Our Particular Bodies

Week TEN | For the Joy & the Sorrow | How Else We Might Be Touched

First, I must interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast with a confession. My life is a pretty big shit show at the moment.

First of all, while my University job (I am a senior writer at the U of MN School of Public Health, for those who don’t know), has been under threat since the moment Trump took office—the almost certain de-funding of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality by 90% means that my entire department (I work in the Evidence-based Practice Center, funded almost entirely by AHRQ), will be eliminated. That includes my job, and the jobs of all of my colleagues.

I personally got my non-renewal letter last week, as did our librarian, because we are the two most senior employees on the team, and are entitled to a year’s notice. I can either work out the year, or take a small severance and 18 months of health insurance benefits. Not sure yet which path makes the most sense, but bottom line is that barring some kind of miracle, my job is going, going, gone.

I wrote about that Tuesday on Facebook, and everything I said there applies here, so reach out to me if you have any interest in the various initiatives I’ll be launching or re-launching. (Also, if you’re not connected to me on FB and want to be, don’t hesitate to add me—my FB is very public and I do tend to share more personal, quirky, off the cuff things there than I do on Substack):

In addition to the professional shit storm, there’ve been other things too (there’s always something else, but the size and scope of the something elses varies, and the ones I’ve been fielding feel big).

The net result is that I’m behind on a lot of things, including reading your snippets from last week, which I am greatly looking forward to because I loved that essayette and I love your voices. So, even while I can never promise to respond to every snippet posted in a given week, it is my practice to aim for reading everything and responding as much as possible. I thank you for your patience as I catch up, which I always am doing in fits and spurts.

Meanwhile, we’re closing in on the end of our delights intensive, For the Joy & the Sorrow. Only weeks left, which feels wild! Then mid April we’ll start our Writing Toward Pleasure intensive, and for that, I am sooooo excited. If you have not heard about the pleasure intensive, you can read more about it here, Is Pleasure Guilty? and here, Writing Toward Pleasure. And if you’ve never done a WITD intensive, you can check out all past intensives here!

As always, participation in the intensives is for paid and founding members, and you can upgrade anytime. This one should be especially good, fueled as it is by not only a great. need for pleasure right now, but also the work I am doing for my upcoming AWP panel (if you will be at AWP, please come see me at the panel or one of my other events!). Note that the astoundingly brilliant Lidia Yuknavitch had to cancel her attendance at AWP this year (noooooo!), but we confirmed today that the incredible Amanda Montei, author of TOUCHED OUT: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, will be joining us as a fifth panelist (yayyyyyyy!).

And now for our delights work this week, we’re looking at essayette #20 in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, “Tap Tap,” and I just love it. I really love it so much.

In t”Tap, Tap,” Gay recounts a moment of casual touch between strangers, which, in itself, offers such rich, rich soil to till in terms of meaning-making and the larger questions of what it means to be a human being living with other human beings on our spinning blue dot.

That in itself is alluring. After all, what else, in the end, do we really have to write about? As Dorianne Laux brilliantly says, “All poetry is preparation for death.” And what is preparation for death, if not learning and illuminating what it means to … be a human being living with other human beings on our spinning blue dot?

Thinking about “Tap, Tap” and the aboutness around human touch as a form of primal connection and great meaning, which I feel just beneath its surface, or perhaps even floating upon its surface, I am reminded of one of my all time favorite poems by Ellen Bass (and there are so many). A poem that takes my breath away every time I read it, while also offering a wonderful example of a literary leap in its last lines. In this poem, Bass transforms an everyday encounter and manages to wring from it one of the most direct and fundamental questions of life—you can see for yourself what I mean, and another time, we will certainly write in response to Ellen Bass’s glorious work: