existential angst, tour dates, chronically ill touring artist pro tips volume 3 (interregnum version), and a letter.

hi ok,

first up here are all the tour dates, with formatting:

and here’s some individual fliers including the one i made for the philly launch with my non professional canva skills:

I hope you will make it out to one of these, and/or buy the book or ask your library to buy it (my favorite thing, most libraries have forms where you can request they buy a book and it’s a way of making it accessible to people who can’t afford it, people who stumble upon it, etc.

some other living altars semi updates:

please watch this space for more info about big things in the works, including: monthly book giveaway of disabled QTBIPOC books! local to Philly one day and longer retreat spaces! another thing I’m really excited about I don’t wanna say anything about yet but it’s exciting!

chronically ill touring artist pro tips volume 3

this is my first in person tour in six years, three guesses why, and i feel like with every tour i revisit and revise what crip/ nd/sick touring is like for me because of the evolving state of my body/ mind and the world. i wrote chronically ill artist touring pro tips and it came out in care work, then I wrote cripping the book tour for GUTS magazine and it came out in The Future Is Disabled.

now I’m getting ready to do in person masked tour in year six of covid and year 2 of project 2025. The Future Is Disabled tour was all online events because touring and asking people to gather inside felt impossible in 2022. the world was divided into unmasked in person free for alls and online covid safer and I wasn’t going to ask a bunch of high risk people to leave their homes to see about a disabled future. but in 2026 for a lot of reasons (some of them: the massive work disability justice has done to continually explain about masking and covid having some overall effect in changing the culture; clarity among a lot of people that any pretense of public health mostly does not exist (vaccines, testing, leadership and guidence from the cdc about viruses) and we are on our own; wanting to fight surveillance, a new wave of op sec emerging partially from the ‘24 encampments where people wanted to evade detection and also not get covid in the tent; etc) having mask required shows made a comeback and there was zero resistance to me throwing them in 13 cities. I also did not have to explain what an air purifier was.

some of the other current conditions:

social media is now largely a gated community mall, the days of posting an event on cripstagram and people see it! and come out! are kinda gone. facebook limits you to inviting fifty people max to an “event,” after that you have to pay. everyplace wants you to pay money. twitter is all the way dead. some of your posts reach, a lot don’t.

people’s memories are shit because everyone has long covid and overwhelm, so posting on one of the five million signal threads means people view it for a second and that it goes down the memory hole.

oh and it’s a demi civil war so, for example, the process of event booking for minneapolis was taking into account that the events person was like, we really want to have you but it may not be safe to gather in groups, can you get a refundable ticket? I guess my “hot tip” for this one is, we were like ok let’s plan for in person for now and if ICE is at a high level of murdering people the week of the event we’ll pivot to zoom. the whole last two months of booking were keeping an eye on where ICE went next and what the level of danger was on the streets. for people attending and also for me getting there and back.

also i’m older, I have a new hip, I got used to five years of zoom which was super accessible for my anxiety and social overwhelm and lack of ability to small talk and need for captions, and also my and everyone’s desire to tune in just sitting in our underwear in our homes. but i did want in person masked gatherings anyway. because right now it feels important to be together, like people were longing to be bodies in a room together in an accessible way because of the impact of years of isolation and hell. co regulation.

I’m remembering something Patty Berne said to me once, when I asked her in 2016 or something if she’d consider also having a livestream component of the Sins Invalid show that year, where she was like, trust me I know how hard it is to get out and get to a venue (patty’s disabilities meant she had pretty limited mobility and faced a lot of access barriers) but I just think there’s something magic about when disabled people, particularly disabled BIPOC, make it out to an event once every few years- it’s life changing, those nights, when we are together. i felt that. I have some hybrid, taped and online events too because that is also magic. being in public, accessible space, together. still here.

but so far we got:

you know what works even better than instagram to let folks know a thing is happening? fucking making a sticker, writing the event and time/ date/location on it and handing it to people you know, even a little bit! at least in your home city! but also walking or rolling around the cities you are in a couple days before and giving them to people and sticking them up on the poles. Arsenal Pulp was like, we don’t have the money to make t shirts or tote bags but wee can make some stickers! they will be at the events, they’re beautiful and I’m hoping the words “the ways disabled people love each other’ and jen white johnson’s beautiful cover art can plaster the telephone poles and bathrooms of a city or town near you, get slipped into crip mail, end up on altars and the fridge.

this is how I used to promote all my shows and shit, just club promoter style with a nice “hey, I would really love to see you there!” and hand the club card out whilst looking cute! or haggard! but like old school hospitality “please come to my party”. there’s something about me writing it down, almost like i’m giving somebody my number vibes, that feels like it energetically works too.

i guess being a former club flyer girl will never ever fucking leave you. and in this moment, people are just so happy to have someone invite us somewhere and to do a thing.

somehow? (because of ongoing work) there are more disabled community spaces now that already have language justice workers and a whole protocol for doing the tech and LJ end of events and hybrid is decent and they can just do it? the solo writer doesn’t have to run it all all the time?

places also kinda fortunately or not get community safety shit now? the event in the city where my #1 stalker lives were like, we read your safety document, thanks for sharing it, we will have people trained in community safety and de escalation there. I didn’t have to do a training or explain what doxxing was.

travel- who knows? i guess the TSA isn’t being paid again? air traffic controllers, it’s been a year of whoopsie daisy. the train is safer? Greyhound doesn’t exist anymore in some places? in msp my friend said they tracked cars more than transit. IDK, I’m going to pray a lot and do my best.

when i was amping up to do this tour I was for sure thinking about bodymap tour in 201five, 20 events in 6 weeks straight and being like, well i’m really broke and people need this and let’s just go DO this. at the end of it I didn’t know my own name but we sure sold that book and there was a zeitgeist around that disabled poetry tour, ripples spreading out from all the people in all the rooms.

but as it turned out, this time around there were a few 12 hour long screen stressed out hyperfocus I feel crazy days, but mostly i just booked tour. two events in one week. come home. do the philly event. chill for a week. drive to baltimore. do an event. come home. halifax was so cute but too hard/ access nightmare to get to, cool, we’ll do a chill hybrid. go to toronto, hang with my family, do a nice reading. go to nyc, stay with my sibling, do an event, come home. have a birthday. chill for a week. go to chicago and minneapolis, stay with friends. come home. chill a week, go to atlanta, come home.

which might sound nutty, but. it’s not 30 in 36

in conclusion, what I’m going into it this time with is:

you can always cancel if you go crazy or get sick, or shift to online, or do it later. “good shit takes time”- alice wong.

enjoy the new hip when it’s new.

make room to have fun while you’re alive, we’re alive.

you wanted to do this disabled love spell grief spell tour as a way of us gathering together in these times. so let’s do it.

disabled arts space, particularly by and centering non white folks, is always a moment people remember, a precious space where people go, shit, I will remember this. the gathering becomes a moments where things change again.

some disabled arts spaces got bigger for a minute, but I am liking and choosing the online, the bookstore, the community center, the speakeasy, the small spaces that are big.

and finally, some existential angst

in my usual “state of the non union” type mode for this substack, a thing i wrote at 2 am about the quality of this moment in time.

2/28/26

Dear Alice,

Hi how are you? I feel totally crazy right now. I woke up yesterday to the news that what I started fearing actively during the summer solstice happened- the U.S. and Israel are bombing Iran, igniting a regional war because fuck it and also let’s bring on the rapture. I keep checking my phone seeing whether anyone’s dropped nukes yet in the middle of like, going to a movie with a friend or doing my dishes, completely matter of fact. It’s fucking awful. When I was a kid, I had reoccurring dreams of, nuclear war had happened, all the air was vaguely yellow and everyone was just driving around in it and going to work, there were domes to protect people but they were broken and the radiation was leaking in, and every once in a while someone would just drop dead and everyone would just keep going. I feel like yeah, I pre-cogged the reality we’re in right now.

It’s been a really rough mental health month for me. It’s like, you know when you’re looking at the ocean and three small waves all hit each other and make one big wave? This is kind of like that but with forty waves hitting. That wave of, tower energy, in a moment it’s over sudden change is not my favorite- I am an autistic Taurus- and endings and deaths where it’s sudden and unexpected and I, you, don’t get a chance to say goodbye are also hard. One minute shit is good the next minute shit is really unexpectedly not good, is gone. Is not easy, and I realized the grief I felt around a breakup was hitting into the grief I am still feeling about losing you, suddenly and unexpectedly and without a chance to say goodbye. On top of everyone else who has suddenly died like that without a chance to say goodbye.And it’s month three after you died and my grief is getting to the bit where I’m like, you are still gone and going to stay gone.

Last summer I was also having a rough time with the perma grief permafrost and was like I’m Going to Get MF Therapy, and I asked my brother who is also someone who was around for 1990s AIDS if he knew any people slightly older than us who had lived through 80s and 90s AIDS where a ton of people died but they lived. He found me one and that person was nice but white and a cis guy and kept saying, just celebrate their lives in your own! from his berth on a cruise ship. I mean yeah, I get that part, I get it. I think my thing was, maybe for him, AIDS ended like thirty years ago. COVID and eugenics and state and MIC murder have not ended for me, or us. People died, people are going to keep dying.

What maybe nobody can tell you about disabled early elderhood is that if you’re one of the ones who lives you live inside a sea of bones. For me it’s like a lot of the time I’m ok somehow and then sometimes the grief of everyone I have lost and the question of how the fuck do you go on- both personally and also In The Movement- feels endless. I have a new therapist and when she was like tell me what’s up during our intake emails I was like twenty people i was close to died in the last five years and I’m supposed to be some kind of something but a lot of days I can barely get my pants on by 4 pm.

Maybe there’s no cure. Maybe it’s just fucking hard. Maybe the answer is just to say yeah it’s fucking hard and you take it minute by minute and know that you may not feel as deep in it all ways. Maybe you learn from other veterans, I mean people who were military but also people who survived America’s war on us when our comrades were gone.

I’m trying to get meds got meds for the first time ever because prayer, weed, nature, friends and herbs were only doing so much and I guess this is healing- I’m like able to objectively look at my brain and be like ok, yes everything is hard and no one is ok but the screaming turned up to level 11, this is like MSG that’s making all the flavors more distinct. If something will dial it down a little, including for right now, I’ll take it. Everyone was like you’ve never been on an ssri before? and I was like nah I been raw dogging crazy with motherwort for thirty years!

Blah blah blah, we lack disabled role models for aging despite what people including ,e have been saying for years- most abled people get disabled as we get older most disabled people get more disabled. But one in a weird way role model? I have is my mom- who, I don’t know a ton about her life in elderhood and death but I do know she was big crazy off and on her whole life, quiet as she tried to keep it. Her medical file, when I got it in the last years of her life, said “personal history of mental health condition undefined.” I don’t know if she ever got meds, or therapy. I think back to some of her hard times when I did know her and am like damn maybe some of that could’ve helped. Me trying to hand her Alice Miller library books about trauma in the car when I was twelve and her just looking at me. Like what if part of how I change the intergen trauma is getting meds too so I don’t spend my fifties screaming internally the same way. My life is already different, I live alone, I have lovers and friends and solitude, disabled community. One of my disabled ancestors is my survivor, abusive, disabled, Mad mom, I don’t know if she’s whispering it to me but she does tell me to go get the meds by her life example.

It’s also different,being younger and feeling like death was all around, and getting older and being like yeah, it still is, the same and different, i have x number of years left, how do I actually want to spend them. I will die, weirdly enough, how do I want to live this particular life before I come back as someone else. The existential thing of mortality, it weights heavy on me at current. Death continues to be all around, how do we keep living through it.

Ragged ending. Real thoughts. See you in the whirlwind.

As ever,

— Leah