What it Takes to Be a TikTok Poet

What it Takes to Be a TikTok Poet: Essay for the Millions

“Before the video is over, I’m snickering and sending it to my TikTok-addicted best friend. He’s a New York wine exec whose only experience with poetry is at my readings. Until now. Onscreen, a manicured hand opens a slim book against the backdrop of rumpled bed sheets—then a perky woman’s voice starts reading…”

An essay for The Millions about TikTok, the poetry content mill, and how we define artistic merit.

Read more here.

Review: The Traces by Mairead Small Staid

Barrelhouse Reviews: The Traces by Mairead Small Staid

“Oh, the joy of being young, artistic, and in Europe—the infinite possibilities of any city, museum, or stranger. This thrill courses through Mairead Small Staid’s essay collection, The Traces. At age twenty, Staid spent a semester studying in Florence, and these memories connect the work’s eleven essays. By analyzing the author’s past with intellectual rigor, The Traces expands collegiate gallivanting into a discourse on happiness as a place with memory as its fickle guide.”

A review for Barrelhouse of Mairead Small Staid’s book-length essay, The Traces.

Read more here.

Reaching For My Family...

Reaching For My Family – And My French Not-Husband

“My mom called me three times at lunch. I was sitting outside on a gray French November day. The meal was chilly, but it was the fall of 2020. We were lucky restaurants were even open. It was the final day before Paris’s second confinement, and the city had a cold, paranoid energy. My friend arrived with a backpack full of just-purchased puzzles, replacements of the ones he’d finished last lockdown. But when I saw my missed calls, I couldn’t have cared less about puzzles, old or new.

Despite my best efforts, WhatsApp rarely rings on my phone. After four years of living abroad, being reachable is never as easy as I need it to be. But sometimes a missed call tells it all. And as I dialed my mom in California, I already knew what she would say: Grandma was on her deathbed. When could I get there?

Back at my apartment, I looked at plane tickets to San Francisco, clicking faster as options appeared and disappeared. My body was shaky with indecision, and I wanted my French partner there to assess the risks. I’d moved in with him for the first confinement, and he was the human hand-sanitizer dispenser who kept me updated on transmission rates, who trained me to wash my hands then lock our door. It’s some combination of freak luck and his loving diligence that have kept us both virus-free.

But he was at his parents’ house in a tiny village outside of Bordeaux where he’d decided to stay when the French government announced the confinement. It forbade both interregional travel and daily errands, except for government-approved reasons. Getting to Paris wasn’t the only administrative hurdle: We have a French civil union, which isn’t recognized internationally; ever since the travel bans of March 2020, he had no legal means of entering the United States with me…”

An essay about loss, confinement, and how the government tries to define family.

Read more at Catapult.

Reborn

Reborn

“The Equilibrant of Conditioning” (detail) © Darrell Black

“The new doctor is Indian, speaks English, and we meet at her office on Boulevard Picpus. Platypus Street, I think as I wander through eastern Paris, clutching two sheets of her health initiatives. They’re almost too esoteric for me, and when I tell Fred what I must do to become a well-circulating, energy-filled individual, he calls my doctor a charlatan, spiking my anxiety, until I call her that too. My charlatan.

My constitution is endangered by lack of routine, my seventh-floor chambre de bonne smack in the middle of the city, bright lights, and loud noises. Through my meditation cushion, through the oriental rug, through the building’s stories, I feel the metro growling. Already there are horns and sirens; decibel levels have increased since the transit strikes and the weekly protests screaming past my door. The obvious solution is moving into Fred’s serene side street. Charlatan’s orders.

These days I eat my lentils piously, always pre-soaked, putting down my spoon between mouthfuls. I’ve acquired a new thermos which will save me from the dangers of cold water. But when I unscrew it in the corner of the library, the ginger tea inside is scalding, undrinkable.

My younger body thrived in adversity—tumblers of whiskey on the rocks topped off with Diet Coke. Now even seltzer’s bubbles are forbidden—liquor and ice both non-starters. I think of the bottomless coffee, street meats, reckless quesadillas. The audacity. Tortilla chips were my last hope, but my charlatan took them away. No snacks and nothing airy. Remember, I’m already ungrounded…”

Essay on wellness, presence, and slowing down for Talking Writing.

Read full text here.

Carrying Our Fear

Carrying Our Fear

“This summer, my partner Fred and I were visiting Cahors, a medieval village in French Occitanie. It was sunset and as we wandered the dark narrow streets, we came upon a place where a group of men were drinking. They were jostling outside the bar, loud and rowdy in their matching white T-shirts and black bow ties. It had to be a bachelor party given the costumes and raucous energy, and I instinctively turned down a side alley to avoid them. It was a dead end.

As I backtracked, the only option was to inevitably walk past them. I held Fred’s hand and tried to feel his calm. He couldn’t have cared less about the testosterone-charged air. Meanwhile, I was on edge, ready to deflect whatever comment might get hurled at me. My body was tense, stiffening, the same way it would during years of catcalls.

Since moving to Paris, I’ve been followed home on two separate occasions. And it wasn’t subtle. Both men were right next to me, talking the entire time. You’re so beautiful. What’s your name. I’ll take you for a drink….”

November column for Epiphany Magazine about epigenetics, charged bodies, and inherited fear.

Read full text here.

Seeing Myself as The Villain

Seeing Myself as the Villain

“…Yet Jemisin’s depiction of the Woman in White has none of Lovecraft’s repulsion. Rather, the villain is given its own story and we see that it’s working to save itself. The City We Became isn’t simply a jarring attack on white privilege, it’s a necessary nudge towards reality. When Aislyn befriends the Woman in White, the novel’s antagonists become its two white women. By inverting white savior tropes, Jemisin shows how systemic advantages have weakened cities while diversity remains their strengths.

Over the summer, I cut my shoulder-length blond hair into a pixie with shaved sides. I also dyed it an ashy violet, and of all the characters in the novel, I most closely resembled the Woman in White. The woman who’s turning New York City into a soul-less shell of itself….”

October column for Epiphany Magazine about N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, diverse protagonists, and resembling a villain.

Read full text here.

Creativity is Not Martyrdom: Part II

Creativity is Not Martyrdom: Part II

Writing Workshops

“We artists know, creating is as solitary as you make it. I may need hours alone getting the words onto the page, but once they’re there, they can only be edited to a certain point. I’ve found it’s impossible to take myself far enough out of a piece to see what doesn’t make sense, catch any dropped details, and stumble over clumsy sentences. The way someone else reads my work is entirely different than the way it sounds in my head. As writers, we’re so close to what we’re trying to say—it always makes sense to us. We need readers to give us their interpretations, and help us see from the other side of the page…”

Essay for Paris Lit Up about writer’s workshops, communal editing, and the benefits of collaboration.

Read full text here.

Reading as a Form of Protest

Reading as a Form of Protest

“This spring, a few chapters into Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig, I had to go look up Myanmar on a map. The historically accurate novel spans two generations and shows the impossible untangling of warring bodies after the British occupation. But reading Myanmar’s Wikipedia page after having read the novel, the dates and facts about the colonial rule, the Burmese involvement in World War II, and the ensuing civil war, elicited far less emotion in me than the story of the native woman who marries a British solider.

Khin and Benny begin their lives together without even speaking the other’s language, and the novel is as much about the endless struggle of communication and human connection as it is about the civil war which harms them and their country. Amid the shockingly brutal moments of Khin being raped and mutilated or Benny being tortured for weeks, there are moving passages of humanity—Khin unable to show Benny her ruined body, their daughters not recognizing their father when he’s finally freed. As a reader who had never experienced similar hardships and knew nothing about the historical moment, these scenes gave me an entry point into the text and brought me close to its foreign characters.

In novels, history becomes more than a series of dates and names, dots on a timeline. It mutates into its true shape, an endless web, connecting unexpected lives. Facts are necessary to give us context and ground us in a common reality—the reason why I turned from Miss Burma to Wikipedia—yet logical arguments rarely change our opinions. As much as we may try to fight it, so many of our decisions and judgments are made on an emotional level. Reading is a way of combining these two facets, of giving us information while also shifting our beliefs on a deeper, emotional level…”

Monthly column for Epiphany Magazine about fiction, empathy, and subverting societal conventions.

Read full text here.

This piece was also featured in Notes in the Margin’s, Last Week’s Links.

Literature is an Essential Service

Literature is an Essential Service

“France’s government mandated confinement lasted from March 13th until May 11th. If we left our homes during these two months, we were required to carry an attestation, signed upon our honor that we were outside for one of five government approved reasons—indispensable work, groceries, medical needs, caregiving, or personal exercise. In the city iconic for its sidewalk cafés, the streets became eerily quiet. Storefronts were dark, locked, or barred with hastily scrolled paper signs: Fermé jusqu’à nouvel ordre.

The accurate translation would be “closed until further notice” but like many other French phrases the literal translation also rings true: Closed until the new order.

During my two confined months, as I waited for further notice, I read twelve books—two paper and ten digital—and listened to four audiobooks. My first novel, Purple Gold, was published as an e-book exclusive, marking the joyful end to a years-long project. I worked fervently on my second book until it coalesced into a completed manuscript. In two months, I had four meetings between my two writing groups and became an official member of the literary association, Paris Lit Up. I had two video-poems published; pitched three essay ideas; gave and conducted an interview; and performed poetry on a livestream fundraiser for the Marine Conservation Society. In my two confined months, I also cried more than I had in the past two years…”

June column for Epiphany Magazine about confinement, literature, and escape.

Read full text here.

Creativity is Not Martyrdom: Part I

Creativity is Not Martyrdom: Part I

“When I first moved to Paris, I found a library near my apartment and vowed to write there every day. I’d quit my job and my new one was to finish my novel, get it published, and be a real writer. At gorgeous historical libraries, bags, food and even water are forbidden, and I’d bury my distracting cellphone and computer in their mandatory lockers before submerging myself in a silent reading room.

I’d write by hand in notebooks for hours, break for lunch, take out my laptop, WiFi pre-turned off, and type up my morning’s work. Most days, I’d leave feeling exhausted and vaguely hopeless, though I told myself the more down-trodden I felt, the more I accomplished…”

Essay for Paris Lit Up about creativity, community, and the joy of collaboration.

Read full text here.

Unsolicited Advice for the End Times

Unsolicited Advice for the End Times

“In 2012, the Mayans predicted the end of the world, I graduated from college and moved to New York to be a writer, and the bookseller Michael Seidenberg began writing a monthly column for The New Inquiry called “Unsolicited Advice for Living in the End Times.” I’d discovered Brazenhead Books, the salon and bookstore Michael ran out of his apartment, during his brief writing stint, and I still remember his one sentence pitch for the column: “It’s short and has pictures.” He told this to anyone who listened, shrugging and raising his bushy eyebrows, as if to say, “What’s to lose?”

As I became a Brazenhead regular, I realized he was right about having nothing to lose and started to read the column. Just like he said, they were short and had pictures, but were also full of wisdom wrapped in layers of funny. Michael’s humor was ever present, in his way of being, as well as his writing, and even if the column seemed lighthearted, what he said had a way of sinking in and staying. Later when I was his assistant, I republished the full collection of his columns on Brazenhead’s website. At the end of his first year, he wrote: I don’t want to get all Baba Ram Dass-y on you, but the sage’s great advice to “be here now” was never more timely. Because when now becomes later, you won’t get to be here then...”

April column for Epiphany Magazine about confinement, positivity, and The End Times.

Full text here, audio below.

Illustrating Our Imaginations

Illustrating Our Imaginations

“Whenever I want to impress someone with my inherited nerdiness, I tell them about how my parents used to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings aloud to my brother, Zach, and I. Why we embarked on this journey and how many years it took, I can’t say. I do know it took place during our formative years and I remember the story and the way the books looked perfectly. They were thick hardcovers, spines sometimes cracking from the weight of the pages, and I remember The Lord of the Rings beginning with Tolkien’s poetic epigraph which I memorized and took to reciting:

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”

This was before Peter Jackson’s movies rendered Middle Earth in painstaking detail and all Zach and I had to fuel our imaginations were Tolkien’s words and a hardcover book of illustrations called The Realms of Tolkien, a compilation of scenes interpreted by different artists. The best were by Alan Lee, whose watercolors we easily recognized. That’s not Alan Lee’s Balrog. Why are you looking at that one? Where is Galadriel? No, the good one….”

March column about Alan Lee, Tolkien’s realms, and how we imagine.

Full text at Epiphany Magazine, audio below.

Cuckolded by Modernity

Cuckolded by Modernity

“When I went to see Ian McEwan speak at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, I wondered how they would arrange the seating. The library is in one of the oldest townhouses in the Marais, Hôtel de Lamoignon, dating from the late 16th century. From the street, massive wooden doors open onto a courtyard surrounded by the stone building. The long lobby has glass cases featuring archival maps and posters, and even if the librarians moved the historic documents, there would barely be space for an audience. The only other option is the stately reading room with its high ceiling and gilded beams, filled with rows of heavy wooden tables and chairs.

I arrived early, inured from squeezing late into enough readings, and the library was unchanged. The crowd gathered in the lobby until they let us into the reading room and I laughed to my writer friend, Nafkote Tamirat, that they’d made only one special accommodation—all the chairs were turned to face the same direction. Despite our mutually responsible arrival, it was impossible to see the unelevated table at the far end of the room where McEwan and his interviewer sat….”

February column about Ian McEwan, ménage à trois, and the temptations of technology.

Full text at Epiphany Magazine, audio below.