The first time

(you were served Citations)

“Detention,” Suburban High School, Illinois: 2012.

The first and only time I served detention was by choice.¹ School had been a set of rules I’d cracked easily enough, and I was about to graduate a follower and hated myself for it. What, then, was this fear? This loneliness? Who even was I?²

I cracked simply, a yolk exposed. As a micro-rebellion I ditched dance class, gym for theater kids and washed out varsity athletes (me). I shimmered with anticipation from the moment I received my notice until I passed through the doorway of detention, a classroom like every other.³ Inside, the watchman⁴ laid down the law: no talking, no drills, no pressure to perform but uninterrupted time to write and to read (!?!). Between me and my old self, a fissure formed.

True, writing and art have rules, but the more I read, the more art I took in, the more I realized what moved me was never an execution of rule-following alone but of rule-breaking. Nonchronology, a woman dressed as a man, a comma where the end should be.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that there was already a hint of rebellion on my record.⁵ A hint: 1st or 2nd grade career day. The teacher warns us against asking our visitors about money. When my dad starts to speak in front of the chalkboard, I raise my hand and ask, clearly, how much he is rolling in.⁶ I remember a thrill in my heart and a heat in my cheeks, but nothing else, no chastising, after that.

Of course, there’s always a potentially worse consequence to breaking the rules, even those you might not have agreed to or understand in the first place. See: gender, geography, race, class, all knotted up in rules, rules themselves. Ever since first finding language for these rules, I’ve been drawn to and inspired by the people — the artists — who make boundaries visible and spoken and/or manipulate them, knowingly and unknowingly. I cut a secret pact with them, I drink their spirit; I’m less afraid, I’m not alone.

Cambridge Dictionary, s.v. “Citation Definition & Meaning,” accessed Dec. 2024.

You’re reading the first entry of Citations, an alt annotated bibliography, a running doc of responses to a world that, from our youngest, most open, omnipotent self, tells us what we shouldn’t do or be.

A consequence of breaking a rule, a citation is, more importantly, recognition of another’s work.⁷ 

Citations is my correspondence with the ideas and people who, I hope, will give us creative license for our own practices and lives. Whether you’re just starting out, starting in a new medium or genre, or want to free yourself from your own traps or the silos built around you, this is a correspondence across space-time and discipline, between all kinds of makers and breakers, for creative people who want to defy expectations and refuse easy categories.

1. Firsts are a prompt, a trope, an entire genre that never gets old. There are the coming-of-age firsts — first kiss, poem, loss — and the firsts that come later in life — first house, first retrospective. Though now that I’m thinking about it, all firsts age us, no matter when they come knocking.

2. A teenager.

3. Discuss.

4. A woman, actually.

5. There are watershed moments in whose wake we only swim in befores and afters, and I’m not saying those aren’t worth holding onto, but I do think they risk oversimplifying our stories and eroding the smaller moments that may accumulate into vital but complicated-to-map tributaries or disconnected but interesting holes.

6. I was an early advocate for salary transparency.

7. Speaking of, a disclosure: When finally settling on this name, I must have had on a shelf in my mind Cita Press, a public domain library and publisher whose feminist mission radiates from its namesake. Cita in Spanish means a quotation or date and is also the diminutive suffix for feminine nouns. Mujer: woman; mujercita: little woman.