# jacquelinemccormick.com ## Posts - [An experimental geography: one woman's hometown odyssey](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/psychogeography-lawrence-kansas-experimental-geography/): Local time: Sunday, September 20, 2026, 9:39 am CST Starting point: 1900 Barker (cafe), located: 816 Massachusetts Song playing upon entry: “Waterfall,” by the Stone Roses Local weather: 71 degrees, winds headed south, 8 mph, very light rain, speckles and spits really. Emotional weather: fresh on the other side of a scorched-earth and heart-blistering week. Witnessed one of the greatest magic tricks of the decade: my quick replacement in the wake of a nine year relationship. I’m not exactly sure how long it took him to move on, but within a month or two of me leaving he was with someone else. As… - [On Pretendians](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/native-american-ancestry-claim/): Raise your hand if you’re reading this and were told you had Native American ancestry at some point in your life. An undefinable and hazy recollection, passed down from generation to generation. A persistent, unprovable assertion…no names, tribes or customs. Hand raised. This claim was made so boldly that I went to elementary school envisioning an invisible line down the middle of my body: on the right was some amalgam of Northern European DNA, on the other: Native. It was neat like that. A half and half. Becoming a Record Seeker But the lack of evidence coupled with the dogged belief… - [Big Time Sensuality - The August Alive List](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/redirecting-sensual-energy/): Redirecting Sensual Energy Saying goodbye to a fairly affectionate long term relationship, one that came with a dog bursting with energy and a genetic instinct to trust everyone now means redirecting sensual energy to everything else. Here’s how that’s shown up for me: Every week I buy myself flowers from the Lawrence Farmer’s Market. Sometimes I go for herbs, the occasional brown paper sack of cherry tomatoes or pearl onions, but I always go for flowers. Deciding on bouquets is tough: there are a variety of vendors with different approaches to arrangement, color pairing and price. I’ve sampled a few different stalls, but… - [What Is a Sense of Place? A Short Essay on Home and Land](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/sense-of-place-essay/): The river is leggy, she runs. Arms, in flow from hugging the ocean. Somewhere to be, but she goes slowly. Like us. The river is a ribbon, like blood, sewn through the land like the threads of our circulatory system. Heraclitus would say that we cannot step into a river twice. Home, a place to return, is an illusion he would say, a tuft of nostalgia, riding on your coat sleeve through the bends.  I’ve stepped many times in this particular bend. It has shed its shell into my waking and nighttime dreams, waxed like the phases of the moon from… - [Did you sign up for my newsletter?](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/did-you-sign-up-for-my-newsletter/): If you signed up for my newsletter and have heard nary a peep from me, there’s a reason for that: there was an error on the backend of my sign ups form. 24 of you signed up and I cannot see nor add your details to my newsletter. So if you have the time and patience, consider signing up one more time and I’ll get you added! Thank you. - [Cicadas, Kaw Valley, and Coming Home to Kansas](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/coming-home-to-kansas/): It’s been a moment since I’ve busted one of these joy-centered missives, so here I am, standing before you, with a bunch of cicadas blasting in the background, fingertips at the ready. Reporting to you live, from Independence, Missouri – my stable and shelter before the big move back to home-home, in Lawrence, Kansas. And while this move was a slow one (and a tough one), I’m ready to share with you all the things that have made me smile, think, feel, and most importantly, feel alive since my return.  The Artist Way I thrive on routine, so it is no… - [The Prescription is in the Vision](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/croatia-sea-organ-zadar-pilgrimage/): I am a woman of visions. This isn’t a humble brag — sometimes I’m graced with pleasant and yet detailed reveries, the natural extension of every human’s goddess-given intuition. Other times it’s a nagging fear, come un-dug from the earth of my body. In 2008, it was the former.  Imagine a junior college cafeteria. Shifting metal chair legs against linoleum. Plastic wrapped sandwiches and Gatorade with chips. I’m 26, late to the game of higher ed, still unconvinced that education wasn’t just for a select few who had the money and privilege to not work full time for four years.  I… - [Some Circles Do Not Want to Be Moved](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/some-circles-do-not-want-to-be-moved/): Light grew weak at the edges, a horizon’s blush. I had left early to beat the sun. In my seat I felt settled like a stone dropped into water, better homed at the bottom than at the water’s edge. I remembered my place next to her and her and him. Siblings. A straight line and a few dotted ones. I could leave like it was a friend’s party, but instead I remembered that they were souls I saw born. In the waiting room or beside them, cutting the cord. I had somehow made the right decision and being with them reminded… - [I read Byung-chul Han's Non-Things and All I Got Was My Humanity](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/byung-chul-han-non-things-review/): “In the end, there are just disembodied voices aimlessly floating in the air.” — Hisoyaka na Kessho by Yoko Ogawa. I am one of those voices. And if you’re writing and commenting on the internet, you are too. There are many versions of us, deconstructing in a tonal prism of Greek choruses — humanoid chirps pinging as data across the walls of our dark, glistening, and private caves. Some voices are bright, and some are sharp, but all eke nourishment from the intangible — a cloud of data, hypertext, links, and chimes. Reading Non‑Things: reclaiming humanity In Byung-Chul Han’s book Non-Things,… - [Smelters, Serial Killers, and the War on Women: What Murderland Doesn’t Name](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/murderland-review-environmental-violence-pacific-northwest/): How femicide, environmental violence, and the backlash to women’s liberation shaped a deadly era in America Years ago, David Lynch brought the show Twin Peaks back from the dead. Affirming a threat hurled by one of its main characters that we’d see him again — clambering through the unsoothable dread of small town life and death in the Pacific Northwest. Making good on his promise made Peaksies mighty glad, and they expressed an excitement they hadn’t felt since their first viewings. As the fervor of the third season’s drop grew to a Ponderosa Pine pitch, I began to question my love for this… - [Creative Jealousy and Hater Culture*](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/creative-jealousy-criticism-artists/): The writer in solitude is a myth. No matter how many deadbolts you have locked on your literal and metaphorical doors, you are a citizen of a creative ecosystem, where all manner of biota flourish or struggle under the material and social conditions of their time. In the petri dish that is creative culture, you are what you eat: if you spite-read when you follow others, your work will struggle to cast off an aura of ugliness. If you’re the creative cheerleader shouting from the stands and offering high-fives, confused about why people openly sneer at your joy for them, you… - [Writing + Reading as Practice](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/reading-writing-practice/): When we’re writing about ourselves, the only sources we’re referring to are internal, a jewel or two plucked from their velvet cases, or lifted with care from the shallows of our oceans—a pearl moved by the moon and memory. But when we want to write on topics unknown to us, on subjects we want to understand more deeply, we must turn to external sources. This is where reading as a writing practice begins. Over the past few years, reading online, I’ve noticed a subtle decline in my ability to retain information. As such, I have returned repeatedly to physical media. Books,… - [Creation's Hungry Ghosts](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/creations-hungry-ghosts/): Taking time off, vacationing (for those of us who can), is so terrifying for the average American’s spirit. There are obvious hurdles that I subtly, parenthetically alluded to a moment ago, the primary of which is financial, and relatedly, a time poverty imposed on us by our rulers, benign or otherwise. But there’s also the terror of having enough time to break through the maintenance of everyday life to see who you are underneath all the “living”. Time away from your house, your job, your community, forces you to confront, in the words of Heinrich Karlsson, “being sentenced to freedom.” It… - [The Texture of Cities: Accidental Street Art and its Antecedents](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/the-texture-of-cities-accidental-street-art-and-its-antecedents/): In cities, there is so much waiting. For the train. For a friend to cross town. For the family ahead to pick up the pace. For another movie set to wrap. For the sun to sink behind downtown’s Stonehenge of high rises, and for the coolness of night to settle. Cities can make us nervous. The loud cracks, bass vibrations, screaming, and car alarms demand a thickening of one’s cortisol reserves. In the first months in a new city, eye twitches and insomnia often settle in. The brain asks: what can be tucked away as part of some unseen schema—there, but… - [Spokane Zine Fest Roundup](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/spokane-zine-fest-roundup/): They say time flies when you’re having fun. And while I’m not prone to living in cliches, yesterday’s Spokane Zine Fest flew by in such a way that I nearly gasped at my watch each time I checked. A little scene setting: every gal, gal pal, she, they, him, her, zir, queer, trans creative baddie you could imagine was on scene. My husband overheard a reassurance to someone anxious about it being their first zine fest – the reassurance was real, pithy: you aren’t alone here. My experience confirms that and not once did I meet anyone who didn’t pass the… - [50 Bucks to Shut My Mouth: A Filthy-Pagan’s Spiritual Reckoning](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/50-bucks-to-shut-my-mouth-a-filthy-pagans-spiritual-reckoning/): $50 at the end of the school year got me to a silent retreat and offered me the opportunity to experience something I’d never experienced before: a supportive enough environment to just shut the hell up.  15 of us slept dorm style, walked a nearby trail and encountered parts of ourselves we hadn’t likely seen in decades. Some tapped into the divine – source, God, nature, something wild and unfettered, but also still and nutritive. With this inordinately privileged bit of time I wrote a lot. I took the time to read, stare off into space and not say a single… - [Where the DIY Kids At?](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/where-the-diy-kids-at/): Alison Christoff of Local Music Shapes Culture caught my eye last December when she asked I had just wrapped my interview with Chicagoland’s wonderkin duo Brain Graffiti and loved the spirit of Alison’s call out. Obviously, I tried to connect the dots between BG and Alison, and who knows, maybe one day Alison’s band Pigmale Brains will tour Elgin and play a bill put together by homies Brain Graffiti. Alison’s interviews with bandmates, friends, local music scene nerds and hype-folks, along with her out-loud wonderings about how local music shapes culture, inspired me. With a lil pep in my step, I… - [Dog is God](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/dog-is-god/): The house is cooler and quieter now. The coolness started when the doctor held her stethoscope to his belly: no heartbeat. I extinguished the candles then – all three, one for each of us. I then opened the doors. An open door would let his spirit fly freely from our home to the park, where he often walked leashed. Here, I thought, he could roam wild. The house is cooler and quieter now. His body, like a giant star, sputtered to its slow languid end. The heat of that star is now being exchanged – not destroyed or created, but bending… - [Break Internet Induced Brain Rot: How to be Human Again](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/break-internet-induced-brain-rot-reclaim-focus-creativity/): Understanding Internet-Induced Brain Rot Picture a battery, any size. Now, picture the top of the battery corroded with white chalky dust.  This is your brain on the internet. I’m mostly joking, but I love using absurd examples to illustrate problems. Fellow millennials and Gen Xers might remember the over-the-top “This is your brain on drugs” ads from the ’90s—especially if you saw them in junior high, a time ripe for parody. But the truth is, the internet is a drug. We are all addicted, and we know it. In its long slide into enshittification, the internet has broken apart, become corroded… - [Country Musician Bobbie Gentry Set Us Free](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/bobbie-gentry-country-musician/): The country musician who vanished by choice—and the art of crafting one's own life - [Ready to rebuild after tearing it all down](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/psst-getting-things-ready/): Hello, I’m resetting my online presence which takes some time. Having gotten off traditional social media, I am attempting to restructure and redirect and reconnect where I’m “from” online. Expect more creative non-fiction, art, half-baked philosophical treatises soon. - [Scars and Other Histories](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/scars-and-other-histories/): A poetic piece on a body's history - [The Internet Turned Me Mean](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/the-internet-turned-me-mean/): and maybe it did the same to you too - [32 Books of 2024](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/32-books-of-2024/): Part 1 of some of my favorite and not so favorite books, short stories, essays and more - [The Aura and Lessons of Clarice Lispector](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/the-aura-and-lessons-on-existence-of-clarice-lispector/): On Mood, Originality, and the Telescopic Genius of Clarice Lispector - [Interview w/Brain Graffiti](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/interview-w-brain-graffiti/): The duo talks physical media, zines and what inspired them to start a DIY music space - [Of Snakes & Sunflowers](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/murder-in-montana/): 103 years ago a woman was murdered. She was killed in a boomtown, a 14 hour drive east of here, here being Spokane, Washington, near the North Dakota border and where her mean man traveled to and fro – in many iterations, from Plentywood, Montana to Williston or Minot and back. He was afforded a multitude of roles and personalities, dimensions through space and time and lies and criminality that my Great Aunt Ethel was never allowed. Think of yourself as a 22 year old, which she was at the time – your brain is fast forming new wrinkles or adjusting… ## Pages - [Who & What](https://jacquelinemccormick.com/about-creative/): I’m a writer and artist living in Lawrence, Kansas. I write and think about anti-algorithmic living, creativity under capitalism, sense of place, DIY spaces, and having a better life than our mothers and grandmothers. You can subscribe to my writing on Substack or follow creative happenings on this website. Contact Email: jmeridianmccormick@gmail.com Also known as Jackie/Jacqueline Treiber ## Optional - [Agent (MCP protocol)](websites-agents.hostinger.com/jacquelinemccormick.com/mcp) [comment]: # (Generated by Hostinger Tools Plugin)