new essay up at Image

This is another quick note to say that I have an essay out in the new issue of Image journal. If you’re a print subscriber, I think it looks particularly fancy in print! You can also read it online here.

I’m really proud of this one. The tl;dr is that I went to see an opera adaptation of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and experienced the mortifying ordeal of being known. In the very small CJS canon, this essay feels like a spiritual sequel (or maybe an answer?) to the essay I published on Marilynne Robinson in Earth & Altar.¹ Maybe I will write on topics other than novels and queer desire someday—but, in the vein of Greenwell’s beloved St. Augustine, not yet!

I’ve been contemplating the future of this newsletter. I want to keep writing to and for people I love (and I do dearly love so many of you—my subscriber list is not long!). But my personal relationship to posting on the internet has felt increasingly fraught over the years, and now with the rise of large-scale generative AI models, I don’t like the idea of posting my original writing for free just so it can train a computer to “write” a dumber post while spoiling several gallons of fresh water out of Carvins Cove.²  

I’m not going anywhere yet, just thinking out loud. I wanted this to be a place that felt low-stakes and yet rigorous, a place for my weirder tangents and maybe-unpublishably-long thoughts about Texas culture. The internet just doesn’t feel like that for me anymore, maybe anywhere. (Maybe I’m just saying I miss 2012-era blogging…)

but in between doom-spiraling in the midst of uuuuuhhh everything, finding ways to help with my body and dollars, and sending in final copyedits to my Image essay and its publication, I’ve run across some good stuff on Al Gore’s internet. I’ll leave you with a little bit of show-and-tell of what I’ve been into recently:

• One of my favorite critics on life in D.C. under occupation by federal troops: Safe and Beautiful | The Point Magazine

• “Sunlight in the Blue Room” by Anna Ancher, which I ran across browsing the Persephone Books website. They add that the full title explains the girl is Ancher’s daughter Helga, crocheting.

• A review of a book about fact-checking by Susan Choi, a novelist and former New Yorker fact checker The Yale Review | Susan Choi: My Days as a Fact-Checker at The New…

• Best thing I’ve bought recently are these clogs that are so ugly they go round the bend to being gorp-core cute. I keep calling them my ‘tactical clogs’.

• Grace Byron in the New Yorker on the war on trans art. I haven’t read Byron’s new novel Herculine yet but it looks like it fucking slaps.

• This Lit Hub essay about writing in the wake of a loved one’s suicide, which gets at some of the same feelings I had while reading Blake Butler’s Molly and the always-complicated problem of writing about people who have died: Literary Hub » Laughing in Hell: How We Tell the Stories of Other Peoples’ Suicides³

• Kelsey McKinney’s newsletter, “This Week in 15 Selections,” where I encountered the above Lit Hub essay.

• Stained glass I stared at for a long time at the V&A–the sign interpreting it said the angel was probably depicting “the angel of the last judgment”:

Texas forever,
CJ

1  That first print edition of E&A was never published online, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

2  https://cardinalnews.org/2025/07/17/roanoke-seeks-share-of-botetourt-countys-google-data-center-tax-revenues/

3  Coincidentally, I read this the same week I read Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow, which is some of the most compassionate, heartbreaking writing about suicide I’ve ever read. I recommend the pairing.