I was so excited to finally get the first issue of Smarg delivered to my door!
This book is both the debut of pals Paul Hallgren and Jesse Switters as a creative team and Snow Day Press, the new local comic imprint. Smarg himself is the alter ego of Swerven Niv-Bakcen, an amateur superhero watching over the city of Hober Hiblin with the help of his friend Jarjin.
I don’t want to spoil any of the plot or surprises from there, but I highly recommend this book if you’re looking for some classic comic book escapades!
Paul writes great dialogue and the world-building is smart, rarely feeling like exposition; I got Batman Beyond vibes from Smarg (an extremely high compliment from me), from the silly, futuristic swear words to the youthful, cocky hero who uses them (and still has a lot to learn).
Never enough praise can be given to Jesse’s gorgeous artwork (in this book and outside it). He creates something that feels warm and nostalgic but also bold and new, all at the same time. It looks like a comic that could have come out of the Golden Age or ten years from now. It’s a testament to his talent that the style and taste in this book are uniquely his own.
Smarg is a fantastic first foray for everyone involved in the project. You can find the issue in local comic shops and be sure to follow its creators on social media! They promise the series will be back in 2025 and I cannot wait.
Grades were released today. This is probably the last time I’ll ever be able to say this, but: I’m an A student this year!
It’s not that I was a bad student when I was younger (though there are probably teachers who would respectfully disagree); I was definitely on the disruptive side, always pushing to the boundaries of things (and occasionally finding myself outside the lines). My grades were generally above average.
This is just a neat bow on the end of my first semester. My advisors thought five classes might be too much but I was able to work hard and find balance while remembering that this won’t be forever and I should have some fun with it. Happy break to everyone who deserves it!
As I remind you every year: lists are so stupid, and oh do I love lists.
These aren’t the “best” in the same way we rank athletes or products; these are the things that best captured my imagination, best dominated my conversations, best made me think and feel and moved my soul in every direction.
I managed to get my lists down to ten each, in alphabetical order, with the exception of comics, which I narrowed to twenty. (I read a lot of comics.) I have an asterisk next to A Complete Unknown because I’m seeing it soon, and if I don’t love it as much as I feel like I will I have a film to replace it.
Cannot WAIT to hear people complain about these! Let me know what you love!
Albums
Beyonce • Cowboy Carter Charlie XCX • BRAT JC Chasez • Playing With Fire Landon Conrath • Employee of the Year The Cure • Songs of a Lost World Fontaines D.C. • Romance Linkin Park • From Zero Magdalena Bay • Imaginal Disk Twenty One Pilots • Clancy Waxahatchee • Tiger’s Blood
Comics
Animal Pound The Cull The Deviant Fantastic Four Feral The Magic Order Man’s Best Moon Knight Nightwing Phoenix Precious Metal Public Domain Radiant Black Saga Transformers Uncanny X-Men Void Rivals Wonder Woman World Tr33 X-Factor
Film
A Complete Unknown* Deadpool & Wolverine Dune: Part Two Flow The Greatest Night in Pop Inside Out 2 Transformers One Wicked The Wild Robot Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary
Television
Baby Reindeer The Bear Dune: Prophecy Echo Hacks The Penguin Nobody Wants This Skeleton Crew Somebody Somewhere X-Men ’97
As much as I like to participate in the popular culture conversation (and, boy, do I ever), I also like to highlight stuff that you would probably miss otherwise.
Even though it’s been the talk of the animation world, collecting awards and getting nominated for a Golden Globe, most people I’ve talked to haven’t heard of Flow, the best film I’ve seen this year. (An exception is my friend Nick, who I excitedly spoke to about this one before I saw it this morning.)
I can’t really describe it. That’s part of its magic.
Basically, it’s about a cat who endures a global flood. The cat meets other animals during its ordeal, and they try to survive together. The world they inhabit appears to have once had humans, but not anymore. I don’t know why. Nothing is explained to you, because there isn’t a single line of dialogue in the entire movie. It’s just the animals, their actions, and the environment.
People usually call something art because it isn’t very entertaining, but this is the rare thing that is both and does both well. I was completely lost in it. I know I love animals more than most, but the attention to detail in this film is astounding.
It’s a hard movie to find. I had to see it at 11:50 am at Southdale, the closest screening to me and the only one they have all day. It starts streaming in January.
If you’re looking for something dazzling, challenging, charming, thought- and heart-provoking, with more existential questions before the credits than answers, then this is the movie for you. It’s going to stay with me for a while.
Btw, when they make Theia into a film, I would like the filmmakers to watch this and take notes.
I just spent $115 at Target this afternoon and have literally nothing to show for it.
Sigh. Allow me to explain. This is a story about giving, taking, and how we decide what it means. I want you to know that as you read this story and see all the red flags, I saw them, too. It doesn’t change the outcome.
After class today I decided to do some light shopping in Burnsville. I said hi to my friend Randy in the produce section, and as I walked away I was approached by a woman.
She asked me if I could help.
I told her I didn’t have any cash. She said she just needed some baby food. I thought, “Well, I can do that.” So she and I starting walking over to the infant aisle and talked along the way. She’s from Ukraine; her family had recently emigrated here because of the war. She talked shit about Putin. She was nice and asked a little about me (she learned I had a 17-year-old son and said that was impossible because I look 20, what a charmer!) and then we arrived at the aisle.
She immediately started stocking my cart with formula. As I’m watching the canisters pile up, I ask her how much they cost. She points at a sign that says $38.99 and I say whoa, I can’t afford all that, I can maybe buy three. So she puts the rest back, before heading down another aisle and grabbing more things like baby drops.
At this point, I set a boundary. I tell her I can maybe spare $100. She assures me that I can make any decisions I need to at check out, which we head straight to after she puts the last items in my cart.
At the register, I start scanning and realize she lied to me. The formula is $59.99 each. At this point, I’ve scanned five items and my bill is over $200. I tell her I simply can’t afford that, and ask a Target employee to void two items. The woman stares at me blankly.
I realize here that only one of two things are true: either she is a really good mama, willing to do any- and everything for her family at home, or she is an absolute sociopath, who does not see me as a human being who works really hard for his money but a very stupid ATM.
So I put $115 on my debit card (after my $5 Circle rewards) and she takes the stuff, the bag, and the receipt and heads back into the store.
I feel really weird about all of this. So I go to customer service, where I end up talking to three different Target team members who basically tell me the same thing: panhandling is extremely common here this time of year, they’re aware of the woman in the store, there isn’t really anything they can do but politely ask them to leave, and there was a very good chance she was going to return that stuff for money.
I told the team members all I wanted to do was help and I sincerely hope I did, and then one of them said to me: “I don’t know if this will make you feel better, but no matter what she does with what you gave her, you did help her.”
I may be stupid (you just read that story along with me, right?), but that genuinely did make me feel better.
I talk about gifts all the time; two of my favorite books are The Gift and Braiding Sweetgrass, and I could talk about gift-giving literally all day. As a culture, we do it so wrong, and it’s hard to undo how we think about it.
But we can’t decide what someone does with our gifts. All we can do is choose to give them. I tell people this all the time, as a fellow former liar: what you do when someone lies to you says nothing about you, and everything about the liar.
As a writer, I wondered why I was sharing this story. What’s the point? Where’s the angle? And then I realized that, like most of life, there isn’t one.
Cynical people will take this as a warning, something to heed as they head out to the store today. Optimistic people might think it’s nice that there are still folks willing to help, despite hearing and seeing every single bell, whistle, and flag possible.
But this is really a reminder about gifts and why we give them. All I truly hope is that the thing I gave keeps moving; I hope that one day she is in a place where a gift is needed and she can give it, and an act like today’s echoes in her mind and moves her heart and hands in the right direction.
Well, that, and this is a story about how infant formula should really be cheaper, sheesh.
Last night, I submitted my last project of the semester. I just did a semester of college! That’s one down, this time around.
So: what did I learn?
Turns out: a hell of a lot.
College did not radicalize me, or even re-radicalize me. I have actually been rad most of my life. But school has a way of letting you know what you don’t know, and the tools it has already given me to help me be a better human are incalculable. I have known things; but the things I’ve learned about the environment and technology and writing and art and design just this year alone has reminded me how big this world and its history is, and how little of it all I really know.
After the election, there was much talk about education and its impact on voting, with terms like “diploma divide” invented to explain what exactly happened. The results of the election made it clear: the less educated an area was, the more likely it was that its people would vote red. This conversation inspired immediate backlash: “You can’t just go around calling people uneducated!”
But here’s the thing: you absolutely fucking can.
Because being uneducated is not the same as being stupid.
There are plenty of intelligent people who never graduated high school (or even went to high school). They did different things with their lives. But many of them don’t know much or anything about our environment or science or different religions or economics or politics, and don’t even know how to tell if what they read on Facebook today is true or not.
That’s what it means to be educated.
And for my entire life, I have dedicated myself to pursuing an education. To learning things that are hard or uncomfortable or that I might not even give a shit about (but often grow to care deeply for).
I’m always telling people who ask me how school is going that this is the kind of stuff that I would be doing anyway, but now they’re giving me credit for it. And school has been a vast, welcoming abyss to really dive into; the deeper I go, the more I find out what education itself really means.
“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership,” said Chinua Achebe.
Isn’t this what we all want? The thing is, we have to work to get there, and we’re farther off that path than we used to be.
So many of us are looking at the world right now and thinking: how unfair. How corrupt. How expensive. How unhealthy. How stupid. How mean. How violent. How destructive. How unjust.
And all of these things are true. But education gives us the knowledge, training, and strength to fight back and to restore our relationships, with each other and with our land and planet. Education helps us transform our despair into hope and joy.
So what did I learn? Like I said, so damn much.
Most importantly, I’ve learned that learning begets learning; that it’s not enough to just ask questions, which is the internet’s favorite dumb pasttime. Nothing in society has ever happened because people were “just asking questions”; everything has happened because people haven’t stopped learning, fighting, and working towards the answers.
My throat opened and drained the tiny bottle of sauvignon blanc from the trunk of my car and I decided it would be the last drink I would ever have.
For then. For now.
I don’t have to get into the rest in detail (it is well-documented around these parts). Melted down after having insane hallucinations; ended up in the hospital for over a week; crawled my way out and found some sober friends; started being way less of a piece of shit and kept on living despite the unbeatable odds.
Sorry if you lost money on me.
For my sobriety chip this time around, I chose the image of a phoenix.
When I hear people talk about the phoenix, I feel like they solely use the bird in severe terms. You rise from total devastation. You are the phoenix when you suffer a traumatic loss. You are the phoenix when you go through a life-changing event. You are the phoenix when you thought your time was over but it was extended at the very last moment.
That hasn’t been my experience at all.
The phoenix isn’t who I have to be under extraordinary circumstances. The phoenix is who I have to be every fucking day.
Because here’s the truth: even though I try really hard, maybe too hard; even though I attempt, like magic, to do everything that is expected of me and then more on top; even though I read a ton and listen a lot and learn so much; even though I seek out and pick up new tools to use whenever I (or others) need them; even though I try to be kind and open and inclusive and not rude and not thoughtless, I fuck this up every. single. damn. day.
And that doesn’t even cover how I still have to live inside the body that has said and done the things that this body has. I can make amends and be truly sorry for every bad thing, big and small, that I have done, but this body is still my only home and this face is the same face that has hurt those I care about.
These are thoughts and feelings that burn.
So at the end of every day, I am ash.
And then, every morning, I am the phoenix.
I get up and I grow new feathers to ruffle others. I look in the mirror and the guy on the other side nods his head, not so much in approval but with acceptance. I stretch out my wings and wonder if I’m still able to fly. I accept the things I cannot change and all that jazz. I promise myself that I will be good to those I love.
This is the common routine of rising.
I couldn’t possibly thank all the people who have helped me, but I do have special gratitude for Holly, Jack, Marvel, and my close friends and family. I haven’t had a drink in seven years and there has never been a downside. Ever. In fact, I used to live in the shadow of the downside and I don’t miss it at all. I like that the tiny bottle of sauvignon blanc in my trunk was the last drink I ever had.
I work in an industry where people often complain on both sides of the table, and live in a world where that’s true at least a hundred times more, but I had two experiences last week in that work, in this world, that were wonderful, and I’m just going to write about them today.
The second was a birthday party.
It was a group of older women (older than me, I mean) celebrating their friend’s birthday. They were having lunch and clearly had known each other for decades, if not their whole lives. The guest of honor was soft-spoken and her pals were there for her completely; I actually wasn’t prepared for how entirely.
Their meal was brought to the table and as I walked away I heard one of the women say to the birthday girl of her plate: “If you want, I can cut that up for you.”
My body reacted before I could. My eyes filled up with seawater and I darted for the nearest coral reef.
For many, when we consider who takes care (or is going to take care) of us, we think of our family: our parents, our siblings, our children, the person we form a romantic relationship with. But for many, friends are those people, and it is one of the most beautiful damn things to witness.
You know: a good reminder that when you get down to it, we actually do care about each other in the most selfless ways.
I love my friends. Because everyone is so busy and we live in a country that seemingly only exists to sap every ounce of energy we produce like the machines in The Matrix, most days all we can do is send each other a text or link or meme to let each other know we’re thinking of them. But we do make time for each other, through it all: game nights and birthday parties and TV dates and movie times. And I do know that if any of them ever needed me to cut their lunch, I wouldn’t hesitate to pick up my knife.
The first happened earlier in the week.
Two women, also friends, were also having lunch together. One of them ordered a salad and was less-than-excited to discover that it had raw tuna on top.
“Well, it’s an adventure,” she said when I asked how it was, which is not a ringing endorsement in my field.
I kneeled down to her level and we chatted about how to make it better. I disappeared for a few minutes, we fixed her lunch more to her liking, and I was about to walk away when she stopped me:
“Your mother must be so proud of you.”
I stopped in my tracks, clenching every muscle in my body while searching for the ones that controlled my tear ducts.
“I… I think so,” I said.
“No,” the woman repeated. “She is.”
I talk a lot of monsters. Mostly the ones inside of me. I have been the worst, and it’s why I so strongly believe in the idea that we can get better. It takes honesty and humility and self-reflection and education and admission of wrong-doing and deconstruction of ego and so, so much work, and that work never ends.
Some days I have very little pride in myself, and every single day I lack a mom to give me any. Some days all I can think about is my monsters, especially when I’m trying to fight them.
I was doing some of that this day and, by some miracle, some thing I don’t and can’t understand, my mom wanted to let me know.
That was just really fucking kind.
And all these words today are a reminder of that kindness. It’s here; by that, I mean, it’s not out there. It’s in our relationships, our friendships, it’s in our interactions with total strangers in our communities. It’s in cutting each other’s food; it’s in telling each other how proud we are.
It’s in you.
I hope you can choose it today, and I hope it’s available to choose every day.
Find yourself in the sexy, violent, scary, and impossibly kind world of the Dampers, a group of vampires who make the decision every day to not feed on human beings.
When one of them is murdered, the simmering tension in their vampiric community is turned up to an unbearable boil, spilling over secrets, scalding in its spreading pain.
Maple Island, the new novel by Dennis Vogen. Experience it November 7 2025.
Am I going to try to convince you to join me? Heck no. Do I still want to talk about it? You bet.
Here’s what happened.
You all know I love animals. So dang much. I got it from my mama. Out of my 13 published books, 4 of them are about animals, and all 13 feature them. (If you’ve read my short story The New Romantics in the Otherworldly anthology, you know what that’s all about, too.)
I have been conflicted about meat since the moment I learned where it came from. Which isn’t to say I don’t love it. There isn’t anything like a good burger or chicken wing. But eating it hurts my heart, in more ways than one.
Last week, I got an assignment for Composition class: watch the Netflix documentary The Game Changers. And change my game it did, y’all.
I can’t unsee it or unthink it: we’re not meant to eat meat. As you learn the reasons why, it all makes sense in a way that will make you want to scream like a goat. Combined with everything else I’ve learned in my Environmental Science class this semester, I was KO’d.
For a long time now, I have had meat-free days. One day at a time, I’ll refuse to eat animals. I know any kind of abstinence is helpful to our health and the planet.
But the movie radicalized me, so I’ve been eating like a herbivore and, honestly, it’s not so bad! My energy levels are legit (you saw me at con), I’m finding fun foods to eat, and I feel better — physically, sure, but emotionally and spiritually, too.
I’m still doing by-products. I love honey and butter and nobody has convincingly argued that cows do not like being milked.
Going forward, I do forsee a little more balance. I don’t think I’ve eaten my last piece of meat. Maybe I’ll shift to meat once or twice a week. I’ve read counter-arguments to the evidence presented in Game Changers and criticism of its biases, and some of it is more credible than others.
But I would LOVE it if some of you gave the film a watch (or maybe you already have!) and let me know what you think. It did a really good job of appealing to my scientific and logical side, but also to the emotional, hypocritical monster that dwells and mopes inside of me.
If you need me, I’ll be outside on your lawn, eating grass with the wild rabbits. I am so sorry for being so annoying.
The Den 