Hi friends!

Thank you so much to everyone who read the March Sadness essays and voted in the contest. I’m pleased to report Neutral Milk Hotel cruised to a 165-61 first-round victory.

This means a second round matchup with either 1-seed “November Rain” by Guns ‘n’ Roses or 16-seed Sammy Kershaw with “Yard Sale.” Let’s just say I’m more familiar with one of these songs than the other.

The second round starts March 11, and my matchup will likely not go live that day, since the 1-vs.-16 tussle happens the day before. If the committee goes for maximum distance and slots us on the last day of the round, that’d be Monday, March 16 (at 10am Central). Will let you know!

If it’s on the 16th, I’ll be letting you know from India—assuming I can—so that’ll be weird.

I gotta say, during revision for this essay, I totally fell in love with it. I started imagining that other people might love it, too, and I even imagined the kinds of things they might say about it. I tried to remain humble, but some lofty paeans snuck in there. This fantasizing felt quite grandiose. I kept in mind it might not go that way in real life. Then it turned out… well, it pretty much went exactly that way.

I’m telling you this because, while I’m always trying to appear humble, sometimes I’m definitely not humble. (Look at that, I made it seem humble to admit I’m not humble.) But people did love the essay as much as I hoped, and that’s worth communicating. I’m excited more people will have a chance to read it.

Every memoirist who chooses to write super vulnerable shit and publish it surely goes through some version of this process, but confidence aside, I truly had no idea how I was going to feel about all this stuff in the essay becoming “public.” At a certain point, I deliberately stopped thinking about it; or maybe what happened is, as the work took shape, it became easy enough to believe in it, and to hand over control.

I still don’t totally know what I think about exposure, or how it’s making me feel. I probably have lots of thoughts and feelings, but they’re latent, percolating, and I haven’t had time to process them anyway (I’m actually dealing with some visa problems for India, and I’m exhausted). So in lieu of that, I wanted to share this quote from All-Star memoirist Melissa Febos, which blew me away a year ago, continues to blow me away, and encapsulates the entire deal:

Like most memoirists, I am a secretive person. The idea that memoirists are oversharers who crave attention is erroneous; we are usually people who have hidden large swathes of ourselves in order to appeal to others, to feel safe. By the time we write our memoirs, those concealed parts have become too heavy to bear. The problem with secrecy is that it isolates us, alienates us from the companionship engendered by a shared truth. It is much easier to control groups of people when you alienate them from each other by encouraging them to feel shame. Hence the political power of articulated experience, what Audre Lorde called “the transformation of silence into language and action,” or what Dian Million coined “felt theory,” or what D.W. Winnicott meant when he wrote “It is joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found.”

Much more to say about this later, I’m sure. For now: thanks for finding me.

The Other News, Which Is Pretty Big News Actually

I’m honestly not sure what to say about this, either; it seems to deserve more thoughts than I have right now. But here goes:

I got accepted to the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) for Fall 2026!

When I found out, I cried, because I wished I could share it with Ashley. Because I knew she would be proud of me, and because I would never have gotten to this point without her.

Well, I can’t end on that… OK, here, I’m sure I shared this War on Drugs song with you before, but it really does say it all.