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1. I fancied myself a little hustler, but not really. I just wanted to have fun. I started in the Pacific Northwest and took my tiny show on the road, dancing in the corners of gay bars from Seattle to New York, LA to Atlanta. Straight bars too sometimes. It was just for a good…
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I’ve been trying to write something about self-abandonment for a while now. My therapist laughed when I told her that prior to reaching out to her for the first time I had been thinking I kind of had things figured out. “Oh well, that’s endearing,” she said, “but there are always more layers.” I can…
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It’s sunny on the south coast and though the wind is here, and it is here to stay, people are wearing shorts and walking around in a kind of spring euphoria. I’ve been actually finding it a little hard to say goodbye to winter—there was something about all that darkness, wet and cold this year…
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a turn and burnto portland in february was excited to gobut then all i could think of to do once i got there was to sit in a bar and reada book of short stories, alone no good sleep, lately. maybe it’s been decades the brightest spot in these miserable timesleonard out of prisonevery time…
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It is 4am in Oaxaca. I’m still on Oregon time, which makes it worse. 2am and wide awake. My beautiful partner and I flew here on inauguration day. It felt perfect, and also I was aware of the hypocrisy: the entitlement of vacationing in a county that my country’s policies have systematically fucked over. But…here…
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Tomorrow is A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest’s 5 month anniversary. But what is that in book years? It seems like a hundred years ago that I found out it would be published by Torrey House Press, another hundred that I went on book tour with my dog Ducky in an old pickup for six weeks…
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I’ve never, ever been into rainbows or flags, and especially not rainbow flags. I was an edgy, little queer when I moved to San Francisco at 25 and thought rainbow flags were for people who were a different type of queer than I was. I guess I thought rainbow flags were for the mainstream gays.…
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Sometimes I go into the bathroom to write. The bathtub can be an especially helpful container, I’ve found, and seems to be pretty helpful for the lower back as well. I live with children but what I’ve found is most adults, regardless of their home lives, have to be clever and resourceful in finding time…
Author of "A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest"
Charlie J. Stephens 