Feels like a minor breach of some writerly code to share an inscription someone wrote to you, maybe, but I just love what Grady jotted on the title page of Great Disasters:
From one tenderness enthusiast to another—
The emotional tenors of both this novel and Devin’s, Pilgrims, gave my heart a good & needed jolt. Both seem to deeply believe in grace—not as something we owe, but something we can consciously cultivate & meet each other with, for collective benefit. Thinking of the opening lines of June Jordan’s “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.”:
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
The love keeps us in the fight, is what I keep thinking about. This night was a tenderness ricochet—from the books to the writers to the songs to the audience to me to you.
Track Changes 004 playlist: Grady Chambers & Devin Kelly
Non-exhaustive list of topics discussed: legacies & expectations of activist parents, ungainly ways in which we signal our interests as teenagers, gratitude for whoever told living legend Mavis Staples about Sparklehorse, running rituals & writing rituals, the formative effects of what we now call "indie sleaze” (2006-2012ish), Robbie Robertson was the most handsome member of The Band but also stole all their money
To greet Aquarius season (shout out to my fellow extraterrestrials), we’re going speculative/surreal/ body horror mode for the February edition, featuring Eshani Surya (Philly) & Kristina Ten (Rochester, NY)!
✧ ✦ Tickets & more info ✦ ✧
Eshani Surya is the author of RAVISHING, recently out from Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic. A disabled South Asian writer, Eshani is a 2025 Publishers Weekly Writer to Watch, a 2023 Finalist for the A.C. Bose Grant for South Asian Speculative Literature, a 2022 Asian Women Writer’s Workshop mentee, a 2022 Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop scholarship recipient, and a 2021 Mae Fellowship recipient. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, [PANK], Catapult, and Joyland, among others, and she holds an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Find her online at @eshanisurya or eshani-surya.com.
Kristina Ten is the author of Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine (2025, Stillhouse Press). Her stories appear in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, and elsewhere. She has won the McSweeney's Stephen Dixon Award, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. Ten is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder's MFA program in fiction.
Hope to see you there, especially since Track Changes is skipping (like so many finger-smudged CDs, am I right) the following month. Off to a residency to try & do some writing myself!
♡ Alina