Ariel Gore, 49—I’m an author and zinester and I draw little cartoons.
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Aside from your creative work do you have any additional source of income?
I teach creative writing online at literarykitchen.net—my little School for Wayward Writers—I’m all self-employed all the time.
Who do you live with and how do you feel about that?
I live with my wife and 12-year-old son. I feel good about that! But we miss my grown daughter who is still in Atlanta. My wife has been doing a lot of cooking and gardening. The radishes are already starting to shoulder up. My son just finished seventh grade online—it was a huge headache trying to track his “distance learning” program across a million different platforms because the school district didn’t have time to get anything cohesive together, so it was all over the place—an email here, a Google Classroom there, three or four other platforms. I was so happy I wasn’t the one in school right now because I totally would have dropped out in overwhelm and confusion.
All of our hair is getting super wild!
How are you spending your time?
I’ve started this stay-at-home-order art project in which I’m endeavoring to draw 50 hybrid beings before my 50th birthday next month. The series is called Home is Where the Freaks Are & the drawings are, little motivational cartoon creatures for the pandemic that I’m selling on social media as I create them.
How is the pandemic impacting you?
I went to AWP and came back with a super-weird flu, but it went away pretty quickly and who knows what it was. Other than that, no one in my immediate world has been sick with the virus. New Mexico has not been as devastated as many other states or our neighbors in Navajo Nation.
I had two books come out this spring, Santa Fe Noir, an anthology of dark fiction I edited for Akashic Books Noir City Series, and F*ck Happiness: How Women are Ditching the Cult of Positivity and Choosing Radical Joy (Microcosm), so those two book tours are on hold. In the meantime we made this cool video for Santa Fe Noir. A handful of the contributors did readings from their homes and my son and I drove around filming footage of the Santa Fe neighborhoods where the stories are set and my daughter, who lives in Atlanta, put the video together. It’s our big quarantine book event: https://youtu.be/_WOB7nPNEn8
Of course this thing is impacting everyone financially—from the book events and book sales not happening to my students who have had to drop out of classes because they have cash-flow issues themselves, etc. My daughter is an art director at an ad agency whose main client was a big airline, so they’re all facing furlough.
We had a lot of travel planned for this summer for my 50th and for another family member’s bucket list as they are dealing with a life-threatening illness, and I don’t want to be all “wah wah” about our Sardinia dreams in the face of a pandemic, but it’s still disappointing to have to let things go, and the airlines are being so incredibly difficult about refunds even if they are the ones cancelling the flights. I do feel a little grumpy that even though the government bailed out the travel industry, we have to bail them out, too, by donating the money for trips we’ll never take. But you know how it is. The shitshow that is capitalism marches on.
Right now I’m focusing on my stay-at-home-order cartoon series and pop-up art sale on Facebook and Instagram. That’s fun. I like to make art this is really simple and affordable. People send me $30 or what-have-you and I send them a little cartoon in the mail and I hope it makes them happy and it helps me pay the bills.
F*ck Happiness is a feminist psychology project I’ve been working on for years and for that I’ve periodically asked women and femmes and feminist of all genders what’s bringing them joy, so we put together a piece about joy in the time of COVID for Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/women-and-happiness/202004/joy-in-the-time-covid
I had been working on a novel-in-short-stories project, but the timeline got hopelessly interrupted by the pandemic, so I’m experimenting with moving about a third of the book into a parallel universe. Also so many surrealist dreams! I dreamed I went to teach a writing workshop at The Attic in Portland and like 100 people showed up and crammed themselves into that small space and I was like, "This is not social distancing!" but no one cared—they were all just getting frustrated because I was having them introduce themselves in Haikus to save time and they wanted to talk more than that, but no one would pay me so I was not going to listen to more than Haikus. Then one of them was drunk and needed a ride home so I took her, and she offered me a small plastic egg full of cocaine for my troubles, but after I dropped her off I couldn't find my car, so I just started snorting the cocaine and trying to walk home and this drag king driving a Cadillac almost hit me and then got out all angry in the middle of the street like he was going to beat me up, but he started throwing punches really far away from me, like a socially distant beating up, so I just started laughing and then he was laughing and I snorted some more cocaine and tried to find my way home.
What do you want to accomplish personally and/or professionally during this time?
I want to accomplish laughing and relaxing even if I don’t accomplish shit. I’m always doing a lot of creative work in life because it helps me with my general anxiety, but I’m noticing now that when it’s getting late at night and I would normally push myself to keep going into the exhaustion, I’m more likely to be like, "you know, Ariel, nothing bad is going to happen if you just go the fuck to sleep.” I mean, it’s all the same fucking day at this point.
What kind of world do you want to see on the other side of this?
The end of capitalism, slavery, misogyny, and exploitation of every kind. I’d like to see all the corporations who put profits before people implode. I wouldn’t mind giving up travel forever if it meant the planet could heal. I'd like a new president or, better yet, no more presidents. But I would totally settle for a new president.
At our Literary Kitchen reading at AWP, Sailor Holladay lead us all in a spell to abolish student debt, and I would like to point out that student loan payments to feds were immediately suspended after the completion of that spell. Right now they are saying folks will have to start paying again the fall, but I would like to see a total jubilee—worldwide debt forgiveness that would include student debt, personal debt, poor countries’ national debt, etc.
I hope everyone who had jobs they hated can find new ways to survive so they don’t have to go back to anything they didn’t love.
How can people find you and support you and your work (website, Patreon, etc)?
People can find me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/arielgore or Instagram @arielfionagore and buy some art. People can sign up for classes at literarykitchen.net. Laraine Herring is offering a Grieving Into Life: Writing Raw in the Pandemic online workshop starting next month and it's going to be amazing. Everyone should definitely get copies of my books. Hexing the Patriarchy is available from most indie booksellers, including Powell’s: https://www.powells.com/book/hexing-the-patriarchy-9781580058742. F*ck Happiness and a lot of my other books and coloring books are shipping from Microcosm right here: https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/books/7430. Folks can read more about Santa Fe Noir and order it directly from Akashic Books right here: http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/santa-fe-noir/. And everyone can support the Feminist Press and get a copy of my novel/memoir, We Were Witches, right here: https://www.feministpress.org/books-n-z/we-were-witches Enter the discount code ARIEL2020 for a 20% discount!