The Sapiosexual Love Letter Podcast

Dear Reader, I have loved sharing and connecting with you through this epistolary project. It gave me a much-needed creative outlet during a very weird time in my life, and it helped me explore my queer identity and engage with some really challenging topics in a disarmingly whimsical sort of format. I hope you have gotten a bit of a kick out of it as well. Last weekend, M. and I spent the day wit...

Dear Reader, I’ve come down with some kind of summer cold, so I hope you’ll bear with me if I start wandering off into fever dream territory. I’m feeling a little loopy. M and I were at Electric Forest last weekend, which was its own kind of fever dream experience but all in a good way. Even the sweltering hot dusty days and the exciting and soggy Sunday afternoon thunderstorm. It was interesting...

Dear Reader, I took the title of this letter from a Greg Brown song, Sleeper , with no deeper significance intended beyond being a reference to April, and also I happened to recently be giving that album a re-listen. (If there was a way to read exposure to song lyrics via brain scan, I bet my results would reveal a brain pretty substantially shaped by 80s and 90s Greg Brown.) I started this newsle...

Dear Reader, I’ve been in my new place about two weeks now, and it’s all starting to feel a little more settled. I’ve got art on my walls. I know where to find the eggs and cream and Ezekiel bread at my neighborhood grocery store. My cat has mapped out the coziest napping spots for each part of the day. I’m still in a little bit of a reading lull. I piled all my physical books onto their shelves,...

Dear Reader, One of the convenient things about writing this letter electronically is ease of editing. Normally. But I’m finding that this particular letter is a little unruly. Something of a weird ramble. I thought about pulling it to pieces and starting over again, but you know what? Screw it. We’re going full ramble. You’ve been warned. Have you heard of aphantasia ? It’s the phenomenon some pe...

Dear Reader, I’m sure you heard the news that last Saturday five people were killed and 17 were injured at ClubQ in Colorado Springs. If you visit ClubQ’s website , you’ll find a note that they’re closed until further notice, but you can also find their regular dinner menu. ClubQ has a menu because it’s a place to hang out and spend time with people, and it turns out that LGBTQIA+ people will eat...

Dear Reader, It has been an odd couple of weeks. I wrapped up my old job at the start of this month and had a nice send-off lunch with my former coworkers. Now I’m working on getting used to being unemployed writing full time. So far the strangest thing about being unemployed writing full time is … well, that it kinda doesn’t feel like anything in particular. That might be because my work-from-hom...

Dear Reader, Just a short letter this time. This week I am marking a new chapter in my life. I am leaving my very stable, steady, conventional job to … well, to make art. To write and explore my creative brain, and wash off the thick dust of years of disuse. It’s exhilarating and a bit terrifying and intoxicating and just deeply strange. I’ve worked at the same company for more than ten years, wit...

Dear Reader, I have a confession to make: I hate writing. I mean, I also love writing. It’s definitely a love-hate relationship. But as a creative person, writing was not my first love. Probably not even my ninth or tenth. As a kid, I loved to draw and paint and sew, to make art and weird crafty things. I remember once “wasting” most of a box of tissues making little puppets and stuffed animals. I...

Dear Reader, I just read a scene in a romance novel where one character invites the other back to his place, despite being very omg-first-time-with-a-man nervous, and the other character notices the nervousness and suggests that they watch a movie. And it suddenly occurred to me for the first time (in spite of all the “Netflix and chill” references that have proliferated in the last decade) that i...

Dear Reader, I really wanted to send you another letter before the month was out, and now it’s the last day of August, and my thoughts are still pretty scattered. Oh well! I’ve been working on a cheeky and ambitious thesis that I like to call “Who Fucks Who In the Patriarchy.” I may return to this another day because I feel like I haven’t quite strung it all together yet. But at a start, a little...

Dear Reader, I was having a conversation with my mom the other day about how a cute house I’ve long admired just went up for sale, and she very sweetly said, “Ooh, do you want to buy it? Maybe it’s meant to be.” And I said, “I don’t believe in meant to be .” And then I flipped her the bird and drove away on my motorcycle. Ok, not that last part, but there’s no way to say, “I don’t believe in meant...

Dear Reader, Hope you’re well. Has it been hot where you are? Are you staying safe? Me, I’ve been on something of an unreasonably grumpy kick. For … well, a few years now, but with a particular resurgence in the last couple weeks. There are many things to be reasonably grumpy about, but then there’s just being a surly bastard, and I regret to say that sometimes that’s me. Partly that’s why I’ve be...

Dear Reader, If you haven’t noticed, I’m an overthinker by nature. This has been a hell of a week for it.  One thing I think about a lot is the way that we think about how we think about what we think we think about. That is, there’s what you actually think about, the whole mess of your perceptions and reactions and speculations and stray idle thoughts and sneaky cognitive biases. And what you thi...

Dear Reader, Happy Juneteenth to you. This week I was reading up a little on Frederick Douglass, and I want to share this quote, which I think is appropriate for the holiday and which also applies equally well in the context of Pride Month: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact...

Dear Reader, I was talking to a coworker last week about mental health in the workplace, managing personal ups and downs and how that affects being able to show up the way that you want to. They were talking about wanting to pursue new opportunities but also worrying about falling flat on their face because new things mean transition which means stress which means potential mental health impact. O...

Dear Reader, I am writing to you on a rainy Wednesday evening. I had tuna casserole for dinner (affectionately known in my family as “tuna noodle glop”) and shared some tuna with my cat, who is small and kindly and very dumb, who I love very much. I am now drinking a modest glass of the limited-run Lemonade rosé from Day Wines—the backstory being that these grapes had been intended for a classic p...

Dear Reader, I have been a little too much in my own head with trying to come up with something clever for you. Part of my brain lately has been taken over by work stuff, which is mostly not that interesting unless you work on the same stuff. Another part of my brain has been preoccupied with bodily autonomy and civil liberties, but there’s nothing I have to add to that discourse that hasn’t been...

Dear Reader, I’ve been chasing around some related-unrelated thoughts around beauty culture and, like, performative beauty, and the cultural dialogues around those things. And before I wade in, it’s probably worth noting that this is all a foreign fucking land to me. I find it fascinating in the same way that I find other foreign cultures fascinating, but I did not grow up immersed in beauty cultu...

Dear Reader, In my regular work life, this past week marked our official return to the office. My workplace is one of those that’s trying out a partial in-office, partial work-from-home model. So I will be going into the office two days a week, and it’s a roll of the dice whether those two days align with the in-office days of any of the coworkers I might happen to wish to bump into. I took the op...

Dear Reader, I have spent the last week processing a swell of primal rage over a comment tweeted by some right-wing asshat. This asshat was described as a business person who lost his recent campaign for public office, but I’ve forgotten his name and I’m not going to go looking for it because he doesn’t deserve the clicks. His tweet was something like, “People who support gender-affirming care for...

Dear Reader, As my corner of the world teeters on the brink of spring, and as I am yearning to start getting outside in the sunshine, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about bodily joy—that species of physical joy in movement, in sensation, in exertion, even in exhaustion. From a conventional “fitness” perspective, I am a fairly indifferent specimen. I’m reasonably strong, have good mobility and ran...

Dear Reader, You ought to know that this is shaping up to be a more regular correspondence than I have managed to keep up in … well, ever. In fact I have a very long history of being a very poor pen pal, or returner of phone calls, or replier to emails. Also a very inconsistent blogger and a non-finisher of all manner of art and craft project. On the other hand, in my professional life, I’ve built...

Dear Reader, I don’t have a proper book review for you today, and I’ll tell you why. The short answer is, I found I didn’t really want to keep reading the book I was reading. But the long answer (because you know there’s gonna be a long answer) is really about my expectations as a romance reader, including how characters are drawn and what sex-positivity looks like to me. The book I’m not-reviewin...

Dear Reader, I started writing about burnout and self-care, and the more I wrote, the more I thought, “No, this is garbage, no one needs to read this.” So we’re not doing that this week. I really love that about writing. I like that about the process. I like that later I can go back, read what I wrote, and think, “Huh, is that really what I thought I think? Well, I’m not sure I agree with that at...