Nevada poet and essayist Dani Putney takes documentary poetics to a new level in Mix-Mix (Baobab Press, 2025). By documentary, I mean a certain relation to historical reality, which is not to say this is historical poetry. It is vivid poetry — lyrical, cynical, ironic, touching, sexy. Because the poet approaches history with all senses and emotions aflame, with heart beating beneath the inquiry, letting itself be known, the result is multifaceted — not merely history, but the experience of history at the poetic level, the level of the soul.

Soul is a silly word, but to say Dani writes with soul is not silly. Full disclosure, Dani is a trampset contributor and a friend, someone who has slept on my couch. Dani is a nonbinary Filipinx writer with a white father who, through mail correspondence, wed a Filipina mother. In this collection, the poet examines this mixed heritage and what it means in a world still compromised by the trappings of empire.

“I’m the ultimate possibility, by which
I mean I wither beside my family tree,

hoping an apple or a coconut cracks
my skull to make me real. Can you
help me understand why I’m alive?”

These lines come from “First Date,” in which the poet compares their heritage to “origin manifest / in your US history text book,” revealing the poet’s alienation in the white-washed myth of America.

In “Mosquitoes,” the poet elicits a defiant kind of despair:

“In this upside-down,
I float above grandfather clocks,
white picket fences, baby-faced humanity:
no future for me.”

In “Nature in Technicolor,” even Nevada, our shared landscape of mountains and deserts, is not enough to equalize:

“Muir & Roosevelt didn’t
see me, or me with you, at the peak
of America’s wilderness.”

But it is this sense of alienation that drives these 50 poems and an essay divided by region and theme. The collection includes excerpts, sometimes reformulated, from Asian Romance Guide to Marriage by Correspondence, which provide context to the relationship of the poet’s parents, and descriptions from Ancestry DNA. “List of Illustrations” links descriptive captions for different artwork, an archipelago of images from the National Museum of Anthropology/Ethnology in Manila to the Nevada Historical Society. The images themselves are blank or redacted, leaving questions about the mechanisms of curation and exhibition.

If the poet feels like an exhibit, separated from mainstream society by the facts of their identity, it is their queerness that connects them to the living world: an erotic, subversive force that bends American cliche and social hierarchies toward a new inheritance, a world being created on the page, fresh and pulsing with discovery. This is how the poet explores the legacy of Walt Whitman and their own father in their brilliant essay “Multitude” — “I contemplate sweet flags dying at the edge of my future grave” — and how the poet declares, in “Anti-mimetic Body,” that “Riding denim / is how I evolve into myself, / a high most never reach.”

It is true Dani, now a doctor in the English language, brings intellectual rigor to their personal cultural excavation, finding layers beneath the historical picture we’re presented. It is also true that Dani can write as fiercely and rawly and lyrically as anyone. The marriage of these two traits is what makes their work fascinating and electrifying. Mix-Mix is a beautiful book that takes nothing about beauty for granted. Reading it, I hear the voice of the future.

Mix-Mix: Poems — Baobab Press

Book Review: Mix-Mix was originally published in trampset on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tolu Oloruntoba’s new poetry collection, Unravel (McClelland & Stewart), offers something strangely mesmerizing — a deconstructed mind tethered to what it haunts. It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a groundbreaking work.

Oloruntoba, a trampset contributor, describes himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He practiced medicine in his native Nigeria before emigrating to Canada. His profuse vocabulary includes medical/scientific terminology that helps elicit, line by line, the dilemma of mortal existence. In lapsing professionally, the poet discovers space in the cracks of institutional society, between malady and cure, phenomena and knowledge, where a deeper study of the self is possible. Poetry is the method. Beneath “the petitions of my body,” a sense, often surreal, comes through “writs of trembling.”

“In this way is deathing a way of birthing: come to calve, / the doe of plasm arrives to deliver the spark it has unwrapped,” the poet writes in “A Mostly Private Corruption.”

Far from being alone in a vacuum, the poet is able to navigate a postcolonial world that is fed by “the genteel fuels of empire.” “Navigate” is probably the wrong word. More like piercing old maps until a new voice emerges — molten, effusive and prophetic.

My favorite stanza appears in “Contronym.”

“A camel, ferrous brown — shoes sharpened / to crampons — may be ideogram enough, needle enough / to pierce the left wall of wilderness sentience. Holdfast, / hold, fast, through the breach. / The one we must confront awaits.”

Calling this stanza “my favorite” might be a lie. “I Was Going To Buy a Parakeet, But the Laundromat Lost My Clothes” appeared in trampset and is a favorite for its weirdness. It involves a more literal unraveling. The poet says that by parakeets, he means books, songbird selves, voices as company. But to the laundromat the poet went:

“Train platforms / remind me of fragility. The laundromat, with its MonFri spin / cycle, its dryer-sheet currency, called, taunted. The snap / of the door had scattered, again, the thread from my clothes / in sudden flocks of lint. I already knew. I had begun to sift / down onto the November sidewalk. I, like the fabric / of my clothes, emulating the down of my birds, no scaffold / of beaks and claws to hold my strange, human, snow.”

The poem alights on unexpected softness. There are many such moments in this collection, amid anguished contortions and hauntings. Something unites the deconstruction. The book (over 90 poems) is alive with the invisible, that which stirs like “winds of an unstable outline.” Unravel brings to readers rich, inventive language that somehow opens the ineffable.

Book Review: Unravel was originally published in trampset on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Bad Foundations by Brian Allen Carr, Clash Books, 2024

This novel is bonkers existentially. In the best way. There’s fear of vermin, mold, ghosts, curses and the ineluctable future. But also the wisdom of myth or at least the intelligent gears of myth-making. “Up until now, we’ve seen it all wrong — lived a reversed myth,” the narrator surmises. “In reality, the rock smiles, lets go of Sisyphus, and rolls back down the hill… And every time a person fails, a rock rolls down toward heaven.”

Cook, the first-person protagonist, is a presumably middle-aged working-class dude with a wife and clever yet sincere daughters. Cook inspects crawl spaces for a living, selling repair packages for a company that profits off such things. The work takes him across the Midwest, into homes in varying stages of decay, to a supernatural hotel, to jail and back again, endlessly inside and outside of anxiety and visions.

Carr sends up corporate culture with hilarious moments, yet, as is characteristic of previous work, endears to the reader a host of memorable characters. This is a testament to his writing: a satirical edge that doesn’t serve caricature but something human and even tender. He can make fun of corporate culture but also find dignity in those trying to meet sales goals. And the landscape beneath houses becomes the perfect device for depth and symbolism, the rot of existence on which people build seemingly solid lives. The book comes with diagrams to leave no technical aspect of the trade misunderstood. And comes with some stirring passages: “For every person on a Zoom call, there are 1,000 people out there balancing the internet on their backs. Making the internet from their sweat. Touching reality so their managers don’t have to.”

Carr is one of those writers whose reflections on working life feel real, not overstated or understated. Even the surreal moments in Bad Foundations are grounded in estrangement and human need. Carr writes like a madcap seer of the working class, prophet of the impossible hustle, and the reader loves him for the fun he has.

BRIAN ALLEN CARR - BAD FOUNDATIONS - CLASH BOOKS

Three books by men I admire lined up on my shelf. Been reading them as spring stretches each day. In the deep reading, in the holes beneath our lives, sprout different kinds of signifiers. A new reading of love. Or sadness. Or maybe a quirk in these pages that makes everyday struggle more real. All great reads for different reasons…

Blur by Dan Crawley, Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2023

Something fun and subversively ecstatic in these stories, just as there is something dark and ragged and lonesome. These fifty flash fictions center familial strife, broken relationships, little knots of human entanglement. They brim with boys and men being cruel to each other or being broken depending on their luck and murky patrimony. Crawley’s prose is spare but full of allegory, figures like the busted-out “Bull” that in the past roamed neighborhoods where people slept outside because of the heat — the bull a wild kind of reckoning eventually lost to swamp coolers and other amenities as people migrated indoors.

The wild and civilized clash often in this collection. In “Big Cat,” a man meets a mountain lion near his friend’s house and feels his courage flagging as he tries to rationalize his own escape. Alas, hollowed out by fear, he experiences something close to sublimity: “Go on, a voice reverberates down deep within your entire being. It’s a voice you recognize. As is the wind that murmurs amid brittle leaves in autumn or water that sings over smooth stones quilting a creek bed.”

And when the stories tilt all the way inside the domestic, into the heart of the frustrated sedentary, the indoors, the subtext Crawley creates between his characters has a real but not unbearable weight. In “Attributes,” father and son (the latter estranged from his partner) share a scene that ends with the making of a sandwich. In characteristic Crawley fashion, the last line reads: “Gently, he starts over.”

Hollows by Tommy Dean, Alternating Current Press, 2022

Well, I’ll be damned. It starts with a declaration of sorts — anaphora used to set the stakes of what I assume is desperate Midwest life. “We all live poorly here,” reads the first story, “Here.” Other adverbs attributed to the stuck and doomed: “insecurely,” “indignantly,” “rashly,” “permanently,” “ignorantly.” “A caged harmony,” the story says. “An erosive happiness.” The forty-five flash pieces throughout probe deep. Dean’s writing is poetic and philosophical, fiercely descriptive. It breaks down toughness with its own bleak toughness, the teeth of a direct but brilliant language, the grit of each symbol.

One of the deepest, “Wave,” is about two quarreling partners, a deconstructed home:

“Every month, I take down a new door, leaving them on the curb for the trash man, small offerings to the spirits of unnamed barriers. Cabinet doors pop from their hinges, exposing industrial cleaners and solvents, cups from shuttered restaurants, plates with scratches from your overzealous stabbing of beef and potatoes.”

Is there something fortifying about such bareknuckled desolation? Maybe it exposes one’s sentiments to their own roots, tethers of love, illusions still throbbing with virginal energy. When reading “The Bridge,” three short stories woven together with the same characters experiencing young love and tragedy, something took shape in me. What if these harsh and formative moments between parents and kids, between friends, between lovers, were key to something greater? What if the desolation nurtured life? I thought this reading “Open to an Ocean” about a boy’s spiritual connection to his mother during an oppressive heat wave and his makeshift rain dance: “And still, she calls for him, because even without water, even with the searing heat, her instinct is to love him, and so he dances.”

And again in “Naming the Darkness,” a piece about two brothers at the turn of the millennium, the younger one sensing the tragic fate of the older one as the older prepares to deploy. The story comes to life with eerie details, and what’s unknowable swirls on the periphery. A sense of dread emerges but also a bond. “I meant to take time more seriously,” the younger brother, 14, says near the end. “To care a little more about the people around me.”

And Drought Will Follow by Lee Potts, Frosted Fire, 2021

Lee Potts writes exquisitely about loss — lost people, lost objects, lost time — each poem a thin steel spring holding light, rain, dirt, crows, “ancient nails,” and aquifers. His lines move with a delicacy that is irresistible and irrevocable. They tinker and plumb shadows. From the natural world of decay and entropy to a haunted dream-life, these twenty-three poems make a spare but indelible debut chapbook.

In “Standing Water,” the individual and lyrical give way to geologic time. Recalling a municipal pool, the speaker of the poem starts:

We learned

to still ourselves,

to allow

our bodies’

hollow chambers

to lift us again

above the weight

of water

and our breath,

unsealed, returned

our voices to us.

The pool is later filled in “like any grave / and largely forgotten,” which leads to a greater reflection on natural and manmade forces, the slow realization of loss:

There’s nothing

here for the moon

to pull at anymore,

but night rain recalls

pausing with the water once

gathered here

and whispers a complaint

to weeds and rocks

on its way into deep,

slow aquifers

and eons

in the dark.

In “Words between the Young and the Dead,” the dead instruct: “You should learn to read roots now.” It’s a wise adage that comes with a note of melancholy. In the everyday, Potts finds tiny broken puzzles of facts and their displaced beginnings. If poetry is anything, it is less reparation than integration with heterogeneous reality. That’s not to say strokes of precision, as found in these poems, don’t lead to a richer inner life. Through its intricately crafted sense of loss, “And Drought Will Follow” sharpens one’s sense of love.

It’s 2 a.m. Saturday, and I am awake, catching up with some of my favorite writers, specifically pieces about childhood, parenting, love. One of my twin daughters is sleeping in my bed with my spouse because she’s been sick. My other daughter wanted a slumber party on the couch — she took the little one, I took the big one — and fortunately her snoring woke me up because now I’m doing my favorite thing: reading/writing in the middle of the night.

Something I read asked hard questions about the role of the father, particularly in a girl’s life when so much of the world is structured around the desires of men. It’s strange that at 41, I’ve found relative peace in being a dad. I achieved this mostly by having no set model for being a dad and allowing ignorance more room in my brain than moral precepts. I suppose it’s a decent kind of ignorance, like soil wetted by rain, some erosion but also new sprouts, feelers, budding eyes.

Last night my spouse told me a boy in school wanted to kiss my daughter on the lips. Far from terrified, my daughter was nonchalant, even mildly intrigued. I experienced no anger hearing this. My own mother often teases me my daughters will be wild teenagers like I was in some grand karmic fashion. My response: okay. While I can be reckless and self-destructive, and I don’t wish that on them, I also don’t care for the opposite? The world is full of well-behaved children who grow up to be tyrants.

More importantly, my spouse tells me how I treat my daughters will inform their future relationships with men. She says no matter how badly I don’t want to be a model for them, I inevitably will be. It’s something to think about, Freud and all, but then I remember how ignorant and unambitious I am, and that reassures me. I want to be present in their lives, nothing more.

There are things I won’t say about my own father. There are things we won’t allow ourselves to say about our parents. I will say I’ve grown closer to my mother as I age and as I experience parenthood myself. I will say my mother was a feminist before I knew what that term meant. I will say it’s important to tell my daughters as they grow up and also the women in my life that I don’t want anything from them. I have my own dreams and desires, sure, but I’m not here to impose them. I’m just here, for the time being, easily entranced by weather, the chance of rain.

A peeled ember glowing without heat.

A sky dripping with honey in waves.

The feather of thought across the page,

your wrists

A trashcan full.

The bellowing night.

Too Much Tongue by Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick, Autofocus, 2022

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

I’ve never read anything like Too Much Tongue, a collaborative series of untitled prose poems by trampset contributors Adrienne Marie Barrios and Leigh Chadwick. Reading it is like finding a nest in your refrigerator, slapping yourself to wake up, then noticing how each wispy thread of the nest is throbbing, changing color. A feeling of magic emerges, concurrent with dread, and the nest explodes in your hands. What was presumably a home for something becomes translucent confetti in the hollow space above your head. In this way, the collection is strange, surprising, and spectacular.

I’ve long believed modernity exists in the human mind as a feeling of horror and awe. There are overgrown yards and smoldering cities. Whatever encumbered language we’ve learned scrapes against the sky, sensing escape. And maybe the poet is someone sensitive to the thick of it, both burdened and burning, subsuming the world’s fatal shapes until they’re molten. Then a shift, a breath, an echo no one has ever heard. Too Much Tongue breaks the mold as the best poetry does.

“Someone tells Adrienne Barrios, There are more than a few of us for whom life is an ache and a long red glare over the horizon.”

The poets use their own names in the third person. This has an amusing postmodern effect — making the speakers of the poems into recurring personas — but even more than self-referentiality, the method gives the poets a way to work through images intimately. And what we glean from their correspondence is that they exist in different parts of America, physically, but together as partners in poetry on the page. The book evokes pre-Musk, in-pandemic literary Twitter, circa 2020, when writers were colliding in social media and forming novel relationships. There were new modes of artistic interaction, new possibilities of hope.

“Imagine, Adriene Barrios messages Leigh Chadwick. Imagine people in a room filled with other people in a room. Leigh Chadwick can imagine but only if she squints. This is what she tells Adrienne Barrios. Leigh Chadwick also tells her if you squint harder, an entire hospital empties and if you keep squinting until your eyes are nothing but skin, it is as if you’ve never slept in sorrow.”

As fantastical as the collection is, it is grounded in real concerns of mental health, school shootings, forest fires, fear of the future, the bite of reality.

“She tries on a dress that feels like depression pretending to be lust,” reads a line. And later, “Leigh Chadwick thinks about telling Adrienne Barrios that every song is a good song to dance to if you’ve just climbed off the mountain on your bed.”

Self-consciousness is painful and bewildering but not without beauty: “Leigh Chadwick and Adrienne Barrios notice the stains on their clothes. The stains are red and shaped like the wilderness.”

And never is the book without compassion — two poets finding mutual respect and recognition in the vagaries of their lines. It feels like something new, like a masterpiece. Only Barrios and Chadwick could have written it. It feels like it couldn’t have been written any other way.

A philosopher once said a turtle holds up the world. When asked what holds up the turtle, he said turtles all the way down. After my own encounter with Too Much Tongue, I would say poetry holds up the world more than anything. It moves in invisible spaces, gives life to dead words. What holds up this book in particular? Bangers all the way down:

“Even so, they find themselves lost in the sincerity of breath. The magic of a pill. The fear of age. The dream of starlings.”

TOO MUCH TONGUE - Adrienne Marie Barrios & Leigh Chadwick - Autofocus

Book Review: Too Much Tongue was originally published in trampset on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Just Outside the Tunnel of Love by Francine Witte, Blue Light Press, 2023
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

To say I know what makes good flash fiction would be a lie. I have no sheet of metrics, no firm rules. One of the Internet’s most popular literary forms, flash fiction appears to have the economy of poetry, the weight of each line, but also narrative leaps reminiscent of novels. Flash fiction does less than the longer short story in terms of space but, given the right writer, infinitely more in that space. So yes, flash fiction writers are poets and novelists in one. Or something like that. Most of all, when you come across a master of the form, they are like magicians, pulling a full-grown, trembling rabbit from a page, half a page. This is all a long-winded way of saying I was instantly entranced by trampset contributor Francine Witte’s flash fiction collection Just Outside the Tunnel of Love.

Witte is one such master of the form, it is clear upon reading. The book offers more than 40 amusing and heartbreaking gems, each polished to a delicious sheen without being forced or stuffy. Compression marks these stories, it is true, but so does a certain cheekiness/breeziness/absurdism that is downright contagious. From sentence to sentence, Witte is deft, daft, punchy and nimble.

The stories revolve around love and the failure of love, of course.

“Meanwhile, the thirst for everything is draping the room like sunlight,” reads a passage in “Clean Magic.” In short, a lover steals a man’s legs. She has a magic rock that glows “like a woman in love.” The rock itself is narrated by a spirit trapped inside it, “mistaking its hardness for truth.” The flash is split into three shorter parts, each weirdly complementing the other in “its own measured way, like time and dying and love.”

In “Perfect,” a woman meets her deceased partner in a dream, where he is far more perfect than he was in life, “his tongue gone empty of lies.” The woman considers suicide in an ironic, matter-of-fact way — irony evident in many stories — but can’t resist the man now perfect in death. The dream is beautiful and nostalgic: “The jab and snag of the rocks and the two of them going naked and in love.”

Love is a wilderness in this collection. Cheating, divorce, and broken families form many plots. Potatoes and pumpkins stand in for companions. Some of the stories have meta elements, narrators self-consciously crawling into themselves or smashing narrative pieces together rather flippantly. Reading Witte reminded me of other trampset contributors out there mining domestic darkness: Cathy Ulrich, Amy Barnes, Sarah Freligh, and Rick White, to name a few. What these writers discover in the unmasking of cliched life is, if not tenderness itself, some softened spot of human connection. “Not-Myrtle,” another beauty from Witte, lands on such a spot: “and when I finally saw your eyes looking straight at me, I could see a half a dozen alligator bites already in them, and I’m thinking that maybe it might be okay to try to put together all our chewed-up parts, you and me, and see if they form one pretty good thing.”

https://francinewitte.com/blank-5/

Book Review: Just Outside the Tunnel of Love was originally published in trampset on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee by Michael Farfel, Montag Press, 2022

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

Right off the bat, I will tell you: I’m not the best person to review this book. I don’t regularly read fantasy, and I recognize trampset contributor Michael Farfel’s The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee is some kind of epic fantasy. That said, I enjoyed the book. And the fantasy genre elements I did recognize — arduous landscapes, battles, mythic swords — were all infused with the author’s raw, boundless imagination.

I first encountered Michael’s imagination in a story he published with us about oven repair:

The Oven. by Michael Farfel | by trampset | trampset.

It was reading this piece when we discovered his talent for building worlds within worlds. Bugsbee showcases that talent on a huge scale. The plot concerns an average-seeming guy, Manfred, who spends his days drinking at pubs and working as a copywriter before being thrust into another realm where a battle is raging for the fate of all realms. Saint Erneel — one of many crusty yet potent characters — takes Manfred under his wing as they try to stop an enemy army that likes to eat suns and wipe out existence. We watch as Manfred grows from diffident slouch to epic hero.

It’s a grand, thrilling journey, tumbling through Farfel’s mind as he creates worlds. His prose is vivid, grounded in sensory experience that gives these worlds life. Here is Manfred eating a squirming, alien fruit: “The juice of the fruit pumped a cool breath through his whole body and for a moment the colors of the world were more vibrant.”

Farfel ups the stakes of the book when exploring the metaphysical. He takes the genre elements and folds and unfolds them in visionary passages. With the same depth he unveiled in the trampset piece, he maps space and time with a keen sense of paradox: “As he looked at it, it revealed itself to be both a pinprick at the edge of the universe and the whole of the world around him.”

Bugsbee is a journey worth taking, if you’re up for it. It is at times brutal, drenched in the gore of battle, and at times as lovely as the grasses and flowers of strange worlds Farfel describes. At its best, the book offers the psychedelic — a heady trip through the cosmos and the self.

the reluctant journey of manfred bugsbee

Book Review: The Reluctant Journey of Manfred Bugsbee was originally published in trampset on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ambrotypes by Amy Cipolla Barnes, word west press, 2022

If inimitableness on the page is a sign of genius, then Amy Barnes is some kind of genius. To review her collection of stories, Ambrotypes, properly, I would need to get a stack of children’s construction paper, cut it to stars and shards using oversized antique scissors, soak it all with the spittle of a dying garden hose, then catapult the resulting mess through the sky, streaking near the space-line, to splatter high-rise windows in New York City. Then maybe I could say something about literary talent and artistic arrival. Then maybe I could get at the ghastly weirdness at the heart of this book. For this is a book of strange dreams seeping and cawing from the disturbed well of American domestic life. I’m talking about bathtubs on airplanes, suburban stigmata, gaping holes in houses. The nearly 60 flash stories in this collection are absurd. They’re also deadly serious.

I’m not sure what other writers compare to Barnes, so I’ll just tell you what came to mind. At first, I thought of the magical-realist Americana of Steven Millhauser. Barnes’ stories pop with a Brand Name symbolism, artifacts of consumer life given warped new dimension, sometimes characters themselves. Then I thought of the postmodern eeriness of Don DeLillo as evident in the namesake “Ambrotypes.” “I watch a documentary that tries to authenticate a newly discovered death photograph of Abraham Lincoln,” says the protagonist. “I stare at his face and freeze frame to see if he’s stepped in a black hole, if the tiny polka dots that make him up in the 19th century are coming back to life on television.”

Lastly, I thought of the speculative feminist fiction of Carmen Maria Machado. Like Machado, Barnes’ stories mix whimsy with horror. In “Mannequin,” a woman falls to pieces, literally, when her abusive ex shows up. In “The Inosculation of Sarah,” which appeared in trampset, the titular inosculation becomes a metaphoric way a mother protects her daughter from a man described as a “tornado in another county.”

Perhaps no author is quite like Barnes, at least that I’ve read. I found myself slowing down for each story, tracing the firework-spread of associations and images. Barnes creates unique textual tension between hard-wrought detail and effusive symbolism: a composition half-severe with its own conceit yet half-loose with wordplay. I noticed Barnes’ first sentences typically cut deep and set the stakes for something odd and severe. “Mama gave me stigmata for my seventh birthday” is how “Cul-de-Sac Saint” begins. It’s one of my favorite stories for images like “fireflies replacing bees around my bloody hand held aloft.” How Barnes grows each kernel of her expansive imagination, well, that’s the uncanniness of this book. Ambrotypes disturbs and dazzles.

ambrotypes

Book Review: Ambrotypes was originally published in trampset on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.