Longtime readers may recall that this newsletter started in January as a series of personal essays about my move to a small village in upstate New York, which coincided with the return of my menstrual cycle. I had given up on ever bearing a child and so I quit my job and moved away from NYC to start my life over. That series of essays explored adjusting to a new place, a new sense of time, a new way of being in the world, and they are now collected, alongside art from Shea in the Catskills, in the book Even the Cemeteries Have Space Here.
Wild’s Falls is the name I gave the newsletter, in a nod to the historical name of one of three waterfalls in the village where I lived. I needed a name, and I hoped that one was spacious and evocative and also obscure enough that random folks from the village wouldn’t come across my newsletter while searching for local hiking trails. I needed a name, and it was the first one I liked enough to take — which is also, interestingly, how I ended up with the name Finn.
The Wild’s Falls cycle of essays ended in June with my departure from Valatie, NY and the release of the book version of these essays as Even the Cemeteries Have Space Here on June 16.
In June, I moved to Phoenicia, NY, where I intended to focus on completing a book-length collection of essays on embodiment, centered on the question: What does it mean to be a gay man who loves having a uterus?
I wanted my book to explore everything from attending a naked night at a gay bar to undergoing a painful fertility procedure, from walking around NYC as a topless woman to learning to hook up with cis gay men, from fingerpainting with menstrual blood to finding my queer literary ancestors.
“This is the place I will write my book,” I said to myself in early June, standing in my new apartment in Phoenicia, surrounded by boxes. I was sure of this. I was setting an intention. Phoenicia was the place I would finish this book.
Two weeks later, I stared in shock at a positive pregnancy test.
What followed was a complete narrative collapse. I thought I knew the story: I can’t get pregnant. Instead, I became a writer. Phoenicia is where I write my book.
My pregnancy took that story away, but it didn’t immediately provide a new one. It didn’t feel real. I wasn’t ready to break a lease for a five, or six, or seven-week pregnancy, not with miscarriage rates being what they are. And what of the book, would I still write it?
I was in limbo. I lived out of half-unpacked boxes all summer in Phoenicia, waiting to find my way into a new story. Would I stay pregnant? Where would I live? What would I do for my writing? What would I do for money, now that I was likely to need more of it?
That’s why I stopped writing this summer. I couldn’t put together a narrative, not even just privately for myself. Sophie Strand’s writing offered me metaphors for living between stories—a hermit crab, a chrysalis—which gave me brief flashes that I might find the thread of a story again.
Now I’m settled back in NYC, beginning to find a story again. What do I most want to do before the baby arrives in February? How can I put containers in place to support me in doing it while my body changes and I sometimes feel as though I’m headed full steam over a cliff?
What I most want to do is to write this book of essays that I have been dreaming of. And how I will do it is one at a time, here in this newsletter. In intimate community with you, my readers.
I write best, and fastest, when I know there are people waiting to read—before I committed to writing every Saturday, I didn’t know it would be possible for me. I used to labor for months over a single essay.
My time to finish this collection of essays is limited by the arrival of my child, possibly even tighter, depending on the ways that later pregnancy impacts my health and focus. I need to do everything I can to make sure I finish this book. To set up the containers I need—schedules and supports and spaces—that will support my writing. This space is one of those containers.
The title of the book I dream of is The Menstruant. Some things have changed since I initially conceived this book, but I still want to write this book of essays, on all of the subjects mentioned above and many more, about what it is to be a gay man who loves having a uterus, which is, for me, what it is to be an embodied human being in this lifetime.
But I won’t hide these essays away until they’re finished and perfect and ready for a book. I will write them here, in this space.
This space is now The Menstruant.
Thanks for being here.
💕❤️!!!