Exiting the underworld

Plus the recording of my Montreal launch for The Realm of Unreality

Guys I did it. I exited the underworld.

2024 was a fucking crazy year. It was a year where I had to face my deepest wounding, my deepest fears, and the very split right at the heart of me. I had to write about incest, and parts of my story that I had never written about before, in order to clear a path for me to become a mother. The only way for me to do this work was to go down to the underworld and I spent a very long time down there. It was hard on all my relationships and it was extremely painful and scary and fraught. But it was also necessary. I didn’t know how long I would have to stay down there and it turned out to be a very long time.

All of this culminated at the end of the summer when my mother threatened to sue me for writing about the incest in my family, and I decided to ignore her threats and keep writing. In the crucible of that decision I went crazier than I have for many years (crazy does not mean outside of reality or unable to make decisions for yourself — it means making impossible choices and telling impossible truths, often through the body and in ways people find incomprehensible because we have been trained to ignore and punish the comprehensible communications of survivors). In my craziness I had a desire to cut myself which I did not plan to act on, but my friend threatened to call 911 on me because she put herself in charge of my body.

Caught between threats of lawyers and threats of incarceration, I charged forward insisting that I am the only one in charge of my body and the only one in charge of my voice. The entire point of this underworld work was to finally claim my autonomy and tell the truth no matter how much that upsets other people. I would not be controlled and I will not be controlled. I went to Barcelona and Toulouse following the words of a stranger who told me that my words were more powerful than the state and that my mother could never silence me because my writing on incest was already being translated, disseminated, and discussed. I shared this writing in Europe and received such warmth and support.

Then I came home and realized there was still more underworld work ahead of me here, as it wasn’t enough for me to claim my voice across the ocean, I had to do it in my home city, where I have haters who use physical intimidation and slander to attempt to silence me. After years of being iced out, threatened, and treated with contempt, I knew I could no longer lay low and let cancellers who appropriate language meant for abuse in order to justify their interpersonal harassment campaigns silence the work I am doing on surviving incest. I had to claim my place in this city I call home and refuse to bend to cancellers the same way I refused to bend to threats of lawyers and 911.

So I decided to host a launch for my incest memoir here. And I was very afraid people wouldn’t come, because I have dedicated haters here and because incest is not exactly a popular or fun topic. But I stayed with the process. I trusted my writing and I shared my vulnerability and I received so much generosity and support from my audience. I wheatpasted excerpts of the writing around the city to advertise the launch and doing that felt crazy and audacious as fuck: not only was I not going to stop writing about incest, I was going to glue that writing to the walls of my city. It also reconnected me to my roots as a zinester and a punk, returning to glue and grit over the algorithm.

The launch was a huge success. Lots of people came. Friends and community members and local readers of my work. But also people who had never heard of me before who felt struck by my words glued to a lamppost. In a room full of people I said things out loud that I spent decades saying only to my closest friends and partners, shattering the silence completely, breaking the spell of unreality, and finally climbing up from the underworld. I did it. I completed my underworld journey in a Mile End loft, reading the impossible words in my own community to people who were brave enough to hear them.

People shared their stories with me after and told me what this work means to them. And I thanked them over and over for being there and witnessing me. Together we made incest into something that can be spoken out loud. We don’t have to live in silence anymore. Nothing about our lives is too taboo to be spoken. The horrors we have lived are not dirty secrets and we have the right to speak the truth in public. We are survivors. And our survival is beautiful and our truth telling is a beacon that lights the way for others finding their way in the dark. I am not ashamed of who I am, how I survived, or the truth of what my life has been. I can integrate all of it. And I do that through my writing.

Other things happened in 2024. I fell in love with C. I moved in with Jay. I became best friends with Nabiha. Through all this struggle there were people loving me, loving me as I am. In the first picture you can see C and Jay, my two partners, sitting at the front in the foreground. Their presence was an anchor holding me steady as I dared to do what still felt so scary. Nabiha was teaching her class that night and couldn’t be there, but she came at the end just to celebrate me. Loving an incest survivor takes something special. Not because we are hard to love but because we need trust worthy people who can be careful with us. My people are trust worthy and careful with me.

I am very lucky, very blessed, and very loved.

I want to thank Laura Kooji, for sharing her writing and her thoughts on Indigenous Language Revitalization as violence prevention work and on the futility of lateral violence posing as justice. I want to thank Kelsey Zazanis for being a writer who dares to write about incest and for her fierce solidarity in this work. I want to thank Bebe Montoya for modelling vulnerability in the creative process and showing me the way through when I was stuck. I want to thank the fans who sent me money so that I could pay for the venue and ensure that I could welcome people who could not afford a ticket: those people came. I want to thank Éris Cazeneuve for writing the words that solidified my resolve not to bend to my mother’s threats, and all those who offered me warmth and welcome in Barcelona and Toulouse. And I want to thank everyone who came to the launch in Montreal and everyone who is brave enough to make incest something that can be spoken.

It feels so good to be back in the topside world.

Thank you. Here is the recording of the launch.