Camp Feelings & Upcoming Episodes (Patreon)

Dear Campers,

It’s that time of year again. Weenies are roasting, bathing suits are drying, and we’re gathered around the fire for another edition of the Satanic Panic Book Club (SPBC).

We began this tradition, of course, last year, when our desire to spend as much time as possible recording episodes for you--and therefore blocking out the rest of the world, who can even remember why--was troubled only by our lack of ready material. Presenting: the book club.

Our first text, of course, was Michelle Remembers, and in a way this was the excuse I had always been waiting for: the book itself, as you’ll know if you’ve heard these episodes, is a genre unto itself. It defies description. It’s a desperate attempt to cash in on the lucrative world of horror paperbacks while also doing something of great consequence, and yet it’s not nearly as fun as as its V.C. Andrews-reminiscent cover implies that it might be. A lot of it is just descriptions of abuse, or disjointed phrases held together by ellipses and the logic of a dream. Reading it is wearying, saddening work. And yet , by last summer, I’d also come to believe that understanding Michelle meant understanding something essential about the origins of the Satanic Panic. I wanted more people to understand it without having to experience it all alone.

By contrast, this summer’s pick, Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller, is practically a romp. Mike is a fabulist who knows how to get to the point, and not a page goes by without some kind of plot development. It reminds me of a lot of the fanfiction I grew up reading and writing: the prose feels innocently certain of its own convincingness. (Is it innocence or is it narcissism? Or both?)

The book could just as easily be called How to Win Chicks and Influence Satanists. And there’s something I find compelling, and depressing, about the fact that the Satanic Panic was essentially the child of these two books, both largely imaginary, one conceived by a man and one by a woman, and that the man’s book has a protagonist who works hard and writes his own ticket in the Satanism industry, and the woman’s book is about being a passive victim of endless abuse.

We’ll be releasing two more episodes of the Satan Seller book club in July. We’ll follow Mike for his rise and fall and discovery of Jesus; we’ll learn about the Satanist conferences, and what they serve at the Satanists parties (hot hors d’oeuvres, poolside). And then we’ll learn what Mike was really up to during his college years (one hint: croquet), and how his empire--built on the story of his former Satanism--came tumbling down. Later this summer we’re returning to our O.J. Simpson Trial saga, where perhaps time is creeping forward at such a glacial pace because 1994 knows what 2020 will be like and thinks it can avert the crisis by lasting forever.

I have to admit something here, something you’ve probably already figured out: I’m telling the O.J. story this way partly because I think it’s meaningful to dissect a story to its component parts, to resist conclusion and to question the effect that our need for dynamic plot can have on our search for truth: but also, and this is my main reason, I do it this way because it’s fun for me. Narrative TV, even nonfiction books, are rarely granular enough for my taste, rarely as dedicated to writhing out of the confines of plot as I often want them to be. The ironclad belief that consumers of some form of entertainment are only capable of enjoying the things we already know them to enjoy frustrates me endlessly. 

I think it takes bravery to be boring--and by this metric, I am very, very brave.

It’s been especially fun for me to dive into the case histories of O.J.’s assembling defense team, and if I kept following these rabbit holes we could go on forever (though I promise--pinky  promise--we won’t). From F. Lee Bailey we could move to Patricia Hearst--who we talked about in a very early episode, but surely not enough--or to the appeal of Sam Sheppard, the man who everyone says inspired The Fugitive (except the people who made The Fugitive). We could jump to Alan Dershowitz and do a deep dive on his defense of Claus von Bülow, another husband who looked pretty darn guilty as far as much of the public was concerned--now why am I starting to notice a trend?

But here, instead, is where we’re going next: To O.J.’s insistence, soon after his dream team began assembling around him, to undergo a polygraph--or, as we TV watchers know it, a lie detector test. But what exactly is the test? What does it detect, and how? How are lies meant to show on the body? And how can we really understand the circumstances of its invention? 

There’s one person who can help us, and her name is Wonder Woman.

(Source)

Summer feels like it could go on forever, especially in Portland, where we recently had a record-breaking high of 115 degrees, and yes you read that right. I mention this largely because I can’t help thinking about it, and partly because, in my usual cockeyed--not to say completely detached from reality--optimism, I’m trying to think about how the slap-your-face reality of all this might spur us to action. There are many of us, apparently, for whom no amount of spurring will work, and I’m working on accepting that. But on the other hand, never before have the consequences of climate change so directly affected not just my life, but my love life. How am I supposed to have a hot girl summer if walking across the street makes me want to pass out? (Sure there were people whose Tinder bios read “I have AC,” you still have to get there.) If this sounds incredibly dumb and petty, compared to the very real path of death and destruction such heat also leaves in its wake, you’re obviously right. But can I derive hope from the fact that the truth is maybe getting drilled a little more deeply into my petty, thick skull? And that other thick skulls might be experiencing something similar?

I haven’t tried to write a note to you campers in a while--haven’t tried to write anything in a while, period. Which I guess is partly why I wanted to write to you now. Writing used to be thing I felt more comfortable doing than anything else--including such basic human skills as walking and sleeping--and over the past few years my relationship with it has become progressively thornier and more complex. And as I write those words it occurs to me, for the first time--because a lot of obvious-in-retrospect thoughts only occur to me when I’m writing--that this handful of years represents the time when I became a full-time writer, rather than a student who wrote or a teacher who wrote or an academic who wrote. Suddenly I was a writer, and the burden of both that labor and that identity burned me out amazingly fast. There was more to it than that, but I think that, somewhere along the way, the joy that had always fueled me flickered down to an ember.

You’re Wrong About has saved me a couple of times. The first came when Mike and I started recording the show, in March of 2018, which now feels like several eons ago. I had just published an essay I’d been working on, off and on, for years, and having it out in the world, finally out of my hands, plus the pace I’d been maintaining as a freelancer--which was, it must be emphasized, nothing to the pace maintained by so many others--had left me feeling about as creative as a mildewed sponge. My children had flown away and I was a sad little pig. Or a dead spider. Possibly both.

What I immediately loved about making You’re Wrong About was the way it let me approach this block: not by trying to hammer through it, but by going around. Don’t break your back trying to drag a down tree out of your path; find a different one. It’s a big forest. And being in conversation, talking to someone who makes me feel both met and heard, unlocks things in me that I can never find when I’m alone on the page. At their best, these activities support each other; work happens when you believe nothing is going on at all, like the secret parties of toys.

When life changed overnight in March of 2020, the show became my lifeline a second time; it was the only part of my day when things felt normal, or when I was in a world I recognized. So we made as many episodes as we could handle, and Michelle Remembers was a big part of that. And I guess I’m reflecting on this journey because writing this letter to you, right now, makes me feel like that much-rumored Satanic Panic book is just a little more in reach. And the fact that I am writing again is due, in large part, to the fact that I know you are out there listening. If we can have this human contact during such a lonely time, if I can do my best to make sense of this world and you can do your best to meet me where I’m coming from and offer your own insight, then that suggests a world where there are people I can believe will care about what I have to offer in written form, too. Not everyone, or even a lot of people. But maybe you.

But maybe I should write that Seitanic Panic book first…

We don’t have a bonus episode for you this June, I’m sorry to tell you; just this gloopy letter. We’ve got some ideas for new bonus content to try out in addition to our usual bonus episodes, and may poll you soon on your preferences. But for now, in the comments section down there, we’d love to hear about what bonus goodies you might enjoy, and what topics you think we should consider for upcoming episodes. It’s a big world, and there’s so much for us to learn about as we emerge, blinking, into the sun.

Stay cool, Daddy-Os. And keep wearing the weird pants.

--Sarah