Some acknowledgements

I am an artist inspired by the way each medium enhances, obscures, and collaborates with the story it tells. For the past few years I have been changing my life.

 

The name given to me by my parents is Alexis Sarah Macnab. Before the zoomiverse, almost no one called me Alexis. My intimates found their own way to a nickname, and people I’ve only just met usually slide into one without thinking. This doesn’t bother me.*

 

My mother calls me Squirrel. She is an extraordinary mind, and from her I learned how to close read, the power of metaphor, and how to turn any space into a home. My father calls me Daughter. From him I get most of my features – brown hair, small hands – and the craving for a brisk morning jog.

 

Both my grandfathers were newspapermen who passed on a belief that hearing, and telling, a story in a certain way will change a person. My grandmothers instilled the warning that the hunger for pigment, for movement, for expression will not leave you no matter how much domesticity you stuff into your mouth.

 

My brother has the art bug (gene? special power?), too. His gift is composition, which he even applied to the newspaper trade as a layout editor. Apples and trees.

 

I’ve had some wonderful teachers (and some damaging ones). At eight-years-old I learned from June Willhite that I was a creator. She teaches me that, still. Joyce Piven teaches me to take play seriously. Rick Wamer teaches me what teaching is really about. Paul Moser teaches me to see myself as a professional. Jim Simpson and Travis Preston teach me to seek out, and trust, collaborators wiser than me. Janie Geiser teaches me to trust myself.

 

My friends, all brilliant artists, are my most inspiring teachers. I’ve made plays with them, dances, puppet spectacles. I’ve explored reality with them, and invaded living rooms. I make art with them, for them, and because of them.

 

Sometimes I get to make projects with my partner, Thadeus, too. He keeps me fed in every way. He would like you to know that he was the first person to tell me I was a writer. He’s certainly one of the first people I believed.

 

I’m an educator, too. I teach in the performing arts, and visual arts, and recently I’ve started teaching the artistic process as liberatory practice for white people doing racial justice work. I love teaching. When I enter a classroom and my students ask, “How are you?”, and I say, “Better, now,” I mean it absolutely all the way down.

 

But, right now, I’m in my studio. The seachange of the pandemic is still shifting me. I’m drawing and writing and gardening. I’m learning and unlearning. Waiting and present.

*A note on nicknames and pronouns:

I am not picky about nicknames with one exception: please don’t use the name of a certain wifi-enabled web assistant accustomed to turning your streaming audio systems on and off. Even someone clearly announcing the “issss” at the end of my name sometimes triggers the commerce overlords to answer in their sweet, femme, supplicating voice saying sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. “Alex” turns it on as well, which is a real shame because I loved going by Alex. So, the challenge is on: the more tangential, the better. Get creative.

I encourage creativity when gendering me as well. Because of my anatomy, physiognomy, and presentation I’ve been “she/her”ed my entire life. But if I could pick any pronouns out of the box, I wouldn’t choose those. Until 2020, the topic of my gender identity was a deeply personal conversation I was having with myself. When the zoomiverse pressured me to put “my pronouns” after my name like a declaration in “rooms” full of strangers, this intensely private realm suddenly became public trivia. The only gender identity that makes any sense to me is Non-Binary. Binaries are false choices invented by systems and societies (like ours) which cannot tolerate ambiguity. (**In conversation with Sean Saifa Wall, I heard Prentis Hemphill say, “…our adherence to binaries requires secrecy and erasure.” Isn’t that the truest thing you’ve ever heard? By the way, are you listening to Finding Our Way, Prentis’s podcast. I am IN LOVE with it. I can’t recommend it highly enough.)

I encouraged the use of “all pronouns” for a few years, but found that mostly people retreated to she/her and stayed there which stings more strongly than being “she/her”ed without preamble. My favorite pronouns at the moment are ey/em/eir (as in: “Ask em what ey wants in eir tea” - a pronoun series I discovered through Maia Kobabe’s excellent graphic novel Gender Queer), and I fall more in love with the set every day. Also, I get it: it’s hard to change habits of language, and even harder to build new patterns with unfamiliar sounds. If I’m not in earshot, I’ll have no idea how you’ll refer to me in the third person, and I can’t control anyone else’s behavior, thoughts or speech. But I know that our society’s unquestioned denial of the full range of gender diversity (and many other diversities) hurts people. I believe it hurts us all. Trust me, I know that the practice of new pronouns is awkward, and hard to remember, and full of small failures. But that practice builds muscle strength in hope and the understanding that the structures we live within were built by people just like us, and we can, together, build new ones when we need to.

Anyhoo, the term Non-Binary describes what isn’t. So, what describes what is? Here are some options for me at the moment:

  • Somewhere on the spectrum

  • A moving target

  • None of your business

  • Come look for it with me

  • Knowable positions with unknowable velocities

  • All of the above  

** Also, eternal gratitude to all the artists and activists and brave friends and students who are my teachers who are fighting to make a world where we can all be asking ourselves these questions, and for the space to arrive at our own answers. There is a difference between inculcation and identity. That gap is one of the portals to freedom.