How to run when you have nowhere to go.
2025
5x9x.25 in.
Risograph print, rhinestones (45-page)
Printed at Directangle Press in Bethlehem, NH, with support from the Directangle Press Residency Grant Fund
How to run when you have nowhere to go. is a record of how sensations of whimsy (the stop of a walking path, the increase of heart rate, the goosebumps raised on skin) disrupt my attention and compel me toward alternative possibilities. Understanding how whimsy disrupts the oppressive and "inevitable" mundanity created by structures of racial capitalism, gender normativity, and sexual policing, the essay text makes sense of the role of whimsy and images in the wake of late capitalism; how these pictures function (in my life and within contexts of algorithms, surveillance, and visibility); and how we might reimagine our relationships to our bodies, the land, and the cosmos. The resulting publication is in many ways unresolved, blurred, unfocused, unfinished, but may it remind me (and maybe others) that we do not have to be algorithmically or categorically useful in service of systems that do not care about us. Citing the scholarship of Rachel Jane Carroll, Audre Lorde, Katherine McKittrick, Sarah Ahmed, Susan Sontag, and Carmen Winant, How to run documents my progress in the difficult discipline of embracing whimsy and invites readers to join it in the project of taking their own whimsy seriously (although never too seriously).
