Ode to a horny universe

Things Published in 2025

In May I profiled L.A. Witch, a band I’ve loved for a long time, for Alta Journal.

In June, I wrote about the auction of David Lynch’s archive and possessions, also for Alta Journal.

In November, I wrote about the work of the textile artist Christina Forrer for Momus.

And in December my interview with the novelist Halle Butler, long in progress, was finally published in BOMB.

At the December 2025 Antioch MFA residency, I stepped in to teach a seminar about pitching and placing work in magazines after the guest scheduled to teach it had to cancel. I gave my own humble, ground-up version of how I’ve enjoyed some modest success placing interviews, profiles, and reviews in the last two years—a different version of this work, certainly, than that pursued by freelancers who make their living through this kind of writing, or professional journalists. At one point, a student frustrated with my description of the fact that an editor may change the tone of a piece to one you yourself would not have chosen asked, “Why not just let them use AI for that, then? What’s the point of even writing it at all?”

This consternation reminds me of the way I used to feel, asking editors and agents visiting the MFA program I attended what they actually meant when they said they were interested in “emerging voices,” since I felt that I wasn’t having such great luck emerging.

A sacred MFA memory: a New Yorker telling the room that they’d never had a NYU MFA student intern at the magazine, as I, a current New Yorker intern, sat in the front row, seeking eye contact with her. A few minutes later I asked my own aggro version of the above question, prompting the program chair to say “Lisa!” in a horrified voice. “[The chair’s] face was melting,” a friend told me after. Now I’m the program chair receiving activated questions from students.

But as I tried to explain to the student, I love writing cultural reporting pieces because they offer a container for my thoughts, a task I can complete, and a way to engage with my art while doing something else that interests me, too, like talking to a musician whose work I admire. As I continue the difficult waiting game of trying to get my second novel published, writing these pieces is a material way for me to connect to editors, artists, and readers, and I am grateful for that.

Things Read in 2025

I always enjoy and appreciate lists of things other people have read, but I am terrible at keeping my own list. I’ve tried it in a notebook, in a Word Doc, in a Google Sheet, in the Notes app on my phone. Nope. Something about record-keeping does not fit with the way I’ve always read, which is voraciously, randomly, mercurially, eclectically, and defiantly.

So here are some books I can remember reading this year. I will never finish this newsletter if I try to editorialize the books in any meaningful way, so I’ll write what I can. Inclusion counts as an endorsement. My method for making this list was pulling the ones I could remember out of my brain, and then walking around my apartment looking at piles of books, trying to jog my memory.

The Practice, The Horizon, and the Chain by Safia Samatar (actually read in very late 2024 in one crazed sitting, highly recommend)

Room To Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

The White Mosque by Safia Samatar (an unbelievable work of memoir and creative nonfiction about—in part, anyway—a group of Mennonites who settled in present-day Uzbekistan in the 19th century, which is also a consideration of the author’s identity as a Somali-American Mennonite. So extremely my shit I could write my own whole book about it)

Olive Days by Jessica Elisheva Emerson (as heartbreaking and compelling a story of forbidden love as I can remember reading)

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (read thanks to Sarah Thankam Mathews’s full-throated endorsement in her excellent newsletter)

Awake In The Floating City by Susanna Kwan (I loved this so much I wanted to write an essay about it, and maybe I still will, but I didn’t manage to do so this year)

The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson (a moving, painstakingly researched memoir/history that combines two of my areas of interest, utopian movements and Black American history)

Barbara by Joni Murphy (ditto what I said about Awake In The Floating City)

Crawl by Max Delsohn (fell me right back in love with the short story)

All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews

Lion by Sonya Walger

Am I Blue? Coming Out From The Silence, edited by Marion Dane Bauer (a reread of an anthology that was monumentally important to me when I first read it at age ten, in which I recognized a catalog of basically everything I still do or try to do as a writer)

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera

Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton (I am still reading this right now, not finished, and it is extremely my shit)

This feels embarrassingly short. I asked Jasper what books he remembered me reading this year and he said “You read so many books though.” Maybe I’ll remember more and make another list. Probably not!

What felt different about my reading this year was the way that I longed for, threw myself into, and felt gratitude for big, engrossing novels, and for nonfiction that felt like them. I wanted to be comforted by greatness of world.

I spent a lot of the first half of this year frozen with fear, doing the things necessary to keep my daily life moving. The night of the 2024 election was one of the worst of my life, up there with the night we learned my mother had terminal cancer and the night following a particularly brutal fight with my ex-husband, during which he threatened to leave me. My heartrate stayed elevated until the sun came up. Then eight days into the new year my family fled our home after watching a fire begin on the hillside ten blocks north of our apartment.

I spent the first six weeks of the year at my mother-in-law’s house, safe, cared for, disoriented, confused. That sense of dislocation expanded when the Office of Management and Budget issued a deranged memo announcing a “pause” of federal grants and loans. I read about this after a friend posted a link to Marisa Kabas’s independent journalism newsletter The Handbasket. It was several days before the story was meaningfully reported on by the legacy media outlets I kept refreshing for confirmation. Loved ones I mentioned the “pause” to didn’t know what I was talking about. Reality seemed to spiral away from me. We talked to a Portuguese immigration attorney, we talked about moving in with my in-laws. I was paralyzed with grief at the idea of leaving the life we had built in L.A. and terrified I would miss some golden chance to do so. Before what? Before every bad thing I feared I could not survive.

I felt as if my well-being hinged on minimizing my exposure to the poison coming out of Washington, but I was equally afraid of poison in L.A., in the air and in the water. I attended Zoom webinars organized by nonprofit organizations, trying to figure out if it was safe to go back, while the majority of my friends went about their lives in the city, and I felt guilty about the volume of my fear, cosseted up in Mendocino. A few times I spun out about my anxiety to people much more vulnerable and at risk than I am, and I’m still embarrassed about that.

As part of my desire to avoid all coverage of the inauguration, I tried to cut myself off from all of the ways I generally consume news, and from social media as well. For a while I let myself use Substack as a backdoor, scrolling its feedlike thing, but I stopped when, within just a few days, Substack started serving me antivax societal collapse buy-a-gun glop.

I didn’t successfully wean myself off news or social media. If anything, I’ve probably spent more time staring at Instagram this year than in previous years, a sentence I am not proud to write. What can I say? I needed a friend, but I often felt too shellshocked to get it together to text anyone. Sometimes I get served these nice Reels about daycare in the Netherlands, or ads for expensive sweaters I can fantasize about buying. Memes I bombard my partner with. It’s not dignified but it is available to me.

I did a wonderful event at Womb House Books in celebration of Anita Felicelli’s excellent new book How We Know Our Time Travelers. In mid-February, the board and staff of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference held our first winter retreat, and then we went back to L.A. On our first night back in our apartment, I was so scared of invisible pollution—of all the risks I could not contain. I made the bed with fresh linens and laid down in it and my partner put his hand on my back and said “You’re safe, little sweetie” and eventually I fell asleep.

In a year with so much fear—reading about the administration’s plan to rendition American residents to CECOT in my husband’s childhood bedroom, learning Trump had deployed the National Guard to L.A. when we were two hours from home after another trip up north, the reclassification of graduate programs such as the one that I chair as non-”professional,” which limits the amount of federal financial aid that can be borrowed by students and has profoundly negative implications for the arts as well as for fields such as nursing—joy also kept showing up, thawing me out.

I got to spend three days with my friend Bryan during AWP, after we hadn’t seen each other for most of a decade. I organized a reading celebrating the release of Katya Apekina’s novel Mother Doll at Sunny’s Bookshop in Tarzana. I was part of launch events for Barbara by Joni Murphy, Questions Without Answers by Sarah Manguso, and Agrippina The Younger by Diana Arterian. With my wonderful colleagues, I organized and lead our June and December Antioch MFA residencies and the 2025 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference.

I visited England to meet my new nephew, went to the Cornish coast, saw a dream show of Ithell Colquhoun’s work at the Tate Britain. I spent many, many days in the sunny company of my friends, my partner, and my child, who speaks now in complete sentences and whose pelt of white-blond hair hangs to the middle of his back. I was presented with a multiverse of experience. A layer cake of contentment and anxiety I ate happily. I was hungry.

As I have struggled with for several years now, when I was most afraid, I relied on work to ground me. Not the work of writing, but the work of organizing and administering and managing. The work I get paid for. Writing, when I could do it, helped me as it always has. But fear, and exhaustion, and not enough time froze me out from it, too often. Not fear of writing. I rarely let myself get there. If I am staring at the blank page, freaked out, I have already won.

I am still not sure how to find the space to write the way I want to, or the way I used to, or in a way that would feel good to me. If I have a new year’s resolution, it is to earnestly attempt to apply my great capacity for problem solving to my creative work. I don’t mean to my creative life. So many “Writer’s Life" hacks and tips and seminars can come to seem like a Weight Watchers’-style numbers game, an endless list of rules to be followed in pursuit of efficiency and results.

I want to find a way to think about the art I want to make—the stories I want to tell—that leverages that same skills that get me paid and enables me to help others. I want to use my gift to help my art exist.

What could bring me back to this space after almost six months with no newsletter but an explosion of horniness on main? First there was the moral panic gooning article in Harper’s—a scary piece of writing, for sure, until I read Danny Lavery, Eli Cugini, and Max Graves’s highly enjoyable dissection, "But PornosexualGooner101 Died 35 Years Ago...This Very Night!" 

Daniel Kolitz, author of “The Goon Squad” sees gooners—I find his take on what exactly a gooner is highly credulous, but if you don’t know, the term refers to an internet subculture of people devoted to pursuing a trancelike state in which they are perpetually masturbating to pornography, a no-nut nirvana—as people who in another life would have been “Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care.”

Lawn care? In this economy? Actually, any of that, in this economy? I’m but a lowly woman (kind of), but Kolitz’s vision of what a non-gooner (pre-gooner?) life belongs to a different social order, wherein (white) men might reasonably have expected and/or been expected to lead a life full of possessions and responsibilities that would prevent them from gooning all day.

And yet…have we not always been gooning or trying to goon?

Madame Bovary is the book that comes to mind as an example, but maybe every book is about seeking a state of pleasure that lasts forever or as long as possible, sticks in the mind, draws your attention back to it, gives the rest of your life a vaguely sick-making shimmer, a nasty secret that gets you through the rest of everything?

What is scary about Kolitz’s gooners—and I agree with Lavery et al that they are having one over on our Harper’s writer—is the way “the rest of everything” has been shut out. But that’s not actually possible. Even the Satanists handpicked for TV that I remember watching on the National Georgraphic program Taboo, a show my ex and I loved, were caring for an elderly relative and working banal jobs.

Capitalism exists, in part, to edge the irrational, psychedelic, visionary impact of sexual ecstasy out of the quotidian. And people have always found ways to shoehorn it back in.

It may be too easy to say that the viral hockey smut television show Heated Rivalry constitutes a kind of queer/femme-coded gooning product, but it’s also not wrong. Have you seen the memes? Or the quickly-assembled erotic audiobook product designed to hoover up the lingering thirst? All of the pleasures the show has to offer, from clandestine shame-fueled rendezvous to wish-fulfillment happy coupledom, constitute an emotional smorgasbord for the lonely soul looking to stim out of the limitations of the present.

Those interested in, ensnared by, or scratching their heads at the Heated Rivalry phenomenon (so, basically everybody) should watch Thirst Trap: The Fame. The Fantasy. The Fallout, a two-part docuseries about William White, a doomed-seeming young Canadian who was essentially bullied into sex work by his legions of rabid fans after discovering that he had a knack for making TikToks that drove older women nuts. In short order White was attending galas in hideous floral tuxedos at his fans’ behest and sleeping with some of them, leading to toxic drama that came to include doxxing, death threats, and a baptism staged on a Greek island featuring White, shirtless in linen pants, on horseback, in the ocean.

Early on in the documentary, White describes a childhood devoted to the pursuit of hockey and also to “being like the hot guys,” whom he studied and tried to emulate. His product of making cute faces, such that it is, was perfectly fit to the shortform video format. White does not do it for me, and I get a little queasy at explanations of his allure such as “To have this gorgeous kid dancing to songs that were the fabric of our youth? It was amazing. Somebody was actually seeing us.” But it’s evident that what is on the surface is also what is beneath it. The medium is the message. Some things are simple.

No matter how much he claims to hope to become one, White is not an actor. His drifting, frightened, pilled-out affect reminded me of a few lost undergrads I have taught over the years. I keep trying to come up with scenarios that could save William White—janitorial contract at a remote research facility?—but there’s nowhere he could go where he wouldn’t have wifi, and his phone can make him money quicker than any job ever could. His poor lip-syncing became the key to some deep lock inside a great many people. The rewards he gathered were irresistible; from the documentary, which does an amazing job of mentioning this without explaining it at all, it seems like White was also creating sexual video content with his (male) cousin for the lucrative online market with a different demographic than his daylight fans. Maybe no explanation is necessary. Have you seen what Piper Rockelle is up to lately? I’d link her Instagram but actually no I wouldn’t.

Appetite for life—horniness, sure, but also longing—is an experience people want very, very badly. The force of that wanting can transform countless lives. The New York Times is always trying to game out the appeal of phenomena like Heated Rivalry or the entire romantasy genre, with their tired technocratic takes on why women enjoy things. (To survive the hell of straight marriage!) I think the appeal of these horny stories is deeper, more elemental. Not irrational but highly rational.

A student recently expressed admiration for what they referred to as the sexual openness and fearlessness in my first novel. They wanted to know how I had done it because they felt that they wanted to do it, too, in their writing.

I told them that I actually felt a fairly unwell for a lot of the time I was writing that book, owing to circumstances in my personal life, and that what they saw as my bravery was motivated by an intense need to tell the truth about women and sex as I saw it, because it was a story I didn’t see told anywhere else. A crazed longing, an unstoppable hunger to be seen. I told them that my therapist at the time had encouraged me to imagine the person who needed to read the book, to think of that person when I felt hopeless about publishing it. I told them that I had done so, and it had helped me.

I’m not sure that what I said helped the student. But they honored me with the question, and the conversation reminded me why I care about anything at all.

Happy new year!

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.