When I started collaborating with Candace Thompson, I was a different person—which makes reviewing our early footage so weird for me. 2018 was a hard year. My father had died the previous fall, setting off a chain of grief and suppressed memories that fueled the year to come. I had been sexually assaulted on a subway station in early January and within a month of that incident wrote the mini-chapbook meditating on chronic patterns of sexual violence in my life that this film shares a title with—and sprang from. Disassociating, I cut my hair into a short bob—the shortest I had ever let it get post-transition. I was in the midst of an MFA program I was, in hindsight, deeply unhappy within. These were the circumstances I met Candace under.
The footage we shot that summer, which has carried into our work together this year, remains a surreal capsule of that time. My hair is longer again, my body is shaped slightly differently now. One of our framing devices through the film, me running throughout the woods, is no longer possible; ongoing chronic pain and joint displacement means that I cannot run any more, something I was doing at least weekly beforehand. But the work that we—and our collaborators Merkel, Allie Shyer, Tatiana Stolpovskaya, Jazzy Schutt-VanMeveren, and Susannah Simpson—made over this year I hope continues/challenges that initial record from summer 2018.
A lie that is commonly believed about ghosts is that they only exist in the past, unchanging. As someone shaped by loss, I refuse that narrative. I believe that we carry our ghosts with us, and as we change, they do as well. Wolf Inventory has grown and grown, from an initial film set in a haunted arts retreat to a larger, sprawling, continuous project. It’s changed, much as our initial process has, from an adaptation of a poetry chapbook to a series of conversations about family, legacy, race & stolen land, intergenerational trauma, and what we can and cannot live with. I’m so proud of what we’ve made, the more generous and abundant hauntings present through the whole project.
It’s been a delight working with Candace and everyone else involved in Wolf Inventory. I hope it means something to you. I can’t wait to see what emerges next.
Zefyr