Content notes: Discussions of environmental destruction, settler colonialism, imperialism, genocide, grief, femicide, war, transphobia, hormone therapy, and the death of a parent; brief references to depression and gun violence.

Let’s make writing do what it’s supposed to.

Let’s figure this out for good.

*

November and the letters are not enough. There are ten or so I’ve seen circulate—some with asks, some without. Some indicate the beginning of things. Some are simply the latest in a string of principled stands, which is to say, the most meaningful of the bunch.

The letters give way to resignations, still contextualized by letters, but letters now attached to acts. Some of these people are relinquishing their livelihoods. At least one clarifies their economic precarity, asks for leads on employment.

I withdraw the first of these essays from a publication owned by the company in the hot seat. I withdraw a short story from another. The company owns eight publications that I know of; in their names appear words like masters, voyage, uncharted, frontier.

For some years, many have noted the ties between this company—either called DNA (Discover New Art) or The Microlending Fund LLC, I’m not sure—and what’s referred to as dark finance.

The most I would have received in payment, had both been accepted, was $400.

Both pieces I had submitted under what they call their “Fast Response for BIPOC and Marginalized Writers” category on Submittable, a company for which the COO was apparently also the founder of the publications owned by DNA (or The Microlending Fund LLC, or both)[1]. I don’t give a reason for my withdrawal, though I do consider waiting for them to accept my work, allowing them to publish the work and pay me, then immediately redistributing the money and putting the work up on my own website, in violation of whatever contract they’d have me sign. This seems, upon reflection, excessively baroque, so instead I simply quietly withdraw.

One of the publications, the one focused on queer writers, rejects the poem of someone I know and care about early in the year. I and the person who wrote it celebrate the publication’s and company’s downfalls. It makes us both feel better about the rejection.

We still, despite our better judgment, take that sort of thing personally.

*

There are three trillion trees on Earth; two billion are planted each year.

To wrap your head around this, imagine instead that there are three thousand trees on Earth, and that two are planted each year. Both of those trees will be cut down in order to produce paper; an additional two will be cut down for this reason as well. If no other trees are cut down for any other reason, we will run out of trees in about a millennium-and-a-half. This is true of both the manageably imagined hypothetical as well as our more unmanageably imagined reality.

A millennium is about the amount of time it takes for a printer ink cartridge to decompose. Over the course of those thousand years, almost as many cartridges will be discarded as there are trees currently on Earth.

The prototypical printer ink cartridge is made of plastic, steel, and ink. Some also have components made of gold or palladium. The ink is a composite of words with secondary, ironical meanings: additives, solvents, pigments, binders. All together, the elements involved in producing a single cartridge include periodic table all-stars like cobalt, zinc, tin, titanium, aluminum, iron, silicon, and nickel, as well as deep cuts like zirconium, chromium, molybdenum, vanadium, tungsten, and manganese.

Another notable component is carnauba, a wax made of the leaves of the Brazilian carnauba palm. It’s one of many of the aforementioned additives, which improve the ability for a particular kind of ink to stick to a particular kind of surface. (The industry term for surface in this context is yet another double entendre: substrate.)[2]

All of the above applies to both printer ink and its cartridges; the printers that use them demand a whole other coalescence of resources, probably with significant overlap.

Discussions of the Congolese genocide often revolve around a mineral called coltan because most laptop and smartphone manufacturers rely on it, but the region’s natural resources, of course, go far beyond: gold, cobalt, zinc, and tin are some of its most plentiful. Their collective net worth in the DRC alone is about ten times as many American dollars as there are trees currently on Earth.

It would be inappropriate to use the numbers in this section to comparatively tabulate the genocide’s death toll, and besides, many of the worst abuses that unfold during a genocide have little to do with outright murder. Let’s just clarify that colonial violence in Congo over the last 150 years, especially in the last few decades, is at least as egregious as that of anywhere in the world, and likely one of the most—egregious, violent, deadly, take your pick of horrific descriptors. You can sketch a similar economy of suffering in most countries belonging to what some call the global south.

“I think one of the really interesting things about this energy transition moment that we’re in,” a man named Richard Morgan says in September, “[is] it’s going to mean that when we look a few decades out, the world is going to be trading a lot less crude oil, less coal, a lot more cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, zinc. And it happens to be the case that a lot of those resources are found in the global south.” This is stated during his public discussion with some energy bureaucrat from the U.S. State Department. (The talk is titled, totally unironically, “Mining the Gap.”[3])

By energy transition, he’s referring to what most people call the transition to so-called clean energy.

“Those countries, quite understandably, want to ensure that they enjoy some of the benefits of that resource endowment,” continues the man whose company is called AngloAmerican, “and we share that perspective.”

Apart from laptops and smartphones, there are countless products sold around the world that are powered and made possible by the violent extraction of resources the AngloAmerican man discusses coolly. The device on which I write this, and the one I use to print a draft—plus the paper I print it out on, and the pen I use to mark it up—are only a few, though I think it’s notable that they would be listed near the top on a ranking of the most ubiquitous.

*

I should probably apologize; the section above feels somewhat disingenuous.

It’s hard to call it didactic: there is no prescription, no overt, explicit judgment. It is an assemblage of facts, gathered together by the most moderate (or mediocre) of searching. I Google global south mineral exports, and the State Department talk is result number six.

I am still working through how to write about genocide. That is what this series of essays is for. I find that removing myself from the narrative—playing observer’s eye, dispassionately stating the facts—is somehow, paradoxically, effective: the observations themselves are enough to elicit emotion. But then I compare my sentences to those in the letters—the many, increasingly common letters, particularly the passionate ones, the aggressive ones that take righteous stands—and I know there’s something lacking in mine. Not passion, or aggression. The letter-writers and myself believe much of the same things, certainly feel the same anger, weep the same tears. I’m referring to something more ineffable.

I get whiffs of it in the parts of these essays that I step into, when I am at stake: my appearance, my transness, my life and health and livelihood. I feel it especially in the essay preceding this one. Writing its ending is the first and so far only time I have cried while writing these.

I think maybe it shouldn’t be possible to write these essays without crying—without some extreme expression of emotion. (Crying, for me, is harm reduction; undistilled rage has too few harmless outlets, and nihilistic glee is never an option, for countless reasons.)

I think if I cry at least once while writing these essays, then I’ll have done something right. It will be a decent benchmark to set: to write for a specific, imagined reader and guarantee that they are moved, except that the imagined reader is myself. This has been the case for most of my writing this year, which may be why I am succeeding at something others are not, even if I am failing at most everything else.

*

If the third section of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is successful at something other writing is not, it’s because death is banal at either extreme. Personal grief over individual loss offers little new ground: all who grieve feel essentially the same things, and what we write in response can only really reach those also grieving at the time of reading. Conversely, the unfathomable death of millions, as a historical event or an ongoing killing, can’t be processed without proper context, and thus becomes in the mind an equation of sociohistorical processes, summating to mass death like a function or proof. The former circumstance is one of too much emotion, from understanding that the death cannot be prevented (it has already happened); the latter circumstance is one of too little emotion, from understanding that it can (it is happening now).

The third section of 2666—originally intended by the author to be its own book, as is true of each of the five sections—achieves some ideal middle ground. Each of the section’s brief, untitled vignettes are about a femicide, or small cluster of femicides, investigated in moderate detail by the section’s protagonist. By the end of the section—or, as intended, the book—the reader cannot possibly recall the details of every death, but they have been exposed to them. The experience of reading it is comparable to the experience had by Milla Jovovich’s otherworldly being in the pre-climactic scene of American science fiction film The Fifth Element.[4] Her character, Leeloo, has spent the film a fish out of water among a distant-future humanity, learning its culture and mores with confusion and bemusement—sometimes disgust—in an effort to save the species from extinction, guided by Bruce Willis’s reluctant cabbie hero towards this supposedly admirable goal. She spends much of the film absorbing information about us and our history from the movie’s high-tech equivalent of Wikipedia, but only near the end of the movie does she search for a word that has come to define her experiences in this world. Slowly, she enters into the search bar three letters:

W A R

A flurry of media speed across the screen, exactly what you might imagine: the prototypical images of war you’d find if you typed the word into Google, or any engine’s image search. Some pictures are more graphic than others. The montage ends with a relatively tame photo of a red-orange mushroom cloud, and I say “relatively” because I had misremembered the montage ending with what many call napalm girl, a photo of a child with a name: Phan Thị Kim Phúc.

The Fifth Element scene, taken in or out of context, is somewhat comical: a white woman shaking violently with tears, at the sight of an undeniable history she’s until then been shielded from, for whatever reason. In the scenes that follow, Leeloo falls into a debilitating depression, refusing to assist in the near-complete salvation of humanity, asking Bruce Willis what the point would even be in the face of so much violence. His answer is the titular fifth element: love. The pair’s climactic kiss becomes the final piece of the puzzle. Humanity is saved.

In 2666, there is no puzzle to be solved, no win to be won, no salvation to complete. The flurry of deaths the reader is shown are those of hundreds of brown women and girls in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, a stand-in for the real Ciudad Juarez, which sits where New Mexico, Texas, and the Mexican state of Chihuahua meet, directly along the U.S.-Mexico border. The protagonist investigates the deaths with detached interest and, by the end, is unable to conclude anything of note. Between 1993 and 1997—between pages 353 and 633 in the American hardcover edition—there is only endless violence, stretching beyond the section’s bounds. Reporters and researchers are described as coming to the town to study and write about the killings—to publish books about them, to draw attention to them from around the world. Many of the murders have culprits who are caught. None of this affects the rate or brutality of the deaths.

I don’t know how many of the murders Bolaño describes are real. I imagine many are based on the details of real cases, which are out there, available to the public. I know he spent time in Ciudad Juarez before—and probably also during or after—writing 2666. Some of the deaths must be plucked directly from history, but who’s to know which.

I feel that, in its intimate fiction, this part of 2666 succeeds at something others do not. I weep the first time I read it, shaking violently with tears at an undeniable history I’ve until then been shielded from, for whatever reason. I was not born in Mexico but—like one-half of my family, who was—it is where I am inevitably headed. Perhaps not necessarily to Ciudad Juarez; perhaps to someplace like it.

The section’s protagonist is named Lalo Cura.

La locura in Spanish means the madness, or also the insanity. Additionally, Lalo is a common Mexican first name, and cura in Spanish is the noun form of cure, as well as the third-person singular conjugation of to heal.

*

Near the middle of November, I see on TikTok a photo slideshow of every trans person who’s died or been murdered in 2023. Later I realize it’s a part one of two; together, they seem comprehensive, though of course that would be impossible.

Immediately, my intention is for the bulk of this essay to become a flurry of murders and deaths. I swipe through the dozens of photos until I find the earliest death, chronologically—the first week of January, on the second day of the year. The articles about her murder are short and mostly repeat the same metadatic information. Her social media presence is both deeply personal and surprisingly substantial: an Instagram account with a large following but few posts, a TikTok account with a much larger following and many, many posts. If I want, I can watch. I can do what I’d do if she were alive: wonder who she is, make some informed inferences, be more or less right, as right as one can be about a stranger.

Many of the trans people in the photo slideshows along with her also are young; I realize it’s likely that tracing their digital footprints will be possible for them all.

When I write essays, I strive to meet the form’s classical goal: to find where I’m going as I write. To find places I wouldn’t have found otherwise without writing. This essay leads me to a task, to something like homework: moderately investigating these people’s lives, whatever I can find—to report my findings like Lalo Cura, to do what Bolaño does in 300 pages, what Leeloo does in a 15-second scene. Because it’s homework—an unchosen charge—I drag my feet. For weeks I wake up and wonder if today is the day I’ll be able to will myself to wander through so much death. The task is morbid. I am certain it will generate an essay of merit. I am certain, at the very least, that it will make me cry. Some days I cry at the prospect of doing it at all, tears that end when I think that I should be doing it, that I need to be doing some kind of archival work, what those who are able are meant to do during genocide: preserving a critical record, like the person on TikTok who assembled the slideshows in the first place, which are really just screenshots of a webpage somebody else assembled, but which—assuming the assembler was trans—would have been a difficult task nonetheless.[5]

But the will never comes.

December begins and I assemble, instead, a little chapbook of prose poems. An essay collection. I send part two of this essay series to a few more publications. I revise a short story about mass shootings that contains its own little flurry of (fictional) death and send it out too. At a Chinese restaurant in West L.A., I get a fortune cookie that says I’ll have good luck, and I consider it a sign that I should (of all things) apply to the Iowa Writers Workshop, and just write the three recommendation letters myself. I apply for a prestigious workshop that costs $800 to attend and which I won’t be able to afford if I’m accepted; I apply for a prestigious fellowship that will give me $100,000 if I’m accepted, and which I am still unsure I’ll be able to survive.

Two of the prose poems in the chapbook get accepted for publication; I send the chapbook and essay collection out as well. I find a small press seeking 20-to-40-page nonfiction chapbooks and calculate how long this essay would need to be if I’m going to bundle parts one through three up as a package for submission, so I have a better idea of about how long this one should be. I up my daily dosage of estrogen from four milligrams to six. On the app in which I log what it calls my “State of Mind,” but which I use mostly to track my period, most of the days are logged as “Pleasant,” midway on the upper half of a seven-point scale that ranges from “Very Unpleasant” to “Very Pleasant.”

Writing this section, particularly the last sentence, makes me feel very unpleasant.

But not enough to finally cry.

*

“Jennifer’s Carnations,” Las Biuty Queens, Iván Monalisa Ojeda, trans. Hannah Kauders.

*

Someone I know and care about tells me, midway through the year, that they can feel themselves being radicalized. Hearing someone say this is one of the few things I ever hear that puts a big smile on my face.

I tell that same person, at some point after that, that I will be whoever I need to be so that the people I know and care about can be whoever they want to be. This is a bargain as old as time, introduced to me as a toddler by Sesame Street’s adaptation of “The Gift of the Magi.” Ernie trades in his rubber duckie to get Bert a cigar box to keep his baseball cards in; Bert trades in his baseball cards to get Ernie a porcelain tray to hold Ernie’s rubber duckie. The whole thing takes place right before Christmas. It’s depicted warmly, preciously, but I don’t even finish telling my partner a summary before we both start to cry.

It’s a few days before Christmas now, and we’ve capped the amount we can spend on each other’s gifts at $20 USD, which we’ll spend today or tomorrow during a trip to a suburban bookstore where we’ll each pick out a book to get each other. Of course, we nevertheless refuse to adhere to the rule: I offer to also get them access to an online class on Frantz Fanon ($20 to $33 USD, sliding scale), and they offer to also get me a Blu-Ray of Daisuke Miyazaki’s Videophobia ($19.99 USD, plus shipping), and we both accept each other’s slightly misguided generosity. We are stretching our personal finances to their limits because we want to make each other happy; we want each other to have something to look forward to on Christmas Day. We are trading in our comfort for the other’s, a bargain as old as time. Really, we’d both be better off spending nothing at all and ignoring the silly Christian holiday altogether, which my partner suggests but I dismiss because last year I spent the holiday alone and depressed; my dad had died just days before and I wanted nothing more, then, than to pretend nothing of the world existed save for my misshapen grief.

There’s a phrase I think about a lot, even though it’s already been co-opted and commodified as the title of a book, a slogan on a tote bag, a viral meme. The phrase is “let this radicalize you.” I see it most often attached to descriptions of events in faraway places—faraway to the audience of the description/phrase, anyway—or sometimes to descriptions of events or phenomena not so far-removed but characterized as symbolic. This number of children have died of this disease; let this radicalize you. This CEO committed this crime for this many years; let this radicalize you. This number of bullets has entered this number of bodies; let this radicalize you. This is the average cost of care for this injury; let this radicalize you. This is the state of affairs on your doorstep; let this radicalize you.

And so on, and so forth.

I’ve been successfully radicalized this way. Over a decade ago, I read the military tribunal transcripts of a trans girl I didn’t know and let it radicalize me[6]; I watched the audiovisual footage of drone strikes that she leaked and let it radicalize me[7]; I watched young people browse listings for mansions on Zillow and let it radicalize me; I watched the brightest minds of my generation barely survive their poverties, their marginalizations, their chronic illnesses and neurodivergences—if they even survived at all—and I let their declines and demises radicalize me.

It works, to a point.

To go any further, at least for those of us in the imperial core, I think you have to stop letting things radicalize you. I think you have let you radicalize you. I think you have to confront the ways in which you have been wronged, harmed, cut down, carved up. I think you have to confront the ways in which you have wronged others, harmed others, cut them down, carved them up. Otherwise, you risk looking elsewhere and seeing the oppression there, on that side of things. You risk missing the oppression woven into your own DNA. As RuPaul Charles warns before Untucked: if you don’t watch out, you’re only getting half the story.

The person I know and care about who tells me they can feel themselves being radicalized, their radicalization takes them away from traditional approaches to writing, but it takes me further into it. As I write this, I am closer than I’ve ever been to success as an author—to having a book on shelves in bookstores, to making the money I need to buy my partner a box of cigars for his baseball cards without having to sell my rubber duckie. To giving him and the person I know and care about a certain amount of financial breathing room, so that they might pursue whatever they like in whatever way they like. Is it a gift to get to be radicalized? If so, it is a gift I want to give; I’ve been on the receiving end of enough gifts, of too many gifts; I sure as hell don’t need any more.

Today, I’m having a hard morning so my partner and I watch a comfort film: Tick, Tick, BOOM!. I cry twice—once when the film wants me to, during its melancholic climax, but once when it’s intending to make me laugh, at least a little. Jonathan Larson, progenitor of bohemian-ode-turned-cash-cow Rent, is in a marketing focus group so he can earn 75 bucks in 1990 USD, which will get him three-quarters of the way to adding a single musician more to the quasi-debut of Superbia, his supposed masterpiece. The audience for this performance will be just friends and producers, the idea being that if someone from the latter group likes it, they’ll cut him a check right then and there—to get it fast-tracked to Broadway, and Larson fast-tracked to fame. (To his impending chagrin, this will not happen with Superbia, but it will happen a few years later with Rent, though the night before it opens on Broadway, he will die of an aneurysm at 35 years old, which is the central tragedy of the film Tick, Tick, BOOM!, and perhaps the primary reason why he is venerated so reverently, though that’s not to say there’s nothing of value in his work; there is, I feel, a particularly critical takeaway, though I’m probably still too immature to successfully articulate it.[8])

In the focus group, he’s surrounded by three urban rubes and a marketing exec who shout out silly, incoherent phrases in order to generate ideas for a campaign to sell—first, as practice—the idea of America, and later, a fat substitute for cooking that can induce, among other things, toxic shock syndrome and skin scales.

Larson, keeping his eye on the prize, chimes in with some banal, saccharine taglines that would take anybody little effort to conjure, but which the rubes and exec fawn over; they’re exactly what they’re looking for, they’re exactly what they need.

Larson looks directly into the camera: “I could get paid for this. I could get healthcare, a 401(k), a BMW, a luxury apartment on Central Park West—no, no, no—East. I could actually be rewarded for my creativity, instead of rejected and ignored. This could be the rest of my life.”

I cry when he says this, and again when I write these sentences.

Then I collapse on my keyboard with relief.

I’ve done it.

With the accompaniment of Jonathan Larson, I’ve finally made myself cry.

I can walk away from this essay and know I’ve done (at least) one thing right.

Maybe let’s try for one more.

*

Here is my letter, my own open letter.

I am a writer who unequivocally stands with the people I know and care about and our fight for liberation against the illegal occupation of the so-called United States, of every territory violently dominated by empire, of every settler colonial apartheid, which is to say: every nation-state, every cisheterosexist orthodoxy, every infrastructure of subjugation and harm. As beneficiaries of the fruits of colonial domination, writers like myself must be loudly and clearly in solidarity against the state’s ever-present cheerleading of genocide against the people inside and outside its imagined bounds who pose any kind of threat to its power. Writers and artists in all genres nevertheless continue to cooperate—and, in fact, solicit collaborations—with all kinds of governments and all sizes of corporations, even as those governments and corporations deliberately weaponize language in support of genocide, policing, surveillance, suppression, and the maintenance of apartheid.[9]

Thus, I am putting forth several calls to action for myself, for me, for Erica Rivera, and Erica Rivera alone:

  • To never again send my work for consideration to a publication or press unwilling to fairly compensate its writers for their labor;
  • To never again send my work for consideration to a publication or press associated with a college or university, or a corporation, big or small;
  • To never again take money from an organization kept alive by donors or dollars associated with governments, universities, and corporations of any kind, including and especially those which operate out of the so-called United States;
  • To refuse nominations for any award that does not freely give commendations and compensation to all those not nominated;
  • To translate my writing into as many languages as I can, starting with Spanish;
  • To share knowledge and information with anyone who wishes to benefit from what I’ve learned, to use as they please even if I don’t immediately find reason to champion their goals;
  • To offer my writings and know-how freely to anyone who requests them, in the form they would benefit from most, including, but not limited to, text files, audio recordings, or ink on paper;
  • To cease relying on cloud services, smartphones and computers, printers and ink, and all digital infrastructures and technologies, tied as they are to colonial exploitation;
  • To never stop writing this series of essays;
  • For this essay, part three, to be the third of three hundred, three thousand, three million parts of this series, if that’s how many parts it takes to write down everything I know about genocide;
  • To write, always, with genocide in mind;
  • With death and destitution in mind;
  • With my death and my destitution in mind;
  • With myrole in the deaths and destitutions of others in mind;
  • With the harm I cause(d) and the accountability that must follow in mind;
  • To ground my cognition in the experiences I am best equipped to articulate, my own;
  • To understand myself as an ongoing victim of genocide, one slower in motion than others but in process all the same;
  • To abandon and abolish whatever it is we call writing as quickly as possible, to get away from this medium, this technology of communication, that is almost never—and likely impossible to make function—in service of liberation;
  • To ask questions for which there may not yet be answers;
  • To offer answers to questions that may yet be unspeakable;
  • To never get a motherfucking MFA;
  • To live up to all this;
  • To understand it’s nowhere close to enough;
  • To understand that there is no enough (the limit does not exist);
  • To believe I can live up to all this and still give the people I know and care about the gift of radicalization;
  • To allow myself to receive that gift from others, which may mean abandoning the ideas of “gifts” and “radicalizations” completely;
  • To respect the words I write as though they were scripture, for I live and die and thus am made holy;
  • To go be more; to always be more; there is always more to be; there is, forever, more.

*

From Bifo, with love:

“You will die; it is not particularly important when. 
What is important is how you live.”

[1] Justin Curzi’s personal website states that he founded The Masters Review in 2010, grew it into six publications—ostensibly the six currently owned by DNA—and then sold them all in a private deal in 2019, three years after he was recruited to be the COO of Submittable (https://www.justincurzi.com/about-me). He is currently an advisor to and investor in “over forty early-stage growth companies throughout the United States” (https://www.linkedin.com/in/justincurzi).

[2] Most of the information about printer ink in this section comes from research conducted by undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis, for a design history course taught by Professor Christina Cogdell (http://www.designlife-cycle.com/printer-ink-cartridges).

[3] The full transcript can be read on the U.S. State Department website (https://www.state.gov/mining-the-gap-critical-minerals-the-sdgs/).

[4] The scene is available to view in many places online, including YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JVaXZ9Jl1g).

[5] The webpage which the slideshows draw on is called “Remembering Our Dead,” and serves as a companion resource for events related to Transgender Day of Rememberance, which is held each year on November 20 (https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/).

[6] The transcripts are in the public domain and available to read in many places online, including the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/usa-v-manning-third-party-transcripts/).

[7] The footage is available to view in many places online, including YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfvFpT-iypw).

[8] Just before this essay is published, someone informs me that Jonathan Larson more or less plagiarized the story of Rent from novelist Sarah Schulman, which Schulman discusses in her book, Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (https://www.dukeupress.edu/stagestruck). I’m still too immature to articulate the aforementioned takeaway, but I feel a hell of a lot closer than I was before.

[9] This paragraph more or less paraphrases “WRITERS IN SOLIDARITY IN PALESTINE,” the first of the many open letters I read in the months after October 2023 (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UVp2E4VoBgXTOYDs6BAAWI8fiaEUqFLOHoN50LKy4oI/edit).

About the Author:

Erica “ERN” Rivera (she/they) is a performance writer, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of The Ecology of Art, Strike!, a collection of essays that will be published by tRaum Books in 2025. The essay above is part of her ongoing series titled “everything i know about genocide,” which began in October 2023 in response to the escalation of the genocide of Palestinians carried out by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel. Part one is available to read on her personal website, and part two will appear in Broken Antler Magazine later this year.

*Feature image by Andrew Neel on Unsplash