Antonio Pérez de Aguilar, Artist's Cupboard, c. 1769 (Museo Nacional de Arte INBA, Mexico City)

A book group in Louise Erdrich’s novel, The Mighty Red, commenting on Eat, Pray, Love: “As for the pray part, I kind of asked myself, why go to India to get enlightened when you can stay home and be a Catholic?” 🔥

Once, as a grad student in Las Vegas, I sat in the back of a Subaru sandwiched between Edmund White & Joyce Carol Oates & her enormous visor & she was TERRIFYING (complimentary)

Hi! The deadline was extended to November 21! www.storystudiochicago.org/advanced-wri...

From LOLITA itself: "An expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face... I asked her what was the matter. “Nothing, you brute,”... This was an orphan. This was a lone child, an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning."

“I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” - Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

This point absolutely correct and I will add that Mamdani demonstrates that an insurgency, even one with real moral clarity and anger at the status quo, can still be cheerful and inviting.

Writing is never as hard when there is a real deep love for your work 💘 I can’t wait to teach this four-week class in February on falling in love (or back in love) with your writing! @storystudiochicago.bsky.social

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

"Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines towards obscurity, not clarity." -Elena Ferrante Amongst the final sentences of the final passage in the Neapolitan Quartet.

I wrote this piece for anyone who has questions about how solitary dharma practice benefits others, and why practicing outside of group settings should not be considered selfish or isolated or self-help. I look at how meditating alone in a cave for forty years can help awaken the whole world.

I curated a list of some of my favorite things I read/heard/saw lately and put them in post. Highlights include: books on spiritual ecology, a short piece on solitary dharma practice, links to non-dual activist resources, Sufi poetry with translation, a link a soberly funny pep talk for writers ❤️

Excited that we can finally share the news! So proud to work with the amazing team at @storystudiochicago.bsky.social! 🫶🏼

Halfway through the second draft of a novel, wandering my house unshowered and unshaved, muttering John Barth's "mere busyness in a story’s middle does not necessarily advance the plot" over and over...

Recent major dudes / lesser demons

I like that republicans keep calling mamdani a “literal communist” because they’ve been calling everyone to the left of william mckinley a communist for a hundred years and they need to distinguish

WOW. A federal judge says he's going to issue a Temporary Restraining Order requiring ICE to make changes at the Broadview facility in Chicago, a facility that until January was only for stays under 12 hours "absent exceptional circumstances," but has become, in Judge Gettleman's words, "a prison."

And again, a pattern of putting out statements accusing people of serious Federal crimes and then releasing them hours or days or weeks later with no charges. And no retraction.

“To be a good citizen of a bad state, one has to do scary things.“

I had so much fun designing my website and writing the copy that I'm now fighting the delusion that I can make money doing this as my fifth side-hustle. www.sarahkokernot.com

I came out as a poet to my novelist husband and he looked at me tenderly and said it’s okay, I’ll love you no matter what.

So proud of my partner doing this interview on why he’s a horror writer 💀🥀

"Do Democrats know what the working class actually looks like?" Nope.

Make that $150!

There are still spots left for our one-night in-person class with @sarahkokernot.bsky.social this Wed, Oct 29, "The Answer Is Already Here: Make Your Own Writing Oracle." Reserve your spot now in this terrific class: buff.ly/gIYtXBX #writingcommunity

Whenever people complain about the number of folks relying on food stamps, it is worth reminding them that SNAP is, by too large of a degree, a subsidy for corporations that refuse to pay a living wage and their political allies who reject public policy prescriptions to reduce income inequality.

My gut feeling is that "people overworked and tired" accounts for 90% of what appears to be apathy.

Catherine Connolly, the independent socialist, is President-Elect. Yet again, Ireland bucks the trend of liberal democracies falling to far right nihilism. Here is who she is - Connolly supports the LGBTQ community & People with Disabilities, Carers & a United Ireland. #Aras25 #SpeirGhorm

This is, I think, the third time I've posted it since I happened to hear it live in July, but here's historian/author @vermontgmg.bsky.social predicting with chilling accuracy what would happen as ICE quickly ramped up its recruiting. www.kqed.org/forum/201010...

Had such a wonderful writing class on at Greenspell Herbal School last Wednesday! We went on the world’s tiniest plant walk to a strip of untended green space at the edge of the parking lot found hidden natural beauty. Then: we wrote letters & poems in praise of decay, ancestry, renewal, & compost!

So excited to teach this class next week!

“But I also would like to point out that the reason those ideas are so rich and so powerful in the South isn’t just that the South is uniquely racist. It is because that’s where the nation shunts all of those conversations.”

#Bloomscrolling but with mushrooms.

Cops led us into the street as the new “protest zone” and then beat us repeatedly. Got hit in the face with a baton. Leaving to pick up my friends who were arrested. Stay safe out there.

I’m a Chicagoan and one thing I’m trying to remember is that cities like this one always outlast empires. We will outlast ICE, the fascists, the corporatists. All of them. Our neighborhoods are the history of people not borders.

Emerging from the darkness of this era will require us to acknowledge that the previous status quo, including many institutions that may have served us well in another era, have been failing for my entire lifetime.

Thrilled to be teaching a class next week! “In Praise of Decay, Compost & Renewal” will be at Greenspell Herbal Academy in Chicago on 10/22. We‘ll be observing the natural world as it transitions to winter, then write in praise of our ancestors, kin, & whatever else continues to nourish us.

May all beings be free from dumbfuckery. By @fulmerford.com

federal agents stealing children and sending them south. where have i heard about that before?

Happy to report that in the last three days I have raised $120 for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant & Refugees Rights through newsletter subscriptions! All paid subscriptions this month will be donated in full to the ICIRR.

I couldn‘t ever have imagined a state governor saying this when I was in high school. That the world has become a more inclusive place Is why the far right is so afraid. We already made the change.

I wrote about supporting immigrants while ICE invades Chicago & its suburbs, finding spiritual resilience in the living world, and the witch & yogini. Also: angels with pigeon feathers. #dharma #witchsky #pagansky

This sounds so fun: Create an oracle to get creatively “unstuck” and build more meaningful patterns in @sarahkokernot.bsky.social's @storystudiochicago.bsky.social class… One class, in person, starts October 29! www.storystudiochicago.org/classes/clas...

For the next month I’m raising money for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant Rights (ICIRR). This October, anyone who pays in full ($30 for the year) for a paid subscription to my newsletter will have their full payment donated to ICIRR which is protecting immigrant families and children.

I honestly don’t understand how someone could say “water is sacred” or “water is life” and then support AI, whose servers extract & waste tons and tons of water, and endanger poor, Black, & Latinx communities.

Horrified by what ICE is doing to Chicago and especially to children. I spent years of my career teaching the children of immigrant parents. What ICE did to those families in the South Side apartment last night is nothing less than child abuse. We have to resist.

ICE is running around Chicago harassing people for not being white. Just a year ago, that was illegal in the United States and now it’s commonplace. That’s not making America great again.