Risa Mickenberg is a conceptual firebrand and kinetic instigator of ideas whose imaginarium comes to life in nearly every form imaginable, from literature to film to music and secret projects, and to mischief in swimming pools in Spain. These days, Risa has just completed a triumphant premiere of her film EGG at the Tribeca Film Festival, where reviews lauded her writing as at last surpassing Albee. Some of my favorite projects of hers are TUMBLEWEED IN A BOX DOT COM, a buddy-road-existential movie with poets S.A. Griffin and Scott Wannberg, her nascent magazine HERMETTE: A Lifestyle Magazine for Aspirational Lady Hermits, her work in establishing the EMOTIONAL LABOR MOVEMENT, the IDEA SEED BANK, the CONVERSATIONAL COPYRIGHT, as well as ISOLATION PORN and SEPARATION ENVY…each of which is awaiting murmuration below.

I first met Mickenberg when we were enjoying my bourbon flask over smokes near the grave of Katrina Trask at Yaddo, although we weren’t at the time aware that we were near the gravesite, or that our paths would continue to cross for centuries to come. I remember it was around four am, we were both relatively intoxicated with what was happening to our brains within the sinister October beauty of no moon and the incessant spectre of Sylvia Plath and Patricia Highsmith, whose desks and spirits were nearby, as replete with manic energy as ourselves. We had arrived to a cadre of all women – perhaps there were one or two men there, but not within of the witches’ circle that began to form at that time. We were possessed and elated, elated by our own intellectual independence and the emerging surprises in our respective projects – her screenplay Egg, and my book The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far.

Perhaps most of all we bonded over the spirits of the thwarted women who preceded us at Yaddo – an artist residency sacred to us both for its championship of independent and often outcast women of art, many of whose blood and tears were shed at Yaddo for the same reason as ours: the alchemy of an experience of autonomy and freedom, of unfetteredness, of what it means to be released from domestic obligations, existential censorship, and the agency to create without restriction.

Shortly thereafter, we became neighbors in the West Village by coincidence mixed with destiny, and have intersected and bisected at other late night fireworks displays along the Hudson River pansexual commerce park and strange gatherings of wildlings that were more wormholes into a different era of the West Village when it was a place of chaos and the sublime than the capitalist consumer styxian hellscape that is the manhattan artist cocktail party.

Mickenberg is a gift to humanity, and I hope if the craft that delivered her to this planet ever retrieves her, it takes me too.

(O)(O)(O)(O)(O)

WIKSWO: You have expressed some preoccupation with starting an Emotional Labor Movement. What are the strategies and tactics involved in forming that, and what results do you envision?

MICKENBERG: I don’t remember where I first read about the term Emotional Labor, but this Guardian article has a good explanation.

The term was a revelation to me. Suddenly I felt the weight of it on me. I saw how I was compensating for other people and detracting from my own work as a result.

I felt the full weight of the underappreciated, expected, uncompensated and devalued work our mothers and foremothers still do: being more human and creating a kinder, gentler world, but also compensating for other people, stopping them from being fully human, and depriving the world of what we all could be instead.

It’s time we took a look at the value emotion has for society, and for us, and at the way we choose to allocate our resources.

An Emotional Labor Movement begins by expanding the definition of Emotional Labor in dictionaries and on Wikipedia.

WIKSWO: What comes next?

MICKENBERG: Next, is a wildcat strike, a month-long cleanse where we surrender our emotional labor.

Because we need to have a re-set.

The Emotional Labor Movement demands that we stop doing things for other people and see what happens if we stop worrying and stop compensating and stop answering for people we care about and let them do it themselves.

Some of the slogans from the ELM are:

QUIT COMPENSATING.

LET THEM WORRY ABOUT IT.

LET PEOPLE WRITE THEIR OWN THANK YOU NOTES.

JUST DON’T DO IT.

WIKSWO: Why step off the sidewalk for a white lady in Biloxi when you have fought for your country and lost loved ones in the trenches of Germany? Why do it? Why ever step off that sidewalk again? Because someone is there with a rope waiting for your neck, that’s why. So as long as there are folx who benefit from the emotional labor of others, there will be violence from them when that supply chain is interrupted.

MICKENBERG: In trying to assign value to emotional labor, do you think we need to consider how it feels to be the recipient of emotional labor?

WIKSWO: Sure. But most people who give emotional labor don’t receive it. If we consider the economic model of emotional labor, it is a sweatshop, it is a form of forced labor, it is a form of slavery. We traffick in unpaid emotional laborers, and they are chopped up and left in a dumpster when they stop being useful. I think there’s usually contempt and anger and betrayal when the slaves rebel.

How does it feel to be the recipient of emotional labor? FAN FUCKING TASTIC. But why notice. It’s so nice to be comfortable as the recipient of emotional labor in your Forever 21 clothes with the servant fanning away the flies with a clutch of ostrich feathers. Are there feelings there? Yes. Typically entitlement. Typically ugly feelings.

So maybe I’ll change my mind and say, yes, let those who are the emotional labor workers take some time to seriously ponder the feelings of the recipients of emotional labor. I’m sure it would be radicalizing. Maybe there’s no going back unless there is equity. And i don’t mean equality, but equity. Justice, parity, remuneration, appreciation, compensation, and so forth.

MICKENBERG: Women are conditioned to expect emotional labor from other women and to not expect it from men. We see it as part of being a good person. It’s hard for us to let it go and feel good. It is valuable to us.

WIKSWO: One of the advantages of being queer at a young age is that I was able to see how much higher my standards were for women, and much more lax they were for men. It really changed me. Now economic systems of emotional labor makes me even more angry. I refuse to give it away as though it’s my duty because of my gender identity. That’s a contract I never signed. But I keep finding myself sliding into it, or facing tremendous anger from others when I try to make my own way in that economy. I’m deemed abrasive for not giving it away for free. I am happy to give kindness. But giving away serious emotional labor is killing me. And many others, of all genders.

MICKENBERG: But we can’t give it freely anymore, or enjoy the benefits it should give us, without recognition, awareness and re-evaluation of the role it plays in our lives, the demands it puts on our time and its value to us.

Giving up our emotional labor, even temporarily, will change us:

We might stop doing things that don’t give us pleasure.

We might stop expecting anyone to do emotional labor on behalf of others.

We might appreciate the work generations of emotional laborers have done, and still do, to make the world a livable place, to make our relationships deeper, our families closer, to clarify and sustain the higher purposes of our decisions.

We also might find that we are doing emotional labor to compensate for the fact that we are not doing the work we really want to do: That we’re using it to feed our egos, to avoid shame by our peers, to provide us with a sense of self when, by surrendering some of this energy, we could serve the world in greater ways that could make us all happier in the process.

We might let others succeed at practicing it more instead of criticizing their efforts or becoming jealous of their treading on our territory. Maybe we’ll step back and let them become more whole.

And maybe we’ll reclaim our emotional labor as something valuable that we allocate to the most deserving, dire or reciprocal or rewarding situations.

The results I envision from the ELM are self-respect, gratitude, empathy and honesty.

I envision workplaces and industries that value emotional labor and reward it.

I see a new crop of jobs that take positive contribution to the world as a primary driver so that people can love their work wholly and so that all labor is seen and valued and is not separate from the world of caring.

I envision an enormous sense of relief from everyone. From those unburdened by expectation, and from those who now have the space to take up the mantle of caring now that someone else isn’t doing that on their behalf.

Even more important are the results I can’t envision.

Women have been burdened by so many things, for so long, that every time I see another woman succeeding, it makes me wildly emotional.

I can’t help but think of all of the lost stories and projects and ideas and discoveries and inventions and political change that have been lost to us all because women picked up the slack and made it easier for men to focus.

The Emotional Labor Movement should result in the importance of feeling, rather than productivity, as the central driver of being human.

WIKSWO: In an Emotional Labor Movement, what would be the organizing principles and methods?

 MICKENBERG: Its organizing principles are:

1. Just let them do it.
2. Stop fighting the patriarchy! Start appreciating the matriarchy!
3. And Maxine Waters’ brilliant: Reclaiming My Time.

We need to just let them do it. So we can focus on what we want to do and what we’re capable of doing that has never been done before; not what we feel we need to do or should do or are expected to do.

We need to raise the bar for ourselves about what makes us feel good – so we can do for others on a much greater scale than being thoughtful.

We have to stop this hazing process of expecting girls, or other women, to do the things that seem expected of us. We need to stop resenting them when they don’t do them. We have to see their resistance as the resistance.

We need to acknowledge the Emotional Labor that’s given us this opportunity by appreciating the matriarchy.

One ELM project I’m starting is called IN HER HAND. It’s a crowd-sourced installation that collects our mothers’ handwritten cards, signed by them, on behalf of others, in the graceful cursive of their day.

We need to value emotional labor equally in everyone and reward it with gratitude and respect for it, rather than meeting it with ever more expectation.

Women are great protectors. We need to also be great protectors of our time.

Because its value has only just started to be understood, especially by us.

WIKSWO: Are there any emotions that you feel would quickly gain primacy in the ELM? 

I think the emotions of the movement will be anger, gratitude, longing, and happiness.

First, anger at injustice and at the devaluation of sensitivity and caring.

Then a flood of gratitude and respect for emotional laborers.

Next will come a longing, by all of us, for a more feeling and compassionate society.

Last, will come a wave of powerful intuition, honesty, liberation of thought, individualism, fulfilled potential and a model for happiness that is a well-rounded external and internal life for everyone.

WIKSWO: And likewise, which emotions do you envision as being difficult to organize around?

MICKENBERG: I think the emotion that’s hardest to organize around is guilt.

WIKSWO: My mother says I was born without the capacity for guilt. She was a preacher. I’m a heretic Chassidic Sikh. I don’t know if I feel guilt, but the emotion that is hardest to organize around is a feeling of ethical and moral sanctity, and the difficulty in assessing whether or not one is adhering to one’s own moral code. I feel a responsibility to do emotional labor for certain people, certain communities, in certain circumstances. I have had to create my own code over time of when I will and will not labor, and for whom, and when and why. It’s very complicated. My mother may be right. I may not be cursed with guilt, just with ideosyncratic morals. (I always misspell ideosyncratic out of loyalty to my brother because that’s how he lost the National Spelling Bee in the 1980s. I’ve always found policing spelling to be very objectionable, and this is my conscientious objection).

MICKENBERG: What’s the difference between feeling someone’s emotional labor and someone’s emotion?

WIKSWO: Communion, equity, empathy, humility, gratitude, and awareness of self-ish-ness mean that you are feeling someone’s emotional labor. Feeling someone’s emotion means that you are closely searching through your database of experienced or imagined emotions to find one that best approximates that of what you presume someone else is experiencing or imagining.

Sharing someone’s emotion is perhaps the most powerful shamatic or mystical experience there is. And that is a blending of selves, rather than a system of currency or exchange. It’s divine union.

MICKENBERG: It’s easy to get angry and say we’ll stop caring. To say we want to just throw in the towel. But then it’s in our nature to wash that towel and fold it and to rub each other’s shining wet hair, and to wrap each other up and build fires for each other and watch each other’s cheeks get warm in the light.

We need these pleasures of making each other happy and safe and loved. We all need to love and be loved. We need to acknowledge that desire exists in all of us.

That’s the outcome that matters most – and should in any movement – to liberate our loving natures.

WIKSWO: Shedding is something that has emerged as a theme in your work and also in your life, which is its own work. I have an enormous collection of snake skins, shedded, and a tattoo of a shedded snake skin on my right hand. What is the underlying impetus for shedding? 

MICKENBERG: Shedding is an act of necessary growth.

Survival. That’s the impetus for it.

WIKSWO: Is it worthwhile to retain that which has been shed, or to leave it behind?

MICKENBERG: Snakes leave their skins behind. Creatures with exoskeletons leave them behind when their protection doesn’t serve them anymore.

In a way, it’s arrogant to think of what we’ve shed as being our cast-off, our property, our responsibility, or ours in any way.

It’s not fully letting it go. It’s drawing from it without giving it nourishment in return.

Shedding is where you and something diverge. It is not part of you any more than anything else in the universe is. It has freedom from you now.

I love sheds. I like the stuff that’s in sheds. Marigold seeds and nails in coffee cans. I like the light that comes through the cracks and the shelter from the wind and the industriousness you feel in a shed, alone, fixing things, growing things, building things.

I admire the jazz practice of woodshedding: secluding yourself and focusing and emerging more masterful as a result.

WIKSWO: We are both passionate about tumbleweeds, which are the desert shedding itself. The tumbleweeds are typically totally dry by the early spring, and break off at the roots leaving the roots to regrow another tumbleweed for the coming season. I usually sleep under tumbleweeds…well, I always sleep under tumbleweeds. Here in New Mexico, they are a hazard on the road because despite their apparent fragility, they can actually pierce key elements of a driveshaft, which is why my 1982 automobile’s wheel broke off while I was driving last month. To me, many things that are shed appear to be quite fragile…snakeskins, tumbleweeds, skin cells, hair, cicada shells…and yet there is a ferocity that belies their visual manifestation.

MICKENBERG: My appreciation for tumbleweeds unearthed when I made TUMBLEWEED IN A BOX DOT COM, a buddy-road-existential movie in which poets S.A. Griffin and Scott Wannberg create a business catching and exporting the inspiring, resilient, untethered tumbleweeds that are the bouncing balls to follow in the song that is the California desert.

I love their prickly ferocity. Their let-loose-ness when the new pushes through and needs their nutrients. A move from being rooted to being carried on the winds. A life, or a death, of freedom and adventure. A total letting go.

WIKSWO: We gravitate towards their qualities in the same way. You are the only other person besides myself who keeps tumbleweeds as beloved houseguests, roommates, and companions. Although my tumbleweeds typically hang over my bed, her tumbleweed received, a believe, a white marble column from the New Jersey Turnpike, although it’s probably actually an etruscan temple fragment. Either way, you are funnier than I am, but we have the same hair, and I’ve slept in your bed when you weren’t at home and had the best dreams of my life. To me, your dwelling place, wherever it is, has represented a kind of hard-won, ethically-complex but heroic freedom. I haven’t encountered anyone who approaches your unique nuance in the practice and thought around freedom of various kinds.

MICKENBERG: Tumbleweeds represent a freedom from need. A freedom from growth as a primary goal.

Complete freedom to tumble and to surrender to the winds and to be self-contained. Freedom from vulnerability and dependency and roots and hunger.

An existence of total acceptance and liberation from the pull of life.

Freedom to be prickly, to be left alone and be windblown.

WIKSWO: In an earlier murmuration, you invoked THE IDEA OF THE VALUE OF IDEAS AS AN IDEA. Does this have implications for THE IDEA OF DEVALUING IDEAS AS AN IDEA?

Devaluing ideas feels like the way of the world.

Pooping on things is a surefire way to gain respect. Meanwhile, negativity just kills everything in its path.

People are always pooping on ideas, and taking their power away, or calling them good or bad. As though saying no is more powerful than an idea. And the sad thing is, it usually winds up being the case. Naysayers somehow have more sway than yaysayers. Yaysayers are so unsung.

I hate it when people say, “That’s actually a good idea.”

As though their filter is more powerful or important than your idea.

It’s amazing that, when you share an idea, other people seem to automatically assume the role of gatekeeper. It’s depressing, insulting and we should all see gatekeeping as the act of insecurity and inability to create that it is.

Gatekeepers need to get off the fence.

Judging is not an appropriate way to respond to the generosity and vulnerability of sharing.

Judging ideas is worthless next to appreciating them and cultivating them.

The cultivation of ideas is so unsung and it is such a valuable feeling for all involved.

Expressing enthusiasm for an idea, helping it exist, feeding it with positivity, deepening its intention, helping the person who has it, just as you are doing in this interview, and with this magazine, is a deeply creative act.

Distributors, producers, collectors, fans, academics, fabricators, educators, fans and makers, encouragers of all kinds are the people who make this world sing.

Building and acknowledging an idea’s power and potential… connecting it and grounding it and giving it every amount of space … that’s the ticket.

I think people wind up holding their greatest ideas close their vests because they know how vulnerable ideas are to negativity and judgment and because they’re worried about someone stealing their ideas.

That becomes a block to great conversations.

WIKSWO: And what are some strategies for addressing this?

MICKENBERG: One idea I have to nip that issue in the bud is the Conversational Copyright ©©.

To protect your ideas and your hilarious remarks you just say, “Conversational Copyright.” From then on, if people share your quip, they need to credit you: ©© Quintan Wikswo.

WIKSWO: You always have more than one tactic. Please share the various flanking strategies.

MICKENBERG: Another idea is the Idea Seed Bank where you can register your idea and people can go to the idea bank and make any of those ideas happen.

The registrant would get credit and compensation, the Idea Seed Bank would get a cut and would reinvest that money in outreach to help encourage people to share their ideas, and the ideas would happen and everyone would benefit.

Of course the system of credit needs to change. We need to all feel both less territorial and more invested in all good ideas.

So many people have so many great ideas that never happen because they just don’t know how to realize them, or they don’t have the right resources, or they just like having ideas but they’re not so hot on the follow through.

I think it’d be a much happier world if people could get their ideas out there, and help each other realize them, without fear or cynicism or skepticism or greed, with more fun and space for absurdity and idealism and consideration for the highest shared goals.

WIKSWO: What ideas do you think are most undervalued in the societies and cultures we currently navigate?

The most undervalued ideas are the idealistic ideas. They’re the most important ideas to have and I think most people stop even trying to think about them.

WIKSWO: Using a wormhole, what devalued ideas of the so-called “distant past” would you carry back to the present day – or the future – and present as valuable? Perhaps even invaluable?

This is hard to answer because the world changes according to previously valued ideas.

I think the important thing is to have new ideas, born of necessity for what exists now.

Then it’s a pleasure to accrue strength by finding the antecedents for those ideas; because all great ideas have a deep well of support and desire. To be curious about, and to learn from our intellectual and emotional peers from all cultures and all periods of time is part of the realization of an idea. Then the momentum of making that idea into reality with the full support of the wave of desire that humankind has had by longing for it for so long… that’s what makes an idea so powerful: because it is so deeply and truly necessary and desired.

That said, some devalued ideas that I think need to be valued and carried into the future are free libraries, individualism, aestheticism, nomadism, witchcraft, woodshedding and hermitages.

MICKENBERG: What is a great idea? What’s great about it? What is greatness?

WIKSWO: Total disruption in the force. Total revelation that the fabric of the known has been folded, spindled, and twisted into something foreign. Alien. Other.

WIKSWO: On that auspicious note, murmurate a bit about Hermette Magazine.

MICKENBERG: Hermette is an aspirational lifestyle magazine for lady hermits.

It launches a whole genre: anti-social media.

Hermette Magazine can help us connect to the fantasy of an ideal life where we leave the material world behind.

Being a lady hermit is hard to pull off. It’s hard to shed the emotional labor, which is why we need a magazine to amp the glamour of nada.

Hermette provides a way to disconnect from the clamor of the social networks, from the pull of feeling needed. It’s a way to connect to your own isolation.

It “lion-ness-izes” star loners, shy people, astronomers, philosophers, nature lovers, grouches, asexuals, foragers, individualists, outcasts, woodshedders, and barren babes.

It has recipes like foraged mussels and watercress salad for one.

It launches a sense of style that ranges from nudity to deep experimentation to not caring that your pants are on backwards.

It reads separation anxiety as separation envy and lets us loose.

It helps women cultivate clarity, perspective, detachment and deep thought.

It explores the revelations, the big ideas, and the deep thinking that can happen only when you dip a naked toe into the ocean of possibility.

It celebrates the twelve volume reading situations. The listening to of one thing for weeks on end. The unrelated. The absurd. The self-directed. The internal debates.

It’s isolation porn. Photos of hermitages and huts and hideouts. The foraged dinners by candlelight. The windblown hairstyles avec weeds.

There are rants. There are essays. There are illustrations. There is fiction.

It comes out only when it feels like it.

It has a website but it’s private; you must subscribe to it or find the magazine somewhere because it will be “distributed,” a.k.a. left in funny places in the hopes that you find it so it doesn’t have to find you.

The point is to create a new feminine ideal: aloneness with your thoughts.

Will actual lady hermits subscribe? Do real musicians read Musician magazine?

It’s kind of a hilarious notion- the idea that any lady hermit would care about having community or support for what she does.

Because the beauty of being a Hermette is never worrying about fitting in or being accepted.

That’s what makes it so “aspirational.”

Hermette Magazine also does away with the editorial we. Rather than saying “our” Hermette coins a more fierce and feline-like determiner: “mrour.”

Mrour motto at Hermette Magazine is: There’s a hermit inside all of us waiting to stay in.

WIKSWO: Isolation is a divine state, and it lingers over the abyss in a way that can be either terrifying or comforting, or both at the same time. Isolation has long been considered critical for mystics and those who want communion with the otherwise unimaginable aspects of the cosmos – this includes physicists as well as what we might call spiritual figures. I’ve always been fascinated by the Anchorites – women who chose to be walled up in towers connected to churches, with a small portal for food and waste, and a high hole through which to hear whatever happens in the nave. I think I would have likely been either an assassin or an anchorite, and perhaps both. Choosing ones own visibility as a woman is very challenging.

MICKENBERG: Is isolation all it’s cracked up to be?

WIKSWO: Social obligations for women and for the neurodivergent and for anyone who is forced into a social persona are especially difficult to detoxify from as an isolationist. Ripping off the persona hurts like a tomahawk but when there’s nobody around to police it, does it really need to be there anymore? Is it a vestigial organ that needs to go? I’d say yes, unless perhaps you are a sociopath in which case, please, seek help.

For people whose persona involves a forced obedience, a forced system of codes for behavior and action, then we need to be able to remove it.

We need practice removing it, and we need to learn the strategies and tactics for removing our personas, lest we begin to believe that they are us.

Maybe we have to put the mask back on sometimes.

But a mask is made to be taken off. And too many people never feel the wild wind on our bare faces.

There is a miasma of expectation both internal and external, conditioned over epochs, for many of us to be welcoming, nurturing, and entertaining and above all, agents of comfort and service. As a hostess, a mother, a worker, an obedient brown person, a likeable queer, an attractive cripple – this goes back to the Emotional Labor Movement, but I would call it the Manhattan Cocktail Party Complex. Like the capitalist industrialist complex. Without many of us shoving that mask persona on our souls, making efforts to work on our congenial physical appearances and social personas to lubricate the genitalia of the fucking human community, it would all collapse.

Let it collapse. Let it all go down. In a big, sticky, splooshy orgasmic slimy mess of masklessness.

Isolation, forced or chosen, removes these mask addictions and policings from the realm of possibility.

There have been many times in my life where I have imposed a total isolation period on myself. Some was intentional, and some was not. Recently, I embarked on a chosen five month period of physical and geographical isolation, which I am currently four months into, and have found it to be searingly painful but highly rewarding as I have detoxified and gone through withdrawal symptoms from exposure to other humans. Almost like radiation burns. They will leave permanent damage, but there is a way to heal them. And that is being alone in one way or another. Or abstaining from certain kinds of gregariousness.

But yes. It is more than it is cracked up to be. I don’t think it’s possible to have a complete human experience without regular periods of intense isolation. There is simply no other way to reach that altered state.

MICKENBERG: Have you had less-than-ideal Hermette experiences?

WIKSWO: I love less than ideal experiences after they are over. My best experiences are typically less than ideal. So I don’t know how to answer that question other than as a contrarian. My Hermette experiences that at the time were viewed as less than ideal were when I was in isolation while I was kidnapped…while I was institutionalized in a solitary environment for post traumatic stress disorder…while I was alone as a young person and unable to fit into a society that was unable to process my experiences as a young female survivor of violence.

But those periods of complete isolation – social exile, existential exile, have become the spine of my presence on the planet. I think it’s what has helped me see ghosts, to see what is unseen. Because I know what it’s like to be unseen, and I can taste the flavor and smell it when it is near. And usually the unseen is what matters most to me. Going through periods of being invisible, unseen, hidden, kidnapped, disappeared, vanished? It’s a luxury to go through life thinking that others truly care about looking for us. Now I know that it’s a luxury, and I don’t take it for granted, nor do I depend on it or expect it or need it for my ego, my professional fulfillment, and various other things.

That would be pathologized or problematized as some flaw in me, but I disagree. I feel a deep communion with the disappeared, and the kind of intimacy possible when invisible is essential to understanding other kinds of intimacy.

For example, I’m just barely young enough to remember the life-or-death consequences of not being closeted. How queerness forced a kind of invisibility, a kind of total disappearance, such that situations in which one became visible to a lover, or another queer person, were moments of abject joy.

Being exiled is also necessary. Being a heretic. Being actively cast out of a community, or the community. I was for a time cast out formally of my family due to revealing rampant multigenerational physical and sexual exploitation and abuse, and for a time I was cast out formally from a white queer community called Wingspan in a smallminded rural town on the border called Tucson. For a time I was outcast in two different geographical communities for not adhering to the racial codes prescribed for me – Nashville, and Bavaria. I could go on. But I won’t.

In all these instances, I had objected to the accepted rules and mores that one had to ascribe to in order to belong, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes just because it never occurred to me that compliance was mandatory.

And then, I was summoned – by the director and staff of the LGBTQIA+ Center, by the Mayor of the town of Schwandorf, by scores of family members in Virginia – and told, here are ultimatums for behaviors and acceptable actions that you must abide by to be in our midst.

These mandates were absolutely untenable and unethical. I honestly would rather have died than to have adhered to them.

Thus, I became a heretic. It was lonely. I was hated. But that’s okay. It’s not like that at the moment, and if and when it happens again I know how to find my center.

So perhaps those would be seen as less than ideal Hermette situations, but I am patriotic about them. They are in my blood now and I would never give up what I saw.

MICKENBERG: Are you getting close to the isolation you want to attract?

WIKSWO: I am getting close to finding a community in which isolation is not considered a pathology, in which the pleasures of isolation are cherished. Saying “a community of isolation” is hilarious, because they are antithetical. But if I know rationally that there are other isolationists, then I realise that isolation is also a state of mind. I can be isolated in Times Square, and I enjoy that. Isolation is an emotion, a state of being, no different than feeling joy or communion or hate or violence.

It’s important that isolation not be frightening. So in that sense, I am able to attract courage, and so, yes.

MICKENBERG: I love the concept of a tattoo of the shed snakeskin. So shedding is something you really hold onto.

WIKSWO: It’s another antithetical contradiction. It’s also a tattoo that I got to match the tint of my own skin color, so unless I am particularly sun-exposed or sun-exiled, it’s nearly invisible. Why get an invisible tattoo of something that has been left behind? The only people who notice my snakeskin tattoo at this point are people who are rare to find indeed. Although when it was fresh and looked like serious self-mutilation, I liked to frighten social entrepreneurs in Dumbo lofts by pretending to be the elevator girl. It was pretty fun. It was a welcome respite from working on art about genocide.

Anyway. Moving on.

For a long time, perhaps by coincidence, girlfriends would give me shed snakeskins and shortly afterwards, we would break up. I presume there was not a cabal of lovers who all drew from the same jar of skins and handed them to me as a totem of what was to come. But I think there was a sense that one of us, usually me, had outgrown the skin we were in. And that sensation is not something that can be left behind.

Outgrowing something means you don’t fit back into it, but at one point you did, so it’s inside you. That knowledge that growth is possible, and the kind of growth that forces you to no longer fit into what you once did.

I see no reason to discard the scars or evidence of that. Likewise, there’s no real reason to keep it. I have a locket filled with the discarded baby teeth of my now-deceased cats. I have a jar filled with the discarded claws of my now-deceased cats. I have a small box filled with the discarded whiskers of my wolf.

I think of them as victory talismans. When my wolf goes out on the hunt and she snarls and explores and adventures, and she comes back and loses a whisker because she’s stuck her head into something that snapped it off, I know she learned something new. I am inspired by that.

When I look down at my hand and see the snakeskin, I know that it is my destiny and my personality to outgrow everything. So I am never surprised. I don’t mistake growth for leprosy. Evolution is not a disease.

MICKENBERG: Do you think forgetting things is unwanted shedding? And that we are surrounded by a kind of psychic dog hair the older we get?

WIKSWO: I’ve talked a bit here and elsewhere about my brain abnormalities, or my neurodivergence or neuroqueerness. I have long noticed a tendency for three things:

One, the erasure of short term memory, typically irretrievable, and definitely attributable to fried neurons…or during a neurological incident, I can lose memory of English and only have access to French and German and Yiddish and a bit of Sumerian. So the brain simply created a different road to a different destination. Very entertaining. I’m okay with that. I enjoy it most of the time, through the fear and disorientation. I like that my brain is in many ways autonomous to my consciousness, although that’s perilous terrain. A conversation for another day.

Two, the erasure of long term memories, typically irretrievable, and attributable to either trauma or disgust – in these cases, witnesses remember things for me and I am surprised to hear them, don’t identify with them at all, and have little interest in their perspectives on what I may have experienced. Occassionally I have to go back and triangulate between multiple witnesses and if the stories match up, then I’ll accept it as part of my life. But reality is very bendable anyway, so why sweat the small stuff. If i’ve forgotten, then it will come back if and when it decides to. Usually with terrible timing, at the most importune circumstances, when it will cause the most disruption. But disruption to the status quo is a good thing, as is discomforting the conservative nature of the conscious brain which is usually a coward and hates to feel afraid or unsafe. Fuck that.

But the third category I find most marvelous – that’s when the brain itself decides to get rid of shit that doesn’t matter, low hanging fruit, stuff that’s taking up storage space and has to go. And so the brain just judiciously discards them and completely bypasses the conscious mind. And I’m okay with that. I like that in terms of evolution, that which is no longer needed is naturally discarded. It’s certainly the most painless way to do it.

MICKENBERG:Do you believe that there should be a term for a woman who is being used to bring token femininity to a project? Like a beard, but maybe a falsie?

WIKSWO: Yes I do. Beard and falsie are satisfying words for this phenomenon. I suggest: MY CUNT IS NOT YOUR YACHT. That’s more a phrase than a term.

MICKENBERG: Do you find yourself getting really angry and then really happy and not knowing which to trust because both feel so right? 

WIKSWO: This is where we must bow our heads or off our caps to the Berzerkers, or the Norse Shapestrongs. I do find myself, as a shapestronger, becoming angry and happy simultaneously and while it is frightening to others sometimes, and I think it’s a state of being that is best achieved with very sturdy and well-considered boundaries, it is like the best fuck in the world when you get it right, which is rare if ever. Pansexual vedic ejaculate all over the place. Shapestronger. Stronger than anything that needs a shape. Limitless. Boundless. Transcending all extremes and meeting in the middle in pure strength of soul.