An Election Postmortem with Raechel Anne Jolie
Plus a Brief Birthday Reflection
Dear lovely people,
Birthdays can be bookends. This past year marked a major life transition as I resigned from my tenured academic job in January 2024 soon after a disastrous cross-country move and devastating breakup. My path has not been easy, and I’m still recovering from intense burnout, but I fought tooth and nail for the life I envisioned as a writer without giving up or looking back. And I think that’s worth celebrating.
I don’t want to sugarcoat the immensity of collective grief and personal tragedy that links us to shared experiences of pain. This grief is precisely what compels me to look for the little pockets of light and life born amid upheaval. I would love to know what’s in your pockets, too.
And wherever you are, reading these words, please know I am grateful for you. Connecting with an amazing community of writers has brought me joy and purpose during a rocky time.
So, needless to say, I was delighted when Raechel Anne Jolie invited me to collaborate on a post-election take on the current political discourse, from the perspective of two femme writers with backgrounds in organizing, academia, and sex work.
Raechel and I decided to put the recorded conversation behind a paywall since we speak on sensitive subjects. If you don’t already subscribe to Raechel’s newsletter, radical love letters, now is a wonderful time to do so. If you have capacity, please consider a paid subscription to my newsletter, too.
My paid subscribers can access an abridged transcript of the recorded conversation below. In addition to stories too tender to tell so publicly, paid subs can look forward to playlists, poems, and other juicy writing from my current book project on why I started stripping as a way to build a home, so to speak, after exiting academia.
For me, the best gift of all time is free time to write. While I strive to share my writing biweekly, as in twice a month, I am grateful for your grace; I’m still adjusting to a new work schedule. Four nights and four days a week I feel like a vampire, waking just hours before sunset and sleeping at dawn. Sometimes I watch my life recede into red strobe lights, or the tiny star cutouts in my blackout curtains. Sunrays stream through shapes to create the illusion of night. There is a heaviness to sleeping with the sun.
Or, to reference Miranda July’s novel All Fours, every day is Tuesday. I write around the clock, under an artificial moon, furiously, in voice notes, or scribbles on sticky paper, if not with clacking keys.
I’ve been writing about unlikely intimacies, desiring ghosts, and emotional labor in and between the strip club and university classroom. For example, in one forthcoming essay titled “The Strip Club is a Mortuary,” I weave together personal narrative, ghost stories, and close readings of films such as Jennifer’s Body, Teeth, Striptease, and Anora—to explore the projection of economic anxieties and heterosexual crisis onto dangerous women.
All of that to say, I’m really excited to share more writing from my work in progress oh so soon, maybe even the unabridged (uncensored! unhinged?) version of a birthday reflection I had planned to post last week before I got the flu. In the meantime, thank you, as always, for supporting and sharing Napkin Manifestos.
xx,
Alison
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