This year, I’m part of an author collective called The Book Bazaar. We’ve been planning for months, and finally we are crowdfunding our books! Through November 19 (just a few days away!), you can pledge toward a book project that interests you.

I’m interviewing some of my fellow authors so you can get to know their projects. Maybe this one — Fistfuls of Poetry — is right for you!

Today I’m talking to Machelle (SpookyxPickle) (they/them), who describes themself as:

an author, an artist, aaaaand a weirdo all rolled into one delightful human bean. At least, they try to pass for human. Usually, they’re two possums and three ferrets running amuck in a trench coat. And one of them is wearing clown shoes. And it isn’t the guy on the ground.
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In their spare time, Machelle enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons with their friends, napping with their cats, and heeding the screams of the void. Sometimes, they even dabble in arts & crafts so that their brain makes the good chemicals.

You can find Machelle’s work under the pen names of Machelle Berglund and S.P. Green. They’re known as SpookyxPickle on most social media apps.

Check out their website or follow them on some socials (most active on bluesky) for pictures of their cats, shouting about indie authors, and weird stuff.

Thanks to Machelle for this interview! — Tucker

What does poetry mean to you? What’s its role in your life?

Poetry is everything to me. I find it in everything. It’s in music, and not just stuff with lyrics, but the instrumental stuff. I find it in my feelings, in the beauty of the world, and the ugliness of it.

It has a pretty big role in my life. I’ve written poetry for a very long time. I remember starting writing in 3rd grade. My teacher really encouraged me to continue writing. She even got me a special notebook. I still have it and it’s full of really bad poetry. I didn’t fill it until 7th grade (I was in a huge emo phase that’s not so much a phase).

So, it’s maybe a little bit important to me, ha ha!

The three poetry books in this project are: Revenants, If I Could Color You, and A Feast For the Void. What does it feel like to work on three books at the same time?

I, uh, have a bad tendency to work on more than one thing at once. It feels a little normal for me. I have to work on everything or nothing. But, there is a bit of an issue with task paralysis for me, but I think that’s more when I’m trying to decide whether I want to work on stuff or relax.

It does help a lot when I have a mood shift since each book has a different mood to it. I can switch to a different collection and use my mood to craft something for it.

What are you learning through writing these books?

I’m really learning to fight my imposter syndrome. It’s got hands, but so do I. Plus, I’ve been working on my poetry skills for years (decades at this point) and will continue to until I die. And, well, with how much GenAI gets up in people’s business, or people decide to use it for “art” — well, my trust in my ability is boosted a lot.

I’m also learning the process of improving my editing and proofreading. I unfortunately end up with typos all over, all the time. It’s really about discipline and taking the time to do it more than once. As an impatient person, it feels like a punishment to go over things more than once. It can be hard to focus, and my mind often fills in the blank. But, I’m working on that.

And, of course, I’m always learning as I work on new projects on all sorts of things. Just, like, all the time.

Of these three books, do you have a favorite, or does it change day to day?

I could no sooner choose a favorite child! (It’s Colors.) They’re all wonderful and have their highlights and specific strengths. It does change from day to day, depending on how well my ideas and poetry lines are going. If it’s going well, if words are flowing, then that one is my favorite.

What’s a poem you admire? Famous or not.

There’s a lot of poems I admire, but I can’t think of them clearly at this moment. I will shout out a poet I really enjoy, who is also a stand-up comedian. Ren Dawe is a fantastic poet. I have his chapbook, Old Gold Poems. I’ve been wanting to read it again. It’s complex and I don’t understand it — but in a good way. It’s beautiful.

I think I need to reread it.

Ren, a Trans man, organized and starred in the “I’m Here to Pee” tour. The basis of the comedy tour was to tour in each state, and have local talent open for his act. I saw him when he came to Sioux Falls. I was introduced to the wonderful Randy Sapphic, Kerner, and more. I still look on the experience fondly.

How did you learn about the Book Bazaar?

I learned about the Book Bazaar by seeing Aimee Cozza post about it on bluesky. Then, I applied, not thinking I’d be accepted. Yet, here I am! During the first Book Bazaar, I ran a campaign for a book called Fairy Seasons. And now I’m here for another!

I admire the energy you’re bringing on board. What’s most exciting for you about participating in the Book Bazaar?

Oh, goodness! So many things! I love watching people’s projects reach funding. I love seeing the cool things people do with their art. There’s also the comradery. I’ve had so much fun chatting and sharing memes with people in TBB. I’ve met so many cool people through TBB and made some cool friends.

I also continue to learn so much from everyone. I’m always in awe of what people bring to the space.

I honestly think the most exciting things are the group things we do. I loved playing Magic the Gathering with everyone. Watching the trailers the other night was so fun! And having a poetry night is going to be tops.

Who should read Revenants?

People who are also frustrated and angry with the state of the world and perhaps the US in particular. This book is about rage, about how societal norms seek to shape us into tools. This is a criticism of the rich, as well.

Also, I guess fans of zombie stuff and They Live.

I wanna say that maybe more right-leaning people shouldn’t read this, but hey! More power to ya.

Who should read If I Could Color You?

Queer folks and allies! Those who want to read about joy, about being LGBTQIA+, about how our beings exist within an ever-moving spectrum.

I have poems about my own journey. I also have some about cheering people on for being who they are. I want to make this a happier collection than all my others. I do have a good amount of poems to do so, but I want to write more, need more.

We deserve joy and whimsy in a world that seems determined to squash it out of us.

Who should read A Feast For the Void?

Oof. Okay. Well, it’s a broad but narrow list. Basically, this is a good book for someone if they want to read about the darkest parts of my life, particularly concerning my childhood. I’m a survivor of CSA. It’s long messed with me. Still does.

My parents also fought a lot, and the rest of my blood relatives liked to sweep uncomfortable things under the rug and ignore them.

I also, unfortunately, have long lived with suicidal ideation. It started before I could even really remember. I have thankfully found ways to cope with those things, but it is still something that hangs around to this day.

This particular book isn’t going to be an easy read. I’m not giving all the dark, horrid details. I’m not The Serial Killer Podcast. But I’m also not holding back.

At its base, Feast is about the messy process of healing my wounds into scars. I’m writing it because I’m full enough of myself to think it’ll be interesting, but also, so others know they aren’t alone. And, also, it’s going to feel really good to get so much of this out.

What’s next for you?

After this project, I’m going to take a break. I want to catch up on video games, mess around with some painting and drawing stuff, and do some writing without deadlines (though all the deadlines I have are ones I’ve set for my projects).

I really want to work on my skills for my art over all. I also need to step away from things to work on my health. I have a lot of chronic pain. And that means managing symptoms. Managing symptoms takes a lot of time and work to do just so I can function.

I do have a specific bigger project, Hearth, that I want to work on. I’ve technically written the first half once. It was going to be a story for Fairy Seasons. Buuuut, well, it just didn’t work. It became a part of one of the worlds I’ve been crafting, and there’s so much more. So look forward to hearing me talk about that!

That doesn’t mean I’m stepping away from Book Bazaar things. Even if I don’t have a project in a collection, I plan to shout about it, share, and make highlight articles. I might even be more timely with them!

Learn more about this project directly from Machelle, who’s here on Medium as SpookyxPickle:

What is Fistfuls of Poetry

This year, I’m part of an author collective called The Book Bazaar. We’ve been planning for months, and finally we are crowdfunding our books! Through November 19, you can pledge toward a book project that interests you.

I’m interviewing some of my fellow authors so you can get to know their projects. Maybe this one — Nekyomanteia — is right for you!

Today I’m talking to Seven Dane Asmund, who describes themself:

I am an indie publisher, author, poet, game designer, and more. Through Publishing Goblin, I have created over 10 divination tools from tarot to oracle dice, roleplaying games, novels, poetry collections, enamel pins, art prints, and radio drama podcasts, including the award-winning, record-breaking Alleyman’s Tarot. I am always creating new works, and I’m always excited to try out a new medium of creation. You can find my products, socials, store, and more over at PublishingGoblin.com.

Thanks to Seven for this interview! — Tucker

Who or what is a corpse oracle, and what should I do if I ever meet one?

Nekyomanteia is Greek, and translates to “Corpse Oracle”. As a person who has always been interested in magic and the occult, the idea of divination through entrails has always fascinated me. I would imagine if you met one, you would be seeking answers. And so I would say: Ask your questions. I would have to think that if anything in this world is sacred, it is our flesh. So what better could give us answers? I believe proper oracles of the dead in ancient Greece were instead reaching out to ghosts, more Necromancer than Corpse Oracle. But we all take our liberties.

Just so I know I’m pronouncing it correctly, what does Nekyomanteia rhyme with?

I would imagine I am not the best at pronouncing it correctly myself, being as it is Greek. But I say it neck-yo-man-taya. Perhaps every dead Greek person is rolling in their collective graves at that, but it is the best effort I have available.

What was it like for you getting a degree in poetry?

It was funny, of course. When you are getting your Master’s degree, and someone asks earnestly what you’re studying, and you reply: Poetry? People don’t know what to do. My aunt laughed. It was obviously not to get a job, though if I wanted to teach poetry at the college level, this would have been the way to go. It was so special. I was in a new city, I was experiencing new people who cared about poetry the way I did, and I explored work I never would have read otherwise. The faculty were amazing. And frankly, the degree is whatever. It’s not that important all things considered. But the knowledge I gained from that space? The comradery in an art form? I struggle to find anything like it again.

What did you learn by resurrecting this book?

I have found that, as a creator who makes a lot of things, it is often easy for me to make something and then move on to the new thing. Putting actual time and effort into realizing an old collection once more? It’s a special thing and invites me to consider my old creative works as being as special, as sacred, as the new ones. I made it 12 years ago now, so I’m a different artist than I was, but it’s still quite special. Returning to the process of gathering my notes and “stitching” poems out of them for an additional set of new poems at the back made it especially nostalgic. But I also got to see the difference in my sensibilities then versus now. When I wrote the collection, I was more willing to let small, 4–6 line poems stand on their own. Now, I feel that I would prefer to see the poem explore something more thoroughly throughout the page, and the average length difference between the poems in the original collection and the new appended poems is rather large.

Are you the illustrator too for all the art in Nekyomanteia?

The cover design and the image between the original collection and the new selection of poems in the book are both photo-bashed collages that I made. While I do generally like to hire artists to create covers for my books, where and when possible, I enjoy making a thing entirely on my own, start to finish. Writing, layout, editing, design. It’s a great deal of fun.

I’d describe the aesthetic as ‘haunted.’ How would you describe it?

I think that’s an apt descriptor. Both in visual design for the cover, and in the work. I have a tendency toward the morbid and horror as a genre, so it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the lines in the collection are ominous, haunting, or about death. The opening poem speaks to this, calling the work: Ghosts of good material. I think it’s earnestly such an honest descriptor of many of my works. I think I’m an artist haunted by the world, by my obsessions. Many of my books come out of some core obsession. Though perhaps that’s the case for many of us creatives!

How did you learn about the Book Bazaar?

Aimee Cozza started the Book Bazaar in 2025, and I was lucky enough to come along for that first ride. Aimee and I paired together on some enamel pin campaigns on Backerkit, so when she knew she was going to make this thing, we were already in discussion and collaboration. I have been very lucky to take part in something so expertly organized by someone with that type of focused personality, as are we all I think!

Who should get a copy of Nekyomanteia: The Corpse Oracle?

I suppose it’s too easy to say that people who like poetry should read it. So instead: People who enjoy art films. People who like the abstract. People who like to fill spaces around what is said, and what is not said. People who can see a finite moment in the world around them and think that the universe is there in that tiny vignette. These poems seem to capture strange scenes with their own internal logic.

Do you feel horror and queerness are related?

Quite the case. While this is not the case for everyone of course, I find that many queer people in my circles can find themselves in horror as a genre. To be treated as the other, as the outcast, as the monster is to connect to the monsters we see and read about in fiction, horror especially. Existing in that space of terror is also familiar for many of us, not just being the monster, but being the survivor or ‘final girl’ who makes it through the adversity that the world around them fails to defeat speaks volumes to queerness. The main characters of horror themselves are often outcast, forced to rely on what makes them unique, often their tenacity, to overcome the foe in a space where the more normative people cannot.

What queer art or lit has inspired you?

I have been so in love with the Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat show. It is unabashedly queer and shameless to tell its story honestly, even when it might chase off some viewers. I was a big reader of those books when I was younger, so seeing it come to life in a way that is dauntless is really quite inspiring. I’ve started to really get interested in the zine space as well, where many queer folks are making their art in the most DIY way possible. I think that being yourself in a way that is unapologetic, and making art in that way, is so meaningful. It’s not about being unfiltered, it’s not about skipping editing or making something without any attempt to shine it up. It’s about making it direct from the heart, and it being true to yourself in a personal way, while also being totally yours to make and distribute.

What’s next for you?

My new poetry collection is entitled Smutherheart, and I hope to complete it in 2027. But around that, I am also writing Blue Bird. Black Bird, a gay superhero story also funding on the Book Bazaar, its sequel, and the sequels to Tales From the Alley, my last-year’s Book Bazaar anthology of short stories. I have more tarot card campaigns coming up in the future, alongside new games and still more. So stay tuned over at PublishingGoblin.com, where I have a list of upcoming projects!

On November 4, the Book Bazaar on Twitch aired my 52-minute recorded video in which I talk about writing a complicated book. You can watch the video on demand, and here (below) is the transcript.

Transcript

I’m crowdfunding my poetry book, Attis & Aleph: Poems of the Daimonic, through the Book Bazaar.

Attis & Aleph is a true story about someone who lived in the 20th century. He had in mind a rather complicated book that he wanted to write. He worked really hard on it, and he just couldn’t do it. It was an existential problem for him, and he literally died of it. I’ve written Attis & Aleph to talk about the lessons I’ve learned while reflecting on this.

Attis & Aleph itself was a difficult book for me to write. It remains difficult. It’s a large phenomenon in my life. It’s a small book, but it’s complicated and difficult. I’ve learned some things about writing that kind of book, and I’ve distilled some of that wisdom to share with you. I hope there will be some useful takeaways for you, if you yourself are thinking about writing a complicated and difficult book.

Seventy lessons about writing a complicated, difficult book

1. In life, and in writing, the context and meaning are always changing. It’s not going to stay still. The story sometimes hovers around you. It’s less and more than who you are. On the one hand, it’s just a story, just some information. But the stories and information that exist in the world are bigger than us sometimes.
2. We have this problem of proportion: it’s only a story, but it’s the story inside of which we live.
3. Another issue we encounter is that, if the story is someone else’s, it might not be your story to tell. Find a version that’s yours to tell. It’s doable.
4. You’re the one who cares about the book, so when you write it, make it sound like you care. Don’t deliberately make it boring. Sometimes, in school, we’re taught to make things sound “objective.” We’re told that’s a good way to phrase a sentence: making it sound a bit sterile or detached. But actually, if it’s something you care about, you’ve got to make it sound like you care.
5. Time is cyclical, and a cycle can draw to a close. Sometimes when we have to write a book, we’re battling time. We’re on deadline. We feel we’ve taken too long to write the book. Maybe someone’s waiting, maybe not, but we take years and we’re still not done. Deadlines are sometimes unhelpful. Sometimes we’re operating on linear time, but maybe that’s not the correct way to understand the time that we find ourselves in. Maybe time is a cycle. When we feel some time pressure, maybe what we feel is that the cycle is closing. It’s not that we are running out of time; it’s that we’re starting over. We will have more time, but not in this cycle. A new cycle will start.
6. If you’re thinking about starting to write a difficult book, consider this your invitation. You may need an invitation. I’m here inviting you to write your book.
7. Not everyone is going to be on the journey with you. When we write, part of what we’re doing is saying: We’re going to let people who aren’t on our journey with us understand our journey. They don’t need to come on it with us; they just need to tune in for a little while and understand what we’re saying. So, when you describe past, present, future, you’re not acknowledging your journey because you’re talking just about one thing that happened in past, present, future. You’re not seeing the journey as a whole. That’s a pitfall we fall into. On the other end, when you describe your journey, you’re not acknowledging your past, present, future moments. You’re seeing the journey as a whole. Will you zoom in on a particular moment or describe the whole path you took?
8. We’re walking lines, borders, frontiers. One approach you can take is to say what it feels like to walk that line, to be on that pathway in the woods, to walk along the edge of the cliff or river. There’s a poetry in that. Understand that people who walk borders are often perceived according to the definition of monstrosity. When we think about what is a monster, it’s something that blurs borders or is on the edges of things. There’s a fear that comes along with being someone who is walking edges and thinking about crossing over. That’s fine. Monsters are in storytelling. They serve a big purpose in stories by showing the limits, and sometimes the limits can be crossed and then we become something else, something different from what we were.
9. Sit for a spell and sip the elixir that enables you to tell the story. I’m a coffee drinker, but there’s magic in having your drink of choice.
10. There is a force all around us. I’m not religious or spiritual, but I’m telling you everything is connected. The force of the connection is what compels you to write. The animating force of Attis & Aleph is that something outside of you, bigger than you, is compelling you to write. For the character in my book, it was something in a box in the basement. Creativity is hell.
11. The world will absorb us. We are mortal. Something will emerge after us. We are thinking about the things that we think about from the perspective of a mortal being who will be absorbed and will reemerge as something else later. That’s why the book is difficult to write. We’re seeing it from our perspective.
12. In 2026, the year I’m speaking from, there’s a magic lever in the computer. I did not invent this thing. Other people in tech companies have invented this thing to spit out words. You push a button and the words get spit out. Many years ago, if you had asked me if I want a magic button to write my book for me, I would have said: Sure, that sounds great! Books are really difficult to write. What we need is a magic button that takes away the difficulty. I no longer think that, because as soon as I was presented with a magic button, I said: Absolutely not, I don’t want that. You can’t pull a magic lever to have your book written for you. You just can’t. In this poetry book, Attis & Aleph, I’m making that argument indirectly. I’m talking about someone who was writing in the 1930s. He was writing by hand with pencil and paper. He probably would have told you that he wanted a magic lever to pull and write his book for him, but that’s not how it works. The various reasons it doesn’t work that way are something we experience. We experience it slowly through the process of writing. It’s something we learn from living.
13. What is the philosophy? What is the way of life? What does it mean that we’re looking for a philosophy or trying to practice a way of life? When you sing, each note matters, but it’s also about how the notes relate to each other. It’s about individual actions and perceptions and also about how they form a context.
14. Beyond that, what we are doing when we write a book is making a discourse. The discourse is really about something beyond what it claims. The discourse is often not what it’s directly talking about or what it pretends to talk about. When we’re talking about the trees, it looks like we’re forming some sentences about the trees, but actually my discourse about the trees is about something more than a tree outside my window. I’m talking about some larger ideas. I’m making words in service of some agenda, and I’m invoking ideas that I did not come up with. Maybe I’m invoking someone else’s ideas about trees.
15. Part of where the book has got to come from is in you. You’ve got to know who you are. If you don’t know who you are, you can’t complete your book. You’re going to get stuck. Focus on what you know, what you intuit. There’s information you just know. You don’t necessarily know where you know it from, but you know that you know it. That information’s coming through you and you’re just the conduit for it.
16. Sometimes we need an adventure. You hear the call to adventure and answer it. You can refuse the call, which is valid. One way or the other, you’re responding to something in the world that is calling you, and you’re making a choice. That goes into your book.
17. If you’re busy or distracted, you could lock yourself in your room until you finish the book. Then you could go back in your memory to visit the beautiful expansive place. You don’t have to be literally on an adventure on a path in the big wide world. Either way, whether you’re sitting at home or out on the road, you’ll find ideas that are in you because you’re the person living your life.
18. Sometimes the information you need is in shadow. The information you can’t see very clearly that’s half-hidden is helping you make sense of what’s in the direct light. Just because it’s a little fuzzy or hard to see doesn’t mean it’s not important. Sometimes the answer is in the darkness. We look in all the corners: illuminated, shadowy.
19. We make a promise to ourselves, a commitment to write this book. What you promise now affects what happens next. The promise is a constraint that you put upon yourself and on your life. You move within that constraint. It directs your path to a focused goal.
20. The world that we find ourselves in doesn’t need to be photocopied. There’s a lot of information out there. For those of us who are attracted to the idea of research, there’s a tendency to write it all down on index cards, do the bilbliography, make ten photocopies of it. The world, though, doesn’t ultimately need to be copied in a photocopy machine, and you are not a photocopy machine. That’s not why you were born onto this planet.
21. Other people aren’t things to be photocopied. They’re people you can know. If you don’t know a person but you’re writing about them, you might just be photocopying them. Maybe you should get to know them. If the difference between knowing someone and relating to them and imitating them as if they were a photocopy that you can take and fold in a binder — if that difference isn’t clear, it’s maybe something to think about. How would I treat people differently if I weren’t trying to turn them into information for a book? What if I knew the person?
22. If you get to be talking to people, sometimes you develop these friendships. With your friends, you’re deciding what’s true, false, important, ridiculous. But things are not more true just because your friends say they’re true. There’s something true about the friendship, yes. However, a statement about the world that isn’t factual doesn’t become factual just because you and your friends are patting each other on the back publicly as a display of loyalty. If you’re bullshitting, your bullshit doesn’t become true just because your friends want it to be true. Repeating things, by the way, does not make them true either. You can keep at it for hours. You can write book after book. If the fact is false and is a non-fact, the repetition won’t turn it into a true fact.
23. There is a force in this world —as I said, it’s the force of everything that’s connected. Think of it as gravity. In physics, there are forces that hold this universe together. It’s not something you can inherit. It’s not something that goes into your bank account. Rather, you are an inheritance for it. I am something getting passed along from past to future. I don’t know what the universe wants to do with me, but here I am, I was around last year, I’m around this year, hopefully I’m around next year. I’m just getting passed around for purposes that are far beyond me.
24. People want to hear about your work, by the way. I don’t know what their level of sincerity is when they ask. Some people are very sincere when they want to hear about your work; other people are just making conversation. When people ask, you may feel like an impostor because your book is difficult, complicated, unfinished.
25. One of your motivations as a writer might be to be accepted. To be seen for who you are. To be heard and believed because you are saying something that you believe is true and important. You want it to give you a place in the world among people. That’s a hard thing. It’s tricky. Just because you write a book doesn’t mean you’ll be seen and heard and believed and accepted. Keep at it. Sometimes we can do that for other people. We can see and hear and believe other writers. That’s what we’re doing here.
26. If you’re trying to connect with other writers, you can keep at it. Keep trying for ten years if you want. If the writer is dead, hold a seance, keep lighting that candle until the dead writer talks back to you. We’re trying to make connection here.
27. In the book, you express what you see and what you don’t see. That’s really helpful. If you’re stuck on your very complicated book, think about what you don’t see. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness. If you assume that you need to walk into a room that’s full of light and then write about everything you see under the light, you’ll be disoriented and confused when the lights go out. But if the lights are out, you can just pause and wait for your vision to adjust, then talk about what that process is like. Why is it that when we can’t see very clearly, we are alarmed or confused or feel as though everything’s complicated? What’s that feeling like? What are we learning from it? It’s just seeing in the darkness.
28. Sometimes we’ve got the question we’re aware of, and then a parent question that underlies it. Think about where the questions are arising from. One of my questions right now is: What’s the purpose of trying to photocopy stuff for the book? Am I memorializing something static in the past? That’s a question that expands to bigger questions. What is ‘the past’? What is ‘making a memorial’? What is ‘making a copy’? What is ‘doing a good job’? Big abstract questions that are in the extended family of questions.
29. You want people to believe you, to believe you can write your book. They’ll believe you if you do it, so go do it.
30. You don’t know where the information is. Try asking someone. Your sibling may remember where the information was put, for example.
31. Sometimes you’re fighting with a ghost. You’ve got to have that fight with the ghost.
32. It’s your book. You know how it works. You may not be ready to explain it, but that’s one step you can take. Be ready to explain your book when someone asks you. If that’s all you do today when you work on your book — just being ready to explain what it’s about when someone asks you — that’s pretty big.
33. Another way to begin work on a complicated book: Begin by naming differences. Observing differences, making distinctions, classifying the things, architecting the information of the book, that’s how it becomes useful. That’s all very active.
34. There’s also a role for passivity. Wait for the light to arrive. Turn a bottle of molasses upside down. Molasses moves slowly, like a solid. Is molasses a liquid or a solid? I don’t know. It moves slowly. You’re waiting outside at dawn, and you’re waiting for the light to arrive, and that sun rises very slowly. The slow pace of the light arriving into the darkness is measuring history as it comes. It’s measuring time. You’re going to be paying attention to where you’re going. You’re the one who’s in charge of this. You’re in charge of seeing where you’re going.
35. Sometimes it arrives in riddles, like the sort of riddle the Sphinx might ask you, and your life depends on getting the right answer. Just be aware you might encounter a riddle. Answer it.
36. Be sure you know yourself. You also know things that are intuitive to you. You just know them. You do.
37. By the time you grasp the light that has arrived for you, it’s already moved on. That’s the weird thing about seeing light that arrives from far away, from the sun. The sun is very far away, and the light takes some time to arrive. By the time you can see the sun, the sun is just not exactly in that position anymore. There’s this sense that we are always a little bit behind. We’re always learning and by the time we learn something, we’re a little bit late. There’s a fear that if we focus too long on a topic and take too long to learn it, we’ll be behind the game, no longer in sync with the universe, and maybe that we won’t have seized on other opportunities, we’ll lose those opportunities, and we won’t have anything left to write. Maybe we only have one book in us. I sort of feel like Attis & Aleph is the only story I tell ever, so there’s a fear of what comes after my book Attis & Aleph. That’s part of what makes it difficult. Maybe I don’t have another book.
38. We’re bound by fate. There are constraints on our lives. In that sense, we are not free. We are not free with respect to whatever it is that contrains us. That’s something we can explore when we’re writing a book. It’s part of the nature of whatever is making our book feel difficult: maybe we don’t feel we have unlimited power or unfettered capacity to write it. We can explore: What are those boundaries that we feel around our life?
39. When philosophers think about the questions that most interest them, sometimes they’re really abstract. Some care about: What’s goodness, beauty, right and wrong? Others are more interested in: Who has power? What’s the power dynamic between people? They’re both important. We tend to gravitate more toward one than the other. It’s the nature of our personalities or our education. But we can change over time, change our focus, get both into play. What are ideas? Also, what are the material forces that shape how we ask the question?
40. You need money to write your book, for example. That’s a material force and constraint. Having money to have somewhere to live, to have breakfast to eat, that’s part of what goes into writing a book. On the other hand, sometimes money is not the thing that writes the book. It might be something else, something a lot more nebulous.
41. Who you are, in the sense of your body or your lineage, matters. Those are more material facts about your life. It is not, however, always the answer to the question you’re asking. Sometimes people phrase a question: What ‘is’ something? What is beauty? What is goodness? It sounds literal, and so people say, Oh, well, it’s literally this, and they point to the thing or a definition of it. But it turns out that the question, What is it? is not always literal. Sometimes what is really wanted is something figurative, half-visible, something you can’t fully grasp. It’s something to play with.
42. How much is literal, how much figurative? You can’t literally count things that are figurative, so you can’t do percentages there. You can’t say it’s 60% literal and 40% figurative. There’s no calculation to be done there. Still, there’s a balance. Every word is a little bit literal and a little bit figurative. If it weren’t both, it wouldn’t be useful or make sense, so we need that ambiguity all the time. Are you being literal when you’re speaking, or is this somehow an abstraction, a metaphor? Every word in your book is like that. It can be understood in both dimensions. That’s why a book is difficult to write.
43. Also, books are a balance of work and contemplation, and what’s interesting to you may not interest everyone. You have to put in work to generate the book, sitting at your desk, writing with a pencil, typing into your computer. It’s work. There’s also the contemplation that goes into it. It comes out of your imagination. The extra wild card is that other people have their interests too. What interests you may not interest them, and vice versa. It’s hard to get feedback to know if you’ve worked hard enough on your own contemplation to write your own book, because who’s going to judge it for you?
44. Sometimes you just write the book incorrectly. That’s what happened to my character in Attis & Aleph. He knew he’d messed up his book and written it incorrectly. You might know your book is wrong but you don’t know where it has broken down. OK! That’s OK. Start with the intuition that something is wrong. That’s a positive thing: you’ve got the intuition, and starting with that intuition, you’re going to fix your book.
45. While recording this talk, I paused for a moment because there was a noise. This happens to writers frequently. We’re thinking in the quiet of our own homes and then the building vibrates because the world is under construction and we’re part of it.
46. Anyway, resuming my train of thought…I’m thinking about violets in Attis & Aleph. Are you more likely to directly perceive a flower as a flower (a biological organism) or to understand the flower as a symbol of something else? Does it convey to you transcendence or give you direct access to transcendence? Or does it tell you about the person who’s telling you about it? Are you learning about the flower itself, whatever the flower itself may be, or are you learning about people’s perceptions of flowers? Are you having a discourse about flowers and the discourse is about itself, not the actual flower? This is why books are complicated. You’re making words and you don’t know if the words are describing the thing you want to talk about or if the words are massaging themselves and talking to themselves, pointing to something or someone else.
47. Speaking about the sublime — flowers, transcendence, beauty, truth… Too many people value violence, theft and extraction more than they value the sublime. I don’t know what to tell you about that, except that things can be beautiful even when they are not popular or something you can sell or consume. You can enjoy something without exploiting anyone for it. That is sometimes a key to arriving at simplicity and clarity. Sometimes things feel complicated and difficult in an unpleasant way when we are trying to extract them. When we can just be present to them and enjoy them, they become simpler. You can go for a walk in the park to figure it out.
48. You can feel that you’re looking at something from a great height, from an aerial view. It gives a certain clarity to the situation. You can distance yourself from it. You don’t have to always be stuck in the taffy of that context.
49. You can sit with your feeling of what it means to want whatever it is that you want. What does it mean to want something, or to feel that you want something? What does it mean to change what you want?
50. Maybe you’re trying to settle a score with someone, with the world. You may be in competition with someone. Maybe that’s part of what you want.
51. On the topic of not believing everything you hear: If you’ve heard that someone else is gullible, and if you believe that, maybe you’re the gullible one. Always investigate what you believe.
52. If you believe there are no books on your topic and no other kinds of external knowledge sources by which you can learn about it, yet you believe you know something about it, this is really great because it suggests that you yourself are a source of knowledge about your topic. You think you know something? Where did it come from? It came from you! You do know what you need to know to write your book. You started your day upset that there were no books in the library on your topic, but actually you know something that’s already inside you, so you have a starting point.
53. If you think you need to get your ideas checked out, you can do that. You can go to the psychoanalyst. That’s your decision to make. You can have a discovery process in a dream.
54. I don’t think it helps to put your manuscript under the pillow as you would for the tooth fairy, but you can have dreams and focus on them. You just don’t control when the dreams arrive.
55. We are shoved into the world when we are born. We can’t walk away from our fate. We cannot walk away from our fate. We don’t control it. You’ve got to have our hand in our own work because it’s our work to do. But you’ve also got to loosen your grip because you have to receive information. It’s not entirely about what you’re grasping. It’s about the fact that you grasp it, that you are the one who grasps it. You can’t take it. You have to receive it. It’s a combination of those things. There are moments when you want to take it and when you want to receive it. There’s a role for activity and passivity.
56. You are the one who’s there all the time. You’re never away from yourself. You are the one who is taking or receiving the information. You’re the one who is writing this book.
57. Nonetheless, it helps to do this learning and self-realization in community. Where are your people? You need a commune? Go and build one. You need to be talking to other people before people will be talking to you.
58. Some people think you’ve got to go to school to write a book. I think, ultimately, it does not matter where you went to school. What matters is if you can figure out how things are connected or separated, or how you identify with or “other” something. If you can figure that out, that’s the education, you’ve got the education.
59. You are not going to liberate other people by talking about them, especially not by talking about them badly. (If they’re already dead, we have got other issues in the attempt to liberate them.) If you’re writing for liberation, there has got to be less talking about people and more talking with them. When you do this kind of work, on your own and in community, you’ll have a thesis, and you can write out your thesis, and then you’ll have a book. If you don’t do this kind of work, that is your choice. You’re not doing the work that your difficult book is calling you to do. If you choose not to do it but you’re still looking for it, you’re still halfway responding to the call, then what you are looking for is in a life you are not leading, and you have got to change your life.
60. Making a very long list of people or things won’t undo the absence of those people and things in your actual life. Making a list does not cure the loss of the things that are on the list.
61. Listing people, in particular, treats them as objects. Listing things they did treats their lives as objects. It makes them brittle and thingified. You cannot understand what anything meant because the lifeforce has been drained out of the context. So, be careful with making lists, with objectifying things to go on the list.
62. Here’s a contrary opinion though, in favor of lists — you have to break down your knowledge into manageable units and manageable tasks. Otherwise it’ll be an uninterpretable mega-pile of stuff. You have to break it down while keeping all the information in context so it doesn’t become a meaningless pile of dust. That’s the trick: put your knowledge in list form, just to make it an achievable task, but in this form it doesn’t mean anything. It has to be in context in the world to be alive.
63. Sometimes you want to categorize people by traits they don’t have. Say, rather than making a list everyone who lives in Colombia (I’m here right now), you could make a list of everyone who doesn’t live in Colombia. Making a negative list, the “not”s: that’s a hard way to categorize anything. Not only because of the size of the category, given everything that fits into it. It’s just a hard way to categorize, because you’re trying to connect people by something they don’t share in common, say, somewhere they don’t live. You may find that this category is not very useful and the reason your book has become difficult and complicated is that the connections are too tenuous. They’re non-connections. It’s a book about all the people who don’t live in a certain place.
64. You do have to structure your book somehow. Your categories may not feel real. They’re too specific, too literal, too overdetermined. You don’t actually know what goes in those categories. You’re just trying to make chapters because you think a book needs chapters. A book probably does need chapters. You are struggling with the meaning of the categories that undergird those chapters.
65. One solution there is to lean into your values. Your values structure your life, if not necessarily your book. You’re putting yourself into your book, and you are a person who has a life structured by values. Look through that lens and get an idea of how to structure your book. The information in your book is like a matrix in which you can grow as an author. The information is scaffolding, it’s support for your life. Your book supports you, and you support the book. Think of it as a growth tool and a plant climbing up the trellis. I don’t know if you climb up the trellis of your book or your book climbs up the trellis of you, but if you start there, it starts to feel more real, and you don’t run into the problem of feeling you’re dividing your book into fake chapters.
66. You can catalog a bunch of stuff for your book. The interesting thing won’t be how much you catalog but the fact that you are the one who catalogued it. You did it in a certain way. That was you. And there was a pathway by which all that information ended up in your hands. The interesting thing is not what’s on the list but who writes the list.
67. You want to use everything you can find. There’s so much information out there. Your book is complicated. You need all this information. But you don’t have to be in a rush. Time is cyclical, and everything will recur in cycles. If it doesn’t happen now, you’ll come back to it later.
68. Meanwhile, for better or worse, you have absorbed what you’re interested in. It sticks to you.
69. If you do this correctly — the whole book — then, after many years, you will realize that the great book you have always wanted is the one you have written, and the great writer you have been waiting for is you.
70. Do not hide.

This is everything I know about writing a complicated and difficult book.

My poetry book that I’m releasing through the Book Bazaar is called Attis & Aleph, and I am the author, Tucker Lieberman.

Everything I just discussed is mentioned in the book.

I wish you everything that is already inside yourself.

I have a confession to make.

I fictionalized the conversational dialogue for this biography-in-poems.

My new book, Attis & Aleph, is about a man who died 86 years ago. I never met anyone who ever met him, and I don’t know of any words he ever spoke. I only know what he wrote. Had I not invented conversations for him, he wouldn’t have any speaking lines in his own biography.

I worry that, with respect to fictionalizing dialogue, I’ve taken too many liberties with the personality of someone who died a mere 86 years ago, someone I could have met (had he lived), someone whom I almost might have known.

For some years, this has been on my mind. I published his biography in prose in 2020. That first time around, I stuck to the facts.

In the six years since that publication, no one has contacted me to say they’re related to him or that they care about his story in the way a family member might care.

Absent anyone else’s input, I feel free, in 2026, to take a new approach. I’ve put words in his mouth, and in his sister’s mouth too. Partly it’s for the artistic experience. Partly it’s to deal with the haunting.

Are there other things that prospective readers may want to know before they embark?

I can provide, as they are called, content warnings. Beginning with this man’s suicide by train, I go back in time to tell his story. He was researching the history of castrated men, trying to make sense of a gender called “eunuch.” He had attended a boarding school where the headmaster formed personal relationships with some of the boys. The 20th was a century of war, and some people owned guns. His father was a wealthy white businessman, connected to the New York elite, who made racist choices.

My book addresses those themes because they are inextricable from the learning. Those were his conditions, and those are the challenges he faced. I have tried to make sense of them. His legacy, in my view, is a frightening tale of failing at writing. I want to understand how his personal limitations and social circumstances may have been intertwined with his inability to finish writing his book about eunuchs.

So those are the content warnings. Those themes aside, I predict that what readers will get most itchy about is (once again) that I fictionalized dialogue. The outrage!

It was kind of rude of me.

But you have to get rude with a ghost.

Look here. I have something to offer you. It comes at a small price.

Nope, I cannot give you a relationship with a man who died 86 years ago. I formed a personal relationship with him, beginning by reading his papers, and I’ve been thinking about him for 14 years. That relationship isn’t transferable at any price.

I can, however, give you a Sphinx.

If reading about the gender-related questions of a lonely, frustrated 20th-century writer might mean something to you, I want you to read Attis & Aleph. If you do, the Sphinx is yours.

Please enter your email to follow my book project. All the projects in the Book Bazaar, including mine, open for pledging in just a few hours. The book was not free to write, and I do need readers’ financial support. If you’d like to be one of the first people to buy a copy through the Book Bazaar’s group crowdfunding effort, I’d really appreciate your support.

Several readers here on Medium have signed up already to show interest. Thank you.

None of us have all the answers, but I’m getting more direct about pointing to the Sphinx.