Welcome To Put Your Face In It

Where apathy goes to die

She’s Putting Her Face In It, big-time. Art by Ryan Stanley.

I have been a writer for thirty years, and a musician for two decades. I’m deep in the midst of scripting a graphic novel, illustrated by my partner, and I’ve written, recorded, and performed something like a dozen* EP’s and full-length albums with my band, Cursed Arrows. (I was also a barista for a decade and a half, who was terrible at latte art and spilled innumerable macchiatos on their owners’ laps, but I didn’t want to lead with that.) I have blogged aggressively and manic-depressively since the early 2000’s. I am also a consummate slacker.

In high school, I skipped countless classes to hang out in the nearby university library, imagining myself as some ghostly Victorian gown-clad entity, poring over volumes of classical poetry and writing my own poems and essays. My high school Advanced English teacher, Ms Dubrick, a personal champion throughout my tumultuous adolescence, grew so weary of my skipping classes in favour of writing my own songs and stories that she merely sighed (I imagine) and gave up. Though, not before I graduated, when she gifted me a beautiful volume of classical prose, the first page of which she had thoughtfully inscribed. I never read it. And then I donated it to Value Village. Ahhhh. You smell that? No, that’s not patchouli. Its apathy.

This is Put Your Face In It, a newsletter about anxiety, poetry, music, looking toward the light, and one woman’s belovedly flawed human existence.

*note my unwillingless to do a simple fact check on myself.