Introducing I HAVE A RIBCAGE; YOU HAVE A RIBCAGE

For a year, from fall 2023 to fall 2024, I wrote the newsletter Art Gardening. Its title was a bit of a lie: it was not about gardening. The metaphor became less useful once I acknowledged that I know very little about horticulture; nonetheless, I crave treating art like a lover I “tend every day,” to quote the ever-lovely Jamila Woods.

So it was not really about gardening; it was about art. I wrote about…

• Ursula K LeGuin’s basement mazes; evil; midwestern anthems

• Dana Omar’s new short film, Stuck¹ ; speaking out when you’re scared; and James Baldwin

• The profound pleasure of directing theatre again

• Making art in solidarity with Palestine

• Learning manicure skills (a proposal for revolutionary friendship)

• Making art to spite men talking at you about Aristotle

• Really smart trees

• Doing club drugs in unfun ways; Holland Andrews’ uncanny, healing anthems; dance about the climate catastrophe and “deep time.”

• My childhood heroes (martyred); college essays (an exploitative, but often tender, genre).

• Gymnastics; why I’m trying to have fun goddamnit; loving Olivia Dean

• Violins in chapels 

In twelve months, I wrote eleven pieces, but the cadence was nowhere near monthly; it lurched and surged. I published whenever I was “ready”, which was a blessing and a curse: the pieces grew until they bloomed (to use my soon-to-be-retired metaphor), but sometimes my finger would hover over the “publish” button for days or weeks, or I’d spend a month chastising myself for not writing the next thing.

I also launched the newsletter barely a month before Israel escalated its genocide in Gaza after October 7th. Overcome with horror and grief, rapidly learning new organizing skills I’d never touched before, obsessively studying up, enraged at so many looking away or cheering it on, writing here was like…hauling myself up a rope ladder through a black hole—forgive the clunky metaphor, but it was the only way I knew how to describe the sensation at the time. I found myself able to write my way through the ways I needed to transform to meet the moment with anything resembling integrity. It’s a holy practice, I think, one I admire in so many other artists. I’d like to keep doing it.

I’ve also re-learned recently (in part through Raechel Anne Jolie’s excellent memoir class, EXCAVATIONS, this fall) that a consistency of artistic practice is necessary to maintain my foundational self-esteem. If I don’t move my body for a few days, the fibromyalgia grows; if I don’t write for a few days, the self-loathing does. In these times, there’s far too much unavoidable pain and loathing to consent to the avoidable.

So, this is my newsletter 2.0, on Beehiiv instead of Substack, with a new name. In an effort to create reasonable expectations for myself, I’m going to be in your inbox weekly, every Friday morning, for the next 90 days. On Friday, February 27th, to celebrate, I’m going to take myself to a cute little gay day spa, wander through a stationary store and lust over all the beautiful paper, and eat a piece of good layer cake (bonus points if I make it myself). After that, maybe I’ll continue a weekly publication schedule. Maybe I’ll shift.

I’m imagining I Have a Ribcage; You Have a Ribcage to be something like “auto-criticism”: discussions of works of art through memoir. Some things I’m planning to share with you:

• An essay on James Baldwin and falling in love amidst fascism

• An analysis of the colonial subplot of Shakespeare in Love (it’s a cautionary tale!)

• A dispatch from August on a diving board (to ease your freezing winter bones)

• A reckoning with T.S. Eliot, my problematic fave (and some #newyearnewyou poetics)

• An advice column about creative collaborations (with a debt owed to Dolly Parton)

• An essay on a just fine work of art with one exceptional moment (and my gratitude to Kesha)

• Micro-reviews of art about whales, water, and enemies

• Dispatches on the art I’m seeing/reading/experiencing.

Who Am I?

I’d also like to briefly (re)introduce myself. I’m a writer, theatre artist, and organizer who is interested in collective effervescence, autotheory, liberation theology, food, experimental performance, and the solidarity economy. I’m a white, cis, queer woman with German Jewish and Western European ancestry. I have chronic pain. I grew up in a professional-class family and benefit from inherited wealth.

I grew up in Seattle before moving to Chicago for a decade when I was eighteen. I cut my teeth in Chicago’s storefront theatre scene (a place of great creativity and great exploitation!)—working as a director, dramaturg, and sometimes playwright. I worked on a lot of new plays with living playwrights, I wrote (most of) a musical based on the Bluebeard fairytale, and I helped grow First Floor Theatre, which is still around and thriving!

Creatively, in 2023, I published “Good Housekeeping for the Sick”—a piece of food writing about hospitality amidst chronic pain—in Bitter Pill Press’ Apple a Day zine. In 2024, I directed she’s bouyant, María Matienzo’s work of queer experimental chamber music (I wrote about it last year here). Spoiler: María and I fell in love—a “showmance,” as we say in the biz.

I organize with a few different formations in Seattle—mostly around anti-zionism, mutual aid, and faith-based organizing (Jewish, Christian, and ~whatever~). In 2021, I was a pastoral fellow at Valley and Mountain, a liberation-theology-based Methodist congregation. I’ve also written a few Op-Ed/movement journalism pieces: most recently, for Truthout, “Organizers Are Demanding Palantir Drop Contracts With ICE and Israeli Military.”

For paid work, I tutor writing to (mostly) high schoolers, and I’m the Communications Director at The Feast, a small living-wage theatre ensemble.

Outside of this newsletter, I’m working on a long-form piece of historical food writing about turn-of-the-twentieth-century Yiddish Anarchists, some rowdy parties they threw, and what that can teach us about cultural organizing; an essay on arts organizations, the genocide profiteers who fund them, and the organizers fighting back; and an essay about crises, theatre, border walls, ceilings, somatics, and the divine, entitled “I Have a Ribcage; You Have a Ribcage”—a kind of “title track” for this newsletter.

It’s nice to meet you or re-meet you. Thank you so much for reading, and I’m looking forward to sharing much more with you over the coming months. With much care,

Jesse

1  Dana successfully made the short film Stuck this last year! In her words, “Stuck is a story set amidst a rising tide of Anti-Arab Sentiment in which a young Palestinian woman, haunted by a ghost from her past, faces an urgent choice: speak out and risk everything, or stay silent and be erased forever.” She and her team are submitting it to film festivals around the country, and they’re fundraising for post-production and submission costs. Contribute to them here!