Gird Your Loins For PULP Public School! Quarantine and Assault! Publishing During #BLM!
Bonjour you dear PULP-ers of great mind, spirit, and sex magic,
Holy moly, what a ride. We started PULP a year ago — a fledgling bud in hard-packed internet soil—and have grown into a goddamn hydra-ed peony. Impossibly petal-ed, rare, tenacious, and should any one blossom be torn asunder by one of feminism’s innumerable adversaries and tumble to the ground? Well its sheer fertility, strength, and intelligence would generate an entirely new peony, capable of exacting the same brilliant growth, the same beauty, the same symbiosis with its surrounding comrades.
(Sorry for the odd peony metaphor — they only bloom 6 weeks of the year and they make me want to weep for their shaggy-headed, fleeting magnificence.)
This is all to say, FUCK YEAH AND THANK YOU!
For reading, for writing, for fighting alongside us in those beautiful bodies of yours—we’re taking a publishing hiatus for July and August while we build PULP Public School and prepare for our re-launch in September…!!!
In the meantime, keep yer fucking eyes on the prize; as all of the Black leaders keep reminding me as I wend my way through protest after protest (good grief the beauty of those rageful bodies), article after article, internet corner after internet corner…
Make this a movement, not a moment.
If you’re a white person, there is so. much. to do, but don’t let it daunt you. You’re stronger than you know, and the revolution needs you.
As always, here’s a host of articles to keep you turned on and up, including a piece from both me and July Westhale in our mutual farewell-for-now of sorts.
We love you in all your juice,
Katie (+July)
Risky Business: Digital Publishing In The Age Of #BLM, by July Westhale
As publishers at PULP, how can we ask folks who are already in positions of vulnerability to make themselves even more vulnerable by telling their stories? The fact is this: it is infinitely safer for white and white-presenting folks to go public with their own narratives about their bodies and their sexualities than it is for people of color, the latter of whom risk criminalization for far lesser crimes than wanting, or talking about wanting.
The Physical Effects Of Racism On The Human Body, by Katie Tandy
There’s evidence that any pain lasting more than a few minutes will leave a trace in the nervous system.
So what if pain was synonymous with your existence? What if the very body you were born into — a Black or brown body — was considered a crime, bound upon birth? What if your body had been exposed to pain — year after year, decade after decade, century after century? What sort of trace does that leave?
I’m Quarantined In The Room I Was Assaulted In, by Lexie Bean
For 98 days, I have been quarantined in a room that I’ve been raped in. In quarantine, your room becomes an extension of your body. It smells like you, remembers your mornings and nights; a room keeps everything you thought you lost.
Under this ceiling, I was pushed inside this room, half-conscious on cold medicine. Between these walls, the same person asked, “What if I keep doing the things you don’t like because it gives me pleasure?”
Lessons From A Nude Figure Model, by Sarah Simon
When I would stand up there, watching people watch me, draw me, scratch me out and start anew, get angry and tear me up, I realized it wasn’t me. The longer the class went on, the less embodied — but more myself — I felt.
This was strange — we often talk about feeling connected to ourselves in our bodies. But no. These moments proved to me that I have something more valuable than that, something that finds convenience in my body as its home.
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