Queer Week III

A belated report from the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and the last week of June.

It’s the dark of the night after dinner and the air is sweet in the way it gets in this part of Vermont, like you could drink it. No smoke tonight from the fires, a now perennial summer problem—smoke from fires hundreds of miles away. I am typing this on my phone in pursuit of a feeling I don’t seem able to call up on my computer weirdly, and I am close to it. I was in my basement tonight on my treadmill, getting the steps I didn’t take during the day, something like a commitment I make to myself. When I do this I feel at times like I’m on a treadmill in one of those space ships in science fiction films, a passenger training for the planet I’m going to live on next as I travel there, but then I get off and yes, this is that planet, I know. No other planet for us. Training is for the planet this will become, is becoming.

I watched Kpop Demon Hunters, a strangely powerful animated film, and thought about how glad I was to see some heroes.

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Roses I was smitten with near the FAWC.

I had just seen some heroes. I went to Ptown at the end of last month, almost as if I was obeying my therapist who told me I needed to celebrate Pride, and what can I say—doctor’s orders. I’m going to Ptown, I told him. For Queer Week. “Perfect,” he said.

And yes, what better way was there to celebrate Pride in this particular moment than to teach queer students from all over the country? My friend Andrea Lawlor organized us to be there at the Fine Arts Work Center again, a third year of Queer Week, alongside Carmen Machado, Catherine Opie, Ilana Savdie, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Celeste Lecesne, and Miriam Klein-Stahl. A Scooby gang of faculty for sure.

A wall of roses in Provincetown I needed to see shaking in the wind.

Andrea was my first ever host in Ptown, back when I first came to there in 1995 to interview Mark Doty for Out Magazine. I slept on their couch. We had met in an Iowa City gay bar back in 1992, where they taught me to light matches one-handed. “I do this to impress the girls,” Andrea said to me that first night, and I knew I would do it to impress the guys. And I did.

I had arrived to Ptown this time feeling burned out and full of unmet grief, and I would like to tell you I laid it out on the sand there, but I didn’t make it to the dunes as I usually do. Instead I turned my grief into teaching, something I learned to do a long time ago, 30 years ago now, like that match trick. The class I taught there was new though, about returning to work you abandoned. A resurrections class for going back to what you gave up on, what you ran away from, what you silenced. This is hard work to do, as we discovered again. And the part that is probably hardest, the part I can only name, is about loving yourself enough to forgive yourself, and then to go back for what you need and what you can learn from.

By this I mean yes, not every abandoned story deserves a return but… did you give up because it wasn’t good yet, when it could be? Did you give up because you were afraid? Did you give up because it needed a stamina you’d only find by working on it? Because there was something about writing you didn’t know yet that would open it up?

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In between classes I walked around looking at the roses. I went out with some friends who either lived there or were passing through—the poet and novelist Sam Sax, who I watched film a young queen curling their eyelashes over a drink at Gifford House, and the poet Franny Choi, there with her husband, Cameron—they each teach a week back to back. I got caught up with Patrick Nolan, an old friend who is not the hockey player but the VP and Publisher of Penguin Books, and who is on the board of the FAWC—we went for a drink at Crew’s Quarters and the kind bartender took pity on me—I was drenched in sweat—and gave me one of their t-shirts. I met music legend Roddy Bottum, who has a new memoir coming out with a delightful title—The Royal We—and spent a little time with him as well. Jacquelyn Woodson came to town and did a public conversation with Patrick, a powerful one about the span of their career, someone else I wrote about in those first days at Out. And I got to see Maggie Nelson, Cody Silver and Justinian Huang, who all stopped by.

One of my favorite parts about summer teaching are the presentations. Night after night, the faculty presentations thrilled me. I can’t wait for Carmen’s new novel, or Cameron’s new book of poems. I came home with Celeste’s anthology of young queer writing and Andrea’s chapbook of memos for their perfect future government. The stories the artists told of their work will stay with me a long time—seeing Andrea Klein-Stahl’s journey from teen queer skatepunk artist to adult queer skatepunk artist supreme, their poster prints changing lives, or Celeste telling a story about Lily Tomlin that I think only they can tell, or Ilana Savdie’s expansion of her creative practice, the habit of challenging herself. Catherine Opie’s first self portrait is still looking at me in my mind.

By the time the student readings came, and the student studio visits, it was a pleasure to see the work, to hear the work, to laugh together. I left that Saturday of Pride in a weird rush, as my flight to Boston decided to leave early, something that can happen with a seaplane that seats 8. Once I was in the air I had a realization. I felt rescued. Rescued from my horror by what turned out to be this slow parade, new friends and old ones, intergenerational conversations or intragenerational ones, cross genre experiments, collaborations, and of course the dinners, the jokes, the message t-shirts. Frozé, espresso martinis, guest stars. And the roses and the sea.

I am remembering a young man I met on the ferry out of Boston who was heading there on a fellowship, and who asked Carmen and I what there was to do in Provincetown. He’d never been. I remember talking about dunes and restaurants but I have a better answer.

“You come back to life,” I could have said. But then I am always teaching what I need to learn.

• I wrote a short sketch about a man possibly confessing a murder to me at the Denny’s in Koreatown in Los Angeles for the LA Review of Books.

• I am doing a fundraiser creative writing craft talk in Philly in the first week in August for Blue Stoop and the Asian Arts Initiative. Please come join us. Also in August: my class on Description and Setting.