Dark sky. Dark days. Dark nights.
Or: marking the winter solstice with a video of my first ever performance with a live band…

We’ve got another week to go before we hit the winter solstice, the longest night, and then — at long last — the light will start to return. My dad made it an annual ritual to stay up until sunrise on solstice night; a pagan act of sympathetic magic, an act of faith and trust. Keep the hearth lit, keep the fires stoked. Steward our own sources of light and warmth until the sun comes back.

The longest night of the year is coming, and this is my last letter to you of the year. I’ve loved sharing more longform writing with you through these letters this year. For better or worse, I’ve been sharing some form of my experience with friends and strangers alike online since my teenage Livejournal days of hardcoded html, neon text on black backgrounds and flashing animated avatars. And — like I wrote way back when I described wanting to start this newsletter — processing the gore, grief, joy, chaos and confusion of being a human through letter- and diary-writing has been a cornerstone of my reflective and creative process for as long as I can remember. Then and now, I’m grateful for the space to sort my thoughts out (sort my head out) by putting words into sentences like a jigsaw puzzle, then chucking the results out into the digital ether to see what sticks, what echoes, what comes back.

But today I want to share something different with you. You might remember a while back, when I performed live with my friends’ band, backofthebrain. I’ve performed my spoken word in a lot of places, from Edinburgh Fringe to the Royal Albert Hall. But crawling around on the floor of a tiny clandestine venue in the shadow of Strangeways prison on the night of a lunar eclipse while four sonic powerhouses collaboratively weaved a real-time sound spell over and under my words… that was a first. Doing it with fragments lifted direct from my journal pages — the most intimate, hopeful, confessional things I’d written for no-one other than myself — that was another. And sharing it with no sound check, no song sheet, no rehearsals, no real other plan than to give ourselves the permission and chance to experiment and trust… for me, another first.

Here it is, remixed into this brilliant video edit by my amazing partner:

There are moments where the words are inaudible. There are moments where you can see me get my pages muddled.  There are moments when everything blurs into chaos and noise. But we’re here for queer failure, remember? We’re here to be imperfect. We’re here to be brave and honest and to do things that scare us, that connect us, to make things which are messy and raw and human. I did that. We did that. Together.

That’s the energy I want more of as we transition into 2024 and beyond: stewarding ourselves and each other through dark days and dark nights; stoking our fires; putting our faith and trust in each other; screaming; making art; making music. Believing in the return of the light.