A note on themes & engaging with this text —

During the summer of 2023, inside a storm of painfully repetitious deaths, I started working on (listening to) an assemblage of writing & other forms called We the Lake. I felt wrecked, tired of echoes & of losing more precious & singular people. So I started, again, to write into grief. For better & worse, this is how I have always processed loss, confusion, frustration, difficulty — by walking straight into the center of it, searching for what I am to find.

The “writing” has been slow going thus far — a few new sentences at a time, much transcribing of pages that have been waiting, re-seeing of older work that wants to be included or considered as source material, & bright spots of correspondence with others. Thus far, We the Lake has many different & sometimes opposing things to say, but it has predominantly begun to think about tenderness & suicide, poets & artists & dreamers, the failures of poetry & philosophy & care, “madness” & sensitivity, survival, the particular tragedy of the American west, & many dear people who no longer have bodies.

Since this project started to emerge, loss & its partners seem only to have multiplied — more early death in the communities I am part of, the ongoing horror of genocide, acute & chronic suffering in cities & rural spaces alike, all of it rendered in greater & greater detail each day — & I feel a deep & quickening concern for those around me, for everyone still here. I do not know how to fix any of this, but I do know that I must attempt to tend to my one corner of things steadily & without fear. I hope that WtL can be a source of comfort or renewal, that someone might find a glimmer of recognition & renewal here, a phrase or two to carry.

It feels important to note that I listen into these spaces as a person who has experienced continual grief events from a young age, usually in the form of losses of friends by violent & sometimes willful means. I listen as a person who was born into a family history dappled with suicide & premature death. I listen as a person who exists within the spectrum of what contemporary western medicine has named bipolar disorder, who has many times made a choice to live, & who has been lucky to have the resources, tethers, & support to do so. The collaborators with whom I write & speak & listen have endured their own such experiences, their own situations of mind & origin & loss, & I am indebted to them, to the examples they have given me of how to be here.

WtL will be edited & changed & evolve over time, sections will be added & subtracted & grow at unknown rates. Names are usually represented by a single letter, with the exception of the dead & living collaborators whose names are included in full. I hope you will encounter the text below as a process document, an ongoing attempt to “show my work” as that work is happening. If you do choose to engage with it (thank you) please do so with care & consideration toward yourself, keeping in mind the themes at hand. & please scroll to the bottom of the page to pour some of your own grief into this lake.