What to Read: Jet Toomer is naming normalized violence

This week, we interviewed Jet Toomer, the writer behind Tiny Violences, a publication exploring daily grievances, microaggressions, and the consequences of belonging.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Jet Toomer

What’s your Substack about in one sentence?

Tiny Violences is about naming, recognizing, and narrating the nuanced barriers to, and costs of, belonging. 

What motivated you to start writing your newsletter? 

I love storytelling and trying to make sense of things through language. Since becoming literate as a child, writing has been a very close companion. It was a practice I could call on for all sorts of reasons, like getting organized or journaling, but it wasn’t something I felt confident sharing with the world.

After a string of rejections, I applied for the Joel Gay Creative Fellowship, a yearlong writing intensive stewarded by Roxane Gay in honor of her late brother, and I was one of the three recipients selected. The idea [for the newsletter] was prompted by [an MFA] writing assignment—and a zine. The zine was part confessional, part list of complaints, part acerbic commentary on the mundane experiences of my life. This all while in the midst of the self-sequestering and societal calamity known as the year 2020. We are living in an age that has normalized violence so much, it’s often hard to give it a name.

You wrote about a friendship that social media effectively helped to end and then followed up that post with a discussion thread with readers. What sparked you to write the post, and what do you think resonated with readers about it?

We spend so much time online and in conversation with people about our personal online performances, or the communities we build in the virtual world, and I was coming to learn more about the parasocial relationships people form with online acquaintances, celebrities, and influencers. I questioned What does it mean to have an IRL friendship transform into a parasocial connection? Writing about the end of my friendship through the themes of online lurking and social media clout-chasing felt like the most accessible focal point at the time—to help me reckon with the abrupt (but alleviating) ending of that friendship.  

Honestly, I was shocked by the responses, so many people resonated with the story. The complex and often unspoken impact social media has on friendships hit close to home for many. Some celebrated the special fortification of relationships because of how we perform them and show up online—but many, many others faced the grim truth that social media often brings out the worst in people. A lot of people have experienced the end of their friendships play out on socials. I also wanted it to be clear to any oppy lurkers that I will write about their shitty behavior without hesitation. 

I find the more specific I get about my experiences, the more universal the themes become; it sounds cliché, but it’s been true. It is such a risk, sharing my life online. It leaves me vulnerable to all kinds of harm, but it also opens me up to myself and other folks, some that often surprise me.

Read more: Some False Starts

Can you describe how “Black People on Getty Images” is an example of the daily barriers to belonging you want to uncover in your writing?

There are stories behind words, places, bodies—that are often masked or deliberately obscured, and I think keyword searches are useful ways to get into how we categorize bodies. Black People on Getty Images was [supposed to be a satirical] way for me to reconcile the violent ambiguity of racial identity that finds its way into everything. In my longer-form essay about queerness and belonging, I use a site, the West Village in NYC, as a portal into identity and a way to investigate why people gather where they do to find community—and how, if we’re not careful to record histories from various vantage points, the truth of a place can be flattened.

Read more: What a Time to Come of Age

Who’s another Substack writer you’d recommend?

I definitely recommend Christy DeGallerie’s Substack, really bad taste. It’s irreverent, funny writing from a native New Yorker, and we need more of that (specifically, queer Black women and femmes). Whitney McGuire’s Look, I Feel Unappealing is another deeply personal Substack that I read often and enjoy. I have to plug the two other inaugural Joel Gay Creative fellows too, The Drip and Alienhood. 

Subscribe to Jet’s publication, Tiny Violences, on Substack, and you can follow her on Instagram or check out her personal website.