Hello and Happy New Year!

I hope you are well during these challenging times. I feel like every day I’m either replying to someone that “I’m not leaving the house unless I must” or encouraging others to “take care and be safe.” I'm ready for Covid to become endemic.

Last year many of you responded to my question on preferred email frequency. The winner by one vote is biweekly. So, henceforth, I'll be sending out Across and Beyond the second and fourth Thursday each month.

Professionally, I love this time of year, including the cold (weird, I know). January is the perfect month to refocus my priorities, consider where I want to take my writing business, this newsletter, and set new goals.


How often do you want to hear from me?

I'd love to get your feedback via my nifty, one-question survey.

Thank you in advance for your time.

Rare is the novel where taste, touch, smell or sound create the prominent sensory descriptions.

We rely on our eyes as humans. We want writers to use visual depictions to describe scenes. We have our reasons.

When we interact with the world we rely more on vision than on our other senses. More more of the primate engages in processing visual information than in processing information from any of the other senses.

Yet we recoil from unwanted touches, even when we can’t see our assailants. Certain smells make us nauseous or salivate. Sounds make us tap our feet or sweat in terror.

Hello,

If you're a writer and/or creative who wants to learn more about marketing; if you find most articles about marketing for creative spirits rather dodgy or sketchy or skeezy; if you want to understand how you might market without waves of disgust and imposter syndrome washing over you, then please consider subscribing to Holy Gusto Marketing's email newsletter.

Holy Gusto Marketing is my company, one I founded last year in the midst of the pandemic. I focus on a specialized niche of email marketing for authors and creators.

Why another newsletter? Good question. We're all inundated with them these days.

Tears of joy. That’s what dripped from my eyes one late Saturday afternoon about four years ago.

Ms. H and I had deliberated for weeks about how to better maximize the space in our laundry area. We landed on shelves, then a shelving unit, then, a nightmarish scenario, a shelving unit from IKEA.

“I can go,” I told her.

“No. No. I’ll go with you,” she said.

The whole thing started with Fowling, or football bowling for the uninitiated.

Maybe it was a birthday party or some commemorative event. I can’t remember. I do remember all of Ms. H’s family (like maybe 8 of them) converging on the Fowling Warehouse in beautiful Hamtramck, Michigan for a few lively rounds of this ridiculous, made-up, American game.

What is fowling?

Take a NFL regulation-size football and hurl it towards a set of bowling pins at the other end of a dirt filled lane, about the width of– you guessed it – a regulation bowling lane. And in an effort to up the exercise quotient of this game, you had to reset the pins every two football hurls.

The governor of Mississippi has his pen at the ready to legislate against transgirls and women. (I'm not giving him any more play. Google it up, if you want the deets.)

He fears for the safety of ciswomen in sports, and so he, along with the ridiculous repubs in the unironically nicknamed Hospitality State, will prohibit trans-identified women and girls from participating in sports on womens teams.

I rant about the naked bigotry of this fake position all the time. (Maybe even a little too much.)

• The position of protecting ciswomen and girls (except when it concerns the 45th, Shouty Cheeto himself, or some no named pedo pastor at various and sundry Protestant and Catholic churches and parishes); and
• The position of not protecting cismen and boys from the likes of me and other transmen (which suggests what? That I'm not. a real man? That cismen and boys don't need protection at all? But what about protection from other cismen who assault boys and men at alarming and underreported rates (i.e. the Kevin Spacey Effect™️); and
• The position of believing that a cisboys will always win against cisgirls sports (like maybe their testicles shrank into their body when they found out about Heaven Fitch, who won the North Carolina State Wrestling Championship in the 106lb division. "I kind of dominated," she said. You sure fucking did, my friend! You sure fucking did.); and
• The position of cowardice on the part of all people acting all scaredy, fearful like on behalf of ciswomen and girls (like they can't just say "we fucking hate transwomen and girls and don't want them anywhere near our daughters" {sons are a different matter, apparently); and
• The position of idiocy when it comes to transmen like me (as if they really want moi to use the women's room and participate in the senior olympics in the women's division, where I'd lose, naturally, and probably to a ciswomen who is 92, but you get my point).

The worst piece of technology ever?

My brain. I forget. I delay. I evade. I refuse. Most days I simply can't remember. Anything. At. All.

Organizing and organizational systems fascinate me. I've tried many and left even more behind.

I require trust in my own system. Adopting someone else's system just because it's a shiny new chicken has failed for me every time I've tried it.

On a dark night during a cold, Michigan winter, Ms. H and I spent time with our nieces and nephew down in the basement watching now-forgotten kid videos and playing Dance Dance Revolution.

Our nephew had to walk me through the game as I had never before played.

I’d watched others play. The video game hall near my job had a full-featured version of the game. Boy did those young people kill it!

I often watched in awe, always too afraid to try the game in front of strangers.

About two weeks I received a rejection email from a reputable journal.

I had submitted an essay I’d been working on for years about internalized fears I’d long possessed about being a transman in male spaces.

The focus of my highest anxieties, I wrote, occurred in the gym changing room. Sans the right junk, I thought I’d be skewered and rejected. I described various coping strategies for changing my clothes with my back turned toward the other men. Friend suggested I stop changing in the locker room, or change in the unisex changing room. Not for me, thank you!

I concluded with a story about the extreme shock I experienced when a cismale friend told me he’d never changed in the locker room nor would he ever. I was even more shocked when he told me he would never use the family changing room. “Just another way to draw attention to myself,” he had said. The story goes on to describe how I’d separated myself from other men in my mind, unable to believe any cisman could be uncomfortable in their bodies or in male spaces.

Picture this with me: you’ve been doing the important work as an anti-racist activist, reading all the right books, listening to the right podcasts, maybe even attending demonstrations.

You talk with other white people about white privilege and white performativity.

So you keep talking and talking. Maybe you’ve been talking for years.

But something seems a bit off, something you can’t quite put your finger on.

I’ve been doing a serious writing folder clean up/review. Over the last twenty years I’ve written in text files, Microsoft Word and Word Perfect. My Mac computer read the *.wpd extensions as UNIX files, which then led me to an online service that converts old file formats into newer ones.

The entire process has made me realize I need to more frequently seek out entropy in my old works. While the majority were aggressively average, and a few just plain terrible, one or two are real gems, and fiction, too. All the more exciting for me moving forward.

Noodling around the internet I came across “” by Alina Popa. Written and released shortly before her death, Popa confronts the spectacle of her body, a body she can’t recognize, a body that fights her and a body that she uses to defy a medical system that has already dismissed her as dead.

No. 1

The realization that I described my fears and sufferings as pitiful attempts to get dates gobsmacked me.

Jay Sennett

No • 1

My packing dildo fell out of my pants. Do I pick it up, look at it, display mock disgust and walk away like I don’t even see it? And if I leave it, what if somebody returns it to me saying, “Hey, did you lose this?”

From Milkman, by Anna Burns, in which middle sister resists the efforts of her district gossips to capitulate to their unfounded and untrue rumoring about her:

So I don’t know was my three-syllable defense in response to the questions. With it successfully I refused to be evoked, drawn out, shocked in revelation. Instead I minimalised, withheld, subverted thinking, dropped all interaction surplus to requirement with meant they got no public content, no symbolic content, no full-bodiedness, no bloodedness, no passion of the moment, no turn of plot, no sad shade, no angry shade, no panicked shade, no location of anything. Just me, downplayed. Just me, devoid. Just me, uncommingled. This meant that by the end of their round-about goads and their many implied and searching significances, still they had nothing from me and I felt justified in presenting this unfruitfulness to them because it was clear to me by this time that in life some people did not deserve the truth. They weren’t good enough for the truth. Not respectable enough to receive it. To lie or to omit therefore was fine. It was fine.

A short newsletter this week. Ms. H and I have been celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary and so I’ve been pleasantly focused this week on enjoying this milestone.

I do want to bring to your attention to two texts that focus on the intersection of science, medicine and the transsexual body. Transsexuals live and thrive in the nexus of medical pharmacology, plastic surgery and the history of medicine and science.

We wouldn’t exist without medical science. Our existence both reflects the advances of medicine and the anxieties those advancements can induce in people.

Susan Stryker’s My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage was performed and published nearly a quarter of a century ago.

I’ve written a lot of memoirist words about being a transsexual over the last two decades. Starting in the mid-1990s I wrote “Interstitial Living,” a bi-weekly column for Chicago’s LGBT paper Nightlines/Outlines, a time when little information existed about transsexuals. How long ago was that? I came out and transitioned when transgender was not commonly used. In fact, transgender was only just beginning to be debated as an umbrella term for members of our various communities.

Every article I wrote the pronoun “I” figured prominently.How could it not? “I” drives all memoirs and forms of personal sharing. Any attempt to use “we,” the first-person plural, or “you,” the second-person singular, would have been met with silence.

Of course in English we use “I.” But I believe the social climate (vague, I know) and political content (even vaguer, I agree) driving transsexual narratives allows us to use only “I.”

On This Day of Reawakening

to all my peep-le

“No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.” - Proverb (but only in the Northern Hemisphere!)

On Metaphors

when one just won’t do

As a transsexual I live with a sad, dry reality: I get one metaphor to describe my choices and experiences.

I was born in the wrong body.

Welcome to Across and Beyond

*trans:across:beyond

Buttondown now fulfills my email newsletter needs. Mailchimp got to be too much. I've been in a minimalist mode for several months, which means the less friction I have in tasks like emailing all you lovely people, the more likely I am to want to complete the task.

Finishing has become important this year, in large part as a result of a convo with Ms. H, who while quiet, never misses anything. And since finishing has become my mantra, I've also ditched wordpress and fallen in love with blot.im for my blog and also decided that all my writing will happen in Scrivener. Create constraints and the like.