keep asking questions now

sadly there is no later.

The Keep Writing project is winding down but you can still subscribe for the last year and receive a postcard every month until July 2027.

If you want to skip the sad story of random violence, you can look at the entire catalog of Keep Writing postcards here.

In my last post, I mentioned that at least two postcards were about dead friends. This is one of them. And it is a bummer.

if you recognize this half smile, feel free to skip this essay.

In 2009, I was an art student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which felt about a million miles away from New Orleans, where I had been living for the previous six years. At least once a month, I took the $5¹, two hour bus trip back, to visit friends, ride my bike, and run into people I loved. It was a time when it was possible to sitout front of St. Coffee, in its first location, and have neighbors and pals wander by, without having to make plans. There were a number of spots, in the Marigny, on St. Claude, even in the Quarter, where your friends would pass by, and stop to catch up.

This is how I ran into Flee.

It was a Friday or Saturday night, late enough to be dark but not cold, the doors of Envie Cafe open to Decatur Street. Alec and I were having dinner when we passed Flee, sitting alone at one of the sidewalk tables. Flee worked at the 24 hour coffee shop where all the gothy-punks worked. We actually met years before, in Seattle. He was loosely associated with a group that had migrated from Spokane, starting a punk house teeming with black-haired teens. I was only five or so years older than most of them, but felt like an elder, working at the co-op with one kid’s mom. Spokeanarchy house was the place your could drop off the dregs of your dumpster diving finds, and the soggy cardboard boxes of food would be appreciated. A few of them moved to New Orleans, showing up at the community bike shop where I organized classes and repair nights. Flee volunteered, and we were reacquainted. Seeing him that night in the Quarter, we caught up. I shared stories of a university art school and he shared about his travels.

Flee told me a story about watching two people getting into a fist fight, that became Keep Writing number seven. He was stunned by the event, a story of violence that wasn’t special or spectacular, a mundane argument turned emergency that dotted our days in the city.

We parted ways for the night. I went back to Baton Rouge.

Keep Writing no. 5, inspired by Flee’s story.

About nine months later, I spotted him on a sunny afternoon in December, maybe Christmas eve or the day before. I was lounging in a chair while a friend cleared an empty lot, trimming unruly vegetation². Flee biked by, pausing at the intersection, and then passing on, heading to his house. Wrapped in the lazy light, I didnt call out to him, or sit up. I didn’t even text to say hi. I figured I would see him later. I let chance rule part of each visit, and at the moment I was deep in conversation with someone else. This is also a part of New Orleans, this surety that you will see your friend again at the next intersection, at the coffeeshop tomorrow, at the next party. This level of comfortable love was in counterbalance to the random violence.

A few days later, I was in a snow flurry in Pensacola, Florida trying to find a place to eat when Ditto³ texted me with details for a second line for Flee⁴. The snow was unusual, and forcing me to drive a more circuitous route to my mom’s in South Carolina. I felt like I was in a snow globe tipped over, jumbled and wrong. I had seen Flee, two days before that text arrived. I had no idea what had happened.

New Orleans is a magical and violent place. Both truths exist. Part of why I had moved to Baton Rouge was because I could no longer stomach the violence. I left during an especially rough spell and friends did not relay details. Flee’s death was part of a string of attacks, by a schizophrenic kid. I didn’t know this until later. That moment, looking at my grey screen text, I called Ditto, asking him to explain.

I missed the second line. I spent the next few days at my mom’s drinking and crying. A few days later, a warehouse caught on fire and a few kids died. The newspaper photo included another acquaintance from the coffee shop, alive, mourning his friends. It was too much.

When I returned to Baton Rouge for school, I was struggling. As much as I loved being having access to print and paper making equipment, being a thirty year old undergrad was isolating. I missed my friends. I missed New Orleans. I wasn’t sure I had made the right choice.

I asked for help.

Using a soft blanket I kept when a former roommate moved to Puerto Rico, I made a warm orange paper. Soft and I turned my former roommates blanket into a soft orange paper, printed the word TRY with wood type in silver ink.

At the time, Keep Writing was a postcard project, a single postcard, with a story or little art print. But I had an idea.

I attached the orange print to a turquoise paper with a question:

What keeps you going?

What do you do when you feel down?

Keep Writing no. 26, the first question card.

The following month, I was still carrying Flee’s death, and decided to write to him. This time, the second postcard, the folded part of the card asked you to write a letter to someone you could no longer talk with.

All my decisions in this project have been impulsive: what if I try this? And if it works, I keep doing it, adjusting slowly. There is never a plan.

In that one card to Flee, I changed the structure of my project to the form I still offer as a template today. There have been some variations, some experiments. But mostly these folded cards.

After 210 cards, I sometimes feel like I am asking the same questions over and over. I run out of inspiring words, am sometimes I too raw, too down, or alternately, too optimistic for the current political climate. I want to say more, and sometimes need to say less.

Keep Writing no.30, a letter to Flee

I called this project Keep Writing because I meant: Keep Writing to your friends. Keep sending mail. telling people you love them. At the time I wrote a zine, Keep Loving Keep Fighting ⁵ and in some ways I thought it was funny to call it Keep Writing. When writers assume this project is series of writing prompts I don’t correct them, but silently I explain they are writing prompts if you want to think about how to stay connected, how to be human, how to take care of each other, how to hold on to the people we love.

I never think of the prompts as strictly writing prompts because I wanted people to answer as they could, using collage or drawings or words. I strive for prompts that are broad enough for creative interpretation but narrow enough to inspire. I am less interested in generating essays and novels and more interested in the places where our stories overlap and what we choose to share with others.

Maybe Keep Writing will re-emerge as a project of actual writing prompts, maybe I will write more letters when it is over. Maybe I will start a new project, but I bet it will remain a way to consider connections: maintaining established relationships, making new ones, and mourning the connections lost .

Further consideration:

This song about that time.

1. okay, I know this goes against everything you think about Lousiana, and believe me, it surprised us too, but for years after Katrina, you could take a bus back to New Orleans for $5. Sometimes it was only $4. They ran every 90 minutes or so. I knew people who commuted that way. It wasn’t safe drinking water or stable electricity, or a living wage, but displaces folks in Baton Rouge could at least get to New Orleans without a car. If you’re keeping track, this was before Bobby Jindal.

2. It’s been hard to explain what I was doing at this spot. The former janitor of the building that housed the bike shop, was clearing an overgrown lot. We always got along—he shared his letterpress equipment when I was starting out, and I told him when he was being a creep. I have no idea what we were talking about that drowsy afternoon.

3. have you seen Ditto lately? I used to run into him near the West Oakland BART but its been years. Tell him hello from me.

4. A second line is a celebration of life in New Orleans, organized when family or neighbors or friends die.

5. yes obviously inspired by Dahlias print