Looking forward to reading this! Really enjoyed The Tender Between and your poems in haiku journals :)

👉 This from the brilliant review/interview/essay by @effervescentvoid.bsky.social on Stephanie Bolster's «Long Exposure», just published at mRb...

mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/long...

Thanks for sharing, Carlos!

The blatant dismissal of the concerns of women, immigrants, racialized people, and people with disabilities, in order to appeal to the supposed majority is... really something. As if most of the population doesn't fall into at least one of those categories.

Criticize the status quo but don't scare people by implying you want to change anything about it.

so stunning I was too stunned to spell "stunning," apparently.

Honestly, anyone who has treated me as a person. And not in the sense that I'm grateful for scraps; like everyone else, writers are overworked and trained by capitalism to see everyone as rivals. It takes effort and integrity to offer your time to an early-career writer without expecting a reward.

[4/4] And, ironically, after all of that relentless self-monitoring, self-abandonment, self-sacrifice, and self-loathing, that high-masking person will probably still get clocked as "weird" at first sight.

[3/4] Evaluating "social skills" by how compliant and unobtrusive a person is, rather than that person's ability to meet their needs, is hugely misleading. That stereotypically blunt person probably has better odds of meaningful friendships, career advancement, and emotional wellbeing.

[2/4] But when neurodivergent people describe social difficulties, they often describe being overly socially submissive, feeling like they aren't allowed to express disagreement, walking on eggshells and neglecting their own needs in order to avoid conflict, and being exploited for these traits.

For some people, telling them to appreciate ordinary life conveys the message to appreciate the everyday ways their basic needs are met. For others, it comes across as a message to ignore the everyday ways those basic needs are neglected.

“I’ll settle for nothing less than being a TikTok star” and “I don’t want to be pressured into being a housewife” are extremely different sentiments, but both may be worded as “I don’t want an ordinary life.”