Starting over

With shovel in hand

the red rocks at Garden of the Gods held up by the hands of wild, green, native Colorado grasses and fields full of wheat

It’s been two months since I last wrote you. Right now, I’m sitting outside in the backyard in sweatpants drinking a Montucky surrounded by the dying ends of the late-summer blooms. The hummingbirds are whirring around, getting day drunk on the nectar in the hyssop flowers. The sky is covered in clouds for the first time in months, threatening to rain but not in a very convincing way.

You might have noticed that the cadence of this newsletter has slowed down a bit in the last six months. Life has superbloomed for me this summer—I married the love of my life, we honeymooned on Grecian islands, I got accepted into The Book Project, and, most recently, I got a new job. Today marks two full weeks at my new job as a landscaper. I got this job with no previous experience in landscaping, just a keen desire to work hard and do something new. My career path has always been an ever-unfolding thing—one job always appearing to carry me onward to the next. And it’s taken me quite a while to learn (know? remember?) that all of these jobs I’ve had mean very little in comparison to the one, big job I’ve always been tasked with in this lifetime. Which is, of course, to write.

My body is feeling the toll of manual labor, big time. This is the first time in weeks I feel energized. Every day has been a journey—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Each job site brings its own challenges and lessons. The sun is relentless. The Colorado soil is sandy, sun-baked clay that even pickaxes have trouble getting through. My wedding ring doesn’t fit the morning after a whole day of shoveling rocks, but I can already feel myself getting stronger, more resilient. The days have become shorter, the work has begun to flow.

Don’t get me wrong. There are times when I curse the land and the intense, back-breaking work it takes to transform it. One tiny rock can kill all of your momentum, stop your shovel dead in its tracks. Sweaty and defeated, I have cried out "fuck me” and “for fucks sakes” more times than I would care to admit. But it takes time to build good soil and breaking it wide open is the first step. Someone has to do this work, or else it won’t get done. If we don’t do the hard work of breaking apart this ground, nothing good will grow here.

In these moments, I try to remember the words of Pauline Esteves, a 92-year-old Timbisha Shoshone elder whose family was forcibly removed from their lands when Death Valley became a national monument in 1933. Last February, I watched an American Outdoors episode with Baratunde Thurston where he interviewed a handful of people who have a connection with the harsh and unforgiving lands of Death Valley.

Esteves was forced to move from her ancestral homelands as a little girl and has spent her whole life fighting to get back. She rejected the white man’s name “Death Valley” and the notion her tribe’s land is uninhabitable. “The way I was taught by the old ones is that we go with what the environment gives us,” Esteves says. “If the wind blows, the wind blows so you go with it. In our religion we don’t practice within four walls. Our religion is written in all these mountains and in the valleys, in the waters, in the wildlife—so, we’re in church everyday. That’s what we say.”

I repeat it back to myself. Go with what you are given. Work with nature, not against it. Devote yourself to the land. Call it church. At the end of the day, I go home, make a big dinner, and rest my body. I wake up the next day and pick up the shovel again.

purple yarrow

I became a landscaper because I wanted to get serious about my writing. Despite being a jack-of-all-trades anti-capitalist artist, working as a copywriter in marketing for a few years had stupidly convinced me that a salaried job was integral to my happiness and success. I was nervous about taking a lower paying job in a new trade and what (if anything) it would mean for my life path. I had somehow internalized that I needed the financial security of a full-time salaried job to finally be able to pursue my dream of authorship—a dream I had been harboring since forever. But I realized that all of those years of holding down a 9-5 desk job writing for someone else never left me with enough creative fuel in the tank to do anything of my own at the end of the day. I always burned out before I got to the page. If I wanted to get serious about writing a book, I was going to have to stop wasting my creative and intellectual energy on other people and start saving some of that for myself.

This job has forced me to simplify my life and cut back on the things I don’t have the time or energy for. Working all day in the mud and dirt has relieved the acute personal pressure I’ve always put on myself to accomplish more than I can handle in a day. Now, I can sit still in one place and do nothing without feeling like I’ve done nothing to earn it. As I learn this new trade, I can feel my tenacity and patience growing alongside tolerance for the more difficult jobs in life (perfect ramp up to parenthood and writing a book). I know I’ve been saying that I’ve been writing a book forever, but that’s because it actually takes forever to write a book—especially your first one. So here I stand, literal and metaphorical shovel in hand, learning a whole new meaning of the words “hard work.”

Throughout all the glorious, monumental changes this year, I’ve been trying to stay present with it all and save up my energy for the long road ahead. BOYS LOVE POETRY has shifted and morphed through many different phases since I first started it over two and a half years ago. I began this newsletter because I wanted to fall back in love with writing again. And fall in love, I have. Through it, I have met and reached all of you. You trusted me and my words at a time when, after recovering from an abusive relationship, I didn’t know how to trust myself.

This newsletter is shifting once again so it can keep being the place it’s always been for me. Now that I am going deep into the book lab, I am craving a looser, more casual place where writing feels like play again. A place where I experiment with meditations on the murkier shades of gender, what it means to love masculinity, the spiraling path of a writer’s life, deep cuts on the darker sides of feminism and queer community, and whatever seasonal lessons or pop cultural moments I’m dying to talk about at any given moment. You might hear from me less frequently but with much more voracity. Expect more of me, less often.

If you are a paid subscriber who can afford to continue your subscription, I would be forever grateful. If you are in a position where you’ve got a little extra to go around, I’d love if you stayed with me through this new iteration of BOYS.

But I also understand the financial burden of funding other people’s artistic careers, even for someone you really love, especially in a time like this! We are all struggling! If you are budgeting hardcore (like I am) and this downshift feels like not enough bang for your buck, I get it. Consider this the permission you need to hop back down to being a free subscriber again.

I’m also going to start trying something new! I’ve seen a couple of other authors do this, and I want to give it a go. There are so many good Substacks out there, but none of us can afford monthly subscriptions to all of the newsletters we love to read. But! I’d like to give you the chance to send a one-off contribution to BOYS LOVE POETRY without being locked in to a subscription.

If you’ve been looking for a way to support my work now and again when you really love something, or if you’ve found value in my past work but never could afford to subscribe, feel free to send $5 my way via buy me a coffee. ☕️ 💸

Appreciate you every day!

Until next time,

xo