not collaborate with ICE. I do not have to allow them entry into my neighborhoods.
I think about this as thousands of ICE agents are spreading across the metro area and greater Minnesota and our governor and Lieutenant Governor are calling upon us to stand together as one community against this threat, and the call could not be more loud.
Official Statement on SAFTA residency
Hi, all,
I am issuing an official statement about my brief writer's residency at SAFTA Firefly Farms in Knoxville, TN, this second week of January 2026.
I sought this residency in August 2025 for research on farm life for my syfy fiction on collective resistance and revolt against the elite class. Before arriving, I had already finished the 4th draft of this novel and sent it off for consideration to a publisher.
SAFTA reached out to me at the first week of January 2026 with a last second opening for a farmhouse residency shared with another unknown resident, and I accepted. I am currently working on 2 fiction sequels.
I arrived at the farmhouse, and the situation seemed agreeable to the other resident who would be in charge of the farm, and Erin and the other resident seemed very empathetic toward the oppression I experienced on the drive down from MN to TN. Security had been called on me at a restaurant then dismissed after I paid because "I was a real T." Apparently, in the South; you can't be a drag, but if you have legally transition, they can't do anything about your presentation. There were also cops all along the interstate from I-94 to I-90 to I-65 and a blockade of several cops in Kentucky. Having returned to Minneapolis now with our Ice crisis, I cannot say that it is worse. They are killing people here. We are in a war zone.
Upon arriving in a red state like Knoxville, TN, with its peaceful streets, I realized that we are in a Civil War. I was grateful for this brief opportunity to escape and hopeful that I would get to work on my writing and scared at the same time that I may not be safe, since I deal with PTSD, and even the safest of environments can be triggering.
The first night there I found a book on the shared return to shelving bookshelf with what looked like a toy closet next to another book that looked like a prison with the word "Subhuman." I am not entirely sure why I was browsing these books - perhaps to see what the other two residents had been browsing, or to see if there were any books of interest there for me, since there really were not in my hidden bookshelf. These two books paired together, though, were very triggering for my PTSD as I had a flashback to being locked in a toy closet with the lights out during nap time by a childcare provider as a child while my siblings got to watch tv. I remember later in life feeling like I had been treated as 'subhuman' as a child. I spent my first afternoon on the farm paralyzed in my room by these two damn covers.
After I came out, the other resident of the farmhouse and I discussed how we were both triggered at first when we got there, but that it was much better now. I was able to turn to my writing and eat. I came to the realization that I can only eat in a place when I feel safe.
Soon afterward, I began noticing the magnets on the refrigerator and their sexual remarks. I tried to discourage them because I do not just hook up with people. Like any person, though, I also feel sexual energy, especially when a sexual environment has been created, and am on testosterone. I did not feel like I should be feeling this way and worried that my energy might be being disruptive, so I spoke to the other resident since she was in charge of the buildings and asked to be moved to another building. I explained that she seemed cool and that I wanted an authentic connection with her but that I was getting sexual energy. She said no, stay, and that there was a chipmonk up there, and that she just felt platonic and to stay away if I felt sexual. I agreed that this would not be a problem.
Later, she called the owner and reported that she felt "uncomfortable" and the owner called me and said that I had to go because I was "sexually harassing" her, though she was the one calling me beautiful and "girl," though I am a man, and putting sexual remarks on the fridge.
After I cleaned up and left peacefully, I realized there was something off about the situation. The other resident in a moment of confidence had confessed that her family had been a part of an African cult when she was a child and that they were Baptists and Methodists now in Georgia and working with the FBI. When she told me this, it had not quite registered that she might have mistook me for an agent since I had identified the place as a rainbow sheep farm to a friend, or that she might actually be there to observe and report on the activities of the farm and trans people, specifically.
Trans people are currently being monitored by the FBI right now, especially those who have been involved in Palestinian activism or other forms of activism, and I, most certainly, am one of those people.
I am not 100% certain, but it feels a little like she was trying to set me up. I'm glad I got out of there safely. Unfortunately, because of her accusations, my bridge has been burned with SAFTA. The owner does not seem to understand that they or she had control of the temperature and other environmental factors of the building through a Nest.
I have returned to MN and wish them the best in the world and hope for their safety. If there are any governmental officials monitoring me, you can sure bet that you will continue to be reading my great literature, and so, too, will everyone else.
I’m on Trump’s Naughty List
Insert Future Announcement (hopefully!!)
When I first released my statement on Project 2025 in November of 2024, I predicted based on its AI summary that it would seek to promote policies that emphasize division based on identity. The summary suggested that at the hands of a conservative think tank we would be “restoring constitutional governance, reducing the size of government, and ensuring that the judiciary aligns with conservative principles”; however, in reading closer, I identified that there would be more government tracking of our data and more government influence on states and individuals. Additionally, when Project 2025 discussed restoring constitutional governance, it talked about retracting amendments as related to Civil Rights legislation; whereby, ignoring the legal system implemented in our country for a version of their own choosing. Scroll down my Blogs to read more.
This was never about traditional family and Christian values. We, the people, have been holding Trump and the system accountable, and trans people have been unrelentless in this effort. This is about power. Those in power have lived corrupt lives, have been corrupt in office, and have gotten to office by means of corruption and intimidation. We call their values to question and the very lives they model that they wish us also to live.
Lucy looking at ‘yo daddy’s kitchen’
I have been between working class and lower middle class all my adult life. I know what work is. I understand wanting to have enough to leave behind something for your children or to help your community, and what if your community is your country. Yet our country, our great United States of America, consists of more than one people. We are a land of many peoples, of many identities. We are the land of both the descendants of those enslaved and slaveholders, but also, immigrants who never knew slavery but were part of feudal and class warfare. We are people who lived this land before us. We are many colors and religions. Each culture has its own belief or view and acceptance of sexuality and gender. The purpose of laws is to protect the most vulnerable, and the most vulnerable are those of us with different abilities, yet these laws are often more of a prison and a confinement than a protection of our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Gene’s holiday greeting card
For this, I am on Trump’s naughty list, for thinking that the corrupt who live lavish lives and exploit the helpless in all manner of ways do not deserve the right to decide our fates.
Happy Birthday 2025
Bodies in Transition has now reached the hands of 100 people!
Data suggests that self-published authors only sell on average 50-100 books. I’m here to tell you that your dream is possible. Independently published through Amazon KDP with a little help from my friends over at Jack Wild Publishing, Bodies in Transition has now reached the hands of a little over a 100 people. What wonderful news to realize during my birthday week!
I’ll be at Queer Market at Open Book on Nov. 29th, and I hope a few more friends decide my book is worth the read. Regardless, I am plucking away at my other two prospective books (1 fiction, 1 poetry) and trying to figure out my best options for them. Please come see me at Queer Market and support, however that looks- whether that means buying a Zine or chatting me up about my latest books I’m writing!
As a final bit of author announcement to wrap up this post, I took First in the Stevens Family Award at the 2025 Minnesota Poetry Prizes Gala with my poem “Sham’s Tomb.” It was a wonderful surprise with mixed feelings as I have recently lost an old family friend. I was not entirely close with her, but I grew up with her kids, and it was just such an odd coincidence to receive an award by the same name the month of her death. Rest in peace.
Everyone Should Tell You That You’re Gonna Lose
Very few people are prepared for failure. In fact, not a lot of people know how to deal with the fact that you win very little in life.
I remember my first encounter with this notion in undergraduate college when one of my favorite professors told the class the percentage of students who would likely go onto graduate school and make it into the profession. I don’t remember the exact number; it was extremely low, hardly a percentage point or two. I just remember some students in the class complaining that she should not be saying that and me thinking that it is important to know what we are getting ourselves into and the statistical rates of success. Because I maintained being on the dean’s list in undergrad and president’s list in graduate school and was rewarded with marginal successes through writing in my program, I had no real idea what failure meant.
It started with getting rejections on my poetry and stories after college. You hear all these things about the number of places you need to send your work before you get accepted and the tiers, but it is hard to imagine. You have specific places in mind. You heard about a place. You want it there. You receive a rejection. Best of luck placing it elsewhere and feel free to send us future work. Now where? Is everyone submitting to the same places? What makes your work a good fit?
Failure became a person, became an embodied text, became a life.
In a society that classifies things as a competition, where there are winners and losers, I became a discard because I was not a good fit. I was too queer but not lesbian or a gay man. I was too trans but not flexible to my audience’s demands. I was white and had been born into an upper middleclass family but had lived in poverty and been houseless despite being educated. I had been in a civil commitment.
These are all classifications that privilege and disadvantage me.
The more I have accepted that I am going to lose; the more grateful I have become for my successes. The more I understand their great significance and that they have absolutely no significance at the same time in the bigger picture of the universe.
There are as many of me as there are people in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Yemen, and Syria.
Have You Changed Yet?
We live in a world where trans people are constantly being asked to change to accommodate the already comfortable. Because 98.8% of the population does not undergo a profoundly, life-altering change, about half this population has a hard time understanding basic human decency and respect. They put the onus on the trans person, deflecting the responsibility to change with the person who has undergone a life-altering change like you would with any other change.
While some trans people integrate parts of their past selves into their identity, others are okay with letting the past die. Still, others have little memory of it or have different perspectives from those who remember them otherwise. Remember when you scolded your children for taking a picture of your one son in a dress and not the other one you would later realize was a boy? Why do we shame men so much in culture for expressing queerness or alternate masculinity, even as little boys.
This other queer boy has grown comfortable with himself. He understands that he does not have to change his personhood for anybody and that it is other people’s bodies that are inviolable. He can say no, even when all others doubt him. He believes in the enthusiastic yes. He is realness unmasked.
Have you changed yet?
Tis the Season
Or, how to take accountability for what a million people probably have never read or will never read and when you already have taken accountability with the people who matter
In my teens, I wrote a blog. A lot of us did. Nowadays, some might call it a glorification blog, but really, I think it was the place I went to find safety from being judged. My friends on there truly cared about me, and I truly cared about them. We were not encouraging each other in the activities necessarily; we were interested in the fuckedness of the lives each of us was in. We reached out and supported each other, especially when it got bad.
I think these kinds of spaces are concerning for many, and in my memories of what I wrote, and the language I created so we could better hide our sicknesses, I know they have their downsides. Even now, when I think about getting a “breath of fresh air,” I think about going out for a smoke. I am not sure how much responsibility you can put on a teenager, but this secret language is something harmful that I created.
Over the years, I have reached out to the specific people I have harmed by my actions and behaviors, taken responsibility, and apologized and done my best to make amends. It’s not that I have been through an anonymous program or anything like that. It’s that I unlearned what I was taught by a therapist as a teenager to do.
In my teens, because I was already a writer, my therapist taught me to create characters and assign them different behaviors and personalities and write about them in a setting in which they could have a dialogue. Later in life, I realized she wanted to prove a diagnosis that is actually a myth by creating the appearance of it. This diagnosis has historically been assigned to queer/transgender people as a way of pathologizing them ever since transsexuality was removed from the DMSV as a mental illness. At the time, I was expressing queer desire and exhibiting abnormal behavior for the social constructs of the gender to which I had been socialized.
But this is not about that. This is not about that timid boy who no longer had a team to play basketball with, so he picked up smokes because it looked cool.
This is about that boy who brought alcohol over to parties. This is about that boy who walked in on guys having sex with girls in their mom’s bedroom and just walked out without making sure it was consensual.
This is about that boy who called a girl fat online in his blog because she said cutters were just looking for attention or crying out for help. Kids can be really mean, even he could be really mean when ashamed.
That boy was me before I even had the words for it, when I thought of myself as a girl because of how I had been socialized. And I am sorry for it. I am sorry for the Xangas and thinking that I could handle it. Mostly, I am sorry to you, if you ever read them. At the same time, I hold my teenage self in a place of understanding that there is only so much judgement you can pass on a child.
To all the genes in me
Man, I can’t tell you where I thought I would be years ago. I was fresh out of grad school, starting on as a lecturer at the University, mad in love with this girl – I think she kind of liked me, too, but I was a wild one.
Do you remember walking around that neighborhood with her and her telling you which houses she liked and would live in and talking about her faith and you getting real deep into faith and going on a trip out West and having this dream and thinking she is the one? That’s wild, man, in a different way! Never tell people you barely know that you think they might be the one.
But it makes sense, you know. She pointed you to a path of purpose and light. Before that, you were just whiskey, cigarettes, and guts on a page for awhile.
What about before that?
I hardly remember being 16. That’s when I had my first drink and cigarette, my first kiss.
16 is really a turbulent time. By then, you’re expected to know what to do with all the new information you have been learning about the world. You were always such a seeker. You questioned things so deeply and profoundly. You saw the darker side of things. Do you remember being a child of 6 when it was all just noise in the trees? Before you started questioning things like hell, and there were just trees and riding bicycles in the gravel and playing in the sand, and it was all so green then, and there could not have been bluer skies down by the lake. But you remember the darker stuff, too, like almost dying twice before eight.
Some people talk to God because they fear dying or going to hell. I talk to God when I’m hurt or want to figure out how to treat others better. There is a way I try to be that I think makes the world a better place is to recognize the good in people, or namaste. I don’t think that means having no boundaries, or that there aren’t people out to harm, but if we recognize the divine in people, we recognize that they are free agents of creation and destruction and try to bring that forth in them.
The creative in me calls to the creative in you.
Academia is a Privileged Institution I am Grateful to Be in & What it Takes to Write a Book
I’m imagining I can write about this topic better than a john, not that he did not do a fine job encapsulating the struggles of being part-time faculty and trying to write a book. But I am, as Janelle Monáe so remarkably captured it in her short story collection The Memory Librarian and Other Stories, a Dirty Computer after all. Our fearless leader Alice in her psychic renderings understood perhaps all too well how they try to cure us of our radical leanings and anything out of the norm of society by wiping our memories and reprogramming us for new and very specific roles and purposes as suited to their society as a shining example of what happens to Dirty Computers.
While the john argues for a more privileged position, his current position as a self-employed writer is very anti-capitalist in leaning. Self-employment requires a network, a community of care—a support system. It requires collaboration and opportunity.
I have a few inside scoops on academia, though I have just surpassed my 5 years of service mark in Minnesota. Having done this amount of time, I can tell you that you are not valued the way you might be in other community service positions. It is not just that the work is not guaranteed from semester to semester, but also that your identity and experience go questioned by your own peers around you. Sometimes, it is a breeding ground for paranoia between administrators and faculty, between faculty and each other.
But I am not here to talk about that. I am here to write about writing 3 books while working full-time. It takes discipline. Even to write this blog right now before my full-time courier job, I must be up at 4:30am scribbling first in a notebook to get my thoughts down fresh. Then, I type it up and edit it in a Word doc and choose graphics. I may not have time to publish before work.
Similarly, while working on Bodies in Transition, and also my chapbook Tender One actually, I woke up at around 4:30am to write and revise. Some days I pushed myself to write more than one poem a day, though not all of them made it into the collection. I had to decide on what story I was telling for the narrative structure. I included older material. I hired an editor. It took around a year to complete and independently publish a full-length poetry collection. (Tender One, which was published by Finishing Line Press, was mostly written in 2015-2016 and edited in 2022, then contracted in 2023, and published in 2024.)
Typewriters are like fingerprints
Since then, I have roughly finished another poetry collection Azaleas & Other Edible Flowers and a fiction novel I’m tentatively calling Storyteller. While Storyteller contains some older materials (also from 2016-2017), it was largely written in the past 2 years. Azaleas has all new poetry. I wrote them while cafe lounging for the most part because, although I worked overload this past year, I conveniently had the schedule where I did not start until late afternoons. So, I wrote in the mornings, taught in the afternoons, and graded and did prep work in the evenings and on weekends. When summer came and I was no longer employed by the school, I started a full-time courier position but was still able to squeeze in 1-2 poems a week and roughly 1000-1500 words of fiction. Most of this writing was completed on the weekends. I excitedly met my goal of completing my fiction novel this summer!
Two tips for you:
Good writing takes mental stamina. Find that space in your week where you can carve out more than a couple hours of time for yourself because good writing takes more than an hour. If all you have is a 30-minute lunch break, write a 3-word poem and come back to it later.
Don’t worry about crossing out or deleting poems or scenes or starting all over because you are not quite getting them right or don’t like how they are turning out. That’s why I use a notebook and pen first. Not everything that crosses your mind is going to come out the way you want it to at first and sometimes you are not even going to be sure what the poem or scene is going to be at first. The imagination is a very wild place.
What is the Name of my AI companion?
I’ll admit that I have been notoriously against the use of AI. I think this bias is common among academic circles, especially creatives. While I briefly took a foyer with generative AI when Project 2025 came out, so I did not have to wade through hundreds of hateful proposed and now implemented legislative orders to find what I was looking for quickly, it was not until this summer that I saw its true possible potential for creative and critical insights beyond summarization. While there does remain programmer bias within AI, such as transphobia, which I have already had to correct several times, I do still find some of it to be helpful.
This summer I fed both an early draft of an MS of my new poetry collection and an MS of my first draft of my fiction novel into NotebookLM. Its AI has done a much better job in providing a synopsis of my poetry manuscript than the fiction novel itself, and I am not sure if that is user error or computer error. While it is possible that the themes and story are more transparent in my poetry manuscript in even its earliest drafts, what the AI seems to struggle with the most with the fiction novel is interpreting the identity of the first-person narrator. The novel delivers a full transition from teenaged years, including a disguise that felt right to a child, to becoming accepted by society as a middle-aged man. Perhaps I need to clarify the language more of how he saw himself as a child. The AI did have some questions about what he felt constitutes “being a man” and why he receives a surgery in the text.
These kinds of questions asking me to explore the motivations of my characters deeper and the relationships between characters deeper were a couple of the areas I found especially useful about my interactions with AI. The questions were very detailed and paginated. While I do believe it took the right type of question to yield these results, such as, “What more do I need to flesh out in the Xavier narrative,” when I simply stated, “ask better questions,” it posed some very good theoretical and analytical questions for me to consider about deeper connections to explore in the work.
All in all, despite its difficulties labeling my protagonist’s sex or knowing when to use the correct pronouns, I am very satisfied with the experience so far.
Anthology Bundle Announcement
Nary: (takes a deep breath) Look. I have hope because I live here. What choice do I have? Even surrounded by these fools, I know there are enough non-fools out here that we can make a difference. The next few years are going to be real hard. The bad guys are going to win some battles. They’ll take more and more power and try to squeeze more and more people out of the future they want. And the scary thing is that it isn’t just the corrupt leaders and Bosses. There’s an authoritarianism that lives inside a whole lot of us, even the decent folk. When we care more about punishing crimes than preventing them. When we care more about our “team” winning than whether or not people are suffering. When we care more about following the rules than thinking critically about what the rules are in the first place. We’ve got to fight it in ourselves, too. And artists can have a meaningful role in that work. Sometimes that work is in our art; like, sure, writing about what people face today matters. Writing about what tomorrow might look like matters. And sometimes it’s less about the art and more about the space we take up in society, the audiences we have access to, the literal places we move through. But either way, we have to face the situation. We have to engage with reality. I’ll wrap it up with this: if someone hates someone else or cares more about their material possessions than other people’s lives, I don’t think I can write a poem that will change their mind. But “changing minds” isn’t the only thing artists can do. We can be mobilizers. We can be movement-builders. We can use our network to spread information. We can preach to the choir, and that choir can knock a wall down. The choir can sing so loud they knock all the walls down. It’s a cool metaphor . . . but it is a metaphor. Songs can’t actually knock walls down, no matter how loud they are. But singers can. –Kyle Tran Myre, “The Role of Artists in Times of Authoritarian Brutality: A Panel Discussion,” Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough
Baki’s Anthology Bundle
I have included this excerpt from Guante as a way of introducing what I believe the purpose of Baki’s collaboration with Queermunity has been these past several months. Baki, a native Minnesotan BIPOC artist and influencer, has been leading workshops for years now teaching folks the craft of Zine-making. For those of you who do not know what a Zine is, it is a self-produced magazine of appropriated art or text often written with radical goals in mind. I have put out a few of these now under Baki’s tutelage, making impressions of my own poetry for the text, complemented by visual storytelling as ripped from magazines like National Geographic.
Two of my pieces made it into the Anthology Bundle that was made possible through Baki’s 2025 Zine Series in Collaboration with Queermunity. This year, their Cultural Districts Arts Fund program was funded by the Arts & Cultural Affairs Department in the City of Minneapolis. It is my greatest hope that they continue to secure funding in the future.
El-hajj Malik El-Shabazz
“We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the ‘white’ from their minds, the ‘white’ from their behavior, and the ‘white’ from their attitude. I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man – and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their ‘differences’ in color.” – The Autobiography of Malcolm X As Told to Alex Haley
Audubon Ballroom
Most recently, I had the great honor of paying a visit to the Shabazz Center where the great feelings of Malcolm X that brotherhood is possible among all races after returning from Mecca is represented on its walls. There are displays from different parts of his life and Dr. Betty Shabazz. It is steeped in culture. The Shabazz Center has recently re-opened for tours Tuesday – Friday, 11-5, after a long battle to restore the building.
A list of the favorite books of Malcolm X
I had the opportunity of speaking with Gaye who with great emotion shared the history of the building and the Shabazz lives leading up to the moment in the Audubon Ballroom.
I had the honor of presenting her with a couple of my Zines as inspired by Malcolm X, and to my great surprise, she took a look at them and said they would reach the hands of his daughter Dr. Shabazz.
The cover of my zine “Writing in the Cafe”
Ascending the steps to Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X became a martyr is a heavy feeling. The weight of that pivotal moment in history lingers there, but as the mural on that wall claims, it is not the end. We shall “Prevail.”
I am so glad I made this trip to New York to visit my friends. It was a time of healing. It was a time of brotherhood. It was a time of great feeling.
my friend Dell and I selecting the ‘little girl’ as our champion between the girl and the bull statue on Wallstreet
my friend Loki looking so serious the day of his promotion
books both Loki and I have decided to read
Is it the Divine he wanted to wipe out?
Is it this body that they hate? I’ve started asking myself this question looking in the mirror every morning ever since I was assaulted.
It is a man’s body, yet unassuming. It is queer. It is white and not poor. It is full of debts- to society, to their education, to the community, to the divine that lives in each and every one of us.
Is it the divine he wanted to wipe out?
I read something once by g. Spivak about “acts of terror” and how in wiping out others you are essentially wiping out yourself and bringing them to paradise, and I wonder if he saw it that way, or if I was simply something other to be terrorized.
This was no Fight Club, though he was destroying something beautiful. bell hooks talks about the ways in which men are fragmented and construct multiple identities for themselves to move and operate in the world. In this, perhaps emboldened by the new administration, he constructed an identity in which it was “okay” for him as a member of civil society to give unwanted touches and harass a person working remotely in the establishment where he was employed and, when confronted with the possible consequences, committed a criminal action against the body of the person.
I told him I would speak with his boss as a customer to check his behavior toward me so there would be no repeat actions. In a fit of blind rage, he yanked me up by my jacket, dragged me out the store, shoved me, and chest and throat punched me, and would not have stopped hitting me had I not threatened to sue. He attempted to trespass me, but it was him who was in the wrong, and he knew it. While I was in the parking lot emailing the owner, I overheard him saying on the phone, “I was scared,” and he had every right to be. Harassing a customer is at best a write up, but he should have just taken ownership for his actions and apologized.
Trans lives matter. Queer lives matter. We will not be physically bullied out of the public sphere.
Sometimes I feel like a Fraud
My birthday has come and past with such sweetness. My mother called me by my name for the very first time, and my friend Colorful helped me understand why it is so very significant that people call me by my government name—because it is something for which I have fought very hard. I have gone to court for this name. It was part of my sex change. I had to prove I was not defrauding the system.
Gene and their friends celebrating their birthday at Lush
Sometimes I feel like I am a fraud because I do not believe that documents or hormones or genitals or chromosomes make me or anyone else their sex. A lot of it feels like arbitrary classifications to create hierarchies. I am a man regardless of these things, yet I am playing by their rules.
December 1st ushered in a new season for me in art and business. I was selected as a vendor for the Queer Market put on by Queer Voices at Open Book in Minneapolis, and the Boiler Room in the Stevens Square Neighborhood is currently showing my Graffiti Art Series through December. I also created a TikTok @with_a_gg_, if TikTok does not end up being banned altogether.
G. Gazelka presents The Graffiti Art Series
The Queer Market was a wonderful affair with queers from across the Twin Cities selling their wares. I ended up leaving with a piece that I had been eyeing since People’s Pride and a couple new friends. What I did not sell at the market can be found on my Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/typewritestoryteller
A Queer Market