GRAPE CRUSH OCTOBER 2025
"René and I were doing some limb work, / Noah says, on the tree out front"
Hi,
I hope you’re doing okay. Are you?
Lately I have been reading this (devastating!) Edgar Kunz poem out loud to myself, especially the parts about being “the ground guy.” We are all the ground guy at times, especially these days. We have to be. If you’ve been on a long shift, I wish you rest, and if you’re about to start one: stay steady, neighbor.
<3, Mairead
P.S. If you like this newsletter, I’d be grateful if you forwarded it to a friend.
“TOP FIVE” OCTOBER 2025
1. DANG.
In a talk I wrote last week (scroll to the bottom to read it), I said I no longer think stories change public policy, and I don’t! I think they can, of course, but if they had that power innately, then why are we living in such violence right now? (Obviously Stoakley Carmichael said this first, and bigger and better.) I didn’t take in many new things this month—because of writing and teaching deadlines, but more importantly, because newness gives me oceanic feelings. Obviously, I adore those (Hi, I’m Mairead), but it turns out, a person cannot survive on them 24/7. I mean this as literally and unromantically as you can imagine. Once, exhausted, I fainted into a brick wall and split my eyebrow on a sunglasses lens.
I love the version of me who works all day, goes for a squirrely walk, then sits in the corner with a pint and a book about death. She’ll never be too far, but she short-circuits awfully quickly. My point is, I did a lot of re-reading and re-playing this month, because otherwise I’ve been working an emergency hotline and teaching young adults and mourning two beautiful friends, and that’s plenty. I’ve read, and kept, other newsletters from these last few weeks about WHAT IS GOING ON IN AMERICA and HOW YOU CAN HELP (fight ICE, in particular), and obviously I’ve written those kinds of newsletters myself. Likely I’ll write them again. But today, I don’t think the issue is that people don’t know, or don’t care, or aren’t trying, and above all I don’t want to put myself in any position that transposes my paranoia or need for rest on anyone else. We can do, and be, good without replicating a carceral model. If I had one superpower, it would be no more billionaires.
If you already subscribe to GRAPE CRUSH, you are certainly someone who has been in community, and is serving it, and growing and changing on your own, too. These truths can exist simultaneously, if awfully, with everything happening in Broadview, IL right now (for one example), and I hope they are for you too.
PS Okay, here are a few resources anyway: orange whistles in community, LA Taco’s community reporting (h/t Dan), Akwaeke Emezi on “naming the center”.
2. “caitlin angelica and the act of grieving by singing really loud,” see / saw (Sept 15, 2025)
In 2023, August Golden was shot and killed at Nudieland, the Minneapolis punk house where he lived. Caitlin Angelica was standing next to him. They were partners, at a show. Like, that’s it. One world ends there. Earlier this summer, Evan Minsker interviewed Angelica in her home (“I asked where she’d be most comfortable to hang out for this interview”). (Minsker and I both wrote news for Pitchfork; he also ran the section for years.) This whole article exists in an impossible place. The event is impossible, writing about a “phenomenal” band actively grieving is impossible, what are these sentences. Minsker clarifies the impossibility when he writes about how in the world a person could be about to go on a U.S. tour, while also at all the Minneapolis shows, while suddenly also on national news, giving a statement at the sentencing hearing for the man who murdered her love. In Minsker’s newsletter, a story other outlets might have boiled into a binary becomes a human illumination about love, home, sobriety, freedom, grief, volume, and above all, how true punks reject purity in a way I honestly think is holy. This kind of sincerity reminds me of everything I love most, which is mortifying, so I’ll stop. Read the interview yourself here.
3. “Flame” by Sebadoh (1999)
At the end of an episode of The Bear (no spoilers!), Richie (Eben Moss-Bachrach) is driving his car as this song plays. I’m a sucker for every element of the scene: a motorik beat (see also); a song playing in a car but ALSO on a soundtrack; late 90s alt-greasy flannel radio; a person surrendering, clear-eyed, to the path in front of them. “You can feel anything you want to feel,” sings Lou Barlow, and it sounds like freedom, not catastrophe. I’ve been earworming this song on my way to teach, when I need to lock into work emails or the hotline tracker, when I give myself five minutes to clean up and no more. It’s helping me turn off the racing thoughts and get to work, so I’ll keep playing it until that doesn’t work anymore.
4. Color combo: brown and blue
If we’ve ever worked merch or back of house together, we’ve probably talked about Dawn Eden’s 1996 Videowave interview with Jonathan Richman, which you can watch here. I like repeating its lists. Eden asks Richman his favorite color, and he answers very seriously, explaining that he likes combinations, particularly trios. (It’s delightful to see the chyron changing shades to match.) She listens and nods, her own technicolor necklaces sparkling, and then, like the pro she is, Eden briefly guides the interview into a conversation about synesthesia. “Some blue to me just sounds like majesty,” Richman tells her. This is a long (!) way of saying I bought a new shower liner, which is shimmery, a dove-blue like Cinderella’s dress. The outer curtain was already a heavy translucent amber, steady as an apothecary jar, and together they make me happy. It’s a blessing to see the colors around you, and to choose them.
5. See again #1
Also, have you gulped cold water lately? Rolled your head around your neck? Here is my Listening Circle Protocol, if you’re looking for something like that. I’ve used it with groups on Zoom, after school emergencies, and before high-risk actions. Here are some playlists I love for focusing.
HEROES & FRIENDS
My friend Kristy Luck has a solo show up at parrasch heijnen in Los Angeles, now through November 8. The show honors instability, and the painting as something that can be ahead of us, “existing before or after the moment but never of it.” I sleep underneath a blue-purple portal Kristy painted years ago. It’s beautiful, in the way the whole life of a flower is beautiful. Her show is too.
RUMOR HAS IT that a fresh run of Love and Rockets t-shirts will be posted here soon.
My friend Sarah Elizabeth Schantz still has spots in her November craft seminar on setting, specifically when to use telling to transport a reading into that setting. Lots of generative time, and a little pre-reading (a short story, an essay, some advice). Sarah is a wonderful teacher. Sign up here.
STAFF PICKS OF THE MONTH
I’ve been working hotline shifts and preparing last week’s talk (linked below), so I haven’t read as much as usual this month, which is okay. I did re-read Can the Monster Speak? by Paul Preciado, to prepare to teach it (and learn more about it from my brilliant students, who certainly delivered). And I sent a Sato the Rabbit book to my niece and nephew, who now talk about milkweed plants magically appearing in their bedrooms.
THE BIG SHIP (WHAT I’M UP TO)
I interviewed my friend Chris Hefner for The Creative Independent (link here). What he said about Chicago is true for me too: “Emotionally, socially, culturally, the version of me that exists now is from there. I like where we live now well enough, but it isn’t our home. I mean, my house is home, my life with my partner and our cat is home but civically I feel a dull but aching dysphoria.” I’ve learned this ache is a gift, and a responsibility too, but MAN is it tender.
I reviewed Mark Polizzotti’s new translation of André Breton’s Nadja for RHINO (link here, thank you <3 Maggie Queeney). The review is handwritten, on cyanotypes I made on the roof with lace, bottles, scissors, my hand, and a ring.
I’m in Week 3 of a pollinator residency. It’s great! Subscribe here for updates about future iterations.
I wrote a new essay about the Poetics of Community Care for the fall colloquium at the Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (link here). I want to write more essays like this one and turn them into a book.
MAY ALL BEINGS BE SAFE & HAPPY & FREE.