Waste No Experience
The corpulent literary blob has room enough for everything.
During COVID I worked at a grocery store alongside Maddy Ward—a professional acrobat who became my friend and collaborator. A couple of days ago, she left me a voice message, “I just re-read this Worm House that you wrote and it was such a gut punch…”
For nearly two years, I made one issue of Worm House per week. Uncle Fingers’ mom gave me a stipend of $35 dollars which was enough to print 20 copies of each 4-page zine. My sobriquet “Miss Expanding Universe” refers to a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, which was inspired by the dance choreographer Ruth Page. Even though both Noguchi and Page died before I was born, I was jealous of their l’amour fou, and sought to inherit the electricity which momentarily fused their lives.
Most issues featured photorealistic depictions of myself and Uncle Fingers. While residing in his mother’s basement which at all times reeked of feline fecal matter, we became ad hoc supervisors of the void.
Like your standard literary publication run by equal opportunity satirists, Worm House shed new light on well-known works—
and took on an array of topics including fame, money, gum, ugliness, bad art, patriarchy, snacks, uncle, incest, artist’s block, manic depression, fear, habits, sobriety, psychosexual frankness, god, feces, lobsters, unrequited love and more…
Good art, if there is such a thing, embarrasses the artist. Worm House’s lodestar was a willingness to remain aggressively, even repellently vulnerable and overexposed. If you start saying to yourself, “I’m really on to something” or “Is this going to get me cancelled?” you’ve already taken yourself out of the flow.
In creating Worm House, I learned this: everything one encounters, without exception, is metabolized into an infinitely expanding blob of significance.
P.S. Approximately 60% of Worm House is compiled in How To Be the Worst Laziest Fattest Most Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the World EVER, sold by Bateau Press. If you live in Portland, you can get a copy at Powell’s, Selected Stories or my next event.