Welcome to The Cosmic Cheeto!
You're here with me now
Welcome, dear subscriber, to my humble newsletter, where I’ll be doing a lot of pondering of things that may strike you as mattering or not, but feel nonetheless important to me. Topics discussed in the coming months will include, but not necessarily be limited to: the LSD trip that changed my pedagogy, the contentious history of the color violet, genres of kindness, the mechanics of fascism (now and throughout history), the ideological hamster wheel of anxiety and self-hatred that is the American middle class, my exogenous testosterone as “Human Growth Hormone” (and no, I don’t mean the kind found in the pituitary gland), posthumanism, animal consciousness and speciesism, ekphrastic poetry about SpongeBob memes, and why philosophy belongs in the creative writing classroom (and vice versa).
As you can see, this newsletter is going to comprise an eclectic bunch of topics, and I’m so excited to share them with you! I plan to write these essays like I run my classes: meandering and free-associative, like a walk through a park in your mind. You know those kinds of afternoon walks in autumn where you have nowhere to be for the next four or so hours, so you can stop and admire fallen leaves that strike you as particularly colorful, or you can take a moment to consider the sky, or you can even park yourself on a bench and people watch? (Sidenote: if you were born before, say, 1997—do you remember people watching? Before we all had our handheld screens, we just sat on benches or stoops or in the grass and kind of let our eyes wander over the tableau before us, taking in all the fascinating human activity? There was no judgment or appraisal or objectification when it came to people watching: it was more an exercise in sustained light interest, a moment of pause in one’s own life to observe other people living their lives. I always got such a sense of camaraderie from people watching, would even silently root people on in their quests to cross the street or hail a cab or chase after the candy wrapper being blown away by the wind. The feeling was that we were somehow all in it together, this messy business of living, and that witnessing each other engaged in said business was a way of silently caring about one another. But I digress – I warned you this would be meandering!) Think of this Substack and the essays therein as just such a walk, and you’re the walker. And keep in mind that, just as with the autumn walk, there’s no “right” way to engage with this Substack: you can backtrack, you can skip around, you can bookmark to read later and then (maybe?) get around to it, you can read only the final sentences of every essay – it’s entirely up to you!
Perhaps you’re wondering: OK, sure, but who are you? Glad you asked!
I’m Rafael Frumkin (he/they), writer and creative writing teacher. I published my debut novel, The Comedown, in 2018, and it’s currently being adapted for TV by Freddie Highmore and Regina King. My second novel, Confidence, came out earlier this year, and my short story collection, Bugsy, comes out in February of next year. I’m currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University, where I teach classes in writing novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction of a variety of forms.
Now that you’ve got my conventional bona fides, here are some of the things that make me the human I am: I’m queer and trans (transmasculine, I suppose you could say, though nowadays I think “trans” on its own is a fairly apt description of my gender); my fiancé Fig Tree and I are looking forward to building a cozy little home far away from any streetlights on the woodsy plot of land we’ve recently come into; I consider my dog, Mina, my Soul Puppy, and have done some incredible growth alongside her: we both got some painful body parts surgically excised in the summer of 2021 (her ground-down bottom teeth, my breasts), we’ve both learned to give into panic less, we’ve gone for miles and miles of walks together, etc. etc.; I love teaching and find that it feeds my creativity so much more than, say, the doomscrolling and anxiety that it’s easy to succumb to when you don’t have the privilege of hanging out with the future of American letters in a classroom for a few hours every week. (Emphasis on future – I suppose I should add “the myth of the naivete of hope” to the list of to-be-discussed topics in the first paragraph.)
If you came here for career updates such as news about my upcoming events, special promotions with my books, and what I’m currently working on, have no fear! These things, too, will show up as especially colorful leaves on the path of your autumn walk.
Much of this Substack will be free and accessible to all, though there will be subscriber-only content as well. This will likely be deep cuts: unpublished and/or rejected stories and essays, juvenilia (anyone curious about the play I wrote in college that was basically the Enron scandal told as a Greek tragedy?), personal transition-related narratives, answers to reader questions, maybe even some poetry! As the subscriber-only side of things starts to take form, I’ll be able to give you all a better idea of what will be featured over there, so you can judge for yourselves whether you’d like to take the plunge and pay me $5/month or $50/year.
For now, though, I’d just like to thank you for subscribing, and wish you a pleasant beginning to your walk!
Much love,
Raf