hi bestie
neue newsletters, summer songs, and heatwaves
thnkng of u
Hi there, and welcome to the first edition of my brand new & so very exciting newsletter. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a friend or family member and are in fact legally obligated to subscribe but (!!!) I really appreciate it, thank you. I’m still shaping what I want this space to look like and provide, so thank you x2 for going on the ride with me. Parts might get moved around, the tone might change. All I know is that I wanted to create a dedicated space for me, a gæ demon, to share everything with you—everything I’m writing, publishing, reading, watching, listening to, and thinking about. It’s the Me Show. Planet Me. Welcome.
You might be curious about the name of this lil newsletter. Who/what is Jem? Is that your dj name? I can’t recall a beautiful pin drop natasha bedingfield moment, but sometime near the end of 2019 I distinctly remember feeling tired of my name. I was tired of going by Jeremiah, especially online. I’ve always felt pretty cozy with my name, even when I’ve struggled with gender dysphoria yayayay, so this was a surprising development for me. Part of it was general career dissatisfaction (generous use of the word “career”). At some point I had internalized the idea that the only way I could grow an audience online as a writer—especially a poet, idk—was as a consistent persona with a nice picture and full name on my socials, even if I was regularly swinging from tone to tone. I thought everything had to ultimately be in service of promoting my tiny short stories about the midwest and poems about, like, being horny for thunder storms. But the reality was that I didn’t have a huge following, I didn’t have a job that paid me to write, and I wasn’t applying for other jobs, so I realized there was really no reason I shouldn’t use my socials as a way to—at the very least—play around with my name. I wanted something that felt a bit sillier, a bit more playful, and a name that felt more androgynous, more fun, queerer, freer. Thus, “Jem” was born.
I went by Jem in my socials for a while. Some more recently-made internet friends call me by that name, even. Mostly it gave me room to do something I hadn’t really done since college, which was play around with ~who I am~. Imagine that! Self-invention, flops. Nothing in my social media presence changed drastically, but throughout the pandemic and the simmering dump-fire of the last year I did feel a kind of blessed anonymity by using a different name, as low-stakes as it was. I changed my socials back because I still publish under “Jeremiah” and I am at my very core a sheep person, but I carry that new name with me. I like to think that Jem is the part of me that is braver online. The part of me that feels a little shinier. Good at memes sometimes. Light-filled.
Some thoughts on using Substack: I was wary of starting this newsletter on Substack because some of the platform’s most prominent users are among the most transphobic writers and ‘thinkers’ working on the Internet today—and users isn’t even the right word because they’re paid through the Substack Pro program. Substack, like so many other tech companies that function as mass publishing companies, has abdicated all editorial responsibility to contributors and resisted calls to more actively moderate the content it publishes. A lot of prominent non-Pro users have now left for other platforms. The company is trying to balance out its Substack Pro roster by recruiting trans writers, but the problem remains the same: how long can a platform claim to be neutral if it’s actively fostering hate within its confines? Probably not very long, and I kind of hate even being near a platform that defers these ethical questions to its users, let alone actively using it. It sucks. They all do it, too. And unlike a media platform or a digital entity conjured by venture capital financiers, I’m a person who lives in the world, has relationships, and has an embodied politics—I can’t pretend people aren’t harmed by words. I can’t incite violence on marginalized people and then comfortably say oh nooo actually I’m just delivery system for other people’s ideas, I’m not a person with a responsibility to do right by other people! The reality is I coexist with other people; I care about other people. I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.
All I can say is that I chose Substack because it was free up-front and relatively easy to use for a newsletter newbie like myself. Every cliched wannabe writer media personality online probably has one now, but that’s ok! I never claimed to be original. I know there are some nonprofit alternatives that other writers have started using due to the circumstances outlined above, and I’m going to be exploring these platforms further. TLDR, I feel bad using Substack but right now it’s an easy option. Thank you for letting me self-flagellate a bit. Screw TERFs.
music 2 die 4
I’m a poet and fiction writer, which sounds tres tres romantique, but a not-insignifant chunk of my writing life is spent submitting things to small magazines, waiting for several months, occasionally years, and feeling bad about myself. I don’t have an agent, so it’s all meeee. Because so much of that creative endeavor is diffused and stretched over deep time, I’ve always taken a lot of comfort in the real time immediacy of music. If I could open my mouth and make a sound other than <ringwraith screech>, I would probably be a songwriter for better or worse (read: worse). I loathe any guy who insists on taking over a playlist at a party, but I am unfortunately someone who takes great secret satisfaction in their ability to curate a playlist and that’s just a difficult truth about myself I need to sit with.
Every summer since I was like 15/16 (?) I’ve been throwing together a smattering of songs I’m vibing with and giving them to my family and close friends (s/o to Emily, Molly, and Laura) initially in the form of a burned cd and now a Spotify playlist. I think it started out with me desperately wanting them to think I was cool, an ambition that has not substantially changed, and then a year would pass and eventually those same friends would ask where the summer cd is and…well, here we are. I’ve basically done it every summer since then, save maybe a couple summers in college where I was clearly an unhinged unhingelina. What started as a burned itunes cd with maybe 10 songs has now grown to 2 hr+ playlist of tracks meant to capture everything that summer is and can be: three months of laughing, driving around, fucking around, longing, ruminating. Dance floor catharsis, sunsets, rebirth, discovery. It’s a lot of pressure on three little months, but summers in Minnesota are short! We have to live it up. Seize the day. Get the shoes, baby.
The link to this year’s playlist is plopped below. Maybe it can give you something to listen to on hard nights when fomo is rearing its head and you think everyone is having a good time without you. Have a date with yourself <3
misc
It is veryyyy hot and sticky outside right now, so I’ve spent most of the past week indoors with my beloved AC unit as I try to practice active gratitude for having AC, a place to live, and a fridge with ice. Reading has been a slow trickle lately, but I’m in the middle of Alissa Nutting’s Made for Love and really enjoying its dedication to flamboyant loony tunes humor~~it’s about love, obvi, and big tech and trailer parks and the limits of intimacy in a wildly messy & surveillance-dipped world. I need to finish so I can then mosey over to my boyfriend HBO Max and watch the series adaptation.
Not a book, but I have also been thinking about this tweet a lot:
I’m not like super interested in Hemingway’s biography but that first bit about “hot drunk trainwreck summer” grabbed me by the throat and threw me down the stairs. It’s so funny and feels like such an achingly accurate description of the raw-dogging-thru-life I’ve been seeing as pandemic rules slowly get eased here in the US. People are re-emerging, friends are gathering, bars are open. People are usually vaccinated I think, it’s mostly safe, but it’s a weird time regardless. If you have similarly mixed feelings, I hope you’re taking care of yourself and finding a way to balance all these goofy contradictory desires: stay at home, run around like a maniac, mute the words “Fire Island Pines,” party all night, ghost all your friends, etc. I’m not sure I’ve found a good balance yet, but it just means we have to find even more energy and patience for a little self-gentleness. A little radical acceptance of our boringly messy selves, again and again. A little self-love moment, I guess.
That’s all for now. I’m off to refresh Lorde’s spotify compulsively. Talk to you again soon girlies xoxo
- jeremiah