Letter From The Editor
This month’s guest editor is my beloved, Kaitlyn Soligan Owens. Kaitlyn is a writer and editor from Boston who, for reasons that are really a lot to go in to, now owns a bar in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s a living person in much closer contact with death than she’s frankly all that comfortable with, but it’s not up to her.
Over the weeks we’ve been working on this issue, I’ve written a lot of things, but as we launch, I realize there is something urgent I must tell you: I am exhausted.
Most days I can barely concentrate on a single task at a time. Some days I accomplish nothing. What I do accomplish I can barely remember, and when I do remember it, I am astonished. I have no idea how I’m getting anything done. Living is a Sisyphean task, and all around us, as present as its ever been in most of our lifetimes, is the realization that we are also always dying.
I hold late-stage capitalism responsible for making us terrifically uncomfortable with death, and also with grieving, which is an essential byproduct not only of death but of all loss, the tangible and intangible, the byproduct of what psychologists call “the trauma of lived reality.”
I believe that is because grieving produces nothing of immediate capitalist value. It is, in many ways, the opposite of capitalist productivity. Grief requires us, all too often, to simply do nothing at all, and so capitalism seeks to distract us, to keep us moving. I received an email today about ways to minimize my distractions and “focus” during the pandemic; I received one earlier this week about how to “overcome pandemic burnout” and another on how to “get past the pandemic wall.” These are all ways of “ignoring my legitimate need to grieve my losses” and “responding to my trauma with busyness and replacing my need to heal with the praise that accompanies ‘productivity’,” and I want to engage with them and ignore the pain I feel about loss very, very badly. I, too, still sometimes capitalism.
TAUNT was a brave creation that stands, like grief, in opposition to capitalism. TAUNT was created on the belief that writing our own stories and reading others is simply essential and that attaching monetary value to media is a goddamn fool’s errand that is generating a mainstreamed version of stories and killing our opportunities for real ruptures that generate human understanding, empathy, and mercy. Issues of TAUNT have radical content, but they’ve rolled out in familiar formats. This is because the founder is a Capricorn. [Founder’s Note: The King Koopa Capricorn 😤]. We’re going to roll out the LIFE//DEATH issue completely differently, because this guest editor is a chaotic-neutral Scorpio who wants to make sure everyone has to sit with these huge, aching questions constantly. The LIFE//DEATH issue will be a digital altar, and we invite you to help us build it. Our first offering – and it is a doozy – are three bare, starkly honest, entirely human accounts from three women seeing some of the people they love most, and themselves, through three very different points in life, under three different sets of circumstances.
Amber Burns-Jones is a mother of two sets of twins in the middle of new life that began during a pandemic, weighing what proximity we need to love, touch and support to make these lives work. Her words for TAUNT are, once again, accompanied by the photography of her partner Kendrick Jones.
Kelsey Westbrook and her brother are living through his incarceration, an experience in which two incredibly close people live utterly different lives, in which neither of them can escape the other’s suffering. And Lucie Brooks writes here about what sometimes happens after the suffering, what happens when you lose what you thought the fight was and must find meaning in how you fight on anew.
The offerings people are bringing to the altar over the next weeks include a photo essay on aging and dying, thoughts on how we honor those who pass, and an account of where this country stands in a life and death moment. There is room here for your grief too, and for your life, and all that it means to you in the face of the enormity of this lived reality. Send us your photos, your poems, your essays; tell us what you need to build. There’s room, as well, for joy. And I would very much like to hear about yours.
The writer Kelly Corrigan lost her father and a close friend, a young mother, in close proximity. She was amazed to find that after the enormity of this loss, after the profound realization of how fleeting her life was, she was having a breakdown, exhausted, snapping at her family, wasting her own precious time. “Shouldn’t loss change a person, for the better, forever?” she wonders. “Maybe [this] curious phrase – it’s like this – applies here, too. Minds don’t rest; they reel and wander and fixate and roll back and reconsider because it’s like this, having a mind. Hearts don’t idle; they swell and constrict and break and forgive and behold because it’s like this, having a heart. Lives don’t last; they thrill and confound and circle and overflow and disappear because it’s like this, having a life.”
L’chaim, as my people say, which means, “to life.” To life – for however long we have it, for however we live it, for however death enters or changes or defines it – to life.
<3 Kaitlyn
Cover Art by Minda Honey
Table of Contents
Kelsey Westbrook’s Brother
Lucie Brooks’ Brother
Choosing Life:
Motherhood in 2020
Amber Burns-Jones & Kendrick Jones
In March 2020, our eldest children celebrated their third birthday at the Speed Art Museum surrounded, as they always were, by loved ones. Kentucky declared a state of emergency the following day. Our youngest children celebrated their first birthday in December 2020, nine months into the pandemic. Nine months of almost no contact with anyone outside of our home. Nine months of little to no awareness of how loved they were, by so many people, who yearned to hold them in their arms.
Letter From the Editor… Continued.
When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, I had the awful realization that it was possible I would die while Donald Trump was president. That thought bummed me out. I wanted the button on my life that my grandparents had, the perspective they’d gained, the belief they held that if they had survived it – the Great Depression, job losses, the loss of children, the loss of family to genocide, antisemitism, sexism – we would too, and we would only continue to make a better world, as, despite the ups and downs they’d witnessed, they believed we had ultimately done in their own time on earth. I wanted to go out on an up, is what I’m saying; I wanted to go out believing that that arc was bending towards justice and that I had had enough time to really help. I wanted what I’ve learned in the end we all want. I wanted more time.
Every life is a story we tell, and time is what gives these stories their narrative shape. We tell one kind of story about those of us lucky enough to live for a long time; we tell different stories about those of us who die young, or “too young,” or “before our time.” Time gives us the perspective that changes the stories of our lives, and of our deaths. Just enough time to reconcile with a family can change the story of a life from one of tragedy to one of triumph. Becoming a young widower is a tragedy; marry again later in life and you have a story of love overcoming age and odds. Life, death, and time – they give us the raw materials we use to build these stories we need to go on living ourselves, until someone is telling ours.
The stories we’re bringing to the LIFE // DEATH issue this week come down to what time gives us, what perspective we earn. Scotty Perry photographed the end of a life well-lived by his grandparents, who had the privilege of growing old and clearly earned the love across generations that made that life look beautifully and heartbreakingly worthwhile. Aaron Thomas, along with his twin brother Alan, documented what time bought some of us, which was the chance to go on living as our country changed, watching the story play out, putting our hands right into this clay and shaping the narrative as it goes.
Not everyone got that chance. We’re missing people who should be here with us and feeling their absence in piercing, visceral ways, the emptiness where we can feel they should be. We’re in a transitional moment, as a country, as a people, as a society, a liminal moment as things start to shift, and I’m left here watching and wondering, grateful still every day for the time that gives me the opportunity to ask the question – what will we all do with ours.
<3 Kaitlyn
Here. (And Now.)
Photos and words by Scotty Perry
The Line It Is Drawn
Words by Aaron Thomas and Photos by Alan Thomas
The Final Letter
From the Editor…
I struggle with death: the unfair way it is allocated, the ways it hurts the living, the empty spaces it leaves. That seems normal. What’s strange to me is how often I struggle with life.
Like the author I mentioned in my first letter to you – this is the third, so ponder why Minda puts up with me! – my mind reels and wanders, fixates and reconsiders, and rolls back and forth relentlessly. I’m acutely aware of the value of my life, and yet I’m often strongly tempted not to really live it. I was tempted, for example, not to have the idea that Minda should let me edit an issue of TAUNT. I was tempted not to fight for the issue when things were wonky. I was tempted not to write letters – three – because whatever lies my tongue will tell, I can never leave them on the page. I tell the truth when I write, and that is so uncomfortable. The truth is so uncomfortable.
I was tempted, in short, to float along on the current instead of swimming towards what might be a meaningful destination, a temptation that I am always fighting. I used to think it was laziness, but I know now it’s fear. Existing brings less confrontation, fewer problems, and far fewer unforeseen consequences; go about living and all you end up with is trouble. Stay home and say nothing and you’ll never have an argument; walk out the door and anything could happen. I know rationally life will happen anyway – you don’t have to do a damn thing to sit at your own kitchen table and hear that it’s cancer – but it always feels safer, and that feeling is the lie that fear tells.
Walk out the door and you will, I promise you, end up in a fender bender eventually. You’ll get your heart broken by friends and lovers and people you finally agreed to trust. You’ll happen by a bakery – maybe, I don’t know, FOKO – and become so obsessed with a pastry – say, I don’t know, off the top of my head, those damn vanilla custard empanadas – you’ll find yourself back every morning, unable to resist, until one day you lock eyes with someone else in line, strike up a conversation, and find yourself with a partner and three kids, which will necessitate attending PTA meetings, where someone will finally drive you homicidal with their several thousand emails concerning food allergies for a class your child isn’t even in and you and your friends will have to hide the body. It’s chaos, I’m telling you. Walk out the door and anything will happen. Not can happen – will happen. Walk out the door and your life will just keep happening because it’s like this, having a life.
Life will happen. We will love and lose our grandparents, and our parents. We will worry ourselves sick over our kids, and someday they will lose us. Presidents will come and go, we will cherish and trouble our siblings, we will occasionally report to work somewhere, and our hearts will break. I’m putting this in writing so, as you know, I can only tell you the truth.
For this last, utterly beautiful, wrenching, heartbreaking and joyful submission for TAUNT’s LIFE//DEATH issue, we’re coping with this – this having a life. Ariel Brooks would like you to know that, despite the fact that this deeply flawed world shapes therapists, therapy will probably still help. Joshua Gonzalez believes in family, traditional and non-traditional support structures, and Pixar. And Miracle Stewart returns once more to say that we have rituals for a reason, and that reason is often healing.
I’m glad that when it comes to this issue I chose to live instead of exist (and that I knew well enough to tell Minda about this idea the second I thought of it, because Minda Honey can be trusted to haul you up to life, however tired or hungover or sad either of you might be, and stand there while you report on your progress and calculate what you owe). I’m glad because getting to live inside of these pieces, inside of these lives these writers have given us, over these weeks, will truly forever rank among the privileges of my life. This is a city with so much to say, and if anyone lies in writing, they don’t fucking do it for TAUNT. I hope you’ve gotten what you need from this too, and I hope sometimes when you have the option to stay home, you’ll remember something from this, and instead, you’ll walk out the door.
<3 Kaitlyn
Your Therapist Has A Therapist
by Ariel Brooks
This is the worst part of what I do now and what I’ve always done. Watching folks fall through the cracks of a bridge it took all of their might to take their first steps onto. The mental healthcare power structure is an inverted triangle and at the very bottom are the people who barely
make enough money to survive, but too much to qualify for any help that the system swears up and down is there for those who need it. What we forget when we encourage people to “get
help” is that competent care is hard to find and even the most basic of services are never cheap.
Remember Me
By Joshua Gonzalez
Other than an altar and honoring the dead, I didn't know much about the Dia de los Muertos. My parents talked about how they celebrated back in Mexico growing up, getting together with family and neighbors taking fresh flowers to the tombs, bringing a mariachi and taking their loved one’s favorite meal or beer. The tradition didn’t continue for them out here in the states though…. There was a part of me that felt silenced, at the core I was this human whose Mexican identity was such a big part of him but there was no room or space for that part to be known in the good ol’ country town of LaGrange, KY.
The Altar
By Miracle Stewart
We are holding space for members of our community who would like to honor LIFE//DEATH by placing a memento of loss or joy on the TAUNT altar. Please email your photos, meaningful quotes or poetry, drawings, or other digital manifestations of remembrance for us to share in this space. We will receive offerings until March 15th. Thank you.
Thank You To Our Friends 🖤
Spencer Jenkins
Spencer graciously welcomed TAUNT under his umbrella at Queer Kentucky to help us launch. This is a partnership, a friendship, and a momentum that cannot be stopped. Please visit and support Queer Kentucky’s fight for LGBTQ+ visibility in the Bluegrass State.
David Welker
David Welker designed our TAUNT logo and the STATUS QUO social media teasers. He is also designing our upcoming merch (Crop tops are coming, y’all!).
Jon Fleischaker & Michael Abate
Jon and Michael were unbelievably generous with their time and encouraging of TAUNT’s mission to toy with what Louisville’s media scene should look like.
Josh Moss
Thank you to Joss Moss for his mentorship and early enthusiasm for TAUNT. TAUNT appreciate’s Louisville Magazine’s collaborative spirit in helping spread the word about the new kid on the scene.
Deedra Tate
Deedra Tate and Don Meredith Co. printed our big ol’ thank you postcards. And they did the things you want most out of a printer – For the job to be fast and done right. If you’re trying to get a handwritten thank you in the mail, donate to TAUNT.
Our 300+ Donors
Folks from all over the country tossed cash TAUNT’s way during a global pandemic because they believed in Minda and the believed Louisville is a city worthy of the nation’s concern. Let’s get heard.