both/and

delightful observations in new orleans

New Orleans is one day south and four days east of Santa Cruz. After Los Angeles, the land got emptier and emptier until it was just me, the big rigs, and the wide dirt plains. The saguaros came and went in southern Arizona, as did the border fence in west Texas. After San Antonio, I hit the hot wet of the gulf swamps, through which I meandered the whole last day and into the evening. The New Orleans city skyline was hazy through the night mist and then Highway 10, along whose road I had been rolling since California, spit me out in the Bywater neighborhood. I found myself bumping over potholes and parallel parking on a one way street, laughing to suddenly be in the city I love. Urban life, just like that. An artful, busy and bustling gem in the heart of a Louisiana floodplain.

hard copy newsletters going out to my 12 paid subscribers last week, yay!

you must be a lover of the lord (or you won’t go to heaven when you die)

I was just in time for the New Orleans All Day Shape Note Singing. Shape Note Singing is an American music tradition that brings people together to sing four-part harmony hymns without accompaniment in a self-sufficient and non-performative style. I’ve been singing in this style for a few years and was glad to roll into town to sing with the good people of New Orleans. That first bright and frigid morning, I walked down an empty street past shuttered up shotgun houses and shivering sidewalk cats to get to the New Marigny Theater, a converted old church with huge stained glass windows and a warm yet unsettling doorman. I’ve gone to a few All Day Singings in my time on this earth, but this one had to be the youngest and definitely the queerest. Shape Note, at least the circle of it that I frequent, is pretty queer, to the surprise of many outsiders. I think it’s because it’s the punkest way to sing hymns, and because the music is cacophonous and embodied, sung with howling vigor. We sing the oldest songs Protestantism has to offer with lyrics warning listeners about repentance and living free from sin, all while living an existence contrary to the ethics of the music’s Puritan roots. I have grown to deeply love the melodies, the harmonies, the archaic language, and the community that forms around it all.

Sitting inside the contradiction of queer Shape Note is really special. The music is like an invocation, a calling forth of an old and grief-stricken sound that not so many people make anymore. And who better to wake the old spirits than the young, gender-nonconforming artists of the gulf coast? This is who I want stealing from the church. To me, a femme-presenting queer cis woman, the presence of openly queer and trans people makes the space safe for everybody. It means that there is an acceptance in the room of the wild, the wicked, the nonconformist, the shunned. And I don’t want to invoke the attention of the lord without the company of the shunned. I don’t want to sing, “you must be a lover of the lord or you won’t go to heaven when you die” if we’re not bursting out into a fit of giggles afterward. The experience of the Shape Note singing the first weekend in New Orleans set a precedent for the beauty that was to follow through my time in this Crescent City.

the sacred clown / invented seasons

Mardi Gras came early this year. By the time I lugged all my boxes of sewing supplies, instruments and jars of tea into the shotgun house I’m subletting, the city was in the full swing of the festival. New Orleans celebrates Mardi Gras for the month leading up to the actual day. I joined into the Mardi Gras celebrations as much as I could stand, not being a big partier myself. B was here for that bit, and we made costumes from scratch (party hats, princess, potato) and followed the parades through the city streets. Homemade costumes, partying, parades, intense and seemingly never-ending reverie and debauchery mark the time up until Ash Wednesday, a day when more than a few folks venture to the Catholic church to receive a cross of ashes on their foreheads.

Perhaps because of the chaotic intensity of Mardi Gras, there is a seemingly city-wide acknowledgement of Lent and its utility for tired human bodies. Like, wow! that was a lot! Let’s slow down. Maybe uninstall some apps from our phones. Drink a lot of water and a little less coffee and alcohol.

I love all seasons, having grown up mostly without them. And I especially love the seasons we invent, like Lent or Ramadan or Christmas. The balance between Mardi Gras and the Lenten season makes me feel more human. Through it we acknowledge the passing of time. The ritual practices that are just good for us to do and we don’t know why, that’s just our animal bodies doing the thing they do.

being alone in the middle of the universe

The house I’m renting is on the corner of Piety and Dauphine St, a long skinny cave with red painted floors in the kitchen and a porch that overlooks one of the busier streets in the Bywater. To me, it feels like the heart of the world. I’ve never lived somewhere so central. People and their leashed dogs are walking by my front door. Customers gather on their patio of the sandwich shop across the street every morning and afternoon while they wait for their order to be called out. I know when the vintage store next to them is open because… I can see every article of clothing on the rack out front. If I play fiddle, people hear me (scary; I can only play when the sandwich shop is closed). It’s the most city-like place I’ve ever dwelt without actually being high-rise or very urban feeling. But despite all this hustle and bustle, I have a quiet and cozy sanctuary all to myself.

Through divine coincidence, I used to deliver Blue Hubbard winter squash to Rebecca Solnit in San Francisco. The first time I did it, I parallel parked on her clamorous Mission district street and crossed with a squash under each arm. When she opened the door to receive them, she asked if we’d like to come in. We said yes.

A quiet refuge contrasted to the world outside: art on every wall, a big kitchen table strewn with books and letters, a cozy bedroom nook overlooking the street. She told me that, as a writer working from home, she prefers to live this way. Indoors is the restful, quiet place and outside is where friends are meeting, bicycles are speeding by, someone’s playing the trombone, the trees are blooming and the garbage cans are being rolled around. To live inside a quiet pocket while life thunders by outside, as opposed to on a vista looking down on the world (see my essay on gated communities¹ for more thoughts on this subject).

It turns out, I adore this way of living too. The alone-ness amidst the bustle. It’s all happening outside the door, but inside it’s just me, my laptop and WWOZ New Orleans Jazz Radio. If I want to see friends or people, I walk to the coffee shop or the park. I am amidst more people than ever, but I am also leading a quieter life. And inside this aloneness/togetherness is a sense of strangeness at being a stranger in a new land, yet feeling like this land is for me

awake asleep at home abroad

Two feelings are fiercely strangling me, but somewhere in their dual grasp for my attention neither is dragging me off. In New Orleans, I am a stranger and I am also in a place where I feel intense belonging. Here, I’ve jumped headfirst into so many things I love: Sacred Harp singing on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights, old time jam every other Tuesday, figure drawing at the bar on Wednesdays when I don’t go to the singing at Clouet Gardens, Friday night open mic, Saturday open comedy improv jam and polyphonic singing group, then Cajun brunch once a month on Sunday. I’m getting a little too comfortable drinking 16oz of cold brew every day from the coffee shop where they know how to pronounce my name. When B was here, we attended a bicycle activism ride that felt like real action, and I called my first square dance here to a very warm reception. I have never felt a faster sense of belonging in a place, charmed by both the physical space—the architecture, the river, the bumpy sidewalks and silly tourists—but also by the people I am meeting and their prioritization of art, music, queerness, being unashamedly exactly what they are in the face of contemporary American culture.

And yet… I am still a stranger here. I have some acquaintances and burgeoning friendships, but no real, deep connections. After all, I’m just here for a few months; not enough time to build anything structurally sound. That’s what makes the juxtaposition of feeling like belonging and not belonging so interesting. I’m charmed, in love, caught up in the thrill of a city, and also kind of lonely. I know that would change if I stayed for longer. This moment is sweet and special, the pull of yearning to be part of things and not quiet being all the way in.

contradictions everywhere

I head back home in mid-April, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t already grieving the departure.

Where I’m going is a land of contradictions too. Santa Cruz has a reputation of being weird and artsy (like New Orleans!) but offers little space or support for up and coming artists, few opportunities to live comfortably or at all without a full time job or two. It is aggressively beautiful and prohibitively expensive. The majority of demographics simple cannot call it home; and it’s therefore mostly comprised of white people and their service workers (aka an amusement park). You are of course still welcome to be “weird” and “artsy” if you bought your house in the 1990s and enjoy going to other old peoples’ open studios once a year, but good luck just existing in your thirties.

Also, I grew up there. I watched the punk café shutter and the big used bookstore too. I watched the city choose to never change, and the impact from that. Six years ago, I moved back for a job and then the pandemic hit so it made sense to stay, and then I fell in love and made friends and started organizing in the community. But the uncomfortable feeling that living there gives me has never left. Santa Cruz has the ocean, the redwood forest, and the wild north coast prairie. It also holds me in a chokehold of feeling like I never left my hometown, like every day I am betraying what I hoped and dreamt for myself by continuing to reside there when what I truly want is to take a leap of faith.

Of course, we always want what we don’t have. Grass is greener, vacations are not real life, etc. But I keep hearing from transplants that New Orleans decides whether it wants you or not, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I were back here before long.

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Writing is hard! Writing is pressure! Sometimes writing this letter feels like it has to be something celebratory, airbrushed, neat and tidy and sense-making (braided essay? perfect thot piece?). My mom reads it, after all, and my bf’s mom, and all of these other people who I want to think I have my shit together. But these two months have proved to me that even if my shit is together today, it can choose to rearrange itself tomorrow. So my question for you is:

1. Here’s where I wrote about gated communities: