This—writing a new Substack post after so many years—feels a little like stopping a stranger in the middle of a busy city sidewalk to ask them to sign a petition. I’ve never never held a little clipboard with the intent of racking up signatures or email addresses, but I can imagine how I’d feel doing it: low-grade terror just before launching into a bid for attention from someone who I, correctly or incorrectly, assume does not want to give me attention. You, the reader, have given me no real indication that I should strike up a new conversation—I’m just sending it to your inbox and hoping its a wanted or at least relevant intervention in your day.
I have signed a lot of petitions in my life, and especially in the past year. Forgive me if I’ve grown a little jaded with familiar forms of protest. I guess I’m not the sort of person who’d canvass, anyway.
If you’re receiving this email, it’s because some time ago, you signed up for the newsletter Max Practice. I got rid of all paid subscribers in 2020; I’m sure we’ve all changed a lot since then. I have no intention of bringing back the paid subscriber model, or of posting to this newsletter regularly. All posts will be free, and will go out when I feel like it. If I do bring back the paid subscriber situation (unlikely), you’ll be the first to know.
The main reason I am writing is to share that, in a little less than year, my debut collection of short stories, Crawl, will be published by Graywolf Press—October 21st, 2025. I will use this newsletter to promote the book, especially as we get closer to publication day. Don’t be shy about unsubscribing if this isn’t of interest to you. There is also a form on my website for those who want to be notified when my book is available for pre-order. I will only email that list about pre-orders, so sign up for that if you just want that notification; stick around here if you want that notification AND my sporadic commentary on Books and Writing. I will certainly write a heartfelt newsletter about the importance of pre-orders at some point, as is literary Substack tradition.
I’ve been thinking about how I’ll talk about my book when it comes out. Why I wrote it, what it’s “about” other than the concrete facts: trans men, 2010s, Seattle. I keep coming back to the concept of truth. I think my book has value because there is truth in it—because a reader picking up the book will, I hope, encounter truth. When I was first coming out as trans, I searched voraciously for these kinds of encounters with truth through art that was specifically about being trans, or realizing that you’re trans; while I’m eternally grateful for what I did find, it didn’t feel like enough, or quite what I was looking for. It didn’t feel like I was finding art or writing in general that spoke to my experience of transmasculinity, or of making the decision to transition. I was looking for a way to think about my own transness—art to think about transness with so I could figure out how to live the rest of my life, now that the possibility of transition had occurred to me.
So, in less than a year, my book will come out. I also want to acknowledge that a couple weeks ago, we passed the grim anniversary of one year of Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
I have not held back in voicing my support for Palestine, during the past year or before the genocide started. I will never forget the first time I made a Facebook post about Israel’s pinkwashing, which I first learned about thanks to Dean Spade’s documentary Pinkwashing Exposed. The post was about gay soldiers in the IOF, I think. I shared a lot of political posts like these on Facebook at the time (when was it? 2017, maybe?) and remember being shocked at the degree of vitriol I received from the Zionists in the comments section. They were friends of friends, mostly, people I didn’t know and would never meet in person, writing paragraphs upon paragraphs about why I was wrong to criticize Israel. I don’t remember arguing with anyone very much. I think I just left the post alone.
For the past year it has felt wrong to post/write anything that isn’t about the atrocities Israel continues to commit, or about the suffering of Palestinians. I haven’t tweeted about much else during the genocide, and I feel similarly unable to promote my book without reckoning with this context. I am proud of the book I wrote, and thrilled to publish it with Graywolf Press, which continues to feel like an absurd dream that cannot possibly be true. At the exact same time, I am profoundly ashamed at my complicity in this genocide and so many other instances of colonial violence. I do not believe Israel has the right to exist, nor do I believe the U.S.A has a right to exist. As a white American, especially, I believe there is something rotten in me that will never go away, because my life is made possible by these systems. Early in the genocide, I remember seeing this message from someone in Gaza: "Tell Muslim countries not to offer funeral prayers for us. We are alive and you are dead." It’s among the most powerful, truthful sentences I’ve ever encountered.
I agree with Andrea Long Chu: speech is a material act. There is no way for me to talk about the value of words and books and truth without talking about Palestine, about the violent suppression of speech about Palestine (from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free), the IOF’s deliberate targeting of Palestinians journalists, the W.A.W.O.G. call to boycott PEN, the canceling of the LiBeraturpreis award ceremony for Adania Shibli’s remarkable novel Minor Detail, Israel’s murder of Refaat Al-Areer, and Mosab Abu Toha’s revolutionary poems and essays. In the midst of this horrific genocide, the power of language has never seemed so clear.
This newsletter first started as a way for me to “practice” writing, to figure out if I was a writer at all. In less than a year, I will have the extraordinary privilege of calling myself a published author. In this sense, the time for practice is over. Time to sink or swim, say what you mean.
