XLVII. the year of attraction

on footnotes, 2025, and ways of knowing

For a recent presentation at work I read Katherine McKittrick’s Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor), an incredible essay on citational practice in Black Studies.¹ In it, she asks us to seriously consider what has not made it into the “main text” of a given work. By enacting her proposed method in the essay, she introduces a citational practice that prioritizes how we know over what we know, with footnotes, endnotes, parentheticals, marginalia, and bibliographies serving not as a collection of names to lend intellectual legitimacy, but instead as sites of process—a space to forge, maintain, and reject relationships. In McKittrick’s almost two-page long footnote about artist Rana Hamadeh’s weak citation of NourbeSe Philip she writes that citation, “is not a nod, gesture, signal, or inspiration. It is poetic infrastructure—black women’s work—that radically repoliticizes black life.”²

The term poetic infrastructure has stuck with me. I consider myself someone who thinks almost exclusively in reference. Lines from movies, song lyrics, pages of books, that thing someone said, a picture I took. One thing is always another—a mental web flickering into both well-worn and bright new constellations—so much noise perhaps coalescing itself into infrastructure. In the process of editing, carving away anything that “isn’t David,” how do we cite everything that we are sloughing off?³ How do we stay in relationship with how we came to know something once the thing is known?

I started this newsletter three years ago (incidentally on an angel number: 2/2/22) as I embarked on my first professional theater job. At the time, or rather by about the third post, I thought it would be a sort of blog about the life of a working actor. It would be a meditation on craft, the challenges and joys of popping around the country, occasionally it would veer off into death and God. It was about the new and vibrant life that, in 2022, was blossoming out before me with seemingly no effort on my part. For the first (and as yet only) time I felt I had to do nothing to sustain my fledgling career, within one job I would look up and there was another.

2022 in Waterbury, CT: booked, peaceful, moisturized, in a rehearsal skirt

In the years since, I have come to know many more things. Somewhere in late 2023 I resigned myself to the idea that this was not really a newsletter about being a working actor. It was more about the books and ideas of the month; occasionally it was about the perils of auditioning, but it was also about borrowing baking supplies. I thought I needed to be writing from backstage to be legitimate. This year, I have finally figured out that booking the job is the “main text.” It is what you see, it is certainly what all the scribbled little notes are working towards, but it is not the work. To be a working actor is to be a person constantly figuring out how to maintain mental stability and creative fulfillment for every second that you are not actively under stage lights. As I look back, I see that all of these essays are the how of my career, a living bibliography.⁴

On January tenth, during a six-hour car ride to Rochester, NY I wrote my first words of 2025: the winter sky! with its milky blushes and bruises! There was so much to the start of the year, so many moments when I thought to myself, capture this you won’t be able to bottle it later, but it never felt like there was enough time. In some ways this is a shame. I wish I could telegraph to you how beautifully my year began, how I felt breathless with opportunity, my cup spilling over and replenishing before I could get anything down. I’ve come down from the high, with still something to say but perhaps without the glow of love-at-first-sight that I felt with the year’s turning—today the sky does not move me to as many exclamatory punctuation marks. Yet, I still believe my proclaimed theme of the year is correct. 2025: The Year of Attraction.

Each year has a theme. This began in 2022, the Year of Abundance. Two important things to note about the year’s theme: 1. it is personal and 2. it is not aspirational. It is not my goal for the year or a manifestation, it is just actually what the year is about. I receive this knowledge (more on that later) somewhere between December 28th and January 5th. 2022: Abundance, 2023: Challenge, 2024: Action, and now 2025: Attraction. In the first two weeks of the year, when I tell everyone I know about my theme (another McKittrick gem: the necessary social function of a liberatory citation practice i.e. “Bigger Thomas. We all know Bigger Thomas. If we do not know Bigger Thomas and someone mentions Bigger Thomas, we go research Bigger Thomas and reread Native Son and read those essays on Native Son and then we read James Baldwin’s take and also White Man Listen!, Eight Men, Black Boy, after which we maybe look over a few of those essays on Bigger Thomas and Biggie Smalls. We then ask everyone we know about Bigger Thomas—what they like, what they don’t like, what they thought of Wright’s portrayal of masculinity, political economy, racism. He walked home with a mounting feeling of fear. We know who Bigger Thomas is.”⁵) the first thing they ask me is: how do you know? And I kind of shrug and laugh and say I don’t know. The real answer is, I can feel it, but we don’t privilege that as a way of knowing. The reality that during the limbo week between Christmas and New Year’s, I am somehow buzzing along the same frequency that keeps the planets spinning and thus can receive a little personal message that feels like it springs from the unique combination of my body in these cosmos, is not something that we would readily treat as a fact. It’s true all the same.

At the top of McKittrick’s essay, she writes that in 2015 she added an image slideshow to her public talks: “The image slides are on a continuous loop. The images are of ideas (in text, song, visual art, maps and places, objects, people) that have shaped my thinking. I started doing this because I was finding it difficult to track, within the context of a public talk, how I know what I know, where I know from, who I know from, and what I cannot possibly know.”⁶ She doesn’t explain these images, she just lets them run as she speaks. If I could build the works cited of my life in a year—the fragments I have written down, the hundred hours of phone conversations, the selfies I took and books I read, everything that made me laugh, and everything that kept me up at night—I wonder if I could point to an exact moment, or give an evidence-based account of how I can predict the year ahead.

xx

Mia

P.S. Just as a little evidence: my 2024 calendar made her way back to me. I have Audrey Libatique to thank; the book never even boarded the plane.

1. Thank you Emmy Catedral for introducing me to this text years ago and for re-introducing it now.

2. It seems right, given her point, to reproduce the whole paragraph from McKittrick’s footnote: “I will not reproduce all of Zong! in order to provide textual proof of Hamadeh’s rewording and revising of Philip’s long-cycle-poem. I view this from afar. How Hamadeh understands and writes the Zong massacre is on her shoulders, as is Philip’s clear, exhausted, unwillingness to be a part of the project. I ask, though, that we dwell on the politics of permission. I ask that we dwell on the politics of permission in relation to black women. And, I want to underscore and centralize and illuminate the effort Philip put into the long-cycle-poem. I was told to cite black women. We are told to cite black women. Sometimes the words and ideas of black women, when cited, become something else. Sometimes the ideas of black women wear out and wear down even though these narratives provide the clues and instructions to imagine the world anew. Often the words and ideas and brilliance of black women remain unread. The words and ideas of black women go uncited. The intellectual effort is unnoticed and stepped over and swept aside. Worn down, sometimes the intellectual work of black women is unmentionable. We must continue to cite their words and ideas well. We must read them well. I cite and site Zong! and NourbeSe Philip as brilliant intellectual effort. I want to engage this text as labor. It is not a nod, gesture, signal, or inspiration. It is poetic infrastructure—black women’s work—that radically repoliticizes black life.” Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor),” Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2020), 21.

3. Things that “weren’t David” in this essay include: Super Nothing by Miguel Gutierrez at New York Live Arts, Clubbed Thumb’s Winterworks, Life Dance IV The Emperor…The Old Woman Persists at The Whitney, English on Broadway, the 1987 masterpiece Predator, the 2024 masterpiece Nickel Boys, an aside about how sick I was during part of my Much Ado run, an aside about how sick I was during my The Wolves run, a conversation with my father about hope and my subsequent accidental merging of the Sisyphus and Atlas myths.

4. Notes from that job in Connecticut: “I have just started a new contract, on the East Coast this time, but still removed from everyone I know and the majority of my wardrobe. Waterbury, Connecticut reminds me of Rock Springs, Wyoming—a kind of forgotten place. Left alone it could be buried under so much sediment and serve as a striated time stamp for future historians. Here were the Radium Girls. Here was the bustling 19th century brass industry, the remnants of which are an abundance of clocktowers and faded Timex nameplates.” Mia Fowler, XII. what did I do to die today (Substack, 2022).

5. Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor),” Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2020), 30.

6. Katherine McKittrick, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor),” Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2020), 14.