Welcome, fellow humans.
Hello there, good people. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a historian and a writer, and I tend to be interested in the forms we use to make sense of ourselves to ourselves, in relation to others and in time. I was trained in the history of science and medicine in early modern China, andbut my current work has evolved to center poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction of all sorts in my work. My scholarship is an art practice. My leadership style is benevolent-witch-in-her-forest-hut-growing-plants-for-potions-with-her-cat-familiar-and-freely-making-offerings-of-what-she-has-to-give-to-those-who-come-seeking-it-out-and-who-are-willing-to-receive-it. I like science fiction and sardines. I live in an old rowhouse in Pittsburgh’s South Side Flats. I grow tomatoes and I take naps. You can read more about me here.
This Substack is meant to give form to the way I work best, and to the kind of work that motivates me: sharing work in progress, in real time, with other humans who might take something from it. My working style, here in this particular moment of midlife, has moved from a project-oriented to a practice-oriented approach. I'm much more interested in the creative possibilities of encounter with broken, unfinished, transforming, open things, and this space is for putting that energy out into the world for kindred spirits. There's a time and place for published objects that give form to the collective fashioning of specialist peer groups and their disciplinary critiques. This is not that.
I'll aim to share something here each week-ish. The length will vary, and the topics will reflect what I'm thinking about ands engaged with that week. Sometimes they will be steps toward a larger organism: memoir-ish, historical craft-ish, short fiction-ish. Sometimes they will not obviously be that at all. In each case I'll do my best to honor the central goal of my work, these days (whether that looks like Chinese history or formal experimentation with historical craft or personal memoir or none of those things): saying what I have to say.
Sometimes these things have monthly fees, or paid tiers that unlock paywalled content. For the time being, everything here is free. In time, I may decide to add a paid subscriber option. If and when that happens, it will happen because I feel that there are additional kinds of content that merit a paid subscription, and that subscriber donations make such content possible.
