Now, it is fall. Over the last several weeks, as I’ve begun classes at Northwestern, returning to the place that first brought me to the Chicago area 11 years ago, I’ve been reflecting often on what this moment has presented within my life, this opportunity to revisit past selves, and a chance to make fresh memories in a place that taught me lots of hard lessons when I was first a student here. And because of my love of music, it’s been hard not to route these feelings through the recent discovery of Penguin Café Orchestra – Tribute, an album of covers of songs from the British experimental musical project that have been woven into my life for many years, made fresh and unfamiliar in their remade forms in other people’s hands.

Covers are a funny thing. Especially when you know a piece of music so intimately, it can feel almost impossible to imagine someone else’s iteration of that song, an interpretative act that is risky and can fundamentally transform what the original piece meant, to its creators and to those who listen. Yet for a group like PCO, whose strange instrumental compositions are so infused with an open awareness of the beautiful and painful act of watching time pass, I’ve been so grateful to encounter these songs anew. I first heard slightly different iterations of the songs a few months ago with Concert Program, a 1995 live recording by the original group, which enlivens the songs yet still feels marked by their original form.

Yet on the tribute album, I hear something different: indeed, these covers feel most profoundly like the act of catching up a beloved friend after many years of separation. Everything is still so recognizable, yet in an unspoken, ineffable way, something has transformed irrevocably, in the dawning recognition that you’ve both made many more trips around the sun, sat beneath countless moon cycles, experienced the world and its changing nature too many times to count, until that thing that once felt so self-evidently the same could not help but be made anew as well.

I write these words on October 29, just one week until election day. It approaches 80 degrees today, a grim reminder that we have already waited too long to address the things we should have many years ago, and will continue to live within a climate that is increasingly unrecognizable to our habitual seasonal patterns. I listen to Torres sing “Life as we don't know it is coming at us quick,” and I know that these familiarities, the recurrence of this campus and my body readapting itself to the comfortable rhythms of the school calendar, must inevitably adjust to these changing circumstances. And of course, what happens next Tuesday will, one way or another, change what is possible in our lives, will open some possibilities and delimit others.

Yet for all of the ways I know I could easily rush forward in my mind to that fateful moment, I do my best to remain present to right now, the overwarm weather and the readings and my new classmates, and know that eight years ago, a very different version of this person that is in continuity to the one writing to you now did the same thing, was forced to see everything we assumed would persist into the future changed by the election of Donald Trump. At that election, I remember my peers brought to a stunned silence by the seemingly unthinkable, overwhelmed by a trajectory unexpectedly butting into our lives, forcing us to understand how tenuous about the world as we knew it had become.

Now, for all of the ways that another Trump election would bring changes I still shudder to imagine, I hope we can at least walk into the future with greater awareness of how changeable we must remain, how we will only make it out alive in building communities that are stronger and more resilient than they’ve ever been before. I say this even as I detect weariness all around me, as I make sense of the fact that we’ve now lived more than a year witnessing the genocide of those in Palestine, and despite our best effort, seemingly little has changed. I constantly feel pieces of my soul chipped away in this ongoing brutality, aware that nothing can restore these things that feel lost in the face of so much brutality. And yet, we must continue to walk onwards, as best as we can, beginning from wherever we are now and travelling to places we’ve yet to see, can barely even imagine, when so much else tells us we’ll never get to that place that calls our name.

A few weeks ago, I attended the book launch of Bill Ayers’s When Freedom Is the Question, Abolition Is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation at Pilsen Community Books. There, in conversation with Eve Ewing, the two spoke of the many things that the freedom fighters who came before us had to endure, laying groundwork for a world with more freedom than when they started. It’s a daunting feeling to know that any real change will likely take root many years after we are there to see it: and yet, this fact keeps me writing, hoping that these words will ring out in a different place and time less fraught than the one we are in now. Near the end of the discussion, I asked a question on how the study of history humbles us, and Bill shared a story from Eduardo Galeano, author of Open Veins of Latin America, who said that utopia always took two steps forward every time we walked towards it. Always outside our grasp, he nonetheless said, “Utopia is good for walking.”

I think of Chloe Dzubilo, a trans woman activist, musician, and artist who I’ve gotten to know more lately, through archival research in New York last month, as well as interviewing those who knew her best. She will play a central role in The City Made Me Trans, the book I have begun within this MFA program, thinking through how my own experiences within the city in my transition have only been possible because of so many who came before me, those named and unknown who made life a little easier for the next person coming along the same path. And when all else falls into confusion and despair, I am reminded of what Chloe wrote in her poem “Dedication,” words come into the present with intuitive beauty: So here’s my humble offering for all the struggling goddesses yet to walk/Things change, and many things don’t.”

A few recent projects

I’ve had some lovely recent conversations on my radio show! In August, I chatted with curator Francine Almeda and architect and artist Roland Knowlden and their collaborative work on Tala, a fantastic new gallery and library at Chicago and Ashland. And a few weeks ago, I had organizer and director Ricardo Gamboa and writer and performer Ruth Guerra on the show to discuss Ruth on the Rocks, a new one-woman act that’s happening on Fridays and Saturdays in Back of the Yards that I’m excited to see next weekend.

I was invited to speak as part of a Chicago Storytelling event at the Newberry Library in September! I got to talk about how I’ve come to some of my thinking around Bodies, Cities, and Memory, and how moving to Uptown after graduation proved so life-changing. (I’m hopeful I was also the first person to say the word ‘transsexual’ on stage at the Newberry, but who knows.) You can watch the whole thing here, and I come in around the 36:30 mark.

I got to write a very silly story about Los Campesinos!, one of my favorite bands, and the lyrics that have stayed with me throughout my life, for Defector.