I am not a writer. I write, read and admire people who are real writers, such as all the writers in the recent New York Times celebration of 125 years of the Book Review https://www.nytimes.com/series/book-review-anniversary. I mostly read either science or science fiction and have no patience for bad writing in the former. I define bad writing as shallow characters, lack of narrative tension, too much sex & violence, absence of any compelling question, like, what if dogs ruled the planet and humans chased balls? But in the process of writing two books recently, one of my own and another a co-edited anthology, I have learned a lot about writing.

Not even four centuries of the Cartesian split have passed, and look where we are: Westerners seem to have forgotten how to exist. I don’t mean that hyperbolically; we’ve created our very own existential crisis. We refer to that crisis as Progress. Quantum physicist and queer feminism scholar Karen Barad…

Despair is a difficult position. Besides an untenable accommodation to misery, it requires considering what we hope for: an end to: war? Saving beautiful species? Saving ourselves? A next date or a meal? How much can we grieve the mistakes of the Industrial revolution paradigm or the ubiquitous patriarchal system or routine, casual cruelties?