Excited to read from Luz at Midnight at this event, a community conversation on what just climate/COVID recovery looks like. I wrote Luz based on my deep involvement over the years in environmental justice struggles in San Antonio, and one particular springboard for the story was the tendency of local powers-that-be to imagine they can address problems like climate change in a purely technological way, swapping out dirty fuels for cleaner tech without addressing its underlying political/economic logics. The book’s political backdrop presents a not-so-distant and very imaginable future in which the necessity of a rapid transition away from fossil fuels launches a new mining boom for the rare earth minerals that will be required to produce all those solar panels and wind turbine strong magnets and electric car batteries–and thus looks a lot like the old world we’re trying to leave behind, with wildcatters and mancamps popping up all over everyone’s watersheds as startups extract and excrete and sleep around with all the city people.

This is the first time I’ll be reading primarily to the folks I’m writing about in the book, so I’m nervous but also excited. I think I picked the right passages.

I’ll be reading at 3:30pm CST but stick around for the rest of the conversation too, which is vital and critical. City people will be speaking, but schedule also features radical and visionary thinker-activists on climate/food/energy justice and regenerative economy, as well as poets and musicians.

To attend, you’ll want to RSVP: sc.org/SAjustrecovery

Here’s something fun for everyone out there who loves wordplay and hates fucking grifters, strongmen, and white nationalist demagogues, especially when they seize power and seek to maintain it at whatever cost.

On Saturday, October 17, I’m excited to be participating in TWO readings (see post below for info on the first!). Here’s the second one, which starts at 2pm–an online reading by members of Stone in the Stream/Roca en el Rio environmental writers collective for the closing of Sabra Booth’s “Hot Pursuit: A Visual Commentary on Climate Change.”

Click below for details on how to attend:

On October 17 at 1pm CST, I’ll be taking part in an online reading organized by Flower Song Press and MC’ed by Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros. See below for details!

I’ve gotten really terrible at Facebook and Twitter and Instagram—out of anxiety I overthink things and as a result end up posting like once a month—but YouTube remains one place I do post with total abandon and nary a flying fart for what people might think.

A couple months ago I said something about this in my monthly Facebook post, about how much interesting writing I do, and also read,  in the comments section of YouTube. It’s a kind of marginalia, I wrote. Or even a kind of latrinalia—a writing on the bathroom wall that no one will ever read—and, at the same time, which everyone will read. Weird.

Probably the cleverest thing I ever posted to YouTube was a parody of “Here I Dreamed I Was an Architect” by The Decemberists: Continue reading →

1. Voices de la Luna’s special Earth Day 50th anniversary issue, “Earth in Praise / Earth in Peril” is out! Co-editors Mobi Warren and Jim and Lucia LaVilla-Havelin did a freakin’ gorgeous job, and they were kind enough to make space for a chapter of my novel manuscript Luz at Midnight.

You can order a copy here–$8 for digital PDF, $10 for a paper copy. Or perhaps you’d like a subscription? That too can be arranged.

Continue reading →

…from the tender beautiful About Place Journal:

Practices of Hope

About Place Journal seeks poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, art, and hybrid forms (including video, digital storytelling, sound, performance documentation, etc.) for our themed issue, PRACTICES OF HOPE. We want to showcase creative practices as activist tools, ways of making change, as well as forms that can bring people together. How can creative practice allow us to feel and act differently? How can we invent new appreciation of and new embodiment practices for humans and other fellow creatures? What can ‘speculative’ or ‘non-realist’ forms mean, and how can we make them resonant for eco-arts?

Many of us cannot afford purely apocalyptic and dystopic fantasies. What else can activate new relationships to climate crisis, species extinction, and environmentally-located social pressures in racist, abelist, classist, ageist, and sexist times? How can we imagine a different future with more of us in it? What hope can we afford? What hope do we need?  Continue reading →

See not one, but TWO calls for submissions below (one for youth, one for all ages) for special Earth Day issue of Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Literature and Arts Magazine. Note that while all-ages deadline is December 15th, youth/student deadline is December 1st: Continue reading →

In just a couple of weeks I’ll be tabling for the first time at a couple grassroots bookfests: first, on September 28, at the Pachanga de Palabras; then, the following weekend at the San Antonio Zine Fest on October 5.

I’ve got three DIY books in the works that I’m feverishly trying to get ready, for now pushing from my mind the possibility that none of them may be ready in time: Continue reading →