Writing Again

My relationship with writing has always been a intense relationship, but a sloppy one.

There was a time in my life when all I wanted to be was a writer, and I thought I could ignore the dyslexia and aphasia that shape my relationship with language. Then I slowly moved into podcasting and became “knower-of-things,” which involved reading hundreds of texts on things that I was only marginally interested in my 20s.

If anything, after finishing graduate school in 2007, I thought of critical theory, particularly as applied to literature and cultural studies, as the elephant’s graveyard of philosophy and psychology with a distracting moniker of “politics” plastered all over it so no one would immediately see the decayed bones. In 2025, I feel differently, although the non-political being dressed as “politics” is still a theme in my thinking.

I say thinking because aside from poems, I more or less don’t write anymore for the public. I make videos nearly every day, and I teach writing to high school and college students, but most of my writing is private, if it is in prose. I write a few scholarly conference papers a year, massive amounts of lesson plans, and introductions to others’ writing, but years of teaching writing, editing writing, blogging, and being wrestled to the ground by the churn of social media mixing with my aphasia—it lost its relevance to me.

That said, I have been working on a few book projects—one with Shalon Van Tine, which has been on hiatus, but to which I have devoted about five years of research on the meaning of Christopher Lasch. Shalon has now earned her PhD, and we will discuss if we have the energy to finish the book. Originally, it was commissioned by the then Zero Books publisher, Douglas Lain, but Lain and I have parted ways (several times) since that commission, Zero has been bought out by Watkins and placed with some of its original writing team, and I have decided the project was much more extensive than originally imagined. The other book project is a book with R. Elle Smith, which will try to apply some of our thoughts from virtue ethics and general system theory as well as complexity theory, to social systems like universities, political movements, and “the left.” You may see snippets of those writings here as well as expansions of things that come up at the solo shows over at Varn Vlog.

This requires me to stop being the “Sage on the stage” (as teachers are often called when administrators want to pretend that students don’t need direct instruction, despite decades of evidence to the contrary) and start writing things down.

I will be doing all sorts of writing here, and even though this makes this newsletter effectively a marketing niche nightmare, more reliant on para-social attachment than some of subject area fandom.

But let’s begin.