The Man with the Golden Microphone killed my dad, and I’m glad he’s dead
The sound of Rush Limbaugh’s voice is the sound of my childhood.
It’s very strange, and confusing, the effect it has on me. On the one hand, it’s full of positive associations: hanging out with my dad in his pole barn, or his workshop. Dad snapping off the radio and stopping whatever he was working on to happily greet me, every time. In summer, fall, winter, and sugar season.
On the other hand, Rush’s voice is full of the negative associations of…its own content: that pure, fetid firehose of bigotry, strong man pseudo-intellectualism, and thinly veiled terror. I can still…
On Sophia Gaia’s two children, and what happened during the last Age of Wonder
No man can measure the span nor speed of time which passed between the birth of Sophia’s unintended firstborn, Yaldaboeth — who is Hunger — and the birth of her truly intended firstborn, Zoe Sophia — who is Wisdom. Nor can any man comprehend that which came to pass between the birthing of Zoe Sophia — during which Sophia died and gave her body to Gaia — and the coming of the children of men.
Yaldaboeth created many terrible creatures to live in the fire, water, air, and stone, before Sophia birthed her daughter and cast herself as a green…
And for the stillborn dream of the white collar career
We moved out of the city last month. Officially. Sold our house and packed our shit and moved it all out into the country.
It had an anticlimactic finality to it. Which seemed fitting.
I was raised on a 40 acre wood in mid Michigan, and I always knew I’d boomerang back to it eventually. Until then, I figured there was no point in living anywhere but the city.
Because diversity of experience is the gift we give ourselves and the legacy we give our children. Also, because it’s possible to have an actual serious white collar career as a…
An honest post mortem, gratitude, and closure.
I opened my Facebook account in 2006, during the tail end of my senior year at Western Washington. With a .edu email address — as was required for registration at that time. As irony would have it, it was recommended to me via my mom, who had run into a high school friend of mine and his mom at the grocery store, and requested we connect.
We never did connect. Even though I would quite have loved to stay in touch with Trent all these years. Now, in retrospect, that origins seems entirely fitting.
Too many essays and videos have…
While the world goes to hell, we’ve gone to the presses. We’ll need SOMETHING to read during the apocalypse.
Hi! Myself, and my upstart nerd magazine COSGRRRL, haven’t been publishing here on Medium a lot lately — but that’s not because we’ve been on hiatus. We’ve been working on realizing the vision I’ve had for COSGRRRL all along: a printed literary magazine, of the post-postmodern nerd persuasion.
After a lot of frustrating our poor illustrator, the insanely talented Dustin Coon (of HydriumStudio), waffling on various publishing methods and platforms, and panning my friends and family for startup cash through IndieGoGo, I’m incredibly pleased to announce that it’s here.
COSGRRRL: The Elemental Series, issues 1–5.
FUCK YOU. I yield my time.
Sent to: Grand Rapids Third Ward commissioners Senita Lenear and Nathaniel Moody, and Mayor Roslyn Bliss
Mayor and commissioners,
My name is Marjorie Steele; I live in the Third Ward, and I’ve lived in the city of Grand Rapids since 2008. I teach business as an adjunct at Kendall College of Art and Design, I’m a local independent journalist.
I was #4 in the call queue for public comment last night when public comments stopped being taken — even though I had called in long before the cutoff time.
Since I couldn’t give my comments last night, I’m sending them…
I’ve been working on this piece for weeks now. I started and canned it twice — something I haven’t done since my rookie blogging days.
This is a difficult piece to write, not only because I know it’s going to be unpopular. But because I know a lot of people aren’t going to understand what I’m saying at all.
But it’s time to say it anyway:
This virus isn’t the crisis. It’s more like the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I feel like in the sudden chaos, everyone’s missing the headline on this one. It’s not COVID-19 that’s deadly…
Generation Z is wide awake and terrified.
Thanks to a sweet tip from a colleague, I recently had the honor of acting as a judge for a writing competition which I won’t mention for Reasons.
Being the reckless overachiever that I am, I opted to judge in the category which had the most crushingly large pool of submissions: 161 poems, written by high school seniors across Michigan.
The responsibility of judging that many works was intimidating, yes. …
New female-founded, semi-illustrated print publication explores diverse perspectives on humanity through the lenses of sci-fi, fantasy, and pop culture.
Have you ever wanted to save the world?
Well now you can.
Part literary magazine, part pop culture manifesto, and illustrated just enough to engage the third grade reader in you, COSGRRRL boldly enters into the world of print with an ambitious five-part series titled Elemental.
In reference to Wendell Berry’s “Farmer Among the Tombs”, in honor of Grand Rapids, Michigan
I am oppressed
by all this glass and concrete
all this scurrying between buildings
and cars like so many worker drones
while my ancestral memory
recalls dancing
in the wild plumb orchard
down by that Grand old river.
I am oppressed
by the street lamps
and sidewalks illuminating nothing
leading nowhere
not even in a circle —
no decency of a cycle
just out into nowhere
where the sidewalk ends
and darkness and nature begin —
“here there be monsters,” They say,
and becon us home to our cars and
our suburbs.
Plow up the parking lots make subsidies for…
marjorie steele
poet, educator, hillbilly gnostic druid. indie publisher and creator of COSGRRRL magazine, teaching business @KCADofFSU.
