Making Art in a Time of Fascism
No really, how are you?
Lovers & Friends,
Hey! It’s been exactly a month since we last spoke. How are you?
No really, how are you doing — in these times of rising unrest, where immigrants are being ripped away from their families by ICE and trans kids are being told that they can’t receive gender-affirming healthcare (despite every major medical association and study on the subject saying it saves lives)? In a time of Israel now attacking Iran and Palestine, and Trump threatening to join a war? Shit’s WEIRD, so how are you feeling?
I ask myself & my friends this question, and lately I’ve been getting answers that surprise me. Before I get into it, here are some updates.
UPDATES ON MY LIFE & STUFF
As part of my ACLU of Texas fellowship, I’m leading five free creative writing workshops across Harris County over the next 5 months. My first one is called Creative Writing for Carceral Justice, and we’re gonna write poems & op-eds about Bail in Texas. You should come out!
I’ve got a cute Pride Month reading coming up in San Antonio on June 26th. Comethru!
Thank you so much to the Balcones Prize awards committee for naming my memoir Pretty as a finalist for their prize in Nonfiction.
The Relationscapes podcast had me on their latest episode, and I talked about being Black, beyond the binary, and the reasons why I waited a while to transition.
I made a video of 7 things allies can do for trans people this Pride Month that people seem to like.
My other newsletter Trans News That Doesn’t Suck officially has 500+ subscribers. HELL YEAH.
I’ll be at the Desert Nights Rising Stars Conference in October.
Now that that’s over, let’s get into this forever-loaded question, “How are you?”
I’ll be honest and say I’m not good. My attention is split in too many directions: work, creativity, self-care, and, tbh, the constant onslaught of bad news. Every time I tune into the news, I brace myself; the current people in power of the U.S. are ghoulish, to say the least. It’s hard to take deep breaths, meditate, and be creative in times of unrest; further, it’s hard to not feel like creativity itself is a “distraction.”
So I’ve been asking my creative friends how they’re doing, and here are the answers:
“I can complain, but I won’t.”
“Man, I’m taking it breath by breath.”
“The bushes by the lake have been blooming.”
“I (and I cannot emphasize this enough) don’t know.”
Though there is a palpable weariness, there’s also still a flair of beauty.
I love that, even in these horrible times, people are still finding ways to do language — convey an emotion we’re all feeling in a sentence that hasn’t been uttered before. Even in the more evasive answer (“the bushes by the lake…”), I receive that as I’m friend saying “even in terror, I still can recognize good things.”
And that’s what life is about, I think: being able to recognize the beauty in people and places regardless of the news — noticing the things that are and aren’t wrong simultaneously. I’m pretty anti-”going to sleep” (AKA tuning out of any bad news). We should stay alert, but not let the news make us bitter, perpetually upset, unable to use our senses to create and observe beauty.
Every week, some person messages me something nasty about Trans News That Doesn’t Suck and every week, I pity them. How terrible that you’ve let the world eat you up so bad that you can’t be happy — for a one-minute-long video (and likely longer than that). How terrible that you’ve let this time eat up the time you have left on this earth (yes, it is true, if you’re stressed and upset all the time, you’ll literally die sooner).
I say all this to say this: if your answer to “how are you” is not some variation of the lie we’re accustomed to telling (“I’m good”, “I’m fine”), then that’s okay. Find a new, more honest way to name how you’re feeling today. Even better: notice something beautiful and include that in your answer. Today, my answer is this:
“I’m feeling good enough to have laughed at this tiktok for 5 minutes and to have noticed that the dog that I’m sitting has an Alfalfa haircut.”
That’s it for now. I hope this newsletter is finding you waking up from a deep sleep or biting into a piece of food so good it makes you say “mmm.” If no one’s told you this, I’m telling you now: being creative in this time is not selfish, or a distraction; it is how you keep your humanity intact. It is how you continue to notice the beautiful things in the world.
Till next time.
Love, Peace, & Chicken Grease,
KB
ty for these thoughts <3
it's been helping me to remember that ppl have been making art throughout fascism and genocide across time as well.