Published during Indian summer.
“Women and Water,” the project by Gale Straub, Hailey Hirst, and Noël Russell, gave me a framework for understanding what I was carrying back from the rivers. Their work asked: what do women bring to water, and what does the water return? My swims, my notebooks, my conversations with the dead; they were all part of that cycle. Relief and reflection in places out of step with ordinary time.
In 2025, it is more acceptable to use an alternative name for this, “second summer.” With context, even in Old America (Europe) had use “old woman’s summer” as an alternative.
But to real San Franciscans, Indian Summer still holds up fine.
This season also began my unfinished investigations into Gang-life among Asian and Pacific Islander communities, connected to Black and Latin struggles. They are not finished investigations, but they are beginnings, and beginnings are enough for now.
San Francisco’s Indian summer arrives in September, long after the calendar has given up on warmth. My return to writing feels the same: belated, unexpected, but searing in its heat.
All summer, I drove inland, chasing rivers, creeks, and lakes where the water still ran cold enough to sting. Each swim felt like a reprieve, a chance to put my body back into the world. Back in the city, the ocean and bay were always there, gray and punishing, but September light transformed even them. Water became a companion, an element that held me through the spiral of release: leaving youth behind, leaving tech, moving toward thirty.
Books accompanied me in this season, as they previously have. Two from Margaret Atwood: The Edible Woman, Moral Disorder. A Betty Smith novel I first read ten years ago was a literal feeling I was trying to chase; and so picked up Joy in the Morning. Heather Clark’s Red Comet, which became not just biography but a line of dialogue with Sylvia Plath herself. Somehow I can’t ever seem to finish our conversation. Anne Sexton’s The Death Notebooks. These weren’t nostalgic reads to me, they marked time and reminded me I was still in conversation with the women who first taught methat writing could be survival.
And with the water came the stories. Inside this issue, you’ll find: a first dispatch from District 6’s Indian summer, a chapter from Lilla’s sisters’ cycle, notes from Alon’s mythic tides, and the way Jack and Izzy keep showing up whenever I write about love. I’m trying to understand why.
I returned to Alon’s mythology, its root system of tides and storms. I picked up *Jack and Izzy* again, my longest-running exploration of the kind of lover I am and love I want. I began building the first (four storylines) in a series around four sisters, Lilla’s, the scaffolding of another. Spreading what I know of: sisters come from mothers and mothers birth daughters. The “P.P.S” to the sprawl of the sisters Sav, Lilla, Meaghan, and Penelope is a fifth installment—a love letter to my mother, in the form of the sisters’: Annie-girl.
These projects waited through my hiatus (through college, motherhood, through turmoil, through lost loves) and now, they could wait no longer. Even journalism returned with the season. I began planting seeds of reporting in San Francisco: District 6, the contradictions of SoMa. Families living through fentanyl’s reach.
If summer comes late here, maybe so can I. This is my Indian summer, heat and clarity long after silence, words returning when I thought the season had already passed.
