🎄december is hard mode + next year things

y’all, i wanted this winter to be me knitting myself a sweater while i watched westerns with the cats in my lap and asher beside me designing some new, strange wall shelf. i did NOT anticipate that in the first half of december alone, i would be in and out of the studio, narrowly dodging covid, driving to and from arkansas to meet and play with like a third of my current country heroes, driving to and from florida to see asher’s family, narrowly dodging TORNADOES, spending something like 10 hours looking for a new place to rent because our rent went up, publishing my first new piece in ages (see below), tangling with weird unwelcome dad emails and weird unwelcome physical pain and weird unwelcome holiday sads while ALSO holding down 3 copywriting clients and somewhere in there trying to finish writing a novel and eat real food and sleep real sleep and not want to collapse inwardly like a dying star.

feeling very thankful lately for epsom salts, target sweatpants, painted mustaches, and the people i love lately <3

i have new writing out in the world for the first time in months! i’ve loved nat brut magazine since i was just one of their fiction readers years ago, and i’m honored to have placed my strange autofiction-essay-poem ‘a book of hours’ with them in this folio edited by mb and r. fay. from the editors:

English-speakers often say that “blood is thicker than water” when talking about the bond of biological families. And yet, for those who cannot survive by this adage, there is the echo of a longer proverb:  “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.”

This hidden inversion, offering the possibility of a future more stable than our beginnings, is a lifeline for survivors of developmental trauma. Without a stable past to tether us, we float through life in a grief-state unnamable to those who have not lived within this space. We learn to speak in a shorthand of half-truths, trying to translate the intimate loss of our childhood into terms intelligible for daily human interaction.

Blood & Water is a rejection of this sanitized translation. Developmental trauma lives in a pre-linguistic space, which means our experiences are bound to no recognizable shape or form. Here, we invited survivors of all types of early trauma to create without fear of the truth. In this folio, we believe that our wounds can be both grotesque and beautiful, past and present, universal and utterly unique, if only we look long enough.

the pieces by acie clark, cat ingrid leeches, and kahlil kasir in particular really resonate, tho they’re all gorgeous. if this time of year hurts your heart, read on and feel kinship.

there’s never been a better time to annoy my dad by preordering the book that helped me come out as trans than this time, right now, the week before christmas! one or several deserts is a collection of 7 short stories that use body horror and surrealism to explore gender, fetishism, pain, geo-erotics, insanity, surveillance, and liberation. you know, cute stuff that’s fun for the whole family. here are some ways you can support me:

• buy a copy for yourself & your friend!

• request one or several deserts at your library/favorite bookstore! the isbn # is 9781948687607 (also on the 11:11 press website)

• repost, like, & save my posts about one or several deserts on the cursed media hellscapes! here are links to my posts for instagram, twitter, & facebook (my birth name persists, but cross your fingers that in the new year the banks will finally harass me by my current name)

• follow me on all the social media thingys! i’m @creekbedcarter everywhere <3

me and yayoi kusama from when asher and i went to crystal bridges in bentonville, ar, a truly radical art museum in so many ways

all those dots forever and ever

tip jar

send some dollars to trans santa this week. could be nice to help some trans kids feel wanted and supported <3 also, the temperatures are dropping, and that means our unhoused neighbors are at much higher risk. if you see a way to help, please do it. if you see a way to be friendly and kind, please do it.

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here’s to the end of 2022, a year that asked a lot of so many of us, and here’s to the beauty of hoping that the new year on the horizon will be kinder, gentler, and sweeter than the last <3

xoxo, carter

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