Earlier this month, I teamed up with the homies at Scatter Joy Project to read alongside a talented group of poets and storytellers. For my selection, I decided to read the first newsletter essay I published this year:
Saturn is Somewhere
One thing I’m sure about is that I learned to get over myself during this past year. Or as Kacey Musgraves put it, “I found a deeper well.”
After reading the essay, a girl came up to me and showed me her photo of the Saturn installation from the same Kacey Musgraves show I described going to.
We started talking about music, and I asked her if she had listened to the new Bon Iver album yet. She opened her phone, and it was the last album she saved.
I love that my work can be an invitation to celebrate our loves together.
I remember how I felt reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us for the first time—specifically his essay on Carley Rae Jepsen. I loved that he was able to show up as himself on the page and talk about the thing he loved you probably wouldn’t expect him to love.
I knew, if I ever returned to the page, that was the kind of writing I wanted to do. As someone who shared several of Hanif’s loves, I felt something reading his work. But you could feel his work even if you didn’t connect with it on the surface.
That’s how this reading felt. I got to hear from Kacey fans who were mouthing the words to her songs along with me or were at the same concert. And there were people who had never heard her music and still connected with my words.
We got to meet in this place. We all got to come drink at the well.
No matter where you fall, I hope there’s something in here for you.
I hope you enjoy, and please consider sharing it with someone special.
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