Consolidation

Being with the process

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Recently I interviewed Kelsey Zazanis on Fucking Cancelled. It’s crazy to me that in all my years doing work on surviving incest I don’t think I’ve ever had a public conversation with another incest survivor before. There is something about it that just feels so right. When you are a scapegoat, constantly framed as the bad one, the crazy one, the one causing trouble, it feels fucking exhausting. The fatigue is something people don’t talk about. They talk about the strength but not the fatigue of constantly having to be that strong. Talking with another incest survivor publicly, the doubling of our voices, the way we affirm each other and make incest something that can be spoken, is very powerful. Very sustaining. In this episode, Kelsey and I discuss the psychiatrization of incest survivors (and how psychiatry is rooted in a history of repressing the reality of incest), incest as a political issue rather than simply an issue of personal healing, the rights of children (childhood as a state of captivity within the family), chronic illness and incest (EDS for Kelsey, autoimmunity for me), as well as spirituality, Jungian psychology, and dreams. It’s one of my favourite Fucking Cancelled episodes and you should check it out. You should also buy Kelsey’s book.

Jay and I also recently released a “Clementine and Jay” episode of Fucking Cancelled. This episode is about the twitter mob going after Vivek Chibber for his recent podcast episode titled The End of Wokeness?. But it’s also an episode about a possible uptick in 2020-like identitarian and cancel culture behaviours in 2025, possibly in response to Trump and the right winning the culture war. While there is a very promising turn toward organized labour and broad based working class solidarity building, some corners of the so-called left are unfortunately returning to and doubling down on behaviours that are widely hated, dysfunctional, anti-solidarity, and contributed to the current cultural victory of the right. We also discuss our deep burn out from being on the frontlines of the bad old years, 2020—2023, of taking down cancel culture on the left. Jay and I are, after a really really hard year, renewing our commitment to the podcast, and to the political work this podcast is in service of: building a functional left that is powerful enough to challenge capital and win. Jay is now producing the pod and doing gorgeous work on editing the sound and the visuals. If you believe in this work, please follow us at FuckingCancelled.com.

Other exciting news: My book Fucking Magic has been picked up by Revolutionaries Press. Fucking Magic is a collection of 12 issues of the zine of the same title, published between 2017 and 2020. I self-published it as a book in 2021, and it is now finding a home with a press in 2025, as part of my push to establish more legitimacy for myself as a writer in the mainstream literary world. Thank you to Wallea Eaglehawk for believing in this project, and taking a chance on republishing an independent book. Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available. I will be selling off all the remaining copies of the self-published version at a discount for a limited time. If you are in Montreal, I can give you an even bigger discount if you are willing to come pick up the book. You can contact me about that here.

Consolidation

I said to my therapist the other day that I shouldn’t be so burned out because I haven’t been going as hard recently. She asked me, somewhat bemused, if I was characterizing the past year as restful. I had to concede that no — the past year wasn’t exactly restful. My partner’s mother was dying, and died. I found out about the suicide in jail of my ex partner. A friend who I talked to every day died in a freak accident. One of my oldest friends died suddenly and unexpectedly. I was physically intimidated at the anarchist bookfair when a person in full black bloc approached my table and poured a full cup of coffee all over my writing, destroying $500 worth of books and zines, and then ran off without saying anything. One of my closest friends threatened to call 911 on me when I was in crisis (but not a suicide risk), knowing that psychiatric incarceration is one of my greatest fears and traumas, and when I expressed how dangerous and unacceptable her threatening me with 911 was, she dramatically ended our friendship without the possibility of discussion, and character-assassinated me to anyone who would listen. Oh yeah, and my mother threatened to sue me for writing about the sexual abuse in my family, telling me that my substack and instagram would be monitored and I would be contacted by a lawyer if there was even an “inference that my father is a sexual abuser.” So that’s what my past year has been like.

I said to my therapist — true, but at least I wasn’t driving all over the continent. In 2023 Jay and I went on an epic tour of the United States, doing events in 12 cities, and me being the only driver. My tires were slashed and shit was poured in the air vents of my car in Portland. In 2022, post covid lock up, I travelled nonstop, as if I could get away from the claustrophobic feeling of police enforced curfews and constant dehumanizing online harassment by never stopping for more than a moment. The truth is the last five years have been unbelievably hard, and I dealt with it by putting my foot on the accelerator and refusing to stop. I was cancelled at an international scale in 2020, and by 2023 Jay and I were touring the Fucking Cancelled podcast, because our hard work and perseverance had changed the culture enough for that to be possible. We fought fucking hard. We were constantly targeted and attacked at every angle. We refused to stop. Ultimately, despite the existence of dedicated haters, we won.