to requite and/or return

book proofs & the final hours of an apprenticeship

It’s a balmy Friday, and I log on to my therapy portal teeming with both excitement and frustration. My practitioner now knows me, my whereabouts, and my what’s-it’s well, and she urges me, in jest:

“Hurry up and get that book out, or people will think AI wrote it!”

On to requite and/or return

When the COVID-19 lockdowns began, I chose to stay unemployed and housed, and to not attend my dream private Liberation Psychology Ph.d. program at an institution beautifully nestled in the mountains, near the ocean. Through ceremony and necessity, I opted in to a alternative scholarship process through the School for the Ecocene.

What followed was a deeply personal and political process of gathering ten years’ worth of poetry, prose, and field notes—works on relationship: with land, lineage, illness, community, institutions, and the self.

to requite and/or return offers no single-issues (in the Audre Lordeian “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives”-sense), nor any typical love poem, but a constellation of visceral invitations to notice, remember, and imagine relationship otherwise.

to requite and/or return is not a traditional dissertation. As a community-rooted action researcher, multidisciplinary artist, and psychologist by training, it departs from the forms and formats once expected of me in academia. This work charts my journey from “publish or perish” to going rogue while leaning into community, art, and auto-didacticism as a path toward becoming. In other words, research became “mesearch” as I chose to quit the grit, allowing myself to be nurtured.

Emerging from over a decade of youth organizing, trans justice work, and participatory research, the book reflects on the ruptures and reckonings that further moved me away from a conventional career/PhD path.

From early writing as a teenager to pointed critiques of the fields I hope to continue to transform, this collection of poetry, prose—and a scathing review of my high school—documents an evolution from a thinker, to a feeler, to a soul finder, a be-er.

P.S., AI has not touched a single piece in to requite and/or return… but my teenage and trippier selves did. So! There’s that.

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j. nyla ink mcneill (they) is not one for small talk, and wants to know, what’s with your soul? As a neurodivergent and visionary polymath, they have published zines, raged against machines, and pierced their tongue (it didn’t hurt, it felt fine). A poet first and foremost, they are also trained as researcher in the field of psychology, working vocationally as a consultant to multiple municipalities, moving about one word, or one action at a time.

To learn more about them, or to book divinatory and/or design services, please visit jnylamcneill.com.