About the writer, your founding scribe
Hi! I’m Kaj Rae, f.k.a Kaja Rae, f.k.a Kaj Lindberg. I’m going to give my background as an “arts worker”, most of which will be gibberish to anyone without background in the slam world or the “literary” poetry world. So hopefully most of you who are reading this and don’t already know who I am.
My background as an arts worker is in poetry. I started out in DC with Youth Poet Laureate competitions, then went to Giovanni’s room in Baltimore, then started performing at their open mics. I slammed on that circuit for the next 2-3 years, 2017-2019, with DewMore Baltimore’s youth poetry team and as the Youth Poet Ambassador. and in that time I was publishing poems in places like SISSTORIES and several other literary magazines. I worked as a freelance writer, an editor (both freelance and with a small magazine), as a book reviewer, and as a literary submission reviewer, uncharitably known as a slushpile reader. Most of my drive for writing came from my experience as a trans psych survivor and childhood sexual assault survivor and reading to justify my own voice and knowledge to myself.
All of this (outside of Youth Poet Ambassador gigs, freelance writing for the Washington Informer, and freelance editing) was unpaid labor that I was able to do because I had upper-middle class parents who fed my creativity, disability accommodations in high school, and no expectation of getting a “real job” until I dropped out of college at 18 due to illness. Arts work was both a privilege and a trap. The moment I needed to make money to sustain a livelihood I couldn’t use the 6 -7 years of experience I had to find a role that was valid enough to get me out of my parent’s house and out of the looming cycle of re-hospitalization.
At 20, I ditched the “literary” world because of chronic illness and all around annoyance with the terrain. I had acquired what is colloquially known as “post- traumatic slam poet syndrome” because my creative practice was a “duende”, spiral around several traumatic experiences artistically in hope that it would resolve. I wrote as a way to keep myself sane and alive, something I repeatedly said in my early poetry submissions. The idea of a career was secondary but as a younger person, the idea that it could be a career and therefore a way out of that situation was enough to keep me working.
However, there was very little accessible money in that field and I was growing less and less able to keep up with the social norms of literary work. As a result, I ended up prioritizing schooling and jobs, which also didn’t work well.
I have a thorny set of access needs where I need more alone time than most people, have limited social capacity, and have intense sensory sensitivities and needs. I don’t identify with DSM labels because they bother me for reasons I won’t get into, but in short, I may have a touch of the tism, mayhaps even a tussle with the tism.
Soup as Method Keywords & Themes & Conflicts
SOUP AS METHOD: a transdisciplinary creative and research method that uses specially designed intuitive tools to supercharge cultural strategy, arts, and organizing work. Working with Soup As Method takes its participants through a tailored process that will challenge oppressive systems, develop life-affirming work methods, work, and foster new forms of relating to their labor.
This is a case study showing that through
- my artistic process
- symbol symphonies: the connected way the cards become story, image, & sound. this is how i build style kits, consult on budding projects, and troubleshoot projects that may feel stuck or disconnected.
- pocket science: figuring out where you or your work may fit in a wider narrative terrain, identifying your own position in a narrative landscape, and building self-understanding around how you work in your creative practice
- budgeting (energy and otherwise), burnout prevention, sustainability: the practical business
Here’s the spread for this project. It’s a spread where the main card is “supported” by the other two. The two support cards are sub-themes while the main is the core theme.
I read the cards for this run of soup as method through several sources, a few of them being Red Tarot by Christopher Marmolejo, Iya Funlayo’s tarot courses, symbol dictionaries (penguin’s is my main one), my own experiences I was reflecting on and linking them to the other meanings.
Five of Diamonds / Pentacles
hardship disability rage
rejection
unwillingness to ask for help
colonial helping styles / coercive care
being outside of grace/forgiveness/compassion impacts of dogma
human v. dehumanizing conditions human v. scarcity
King/Sage of Hearts / Cups
emotional leadership psychology
poetry
mastery of emotions lack of sensitivity
Queen/Sibyl of Diamonds / Pentacles
harvesting inner maturity
cultivated abundance
developed skill in exchange, reciprocity, and material concerns
Pocket Science
a very abridged pocket science origin story
Pocket Science was born somewhere between December 2023- March 2024. I applied to the Center for Story-Based Strategy fellowship in the process of losing my housing to mold, then Airbnb hopped with the money I had from a previous job and disability overpayments. then the Airbnb got broken into, then I was on a couch, then i was back Airbnb hopping, then I was in a sublet, then I was on a lease and housed. In periods of high stress, time warps. So I called it the mold portal.
In the portal I was dealing with med side effects that were painful and difficult to manage. In lieu of some other form of grounding, I was studying the Center for Story-Based Strategy SBSU course and ReFrame’s narrative predictions for 2024.
I listened to a lot of music and started the prototype playlists for A World For Us and wrote several of the early versions of those poems in that process.
Pocket Science was a joke I made, riffing off of “it’s not rocket science”, after finding the Narrative Observatory and seeing how they map out value aligned audiences, track long narratives, and make sense of how artists design narratives to make an impact. So synthesizing these influences, I started to design this.
I then received notice of acceptance to Center for Story-Based Strategy’s fellowship, replied with my confirmation. Once I accepted, I received formal workshop training from CSS and began to investigate Culture Hack labs’s approach to cultural / narrative strategy. This broadened my approach to the work. I started to integrate different tools and thought processes; including the CSS toolkit and the social listening and community networking models from Culture Hack. From here, I integrated those two toolkits into a practical framework from a lone relationship anarchy youtuber (AnRel, link [here]()) that could cover both the micro levels and macro levels of narrative/cultural strategy.
I built this out in a research framework I was calling “narrative epidemiology”, taking cues from both colonial, pre-colonial, and decolonial, bodies of scholarly work that identify culture as biological. Then I scrapped it and settled on the use of tarot/bicycle cards as a system of mnemonics for all the information in there. Most of my writing in that framework was articulating what was obvious to me and most other people, I got very detail oriented about it, to the point of losing the forest for a pine cone, and was envisioning a whole slew of other things down the road. In short, I was trying to overcome epistemic injustices I’d previously experienced by overcompensating with faux-intellectualism and citations. I made a rookie mistake; attempting to rebuild the wheel instead of finding someone to teach me how to ride the bike I already had.
Practical Rundown
before we start
Art is labor. It is luxury labor that shouldn’t be a luxury. And selling it means it operates in the market. I am producing a product that may or may not have a product-market fit and the freewheeling autonomy we generally ascribe to artists is only accurate when there is a place outside of that framework of market and product. I hate this limit on artistic autonomy to the point where I frequently will not share my work at all because I know it isn’t meshing with the market. In writing this and in reflection periods during the production of this work, I took a scientific approach more than a creative one. In making that shift, I could reconcile the discontinuity between my creative drives and the reality of making art in a market. There are production standards that must be met, complied with, or queered effectively, or else the work is unprofitable and therefore unsustainable without some other way to fund a way of life. The work then became “how do I queer these standards effectively?”
These production standards, because the power dynamics are intentionally obscured, encompass the whole identity of an artist, replicating the dynamics of resource extraction in the psyche and spirit of the artist. The autonomy ascribed to artists is a myth, created mainly for artists who already had autonomy under white supremacy and is entirely reliant on adopting the life- ways of the people the dominant culture allows to have autonomy. So, white people and sometimes able-bodied, successful people of color who it can uplift insofar as they are useful for the goals of capital. It’s an alluring trap. And I wanted to get out of it. Badly. Because I’d gotten into it several times already and when I inevitably cannot meet it’s standard, I am booted out with a “wish you the best in your next pursuits”, bruising, and less and less life left.
Artistic labor by people outside of the historically valued identity of “artist” or placed within it only as far as they can keep up with the fast-paced memetic environment of what’s hot with rich people, meeting the “bar” of social performance within artistic spaces (i.e. being respectable, acceptable, and not rocking the boat), all while navigating the grinding precarity of life outside of “the arts” is unsustainable not because of personal failings, lack of drive, and often, not even because of lack of skill, but because we were never supposed to be alive to make art in the first place. Even with the growth of arts spaces that value queer, trans, BIPOC, femme, disabled experiences, the same dynamics as white-centric spaces often do continue. This, I largely attribute to ableism, because ableism is the core tool of capitalism to wage war on our humanity. The denial of our inclinations and needs that come up while doing arts work to ensure a good performance, show, or piece, can quickly lead to horizontal hostilities.
Even when these needs are accepted, carceral models of self-care, lack of access to medical care or non-abusive medical care, lack of accessible, neuro-affirming and trauma-informed or centered mental health care options, lack of access to alternative healing modalities and their invalidation, the popularity contests for care and dignity that leave disabled people who aren’t deemed respectable or are “too difficult” for able-bodied people outside of care, and so many other conditions that make it difficult to get your needs
met, the lack of a proper model for addressing that breeds resentment and the
slow burn of social cohesion and care melting away. All while we make art, not realizing it is an entertaining trap where we may die sooner than we think, if we are not careful.
Many art spaces will overtly or covertly treat people who cannot fit this role in ways that reaffirm our rejection. Swallowing that rage is a death trap, too.
The evidence of this trap is our absence; the survivorship bias of who is in the artistic spaces in the first place. Who could get through the door? Who could stay? Who was able to invest the time to dodge shadowbans, account deletions, and anti-black social media algorithms and “make it” another way?
This is no different than most other work. But art still has an aire of mystique, an expectation forced gratitude, even when the pay may be too low for the skill level of the artist or the work done. Capitalism makes art soul- sucking. It doesn’t have to be that way.
So in short, my hope with this project has been finding avenues for life outside of the market model of artistry and finding ways to make art, services, frankly, anything I and other Black, queer, trans, mad, neuroweird people are able to do as well, that can fund ways of life in regenerative solidarity economies.
Before I enter the rundown of practical costs, I want to mention where the funds for this project came from. I was able to do this project because I had access to federal disability funds that paid my rent and bills, and occasional financial support from my mother and father to cover costs my disability couldn’t cover. From CSS, I received 1,000 dollars in operational funds, and the split stipend of 3,000 dollars, 1500 received in april and the second part of 1500 to be received in November.
Here’s the practical rundown of costs.
The Book
Link and extra documentation
costs… in money
sketchbook pro mobile app: $2.11 spotify subscription 11.99/month
in time
the phases were poem and copy compilation collages playlist creation compiling readying for publication (ongoing)
There’s eight collages in my book. My collage workflow is generally around 2-3 hours in Sketchbook, but here, I was experimenting with new techniques digitally. So it took longer, especially for “immaterial love / material world” and “an old bird makes & un-makes the world”, where that experimentation went the furthest.
“void-making” about 2 hours
“pratfall from grace” about 3 hours “self-shaper” around 4 hours
“TURN THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN” around 4 hours
“if you want to go home” I lost count here. I worked on this collage on and off for a year because I was stagnated creatively and moving around a lot.
“an old bird makes & un-makes the world” about 4 hours “immaterial love / material world” about 4 hours
Poem time is not real and is unquantifiable. This is a gap I am leaving because I can’t count how many hours I spent on these poems.
Compiling was done on Canva for free. This took maybe 5-10 hours total. Tasks included, taking page margins, figuring out a font kit, applying standard formatting, ordering the poems, collages, and prompts, and integrating the playlist.
in energy
Major energy drains:
Inner editor weight: I have a vicious inner editor. Not an inner critic, though she’s there too, the inner editor is not always critical, she’ll shut up if she thinks it’s up to her standards. But her standards were created in a different environment than the one I operated in for this project. I learned how to edit and created my poetic standards through reading hundreds and hundreds of poems as a slushpile reader and as a student of poetry. I saw my poems with a deeply ingrained mindset of “where would this poem find a home?” Or, I viewed my poems through a lens of comparison to the “marketable” poets who were making their way into first book prizes and MFA teaching roles at the time. That mindset was now outmoded and unhelpful. I had to reshape my editorial eye down to one that honed in on my intention rather than attention, accolades, or self-validation. I had developed a pragmatic and utilitarian view of poetics that killed my poetic drive. It made most of my words mean nothing to me and I would frequently stop writing because of analysis paralysis and a lack of self-trust as a poet, writer, and communicator in general.
L anguage tolls & nonsense: I had to get over a hump in my poetic process about how I relate to language as a whole. I couldn’t speak or think in words at times while making this, re-integrating into the precise language game of poetry either ended in incoherence or repeating poetic patterns I was only subconsciously aware of. I figured out that I work better in poems when I use core images as anchors and build relationships between those images, other art, and music to vary the sensory landscape of the work. Then I placed those images inside the book in all of those forms, the guiding playlist, the collages, the story, and the poem. It ends up drawing a network semantics links. Language still doesn’t make sense sometimes, and I’m becoming more okay with that.
The Sculptures
DOCUMENTATION HERE:
costs…
in money
materials costs in total for the sculptures were: armature wire x2 ($19.78)
paper clips ($34.03)
boxes to set up the install (free) stencils (8.99)
sheet covers (repurposed from a bedding set that was $15.99 in total)
white cloth (free 99, things were being tossed from previous housemates) syringes (repurposed)
rollator (repurposed: $60.48) concrete blocks (free 99)
wood stick (free 99)
5 pennies
lights (26.69) adding it up:
no repurposed items: $89.64
repurposed items: $166.01
in time
The first bird I called a “cope bird”, made over a few hours on a low spoon day. The second one was similar, but I wanted a bigger one, so it took longer. birds 3 and four probably took 3 hours for both of em. and the big sculpture took a solid 3 weeks, hours definitely not counted, but basically most of my time during those 3 weeks was spent sitting and making the bird.
Then the cardboard cards, stenciled over, was about 2 hours in an evening.
Finally the install process, which I did several times, due to my own lack of intentionality, took most of the day on a Sunday.
bird one – 3 hours bird two – 4-5 hours
bird three & four – 3 hours bird five – 30 hours cardboard cards – 2 hours install process – 7 hours
total: 55 hours
so a 40 hour work week and some change.
in energy
Significantly less than the book because of a lack of sensory overstimulation. There were more gains than losses in this process.
a world for us, the book
In this section, I’ll give some highlights from the book and the application of Soup as Method structurally. It uses the insights I got through a Battle of the Story process, but not in full. I would advise reading through this with the book! You can buy an e-book here. If cost is a barrier, send me an email and I can send you a copy.
The structure of the whole book operates like this:
Key Conflict: High v. Low
This theme is the core thematic concept that moves the text. It’s origins are in the introductory spread: five of diamonds. The five, as the core number here, is a process of dis-assembly and shattering. Then , reading through Marmolejo’s close reading of the five of pentacles where they point out the leper bells on the bodies of the travelers, I began to make more relations and design the text. I took their themes of contagion, rejection, and integrated it with the work of zuri arman’s “Feeling Unsentimental” and their thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic; specifically honing in on their middle section “The Impossibility of Incorporation”. Here, arman makes a point to “emphasize the religious infrastructure that orders thought” after walking through how Sylvia Wynter outlines the ‘ladder’ of humanity where the “Black’s position is predestined because the human’s current descriptive statement is the result of the continued secularization of an originally religious ordering schema based on ‘degrees of spiritual perfection’. That is, the ordering of humans and “the Other” in Western thought was originally rooted in the calculated proximity to a Christian God.” So, taking that and arman’s conclusions about COVID-19 and Black queer proximity to death and twisting it in with my own life experience, I created the collage “pratfall from grace” which holds up the middle section of the book with its core images, the cardinal, the bell, and the Sun/gold.
This text “a world for us” is operating from the mindset that gender is a carceral system and a dystopian concept, two thought processes I’ve adopted from Nkiru Nzegwu and a lecture from Interrupting Criminalization’s cohort of abolitionist scholars. As such, none of the symbols here are read as explicitly gendered, outside of the Moon, because I couldn’t let go of my sapphic with citations poet habits and can never think of Her any other way.
This conflict is pushed further in “TURN THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN” which integrates the earlier themes from “a well kept secret, our loud names”, “FOR VOIDGIRLS”, the collage “void-making”, and makes the conflict between those two parts of the narrative clear. At the bottom rung of this ladder, the void and at the top, the sun.
Core questions for thinking through this conflict were:
If art is spiritual work, who gets to be seen as having a soul or a self- identity?
What parts of myself are valued or devalued within these competing frameworks?
How has/is/will spiritual ableism, psychiatric policing, neoliberalism, and cisheteropatriarchy influencing my ability to live with a whole identity (body, mind and spirit)?
Core Images and Sub-conflicts
The Sun: a symbol of the soul, fate, the King, active principles, and also, gold, capital, the future, futures, et cetera.
The black hole: I didn’t research this one nearly as much. The black hole image stems from Kai Cheng Thom’s writing on Substack where she talks about wholeness. Linked here.
Fire: in it’s use in the book, it is serving both as an unwanted halo and as a method of escape
Birds: specifically, the cardinal, the crane, and the crow. The sea
The Golden Thread The Moon
The Sun moves between narrative frameworks in it’s usage. In “prayer for my hair” it’s working an idea of the Self or the inner divine spark. In “lessons in defrosting” it’s working both meanings, the inner spark and self that melts away the blockage and capitalism. The tension between these two images is one I’ve been working through poetically, between being destroyed by rage or sorrow and being inspired to action. A song that summarizes this best is f.k.a twigs’ home with you.
The Moon appears in this text as a symbol for the body, for rapid change, for cyclical moments of birth and rebirth, the receptive principle, and as a sign for beauty and femininity. It is a minor image here, but I kept it in because it’s themes counterbalance the Sun. I regret not giving this more of a highlight, but that deadline is looming. To see the themes clearer, look for silver in the book.
The black hole appears in text at “FOR VOIDGIRLS” and “a well kept secret, our loud names”. These two iterations of this image set it up as both a source of hope and power. But they do so in the midst of other images that contrast and reject the power of the Sun. Where the collage “void-making”, takes place in a closed off room, the final moments of “a well kept secret…” happen in a dayroom where the main character is seeing only water, the black hole becomes a way to find a different way of life. Please excuse this trite citation, I’m using it because it applies here, but the black hole as an image in this text serves as an avenue for finding “other sun’s” as Octavia Butler said.
The golden thread is the tie through the whole book. As the myth goes, it was used to navigate a labryinth to overcome a trial. The symbol is working as a sign for direction, self-direction specifically, in situations where guidance is either misleading or scant. The thread comes up with the sea as a call back to the solar symbols and as a sign for the Self finding its way through.
For the birds, I’ll focus on the cardinal, it’s a bird of change. The cardinal’s appearances in the text are moments where the “ladder” is being “climbed”. When the bird reaches the top, it’s another layer up. So each time this bird appears, until the last time it appears in “immaterial love / material world” it marks another layer up. The book itself, while not organized in that way, is
intending to create that effect of a slow elevation out of one state into another. The molting of wings is a sub-image as well. It appears both in “I got sick of word-rot” and in “seafarer’s song”. Molting is taken as a sensitive and uncomfortable place, the between phases of change.
This is where the collage entitled “NO MORE STILLBORN GIRLS” came from, which has been removed from the book because I didn’t give it enough space and I don’t feel comfortable leaving it in there without it or opting into the litany of dead trans femme’s names deal that nauseates me. It’s about that sensitivity, and getting your wings clipped before you even really got a chance to fly, so out of metaphor, the violence that happens to trans women and girls in the period where they begin the process of embracing their identity and adopting a new way of life.
The golden thread image, at the end, concludes the conflict of the Sun and the Moon. The end of the text is meant to complete the stitching process in “seafarer’s song”, re-assembling the self.
And that’s where the project closes. Reassembled. Thanks for reading 
.