dykes day for Worms
dykes day for worms
My name’s Fabiola; I am a writer and editor based in DC. I run an experimental literary practice called Hermetic State and recently, we just published our first book called dykes day, a holigay. We set out to create a project that was lush, reflective, open,poetic and regenerative for the lesbian community here in DC and across the Mid-atlantic. Below we take a look at some of the items that cluttered our work desk for the duration of this process.
dykes day, a holigay is written by Tahjia Brantley, Mayah Martinez, Adaeze Okere, Pau B.C, Mayah Lovell, and myself (Fabiola Ching). Gabrielle Octavia Rucker served as our editor and Samantha Vassor was behind all our graphics and visual work, save for the book layout. We are working on a soundscape to accompany the book lol we are dramatic; the soundscape is mixed and mastered by MANIIK and 000777. To us, they are Saz and Lona. Saz and Lona also produced our most recent radio show with Montez Press Radio in NY...
dykes day originally genesized as a three-page series of poems written by my friend Mayah Lovell - very thick, sensious and textured stuff. For as long as I’ve known Mayah, she’s been like this; her hands are in the dirt, constantly moiling. So I was down when she asked if we could produce this work into something more robust and more generous. This was July 2021, I had just gotten my first tattoo and was very worried about being houseless in a month. This was during the era of “now more than ever” and more than ever, I needed to be spacious and hopeful and slow. I had been thinking about experimental publishing as a thing I could do and was curious about within my practice. My attempts to connect and work felt futile and short lived, even embarrassing at times. dykes day provided the perfect opportunity to not just work and take my writing practice seriously, but to make some friends also.
dykes day book trailer designed by Samantha; this was an amalgamation of not only the drafts we were writing but also our visual inspirations/motifs. A lot of this trailer is a nod to MESSY IN THE GARDEN, which is a play featured in our book.
Mayah and I’s vein diagrams intersect at most times - before we even met in person to draw up an outline of what this book could look like, or how we would even pay for something like this -we already had mirroring expectations and ideas for the writers we wanted to commission and the places we wanted to explore. We knew that we wanted a roster of dramatic poets, ideally black dykes who also lived in the mid-Atlantic. We knew that we wanted to produce a body of work that was multidimensional and bright, taking the act of worldbuilding very literally by incorporating sound and movement. We knew that we wanted it to be fluid and always open. Other visually motivating shit like…surrealist giantess porn art came to mind, as well as liquified letters and where did all the black dykes of Logan Circle go?
As part of our writing process, we held consecutive writing workshops and clinics, through the winter and into the spring; at the very least to clear our throats and see how we were doing. We went through a broad iteration of drafts, ideas, and characters per story and poem. Maya Martinez was just off the heels of publishing a book herself but was still traveling and working. She and Mayah L wrote an erotic love play about two larger-than-life women, a trippy hypnotic dream of a play. Tahjia is in the Iowa Writers Workshop so she’s on a rigorous writing schedule, practically on a daily basis - one would guess that she churned out hundreds of poems last year. Her work is intricate and layered as fuck. Adaeze was taking a break from sculpting and furniture making this year to focus on paper art and writing - and that was a blessing to us quite frankly. Adaeze is very sure and intuitive with her work. Pau was on a different time coast in the Oaxacan mountains, doing a lot of auditory work, making candles, all while writing some heart wrenching prose - her poem 30 closes the book and I am yet to read it without ice in my throat. Me myself, I was working retail jobs and finding it really hard to sound like myself. It had been a frustrating year.
Doodles by Maya and Mayah while writing Messy in the Garden, an erotic surrealist play printed on pink pages in our book. The calligraphy in “Fin” shows the disintegration of Little Thief when they were sucked down the esophagus of Giantess 2. Pink segmented worm, strawberry, 2 fuzzy caterpillars, a moth folded inward, light pink rosehip. Strawberries were one of the central objects of the play. The giantesses are as tall as Sequoiadendron giganteum trees. We sketched a tall tree that would be along the margin of a page. The giantesses face one another at the end of the play while lying on top of each other. They have an undeniable twin energy, so we thought of doing the Rubin vase illustration–that image of the 2 faces that creates a vase in the middle. Rubin vase is more of an ambiguous image, and because the play is surreal we wanted to sketch it in a way that also shows their maniac smiles/expressions.
It feels like we were never not writing or working or thinking about this world- and the people in it - or remembering, or the places or the font sizes. All whilst life was happening. Writing a book is insane and publishing is a wild wild west. Mayah says she won’t write anything new in 2023. I hear that.
A lot of writing is paying homage and showing devotion to other works that you love, at least for me. We wanted to share some books, ideas, and rotating themes we kept littered across our desks throughout this process. As excited as we were to write this book, we were more excited about interacting with our favorite things and sharing them with each other.
From the dykes day desks:
Fabiola: I read Narratives in 2020 and I was really floored by it; I identified with the distinct method of formatting, this sort of playful informality; it felt very intimate to me yet generous, inviting. I know it’s not new when people write with all lower caps or with little regard to “appropriate” punctuations but that is a style of writing that was spearheaded by black women, mostly as a method of ensuring accessibility. It’s also something that we took seriously in this book (dykes day is in all lower-case, no punctuation marks to emphasize that it belongs to everyone) and it’s a practice that Mayah emphasizes in her writing as well.
Narratives was published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and I highly respect the work they’ve done, they are a major catalyst for why I want to produce experimental texts by black lesbians.
African Love Stories: An Anthology by Ama Ata Aidoo
Mayah: African Love Stories: An Anthology is a book printed in 2006 that features several different short stories about the love lives of women written by African Authors. I loved the way the book features intergenerational perspectives, and includes deep heart wrenching topics of family, queer relationships, child bearing in a tale-like writing structure. The essence of folktale and storytelling was a huge point for the way we share in dykes day. Words from black women are so vital for the way humans move forward and through the world.
Hidden Washington DC 1984 - 1994 by Michael Horsley
F: This is a really vast collection of photographs of “old D.C'' from the mid 80s to early 90s by Michael Horsley. It’s a major part of my research; for the book, I knew I wanted to write something that paid homage to my coming of age in d.c, the places I would walk around and stare at with my friend Abby. And I wanted to spin time as well, go back and forth. Washington D.C is beautiful and I feel fortunate to have landed here. My contribution was a series of vignettes inspired by the McMillan Park Reservoir, in particular the silos that overlook the Bloomingdale neighborhood; they are these sort of eerie concrete domes. If you’ve ever driven down North Capitol in North East DC, you’ve seen them; they are part of an old sand filtration system that purified water through these sand-filled silos. It is the last of its kind still standing, the sand is still there and all. In the 20s, it was open to the public as a park and it became thee unofficial integrated park in D.C, amongst being a community site for activists, children, etc.
The Commission set out to create a comprehensive plan to preserve park space and provide for the recreation and health of the growing city. The spaces chosen for this purpose were primarily hilltops with extensive views of the city, creating an “Emerald Necklace” of parks along the high points of the city as places to escape urban life while still in town. McMillan Park realized that ideal by combining the new below-ground sand filtration system with the above-ground park and landscape created by Olmsted[...]
So you get the idea. But as long as I’ve known them, they’ve been sitting abandoned and locked for decades now while the city tries to figure out how to turn it into an eyesore. My friend Abby told me, in the summer of 2019 I think, that people go on dates in those silos, under the earth. They bring a bottle of wine too. I think that opened up a whole world for me, however I am yet to go in there myself.
This is a reading of one of the vignettes I wrote entitled Fall 2003; it’s about two friends going down into the silos to smoke weed after school.
Queering Black Atlantic Religions, Transcorporeality in Candomblé, Santería, and Vodou, Duke University Press, by Roberto Strongman, gifted by Mayah’s friend L Scully
M: Queering Black Atlantic Religions demonstrated that religious rituals of trance possessions are a vehicle that allows humans to realize themselves as embodiments of the divine. The merge between humans and the divine in these rituals creates gender expansive identities. They write how trance possession is essentially part of all African diasporic cultures. How can a poem use structure and form to have conversations around dykehood? How can punctuation be used to show community and radicalism? These are some practices we talked about through workshopping for the anthology. The acknowledgment for dykes day writing was within Afronowism, ritualism, gender expansive identities, and mourning queer and trans ancestors–all whilst highlighting those worlds for readers of the African diaspora.
M: LA Warman’s Whore Foods uses lesbian erotica to discuss politics and racism in the setting of an Organic Grocery Store, which is essentially WHole Foods. The surrealism is that the entire book is about an employee fantasizing about fucking everyone at the grocery store. The fiction and horniness of books like these pave the way to continue lesbian literature. The bold lesbian cover art inspired us for the back cover of dykes day, a holigay. I knew I wanted book cover art that showed erotism between 2 Black dykes, something seriously sexy, not being afraid to take a little risk.
F: Also, on the theme of back covers that are seriously sexy, The New Fuck You also has a back cover that is similar to ours and Warman’s cover - it’s a graphic of Wilma Flinstone and Betty Rubble fucking, or about to fuck.
F: I first saw Samantha’s work on IG, I think it was a flyer she had designed for artist Sienna Kwami. It was preeettyyyy. Very lush, utopic stuff. This was like a few years ago but when dykes day came around, I knew that we would be remiss if we didn’t hit her up. She understood the motifs and exuberance that we wanted to portray on a visual level, and she was also down for all our dramatics. My favorite graphics are of the GIANTESS lovers, which are portrayed in the play Messy In the Garden, written by the Mayahs.
M: It was really inspiring for us, but also really meta, to write while collaborating with our designer Samantha. We shared our poems and writings with her and she created images and 3D animations in her style. It was beautiful to see the colors, shapes, and feelings from our dykehood come to life visually, while also allowing a lot of free-reigns for her art so she could interpret the book in her own way. We had this back-and-forth communication, between the shared mediums that ultimately resulted in this bright eremia.
dykes day, a holigay is now available for purchase on our website, and you can also read the introduction written by our friend Ayana Zaire Cotton. Please email us at dykesday@gmail.com for stocklists.
