by jacquin cunningham
images courtesy stacy kranitz
images courtesy stacy kranitz
Two months later, Kranitz was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Public Service with ProPublica writers Cassandra Jaramillo, Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana for the series “Life of the Mother.”
Jacquin Cunningham: You’re having a show in New York, and I think before we talk about that, which is The Safety Net, at Psychic Readings Gallery from April 3rd to May 10th with Chris Verene, I wanted to first talk to you about As It Was Give(n) To Me and the show that you did last year at CCProjects.
Stacy Kranitz: Oh, you got to see? Oh good.
JC: Yeah, which was really amazing. As I’m talking to you, I’m looking at the poster to it. I’ve got it above my desk.
SK: Have you got one of them? Yes. I love that.
JC: Actually, got two!
SK: Oh, good! I was trying to force them on people when I was there.
JC: I’m all about print media, you know, I’ll take everything!
SK: Oh, that’s true!
JC: I wanted to talk to you about that project cause Twin Palms published the book which the exhibition accompanies in 2022, but you’ve been producing this body of work for 15 years now, which is a long amount of time to work on one project. I’m wondering, how do you look back on it and what’s changed over that amount of time?
SK: I was just talking to someone yesterday about how so much of what I did like in the first, especially in the first five years, was very much alone by myself, just like engaging with strangers. But then five, seven years in, I actually made a lot of connections with people who I would return to visit.
So, it was no longer this isolated person gazing at these places because I was literally moving from a friend group to friend group in different parts of Appalachia. For a really long time, I would just scour different resources, mostly local newspapers for different events where people would be gathering so that I could like engage with people without creeping them out… which I also did at their house. I kind of miss that because now when I go out it’s very specific what I’m doing, and I really don’t have a ton of free time to just travel beyond going to spend time with the people that I’ve already made long-term commitments with.
JC: I think one of those moments in communities I really enjoyed looking at the photos of is the compound in Ohio, Skatopia, which I think speaks to so many different ideas about community and fraternity and what we’re missing in our lives now.
SK: We originally decided to put it cause— it is like a separate project. It just also happens to be in Appalachia. Which I try to remind people, they’re like, “how do you work in this one area?” I’m like, “it’s 10% of the United States!” (laughs)
JC: It’s huge!
SK: I could spend my whole life there and I would still not uncover everything interesting going on. But I had read about that place when I was pretty young in a skateboard magazine, and I had always wanted to go.
And so finally 10 years later, I was able to go. Now I go a couple times a year, and some of my closest friends are integral parts of that place. So, it has a really significant role in my life. But for the book, my editor decided he wanted to put it in the book, and I was like, “Oh, that’s strange. I don’t know that I would do that.” But then that was around the first election of Trump as our president. We did elect him twice. (Both laughing in commiseration.) What he was interested in—and I felt like this was really quite significant—is that it was a rebellion, but not a rebellion of the like elite educated left. Which, I mean, where are they now? Cause I don’t see ‘em anywhere.
JC: They’re totally gone.
SK: You guys come on out on the woodwork. We need you!
JC: And your money!
SK: And your green juice and like your—
JC: God. Yeah. Your $19 strawberry.
SK: Come on, get outta here! And I felt like that was much more interesting to me. A lot of these kids— I say kids, now they’re all adults and have children— grew up with parents who were addicted to opioids.
JC: Mm-hmm.
SK: They’re that generation that grew up in a real darkness that was created by capitalism. Their rebellion is just like an all-out rebellion against everything. It’s not a rebellion with a strict ideology.
JC: I think when, especially those people who’ve grown up on the coast or are liberal elites, look at imagery of people who are rebelling against everything, they come with so much judgment. You’re not making a value judgment on the merit of that rebellion through your lens. You’re appreciating it for what it is.
SK: I feel like I really appreciate it. (Laughs excitedly.) So, I feel like this place is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And I’ve invited people to come and they did not feel that way.
JC: Interesting.
SK: So, I clearly have my own view of what I like. But, when people say that I’m very like non-judgmental in the way that I photograph, I think I’m very judgmental, but I’m always trying to be not judgmental. The whole process is interesting to me because it’s a chance to try to allow people to be who they are without putting preconceived ideas onto them. It’s an important component of the work.
JC: Maybe it’s like when you say something is cooked with love and it tastes better. Maybe it’s the intention that comes out in the eye.
SK: I’m as judgmental as anyone, but I really think that the camera is this opportunity for me to try to undo that.
JC: It’s something to unpack that word, ‘judgmental,’ because when people seem to use it in that context, they’re probably thinking to judge something for being bad or being regressive etc. Maybe in seeing a lack of a diagnosis of that in these subjects there’s something that others gain from it by looking.
SK: I think people would be really shocked if they were to witness me producing it because I don’t think it is as like noble and beautiful (laughs).
JC: It’s interesting to think about your work as continuing the documentary tradition. I’m sitting here with my Dorothea Lange MoMA monograph.
SK: What year was that from?
JC: It was published in ‘66.
SK: I’ve seen her work in like recent contexts which had been really interesting. There was an exhibition that pulled from her journals; because she made a lot of notes while she was photographing, and they created like a whole different context for the work. And then there was an artist, Sam Contis, who went into her archives and created this really beautiful, haunting book called Day Sleeper. It’s a really beautiful, um, and, and I’ve enjoyed seeing these different recontextualizations of her work. I feel like this didn’t get a lot of attention: there was a fictional novel written a few years ago about her life.
JC: Oh, interesting. I did not pick up on that.
SK: It’s not incredible, but it was certainly interesting to read. She does reimagine Dorothea as more of a feminist than she probably was. I did learn a lot from this fictional account— I have no idea if it’s correct or not— but it was incredibly fascinating. I’ve enjoyed, at different stages in my life, understanding Dorothea Lange from a different perspective each time.
JC: I was also thinking about the ways in which your work differs and expands on the American tradition of documentary photography. We’ve talked about this question of judgment. That’s one thing. But also, there’s so much empathy in your gaze, and it seems that you’re very aware of the power you have as the person behind the camera looking at people in front of it.
SK: I see it as a triangle. You have the subject, the viewer, and the photographer, and I feel like we’re all in conversation together and no one is right or wrong, right? All our feelings and thoughts about the photograph are valuable. When other people use my images to make judgements on people, which does happen quite a bit, I feel like that’s important information. I feel like that’s a layer of this conversation. And then the way that subjects in the work use the images adds another layer because they see the images so differently from the way I do, and from the way like an outside viewer does. Then there’s my intentions. I always try to make sure that all those layers are allowed to speak.
JC: I assume that you and your subjects are talking about these images. Is there anything that they’ve said that’s really surprising in response to them?
SK: I think this comes with having worked with people for so long. I didn’t realize how significant the photographs would be to someone who has changed a lot over time. I have a good friend, Pat, who I photographed and when I first met him, he was doing a lot of drugs. He was just a very different person. Now he has children, and he has responsibilities, and he doesn’t do drugs— at least most of the time. And he looks back at these images with a really powerful nostalgia of a time in his life. And I think he’s like really appreciative that that was documented because his memory of that is hazy, but then it’s also memorialized in these kinds of hyperreal images. A lot of the people in the photographs have passed away.
JC: Mm-hmm.
SK: So, it ends up being this kind of meaningful document over time. I’m sure also that he spends a lot of time not thinking about these pictures at all! Something that was really remarkable to me to see is how over time, myself and the subject both imbue these images with so much nostalgia. For me, it was this early period of me making work and how little I knew about how be around people, be with people.
I also did a lot of drugs when I met Pat, and I don’t do as many drugs anymore. So, it’s fun to spend time with the people that I spend time with who I’ve photographed for so long, and to look at the pictures, and talk about the changes that we’ve made.
JC: Yeah, for sure. I remembered this quote which was in your show, As It Was Give(n) To Me, by Louetta McCowan: “It’s so sad to see the big, ugly holes in our mountains.” You’re placing that alongside the work when you’re exhibiting it. It’s a deep reflection of the reality that you’re photographing.
SK: There’s a wider gaze that I’m a descendant of. And in the case of Appalachia, you have the missionaries, these different people whose portrayals of it have affected everything since. So, I wanted to make sure that I recognized the lineage in the work itself in some way. I’m telling a narrative. Even if it’s not the most traditional narrative. I think it’s important to recognize that we’ve been telling these stories of the other in different ways since the beginning of our humanity.
JC: It is really true. That library that you had set up as well was such a great resource in the show. Cause it’s so easy for people looking into Appalachia to not be interested in understanding that history that you’re talking about and why the photos that you’re taking exist.
SK: I think it’s so special to be able to put a little section in your show that shows what drew you to spend so much time making the work. I’m coming from the documentary tradition, so I think that’s also integrated in that desire. And also, it’s about my love of pamphlets.
JC: Oh, yeah?
SK: When I travel, I stuff my car with pamphlets. Anywhere I see a pamphlet, I must have it! So, I was like, what am I going to do with all these? Oh, I’m going to share them with the world. I make them and then I use the information from different archives, and I create my own pamphlets.
JC: So, we’re going to be seeing you on My Strange Addiction is what I’m hearing.
SK: I mean, I’ve already done three episodes! This will be part of my fourth.
JC: Brilliant.
SK: Yeah. I’m a regular!
JC: That’s a good addiction. Better than eating your bed, you know? I think in terms of your long-term health.
SK: Oh yeah. Okay. I’m going to agree with you there.
JC: But pamphlets are a great resource and there’s such a connection to labor history, which is something that you’re deeply interested in. So, it makes a lot of sense to be addicted to pamphlets.
SK: They have a very rich history that I find in
credibly significant. There was like this weird period of time where they told these narratives in pamphlet-form of murderers.
JC: Oh!
SK: That was like a big trend. Around the turn of the century, they were really affordable. People who were into true crime created this format that was digestible in that way, kind of like a tabloid you would pick up at the grocery store.
JC: That’s fantastic.
SK: So, there’s a lot of interesting ways pamphlets have been used over time. They have the political element and then they are this really interesting way of transmitting information. I did my own pamphlet project in Appalachia because—I think it’s very common for artists—there were 10 years where I didn’t have health insurance.
JC: Hmm.
SK: So over time, I collected a number of health issues because I just hadn’t addressed any of them. When I finally moved to Appalachia, I got on the marketplace exchange, and I had healthcare for the first time in a very long time. I also was like living transiently and only using like urgent care if I was in an emergency. So, I started going to the doctor and I had no idea, because I grew up in suburbs, how bad rural healthcare was.
JC: Oh yeah. Oh my god.
SK: It was frightening. The doctors were really awful. I now drive an hour and a half to see a doctor because I’ve had such bad experiences. But I would sit, because you wait a lot longer in rural communities to see a doctor and sometimes you have to come back the next day. They really don’t give a fuck, at least in my town, Smithville, Tennessee. I was in these waiting rooms, and I was shocked at how there were pamphlets, but they’re all by drug manufacturers.
JC: Wow.
SK: It’s all this disgusting kind of capitalism that we’ve seen do a lot of harm. We’re at an office where we’re seeking care, and yet that’s all the information that is available to us. They’re being sold medications. One of the first things I did was I created this series of pamphlets on healthcare issues that were prominent in Appalachia, and I tried to put them in the lobbies of these different clinics, libraries, and other places where pamphlets love to flourish.
JC: Anti-Johnson and Johnson, crazy Bayer nonsense. Yeah, totally.
SK: So that was a really fun thing to do because it’s like a very small gesture. I would not imagine that I saved anyone’s life with my pamphlets, but it felt useful to me to be able to do something with my frustration with this system.
JC: I mean, we’re in this moment of forced impracticality. It feels like there’s so little power, but there’s so much if you stop worrying about what Washington is doing, and think, “What can I do in my 10 feet of space?”
SK: I think that the solution for all of us right now is to think smaller while we adjust and come up with bigger solutions. But to just stew in our homes and refresh the internet to learn what Trump said today?
JC: It’s like flashbacks from the past. I remember like the nightmare of living here the first time was that you would go on your phone and there’d be like 10 different New York Times notifications about some post, and he said something racist and then he called like a lady ugly. It’s just like, what the fuck?
SK: Yes. All of it. That’s a day in the life.
JC: You know that experience of getting sent home from a healthcare clinic seems like the end goal of these people, to gain power over us by wasting our time.
SK: I think so. And he is succeeding in a way that is scary to everyone, except my brother who is very open about the fact that he only cares about politicians that will lower his tax bill. We could fall into the trap of trying to have that conversation, because I had been refreshing my news every day and it did nothing for either of us. It produced nothing useful for us to argue about that.
JC: I guess being a photographer, a picture really is worth all those words.
SK: Because you don’t get caught up in the idea of right and wrong. You’re creating a much more interesting gray area that’s open to interpretation, which again, is why that conversation is only interesting if it involves the full triangle.
JC: I think of your photography of a Klan burning of the cross. It’s so striking that you’ve got one picture of people performing these made-up rites around burning crosses, in the full garb, and the other image you’ve got is a bunch of people lighting some stuff on fire and drinking around it.
SK: When I was at that at Klan rally, I was shocked at how simple like the goal was, which was really just to have a good old fashioned cookout and connect with like-minded people.
And then there was a ritual attached to that and is really important to them to be a part of that tradition. And that is not that different from a group of my friends hanging out around a fire and drinking beers and burning tires.
JC: Exactly.
SK: Trying to understand the things that people like to burn. [Both laugh.]
JC: Honestly, as a reformed pyromaniac, I understand—tires, not crosses, of course!
SK: I’m working on this story right now and I’m trying to get access to show pollution and obviously I’d have to put myself into the pollution to show it. And how can you talk about something or make work about something unless you do experience it in some capacity?
JC: But it’s interesting to think about those things that we don’t really see in the air and those feelings that we don’t really see in each other until we reflect back on them. That cross burning moment was something where I had several different reactions. But you can see, like you’re talking about, that recognizing the value that it has for that group of people is very powerful to be able to capture. I don’t think a lot of other people would even go there.
SK: No, I was outed as a Jew, and I left.
JC: Oh, really?
SK: I made it through eight hours of being there without being outed. And the way I was outed is so bizarre. Now I am very embarrassed to say this, but this was a long time ago when I made that photograph, and I wanted to confuse people. So, I bought a $5 cross necklace and put it on.
JC: Wow. Right.
SK: To fit in better. And it did not work because there was this like period of time in the afternoon where they opened it up for speeches and different people could get up and say whatever they wanted. It was a lot of evil racial hatred. So, this guy gets up and he’s like, “Let’s not forget about the gays and the Jews!” It was like they weren’t getting enough attention. So, he starts going on and on about the gays and the Jews. And then a little bit later, he walks up to me... and also, I should say that this guy’s skin was purple. My friend said that she thought that it was due to a worker illness.
JC: It’s silver, silver nitrate. Like that famous purple guy on the Dr. Oz show in the early 2000s.
SK: Holy shit. This guy walked up to me and the strange thing he said to me was, “I apologize for offending your people.” And I was like, oh shit, just been outed. But he apologized.
JC: That’s ridiculous.
SK: But it’s powerful, right? Because when you’re face to face with the people, what was his instinct to do? His instinct was not to say, “Get the fuck out of here.” His instinct was to apologize.
JC: That is interesting.
SK: That doesn’t dismiss anything that happened.
JC: Yeah.
SK: But it was really fascinating cause I was like, okay, I’ve been outed, but I’ve also been apologized to, I don’t quite know how to respond.
JC: I think that that is so powerful cause it just speaks to how irrational hatred is.
SK: Yeah. I left the event afterwards. I don’t know that I needed to leave, but it seemed also I’d been there for a really long time.
JC: Eight hours is a shift.
SK: The cross burning had happened, the sun had set. And I was outed anyways. When I was driving away, I was just thinking about like, “How do I create images that imbue the complexity of that,” that don’t just say like, “Oh, ha-ha, look at this, or oh, gross, look at that,” right? That, which is a very one dimensional, antagonistic use value for the images. Making a book and having an exhibition where you can put those images in deeper contextualization is such a gift.
JC: It’s interesting to hear you say that cause when I talk about your work with other people, I always use the phrase magical realism. It’s sort of like what you’re saying is that in creating this image, you’re allowing people to see a truth that’s deeper than their own reality. And like by peering a bit beyond what the image is, you’re tapping to some feeling that allows people to have informed empathy.
SK: It’s an important gesture for me. It’s something that I learned as a child in dealing with my dad, who was both evil and good. I had a really hard time with it for so long. The big lesson of me coming into my adulthood was that we’re drawn to the binaries, like right and wrong, but they don’t serve us. The work had to be like about that—the beauty and power of the gray.
JC: It’s such a great project in deconstructing people’s perception of this massive area of the country that is lumped together in the collective consciousness, not only of people like in America, but elsewhere.
SK: And there are other “Appalachias”, right? Every country has their own version of Appalachia. So, it is a very universal idea to other, this group of people who didn’t have access to all of the advancements that everyone else did as quickly. So, they seem a little bit, what we would say “backwards.” Actually, maybe they weren’t backwards. Capitalism just taught us to think that.
JC: Everyone is a servant to capitalism in that way. But one thing in your work is that the way that deconstructs how we think about where queer people live as well. People don’t understand that every single multiplicity of humanity thrives every single different place. Not just in New York, in the West Village on Gay Street.
SK: We have two queer communities where I live in my county. There’s a large population. Maybe not large, but there is a population of people who want to live as a rural queer person connected to nature. And that probably isn’t the understanding that we have of queer identity because we’re thinking of it more in urban environments.
JC: Exactly. It’s so interesting to see that as being very much removed from that urban capitalism that is totally all-consuming. I wanted to ask how you feel working with different publications. You’re making with amazing work with ProPublica, The New York Times, LeMonde. Do you find that you have to code switch a little bit when you’re doing that work? Or do you come at it with the same intention?
SK: There’s sort of extensive history for me with a complicated relationship between journalism and art. When I say that, what I’m really talking about are the ethical constructs that are attached to journalism and that aren’t attached to art. That’s the difference. I started my career as a magazine photographer. And for a long time, these ethical constraints didn’t make any sense. I thought, “They’re so fucking stupid and out of touch.” But this is a job, right? You don’t align with everything that your company that you work for does. I just abided by the job because I knew that was the way to get paid, right? Then five years in, I became really disillusioned and I felt that kind of icky feeling one feels when they think that their dream career is so great and then they realize that it’s actually just like every other bad, problematic thing that they hate. Then I shifted to art because I was like, “Oh, there’s no rules and this is really freeing and I can say more deeply what I want to say without these constraints of the falseness of truth,” right? The thing that attaches to journalism that really just creates a bigger kind of like wall, like a distance, doesn’t actually achieve what I think it thinks it’s trying to achieve. I got really excited to work in that realm. And then five years in, I was like, “oh, this art world is disgusting!” (Laughs) This art world is awful. Is it worse? What I did figure out was that when I get frustrated with one, I switch to the other, and my life is better with both. I can shift back with a renewed sensibility. My art is a critique of journalism in many ways. It’s always that idea of keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer.
JC: Also, I guess, who’s in on the joke?
SK: I really thought that it would cause a lot more problems than it has, especially when it comes to a place like ProPublica where they take those things very seriously and everything’s at stake for them because they get sued a lot. They’re taking down very powerful entities. They are much more interested in making sure that I’m abiding by their rules. Which again, there’s a lot of limitations to those rules where they just don’t work in reality. The people who wrote those rules do not work in the field. One thing I did learn was that there are organizations out there who believe in journalism but also believe that it has a lot of flaws, and everything needs to be open to discussion.
JC: They’re not afraid of the gray.
SK: Okay... (Laughs) They were a little afraid! Because the project I worked on for ProPublica was… intense.
JC: I mean, post-Roe America.
SK: Oh God. That was one of the most intense things that I’d ever done. One of the other things that is nice about journalism, and this is very much an aside, is that I work alone on so much of my personal work and it’s really just me out there. There was something really wonderful about having an editor that I could call at four in the morning whenever I needed. I don’t really have that with my personal work. And so, I felt a lot less alone in that sense.
JC: Being that community is really powerful and there’s something about journalists, they really lock in.
SK: Yeah. I really admire many aspects of journalism. Those aspects all tend to be at places like ProPublica and not anywhere else.
JC: I mean it’s funny cause I come from a journalism degree. And a lot of what you’re talking about is the reason I don’t want to be a “journalist,” because there’s less interest in getting to the feeling of something and having a level of compassion.
SK: A big problem with the story that we did for ProPublica was that a lot of the editors didn’t see its value. But they were willing to let it play out. It turned out that that story was the most read story last year on their website, and it was the longest engagement of any story.
JC: Hmm.
SK: I think that we have those blinders on and we forget that you can’t just report these atrocious facts and air that dirty laundry without creating some deeper narrative that questions our understanding of things. It really wasn’t, in the end, about Roe: it ended up being about the bias that if we’re taking away people’s rights to choose whether they can have their baby, what are we providing them to care for this child that they may have not wanted in this case because they were likely to die?
JC: The two images that I think of from those stories is the mother who has the c-section scar; and then the header for the one year post-Roe piece is a mother and her child, who was now 1-year-old. You’re totally right. It takes more than just the facts, cause there’s so much elitism in facts.
SK: I think that’s a really great point. Who’s able to access or who has the time and the space to access a website like ProPublica? Why is ProPublica getting on TikTok? I was like, that’s dumb, but actually it’s not. We do need tell stories in the places that people are looking the most. I was so impressed with how that succeeded cause there were actually times when I wasn’t sure what we were doing.
JC: Yeah.
SK: Well, cause there’s a part of the story where it’s like she has the baby, and the baby is healthy, and she didn’t die. And so, you’re like, “well, is this a pro... life story?
JC: Yeah. Do we need to recast?
SK: But then you’re like, no, there’s so much to talk about here. You don’t have to have that obvious example to talk about the issue.
JC: Exactly. And that’s something that ProPublica can do that your standard for-profit newspaper will not do. The whole idea of an “angle” is so destructive.
SK: Yes. I think the most frustrating part to me is the fantasy of objectivity. There’s no way that any reporter can be objective. It just can’t be. And so why attach yourself to this idea that’s not true? Because then you’re ruining everything else you say. You’re undermining it all.
JC: Tabloids are phenomenal in that, yes, they cause harm, but no one’s trying to piss up your leg and tell you it’s writing.
SK: But then, I think about the art world being about that freedom to share your ideas. It’s also deeply connected to capitalism, your ability to survive as an artist. That’s based on a lot of things that are really just as limiting.
JC: Speaking of which, you’re up opening a show in April with Chris Verene. How is that work different to the last show that you had in the city?
SK: The work is about the connections between two places that exist where people rely on the safety net a lot more and that place is like outside of the city. I think that was like what we were interested in because in New York City, many people rely on the social safety net, but we’re looking at a very different group of people living in a very different type of community. New York has collapsed them all into one place that’s “not New York.”
JC: Exactly. That sense is tough to deal with. People like to think that New York is the hardest place to live on Earth.
SK: If you just attack or lambast all of these awful things that are happening, you’re opening that black and white conversation, and I don’t think either of us are interested in that. And so, I was thinking a lot, especially right after the election in the first few weeks of Trump’s second presidency about the idea of mutual aid, which is something we were talking about in the sense that it’s not about these larger solutions: it’s about what can I do for my neighbor?
JC: It’s interesting to see how people’s priorities shift and change and mold to that moment, and how others fall away. Older trans women are giving younger trans women hormones.
SK: I think it makes a real difference to figure out the ways that you can offer something to someone you know, exactly like the example that you just mentioned. It yields behavior that I aspire to, to be someone who can identify someone in need, someone who’s not able to access. I learned so much about the safety net during that ProPublica story and just how these things exist on paper. That there are these resources they are near impossible to access and the people who can access them easier are people in positions of power, are people with better access to education. And I think that’s something that’s very hard for the liberal elite to understand.
JC: It’s so true. Especially when your whole political ideology exists because of pieces of paper and not anything real.
SK: I always think of things as like gestures, you know?
JC: Mm-hmm.
SK: It’s sort of hard to say that it will amount to anything meaningful or powerful, but as a gesture, it does feel significant to me.
JC: I mean, so much of what people want is to be seen.
SK: Even though people in New York do forget about the rest of the country, they do have memories of that person that they know, or their childhood or what have you. And it’s a great way to reconnect to that and let go of that black and white thinking of, “Oh, they’re just a bunch of Trump-lovers,” which they know is not true, but it’s so easy to lock into that idea.
JC: Yeah. You just gotta close up Pandora’s box for a second.
SK: The reality is that most of the people that I spend time with do not vote. The disenfranchisement is so deep that voting does just not feel like something that could in any way be useful to their future.
JC: You get disembodied from the machine of it all.
SK: To feel like voting matters, to have the agency? I think that’s a privilege.
JC: Just to have the time to go and do it. The act of it is just so time consuming, waiting hours and hours and hours. And that is exacerbated if the doctor’s office is sending it home, you know, I’m sure the voting booth isn’t going to stay open either.
SK: I mean, the voting booth is so fun though, because there’s like farmers, at least in my county. And then you have some of the people from the queer communes and you’re just like, this is a great mix.
JC: You’ll have to invite the Democratic Party establishment to come to the cookout and see if they learn anything.
SK: Oh yeah. We have a Democratic Party in my county. It’s like five people. I’m going to go down and smack them around and get them all sorted.
Stacy Kranitz’s book, As It Was Give(n) To Me, is availible from Twin Palms.