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Random Stuff

Instead of Writing, I Do This

September 18, 2025 ·

lettuce, basil and tomatoes on and in front of porch with brown mulch

This spring and summer, instead of writing, I retreated from lit, (except for a thin online presence) and grew a garden. I was feeling tired, had a very difficult ’24 fall and winter with things going wrong on all fronts, expensive home and now auto repairs, and clients and friends blowing me off, causing hardship on all fronts. Also, my social/online community was ripped into fragments, and two of my accounts were penalized and destroyed by Meta and X. How could I publicize my book? I had worked years to connect with a community and grow those accounts, then, gone! Relationships diminished by algorithms.

I had already taken a pause in the fall while doing a Granta workshop and wading through a lot of problems, the loss of a family friend, and some strange family shit I can’t even write about. 2024 was a sucky year, it ranks among the worst, and it should have been great because my book released, and I had some writing windfalls, but…

I was trying to write memoir and felt like the universe was sabotaging my opportunity with security issues, family issues, and canceling clients with the accompanying financial troubles—the universe unleashing its players and tricksters, and me feeling helpless in all of it.

One day, in the fall of ’24 while I was attempting to finish up the workshop, my nervous system just shut down, and I said, fuck it, I’m going to try growing a garden again, and am going to make compost for the spring and recycle things on my land to enrich my soil. Escapist, maybe, but in my typically obsessive style, it became my main focus (along with my book release) and what I most cared about in those months. It can be liberating to separate from language and live in your body, I’ve found.

I had tried to grow one in 2019, the spring after Max died. Put hours into it and a lot of money, and in one night, the deer downed my beautiful tomatoes and practically everything (it must have been a herd). The main garden had large, four-foot fire rings I bought before before they became trendy. I’ve always liked plain, utilitarian things. Also, there are other, smaller and larger metal beds of various shapes scattered around the property.

I had planted memorial flowers around my property for Max, perennials, that were also eaten by the deer. Today, one lavender plant remains; it survived my neglect (also, deer don’t like lavender).

2019 Memorial Plants

After the deer invasion, I let everything grow over and it sat for several years until the fall of ’24 (when I decided to give it another shot). I bought some wire fencing used to make animal-proof cages, some posts, and hauled piles of grass and leaves which I meticulously chopped for organic compost. I added worm castings and other compost to the beds, which I, by then, knew had terrible soil (a bad online purchase dumped on my property). I raked, blew and chopped endless bags of leaves and covered the beds, which proved to be beneficial over the winter. I planted some bulbs, potatoes, and garlic for over winter, which turned out to be, mostly a failure, due to poor timing, bad soil, or bad luck.

I needed something to look forward to. Something that had nothing to do with humans judging, accepting, or rejecting me, either in literature or in my real life. Something that was mine and mine only. Something no one else, save for the weather gods and the beasts, could undo. I needed some hope when I had none. And know my lack of hope wasn’t due to organic depression or misfiring, it was because I was getting hit with a barrage of shit and bad luck. So much, it was hard to take, and this gone-hope, while exasperated by my personal “unluck,” seemed to be also part of something collective, given world events and the election, all hitting hard in a dark synchronicity.

For as much value as there is to be present, in the moment, what the gurus say, I find that hope is grounded in a future, in plans, and in possibilities, but also in the way we can openly greet the unknown… And we need hope to thrive, to even get through each day, and we need it for trusting the power of attention, intention, and all of the benefits of mindfulness. I can’t control who is in office, fascism, the publishing world, who buys my book, who parented me, who loves me and who doesn’t, but I can sync myself with nature and feel the powerful sense of belonging that comes with that, which, in my active, sweating, laborious meditation as I am working the earth, listening to the plants, and observing the magic order of nature, feels greater than all the inequities and injustices I have been, and continue to be pained by, like so many other millions of people… If I could only do this, garden, nothing else, I would be happy all the time.

Max, who is now gone, started gardening the year she suicided. She rented an allotment and built some beds—spent hours in the hot sun, removing grass, refreshing the shed that came with the plot. The day, she left this world, we were supposed to build beds with some thick, green timber I bought…

rich black compost pile om yellow green grass

She wanted to worm compost, in part, because it could be done in a small space. Assured me that was the best way. I knew nothing of it without her mentioning it, but I have taken her advice, which is only one small way in which she lives on. It’s not as macabre as it sounds. I acquired a multi-level worm hotel from Facebook Marketplace for cheap and acquired some red wiggler worms. I’m still learning to care for them.

There’s a learning curve to any composting, and it has really been just this spring and summer where I learned to hot compost outdoors, and I also worked out the ratio of food/water/bedding/etc. for the composting worms. I admit there is still something that gives me the willies about worms, but I have a wee bit of something nurturing in me, and I liked having something to take care of, or a worm someone. What I didn’t know was that somehow gardening and learning composting, all the kinds, and DOING IT, would help me somehow better accept death and the painful comings and goings of people in life, the way some things are seasonal and/or the cyclical nature of all things.

Porch plants

I was once a caregiver for someone I adored. I am not a caregiver type, however, as much as partners and others have wanted to make me so. I’m weird. Withdrawn. I don’t like schedules that aren’t of my own making. But somehow, this year, I’ve tuned into the needs of plants. Each day in the morning, I feel a kind of hope. The first thing I do is head out to the plant beds and see what is blooming, admire the bees pollinating, and watch the butterflies and wildlife, all doing what they were intended, or just what they know. There’s a sense of not knowing what will come next, how big it will be, how green and what shade, and, of course, how long it will be here.

 plants in green

I deliberately overcrowded most plants, so some of the beds look like mini forests. In the beginning, they were lush and green. I ignored what the seed packets said about spacing (which are really geared toward commercial farming) and let the plants touch each other. The tomato forest with one-foot spacing I chose not to prune did the best. It was god-awful hot, and as it turned out, they needed the shade provided by their unpruned side shoots. Plus, tomato plants are social. They like to touch each other and other plants. They relish their basil and hot pepper friends. And the lone lavender plant was thrilled to have companions, thrived in fact, after years of neglect. I am letting the plants live their full lives by not pruning them to death, and they are still giving me something, food on my table, the anticipation of color, the gorgeous, greens, oranges, yellows and reds.

The one bed, where I did properly prune and mulch and spaced them more widely, performed poorly by comparison, until I moved (crowded) six sizeable container tomato plants into the mosquito tent with them. Then they all went crazy, their “arms” grew and entwined; they became a wild jungle. Then they started blooming and producing fruit. It was amazing. Perhaps I would get way more fruit if I pruned the hell out of them, like every YouTube gardener insists upon, but here’s the thing, I think they are happy and thriving in their overgrown, tangling green state, and that was as important to me as food.

Next year, I may experiment more, try to manage them through building a long overhead tract with hanging apparatus for them, or maybe arched cattle panels to support vines. But to imagine a plant possessing its own sprawling freedom and joy, and that a plant has a consciousness, is part of my spiritual growth. Did you know plants/forests/ecosystems have mycorrhizal networks that extend for miles and allow plants to communicate and even transport nutrients to one another? In return, plants give the fungi sugars and carbs. So plants have a collective consciousness too, and to foster this on my property, even on a very small scale has made me hopeful, but also, I gradually realized that I was part of this magical thing, these processes that are what nature intended in a world being destroyed by industry and greed. By opting out of certain things, I was opting into something life changing, potentially self-sustaining, and moral. And, I have to add, spiritual. A lot of it was paying attention and listening to what the plants have to say, how they live in the world.

This year, rather than doing expensive fencing, I cobbled temporary fencing and rods together to hold up plants, protect them from wildlife, and secure some food for me, not just the creatures. It has been amazing and transformational. I made most meals from scratch once the garden started blooming and had fresh salads for weeks with fistfuls of herbs. Cucumbers haven’t tasted this good in years, nor tomatoes. It has made me realize even the organic food I bought at stores is crappy.

yellow spaghetti squash on ground

And now it’s September (I started writing this in August), and my community, did, in fact show up throughout ’24 and ’25, despite the ways we became scattered, as did many other folks to promote, interview, and review my book. I am, indeed extremely blessed and humbled for all of the support I received. But still, just as expected, the penalties on my accounts profoundly impacted my reach. At the end of July, the book was named a Lammy finalist, and, this fall, I placed third in a writing contest, all wonderful things, and yet the wind has again shifted, and life has thrown some shit my way and some devastating blows to Americans, ICE is disappearing people en masse as we watch, helpless. NEA grants were canceled (can these be an unrealized freedom?), an influential/harmful person was assassinated, and people want to re-frame his life to suit their agendas, and much of our own lives are presented more as fiction than fact, I find, all while our first amendment rights are being stripped away (and this is only a bit of it). And then there is Gaza/Israel… Devastating, and so much suffering with no end in sight…

So here we are again, and how do we find hope in these existential/surreal times… To turn on the news, go on social, or where I live, leaving one’s home even feels like submitting to gaslighting. It is sometimes too much to hold.

But I occupy myself with tasks, chopping the dried, finished plants, the once-green cucumber leaves and dark-spotted basil, all for compost while preparing several new beds for next year with finished compost I made and some improvised hugelkultur from the mess the tree trimmers left in spring. Preparing piles of dead wood for chopping. Filling tin-can ovens with wood chips for making bio-char and looking forward to the burning and renewal of the soil next year, as I wonder about the larger burning and where we are headed as a country and a world. Hope in uncertainty is a task of the tallest order. What are you doing for hope these days? Does it involve color or language, a calendar or a candle? A tree, a song, or a soft hug from someone you love?

I wish I had more answers or any, but sometimes hope is just a lot of work, as is happiness. Maybe we can hope that from all of this violence, disruptive politics and burning that we will find some fertility in the ash and that a new order will emerge up the road. It is the age of Aquarius after all, meaning change, the transformational kind… Let’s imagine a world in which people behave like mycorrhizal networks, sensing what the “other” needs, rushing to provide sustenance. I see it in my small lit community. We survive, it seems. Thank you for the support, kindness, and for fostering possibilities—one of hope’s more elusive qualities—from the bottom of my heart. And thank you for stopping by.

Lavender Fields, England

Welcome to 2025 – Is Social Media Dead?

January 17, 2025 ·

winter field with dead corn stalks in monochrome, bluish

Welcome to 2025 and the lotta things hanging over us… And David Lynch just died. I hope he went out gently. It’s interesting, sort of, to see what he meant to different people. Blue Velvet was one of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen. I felt disturbed for days by the scissors scene… And the summer after my grandmother died, I tried to re-watch Erasure Head and cried my guts out. The previous viewing didn’t impact me that way, I was with friends in a dingy Detroit apartment, all of us on a wrinkled bed with beer and cold pizza watching a tiny screen. There’s a way company can impact how you experience film (or any art), but I recall how everyone seemed so disconnected in his movies, such an existential feeling… And yet often lacking something human for me, and so, not quite relatable, but still always impactful emotionally. I will probably revisit his work now…

Some people I’m fond of and who I have considered as part of my lit community have vanished due to all the social media corruption. I admit I’m a person with some residual abandonment issues, but having found a small creative community for the first time in my life, I am really saddened by the dismantling of it. If nothing else, I hope people find richer relationships that exist outside of social show-and-tell, character-limited interactions… I’m a bit amazed though at how easily people toss connections, almost as if this were all some kind of simulation (thanks Teresa Mestizo for seeding this concept).

About ten years ago or so, I got off Facebook for a year and mostly never communicated with people including what little family I have because that it the only way they wanted to interact.

This may be time for people to start having more picnics and for lesbians to do potlucks again. Social media has harmed us in so many ways. I think queers tried harder to get along, to build communities before online dating and social made us all seem like disposable objects.

For writerly news, I did an interview with James Diaz about my book in Anti-Heroin Chic in December. If you missed it, it’s here, and there’s another with Kristine Esser-Slentz in (Re) An Ideas Journal soon (maybe this month). Jami McCarty wrote a review of my book for New Pages (also out this month). I will be posting links! We talk some about grief in both of the interviews–also, about privacy issues, grandmothers, and writing trauma.

I have found it increasingly difficult to promote my work on social as my Meta accounts saw a shift awhile back, greatly reducing my reach. I believe it is shadowbanning. A lot of people including creatives are complaining about it. But also, some time last year, all the hashtags I used to tag queers disappeared (or were banned). Instagram won’t publish an actual list, but you can tell when you type or search (through suggestions) if they exist. The problem is that they will penalize your account for using them. I lost track of most of the queers I interacted with–and we used to see each other’s post regularly. You can read about this online. Instagram has been called out multiple times since 2016 for taking negative actions on queer accounts. I have spoken about the recent shift for months, but what I find is people are not alarmed about things until it impacts them personally. Right now, Meta’s tactics are impacting a lot of people, and they’ve given the red light for people to harass queers, not just ignoring it as they have for most of their history.

And Twitter (I still call it that), is another asshole you don’t need me to tell you about. My reach on Twitter, the month my book came out (before the election) was reduced by 75%. I used to count on 4000 views for a post (that is no influencer number), but suddenly, I was lucky to get 1000. Anyone who has been there long knows this isn’t good for a book. I feel really discouraged. But I’m staying–because I’m stubborn, and because there are people who are kind and who enrich my life with their art and their presence. I don’t think people will spring back as they did in previous exoduses, but I don’t know where this is all leading. I hated Bluesky the first time I was there, but some think it has improved. For now, I don’t have the bandwidth for another channel.

I will be doing another post about social soon, but I just wanted to drop in with a ’25 post. I hope you’re all hanging in there. I hope something comes of this cease fire, but I’m already hearing whacky things. Stay sane in the crazy new year, and find people to be safe with and furry creatures to cuddle. And please consider also that if you leave, they win. It’s divide and conquer. These evil people know what they’re after.

xo,

Koss

2023 Three-Quarter Year Publishing Update | Koss

November 3, 2023 ·

asemic art with earth tones, watercolor, and black ink characters in square format
Asemic Writing Image Published in Cutbow Quarterly

It’s been a busy publishing year and since creating a “What’s New” page, I’ve been really lazy about updating the site. I see people are actually looking at my blog, so I should be writing something brilliant for you (thank you for checking it out). Truth is, my Aquarian brain is sometimes visual, sometimes verbal, and sometimes able to write things. But I’ve mostly been in visual mode all year… so I hope you enjoy those things. I’ve had lots of publications since my last update. You will find some, but not all on my “What’s New” page. If you are not up to reading, you can certainly skip to that page for quick links. But know there are some erasure poems at the end of this article.

Compared to other years I submitted SIGNIFICANTLY less this year, but I did submit some. You may have read the popular blog post suggesting you submit 100 subs. I think 200-300 is a better range if you are serious about publishing. Of course, if you do long-form writing, 300 will probably not be possible, but if you write microfiction, flash, and poetry, maybe…


You will hear criticism about sending lots of subs and, of course, editors would like to feel their magazine is special so you should only submit to them and a couple of select others, but here’s the thing, their journals can still be special while you are trying to take care of yourself. Subbing in quantity is especially important for marginalized people as we don’t have access to the same networks and, I have to say, privileges that certain other groups have. This does not reduce it to a numbers game — you should still send to journals you like and editors you trust. If 300 is overwhelming, then start with 100. If you’re only submitting to say, those university presses and fancy publications, you might get a 3-percent placement. From what I’ve heard, this would not be a bad number, depending on the acceptance rates of the publications. But enough of my advice.

So here are a few highlights of my publishing life since April (when I published my last update). I had five poems including a new erasure published in Speakeasy, a new queer journal. They are to be compiled into their inaugural issue. If you like Transformers, you’ll like the erasure. It’s so nice to get a little love for erasure poems.

Cutbow included an asemic piece and used it for the cover (check out the main image on this page). If you haven’t seen Cutbow, it’s a very professionally managed (by editor, Arden Hunter) print and digital journal for experimental and visual poetry.

pink flamingos with beaver mag text and orange and pink psychadelic background

I have two Wuthering Heights visual erasures forthcoming in the print version of Permafrost. They say it will be released this month after a long delay. Fingers crossed. You can find more of my Wuthering Heights pieces here and here in several other journals including Sage Cigarettes and Beaver Mag, both run by lovely people, I can’t say enough nice things about the Sage Cigarettes staff (Sadee, L.E., Steph and all). Beaver Mag also included one of my crossword poem/collages in their “Tacky and Tasteless” issue this past summer. Beaver Mag is a queer-friendly newer journal with very diverse taste in art and poetry. They are LOVELY and friendly. You should send them work if they seem like a good fit.

black eyeglasses with purple lenses on pink background with promotional text

Another of my favorite journals for experimental work, Petrichor, also published crossword poems in their latest giant issue. They were published in the Pebbles section and they have a new future/sci-fi call up soon you might want to check out. I believe the deadline was extended, but I’d check out their Twitter or Blue Sky page for updates. Petrichor also blew me away with a BoTN nomination for an ekphrastic poem they previously published. Find it here. Seth (EIC) is another extremely professional editor and I highly recommend Petrichor, especially for experimental writing and visual poetry.

I have several new asemic writing pieces up at Up the Staircase Quarterly. They do an excellent job of displaying art and there’s lots to look at in this issue, so be sure to check it out. April is another super-nice-professional editor to work with.


I was lucky to get invited to Second Sunday readings. You already missed it, but it lives on YouTube.


And, finally, I was blessed to receive some Best of the Net nominations this year. You can read about them and find links to the work, along with many of the other nominees on this dedicated page. I’m very grateful to all of the editors for thinking of me, and this happened during a rather discouraging time… Being a writer and artist is a tough path, as I’m sure you know if you’re reading this.


Be well. Keep writing, painting, drinking coffee, and most of all, I hope you’re making space for joy. My recent joys include joining an asemic group on social and seeing all the wonderful work people do. There is something very different about taking in art as opposed to reading for me as it occurs in a “brain-rest” state. I highly recommend inviting visual art into your world. The other joy over the last couple days is the blackout rejection letter poems people are sharing on social. I’ll leave you with several I made. Thanks for stopping by.

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