Dear Diary,
Remember last year when I was like, omg I’m Santa? Those days are over. There was a flare of suspicion as I mused over how expensive the metal Wings of Fire poster from Poland was, and the child was like, ‘So, it’s from Santa,’ and gave me a look. As we’d also been discussing what my sister would get for him, I had an out. But then.
Walking home from Muay Thai the other evening, already pitch dark though it’s only 5:30, the child has something to ask me. While internet shopping with his stapdad, he glimpsed a Japanese Beyblade in the Amazon already-ordered section. The child organizes his holiday list minutely, parsing out which gift comes from whoch source. The Beyblade was number two in the From Santa category.
Beyblades, for the childfree-by-choice, are these martial tops that you set spinning with a little device, metal and plastic berserkers that whirl and smash into one another, sometimes bursting their opponent into pieces. They are wickedly fun to play with, so much so that my mother went online and ordered a battlefield for them, so we could have a proper arena and not keep chasing them across the table. We’ve turned into a Beyblade family, and supposedly the very best ones are these pricier Japanese imports, a perfect item for Santa to handle, so why was it there on the internet amongst the hair dye and cat food and other items that had already been delivered.
I was busted. I stammered. His eyes were gleaming, like he’d caught me in something. I felt like he sort of knew, and wanted it confirmed. ‘Are you sure you want to know?’ I asked him, mirroring his playful tone. But then - what was I thinking? I must preserve the magic! ‘I got it just in case Santa doesn’t bring it, to make sure you have it,"‘ I said, pretty good save, right, but he sort of smirked at me. ‘Not believable?’ I asked. He shook his head.
I stopped and held his little face in my hands under the street light, by the plumeria tree. I felt like I would be changing his life forever. The world would go from being a place where chubby dudes in folk costumes fly the skies in olde worlde sleighs pulled by flying mammals. We were in some sort of bardo between a reality where reindeer fly and they don’t. What are the ramifications of this? Is it, like, Earth sucks, let me introduce you to the harshness of it slowly, first of all, there are no flying reindeer, and also, there is war, such as the one against Palestine, surging for decades and now at a tipping point both apocalyptic and hopeful, because people are finally talking about it, standing up to the shaming accustations of anti-semitism that have kept so many justice-minded people silent for so long. Not that this is about Palestine but really, right now, everything is about Palestine, at least a little, and this is how it ought to be, particularly when my country, the United States, is fashioning the bombs.
Anyway. I told him. There is no Santa, or rather, Santa is me. The tears came immediately, immediately I felt I had made a tremendous mistakes, one that could not be taken back. Like the all-seeing eye in the Thoth tarot’s rendition of The Tower, it was a revelation, and once you see the truth the truth cannot be unseen and life is necessarily different. The child made it to the front steps and then collapsed on the stoop. I collapsed next to him, both of us crying over this strange loss. He is nine years old; his best friend at school does not believe in Santa. It was inevitable, the time was almoat certainly correct. I pulled him onto my lap and he let me and we both sat there and cried, mine quiet and his howls. ‘I wish I could forget I know! I wish I could forget I know!’ he repeated it again and again, like a bum spell. Eventually he calmed a bit, and we went inside.
The child bounced back incredibly well from this possibly cruel rite of passage. Like all of us who spent our early years alive to the reality of these magical creatures, he does not wish we hadn’t pulled the Santa prank on him. He gets it. He’s not mad at me, which was frankly shocking. We had straight away gotten my sister and her kids on a Zoom so he could debrief with them, and everyone shared their own story of primal disillusionment. For me, the media I’d been consuming - adult media - had had too many references to Santa not being real. They just piled up and I confronted my om and she confessed. I was very glum that Christmas - I like to hold onto a tragedy, water it with tears. I remember sulking in a corner on Christmas eve and my godmother trying to cheer me. ‘Know when you’ll be so happy?’ she asked. ‘When I see my presents in the morning?’ i ventured, for that was a sizable consolation prize - Santa was bunk, but the presents remained. ‘No,’ she said. ‘When you have your own kids!’ Ugh. What a dope. I wasn’t going to have kids, a stance I maintained til it was nearly too late to.
The morning after the terrible reveal, the child laid on the couch watching YouTube gamers, and said, ‘I guess I should say thank you to you. For all the presents I thought were from Santa.’ What the hell??? I am certain I never offered such a thoughtful bit of gratitude to my own mother. ‘You didn’t,’ she confirmed. The child also shared that he was still very excited about Christmas, and this has proven to be so. It is a relief not to have to cram all the gifts in the office closet and pray he has no occasion to go there. Currently they are spread across the office daybed, covered by a blanket.
Anway. I have some updates about my small, queer press, DOPAMINE, that I would like to share. First of all - if you are in southern California, please do come to a excellent DOPAMINE mini-showcase at The Broad next week, Thursday, December 14th. It’s party of the museum’s Smog Check Thursdays series where they showcase various local writers and publishers. Do you know how hard it was to select which DOPAMINE authors to curate into the event??? The series of intricate coin flips that alllowed not I but the universe to select the lineup? It’s a great lineup but would have been regardless as the DOPAMINE roster is dope. For the event, the universe wanted Clement Goldberg, whose novel, New Mistakes, will be out in September; Naz Riahi, whose collection, Vibrations, was shopped by an honest-to-god agent and still I hold the manuscript in my hot little hands (it will be out in 2025), and Amelia Ada, whose book-length poem, Hard and Glad (2026) reminded me how much I love a funny, personal, lyrical book-length poem. Come and see them, it’s free with a reservation!
Okay, what else? Well, you guys, running a press is expensive! I’m about to head over to the copy shop to pick up a bunch of manuscripts I need to send out to hopeful blurbers, and I’m a little numbed out at how much it costs! While we at DOPAMINE will be hosting fundraising events and whatnot, I wanted to also use this here platform to do a lil fundraising and let you know about a four-week generative workshop I’m running next month, Writing for Witches. All of the money for it will got to DOPAMINE, and help us put more more books in the world. I’ll list all the author’s we’ve got coming, but first -
- Wait, I’m interrupting myself! Because I want you to know that one way DOPAMINE is trying to innovate is that instead of giving writers an advance on their royalties, which they then have to earn back, meaning their book has to sell X amount of copies so we can recoup what we paid them, and then they can start getting royalty checks - well, we are not doing that. Because we are a non-profit, existing to support writers, we are giving our authors a commissioning fee, basically some cash to help them with their writerly life, and it is a gift, and they do not have to earn it back. They start earning royalties with the first book sold. Okay, back to the workshop -
Writing for Witches is for witchy people who write, or for spooky-ass writers, and I have frankly never met a writer who isn’t somewhat creepy. The three hour classes will take place Sundays in January, 2pm - 5pm Pacific Standard Time. The fee is $400 paid directly to DOPAMINE’s Paypal or Zelle account. Don’t have either? Well, just get it! I’m the literal worst at all things technological and financial, and if I can figure out these apps, so can you!
During the class I will share mystical writings - both nonfiction and also work from creative writers who bring the mystic into their work somehow. We’ll use these pieces as prompts, and then we will write together. I’ll also ask folks to share their work with the class, selecting folks at random so be prepared! It’s really helpful for everyone when a writer shares their work in progress like this, so get cozy with the notion. We’ll also do some medtating, group ritual, spell casting.
If you want in on what will for sure be a really fun and meaningful class, say so in the comments and I will send you an email. The classes will be on zoom, of course. I’m also teaching an in-person week-long version of this class in August at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, so there’s that, too. But this one here will help us keep the DOPAMINE train running!
Also - maybe you’re more of a reader than a writer? Maybe you think it’s cool and audacious that I - with the help of Beth Pickens, without whom nothing in the world really happens - was just like, fuck it, I’m 52, I want to start publishing, it’s a natural extenstion of the work I have been doing in the world for literally decades, who cares if I barely know what I’m doing, I never have let that stop me, let’s go! And maybe you would like to support this pluck and optimism in a way that really makes a difference - with a donation.
I know that some people are able to make large donations to non-profit charities, of which DOPAMINE is one. We had one such person, a fantastic queer who wants to support real queer art-making at the ground level, and they have made it possible for us to get started. If you are a person who is capable of making a large donation, because you’ve got family money or a plush job or a little of both - please, message me. Let me wine and dine you (virtually?) and tell you how incredible the books we’re bringing into the world are.
Perhaps you ae like moi and you can’t make a ginormous donation but you do give to charities and whatnot, as they pop up in your sphere, and you can toss us a bit of cash - well, kind person, please do! These contributions are so valuable to us. And, even if you only have the teeny-weeniest amont to donate, and you’re like, ‘I shouldn’t bother, it’s so small’ - please bother. It’s not too small. If everyone ready this even made a small donation in the name of upstart queer lit, it would really help us continue this work!
Yes? Okay? You’d like to? Just go to your Paypal or Zelle and search for dopaminebooksla@gmail.com We wish we could offer you a Venmo route, but we can’t, cause we’re non-profit. Bummer, I know. But remember, however you donate, it’s tax-deductible.
Before I end this I want to tell you all who we have slated for publishing. We are currently full through 2027, which is INTENSE! For a minute I thought maybe I’d do more than four books a year, because there are so many amazing books out there, but then I met with my amazing publishing mentor, Hedi, and he was like, you don’t want to do that. Because, money. And he’s right. But I do hope that we can grow and be successful and eventually have the resources to take on more titles! But for now:
2024 we have our first book, the anthology SLUTS, coming out in slutty Taurus season on May 7th. We have events through the summer in spots like LA, SF, Minneapolis, Boston, New York and Provincetown, so stay tuned. Clement Goldberg’s otherworldly queer romp, New Mistakes, hits in September; Vera Blossom’s cheeky, candid How to Fuck Like a Girl drops in October, and Shawn Stewart Ruff’s Days Running, about the repurcussions of a hate crime on a Black teenager in 1970s Cincinnati, releases in November.
2025 the anthology will be WITCH, and the books are Naz Riami’s thoughtful, funny collection Vibrations; Brooke Palmieri’s mystical highbrow/lowbrow essay collection Bargain Witch, and L. Scully’s unhinged book-length affirmation, Self-Romancing.
Will the world still exist? Is so, we will surely need a laugh, and the anthology be CLOWNS. Dammit how did I just mess up this formatting? Anways. we will have that glorious, book-length poem I was talking about, Amelia Ada’s Hard and Glad. We’re doing an essay collection from my number one most favorite clown-about-town, Jibz Cameron, AKA Dynasty Handbag. And a gorgeous memoir about family and motherhood and growing up feral, by Amra Brooks, Your Beginning and Your End.
Okay, we made it. The anthology of the year: CRIMINAL. We’ll have a gothic horror novel from Grace Lavery, a collection of essays about beauty and nightlife from Amanda-Fey Jimenez, and a genre-bending novel about the chaos of queer lives and politics from Calvin Gimplevitch, whose short story Rent, Don’t Sell, is one of my favorite short pieces, up there with George Saunders and Mary Gaitskill.
Few. Okay. So, to recap - Santa is not real, Palestine is real, please do what you can to speak out against the war because the propaganda machine is so heavy, I really believe every single NO needs to be heard. Please come see DOPAMINE at The Broad in Los Angeles, join my Writing for Witches workshop to support DOPAMINE, and/or donate to this queer literary future.
I want in for that writing class! Lucajdavis at gmail!
I could love to know more about Writing for Witches please!!