https://riveraerica.com/ writer, editor, artist 🏳️‍⚧️ Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:17:08 +0000 https://i.snap.as/cVYyePF2.jpeg https://riveraerica.com/ https://riveraerica.com/fluconf2025?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Independent publishing and archival Drawing on forking practices in software development, sampling practices in audio production, my work with collage art, and the speculative archival work of Saidiya Hartman, I've been trying to develop new artistic forms more sensitive to the networked nature of our histories and futures. Enter incarnations: a literary form in which you rewrite a historical text and set it in a far future, and write it from the perspective of your future self. The form also functions as a strategy for intervening in processes of "copyright"-making by challenging traditional conventions of authorship and (self-)publishing. Finally, incarnations also fall under a new, umbrella genre of speculative writing I call autofabulation, conceived as an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-oppressive artform intended to allow its practitioner to actively work towards liberation. This event will also include generative prompts that encourage participants to engage in their own forms of speculative archival work, including—but not limited to—writing their own incarnations. brbrbrbrbr Content/trigger warnings: Discussions of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, anthropological dehumanization, mental health (depression), death, and transitioning; brief references to parental abuse, parental death, illness (cancer), economic apartheid, torture, lynching, amputation, medically transitioning, and transphobia; oblique references to current U.S./world politics --- brbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbrbr Dear [REDACTED], A week ago, I was certain what I would offer you in this space. I've had the honor of teaching others about incarnations and autofabulation three times now: last summer, to creative nonfiction writers at a seminar hosted by Tin House, a small press and esteemed literary institution; and twice in the last few months during two virtual workshop series hosted by Relatively Queer, a small community of queer and trans creatives that I was invited to join as a co-facilitator after meeting one of the other co-facilitators in the Tin House seminar. They listened to me read an incarnation aloud during the seminar, and were compelled to correspond with me via e-mail about archival work, speculative writing, and the mechanisms of (neo)colonialism (among other topics), and soon I was formalizing what I'd developed around autofabulation into a workshop curriculum and presentation slides. My original intention was simply present you with a slightly modified, more "tech-oriented" version of the materials I'd previously created, but a series of strange and unpredictable events this week has pushed me off this path and onto another one. Bear with me, if you will. More background: I was admitted to the Tin House seminar after submitting an unfinished draft of the second chapter of a book project written as a series of a letters to my younger self. I wrote the first chapter, and had the idea to turn it into a book project, after a publication reached out to solicit a piece from me, the first and only time this has happened to me since I began taking the work of writing professionally seriously. The editor who solicited the piece reached out because she had read an early draft of my forthcoming essay collection as a reader for one of the small presses to which I had submitted it; they didn't accept it, but another of their readers was the one who connected me to the small press that eventually did accept it for publication. The essay collection only came together in the first place because I took all of the writing I did in 2023, during the first year of my medical transition, and then assembled it into a little book, the idea being to use the sales from the book to fund mutual aid projects like the one I started in January 2023, Art, Strike!, which was essentially the catalyst for everything I wrote that year. This is a lineage. The connective tissue here (the line of this lineage) is one of tiny interactions. My publisher, tRaum Books, noted recently that they've never held an open submission period. Every book they've ever published has found them through one connection here or elsewhere in the vast and sprawling network of small connections people make online. My book is no exception. The correspondence I've had with tRaum's founder, Rysz, has produced some of the most impactful writing I've ever read and/or written; as is the case with my correspondence with alks, my former Art, Strike! co-editor, whom I met in a comment thread on a now-defunct, short-lived, and little-known microblogging platform; as is the case with some new correspondence that began this week on precisely the topics of this session with a relative stranger on the fediverse; as is the case with my connections to and with the Relatively Queer community; as is the unidirectional correspondence I've had with my younger self in the aforementioned epistolary essays. As is, perhaps, the correspondence we are embarking on right now. brbrbr Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (2023 to 2025). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: Art, Strike! (mutual aid project); The Ecology of Art, Strike! (essay collection); Split/Lip Press tiered rejection (connects me to my publisher, tRaum Books); Under the Sun reaches out (essay solicitation); The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy, chapter two (unfinished draft); Tin House seminar; Relatively Queer (virtual workshop series); FluConf 2025. Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (2023 to 2025). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: Art, Strike! (mutual aid project); The Ecology of Art, Strike! (essay collection); Split/Lip Press tiered rejection (connects me to my publisher, tRaum Books); Under the Sun reaches out (essay solicitation); The Trans Girl's Guide to Grey's Anatomy, chapter two (unfinished draft); Tin House seminar; Relatively Queer (virtual workshop series); FluConf 2025. brbrbrbrbrbrbr --- brbr exhortation Draw a straight line across a blank page. What series of events brought you to this moment? What tiny interactions, online or otherwise, facilitated your ability to be present here? Who is part of your lineage? What else is that lineage comprised of? Mark these on the line with labeled dots. Go as far into your history as necessary to get as clear a sense as possible of how you got here. Honor momentous occasions. Honor mundane ones equally. How integral have small connections been to your journey through this life? How integral are they certain to be moving forward? brbr --- brbrbrbrbrbr As a child and teenager, in order to escape a household rife with violence and abuse, I spent a tremendous amount of time in libraries. My favorite sections were those where books were for sale, usually for pennies, and often books you'd never find available for checking out (books that were out of print, wholly unpopular, self-published, or otherwise perceived to be relatively valueless). One of these was a writing textbook published sometime in the latter half of the 20th-century; I took it home with me and didn't crack it open for many years after, and only did when I was in my early 20's and facing a stubborn case of writer's block. One of the chapters was about style; in order to get the writer thinking about what comprises style, it exhorted the reader of the textbook to take a passage written by another writer, and replace all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives in it with nouns, verbs, and adjectives of their own. Everything else was to remain the same: the pronouns, the conjunctions, the structures of the sentences. The idea was to wear another writer's rhythm like a glove, to try it on for the length of a paragraph and see what it felt like. The author's style (their essence), the textbook argued, was not in the content of their writing, but in the unique ways in which they chose to present that content to the reader. I tried it out for myself with a passage from a short story from my big blue The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (even then, a decade before admitting to myself I was a trans woman, I was always drawn to writing by women, and the main characters of my stories were always women, too). Immediately, the writer's block vanished. Abandoning the passage I'd tried on like a glove, but remaining deeply inspired by it, I wrote and completed a short story for the first time in years. It was terrible, and I wouldn't show it to anyone even if you paid me, but I did finish it. And the exercise stayed with me. Many years later, I began taking computer science classes at my local community college with the intention of minoring in the discipline once I transferred to a four-year university. I'd been playing with code since childhood, when my parents enrolled me in a small, free summer program at my elementary school that included curriculum on HTML programming; it was then that I built my first website, which sported nothing more than a menu for an imagined restaurant. I'd taken computer science classes in high school, part of the school's requirements for graduation, being a public science and technology magnet high to which I'd had to apply in a process not dissimilar in intensity to the process I'd go through again four years later, and then again many years after that, in order to make my way into higher ed. But it wasn't until the community college classes that I learned of Git, and version control systems, and the forking of a codebase that can occur during a solo project as you take it in a slightly new direction, or a collaborative project when one or more decide to spin it off into their own. Many years after that, in Pasadena, California (a city which I like to call Robledo, after the fictionalized version in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower), I found myself in the midst of a profoundly disabling depressive episode, catalyzed by the diagnosis of my stepfather with stage four colon cancer, the assurance of his imminent death, and my brewing awareness that I was trans and that I needed, more than anything, to muster the courage to tell him before he passed. Trusting a whim whipped up by a long-ago learned strategy for combatting depression—taking on a silly art project—I sat before some blank canvasses I'd bought years before and began cutting up the copious political flyers residents of a city receive in the mail promoting this or that local candidate, or local resolution. I taped the words onto the canvas to form a cheeky critique of the economic apartheid my city, like all others, was deeply invested in maintaining: eliminating rent control, protecting the rights of landlords and property owners, criminalizing homelessness, and so on, and so forth. This was my first collage—the first of what would soon be many. Less than a year after that, after my stepfather's death—after my failure to come out to him in time, after coming out to my partner and then the world, after starting my medical transition—I wrote a hermit crab essay, a genre-agnostic literary form in which the author takes an otherwise "unartistic" format (like a recipe, product review, or job application) and uses it as the shell for a piece of writing that subverts and/or transcends the format. A tiny excerpt from a pages-long run-on sentence in the piece, titled "Job Application": ...I am trying to learn to trust my whims more instead of talk myself out of them (I can talk myself out of—or into—anything, which I learned far too late is a very, very bad thing)... This approach to trusting my whims had drawn me that day into a downtown Pasadena bookstore, where the employees' kindness in trying not to misgender me at a stage in my transition when I felt extremely self-conscious about my gender presentation had made me want to apply to work there ("Job Application" hermit crabs the application I would have filled out had it not been for the fact that the bookstore was apparently very anti-stealing, and asked multiple questions on the form about what you would do in the case of witnessing theft, and, given my staunch belief in the necessity of abolishing the concept of property, plus the fact that a few Reddit threads noted the bookstore's extremely hostile attitude towards its employees, all this made me turn the application into a hermit crab essay instead of actually applying). Inside the bookstore, though, and before the interaction with the kind employees, trusting my whims made me pick up, for no articulable reason, a book on Martin Luther, about whom I knew little save for his most well-known act: nailing 95 theses to a church door in 1517 and subsequently ushering in the Protestant Reformation. I took the book home with me and began to read it, and all I could see was myself. The book begins: In Spring 2017 I was asked to speak from Luther's pulpit. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years writing a biography of the reformer. Few biographers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Wittenberg pulpit had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my father, who had died just ten months before, and who had been a minister of religion when I was growing up in Melbourne, Australia. Moments after reading it, I began to type: In Spring 2117 I was asked to speak in Rivera’s apartment. I knew that this would be an emotional experience, because I had spent the last twelve years of my life writing a biography of the abolitionist. Few writers get so close to where their protagonist lived and worked, and others who had spoken from the Robledo apartment had told me of its effect on their lives. I knew too that the event would bring back strong memories of my stepfather, who had died just two months before, and who had been an organizer around abolitionism when I was growing up in a U.S. American colony. The Rivera in the second excerpt is me. This was the first incarnation. brbrbr Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (1991 to 2023). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: turbulent household/obssession with libraries; first exposure to programming; purchase of writing textbook; first short story completed in years; first exposure to version control systems; diagnosis and death of stepfather; first collage; purchase of book on Martin Luther; first incarnation. Black and white timeline of the events detailed in the preceding section (1991 to 2023). Dots along a straight line in the center labelled, from left to right: turbulent household/obssession with libraries; first exposure to programming; purchase of writing textbook; first short story completed in years; first exposure to version control systems; diagnosis and death of stepfather; first collage; purchase of book on Marti