She Shreds Media has released our final print magazine this month as we fully transition to online. To say the absolute least: it was a truly wild ride and often unhinged ride creating this time capsule during a national health crisis and the country’s most impactful uprising for Black lives and anti-racism.

To say a little more: these last six years as Managing Editor of She Shreds Magazine—editing 13 out of 20 issues—has been so transformative for me on a personal level. More importantly, this niche magazine has also ignited a transformation in the music industry: changing the way women and nonbinary musicians—especially Black and brown women—are covered in the media, holding gear companies accountable for their sexist and racist behaviors, and uplifting marginalized voices. I'm honored to have had any role in this at all, and I feel so lucky to work with such an amazing, dedicated team.  As a lover of tangible reads, and a writer who went to school for journalism 14 years ago (excuse me?!) during a time when print was 'officially declared dead,' I'm beyond grateful to have had the chance to work for a print publication that fuses feminism, music, and progress. 

Today through July, we will be donating 100% of sales from the digital edition of Issue 20 to two organizations chosen by cover artist H.E.R. and She Shreds: Rock the Vote, an organization building the political power of young people; and Give a Beat, an organization reducing the harmful effects of incarceration through music production, DJing, and education programs.

At She Shreds Media, we've been working on an evolving resource for white and non-Black musicians to aid them in their anti-racist work. It is updated twice a week with collective input, and I feel honored to work with a team who puts this work at the forefront of our company.

I hold Karen Dalton’s music and story close to my chest, and so I’m thrilled to have contributed to this love letter to her: It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best: a Karen Dalton fanzine, published by Syncronised Witches Press. “Canary in a Coalmine” is a piece about trying to find light in the dark. Here’s a little excerpt:

Three of us branched off and talked about our mothers, their deaths, the ineffable impact. I felt lonely as I realized the fear I carried, the effects of grief, the ignited thoughts that can burn up whole days. I revolved my subconscious around time, a quickly draining hourglass, and a fear of both success and demise. I softened, I quieted, and I woke up. In that moment I could feel you—a canary in a coal mine.

february 28: a task

Have you felt so low, so finely in tune with the arrangement of your insides, that it takes a soft yet precarious movement of both mind and body to emerge? And when I say emerge, let it mean what first comes to mind, let it mean the home, and the heart, and the vile corners of your mind. Let it mean something other than just sleeping through the winter—but sleep through the winter, if you must—or stepping aside continuously until you find yourself on the edge, the coast. Your body soaking in boreal saltwater, aching for the horizon.

Ask yourself, and do it now: have you ever felt so in tune with anything at all?

The world was softer then. We ran away screaming from beehives and then ran giggling toward them. We broke rocks open with our father’s hammers and struck gold. We picked flowers and ripped them apart, or brought them home to our mothers. We won goldfish from the Italian feast every summer; they would die within days, our grief would fade within hours.

We dreamed our futures to be enormous and full.

Someday I will write a book, I told my mother, and she believed it. I wrote stories and read them out loud to the tape recorder; my brother’s sometimes came into the room and I had to start again. I kept journals at ten and never grew out of it. I was attracted to the sound of words, the crinkle of plastic covers on books, the way the elementary school librarians would lick their fingers and turn the page.

Author, Mom. These were the answers to the questions I remember constantly having to answer: What do you want to be when you grow up? Who do you love?

The answers remain the same, despite the wavering existence of both.