30 days of prompts: day 24

& round-up

May 25, 2022

Happy Wednesday!

Look. I know it’s not actually a happy Wednesday. Everything is terrible beyond just the normal terrible ways. Everything is terribler than usual—trust me, I know.

I hope you don’t think I’m callous to continue to catalog silly little things. You’re still going to get a prompt from me in your inbox every day for the next six days, because I promised 30 days of prompts & providing one daily has sort of given me a sense of purpose. Thank you, once again, for keeping me alive.

Here’s what I have for you today:

The prompt
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Resources
Tweets

Because I’m apparently feeling snarky, it’s a long one—

so please open this email in a new window if you want to get to the end.

Day 24: Prompt

Write a poem in honor of LGBTQ+ Pride Month.

It’s almost June! That means it’s almost Pride Month! This poem can be about an experience at the Parade, it can be dedicated to a queer/trans loved one, it can be about your first girl-crush, it can address your own journey, or it can be about shame, if you want. What I mean is: you don’t have to be ~part of the queer community~ to respond to this prompt. You can write an allyship poem; you can invoke Sappho; you can use a gay-ass quotation from Emily Dickinson as an epigraph.1

Anyway, here are some examples:

& a few of mine:

Housekeeping:

There was a mass shooting in the US again yesterday & I don’t have anything poetic to say about that.

roxane gay @rgay

What do you say when 14 children and a teacher have been murdered at school? Language is inadequate to the task of explaining the callousness of a country that does absolutely nothing to address rampant gun violence. There is no culture of life here. It is a culture of control.

roxane gay @rgay

Unless we are talking about guns. When it comes to guns there is no interest in control.

Netflix

has released a new transphobic comedy special the same week that they laid off a ton of LGBTQ+ employees. I intend to cancel my subscription just as soon as my parents finish Schitt’s Creek. Please join me. &, if you have any Netflix stock, maybe sell it because—with so many other streaming services now to compete with—it only goes downhill from here for Netflix. Karma, baby.

Anyway, this post was about Chappelle, but it can easily apply to Gervais now, too—and it’s worth reading:

I'm not asking comedians to stop telling trans jokes. I'm asking them to stop telling *the same* trans jokes over and over.

Also:

℮oin Higgins @EoinHiggins_

Ricky Gervais has a new comedy special coming out Tuesday. Word is that Netflix sat on it for months because of how virulently transphobic it is—worse than Chappelle—but are releasing it anyway for fear of right-wing backlash.

Elon Musk is a cunt @Gobias___

Ricky Gervais could go after the governments, banks, billionaires. The ones causing actual harm to ordinary people all over the world on an unfathomable scale every single day. But he goes after trans people instead. Yeah Ricky, son, you speak your truth to power. Coward.

Big Red @bigredgaymer

In honour of Ricky Gervais and his 2-4-1 rant on trans people and cancel culture, I am in fact, cancelling. Thanks @netflix #TransRightsAreHumanRights

I will be in Houston

for exactly 32 hours in early August for a bunch of appointments. Anyone want to lend me their car? I will give you a bazillion zines. I will make you some art for your walls. Let’s barter like in the olden days. I’m broke but can offer something. Hmu.

Issue 9

of The West Review comes out next week. I love promoting writers, even in such a small literary journal, & paying them what I can for their immense skill.

The West Review @The_West_Review

All, Issue 9 (!) will be out in one week. Can't wait to showcase all the extraordinary writing & share it with you!

Any publisher requesting First Rights should pay for those rights. I don’t think there’s a need to pay for reprints, but if you’re an organization that insists the work can’t have been published anywhere else: you need to pay for that right.

That’s my hot take & bizarrely what gets me into the most trouble. I’m not saying that you, as an editor, are a Bad Person for not paying your contributors. I am simply saying that you are unethical.2

What I’m reading:

PAMELA PAUL IS THE NEW WORST COLUMNIST AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hilarious. Please stop giving dull people cool jobs. Unfair that she gets to share her ~hot takes~ in the NYT while I’m stuck crying in my car on a Tuesday afternoon again because no one will hire me.

Quotations:

All night you eyed the man I wanted to be;
my jaw flexed tight.

-W 177th & Broadway, Taylor Johnson

Resources:

Tweets:

Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @KendraWrites

Confession: I didn't know what hiking was until I went away to college. And once I learned what it was my take away was basically "walking that white people have made complicated"

Your Pal Billy! @Your_Pal_Billy

It absolutely never fails.

Malcolm Harris @BigMeanInternet

If you're a leftist who doesn't feel personally under attack by this anti-queer hate campaign then I wonder in what community you do your politics...

make up a guy @makeupaguy

guy who pronounces LGBT as "el jibbity"

The West Review @The_West_Review

All, Issue 9 (!) will be out in one week. Can't wait to showcase all the extraordinary writing & share it with you!

Despy Boutris @itsdbouts

my birthday's coming up in july & if anyone's wondering what gift to buy for me, i only want one thing: a will to live. thanks

In conclusion:

As always, I hope you’ll consider buying some books or art or zines or shirts or giving me attention on Instagram. No pressure, though.

See you tomorrow!

-DB

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Here are a few of my favorites:

We are the only poets—and every one else is prose.

-Emily Dickinson in a letter to Susan Gilbert, 1850

Oh, my darling one, how long you wander from me, how weary I grow of waiting and looking, and calling for you; sometimes I shut my eyes, and shut my heart towards you, and try hard to forget you because you grieve me so, but you’ll never go away.

-Emily Dickinson in a letter to Susan Gilbert

In thinking of those I love, my reason is all gone from me, and I do fear sometimes that I must make a hospital for the hopelessly insane, and chain me up there such times, so I won’t injure you.