Month: May 2026

The Gilda Stories — Chosen Family, Immortality, and Resistance

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Gomez, Jewelle. The Gilda Stories. Beacon Press, 2023.

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez is a vampire novel that explores racism, queer love, slavery, chosen family, and survival across generations. More than simply a vampire story, the novel examines what it means to belong to one another in a world built on violence and displacement. The story begins with a frightened young woman escaping slavery and finding refuge in Gilda’s brothel, where she is introduced to compassion, education, and community in a way she has never experienced before.

“The gambling, musical divertissements, and the private rooms were all well attended. Gilda employed eight girls, none yet twenty…” (14). From the beginning, Gomez creates a setting that feels alive with intimacy and emotional texture. The young woman remains fearful of white men and the possibility of being dragged back into slavery: “Any of these men could capture her and take her back to the plantation” (29). Yet within Gilda and Bird’s household, she witnesses something entirely different from the cruelty she has known. The women are intelligent, capable, compassionate, and empowered: “They all had manners of ladies, could read, write, and shoot” (24).

Eventually, the young woman learns that Gilda and Bird are vampires, though Gomez reimagines vampirism as something rooted in connection rather than violence. “It is through our connection with life, not death, that we live” (43). The vampires in this world do not exist purely as predators. Instead, they exchange energy, dreams, and emotional understanding with humanity. Gomez writes, “We draw life into ourselves, yet we give life as well… It’s a fair exchange in a world full of cheaters” (43).

Chosen Family and Queer Love

One of the strongest elements in this novel is its exploration of chosen family. The emotional architecture of the relationships feels deeply intentional, especially the connection between Gilda and Bird. Their love is romantic, nurturing, and spiritual all at once. When Gilda prepares to die, she asks the young woman to remain with Bird, believing she belongs among them. Eventually, the young woman takes on the name Gilda herself, continuing the family’s lineage and identity she has entered.

Throughout the novel, Gomez repeatedly returns to the idea that family is not solely determined by blood, but by loyalty, protection, understanding, and mutual care. Eleanor later says, “…to choose someone for your family is a great responsibility. It must be done not simply out of your own need or desire but rather because of a mutual need” (63). That line felt especially powerful to me because it defines family as a responsibility rather than ownership.

The language surrounding community and belonging throughout the novel is often breathtakingly beautiful: “Those of us who can withstand that uneasy pulling of the sea’s waters swirling about the bay feel firmly rooted here and protective of each other” (71). Gomez creates an emotional atmosphere where intimacy and survival become deeply intertwined.

Resistance Against Exploitation

The antagonist, Fox, represents exploitation, cruelty, and domination. Unlike Gilda’s compassionate philosophy, Fox treats working women as disposable and slave-like. Because Gilda herself escaped plantation slavery, her conflict with Fox becomes deeply personal and symbolic. As the story unfolds over time, Gilda also becomes involved in activist movements such as Greenpeace and the Black Panther Party, continuing the novel’s larger themes of justice, resistance, and collective care.

One thing I struggled with personally was pacing. I found myself wishing Fox had been introduced earlier within the story, possibly within the first sixty pages, to create a stronger central tension sooner. I also wanted the novel to slow down more often and remain longer inside the emotional and sensual details of each scene. The relationships, touches, environments, and emotional moments were among the novel’s strongest parts, and I often found myself wanting more time to fully inhabit them before the story moved forward. By the end, the pacing felt rushed to me compared to the emotional depth established earlier in the novel.

Still, what stayed with me most was the novel’s belief in companionship and healing across time. Even after centuries, distance, grief, and transformation, the characters continue searching for connection with one another. The story ultimately suggests that survival alone is not enough; people also need intimacy, community, and love in order to remain whole.

The Curse of the Photograph

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Life is a trip. After living in our Eureka home for five years, we’ve finally started cleaning out the garage. I sorted through the kids’ toys and learned plastic toys are apparently the number one thing thrift stores no longer want because they already have too many. My eldest has three sizes of clothes ready to part with. Everything is boxed, labeled, and separated. I sorted my own clothes from years of hand-me-downs. I donated half-used art supplies and unfinished paintings to The Maker’s Apron.

Now in the back of my car are the things nobody wants: an old, sour car seat, battered clothes, and boxes of family photo albums.

Not my family’s albums. Someone else’s.

Months ago, I picked up three boxes of 1980s family photo albums from Facebook Marketplace, thinking I would use them for scrapbooking or maybe for the Grimoire workshop. The women had perfect hairdos, the children looked happy, and newspaper clippings from the era were pasted beside photographs like tiny time capsules. But the longer they sat in my car, the heavier they became.

I messaged the library. The historical society. Nobody answered.

Eventually I listed them back on Facebook. A woman who happened to be my neighbor picked them up, promising that if she couldn’t use them, I would take them back. A few days later, she called. Even she couldn’t figure out what to do with them.

So now they’re back in my car.

And I cannot bring myself to throw them away.

The more I think about dumping somebody’s memories into a landfill, the more impossible it feels.

We’ve all heard the myths before: photographs steal souls, mirrors are cursed, vampires can’t appear in either. But what do these stories actually say about photography and memory?

The idea that photographs can curse someone or steal part of their soul stems from spiritual beliefs, folklore, and the unsettling mystery surrounding early 1800s photography. Many cultures viewed cameras as supernatural because they captured an exact likeness permanently, something humanity had never experienced before.

Some Indigenous and traditional cultures believed an image contained part of a person’s spirit or life force. Mirrors carried similar fears. Reflections were often associated with the soul, death, and alternate realities. In Victorian mourning traditions, mirrors were covered after death to prevent spirits from becoming trapped inside them.

The mythology surrounding vampires evolved from these same beliefs. In Eastern European folklore between the 1600s and 1800s, vampires were seen as corrupted beings without proper souls. Later Gothic literature, especially Dracula in 1897, reinforced the idea that vampires could not appear in mirrors because mirrors symbolized divine reflection and humanity.

Photography eventually inherited the same anxieties.

But now we’ve entered a new stage of the curse: the digital image.

Unlike physical photographs, digital pictures can exist infinitely. They can be duplicated endlessly, altered invisibly, stored in clouds we cannot touch, and forgotten beneath thousands of nearly identical images. The curse of the digital photograph is no longer spiritual in the traditional sense. It’s psychological.

We document more than ever before while remembering less.

Digital photography created what I think of as the Paradox of Infinite Memory. Because storage is endless, moments lose sacredness. Instead of fully living experiences, we perform them for documentation. The image becomes more important than the memory itself.

Social media intensifies this. Photographs no longer simply preserve memories; they create identities. Filters and curated feeds distort reality until people begin comparing themselves to perfected versions of others and themselves. Mirrors once reflected the soul. Now algorithms reflect curated selves.

There’s also the strange permanence of it all. A printed photograph can fade naturally over time, but a digital image may survive forever online while simultaneously becoming inaccessible due to dead hard drives, forgotten passwords, obsolete formats, or deleted accounts. Modern memory exists in unstable systems we barely control.

And maybe that’s what unsettles me most about these albums.

These people existed. They loved each other. They celebrated birthdays, vacations, and holidays. Someone carefully scrapbooked these pages by hand. Now their entire history sits forgotten in the backseat of my car because nobody knows what to do with it anymore.

So for now, I keep thinking I might burn the photographs one by one as a release ritual. Or bury them. Or use them in art.

Maybe memories deserve transformation instead of disposal.

In my studies lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about memory and the human condition. Sometimes, memory is all we truly have to learn from life, to appreciate it, and to evolve through it. Some spiritual traditions even believe the key to remembering past lives is first learning to remember this life fully and intentionally.

Facebook is strange in this regard. Sometimes it holds more photographs of our lives than we do ourselves. What kind of magic do we hand over when we offer our memories to social media platforms? Is memory itself part of what keeps those systems alive?

I stopped scrapbooking after my son’s first birthday. Maybe because digital photography changed the ritual of remembering. The articles are right: sorting through endless images can be overwhelming. And often the Facebook photos aren’t the ones worth printing anyway. It’s the uncandid photos, the accidental moments, the imperfect images, that feel the most alive.

I have a friend who doesn’t use social media, and I decided I’m going to print our photographs together for her. She rarely gets to see the images floating through everyone else’s feeds. Maybe people without social media receive photographs more intentionally, more like gifts.

I wonder what will happen to all the photos I’ve taken someday.

Will my kids keep them? Pass them down? Throw them away?

I didn’t inherit many albums from my grandparents. Mostly just a few passed down from my parents. And honestly, one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t spend more time visiting my grandfather before he died. I convinced myself I didn’t have enough money, enough time, enough stability.

But a photograph can’t replace presence.

Sometimes you have to create the memories you want to capture in the image of your past.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain — Winning through Authenticity

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Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Random House, 2021.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders is a craft book that examines four Russian authors and how storytelling can reflect morality, culture, human nature, and community. Saunders breaks down the mechanics of storytelling sentence by sentence, showing how every detail matters and how intentional writing creates emotional resonance.

One story that stood out to me was The Singers. The story slowly introduces an entire tavern full of people before the singing contest even truly begins. Saunders writes, “It was an unbearably hot July day when, scarcely able to drag one foot after the other, I walked slowly, accompanied by my dog, up the Kolotovka ravine in the direction of the Cozy Corner” (67). Immediately, we are placed into the exhaustion, the heat, and the atmosphere of the setting.

At first, the pacing almost feels too slow. The first eleven pages are mostly descriptions of people sitting in a bar. But that slowness becomes the point. Instead of simply saying the tavern was crowded, the story allows us to feel the room through observation, gossip, body language, and internal dialogue. The tavern becomes alive.

Community as Character

One of the most interesting craft choices in this story is how the community itself becomes a character. Every person in the tavern seems connected through shared history and quiet observation. The narrator notices Yashka the Turk standing in the center of the room: “a lean, slender man of twenty-three, wearing a long-skirted blue nankeen coat” (69). Small details like clothing, posture, and mannerisms layer the scene until the reader can almost smell the tavern and hear the crowd shifting around the room.

The emotional tension builds between the two singers. The contractor performs perfectly, technically polished and controlled. Yashka, however, sings with emotion and vulnerability. His voice is imperfect, but it resonates far deeper with the people listening.

Authenticity Resonates More Than Perfection

This story reminded me that authenticity will almost always move people more than perfection. A technically flawless performance may impress an audience, but emotional honesty is what creates connection. Yashka’s flaws are what make him human, and because of that, his singing reaches the community in a way the contractor’s performance cannot.

Saunders also discusses how long the buildup is before the actual “heart” of the story occurs. The exposition takes patience, but without it, the emotional payoff would not land the same way. The reader must first understand the people, the environment, and the culture before the climax can truly matter.

The Child Within the Adult

At the end of the story, after the celebration and drinking have ended, the narrator walks home and overhears a boy shouting to his brother, “Dad wants to give you a good hiding!” (82). It is such a small and almost humorous ending, but it carries something universal within it. No matter how old we become, there is still a child somewhere inside us. Across cultures, generations, and countries, people continue echoing the same emotions and relationships.

This book deeply influenced the way I think about storytelling. Sometimes spending extra time in setting, atmosphere, and internal observation can create a much more immersive emotional experience. It also reminded me that flawed characters are often the most lovable because they feel real. Most importantly, it reinforced the idea that, despite our cultural differences, there are deeply human experiences that connect us all.