Welcome readers!
I’m Phoenix Mendoza, a tattooer homesteading in the woods. When I’m not wrangling goats or butchering chickens, I am writing. In fact, I am often writing in my head mid goat wrangle, mid throat slit, mid hole dig, mid brush burn. I am an unashamed enthusiast of the carnal, compostable, and corporeal, and wholly dedicated to finding and luxuriating in the dark, sensual junction where beauty and disgust meet to rot together.
Why now.
For years now I’ve been intending to construct a space to share my original writing, and for years I’ve put it off. It never felt like the right time, and it was daunting to go back and comb through the hundreds of documents spanning all the way back to my college years and decide what felt worthwhile to share. Fan fiction continued to feel safer, so I defaulted to sharing my writing exclusively in that medium, despite writing plenty of original fiction, poetry, and personal essays alongside transformative fandom works.
However, in light of launching my writing class, BLOOD/INK/BONE, I felt it was finally time to create this space. So, here we are.
The writing I will be sharing here spans many genres, and many years of my life.
I have always written. As a result, I have literally decades worth of accumulated stories, poetry, and personal essays sitting on my hard drive. Up until now, I have only shared my original writing with close friends and my wife. But even much of my old, dated work is, in my opinion, worth a wider audience. Especially today, when there are tremendous efforts in the publishing industry trending towards anti-intellectualism and puritanical censorship. My writing is always tender, but it is also often dark, strange, macabre, and grotesque. It has gotten me “cancelled” on more than one occasion, which I think means that what I have to say, and what I have said, is all the more valuable.
The earliest works I will be sharing are from my college years, but much of what I have to share I wrote in the last year. Some of it will be behind a paywall, because I think it requires an audience willing to self -select into reading, and I don’t necessarily want any curious follower to have access to it. Some longer pieces I will post the introduction to for free, and you must become a paid subscriber or purchase the published work to read the entirety. If you choose to subscribe, know you will be choosing to expose yourself to troubling content, some of which was written back when I was young. I currently do not endorse every opinion shared in every personal essay I may share.
What you can expect.
Free Subscribers to this substack will get semi-regular emails containing written work. Some of it will be poetry, some of it will be personal essays, some of it will be fiction. Some of it will be current, some of it will not be. Some of it may be complete, some of it may be the beginning of longer works I intend to publish or share with my paid subscribers only.
Paid Subscribers to this substack will get access to, for lack of a better word, the juicy stuff. The more personal, more painful, more controversial works I am writing or have written over the years.
Are you ready to jump in?
Thank you for supporting independent, female hobbyist writer’s work.