new book / new job

and reading about deals with devils

Something happens in the late stages of book writing. It has to do with the logic of language. You come back to a paragraph, something you first wrote months ago, for the seventeenth, eighteenth, or thirtieth time. You tweak, tighten, stet, try it all over again. All of your thinking, research, the words you keep moving around, everything you’ve been putting into months and months of work starts bubbling up, and then the whole emerges: a paragraph greater than the sum of its sentences. I don’t understand it, which is what I mean. It’s the work’s internal logic robbing the reigns you’d been holding, beginning to speak. When you’ve put enough of the words on the page, have removed enough of the chaff, they take on something living, rhizomatic, resonant.

I’m not trying to oversell it, but just describing what, in this sprint of a five-month book, I finally started to feel in the last couple weeks of work. I felt something else, too, as I dug around into the roots, economy, and reality of the modern immigration camp system, along with the deep history and growing presence of community resistance: I felt a little hope, a glimmer in the weltschmerz.

One veteran organizer I spoke with, Leonardo Vilchis, put it to me like this: “Right now it’s hard. Right now it’s scary. Right now we don’t know what the hell is going on. But everybody who’s going through this process is going to fight back.” So many already are, and not just in a reflexive, reactionary way, but also by doing deep care work, mutual aid, and community bonding. And that is promising not only because it is both urgently needed and consolatory, but because it has the potential to be lasting.

Maybe one of the other reasons I’m feeling a small spark in these dark political times is because I was beneficiary of that communal caring. The book came together not only by leaning hard on the practitioners — I calculate I did over forty formal interviews in about five months — but also through friends, readers, research assistance, and editing help. Brilliant people read rough and early drafts, did consults, digging around, and editing. And that’s not to mention my actual editor, Katy O’Donnell at Haymarket, who also helped set the course, read some along the way, and then did a very rapid and luminous edit.

It took a village.

New Gig: LOOKOUT

I’m now reporting for a fabulously exciting young nonprofit media outlet, Lookout. We focus on queer and BIPOC communities, but are open to any important story holding the powerful to account or shining a light. We’re ambitious, want to grow, and will be doing hard-hitting investigations and accountability work. I’ll be focusing on the Arizona statehouse while the legislature is in session. Outside of and during that reporting, I’ll be writing about immigration, the border, and extremism in Arizona and beyond.

I’m still getting up to speed, but here’s my first simple piece, co-written with my editor, Joseph Jaafari, about a proposal from two Arizona Republicans to deploy ICE agents at every polling place in the state during the upcoming midterms. That is just one of many, many pieces of legislation (ranging from extremist to plainly illegal to impossible-to-implement to immediately-vetoed to decent to desperately-needed-but-impossible-to-pass) I’ll be following as the legislative session proceeds

Sign up for my weekly Lookout newsletter here.

This is the second time I’ve been the first full-time hire for a non-profit news outlet. The previous one was Arizona Luminaria, and I’m proud that my last article for them is a conversation with the inspiring poet, environmental defender, and border activist, Russ McSpadden. You can buy his book of poems, Borderlings, here.

Reading the Devil

The School of Night is the fourth book in the Morning Star series from Knausgaard, and is about a young and unlikeable photography student in London in the 1980s. He is capable but not great at his trade, until…

What would you trade for true artistic genius, for flights of creation beyond intelligence or even intent? I can’t go into detail about Knausgaard’s Faustian deal — it’s both diffuse and would be too much of a spoiler. Suffice it to say I felt like puking and throwing the book at the wall — in a good way — at a few points in the novel.

In Doctor Faustus, Mann, however, spells it out, though also explains that the torments of hell (or maybe the promise of hell? — it’s all twisted into complicated meta-theological dialectics) are impossible to describe with language. The horny one does take a partial stab at a scene from the fiery pits: “Their great agonies will make them devour their own tongues, yet they don’t form a community, but are full of scorn and contempt for one another and as they sing and groan they shout the filthiest insults at each other.”

How far is that from a description of American politics?