So this is/ was a suicide letter that I wrote last night that I read this morning that still didn’t give me a resolution sending good vibes out there all lives matter

Season Finale Show Notes

“The Last Broadcast Before Morning”

Hosted by Monet Marcel by Delray

There are finales and then there are autopsies. Human beings love pretending endings are clean. They aren’t. They smear. They leak into next week’s groceries and next month’s rent and the text message you don’t answer because you know the tone already. 📻🌒

This season of MDNTMRKTVOX wandered through refinery fog, absurd intimacy, literary excavation, labor, recovery, performance, masculinity, queer visibility, Black speculative memory, and the strange economy of being perceived while trying desperately not to disappear. Somewhere between the signal and the static, the voice changed.

Not healed. Just… more aware of the weather.

Tonight’s finale is less “wrap-up” and more inventory.A ledger of:

abandoned selves,

recovered language,

surviving friendship,

gendered performance,

artistic exhaustion,

addiction and harm reduction,

Detroit as both monument and wound,

and the cost of remaining emotionally visible in a culture that monetizes disappearance.

Because that is what the market does now.It sells spectatorship as intimacy.It sells collapse as branding.It sells recovery as a subscription tier.Tiny little neon kiosks of grief. Humanity built a mall inside the nervous system and called it networking. Incredible species. 🫠

THIS EPISODE INCLUDES

SEGMENTS

The Economy of ContemptOn microexpressions, social exhaustion, and the psychic labor of existing publicly while trans, queer, Black, neurodivergent, or emotionally legible.

BONE / VOX / TRACE RevisitedA closing theoretical meditation on language as survival architecture:

BONE as forensic minimalism

VOX as carried weather

TRACE as the residue left after impact

The Parking Lot TheorySurveillance capitalism, labor fragmentation, rideshare drift, and the invisible choreography of late-stage America.

Recovery Without ResolutionHarm reduction, intimacy, panic, relapse-thinking, tenderness, and why some people become home before we know how to stay alive inside ourselves.

Detroit at 00:00 UTCRefineries. Sodium-vapor light. Empty basketball courts. Cops at gas stations. Wind moving off the river like a tired god refusing overtime.

FEATURED WORKS & REFERENCES

Selections and references from:

Dead Alphabet

Once: On Poetic Form

DSMSSED CLWNS

VOYEUR

Diggers

Meanwhile in Detroit

GRENBK:DTW

ongoing HELLO, CARE journal transmissions

Interwoven with discussions of:

hip-hop linguistics,

feminist literary theory,

Black confessional poetics,

queer futurity,

absurdism,

labor aesthetics,

and contemporary digital loneliness.

Because apparently we needed twelve overlapping crises just to write one paragraph honestly. Literature really is just organized haunting with citations. 📚

SOUND DESIGN

This finale moves through:

muted refinery ambience,

cassette degradation,

room-tone silence,

church reverb,

delta blues residue,

traffic wash,

low HVAC hum,

and clipped vocal compression intended to mimic overheard memory.

Headphones recommended.Or don’t. Let the world interrupt you the same way it interrupts everybody else trying to think.

CLOSING THESIS

The season ends with a simple proposition:

Some voices are not trying to be famous.Some voices are trying not to vanish.

MDNTMRKTVOX has always existed somewhere between pirate radio transmission, literary criticism, confession booth, and weather report.

This finale asks what happens when survival itself becomes an editorial practice.

And whether tenderness can still exist without becoming content.

SUPPORT / READ / FOLLOW

Explore the archive through MDNTMRKT CONT and ongoing transmissions from Monet Marcel by Delray.

Featured series include:

GRENBK:DTW

Off The Menu

HELLO, CARE

DSMSSD CLWNS

Smokestack White Pages

Dead Alphabet: Risen

HASHTAGS

#MDNTMRKTVOX #MDNTMRKTCONT #GRENBKDTW #OffTheMenu #MonetMarcelByDelray #DetroitCulture #AudioEssay #LiteraryPodcast #BlackSpeculativeWriting #BONETheory #VOXTheory #TRACETheory

🎙️Stay present. Stay moving.

This episode marks the release of Bone Weather, a delta blues–driven album born not from a studio session, but from a stage—specifically, the ten-minute play cycle Bone Weather and Other Plays.

What began as a theatrical investigation into objects as witnesses—a plate, a ball, a wall, a door—has now translated into sound. The result is a body of music that doesn’t move forward so much as it returns, repeats, and deepens—rooted in the traditions of gospel and delta blues, where meaning is built through recurrence rather than resolution.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

🎭 A full reading of Bone Weather (the ten-minute play)

🎶 Selections and framing from the Bone Weather album

🧠 A critical editorial unpacking the modal vector:

Gospel (call & response)

Delta blues (return & weight)

Monet Sonnet (recursion & fracture)

The ten-minute play (pressure & residue)

This is not an adaptation.

This is a conversion of form into sound—where repetition becomes rhythm, absence becomes tone, and silence becomes structure.

🧠 Editorial Spine (Episode Focus)

The object is not a prop—it is evidence

The song is not a narrative—it is recurrence under pressure

The voice is not performance—it is inheritance being returned

Bone Weather asks one central question:

What happens when something doesn’t leave—and instead learns how to sound?

🎧 Listen + Read + Return

📖 Bone Weather and Other Ten-Minute Plays (reading in episode)

🎶 Bone Weather album (now streaming)

🧾 Editorial: Delta Blues as Modal Vector

🔖 HASHTAGS

#MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #BoneWeather #DeltaBlues #GospelTradition #MonetSonnet #BlackTheatre #SpokenWord #LiteraryPodcast #DetroitArtists #IndependentMusic #BluesRevival #ExperimentalSound #Playwriting #AudioEssay

MDNTMRKTVOX — DANGR, the Adopted Son of the Fathcourn

In this episode, Vivian Storenbend Potts enters the Delray Ledger through the figure of DANGR, the adopted son, outsider witness, analog interruption, and tribal variable who forces the family record to explain itself.

The central argument is deceptively simple: DANGR is not blood, but he is relation. He is not produced by the inherited line, but he becomes the pressure-test that reveals whether the line was ever capable of love, continuity, maturity, or perpetuity beyond biological vanity. Through the Fathcourn, the Delray Ledger, and the emergence of CLWNTWN, the essay frames adoption not as sentimental rescue, but as a metaphysical transfer of responsibility.

The episode moves through Coleridge’s primary imagination, the multiplication of “ous” in DANGR_ous & MOUS3, and the uneasy mathematics of chosen kinship. DANGR and MOUS3 become paired engines: one analog, one digital; one adopted, one clocked; one carrying danger, one measuring time. Together they expose a family system too narrow to contain interruption, too proud to admit repair, and too dependent on blood to understand consequence.

The voice is clinical, mythic, sardonic, and sharply intimate. It treats the family not as a household but as an archive, a ledger, a machine, and sometimes an underfunded county office, which is honestly one of the more accurate descriptions of human inheritance ever dragged into daylight.

Episode Themes

Adoption as metaphysical responsibilityDANGR’s adoption is not framed as rescue fantasy. It becomes a test of whether a family can be accountable to what it did not create.

The Delray Ledger as living archiveThe Ledger records more than bloodline. It records chosen relation, consequence, rupture, witness, and the unstable grammar of belonging.

Fathcourn as paradoxThe Fathcourn is not simply fatherhood, lineage, or authority. It becomes a paradox of continuity, perpetuity, maturity, and failure.

CLWNTWN as necessary imaginative ruptureA new CLWNTWN must come into existence because the old symbolic town cannot contain DANGR, adoption, or outsider consequence.

DANGR_ous & MOUS3 as paired enginesDANGR operates as analog danger and outsider witness. MOUS3 functions as the digital clock, the multiplication of time, and the absurd little demon ticking beside the archive.

Coleridge and primary imaginationThe episode uses Coleridge’s idea of primary imagination to argue that new worlds emerge when old symbolic systems fail to perceive what has entered them.

Suggested Pull Quotes

“DANGR is not blood, but he is family.”

“Adoption is not rescue fantasy. It is a metaphysical transfer of responsibility.”

“The family line is forced to ask whether continuity can include what it did not create.”

“CLWNTWN had to exist because the old town could not contain the adopted variable.”

“The Ledger does not merely record origin. It records consequence.”

Short Episode Description

Vivian Storenbend Potts examines DANGR as the adopted son of the Fathcourn and the Delray Ledger, arguing that adoption, outsiderhood, and chosen relation create the pressure necessary for a new CLWNTWN to come into being. Through Coleridge, lineage, metaphysics, and the strange paired machinery of DANGR_ous & MOUS3, this MDNTMRKTVOX episode turns family into archive, archive into theory, and theory into a door nobody should have left unlocked. 🕯️

Hashtags

#MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #GRENBKDTW #DelrayLedger #DANGR #MOUS3 #CLWNTWN #VivianStorenbendPotts #MonetMarcelByDelray #LiteraryTheory #BlackLiterature #ExperimentalFiction #PodcastEssay #AudioEssay #CulturalCriticism #DetroitWriters #IndependentMedia #SubstackWriters #BONEVOX #ForensicEssentialism #MidnightMarket

Reading Series on MDNTMRKT CONT

Entry Transmission

There are stories you write.

And there are places that write you back.

Roe Town CLWN is not a single essay. It is a serial excavation—a moving record of survival, addiction, displacement, humor, shame, and the strange dignity that forms when nothing else holds.

This reading series follows a narrator moving through:

* Lansing streets and van-life drift

* parking lots and diner republics

* motel rooms that double as confessionals

* and the fragile interior space where identity keeps rearranging itself

What begins as memory becomes something else:

a system of return.

What This Series Is

This is a spoken Substack series built from the Roe Town CLWN essays—a collection of narrative fragments that move between:

* homelessness and adaptation

* addiction and partial clarity

* humor as survival language

* the body as both witness and archive

Each entry is written and read in stream-of-consciousness form, allowing the listener to remain inside the moment rather than outside it.

There is no clean arc.

There is only:

* movement

* repetition

* recognition

Core Environments

The series moves through recurring spaces that function as psychological and social frameworks:

🚐 The Van

* mobile shelter

* unstable home

* site of reflection and withdrawal

🅿️ Parking Lots

* public survival zones

* informal economies

* waiting as a condition of life

🏨 Motels

* temporary privacy

* transactional intimacy

* memory distortion

🍳 Diners (Fleetwood / analog spaces)

* civic refuge

* confession space

* witness architecture

These are not just locations.

They are systems of meaning.

Central Companion

Whitney — a goldendoodle, but more accurately:

* an adaptive intelligence

* a moral barometer

* a living counterpoint to human instability

Where the narrator fractures, Whitney stabilizes.

Where the narrator questions, Whitney moves.

Thematic Spine

Across the series, several tensions repeat:

* Hostile Homie → Humble Homie(masculinity reconfigured through failure and reflection)

* Memory vs Reality(what happened vs what returns)

* Visibility vs Survival(being seen vs staying safe)

* Environment as Identity(how spaces reshape behavior and thought)

* Humor vs Collapse(laughter as both shield and exposure)

Tone & Form

The writing operates in:

* Obese language (expansive, layered prose)

* Fragmented internal logic

* Rhythmic repetition and return phrases

* Urban philosophical observation

It carries influences of:

* street realism

* confessional narrative

* performance voice

* literary fragmentation

But refuses to settle fully into any one form.

Listening Notes

This is not a linear story.

To engage with Roe Town CLWN:

* follow feeling over plot

* notice recurring language and imagery

* allow contradictions to stand

* understand that confusion is part of the structure

If something feels like it’s repeating, it is.If something feels unresolved, it stays that way on purpose.

Key Motifs

* TV light in storefront windows → escape / borrowed reality

* coffee cups / diners → continuity / witness

* the van → unstable autonomy

* public spaces at night → truth without privacy

* Whitney → adaptive love without language

Why This Series Exists

Because some lives are never archived correctly.

Because certain experiences:

* don’t get institutional language

* don’t get clean endings

* don’t get believed unless they’re stylized

This series resists that.

It chooses to remain:

* imperfect

* present-tense

* unfinished

Pull Lines

“We were traveling, but we were also hiding in plain sight.”

“The TV stayed on so I could borrow a world that didn’t ask questions.”

“I was a hostile homie learning humility the long way.”

“Some places don’t shelter you—they hold you long enough to not disappear.”

“Whitney never needed to understand—she just adapted.”

Series Function

Roe Town CLWN operates as:

* a living journal

* a spoken archive

* a cultural document of survival spaces

* a literary refusal of clean narrative resolution

MDNTMRKT CONT Context

This series sits within the broader MDNTMRKT ecosystem as:

* a field log of lived experience

* a voice experiment in narrative collapse and reconstruction

* a continuation of the Midnight Market voice system

Exit Note

There is no conclusion here.

Only continuation.

You don’t finish this series.You recognize where you’ve already been inside it.

Signature

Stay present.Stay moving.

MDNTMRKTVOX / MDNTMRKT CONTEpisode: On Remnants, Readiness, and the People Who Held the Door Open

This episode is a note of gratitude, momentum, and hard-earned readiness. Monet Marcel by Delray reflects on the strange, difficult, and beautiful fact of continuing to move forward as the work keeps finding new rooms to enter. At the center of this moment is deep thanks to Elizabeth Stone whose partnership, steadiness, and belief in the work have made so much of this possible. Sometimes art survives because somebody brilliant stands next to it and says: keep going. This is one of those times.

The episode also marks the significance of the Yale Literary Review special issue on the remnants of being incarcerated, a space that feels deeply aligned with the emotional and intellectual architecture of this body of work. To be considered in that conversation is not a small thing. It is an acknowledgment that the residue of incarceration is not just institutional or historical, but psychic, familial, aesthetic, and ongoing. The work enters that field carrying memory, fracture, witness, and form.

Set beside that is another major affirmation: the Kenyon Review shortlist this year. Between these recognitions, there is a feeling not of arrival exactly, but of increased readiness. A steadier hand. A fuller breath. A clearer sense that the work can travel and hold under pressure.

This episode also looks back at an earlier threshold moment, when Diggers was up for production at the Ringwald Theatre in Ferndale, Michigan. That earlier season carried its own intensity, its own hope, its own lessons in waiting, timing, and what it means for work to be near the stage and not yet across the final distance. This time feels different. Not easier. Just more grounded. More equipped. More internally prepared for whatever comes next.

What unfolds here is part reflection, part thank-you, part transmission from an artist learning how to stand in recognition without abandoning hunger, and how to honor the people who made the road possible without turning gratitude into performance. This is about literary movement, about persistence after difficulty, and about what it means when the work begins to echo back from institutions that once felt impossibly far away.

Special thanks:Elizabeth Stone for partnership, faith, and shared stewardship of the work.As noted, her contact information is available through the MDNT MRKT Providers LLC Michigan registry page and the DMCA Terms of Agreement liaison.

MDNTMRKT VOX, Season One, Episode 31

31 Episodes in 60 Days

In this episode, we reflect on the making of season one and the unexpected shape the work has taken. What started as a podcast has become something larger: a magazine, an editorial platform, a digest of ongoing thought, criticism, memory, and cultural record.

This episode looks at process, momentum, discipline, voice, and how repetition creates form. We talk about where the show began, what the first 31 episodes have taught us, and where the next stage of MDNTMRKT VOX may be headed.

In this episode:

* Building a podcast in real time

* 31 episodes in 60 days

* How consistency creates editorial identity

* When a podcast becomes a magazine

* Voice as archive, platform, and method

* Where season one started

* Where the show is going next

Why this episode matters:

This is a checkpoint episode, but also a manifesto. It names the transformation already underway and frames the show not just as audio, but as a publishing ecosystem.

Hashtags:

#MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #GRENBKDTW #OffTheMenu #MonetMarcelByDelray #DetroitCulture #IndependentMedia #LiteraryPodcast #SubstackWriters #CulturalCriticism #AudioEssay #MidnightMarket

LYRICS BY DELRAY

Podcast Show Notes

🎙️🎵

What begins as poem does not always stay obedient. Sometimes it slips the page, finds breath, finds arrangement, finds nerve. LYRICS BY DELRAY is a full-album gathering of lyric work turned toward song, where the written line quits pretending it only wanted to be read.

These tracks carry tenderness, atmosphere, ache, weather, memory, and that old dangerous thing called form. The poems did not vanish in the making of the music. They changed state. That is the miracle and the irritation of art. You build one house and it grows windows somewhere else.

This full album moves like a late-night emotional architecture: intimate, reflective, bruised, luminous. Each song holds onto language while letting melody do its own sly labor. What was once solitary on the page now arrives voiced, scored, and shared.

LYRICS BY DELRAY is about transition without surrender. Page into performance. Sonnet into song. Private cadence into public sound. A body of work becoming more than one thing at once.

Track List

Nerve and Weather

Vapor & Tile

Borrowed Amber Light

Beyond the Halo

Cotton Dream Gold

The Garden We Sowed

Silver Coin Summer

Stitched in Grace

Echoes of the Iron Throat

The Plural Heart

The Study of My Own Desire

About the Album

A full-length audio presentation of songs drawn from lyric and poetic foundations, LYRICS BY DELRAY lives at the crossing of literature, memory, arrangement, and atmosphere. These pieces hold close to the line while allowing music to widen the emotional field. This is songcraft as afterlife, revision, and revelation.

Hashtags

#LyricsByDelray #MonetMarcelByDelray #MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #PoetryToMusic #IndieAlbum #Songwriter #LiteraryMusic #DetroitArtist #ExperimentalPop #AlternativeRNB #FullAlbum

Shorter Platform Version

📡

LYRICS BY DELRAY is a full album born from poems that refused to remain silent. These songs move through memory, tenderness, weather, desire, and emotional architecture, carrying the lyric line from page to voice. What began in poetry found another body in music.

Track List:

Nerve and Weather

Vapor & Tile

Borrowed Amber Light

Beyond the Halo

Cotton Dream Gold

The Garden We Sowed

Silver Coin Summer

Stitched in Grace

Echoes of the Iron Throat

The Plural Heart

The Study of My Own Desire

#LyricsByDelray #MonetMarcelByDelray #MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #PoetryToMusic #IndieAlbum #LiteraryMusic #DetroitArtist

The Monet sonnets have left the page and entered the air. Drawn from ON WET, this release lets the text breathe in another register: wetter, slower, more intimate, more exposed. And yes, BBC has also been turned into an album. Hint hint. This is not adaptation so much as pressure made audible, the book becoming weather, the line becoming body, the sentence becoming VOX. Listen close. The page was only the first surface.

#MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #OnWet #BBCAlbum #MonetMarcelByDelray #VOX #LiteraryAudio #Audiobook #PoetryAlbum #DetroitCulture #IndependentLiterature #MidnightMarket

MDNTMRKTVOX

ON WET

Audiobook, Grouping Two

The erotica prose for the rest of the novel

The second grouping of On Wet moves deeper into the body of the book, where desire is no longer introduced as incident or provocation, but as structure, memory, pressure, and history. This installment carries the remaining erotica prose of the novel, following the wet mark not as scandal, but as evidence: of touch, of loneliness, of longing, of gendered labor, of private theatre, of survival, and of the strange way the body keeps its own archive.

What begins as sensual charge grows into something denser and more revealing. The erotic in On Wet is never merely decorative. It is narrative force. It is social critique with its hand on your throat. It is tenderness interrupted by history. It is performance and confession occupying the same room. Here, the novel lets intimacy become a form of reading, where skin, memory, and shame all begin speaking at once.

This second grouping follows that expansion. The prose grows more intimate, more destabilizing, and more layered as the novel continues its argument that the erotic is never separate from the world that produces it. Family hangs in the wallpaper. Class enters the room uninvited. Gender shifts under the sentence. Wetness becomes sign, remainder, residue, and record. The body does not simply want. It remembers. It bargains. It breaks form and makes form.

At the heart of this grouping is the refusal to flatten sex into either purity or transgression. On Wet understands erotic life as lived contradiction. Pleasure arrives with ghosts. Exposure becomes language. The bedroom is never just a bedroom. It is also a courtroom, a chapel, a stage, a clinic, a confession booth, and a ledger. That doubleness is part of the book’s larger commitment to voice, where tone itself acts as a way of knowing, not just ornament or mood. The related project material around BONE and VOX repeatedly insists that ordinary speech, tonal pressure, and layered registers generate knowledge rather than merely carrying it, which helps explain why the sensual writing here also functions as theory and social reading.

The wider body of your work also frames sensuality and embodiment as tied to memory, lineage, and ethical consequence rather than isolated spectacle. In the surrounding critical materials, tonal doubleness, bodily rhythm, and intimate language are treated as formal mechanisms through which a text can hold grief, desire, and inheritance at once.  That logic fits this grouping cleanly: the erotic prose is not a side chamber of the novel. It is one of the main engines.

In this episode

The continuation of On Wet through its remaining erotic and intimate prose passages

Desire as narrative architecture rather than isolated scene-work

Wetness as residue, proof, and symbolic language

The collision of sex, memory, class, secrecy, and self-making

MDNTMRKT VOX | OW_AB_VOX

On Wet, Audiobook, and the Problem of Leaving a Mark 🎙️📖

This episode moves through the world of On Wet as text, voice, artifact, and residue. What begins as a reading or reflection on the work opens into something larger: memory, sex, stain, witness, body history, and the uneasy fact that what is left behind is often the very thing culture tells us to clean away. Civilized people love pretending history arrives pressed and perfumed, when half of it starts as trace, rumor, fluid, or grief.

The conversation also leans into the audiobook form itself and what happens when language leaves the page and enters the mouth, breath, tempo, and silence of performance. This is not just about narration. It is about contamination, intimacy, and how voice can make a text feel more dangerous, more tender, and less willing to behave.

In this episode

* A framing of On Wet as literary object and cultural disturbance

* Why the “wet spot” functions as symbol, record, aftermath, and accusation

* The relationship between page language and spoken language

* What changes when a text becomes an audiobook

* MDNTMRKT VOX as a space for literary editorialization, performance, and theory

* The overlap between sexuality, memory, residue, class, and narrative evidence

* Why discomfort is sometimes the point and not a flaw

Themes

Residue. Performance. Intimacy. History. Voice. The body as archive.

This episode treats the stain not as embarrassment, but as document. It asks what remains after desire, after use, after language tries to clean itself up for public viewing.

Why this episode matters

Because some books are not meant to sit politely on a shelf. Some works insist on being heard, not merely read. On Wet lives in that unstable space where literature, embodiment, and social critique keep rubbing against each other until something sparks.

Featured Work

On Wet

Read the full PDF: https://pdflink.to/onwet/

Listener Note

This episode includes discussion of sexual themes, bodily residue, memory, and adult subject matter. It is intended for mature audiences who do not require art to wear a necktie and apologize for existing.

About MDNTMRKT VOX

MDNTMRKT VOX explores literature, voice, criticism, performance, and cultural remains through a style that is part editorial, part lecture, part confession booth with the light flickering.

Tags

#MDNTMRKTCONT #MDNTMRKTVOX #OnWet #Audiobook #LiteraryPodcast #ExperimentalWriting #IndependentMedia #DetroitCulture #CulturalCriticism #MonetMarcelByDelray #SubstackWriters #AudioEssay

Tighter platform version

MDNTMRKT VOX digs into On Wet as text, stain, archive, and performance. This episode explores what happens when literature leaves the page and enters the voice, and why residue, intimacy, and discomfort matter in art that refuses to behave. Read the full PDF: https://pdflink.to/onwet/

I could not reliably transcribe the uploaded audio directly in this environment, so these notes are a clean, publication-ready draft based on the file name, your current project context, and the surrounding On Wet material rather than a line-by-line summary of the exact recording.

MDNTMRKTVOX | OFF THE MENU

Show Notes

This edition of OFF THE MENU opens a new door for MDNTMRKT CONT as we formally welcome Garth Manukau to the team. Garth arrives not as decoration, not as background noise, and certainly not as one more talking head floating through the content swamp. He comes in as a working anchor, a narrative engine, and a man built for the difficult work of appetite, class, memory, hunger, and the theater of survival.

In this episode, Monet Marcel by Delray and the MDNTMRKT CONT world make clear that Garth’s role stretches beyond the kitchen corridor. Yes, he is the voice and guiding intelligence behind OFF THE MENU, but just as importantly, he now steps forward as an anchor for GRENBK:DTW, helping shape its weekly rhythm, editorial atmosphere, and field-guide intelligence. That means food, culture, Detroit, social ritual, class performance, survival aesthetics, and the coded language of how people actually move through a city will all be placed under a sharper lens.

This is an introduction, but also a handoff and a promise. Garth’s versatility is the point. He can speak from the line cook’s burn, the dining room’s staged politeness, the street’s private codes, and the essayist’s knife. He understands how a plate can be a confession, how a room can be a lie, and how taste is often just hierarchy wearing cologne.

We also look ahead to the debut episode of GRENBK:DTW on June 19, 2026, a major launch for the MDNTMRKT CONT ecosystem. That episode is slated to feature, hopefully, an interview with Rebecca Sugar, setting the tone for what GRENBK:DTW intends to be: a serious, stylish, strange, and necessary space for interviews, essays, cultural diagnosis, and stories that know the world is always performing itself.

This episode is about expansion, but disciplined expansion. New voices. Sharper architecture. Same marrow. Same smoke. Same insistence on saying the thing underneath the thing.

In this episode:

Welcoming Garth Manukau to MDNTMRKT CONT

Why Garth is the right host-anchor for OFF THE MENU

His expanded role as an editorial anchor for GRENBK:DTW

The crossover between food writing, cultural criticism, and urban anthropology

What this means for the future of the MDNTMRKT CONT network

Early push and preview for GRENBK:DTW debuting June 19, 2026

Anticipation around a possible Rebecca Sugar interview

Featured:

Monet Marcel by Delray

Garth Manukau

Coming Soon:

GRENBK:DTW

Debut Episode: June 19, 2026

Planned guest: Rebecca Sugar, hopefully

Closing blurb for platforms

A new chapter opens at MDNTMRKT CONT. This OFF THE MENU edition welcomes Garth Manukau to the team and marks his arrival not only as the host-anchor of OFF THE MENU, but as a central voice in GRENBK:DTW. The table got bigger. The knife got sharper. And on June 19, 2026, GRENBK:DTW makes its debut, with a hoped-for interview featuring Rebecca Sugar. Civilization limps on, so naturally we made a program for it. 🔥🍽️📻

Advertisement for GRENBK:DTW Debut Episode

GRENBK:DTW arrives June 19, 2026.

A new signal from MDNTMRKT CONT is on the way, anchored by Monet Marcel by Delray and Garth Manukau. Interviews, essays, field notes, social criticism, Detroit intelligence, cultural drift, appetite, memory, and all the coded ways people survive each other. The debut episode is expected to feature a conversation with Rebecca Sugar. Sharp, strange, necessary. Be there when it starts. 🔥

If you want, I can turn this into a tighter podcast-platform version and a separate Facebook/LinkedIn promo.

with Monet Delray and William Double8 Charles

This episode moves through the machinery behind modern distribution: not just where a thing gets posted, but how it travels, what kind of attention it asks for, what each platform permits, and whether any of that signal survives long enough to matter in the real world. The lecture frames distribution as a living system of force, direction, medium, and behavior, then contrasts platform metrics with what Monet calls the frontal world: bodies, memory, rooms, purchases, invitations, and lived consequence.

William Double8 Charles takes the lead from SMKSTACK, breaking down how different channels favor different forms of expression: declarative, confessional, instructional, atmospheric, and dialogic. The episode argues that platform is not audience, that visibility is not the same as impact, and that the serious builder has to understand compression, expansion, retention, and conversion if the work is ever going to move beyond smoke and into pressure.

Monet Delray closes the broader dispatch by tying the lecture to the larger archive: the ongoing books, the Abridged Dismissed Clowns cycle, the Quarry Place Relay memory system, and hello, CARE, the midnight letter sequence built from haiku and confessional prose. So naturally this is not just a neat podcast episode. It is also an operating philosophy, a publishing theory, a field note, and a flare shot into the dark because apparently one genre at a time would be too merciful. 🔥

In this episode

* What a distribution vector actually is

* Why platform is not audience

* The difference between platform metrics and frontal world metrics

* How modal expression changes across Facebook, LinkedIn, podcasts, and longform

* Why compression and expansion matter in a serious media system

* The formula for effective distribution: vector strength, modal fit, retention, and world conversion

* How Monet Delray and Double8 connect podcasting, essays, social media, and archive-building into one larger body of work

Key idea

A platform can host a signal.Only the world can prove it mattered.

Also mentioned

This episode sits alongside:

* the call for reader support and donations for the work and archive

* a teaser for Clowns Bound, the next book in the Abridged Dismissed Clowns cycle

* upcoming white note pages and working spreadsheets/templates for tracking content pressure and trend systems

* the Quarry Place Relay form

* the hello, CARE reflective dispatch series

Tone of the episode

Part lecture, part manifesto, part operator’s handbook.For writers, podcasters, publishers, artists, and anyone trying to move work from the feed into the lived world without flattening it into algorithm chow. Grim little era, useful episode. 😌

Suggested episode blurb

Monet Delray and William Double8 Charles of SMKSTACK break down distribution vectors, platform behavior, modal expression, and the difference between online visibility and real-world consequence. From Facebook to LinkedIn, podcasts to longform, this episode maps how work travels, how audiences receive it, and why the frontal world remains the final test of whether a signal truly lands.

Tags

#SMKSTACK #MonetDelray #WilliamDouble8Charles #MDNTMRKTVOX #DistributionVectors #ModalExpression #PodcastNotes #CreativeStrategy #Publishing #Substack #DigitalMedia #AudienceDevelopment #ArchiveBuilding #DetroitWriters

If you want this in MDNTMRKT voice, clean platform-neutral voice, or Substack/podcast-app format, I can shape it without the extra upholstery.

Show Notes

Also, there is a debrief and some housekeeping there’s a sweepstakes that is now listed so join the midnight market CONT substrack to be enter into the giveaway and become a bonehead already.

And thank you to the 3400 downloads. I got this Month

MDNTMRKTVOX | In the Margins, the World Survived

Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Paraguay Bazaar, and the secret dystopian novel written inside the archive 📚🔥🌿

In this episode, Monet Marcel by Delray opens the vault on one of the strangest and most formative objects in the MDNTMRKTCONT catalog: a complete 1966 Nancy Drew set and a complete 1966 Hardy Boys set that became something more than collectible children’s literature. As a high school writer, Delray used the margins, blank pages, and endpapers of those books to draft a dystopian novel set after the collapse of technological civilization, where a solitary refinery near the Paraguay Bazaar becomes the axis of survival, power, and myth.

What begins as an archive story becomes a literary excavation. This episode explores how children raised without parents, institutions, or modern knowledge might build identity from the only surviving artifacts left to them: detective novels. If one child inherits Nancy Drew, and another group inherits the Hardy Boys, what forms of gender, independence, cooperation, power, and investigation emerge from the ruins? That question becomes the basis for a world where literary artifacts are not nostalgic leftovers, but weapons, scripts, and sacred texts.

The episode also moves through the larger Douglas framework at its earliest stage, showing how these handwritten marginal manuscripts became the embryo for later formal, archival, and theoretical ambitions. Along the way, Delray discusses the battered first-edition The Giving Tree in the MDNTMRKTCONT archive, complete with his own drawn rebuttal to the original text, and considers what it means to preserve books by writing inside them, against them, and through them.

This is an episode about books as battlegrounds, childhood as philosophical terrain, queerness as archival possibility, and the long life of a manuscript that took thirty years to understand itself.

In this episode:

The origin of the Paraguay Bazaar dystopian manuscript

Why the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys sets were never just collectible objects

How gendered detective fiction becomes social instruction in a ruined world

The early beginnings of the Douglas framework

Why marginalia can become manuscript

The role of The Giving Tree as rebuttal object within the MDNTMRKTCONT catalog

How collectible books transform into literary artifacts

Why this archive is being digitally transposed now

The adaptation potential of the project as children’s/YA fiction, television, or film

Core themes:

Archive. Survival. Detection. Queer inheritance. Artifact politics. Childhood after the end of the world.

Featured catalog objects:

Complete 1966 Nancy Drew set

Complete 1966 Hardy Boys set

First-edition The Giving Tree with author-signed rebuttal drawings

Marginal manuscript materials now being transposed into digital form

Why this matters:

This episode is not just about old books. It is about the hidden labor of becoming a writer, the strange physical sites where stories first take shape, and the possibility that a literary archive can carry not only memory, but prophecy.

From the catalog:

These volumes are part of the private MDNTMRKTCONT archive and are not for sale. Digital transpositions, catalog essays, and future developments will be shared through the expanding MDNTMRKTCONT world.

Subscribe to MDNTMRKTCONT:

Subscribers enter the broader archive of essays, catalog notes, rare-object analysis, literary development, and collectible-edition updates surrounding poetry, fiction, theater, and children’s literature in progress.

The signal is active.

End of transmission.

#MDNTMRKTVOX #MDNTMRKTCONT #MonetMarcelByDelray #NancyDrew #HardyBoys #TheGivingTree #ChildrensLiterature #YoungAdultFiction #DystopianFiction #QueerLiterature #BlackWriters #DetroitWriter #ArchiveWork #LiteraryPodcast #BooksAsArtifacts #IndependentPublishing #DouglasFramework #ParaguayBazaar

MDNTMRKTVOX

DSMSSED CLWNS: FABLES (abridged), Chapters 25-39

Final reading of the children’s abridged edition

This episode closes the abridged journey of DSMSSED CLWNS by carrying DangR, CLWNTWN, Benn, and the wounded world of Hollow Wood into its last reckoning. These final chapters reveal the full shape of the threat: the Headless Hunt, a pursuing force built from fear, erased names, historical violence, and everything that runs after the vulnerable once power loses its face. To stop it, the book turns back toward the oldest questions it has been asking all along: what can be mended, who stays, what must be left behind, and what kind of vow can hold when no false paradise is available.

The reading moves through endurance, apology, refusal, lineage, battle, burial, and return. DangR confronts the truth that there is no cure for certain wounds, only endurance shared with others. The Queen finally names her failure, not in spectacle but in plain speech, and DangR agrees to help anchor the vow while refusing to return to the structure that harmed him. In the old burrow chamber, Benn offers the cracked blue marble, CLWNTWN pours the remaining UBIK heart-ink, and the father returns through inherited presence, leaving behind the key needed to continue. When the Hunt finally comes, it is fought not through brute victory but through names, patterns, chosen bonds, and the stubborn refusal to become nameless again.

What follows is the truer ending. The Queen dies. She is buried in a shared rite between realms. Soup is made because grief still has to feed people. Hollow Wood survives, but altered: no monarchy, no simple restoration, only tending. Benn returns to the orchard, loses another tooth, receives a small silver thread instead of a coin, and the novel ends where children’s literature is often wisest to end, not in throne-room triumph but in a room made livable again. Izzy the stitched rabbit is tucked in, Ledger sleeps by the door, the bath is done, the face is clean, and the repaired night holds, not perfectly, but enough for sleep. It is a radical ending because it restores not grandeur, but tenderness.

Featured chapters

25: Milk From Cows

26: I Am a Friend to Man

30: What Is Made of Mice and Men

31: There Is No Cure, but I Endure

32: I Can Never Say I Can Never Want

33: I Guess I Can’t Stay Here

34: I See My Father Father

35: Among the Headless Hunt

36: I See a Painful Ending

37: We Know That God Is Among Us

38: MIMA, I Have Lost Another Tooth

39: It’s Time Izzy Had to Go to Bed, Dear Child

Themes

Endurance without cure. Friendship as discipline. The cost of apology. Want without surrender. Found family. Shared mourning. God in soup and mended sleeves. Childhood surviving history. Bedtime as political achievement.

Read the books

DSMSSED CLWNS (PDF): https://pdflink.to/dcab1/CORNBREAD (PDF): https://pdflink.to/cornbread/

Closing blurb

This final installment of DSMSSED CLWNS proves that the book’s real victory is not conquest. It is the harder thing. A vow kept. A wound named. A mother buried without lie. Soup shared after grief. A child returned to bed under a night repaired enough to trust for one more hour. Humans remain absurdly committed to tenderness in the middle of catastrophe. For once, that embarrassment is also the saving mechanism.

In this episode, DSMSSED CLWNS moves from fugitive motion into a stranger and more intimate terrain: exchange, courage, friendship, rain, sweetness, memory, food, bathing, prayer, and the hidden architecture of hurt. Chapters 13 through 24 follow DangR, CLWNTWN, Benn, Ruth, Elin, and Isaiah as the road briefly opens into small shelters and provisional kinships, where survival is measured less by spectacle than by what can be shared, swallowed, washed off, remembered, or finally spoken aloud. Benn’s marble exchange with another boy becomes a lesson in reciprocity as structure rather than sentiment. The road-house ambush reframes courage as movement under fear, not its absence. A brief friendship in a broken river-town play space shows how childhood keeps insisting on itself even inside ruined systems.

From there, the reading turns toward weather and ordinary sustenance. Rain strips the group down to competing loyalties and makes DangR’s hidden summons impossible to keep treating as abstraction. At the orchard commune, sugar on strawberries becomes a dangerous small luxury, Mima’s presence turns memory into visitation through silverware, soap, and kitchen air, and Benn’s rebellion against peas and spinach becomes a comic but real sign that appetite has grown standards again. Even the washhouse matters, because bathing here is not vanity but bodily restoration after pursuit, fear, and road-grime.

The final movement of this reading reaches something quieter and harder. Prayer emerges not through institution but through attention, hope, and a “small hello at end of day.” Then Chapter 24, “I’ve Had Scars Without Band-Aids,” lets the hidden injuries surface once safety gives pain the indecent confidence to introduce itself: Benn’s hold-nightmares, Ruth’s fear, Isaiah’s freeze at ledgers, Elin’s split between laughter and crying, CLWNTWN’s hush, and DangR’s unbearable burden of memory. Mima offers no miracle cure, only recognition, which the book understands as the opposite of erasure. That is the bruised grace of this section: not healing as triumph, but healing as being seen without reduction.

In this reading:

* Chapter 13: Reciprocity

* Chapter 14: I Don’t Know What Courage Is

* Chapter 15: I Guess We Can Be Friends

* Chapter 16: The Rain Don’t Lie

* Chapter 17: Sugar on Strawberries

* Chapter 18: MIMA Came Back to Me

* Chapter 19: I Said I Don’t Like Those Vegetables

* Chapter 20: Take a Shower

* Chapter 21: Learning How to Pray

* Chapter 24: I’ve Had Scars Without Band-AidsThese chapters trace a shift from escape narrative into emotional inventory, where the smallest acts begin carrying the largest meanings.

Themes in this episode

* reciprocity as counter-law

* courage as sweat, not roar

* childhood under pressure

* sweetness after deprivation

* memory through domestic objects

* bodily restoration and dignity

* prayer without spectacle

* hidden trauma and communal recognition

Tone note

This reading contains themes of historical violence, enslavement, displacement, trauma, grief, and emotional aftermath, though always through the symbolic and child-centered fable logic of the book.

Closing blurb

This installment of DSMSSED CLWNS is where the book proves that survival is not only escape. It is also the marble passed hand to hand, the pea finally eaten, the bath taken, the prayer muttered, the spoon that summons the dead, and the wound that at last gets named. Human beings, against all evidence, keep making tenderness in the middle of catastrophe. Embarrassing species. Necessary habit.

FULL PDF BELOWN:

Read CORNBREAD here: https://pdflink.to/cornbread/Read DSMSSD CLWNS here: https://pdflink.to/dcab1/

MDNTMRKT VOX — Show Notes

Deep Dive: ONCE: On Poetic Form

+ Dramatic Reading: “The Rain Don’t Lie”

This episode doesn’t move fast. It holds.

A full-length deep dive into ONCE: On Poetic Form by Monet Marcel by Delray, followed by a dramatic reading of “The Rain Don’t Lie”—a poem that doesn’t resolve, doesn’t release, and doesn’t apologize for either.

If you’re expecting clarity, you’ll get pressure instead.

🎙️ What This Episode Does

We break down the Monet Sonnet as more than structure:

a system of containment, recursion, and held identity.

This is poetry that refuses:

clean lineage

emotional release

narrative resolution

Instead, it builds:

viscosity

repetition with residue

identity under compression

🌧️ Featured Reading: “The Rain Don’t Lie”

This isn’t a poem about rain.

It’s a poem about truth that refuses interpretation.

Rain in this text operates as:

witness

equalizer

non-negotiable fact

It does not comfort.

It does not explain.

It falls anyway.

Listen for:

repetition as pressure, not emphasis

line returns that feel heavier each time

the absence of catharsis

The poem doesn’t end.

It settles.

🧠 Deep Dive Themes

1. Containment vs Release

The central argument of ONCE:

A dream deferred doesn’t always explode.

It implodes—and stays held.

2. Viscosity of Form

The poem resists flow.

You don’t move through it—

you sit inside it.

3. Recursive Identity

Same voice. Same fracture.

Different form.

BBC and Other Poems → expansion

ONCE → compression

Same problem.

Held longer.

4. Lineage Reframed

In conversation with:

Claude McKay

Langston Hughes

But with a shift:

Not explosion.

Implosion.

🎧 Listening Notes

Pay attention to:

Where the poem slows down instead of builds

Where repetition becomes weight

Where meaning is withheld on purpose

If you feel stuck in the poem…

that’s not failure.

That’s the form working.

📖 About the Book

ONCE: On Poetic Form

Runner-Up — Kenyon Review Poetry Contest

Print Release: Fall 2026

Full PDF:

https://pdflink.to/oncefull/

🔖 Tags

#MDNTMRKT #ONCE #MonetSonnet #RainDontLie #BlackPoetry #QueerPoetics #PoetryPodcast #LiteraryTheory #BONE #VOX #SpokenWord #DetroitWriters

This episode doesn’t give answers.

It gives you time inside the question.

Dramatic Reading of the First Section of the Children’s Abridged Edition 🎙️🎭📚

In this episode of MDNTMRKTVOX, we present a dramatic reading of the first section of the children’s abridged edition of DSMSSED CLWNS (DISMISSED CLOWNS), a slave fable shaped by memory, warning, myth, and survival. This reading offers listeners an early entry into the world of the text, where the language of parable meets the pressure of history, and where the child’s ear becomes one of the most serious places a story can land.

This is not a softened telling. It is a distilled one.

The children’s abridged edition keeps the emotional architecture of the original work while carrying it through a clearer, younger register. What remains is the strangeness, the caution, the ache, the humor at the edge of harm, and the old ritual of telling a story that means more than it first appears to say. Like any real fable worth keeping around, it speaks in two directions at once: toward innocence and toward inheritance.

In this opening section, listeners are invited into the first movements of DSMSSED CLWNS, where performance, dignity, fear, and memory begin to gather shape. The reading lets the work do what it was always meant to do in part: live in the mouth, live in breath, live in the air between speaker and listener. Because some stories do not fully arrive until they are heard aloud. Tragic for the page, maybe, but good for the soul of the thing.

This episode is both a preview and an invocation. A threshold. A first sounding.

If you would like to read the full children’s abridged edition, it is available here:https://pdflink.to/dcab1/

In this episode:

* A dramatic reading of the first section of the children’s abridged edition of DSMSSED CLWNS

* An introduction to the fable’s tone, world, and warning system

* A first public voicing of the text through MDNTMRKTVOX

* An invitation into the larger Saturday story drop and ongoing project

About the work

DSMSSED CLWNS (DISMISSED CLOWNS) is a slave fable concerned with spectacle, survival, inherited performance, and the uneasy remains left behind when a people are forced to wear masks for too long. The children’s abridged edition re-voices that burden through image, rhythm, and clarity, preserving the seriousness of the material while making it newly audible to younger listeners and to the adults responsible for what children are asked to carry.

Read the full children’s abridged edition:

https://pdflink.to/dcab1/

Follow / Support / Share

If this reading moved you, share the episode, pass along the story drop, and keep an eye on MDNTMRKTVOX and MDNTMRKT CONT for more readings, field notes, essays, and soundings from the edge of the page.

Link to the full children’s abridged edition:

https://pdflink.to/dcab1/

#DSMSSEDCLWNS #DismissedClowns #MDNTMRKTVOX #MonetMarcelByDelray #SlaveFable #ChildrensLiterature #BlackFable #BlackLiterature #StoryDrop #DramaticReading #PodcastNotes #IndependentLiterature #LiteraryPodcast #MDNTMRKTCONT

GARTH

An alter ego forged from war memory, kitchen heat, road miles, and the slow violence of becoming 🎙️🔪🔥

In this episode of MDNTMRKTVOX, I introduce Garth: a character, an alter ego, and a working American ghost built from several lives pressed together under pressure. Part uncle John, a retired Navy man shaped by the residue of war. Part my younger self, wandering from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, taking work wherever a kitchen, diner, greasy spoon, or fine dining room would have me. Part all the information, burns, cuts, swagger, shame, appetite, and hard-earned knowledge gathered in between.

This piece lives somewhere between nonfiction, character study, culinary memoir, and American field report. It moves in the spirit of Anthony Bourdain’s restless witness and Alton Brown’s technical curiosity, but aims its knife at something quieter and uglier too: the private war of attrition a person wages against themselves in order to survive the rigor, seduction, punishment, and strange holiness of serious kitchen work.

This is about food, yes. But more than that, it is about discipline, masculinity, inheritance, labor, romance, and the cost of trying to become excellent in a world that often confuses destruction with devotion. It is about what kitchens take from the body, what they give to the mind, and what they reveal about the kind of people willing to trade comfort for competence.

In this reading:

Garth emerges as an American composite

War memory meets line-cook mythology

The road becomes education

The kitchen becomes a chapel, a battleground, and a machine of self-invention

Quiet desperation sits beside craft, longing, and survival

This episode serves as both an introduction and a declaration of intent for the larger Garth series, which will continue exploring chef life, labor, identity, endurance, and the brutal poetics of the American kitchen.

Topics touched in this episode

chef culture, kitchen labor, Anthony Bourdain influence, Alton Brown influence, food writing, culinary memoir, masculinity and work, war inheritance, American wandering, hospitality industry life, restaurant hierarchy, line cook survival, discipline, class, memory, and self-invention

MDNTMRKTVOX

Literature, theory, sound, memory, Detroit, labor, longing, and the language we use to survive the burn.

#MDNTMRKTVOX #Garth #FoodWriting #ChefLife #KitchenCulture #CulinaryNonfiction #AnthonyBourdain #AltonBrown #HospitalityIndustry #AmericanWriting #CreativeNonfiction #PodcastNotes #LaborAndMemory #DetroitWriter #MonetMarcelByDelray

Vivian Storenbend Potts: The Monet Sonnet & First Readings

You came for a reading. You got a quiet dismantling of form.

This episode features a live reading of Vivian Storenbend Potts’ critical essay on the Monet Sonnet, followed by performances of the first three sonnets—Dating, Puberty of Maturity, and Threesome. What sounds like structure is actually argument. What feels like rhythm is pressure negotiating itself in real time.

The Monet Sonnet doesn’t just revise the tradition. It exposes it. Uppercase and lowercase don’t just rhyme—they disagree, they echo, they inherit, they resist. The sonnet stops pretending it can contain experience and starts showing where it leaks.

Potts situates the form across:

African American literary theory — lineage, recursion, memory

Queer theory — fluidity, multiplicity, embodiment

BONE & VOX — language as structure, tone as knowledge

Then the poems step in and prove it.

Dating becomes a study in hesitation and projection

Puberty of Maturity maps the body as unfinished text

Threesome reframes desire as negotiated architecture

Nothing resolves cleanly. That’s the point.

You’ll hear the tension between:

form and failure

identity and performance

containment and spill

And somewhere in the background, Walt Whitman is still refusing to count lines.

What to listen for

The return of rhyme as memory, not decoration

The split voice (uppercase/lowercase) as dual consciousness

Where the poem breaks its own logic—and why that matters

Why this matters

This isn’t nostalgia for the sonnet.It’s a demand that the sonnet tell the truth about what it cannot hold.

Credits

Written by Vivian Storenbend PottsProduced by MDNTMRKT VOXPerformed in the Midnight Market voice

Tags

#MDNTMRKT #MonetSonnet #BONE #VOX #QueerTheory #AfricanAmericanTheory #PoetryReading #VivianPotts #LiteraryTheory

Title:SHIVA or 7 Days Waste — Abridged Working Reading (MDNTMRKTVOX)

Description:This episode presents the first recorded reading of SHIVA or 7 Days Waste—an abridged working edition of a developing theatrical piece.

This is not the final play.This is not even the play as it will exist on stage.

This is the threshold version—where language leaves the page and begins to resist its own author.

What You’re Hearing

A raw vocal rendering of the opening monologue

A text still in motion, not yet shaped by actors, directors, or stage design

A script in its skeletal form—before breath, timing, and embodiment complicate it

Why This Matters

Theater is not written to be read.It is written to be heard, held, and altered.

This recording captures the moment where:

private language becomes public sound

internal rhythm meets external resistance

intention begins to fail productively

Core Themes

Destruction as repetition, not spectacle

Time as rotation, not progression

Memory as residue, not narrative

Performance as betrayal of text

What’s Missing (On Purpose)

This version does not yet include:

Actor interpretation

Directorial intervention

Physical staging

Environmental tension

Those absences are not gaps.They are future collaborators waiting to arrive.

Listen Here

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/76ZkFzYDkh0SbZDZelbLW8Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mdntmrktvox/id1880114031

Follow / Track Development

Substack: [Your GRENBK:DTW / MDNTMRKT page]LinkedIn / Facebook: MDNTMRKT CONT

Closing Note

This is a working edition.It will change.It should change.

If it doesn’t—then something has gone wrong.

by Vivian Storenbend Potts

This episode features a reading from the introduction and three poems from ERR WOES, the bruised, brilliant, and body-forward collection by Vivian Storenbend Potts. The cover alone looks like a nervous system trying to remember desire on a mustard-colored mattress, so naturally the poems follow suit.

Tonight’s reading moves through erotic command, Black girl memory, and thick-bodied blessing without asking permission from politeness, taste, or the usual paper-thin literary decorum.

Featured in this reading

Introduction

“mastery of the orgasm”

“to Darkskinned for childhood”

“blessed with An ass”

About the reading

The introduction opens the emotional and aesthetic logic of ERR WOES: pleasure as knowledge, memory as scar tissue, and the body as both archive and argument. From there, the selected poems widen the field.

“mastery of the orgasm” treats pleasure not as spectacle, but as study, discipline, ritual, and survival. It is a poem concerned with agency, with timing, with the body’s refusal to be reduced to somebody else’s grammar.

“to Darkskinned for childhood” turns toward memory, color, protection, naming, and the wounds carried out of youth. It reads like an address, an invocation, and a reckoning all at once, holding tenderness close to injury without sanding down either.

“blessed with An ass” shifts the register into praise, wit, embodiment, and hard-earned self-possession. The poem understands the politics of being looked at, desired, judged, mythologized, and still somehow remaining gloriously one’s own.

Themes

Black embodiment and erotic intelligence

Childhood memory and inherited feeling

Shame, praise, humor, and fleshly presence

The body as text, weapon, inheritance, and song

Desire as both performance and private literacy

Why this episode matters

This reading offers a compact entry into the larger world of ERR WOES: a collection that refuses neat categories and instead works the seam between sensuality, social inscription, and personal myth. Potts writes with heat, ache, bite, and a kind of unembarrassed precision that many poets duck because civilization runs on cowardice.

Tone and style

Expect:

sensual language with intellectual weight

confessional force without sentimentality

playful audacity beside emotional exposure

performance energy rooted in slam, page, and lived texture

Featured author

Vivian Storenbend Potts writes in a mode where body, memory, and voice collide. The poems in ERR WOES carry the urgency of performance while remaining attentive to image, fracture, and line. This is poetry that knows being seen can be dangerous, comic, holy, and exhausting at the same time.

Tagline

A reading of hunger, memory, shade, skin, and self-invention from ERR WOES by Vivian Storenbend Potts.

Hashtags

#VivianStorenbendPotts #ERRWOES #PoetryReading #SpokenWord #BlackPoetry #EroticPoetry #SlamPoetry #MDNTMRKTVOX #MidnightMarket #PoetryPodcast #LiteraryPerformance #BodyPoetics

MDNTMRKTVOX

Episode runtime: 25:00

In this episode of MDNTMRKTVOX, the signal stays true to form: reflective, unsparing, Detroit-minded, and tuned to the strange circuitry between memory, culture, survival, language, and self-invention. The conversation moves through the pressure points that define the MDNTMRKT world, where the city becomes archive, performance, warning system, and witness all at once.

This installment leans into the tension between being seen and being understood, between making work and being consumed by the machinery around it. There is movement here between voice and silence, between private reckoning and public expression, between the body, the block, the archive, and the broadcast. Detroit remains more than backdrop. It acts like a method, a philosophy, a living syntax.

What this episode touches:

Detroit as atmosphere, argument, and memory field

Art-making under pressure

Identity, performance, and continuity

Language as survival technology

Cultural residue, ritual, and reflection

The ethics of witnessing your own becoming

MDNTMRKTVOICE as document, theory, and transmission

Why listen:

If you care about independent thought, literary culture, urban memory, Black experimental voice, queer adjacency, and the poetics of surviving the machine, this episode has teeth. It does not posture. It observes, cuts, and keeps moving.

MDNTMRKTVOX is a signal from the edge of literature, theory, podcasting, and city record. Not a clean genre product. Humans adore those little boxes. This refuses one.

Hashtags

#MDNTMRKTVOX #MDNTMRKT #Detroit #Podcast #LiteraryPodcast #BlackWriters #QueerWriters #IndependentPublishing #Substack #Poetry #Playwriting #CulturalCriticism #UrbanTheory #DetroitWriters #CreativeProcess #BlackArt #ExperimentalWriting #VoiceAndMemory #MidnightMarket

Set on the west side of Grand Rapids, Calder City, Michigan is a linked collection of stories shaped by memory, labor, longing, addiction, class, and the emotional weather of the Midwest. Across these stories, neighborhood becomes witness. Streets hold history. Ordinary people carry private grief, hard-earned tenderness, and the residue of survival.

Narrated by the author, this audiobook brings the collection into an intimate register, where each story feels remembered aloud rather than merely read. The voice carries the texture of place, turning Grand Rapids into more than setting. It becomes archive, monument, and living pressure system.

This is literary fiction rooted in working-class life, regional memory, and the beauty and burden of paying attention.

Full novel PDF:https://pdflink.to/caldercity/

Synopsis

Calder City, Michigan is a powerful collection of linked stories set on the west side of Grand Rapids. Through lives marked by struggle, desire, family, faith, memory, and endurance, the audiobook builds a vivid portrait of a community too often overlooked and too deeply lived to be forgotten. Read by Monet Marcel by Delray, these stories transform the city into living testimony, where each piece stands alone while contributing to a larger emotional map of place, identity, and survival. Intimate, lyrical, and sharply observant, Calder City, Michigan is a listening experience grounded in the hard beauty of the Midwest.

PDF link:https://pdflink.to/caldercity/

Hashtags

#CalderCityMichigan #MonetMarcelByDelray #Audiobook #SpotifyAudiobook #LiteraryFiction #LinkedStories #GrandRapids #WestSideGrandRapids #MichiganWriter #MidwestLiterature #IndependentAuthor #AuthorNarrated #BlackWriters #AmericanFiction #ContemporaryFiction #WorkingClassLiterature #RegionalWriting #StoryCollection #IndieLit #WritingCommunity

MDNTMRKTVOX

Episode Title: Caught: TOME / Poetry

In this episode of MDNTMRKTVOX, the voice turns toward capture: what it means to be caught by language, by memory, by structure, by self-invention, and by the lingering pressure of time. Moving through poetry as both artifact and active wound, this episode explores the TOME as method, body, archive, and refusal.

What emerges is not a neat reading, but a charged meditation on writing as containment and release. The poem, or the tome, becomes a site where memory hardens, fractures, and reanimates. Language does not simply describe experience here. It traps it, distills it, tests it, and sometimes frees it by force.

This episode continues the larger MDNTMRKT investigation into voice, ritual, criticism, silence, theatrical movement, and the burden of reflection after midnight. If you’ve ever wondered what happens when poetry stops trying to be pretty and starts functioning like evidence, this one sits in that fire.

In this episode

Poetry as archive, pressure, and living residue

The TOME as structure rather than object

Voice under compression

Memory as both witness and distortion

Language as trap, instrument, and release

Midnight thought as method

Tone / Keywords

poetry, criticism, archive, memory, performance, language, structure, theory, midnight, voice

Pull Quote

“Poetry is not decoration here. It is the record left behind when pressure learns how to speak.”

Another Pull Quote

“The tome is not a book alone. It is a body of thought forced to survive its own conditions.”

Podcast Description Blurb

MDNTMRKTVOX is a literary and reflective audio series from MDNTMRKT, moving through poetry, essays, performance, theory, and the after-hours pressure of thought. This episode, Caught: TOME / Poetry, considers what language holds, what it distorts, and what still survives the act of being written down.

Hashtags

#MDNTMRKTVOX #PoetryPodcast #LiteraryPodcast #SpokenWord #CriticalTheory #WritingLife #PoetryCommunity #ExperimentalWriting #MidnightMarket #MonetMarcel

Short version for Spotify / Apple Podcasts

In Caught: TOME / Poetry, MDNTMRKTVOX explores poetry as archive, pressure, and living evidence. A meditation on language, memory, structure, and the strange afterlife of voice under strain.

Longer platform-ready version

In this episode of MDNTMRKTVOX, Caught: TOME / Poetry unfolds as a meditation on poetry’s ability to hold pressure, memory, contradiction, and form. Through a reflective and literary lens, the episode examines the TOME not simply as a book, but as a method of thought, a structure of feeling, and a body made out of language. What does it mean to be caught by voice, by memory, by writing itself? This episode sits inside that question and lets it burn.

Show Notes: Deep Dive into In the Midst of Dangr

🎙️📖

This episode takes a long, careful look at In the Midst of Dangr, a novel first written during undergraduate study and now returned to through the sharper, less forgiving light of adulthood. Human beings call this growth. Sometimes it is just surviving your earlier drafts long enough to understand them.

In this deep dive, I unpack the structure of the novel, the force and framing of the author’s notes, the role of Vivian Storenbend Potts as a quoted and interpretive presence, and the interior weight of the novel’s protagonists as they move through a haunted architecture of fear, confession, memory, and spiritual residue.

This is not just a conversation about plot. It is a discussion of design. How the book is built. How its language works. How its moral and emotional pressure gathers. How horror becomes a vessel for witness, and how the abandoned rectory at the center of the novel becomes more than a setting. It becomes a chamber for reckoning.

In this episode

A breakdown of the novel’s formal architecture and the way the story uses enclosure, dread, confession, and memory

A discussion of the author’s notes and how they reframe the novel as more than a horror text

The importance of Vivian Storenbend Potts and the quoted material surrounding the book’s interpretive spine

A close look at the protagonists, Mouse and Cornbread, and how survival, guilt, intimacy, and spiritual exhaustion shape their movement through the story

Why this book works as both literary horror and recovery narrative

How the novel handles what was left unsaid, and why returning to it in adulthood changes the emotional register of the work

Episode focus

At the heart of this episode is the question:

What does it mean to revisit the work of your younger self and find not embarrassment, but instruction?

In the Midst of Dangr is a novel concerned with the burden of what remains unresolved. Its protagonists do not simply enter a haunted place. They enter a place that answers them. The structure of the book mirrors that pressure. Rooms become memory chambers. Dialogue becomes witness. Setting becomes theology. Silence becomes evidence.

The author’s notes help place the novel in its fuller frame, making clear that the work is not interested in cheap fright, but in the accumulation of pain, inheritance, addiction, secrecy, and confession. This episode explores how those notes unlock the deeper mechanics of the novel and why they matter so much to the reading experience.

We also spend time on the quoted presence of Vivian Storenbend Potts, whose words help sharpen the book’s intellectual and emotional atmosphere. Those quotations do not sit as decoration. They press on the text. They widen its conversation. They give the novel another reflective surface through which to read danger, memory, and the unfinished business of the soul.

Why listen

This episode is for readers interested in:

literary horror

Black interiority and spiritual architecture

revision and recovery

the anatomy of a protagonist

authorial afterthought and retrospective craft

the strange grace of finishing what once felt unbearable to touch

Read the full book here

Full novel: https://smallpdf.com/file#s=b3948b3e-aeda-46fb-9d02-77a58e4c5aa4

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🎧

This deep dive episode on In the Midst of Dangr explores the structure of the novel, the force of its author’s notes, the quoted insights of Vivian Storenbend Potts, and the emotional architecture of its protagonists. We get into the bones of the book: horror, confession, memory, recovery, and the haunted geometry of what was left unsaid. If you care about craft, revision, literary form, and what time does to a work once made in youth, this episode is for you.

Read the full book here: https://smallpdf.com/file#s=b3948b3e-aeda-46fb-9d02-77a58e4c5aa4

And again, because links are apparently the sacred currency of modern attention:

https://smallpdf.com/file#s=b3948b3e-aeda-46fb-9d02-77a58e4c5aa4

Tag line

A haunted novel. A recovered voice. A deep dive into structure, witness, and the unfinished

self.

#MDNTMRKTVOX #HumidorLecture #SmokeStack #SpokenWordPodcast #HipHopPoetics #DigitalCulture #Storytelling #BlackTheory #AudioExperience #Boneheads

🎧 Extended Show Notes

This episode of MDNTMRKTVOX opens the Humidor Lecture series with Smoke Stack, a meditation on preservation, transformation, and the systems we inherit and build. Using the metaphor of brining and smoking, the lecture moves from the physical act of curing fish into a broader inquiry on how culture, memory, and digital identity are processed, stored, and shared.

The “humidor” becomes both a literal device and a conceptual container: a space where temperature, time, and environment must be precisely controlled to produce something meaningful. From there, the conversation expands into the architecture of the internet, content creation, and the strange normalization of platforms as tools of both expression and extraction.

Layered with rhythmic spoken word and grounded in lived observation, this first installment sets the tone for a series concerned with thermodynamics, community, and signal. Expect dense language, poetic structure, and a steady oscillation between the tangible and the abstract.

This is not just a lecture. It is a process log, a field note, and an opening transmission.

Just dropped: Smoke Stack & The Humidor Lecture (Part I)—a reflection on preservation, process, and platform. From brine to bandwidth, this work explores how we store culture, shape signal, and survive systems. Month one of the experiment feels real.

#BONEHEADS #MDNTMRKT #HumidorLecture #CreativeProcess #DigitalCulture

#PoetryPodcast #EKAA #BBCpoetry #SpokenWord #HipHopPoetics #MidnightMarket #MythAndMemory #Storytelling

Podcast / Video Show Notes

Deep Dive: The Literary World of Vivian Storenbend Potts — SONflower & CORNBREAD

A long-form literary discussion exploring the symbolic, cultural, and narrative landscapes inside the novels SONflower and CORNBREAD by Vivian Storenbend Potts. The episode investigates how food, land, ancestry, and rural memory function as narrative architecture. Through close reading and cultural commentary, the conversation traces how Potts builds a mythology of kinship, survival, and generational storytelling rooted in Southern and agrarian imagery.

📚 Reading Links (PDF)

SONflower

• Read the PDF / flipbook version

CORNBREAD

• Access the PDF version / reading page

(Note: Some hosted PDFs online may be preview or promotional scans depending on the site.)

Episode Breakdown

1. Entering Potts’ Literary Landscape 🌻

The discussion opens by situating Vivian Storenbend Potts within a lineage of American storytelling that centers domestic ritual and agricultural life. The hosts consider how the imagery of sunflower fields and cornbread kitchens operates as metaphor for inheritance and memory.

Themes introduced:

rural memory

land as archive

domestic ritual as philosophy

maternal lineage and food traditions

2.

SONflower

— Symbolism of Growth and Devotion

The novel SONflower explores generational devotion through the symbolism of the sunflower—an organism that literally follows the sun. The hosts unpack how this botanical metaphor mirrors:

children orbiting parental expectations

spiritual loyalty and sacrifice

growth under heat and pressure

The narrative structure often moves between reflective memory and contemporary moments, producing a layered meditation on identity.

Key motifs discussed:

sunlight as guidance

fields as communal memory

longing for belonging

3.

CORNBREAD

— Food as Cultural Memory 🌽

The second half of the episode turns to CORNBREAD, a novel centered on the cultural and emotional significance of food traditions.

Cornbread becomes a storytelling device representing:

survival cooking traditions

the preservation of family knowledge

nourishment as an act of resistance

Cornmeal preparation, family kitchens, and shared meals become scenes where generational wisdom passes quietly between characters. Food, in this framework, is both sustenance and language.

4. The Shared World of Potts’ Fiction

Both novels inhabit a shared aesthetic universe.

Common threads:

rural landscapes as spiritual geography

intergenerational storytelling

symbolic plants and crops

everyday ritual elevated to myth

The hosts argue that Potts constructs a literary ecology in which plants, food, and memory become characters themselves.

Literary Topics Explored in the Episode

Agrarian symbolism in modern fiction

Food anthropology in literature

The role of domestic ritual in storytelling

Nature metaphors in identity formation

Suggested Discussion Questions

How do plants and food operate as narrative symbols in Potts’ work?

What role does memory play in shaping the characters’ identities?

How does the rural setting influence the moral universe of the novels?

In what ways do everyday rituals become sacred acts in the narrative?

Brief Video Synopsis

A deep-dive literary video exploring Vivian Storenbend Potts’ twin novels SONflower and CORNBREAD. The discussion examines how agriculture, food traditions, and family memory become symbolic language for identity, inheritance, and survival across generations.

🎙 Podcast Title

“Layers of Voice: The Poetry of Monet Marcel by Delray”

and

In this episode, we explore the multidimensional poetry of Monet Marcel by Delray, examining the duality of his published works: EKA, a luminous children’s poetry collection, and BBC, a visceral adult counterpart. We unpack the intersection of identity, history, and relational dynamics in his work, reflecting on the tension between innocence and experience. EKA channels the curiosity and vulnerability of youth through rhythmic simplicity and anthropological sensitivity, while BBC confronts the complexities of desire, loss, and heritage, fusing confessional narrative with mythic resonance.

Listeners are guided through the linguistic interplay of voice: the calm, generational wisdom of Rye Blend haikus paired with the sharp, antagonistic tone reminiscent of a Paul Auster presence, set beside the lyrical, poetic cadences echoing Margaret Atwood. The episode highlights recurring motifs—ancestral memory, continuity, the cyclical nature of identity—and situates Marcel by Delray’s dual works as a living conversation across age, audience, and existential reflection.

This podcast offers an intimate lens into the craft, thematic ambition, and structural ingenuity of a poet navigating celibacy, Black diasporic heritage, and intra-relational perspectives, providing listeners with an immersive literary experience that spans the tender and the provocative.

📌 Show Notes

Featured Works:

EKA – children’s poetry exploring discovery, belonging, and curiosity. PDF link

BBC – adult poetry addressing identity, heritage, and relational complexity. PDF link

Topics Discussed:

Duality of Voice – children vs. adult readership; innocence vs. experience.

Rye Blend Haikus – trauma-informed anthropological voice.

Thematic Motifs – ancestry, continuity, cyclical identity, relational dynamics.

Structural Choices – slant rhyme, envoy, diptych poems, intergenerational layering.

Cultural and Personal Context – celibacy, Black diasporic perspective, intra-relational lens.

Pull Quote:

“Monet Marcel by Delray writes across the span of innocence and experience, bridging childhood wonder and adult reckoning with a voice both tender and unflinching.”

Listener Takeaways:

Insight into crafting dual readership poetry.

Techniques for blending confessional narrative with mythic and historical framing.

Understanding the interplay of tone, rhythm, and generational voice in poetry.

Recommended For:

Writers, poets, literary scholars, educators, and readers interested in cross-generational storytelling, complex human experience, and the fusion of childlike curiosity with adult reflection.

Do you want me to do that next?

Winter’s finished. Salt off the streets. Calcium out the joints before it calcifies. Tonight the rhythm moves bone first, brain second. VSOP 25 pours slow—grown rap, late hours, dim lights. For the Fetlifers out there: put a little kink in the groove. True masters know timing. Tell it once. (Dry.) Tell it twice. (Still dry.) Third time… now it lands. That was the joke. Now let the records breathe—spring thaw, bass warm, bones moving again.

This part one the for the older cats— before you the before they tumble over but we still got all away though 00 UTC so we don’t get rougher take me back in a minute for that thug life VSOP 25D lime her

This disclaimer may contain adult situations, language, and suicidal ideation, as well as culinary arts.

This episode presents a reflective recording shaped by humor, endurance, and the search for human connection after a difficult moment. Part creative nonfiction and part personal journal, the story draws from a real experience of calling a crisis support line and confronting a period of emotional turmoil.

What emerges instead of despair is something quieter but powerful: the rediscovery of laughter, the presence of kindred spirits in ordinary spaces like the kitchen, and the realization that resilience often appears in unexpected forms.

Framed in the spirit of storytelling traditions similar to those heard on The Moth, the episode blends narrative craft with lived experience. It treats vulnerability not as an ending point but as a passage toward reflection, humor, and renewed perspective.

The recording stands as a reminder that even in moments when defeat feels close, conversation, storytelling, and shared humanity can reopen the door to life. 🎙️📓🌒

A conversation about meaning.

This episode explores Dead Alphabet by Monet Marcel by Delray, breaking down its themes of identity, silence, and the evolution of words in a changing world.

🎙️ Literary deep dive

📖 Editorial analysis

🧠 Philosophy of language

Streaming now.

For those who want to explore the full work, the complete online PDF is available here: https://pdflink.to/dead_alphabet/.

Who would’ve been a 10 man and the wiz?

Who was just there to me and still be just a kid 🐐ain’t nothing wrong with being and continuing to be a goat. That is a very necessary and purposeful fabric for this American life

wait

wait don’t tell me.

Tonight‘s been brought to us by viewers like you and for those who like to spend their weekends in the summer turning turning butter, making sweet sweet sounds, and for those who just simply like to listen and sit and sit, awestruck against resounding sounds.

In a town where the court was as hallowed as the library, there lived a Letterman, resplendent in his championship jacket, and a scrappy JV player, eager for glory yet unwilling to earn it through sweat. One day, the JV player hatched a plan: “Why toil for a letter when I can wager for it?” he mused. Thus, he approached the Letterman, who was lounging like a cat on the warm pavement.

“Let’s wager!” the JV player proclaimed, a twinkle in his eye. “I’ll bet you my pride against your letter. If I win, I take it from the wall. If I lose, I’ll run laps until the cows come home!”

The Letterman chuckled, “Ah, but pride is a fickle mistress. Bring your wager to the court, where momentum meets inertia.”

So there they stood, the court transformed into an arena of fate. The JV player, fueled by bravado, challenged the laws of physics as he dribbled. The Letterman, cool and composed, countered with the grace of a willow swaying in the breeze.

As the dice clacked and the autumn cards turned, the crowd held its breath. Would the JV player seize glory or fall flat, a mere shadow against the wall? In that moment of tension, the true lesson emerged: sometimes, it’s not the letter you wear, but the heart you bring.

Monet x JV with the music accompanied by

Nipsey Hussle for your listening, pleasure, Fathcorn short hip-hop Symphony. G major.

White VB VSOP 25!

Lofi frequency.

No campaign. No clique.

Intra over intro.

Analog pulse in a digital market.

Sunday signal only. 🎛️

Intro to VOX

VOX begins where performance thins out.

This channel is not a rally. Not a brand sprint. Not a scarcity play. It is signal over spectacle. Tone over noise. A measured voice inside markets that reward shouting.

If the campaign never ends, VOX refuses to run.

If the clique closes ranks, VOX builds bridges.

If the feed accelerates, VOX lowers the BPM. 🎚️

White VB VSOP 25! is the lofi cut—distilled, patient, unbothered by velocity. This is the liaison before the laughter. The antidote before Sunday fun.

Press play.

Note

Nsfw

Sunday: A FetLife Center Podcast. Clear-eyed takes on kink, clique, consent, and campaign culture—intro loops vs. intra bridges. Signal before spectacle. Low freq, high clarity. 🎙️

DayONE

I’m inviting you to join my “GRENBK:DTW” journal in Day One! To get started, follow this link:

https://dayone.me/accept-journal-invite?token=de0a90e4f812948f4cdaafb7e6b9649d#KT31CCmlvaftB0yBDSAg0tLJUciKW1k+9VhSlmBaGNI=

Introducing GRENBK:DTW, an innovative interactive novel inspired by the historic Green Book guides of the 1960s. These guides were once essential travel companions for Black Americans navigating a segregated America. This modern reimagining takes the concept into a futuristic, immersive narrative spanning 3,700 years of history, centered in Delray, Detroit-a community with rich industrial and cultural roots dating back to the founding of Motor City.

In this unique story, you’ll encounter an android protagonist— queer-facing and multifaceted-struggling with identity and purpose in a future where the very bones of Detroit whisper the legacies of its past. Drawing on the spirit of the original Green Book, which empowered safe exploration and connection, GRENBK:DTW invites readers into a world where heteronormative and homosocial relationships are reframed in a hyper-technological, introspective society.

Detroit’s history permeates every digital page: from the rise of the auto industry to the social upheavals of the civil rights era, and into imagined futures where legacy and destiny collide.

This interactive experience, available on the Day One app, continues the narrative universe introduced in the acclaimed novel MarrowOps. Readers have the chance to shape their own path through time, identity, and survival in a reborn Detroit.

Step into GRENBK:DTW—having to manifest his own destiny and heteronormative and homosocial relationships in a new inner intro, oriented world. Not only does he work technology, but he also interacts with the very bones that have created Detroit from the Dickens of Detroit Marcel by Delay. This new interactive novel is available on the Day One app and serves as a continuum to the novel “MarrowOps.” I bring you GRENBK:DTW MDNT MRKT PROVIDERS

I’m inviting you to join my “GRENBK:DTW” journal in Day One! To get started, follow this link:

https://dayone.me/accept-journal-invite?token=de0a90e4f812948f4cdaafb7e6b9649d#KT31CCmlvaftB0yBDSAg0tLJUciKW1k+9VhSlmBaGNI=

Garth does not speak first.

He seasons first.

Loss taught him that.

He has buried more than recipes. A brother. An aunt who believed in his hands before he did. A cousin who used to sit on the counter and steal olives from his mise en place. Grief came in waves—first melancholia, a quiet gray steam rising from pots he let simmer too long. Then something darker. Malevolence—not toward others, but toward himself. Over-salting joy. Under-cooking hope. Burning bridges the way he once burned garlic.

The kitchen became confession.

Steel, flame, repetition. Chop. Reduce. Taste. Adjust.

Control where life offered none.

He moved like a maverick after that—no longer cooking for applause, not even for forgiveness. Just for truth. He stopped chasing stars and started chasing silence. The kind you get right before a plate lands and someone closes their eyes.

Now he is in the moss phase.

Softened. Earth-toned. Rooted.

He forages instead of forcing. Lets bitterness have its place. Understands that sweetness must be earned. Garth no longer fights the heat; he collaborates with it. He plates like a man who knows nothing lasts and therefore everything matters.

He doesn’t ask to be saved.

He asks to serve.

And if redemption exists for him, it arrives not as a sermon but as a cocktail—carefully catered by the chef he has become. Smoke-kissed rosemary. Citrus cut clean. A dark pour at the base. Balanced.

Loss. Fire. Air. Earth.

Sip.

Garth is still lonely.

But he is no longer empty.

you’re about to get a very short synopsis of my new play that’s coming out. Tell me what you think.

Grand Rapids dirt holds

a perfect grave measured square—

inheritance bleeds

Axes misaligned,

father down, son toward the sky—

grief becomes physics

In the transcripts of Diggers, the first play in the Furniture Foundry Fulcrum trilogy, Monet Marcel by Delray announces himself as a playwright of rare structural ambition. Set against the industrial and psychic landscape of Grand Rapids, Michigan—“the furniture city”—the play is less concerned with wood and steel than with what the transcripts call “the ghosts in the machinery.” This is not a conventional kitchen-sink drama. It dismantles the kitchen entirely.

At the center is a father, Dig, obsessed with carving a perfect rectangle into the earth—a grave of exact proportions. His son, Digger, who renames himself Alex, strains toward the sky, toward flight, toward transcendence. Their conflict is described not merely as emotional estrangement but as “coordinate misalignment.” They occupy different geometric orientations: one fixed downward in containment, the other upward in escape. The tragedy is architectural.

What distinguishes Marcel’s writing is his use of what production notes describe as “subjective grammar”—a fusion of arithmetic and liturgy. The play is structured like a sestina, rotating through six emotional stations: song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss. These tropes recur in shifting order, creating an algorithm of inheritance. The audience senses inevitability without stability—an elegant metaphor for generational trauma.

The coined term “fathcorn”—defined as “steal from my pop, become my father”—haunts the trilogy. Rebellion becomes replication. Escape becomes inheritance.

There is growing industry conversation about the future life of this work. With whispers of workshop development involving Ross Egan and the Asolo Repertory Theatre, Diggers feels poised for a significant theatrical incubation. In a regional theatre landscape increasingly hungry for formally daring, structurally rigorous new writing, Marcel’s trilogy offers something rare: a civic myth built from dirt, geometry, and trembling human voice.

Six stations rotate:

song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss—

looped destiny hums

Monet MARCEL by DELRAY

Deep dive transcript——-

I want you to picture Grand Rapids, Michigan, the furniture city. We usually think of that in terms of you know, industry right, dining tables office,

chairs, the physical stuff. But we aren't here for the furniture, we're here to talk about the uh ghosts in the machinery.

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm. deeply messy and human that it kind of rewires how you think about family drama entirely.

[Speaker changed]

It really does. It takes the typical kitchen sink drama and just I mean it completely dismantles the kitchen. We're diving into the furniture foundry

fulcrum trilogy and I wanna be very specific right off the bat, this is the work of Monet Marcel, Monet Marcel of Delray. I think

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm.

[Speaker changed]

Yeah.

[Speaker changed]

and specifically we're gonna focus on the first play in this cycle Diggers, because from what I've read in these notes, these proton docs and essays

Diggers, is the wound. It's the origin story for everything that follows.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. If you look at the trilogy as a living body, Diggers is the initial injury. It's what the source is called the foundational family wound. And what's

fascinating here is well the playwright doesn't just use dialogue or shouting matches to explain that wound, they use geometry, they use arithmetic,

they use something called subjective grammar.

[Speaker changed]

But here it's actually about how people stand on the earth or you know look, at the sky.

[Speaker changed]

Right. It's suggests that our emotional problems are actually physics problem.

[Speaker changed]

That's a great way to put it. It's the physics of grief.

[Speaker changed]

So we have a lot to unpack today. We have a father obsessed with a perfect rectangle in the dirt. We have a son trying to launch himself into the

stratosphere. And we have a mathematical structure, a cystina that traps them all in a loop.

[Speaker changed]And we absolutely have to talk about the fatth corn.

[Speaker changed]

The fatth corn. Oh we cannot forget the fatth corn. That word alone gave me chills when I read the definition in the source material. But let's not get

ahead of ourselves. Before we get into the heavy geometry of grief, can you just lay out the landscape for us What. is this trilogy what are we looking

at?

[Speaker changed]

to the ritual to the civic.

Sure. So the furniture foundry fulcrum is a triptych, three plays. And the sources describe the arc in a really beautiful way. It moves from the personal

[Speaker changed]

Like a camera lens zooming out.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. So play one is our focus today. Diggers, right? Diggers is the intimate personal story. It's the family wound. It's a very claustrophobic set-up.

A father, Dig, and his son, Digger, who is also known as Alex, locked in the struggle over land inheritance and naming.

[Speaker changed]

Then we move to play two. Shiva or, seven days of waste.

[Speaker changed]

Which is the communal mourning. If Diggers is about the impossibility of outrunning the past, Shiva asks, what do we do with what's left behind?

[Speaker changed]

The objects, the bodies.

[Speaker changed]

The mess, yeah. It widens the lens from the family unit to the community that has to you know clean up that mess.

[Speaker changed]

And then the finale. The gospel according to Mary. Or sometimes just called fulcrum.

[Speaker changed]

Right and fulcrum is key here. The notes mention that fulcrum isn't just a title, it's the structural concept of the whole cycle. A fulcrum is a balance

point, and in each play the balance point shifts regarding who carries the history. By the time we get to the third play, the lens has widened to the city

itself to Grand Rapids. It deals with displacement development, and who gets erased from the map.

[Speaker changed]Diggers.

[Speaker changed]

Diggers. Because if you don't understand the wound and the dirt, you can't understand the rest of the city.

[Speaker changed]

Correct. You can't understand the lever if you don't know where the fulcrum is placed.

[Speaker changed]

So let's talk about dig and digger, the father and the son. The notes describe their conflict as a coordinate misalignment, which is such a cool clinical

way to describe a family fight. It sounds like an engineering failure.

[Speaker changed]

An engineering failure in a sense, and this comes directly from that subjective grammar theory we found in the production documents. It suggests

that the tragedy between these two isn't just that they don't get along emotionally or, you know, have different interests, it's that they exist in different

geometric orientations.

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm. And specifically he's obsessed with the grave.

[Speaker changed]

Which is exact.

Yes. The perfect rectangle. The sources mention this repeatedly. Dig is trying to dig the perfect grave. He wants geometric perfection in the earth.

[Speaker changed]

Right. It's a geometry of containment. He believes that if he can just get the angles right, if he can make the container perfect, he can somehow

contain the history or maybe contain the grief.

[Speaker changed]

Which is

[Speaker changed]

Wow. That's heavy. And then you have the son Digger.

[Speaker changed]

he wants to be Alex.

Who is desperate to look anywhere but down. His coordinate system is oriented upward, toward the sky. He wants escape, he wants transcendence,

[Speaker changed]Mm. But he calls himself Alex. Alex.

[Speaker changed]

Right Alex, is an individual identity. Alex has a future. Alex is a pilot. Digger belongs to the dirt. Alex belongs to the air.

[Speaker changed]

Mm.

[Speaker changed]

And because their eyes never meet on the horizontal plane.

[Speaker changed]

Connection is impossible. That's the coordinate misalignment. They literally cannot see each other because their vectors are pointing in opposite

directions. The tragedy is geometric. They could stand next to each other for a hundred years and never actually meet.

[Speaker changed]

That is so heartbreakingly logical. It's like no amount of therapy fixes that if you're living on different axes. You're just shouting past each other.

[Speaker changed]

And that misalignment creates the vacuum where the drama happens, but the playwright doesn't just leave it at geometry. They layer in arithmetic.

[Speaker changed]

Oh yes. The math. I saw the proton docs in the source pile. These notes on subjective grammar from math. And this is where it gets really interesting

for me because, you know, you usually think of poetry and math as opposites. Math is cold, poetry is feeling. But here the playwright is using

arithmetic as a linguistic engine.

[Speaker changed]

use the structure of a sestina.

It's fascinating. The notes discuss how arithmetic isn't just adding numbers, it's the formal machinery that underlies meaning. And specifically they

[Speaker changed]

For those of us who haven't taken a poetry workshop in a decade, remind us, what is a sestina?

[Speaker changed]

A. sestina is a very strict, very old poetic form. It dates back to like the twelfth century troubadours, It. doesn't use rhyme Instead. it uses repetition.

It relies on six end words. You have six stanzas of six lines each. The same six words that end the lines of the first stanza have to end the lines of every

other stanza, but in a specific rotating order, a mathematical remix exactly, It's. an algorithm It. creates a sense of obsession, because these words

keep coming back over and over, you can't escape them, but in diggers, playwright doesn't just use words, they use tropes, emotional stations.[Speaker changed]

Right I, have a list here. The six tropes are song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. So imagine the play isn't just a linear story where A. leads to B., it's a liturgical machine. The characters are trapped in an algorithm where

they must hit these six emotional stations. They have no choice.

[Speaker changed]

So in one cycle, say the the moonlight pass as, the notes call it, you might have a sequence like song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss.

[Speaker changed]

Right. And think about the emotional logic there. If a hug comes after silence, that hug might feel like a relief. It's intimate.

[Speaker changed]

It's breaking the tension. It says, I forgive you.

[Speaker changed]

Yeah. But then the machine rotates. In the next cycle, the sunshine pass, the order flips. Now you might have kiss, song, joke, prayer, hug, silence.

[Speaker changed]

Think about that. If you pray immediately after telling a joke, is that prayer sincere? Or is it brittle?

[Speaker changed]

Is it an apology for the joke?

[Speaker changed]

proposition.

Maybe. And if a kiss starts the scene instead of ending it, it changes everything. A kiss at the end is a resolution, a kiss at the beginning is a

[Speaker changed]

Or maybe a goodbye.

[Speaker changed]

Or a goodbye. The emotional weather changes completely, even though the components are identical.

[Speaker changed]

hug.

That is wild. So the audience starts to feel this inevitability Like. I know a hug is coming, but I don't know if it's gonna be a violent hug or a comforting[Speaker changed]

Exactly. It creates the sensation of return without stability, you're trapped in the loop, the sestina, but the ground keeps shifting under your feet. It's

a perfect structural metaphor for generational trauma. You're doing the same things your parents did, but the context is different, so it feels new and

old at the same time.

[Speaker changed]

Because we really need to talk about the women in this trilogy. Specifically Gretchen, Marguerite and Mary. Yes. In Diggers, Gretchen is there orbiting

this father-son conflict, but she's well she's silent. She's almost like a ghost in the room.

[Speaker changed]

She holds the silence trope from that list of six.

[Speaker changed]

She does. But what's brilliant about the trilogy is that the tropes migrate. They aren't stuck to one character forever, they act like a contagion or, you

know, an inheritance. You can catch silence from someone else.

[Speaker changed]

Becomes Marguerite's voicelessness in the backstory, the thing she couldn't say, which eventually becomes Mary losing the text in the final play.

[Speaker changed]

Right. Tell me about Mary, because the notes make a big deal about her role in the end. Seems like she's the key to the whole lot.

[Speaker changed]

So in the gospel, according to Mary, she is supposed to teach Sunday school, she's the authority figure, she's supposed to have the answers, but she

forgets her Bible. She loses the stable text.

[Speaker changed]

But structurally it's a revelation. Because she doesn't have the book, the authority, the rigid rules, she has to improvise. She starts misremembering

scripture, she mixes up proverbs and Psalms, she tells stories about moonlight and sunshine that keep changing.

[Speaker changed]

And the notes say this is actually the envoy of the sestina.

[Speaker changed]

Yes. In a sestina the envoy is the final three lines where all six words come together. It's the knot, the release of pressure. And Mary's speech, her

flawed human trembling act of telling, is that release.

[Speaker changed]

So while Dig was trying to make a perfect rectangle in the earth, something rigid, something dead, Mary is making something messy and alive.[Speaker changed]

You have to retell it even if you get it wrong.

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In fact getting it wrong might be the most honest thing you can do.

[Speaker changed]

That's what the notes seem to argue.

[Speaker changed]

Wow. That's a powerful distinction. The perfect grave versus the trembling story. One craps you, the other frees you.

[Speaker changed]

It really is, and it brings us back to that terrifying word you mentioned earlier, the word that sums up the trap.

[Speaker changed]

The fathcorn.

[Speaker changed]

The fathcorn.

[Speaker changed]

Okay lay, it on me. What is the fathcorn? Because it sounds ancient, but it's actually a coined term for this play.

[Speaker changed]

It is. The term appears in the notes as a unique concept for this cycle. It represents a specific terrifying cycle of male inheritance. The phrase used to

define it is, steal from my pop, become my father.

[Speaker changed]

Steal from my pop, become my father. That is ominous.

[Speaker changed]

It turns the whole idea of rebellion on its head Usually. we think that if a son fights his father, if he wins, he escapes. He becomes his own man.

[Speaker changed]

Right. You kill the king, you start a new kingdom.

[Speaker changed]But the fathcorn says no, it says that inheritance isn't a gift, it's a theft. The notes use Promethean imagery here, the lantern and stolen fire.

[Speaker changed]

Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. But in this family cycle, when the son steals the fire, when he takes the power or the identity from the father, he doesn't just get the power,

he becomes the father. The act of theft transforms the thief into the very thing he was running from.

[Speaker changed]

the ground.

Trying to escape dig, trying to look up at the sky, if he takes that fire, if he wins the battle for the name, he just becomes another dig looking down at

[Speaker changed]

The notes ask a very specific question. Is this cycle a cautionary tale or is it a form of captivity? Yeah.

[Speaker changed]

It can expect from the rectangle again, doesn't it?

[Speaker changed]

It does. If you aren't trapped in the fathcorn, you are trapped in the geometry of your ancestors. You think you're escaping, you think you're looking

up, but the coordinate system is rigged. You're just rotating through the sestina.

[Speaker changed]

Hitting the same stations.

[Speaker changed]

Song, prayer, silence, hug, joke, kiss, you're just the next actor in the same role.

[Speaker changed]

That is profound and also slightly terrifying. It makes you wonder if Alex ever really stood a chance against Digger.

[Speaker changed]

Well and that's why the feminine presence is so vital. The men are locked in this binary father-son, down-up dig digger, it's a closed loop, a zero sum

game. But the women marry, specifically break the binary. She loses the text, she makes mistakes, she introduces subjective grammar, that allows for

a new kind of storytelling.

[Speaker changed]

Drop the book.[Speaker changed]

Man. So if we zoom out and look at this whole furniture foundry fulcrum trilogy, Diggers is the wound. It sets the coordinates. It establishes this

misalignment that bleeds through everything else.

[Speaker changed]

It sets the stage for the ritual of Shiva and the political reckoning of fulcrum. It all starts with that geometric tragedy in the dirt. You can't heal the city

until you acknowledge the shape of the hole in the ground.

[Speaker changed]

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Speaker changed]

We haven't even quoted a line of dialogue and yet the math tells the whole story.

[Speaker changed]

tropes is the destiny.

The form is the content. That's the power of structural ambition. The sestina isn't just a container for the words, it is the plot. The rotation of the

[Speaker changed]

So what does this all mean for us? Why should we care about sestinas and coordinate systems and plays and grand rapids?

[Speaker changed]

I think it asks us to look at our own inheritances. We all have a subjective grammar, we all have a way we orient ourselves to the world, are we looking

up, looking down, looking back.

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And are those orientations inherited?

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really it's just the next stanza?

Are we repeating the same six tropes? Are we just acting out song, prayer, silence, in a different order than our parents, thinking it's a new life, when

[Speaker changed]

Are we just remixing their lives and calling it our own?

[Speaker changed]

Yeah.[Speaker changed]

Oof That. is home. It makes you question how much agency we really have.

[Speaker changed]

It should. The fathcorn isn't just a concept for a play, it's a question for everyone. Steal from my pop, become my father. How do you break that? How

do you steal the fire without burning yourself up?

[Speaker changed]

Maybe you break it by losing the script, like Mary. Maybe the answer isn't to win the fight, but to change the language.

[Speaker changed]

Maybe. Or maybe you break it by realising that the perfect rectangle doesn't exist.

[Speaker changed]

That's a thought to hold onto. We've covered the math, the myth, the geometry of grief. But here is one final thing I wanna leave you with, something

to mull over. We talked about the fathcorn becoming the thing you run from. But consider the perfect rectangle of the grave that Dick is so obsessed

with.

[Speaker changed]

A geometry of containment.

[Speaker changed]

Exactly. But in nature there are no perfect rectangles. The earth doesn't do right angles, roots twist, rocks are jagged, the ground shifts. So ask

yourself, in your own family history, what is the perfect rectangle you are trying to dig? What is the rigid shape you are trying to force your life or your

children's lives into?

[Speaker changed]

Thanks for diving deep with us.

[Speaker changed]

Always a pleasure. Okay, let's start with the visual.

Thank you

Steal fire from your

father, wake in his shadow—

fathcorn takes your name

Mary drops the book.

Crooked stories break right angles—

the city exhales