Hey! How are you? I hope you’re weathering all this horribleness okay (and if you’re not, please let me know if I can do anything to help).
It’s been awhile, I know. Time for an update.
I’ve been neglecting the Mossy Skull in favor of a certain publishing venture I’ve embarked on. If you’re here, you may have heard of it. Reckoning is an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice. I started on it last July; the first issue came out in December. The submission deadline for the second issue is the autumnal equinox, September 22nd.
It’s going well, I think. I’m learning. I’m paying reasonably good money for amazing work that might not have found a home otherwise, or at least not earned its creator quite as much. I’m getting to know some of those creators a little, by interviewing them and working with them. Some of them are getting to know each other. It’s even possible that at right this very moment someone is making something beautiful and thoughtful they might not have made if Reckoning didn’t exist. And of course I hope somebody somewhere is reading it all and being amazed and inspired.
But it’s a hard thing to assess as a whole, at this early stage.
I’m trying hard not to be glib.
“Reckoning” is, I think, a lovely word with quite a breadth of applicability; I feel like I see it used more and more these days, partly as a result of the ascendancy of a certain gumball-colored sociopath, but also it seems it’s the way the collective consciousness of the human race was already going. We’re being asked to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, or the lack thereof. We’re trying to figure out what that responsibility looks like. This is what I wanted Reckoning to be about. But it becomes clear that publishing Reckoning and a reckoning with my own life and choices are separate undertakings, and one can’t take precedence over the other.
Here, then, by way of an update, and hopefully as a stopgap for the ongoing benign neglect I expect this blog to suffer for a good while yet, is how I’ve been reckoning of late.
- I moved away from my huge, loving family and the elite liberal socialist utopia of Massachusetts for the post-industrial, post-working-class kleptocracy of Southeast Michigan. I did this for economic reasons: it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to live here, because no one wants to. Plus my wife got a very good job for the equivalent of which on the east coast competition would have been prohibitive. We were able to make this move at all only because of our privilege. We’re white; we have expensive east coast liberal educations and loving family with the long-term economic benefits of same. And I am aware of this privilege, the extent of it, only because I moved here. The distance allows me to see the stratification of this country for what it is. Did I start Reckoning because of it? Yeah, probably.
- I bought a hundred-year-old former church parsonage for one fifth what the equivalent would have cost in the Boston suburbs where I grew up, and therefore could afford to outfit it with solar panels despite active discouragement from my new state and energy utility. I’ve had them for three years and am nowhere near earning back my investment.
- I converted my barren food desert of a lawn to a permaculture food forest: apple and cherry trees, elderberry bushes, blackberry brambles, native grapes, hops, asparagus, nettle, strawberries.
- I wrote, workshopped and revised a novel. I sent it out to a few agents, then got too wrapped up in Reckoning to follow through, and now it languishes.
- I leased an electric car and spent a few months convincing my utility to let me plug it into the solar panels.
- I guest-edited an environmental-themed issue of a respected literary zine. I liked it so much I started my own.
- I spent a year reading diverse fiction.
- I joined my local government. I volunteer on my town’s environmental resources committee, trying to convince a bunch of working-class white Republicans to recycle. It sucks.
- I voted for Hillary.
- I sold a story to BCS, a weird western set in turn of the (twentieth) century Michigan, stuffed full of references to the Grateful Dead and the Great American Songbook. It comes out in July or thereabouts. Apparently I also get to read the podcast.
- Speaking of podcasts, Far Fetched Fables will be running “Asleep in the Traces” sometime soon.
- I gave a bunch of money to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center and etc.
- I bake a loaf of sourdough bread once a week. Lately it has flax seed, brewer’s yeast and honey.
- I called my congressman (Mike Bishop, R, Michigan 8th district) a bunch of times, about a lot of things, to no noticeable effect.
- I brewed a lot of beer, cider, and mead, using ingredients I grew or foraged wherever possible. I drink it with help from my friends.
- I did my taxes. I did Reckoning‘s taxes. Still waiting for my application for 501c3 status to come back from the IRS. Any day now.
- I secured help with Reckoning from an amazing and far-flung editorial staff.
- I had a kid, and now am in the process of adapting to his sleep patterns, while also learning about the fascinating hallucinatory and life-shortening effects of insomnia.
- I’m out in the woods and fields and brooksides pretty much every day.
- I loved and appreciated my family and my friends.
So that’s some kind of tally, anyhow. Something on the way to a reckoning? I don’t know, it never feels like enough. But I guess that’s what life is.
Cheers, peace, love, solidarity, as I’ve begun signing all my emails. See you around.
Michael
