This issue of The Intronaut is coming to you from the same sender,¹ via a new courier.² Instead of being a publication that sends essays-as-emails, The Intronaut is reverting to (read: "evolving to") to an old-school personal newsletter: a monthly round-up of links. This format gives me the freedom to write and publish whatever I want on my personal site—essays, fiction, poetry, logs—and gives you the option to read as much or as little as you'd like.³

I've had a lot of fun putting this email together, which bodes well for the new format, and I hope you enjoy it too. Here's what I've been working on.

Beneath the Glacier Is Out in the World

A couple weeks ago, I was in Iceland for the first time since the 2022 adventure that inspired Beneath the Glacier. The occasion: a total solar eclipse. Totality was magical and unnerving (there's an essay to come on that). And as my friend and I traveled around the country, I gifted 27 copies of BtG to the people we met along the way.

At the very end of our trip, in the Keflavík airport, we met a backpacking couple from NC, and when I handed them my last two gift-copies, the woman recognized it! She said she had seen someone carrying it around at some hostel, and that she remembered it because she loves the cover! So, at least in Iceland, the word is out.

If you have already read the book (thank you!), you can be the first person to review it on either Amazon or Goodreads.

Micro-Doses of Dream-Inspired Prose-Poetry

I've kept a dream-journal since 2014. Lately, I've been challenging myself to turn some of my most salient and vivid dreams into pieces of prose-poetry.⁴ The risk of sharing dream-scenes is that they come across as useless gibberish, so these are stylized to have coherent themes while (hopefully) retaining that loose, disorienting feeling of a dream. (And they come complete with voice-over readings by yours truly!)

"Sewer Slinking"

Slinking through a sewer wishing I were leaner, sleeker but grateful to be wading through this scent-less scum, safe from my predator: an invisible heat-seeker, call 'er cheetah . . . Continue reading →

"Glacier Bay"

Cleave, slip, shatter, sink—I need to see it. Treading tepid water, freezing, insisting that it happen while I’m watching—I await the magician’s prestige. Continue reading →

"Away From Annotating"

Why I'm allowing myself to read without a pen

Ever since editing became my job, I have found it harder to read for leisure. My default mode is editing-mode, which means reading with a pen and commenting in the margins. When I read this way, both engaging with the content and studying the craft, I probably average three or more minutes per page. At that rate, it takes me about 15 hours to read a 300-page book. That's how I love to read. That's how books stick with me and how they come to morph my mind. I don't want to change that, but as a writer, editor, and self-publisher, I need to be reading more books, turning more pages. To that end, I have an idea. Continue reading →

This Summer's Logs

All the while, I've kept up my practice of logging, and I've published 24,700 words in the past three months. Here are a few of my favorite entries from this summer.

Jun 18

Sleep cannot be coerced. It is one of the only daily activities that will always require surrender and openness; more and more, our other activities of the day can be accomplished by grasping. June's logs →

Jul 01

Skin is matter–space liaison delimiting person from place no matter species or race. My relationship to environment became my skin’s condition: a murky moat-canal failing to exclude and expel the correct bodies from mine. The itch, I scratched—blaming it for mind’s condition, until I came to know that I had failed my sacred membrane. July's logs →

Aug 26

This is an overdue addition to my list of favorite words: enjoy, for the simple relationship between its prefix and root; literally, “to fill with joy,” “to imbue with joy.” This word reinforces the fact that joy is a choice and is always accessible, that it comes from within one and seeps out into the world, into one’s life and into others'. August's logs →

My current focus is to create as much as I can—whatever I have the energy for—without limiting myself to projects that feel productive. Here are some of my most developed ideas. By voting, you can help me choose which one to prioritize next.

Thank you for reading,

Garrett Kincaid