I’m still in Michigan this week, but within hours of first arriving on Saturday, May 2, I’d already put a fork into a Sanders Bumpy Cake and cracked open a Vernors ginger ale. It’s part of the laws and statutes for all current and former Michiganders, under chapter somethingoranother, code thingamajiggy. My qualifications on this topic speak for themselves: I spent my first 22 years in the state shaped like a mitten (save month zero to month six of my life, which took place in the suburbs of Chicago). Either way, my foundation is about as midwest as it gets. I’ve also watched all 590+ episodes of Law & Order: SVU, which means I’m an attorney (and a detective), so don’t ask questions, just trust me on this.

There’s much I miss about Michigan. Not the winters. And not the constant construction on I-94, I-75, or I-696. I do miss the people, specifically their accents, their hardworking, not afraid to get their hands dirty gusto, and their genuine give-you-the-shirt-off-their-back charm. I miss the summers on the lakes and up north, and the turning of the leaves in the fall. I miss being in a place with undying love (and an endless sea of merchandise) for every college and national team we lay claim to: Spartans, Wolverines, Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, Pistons, whether we are at the top of our game or the worst in the league.

But by far, what I miss the most are the regional delicacies. Because in Michigan, there are food tenets that must be followed, and while my Leo sun sign might be all, “No one tells ME what to do!” it’s my Virgo rising that rules the roost. And she’s a real by-the-book type of gal, so every time I step off the plane in the McNamara terminal at DTW, whether I’m going to be in town for 24 hours or two weeks, I’m calculating my strategy for how and when I’m going to hit every item on that food and beverage checklist. And that list has not changed since I was old enough to have opinions, which, if you know me, was approximately since birth.

Roll call…

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Sanders Bumpy Cake

Let’s start with the (butter)cream of the crop: Sanders Bumpy Cake.

A little history: Sanders was founded in 1875 by a German immigrant named Frederick Sanders Schmidt, who opened his first candy store on the (still) legendary Woodward Avenue in Detroit after his Chicago shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. By the mid-20th century, the company had 57 retail locations, including the original Grosse Pointe, Michigan location on Kerchevel Avenue in the heart of the Village shopping area. It was part store, part cafe, with a counter top serving not just bumpy cake but also their infamous hot fudge cream puffs.

That original GP location closed by the 1990s, though for a brief time, there was a new Sanders Chocolate & Ice Cream Shop outpost that opened further down the street on Kerchevel. That one has also shuttered its doors (as of 2020), but there are a few Sanders retail locations still open, and the good news is you can also buy Bumpy Cakes at most Kroger grocery stores (now available in three different sizes and a few different flavor variations!).

You’ll usually find them in the bakery section, where they have a smaller cooler or freezer for certain desserts. While it now often comes frozen, it’s imperative you allow the cake to get to room temperature before diving into this masterpiece: a devil’s food cake topped with thick ridges (aka the bumps) of ganache-covered buttercream and finished with fudge icing.

Fun fact: Henry Ford, before he was thee Henry Ford and still just a young mechanic getting called in for repairs, used to fix the electric motors at Sanders. I didn’t know the venn diagram of that little bit of Michigan history until this week.

Vernors

Another official legend brought to you accidentally by Detroit pharmacist James Vernor, who was experimenting with a spiced ginger tonic before the Civil War. He got called to serve, sealed the concentrate in an oak barrel, and came home four years later to find that whatever the wood had done to it was something entirely new. He declared it, “deliciously different,” which has been the slogan ever since.

The unofficial truth: his own son admitted in 1936 that the timeline was a little embellished.

The actual truth: none of this matters, because Vernors is not a ginger ale in the casual sense of the word. It is golden, faintly vanilla, and aggressively carbonated in the best way possible. In Michigan, we drink it like water (but not like Flint water). Aretha Franklin used to glaze her Christmas ham with it (you can find the recipe here), and there is also the Boston Cooler rendition, aka Vernors over vanilla ice cream, though why this wasn’t called the Detroit Cooler, I’ll never know.

Sure, I can get Vernors in other areas of the country now, including Las Vegas where I live, but it just hits different when consumed in the 313. Every time, after that first sip, my nervous system is all, “There you are!” and I’m all, “I know, I know.”

Buddy’s Pizza aka Detroit-Style Pizza

Small but important caveat before we begin the pizza TEDtalk: I grew up eating Buddy’s. Or Mr. C’s. I did not grow up eating “Detroit-style pizza.” We never called it that, or if we did, I certainly don’t remember it as such. I first heard that phrase maybe five or six years ago, when I was still living in Portland, Oregon. Don’t get me wrong - happy to see Detroit get some brand billing on this, and all for this particular regional obsession becoming a trend, because that means outposts in cities across the country. Now, whether or not these outposts actually get it RIGHT is up for debate, but I’m happy to report we have at least two spots in the Las Vegas area that have knocked it out of the park (Pizza Rock and Good Pie).

The “it” is a rectangular pan pizza with a chewy, almost focaccia-like crust, Wisconsin brick cheese caramelized against the edges of a blue steel pan, and sauce on top of the cheese instead of under it, which sounds like chaos and is in fact the only acceptable way to exist.

Buddy’s has been doing this since 1946, though truth be told, the current execution is a mixed bag depending on location (the downtown outpost near Grand Circus Park did nail it last time I was there). Word has it that Grandma Bob’s and Michigan&Trumbell, both in the Corktown area of Detroit, are on the current shiz-nitz list. Checking it out tonight in the name of science… I’ll report back.

Better Made Potato Chips

In 1930, Cross Moceri and Peter Cipriano bought a small potato-chip operation in east Detroit, with their sights set on, “How can we do this better?” And perhaps that’s exactly what inspired the Better Made (talk about straightforward) brand name, which officially launched in 1934. They have now outlasted more than twenty competitors and are still headquartered in the D with a product line that includes plain and flavored potato chips (over 60 million pounds produced annually!), corn chips, cheese puffs and curls, popcorn, pretzels, dips, and pork rinds (hard pass for me on that last one). Their tagline is “Everything’s made better with better made,” which quite frankly is just good life advice that goes well beyond snacks.

Faygo

In 1907, two Russian immigrant brothers named Ben and Perry Feigenson started a bottling company in Detroit, taking up residence in the space above the plant and delivering their goods by horse-drawn wagon. Their first flavors (fruit punch, strawberry, grape) were based on cake frosting recipes they’d brought from Russia. In 1921, they decided “Feigenson Brothers” was too long and renamed it Faygo.

Apparently the brand now offers 57 flavors, but my go-to has always been Rock & Rye. I’ve never known what inspired that name, but the University of Google tells me it was named after a Prohibition-era cocktail (a rye whiskey softened with rock candy). I’d describe the taste along the lines of cream soda’s “cool” aunt or uncle, the one who shows up to family parties with the best presents. Outside of Michigan, my guess pretty much nobody knows what the hell Faygo or Rock & Rye is, but inside the lower and upper peninsulas, we know what’s what.

Coney Island

There’s a famous rivalry between two Detroit establishments, American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island, two legendary neighboring downtown spots that have been competing since the early 1900s and about which people have deeply held, non-negotiable feelings.

Mad respect for this, but it’s a dog fight I’ve never been in, because my actual Coney formation happened at one of the several National Coney Island locations, specifically the one near the corner of 7 Mile and Mack Avenue, right on the Grosse Pointe/Detroit border. I might petition for a plaque to be made and affixed to one of the booths, commemorating the years I spent ordering chili and cheese fries (back when my metabolism could still handle such things).

The Detroit Coney dog is also its own specific thing – chili, mustard, onions, beef hot dog in a steamed bun – but never MY thing. Sorry (not sorry), but I don’t do mustard, or raw onions… or white creamy curdly (cottage cheese and mayo are grounds for justifiable homicide), red chunky, green chunky, or condiments. Period.

Now you.

That’s my list. The gold, silver, and bronze plus three honorable mentions that constitute a homing signal for me. But I want yours. What’s the food (or foods) that you make a beeline for the second you land somewhere you once called home? The regional thing that doesn’t exist anywhere else, or exists elsewhere but isn’t the same? The thing that takes you back to a specific time, place, version of you? Drop it in the comments. And if you grew up in Metro Detroit and I’ve left something off what would be your list, let’s hear it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still have half of a Bumpy Cake left to slay.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

The signs of graduation season are in full bloom. I’m currently in Michigan at my mom’s house, and on my walks with my dog Gilda, we pass dozens of suburban lawn signs in the neighborhood, congratulating members of the class of 2026. Fancy, personalized signs. Meagan. William. Tyler. Sophia. So maybe it’s no accident that I also just came across a box of artifacts related to my own graduation in my mom’s basement. Things she has absolutely no business still having.

I may or may not have similar time capsules in my own home. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

Among the contents: several copies of The Tower student newspaper from my alma mater, Grosse Pointe South High School. I served as Deputy Editor, but in Vol. 64, No. 30, dated Thursday, May 28, 1992 (thirty-four years ago this month, whoa), I was not the journalist, but rather part of the story. On the front page of this issue, an illustrated biplane trailing a banner reads, “INTO THE MYSTIC,” (why we chose a 1970 Van Morrison song for our 1992 class song, I’ll never remember), and, “SENIORS TAKE FLIGHTS.”

My senior photo is also on the front page. I’m wearing a very… earnest blouse. And pearls. It’s giving major Tracy Flick vibes. You’d definitely hire me as a temp.

I was one of two commencement speakers selected from an audition pool of eight candidates. Fortunately, the other slot went to my dear friend Heather King (who bore absolutely no resemblance, behavioral or otherwise, to any character from Heathers). Our speeches, according to the article, “recall memories of the past and dreams of what the future might hold.”

When asked about my speech, I told the reporter (who was also a classmate and newspaper staff colleague, but let’s make it sound more like Bob Woodward and less like the guy whose locker was next to mine): “It is an analogy to the Wizard of Oz. If I told any more, it would defeat the purpose of the speech.”

I was seventeen and 10 months old, and already committed to the bit.

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I’m fairly certain there’s a full, printed copy of my speech sitting in one of my artifact boxes somewhere in my Las Vegas home. I remember coming across it when I was packing to move from Oregon last year. I’m also almost certain there is a VHS tape of the actual ceremony. For those under 40, VHS stands for Video Home System, and a VHS tape is another phrase for what we called videotapes in the 1900s. We would play them on these magic little machines called VCRs, which stood for Video Cassette Recorder. None of these things came with Instagram or Tiktok.

What I do have on hand are slightly fictionalized fragments of the speech and moment, forever memorialized in my first novel (which, of course, my mom also ha sin her house), Grosse Pointe Girl: Tales from a Suburban Adolescence, published by Simon & Schuster. Getting published by one of what we now refer to as the “Big 5” was a dream come true, and my early books will always be like dear, lifelong friends. Grosse Pointe Girl is more closely inspired by my own upbringing in a very affluent suburb of Detroit. My second novel, The Girl I Wanted to Be, is not at all ripped from my personal headlines, but inspired by that moment we all have where we stopped seeing things as a kid and clicked into acute awareness of the adult world.

Both books are paperback originals and stand-alone novels published under the adult division of S&S. As both are narrated from a teen POV (which I’ve always loved), I’ve also had a lot of teen readers (which also delights me to no end). Much has changed in my life since these first came out, including the voice and tone of my writing, but when I revisit these books now, I also see some serious foreshadowing of experiences I would later have in my adult life that I never could have known at the time I originally wrote these novels. Pretty incredible, right?

My first book also featured not only a cover but also interior spot illustrations by wonderful artist Christine Norrie, including the infamous commencement speech moment.

Here are some of the related excerpts, featuring the narrator Emma and her will-they-won’t-they best guy friend Billy.

***

By Tuesday, the hallway buzz has turned from prom to graduation, just a week or so away. I’m thankful for the subject change, hoping to avoid shared details of Billy’s prom night. We’ve reinstated our traditional third-period smoke break in his car. This week, the hall monitors don’t even bother asking us for passes when we saunter into class fifteen minutes late.

“Are you ready?” Billy asks me, rolling down the window. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

I’ve earned the distinction of commencement speaker after auditioning with twelve other students. My speech, “The Road to Oz,” is packed with analogies and lessons: the yellow brick road being the path ahead of us; the quest for a brain, a heart, and courage; ruby-red shoes that gave you the power to control your own destiny the entire time.

I had no idea what I was talking about. The administrators ate it up.

“Sure. I’m going to tell three hundred and fourteen people what to do with their lives.”

***

The night before graduation, Billy Crandall and I drive over to the school grounds around midnight. The front lawn has been set up for the event, and if the weather holds, tomorrow at seven p.m. we will begin our walk across the stage in front of the blue-and-gold banners and accept our diplomas and wonder what comes next.

Billy parks around the corner and we crouch low as we sneak across the lawn to the stage. He takes a seat in the front row while I practice.

“You are headed for a place called Oz,” I say in a politician’s voice.

“When Dorothy began, her intention was to find a way home again. Is that how you feel now? Do you really want to leave the security and comfort of Grosse Pointe South?” I ask a sea of nearly empty folding chairs.

Billy stands up and begins to clap.

“Wait,” I say. “I’m not finished yet.”

***

Reader, I was never finished yet. This has not changed.

What has changed is everything I would actually say. Now.

The Road to Oz, Take Two: 2026 Remix

Distinguished faculty, beloved parents, family, and friends, and fellow members of the Grosse Pointe South High School Class of 1992:

Welcome, and good evening.

I had a whole speech prepared. A real banger with some deeply sincere, frequently clichéd, on-the-nose analogies to the Wizard of Oz. Creative but also largely predictable. Primarily cheerful. Controversy free. Safe.

But I’m setting it aside tonight, because I have some things to tell you that seventeen-year-old me could never have known to say.

Consider this a dispatch from the future. Pay attention.

First things first: put down the cigs and the booze. The Benson & Hedges, the Salem Menthols, the Camel Lights, the Marlboro Lights, and definitely the Marlboro Reds. Also the martinis, the seabreezes, and all our training wheel versions: Boone’s Farm, Sun Country Wine Coolers, Mickeys 40’s. I know: most of our parents always had one in each hand. As did their parents. It’s practically a love language in this zip code. But here’s what nobody is saying out loud in Grosse Pointe, and probably won’t for another decade or two, if ever: none of these things are taking the edge off. They are the edge. We learned very young in this town that you don’t talk about the hard things. You numb them, you mask them, you serve them in a crystal glass at six o’clock and call it unwinding. Some of you will figure out a different way to cope. Do that sooner rather than later.

To the women in this class: you are also allowed to want more than what this town has historically suggested is the appropriate ceiling for your ambitions. You can get married. You can have children. You can be a devoted partner and an incredible mother… and also, you do not have to. You are allowed to want a career, a creative life, a path that looks nothing like the blueprint. You are allowed to want that without apology and without explanation. (And if someone does eventually greenlight The Real Housewives of Grosse Pointe, I want it on record that I called it.) Oh and PS? Your outward appearance, no matter how tight, taut, tucked you fight to keep it? It’s the least interesting thing about you. And anyone who ever suggested otherwise does not deserve another second of your time. And if your own voice in your head has been the loudest in this choir, the time to bid them adieu is right now.

To the men in this class: you are allowed to have feelings. I’m fairly certain no one has ever told you that. What many of you have likely heard and felt in your bones since birth is the weight of expectation. Follow your father into the firm. Become the executive, the lawyer, the doctor. Do it without complaint, without visible struggle, without ever once admitting that this might not be what YOU want. Some of you will carry that weight and quietly suffocate under it. Some of you will realize years from now that tonight was your peak. Not because you weren’t capable of more, but because no one ever gave you permission to find out what more looked like. You are more than what you’re being handed. You are allowed to want something different. You are allowed to need things. That is not a weakness. That is, in fact, your greatest superpower.

And to everyone in this class who has spent the last four years hiding who you actually are because this was not a place, nor was 1992 a time that made it easy or safe to be anything other than what you were told to be… I see you. It gets so much better. The world you’re walking into will change in ways that would astonish you right now, and you will be able to exhale, and be the real you, out loud, in public, without apology. I won’t lie to you and tell you the fight is over. But you will not be alone in that fight, and you will be more loved than you currently believe possible. Hold on.

Now, let’s circle back for a minute on that Oz story. The Scarecrow’s whole crisis was that he thought he didn’t have a brain. And he was so focused on the brain in his head, he forgot that we actually have two: the other one that lives in your gut. The one that’s been trying to tell you things for years. The one that operates on truth rather than fear. Start listening to it.

The Cowardly Lion thought he lacked courage, but what he actually lacked was permission to try and fail. So here’s your permission: make mistakes. Enormous ones. Embarrassing ones. The kind you’ll be telling stories about in thirty years. Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s the actual mechanism of how success happens. The detours are not the problem. The detours are a critical part of the entire story. The detours are where all the growth lives.

The Tin Man was convinced he had no heart. He was wrong. He was the most feeling one of all of them, and it terrified him. So: check on your people. Not the performative check-in, not the how are you said while already walking away. The real one. Some of the people on this lawn tonight will not make the whole journey, and the grief of that does not have an expiration date. Say the things that need saying before you need to say them. Be someone’s Tin Man.

Spoiler alert: the ruby slippers were on your feet the whole time. I’m keeping that part from the original speech. What I failed to mention is that nobody else gets to decide when you click your heels. Not your parents, not your partner, not your job or your title. Stop equating your worth to whether or not someone else chooses you. Choose yourself. Also, the good witch knew about the slippers the entire time, but if she’d told you earlier on, would you have believed her? No. But that was intentional - she knew you had to figure certain things out on your own. So go figure them out.

It’s also okay to not know what comes next. It’s okay to leave this very white, very wealthy, very specific bubble and fall apart a little and put yourself back together differently. Grosse Pointe is a beautiful place to be from in many ways, and it also carries a history of deep dysfunction. One of my favorite phrases is, “Both can be true,” and that is certainly the case here. Be proud of where you’re from. And don’t let it entirely define where you’re going.

Be kind. Give grace. But have boundaries. Reinforce them. Protect them. Maintain them. Kindness without limits is not a virtue, it’s an open door, and not everyone who walks through it deserves to be there.

And finally: if I told you who is president by the time we all turn 50, you would not believe me. And if I could go back and change the course of history in any single way, that would be the one. But I can’t. So instead I’ll just say this: pay attention. Participate. Exercise and protect your rights. Take nothing for granted. And remember this: the man behind the curtain is always, always, smaller than he appears.

Congratulations, Class of 1992.

The road is yours.

I’ll see you out there.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

I think the first time I ever used the term “infinity,” it was in relation to feelings. As in, “I love you times infinity.” I don’t know if I said it to a family member, a fleeting teen love, or maybe it was a situation of, “I love this times infinity,” not a you, and the this was the best cupcake I’d ever had. I do know I’ve always loved the hyperbole of it, and that I understood that infinity meant endlessness, rather than any specific number.

But if you take the number 8, and turn it on its side, you get the infinity symbol. Is that ironic? That a symbol meant to represent an unbounded quantity does, in fact, look like a number, depending on the tilt?

Yesterday marked the 8th year of my sobriety, but I also realized that 8s have always been built into that major life change moment: April 28, 2018. I often get asked about how that came to be, and if you know me, you know I’m very open about addressing any and all related questions.

If you don’t know me yet, I shared a very brief answer to that question in my first Substack post, but there’s always more story behind the story.

Eight years ago, I didn’t realize it was day one of anything.

Certainly nothing that was going to be longer than 30 days max.

I was, however, acutely and painfully aware that I was drowning in some of the most excruciating heartbreak and grief of my life. My decades of numb out choices had reached a point of maximum tilt, to the extent that for the first time in my life, I did not feel safe with myself. And trust me, no one was more shocked — or more terrified — by that than yours truly.

Thankfully, I was still of the mind to have an awareness that I’d reached Defcon 1 and needed to do SOMETHING, immediately. So I decided to take a “break.” And maybe I told myself it was a “break,” because committing (or admitting) to anything beyond that would have simply been too much to swallow.

Three months in, as I was approaching my come-into-this world birthday at the end of July, someone asked if I was going to celebrate my “break” and count it as a “success” by bringing it to a close with birthday cocktails. I heard myself say no before I even thought about it. Not a reluctant no. Just: no. Which of course I now know was really a yes — to me, to life. And an understanding, an acceptance, a rush of gratitude with the realization that this “break” was becoming something else entirely. Something without a finish line. A continuous loop, moving, returning to itself, beginning again.

I always do something special on my Soberversary. In the past, it’s often been a one or two day trip with my dog daughter Gilda to somewhere within a three to four hour driving distance. This year, I decided to stick close to home and take in the perfect 77 degree, sunny Las Vegas day, sitting poolside and losing myself in Mary Laura Wilcott’s magnificent memoir, Bomb Shelter. Took an epic nap with my dog babies that deserved its own award. Enjoyed a phenomenal dinner with my partner at Delilah’s, an absolutely beautiful, pretty-impossible-to-get-in-to restaurant that serves as an homage to the glamorous age of Hollywood and Las Vegas. Toasted with a truly lovely non-alcoholic sparkling wine (this is harder to find than you might imagine). Topped it off with a salted caramel chocolate cupcake (that I, of course, love times infinity), adorned with a silver 8 candle crown.

Each year, I also source a single marble representing a year of sobriety, a practice I was inspired to start years ago by Brené Brown. The first three marbles came from my dear friend Katie. Some I’ve found on my own, at various vintage and thrift shops. Years 7 and 8 have come from my partner, and they have been, as he tends to be, several levels above what past me, pre-sober me, would have picked for myself.

This year’s marble is made of amethyst. And while I have been woo-woo for a very, very long time, and my house is a crystal palace, including a few different amethyst pieces, it was only over the last year that I discovered this stone is associated with sobriety. In fact, the word amethyst comes from the Greek word amethystos, meaning: not intoxicated.

He was extremely intentional in choosing amethyst for this year’s marble, which was also crafted to be UV reactive under black light. He also created and designed a handmade card for me (dude knows me and the way to my heart), with one side explaining the origin story behind the stone, and the other containing a personal message that I’m going to keep private. But let’s just say I cried in public. No shame in that statement, and besides, Delilah’s does not allow photography inside the establishment (though I did sneak one of the marble under the black light wand he got me to go with it, and as you can see, the result is otherworldly).

I also seem to always spot the respective number in the wild day of, or maybe I’m just more acutely aware of it. But sure enough, 8s were winking all over the place, including the first slot machine we saw after dinner, with a grand jackpot of $88,888.88.

I didn’t win that jackpot. But for the past 2,920 days, I have been reaping the rewards of another jackpot. One I love times infinity.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

What I’m not obligated to tell you (but will, because Overshare is my jam) is that some of those early poems were absolutely, magnificently, catastrophically dramatic.

Exhibit A:

That is “We Live on Baker Street,” written by one Sarah McCandless, age 14, freshman at Grosse Pointe South High School, class of 1992. It won an honorable mention in the 1989 National Scholastic Writing Awards, chosen from 24,000 entries.

Honorable Mention.

The Grosse Pointe News ran my picture as though I had won a gold medal.

(props to my mamma for keeping the clipping)

To be clear: I have never experienced a single thing described in that poem. But at 14, channeling every dramatic thing I had ever read or watched or imagined into twenty lines about a life I had not lived felt like the most honest thing I could do.

Inspiration source materials included but were not limited to:

• Every ABC Afterschool Special, particularly that really bleak one trying to be a modern day Romeo & Juliet starring Molly Ringwald.

• The entire V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic canon, yes, all the way through Seeds of Yesterday.

• The oh-so-hetero, girl-has-yet-to-find-her-own-agency, waiting-to-be-chosen blueprint of “boy realizes girl was always the one.” See: Jake Ryan showing up for Sam at the end of Sixteen Candles, Blane showing up for Andie at the end of Pretty in Pink.

• Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume (I think this is also what started my love affair with New Mexico).

• Beverly Hills, 90210: more Brenda-Dylan-Kelly storylines, less Donna Martin Graduates or David Thinks He Can Sing.

I desperately craved something dramatic, or at least something interesting, to happen to me, primarily so I could enter (and win) Sassy magazine’s Sassiest Girl in America contest (and then be asked to join the editorial team, permanently).

In the meantime, I channeled all that had NOT happened to me into make believe short stories and poems.

Which are, of course, now extremely funny in retrospect.

Here’s another story behind the story in that newspaper photo: the outfit I’m wearing. It was a deliberate recreation of a look worn by Cindy Mancini in Can’t Buy Me Love, specifically the airplane graveyard scene.

Cindy Mancini, for those who need a refresher, was the most popular girl in school, but her secret shame was that she wrote poetry. Because DUH you can’t be a popular girl AND write poetry. GROSS.

Let’s just say me and Cindy were also two peas in a pod when it came to the “quality” of our work. A line from her pièce de résistance (that Ronny / Ronald later co-opts and uses as his own to get in another girl’s pants):

Someday my wish is for him to hold me in his arms,
in a sea of deep blue,
together at last,
together as two.

Maybe Cindy should have received the honorable mention?

Regardless, I was dressing like a secret poet… while winning a national poetry award. Make of that what you will.

The teacher in that newspaper photo, the woman beaming as she hands me what appears to be an award or a certificate, is Mrs. Koch. Eva Koch, though she was always Mrs. Koch to me (pronounced Cook).

She was my first true mentor.

I was one of maybe three freshmen who landed a spot in her Creative Writing class. I don’t know exactly how I got in, but I know what it felt like: like someone had seen something in me before I had fully seen it in myself. She had thick reddish brown hair and she was always so put together. She had handwriting I loved, cursive (a lost art), beautiful in both presentation and content, script that made you want to be the person whose work she was writing on. I still have drafts with her notes tucked away somewhere. I have never been able to throw them out.

She also created Imprints, the literary journal at Grosse Pointe South that gave student writers, photographers, and artists a home for their work. I appeared in every single issue during my four years there, and I was the editor my senior year.

She built the thing that built me.

Mrs. Koch passed away in January 2022. She was 88 years old and she had spent most of her life in service of other people’s language. When I found her obituary in, where else, the Grosse Pointe News, I sat with it for a long time.

I don’t think I would be a writer without her. I know I wouldn’t be the writer I am.

The poetry got better. That’s not a brag, that’s just the truth of what happens with more time and dedication to the craft, including immersing myself in the greats, the true gold medalists: Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Atwood, Kwame Alexander, Carolyn Forché, Anita Skeen, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Mindy Netifee.

Here’s something I wrote more recently. Not about a life I hadn’t lived, but about one I had lived, was living, and paying attention to:

In Solstice, Winter

I have never relied on vision
to see my way through your dark.
There are always clues when you’ve reached
maximum tilt away from the sun.
The waft of mildew upon discovery
of damp clothes left behind
in the washer. Toast served
burnt and dry.
Weak and bitter
coffee. How your body remains
a frozen tundra
because there is never enough warmth
from my touch.

Here is what I know to be true:
This is how you spin.
And when you enter
your most distant, southern point,
your shortest day and longest night,
what appears might be your final standstill,
I will continue to orbit around your orbit,
gazing at the possibility
of our rebirth.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about this April, during this particular National Poetry Month, in this particular moment in the world:

Poetry is not only what lives on the page.

I see it in the desert sunrises and sunsets in Las Vegas. The kind of sky that stops you mid-sentence, that demands you look up and stay looking. There is no other word for what those skies are doing except poem.

I see it in my significant other in a thousand ways, including how he makes me coffee every morning and brings it to me without being asked. That’s not a small gesture. That’s a sonnet.

And I saw it last weekend at the Boston Marathon, in a video that has now been seen by millions: two strangers helping a runner who was struggling to stand and cross the finish line. Just reaching out. Holding someone up. Making sure they got there.

If that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is.

April is the month we officially designate for it, which I appreciate. But poetry doesn’t wait for April. It shows up in handwriting on a draft. In a sky that won’t let you look away. In a partner who thinks about your needs before you’ve even thought about them yourself. In two people at mile 26.2 who decided that finishing together mattered more than finishing first.

And it showed up in a ninth grader wearing her best cobbled together Cindy Mancini outfit, writing about a life she hadn’t lived yet, reaching for language.

Because reaching for language was the only thing that made sense.

And still is.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

I’ve been trying to find the right word for what this moment feels like.

The specific, physical, cellular feeling of living inside this particular chapter of American history. The one where you wake up and reach for your phone and something new has been broken or threatened or taken, and you haven’t even had coffee yet.

The word is tax.

Not the filing deadline kind, which is today, BTW… hope yours was less painful than the country’s. I mean the other definition. The one that doesn’t get enough airtime:

A strain. A heavy demand. A burden.

That’s what this is. That’s what this administration is. An endless, relentless, deliberate tax on our attention, our energy, our nervous systems, our ability to think clearly about anything else. And I believe that’s not accidental. Overwhelm is a strategy. Paralysis is the point.

I refuse to be paralyzed. But some days, it’s a close call.

I moved to the Las Vegas area last March, which means my activism looks different than it did in Portland, Oregon, where I lived for years. Portland has always had a certain infrastructure for resistance. You knew where to show up, who would be there, what the drill was, and the drills were frequent and large (though often blown way out of proportion or completely misrepresented in the media, but that’s another story).

Las Vegas is different. It’s not a place commonly thought of as Protest Central. We’re not really on anyone’s radar, and if we are, it’s more as a place to strike (as in a target), not a place TO strike (as in protest). But Nevada IS similar to Oregon in the sense that, like Multnomah County that houses the Portland metro area, Clark County, which consists of Las Vegas and its surrounding entities (Henderson, Summerlin, etc.), is also still mostly blue, while the rest of the state of Nevada, much like Oregon… is not.

But the other thing that’s different is the desert, at times, has its own particular way of making you feel like you’re shouting into a void.

And yet.

I found Indivisible Las Vegas. I show up to protests. I call representatives, mine and sometimes ones who aren’t mine, because at this point we are all in each other’s districts when it comes to what’s at stake. I use whatever platform I have to amplify what’s happening, to make sure the people in my life can’t look away, to be a person who does not let the enormity of this become normalized.

And still. Still. I always feel like I’m not doing enough.

That feeling, that chronic insufficiency, that sense that no matter what you do the scale of it dwarfs you, is also a tax. It’s what they’re counting on. The gap between the size of the problem and the size of what any one person can do is designed to exhaust you into giving up.

I’m not giving up. I don’t know how many seasons we have ahead of us of whatever this “Handmaid’s Tale The Last of Us Walking Dead Civil War” real life spin off we’re living in, but I’m not giving up.

Not willingly. Not ever.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: what does fight even mean right now?

It used to feel clearer. Show up. Vote. Donate. March. Call. And yes, all of that still matters, all of that is still necessary. But there’s something else being asked of us now that doesn’t have a clean verb attached to it. Something about staying awake without being consumed. About bearing witness without being destroyed by what you’re seeing. About finding a way to hold both the urgency and the long game simultaneously.

I worry we won’t ever have a fair election again. About what this country looks like a year from now. I think he is going to get people killed. Let me rephrase: he is already getting people killed. And that number, that toll, that tax, is going to skyrocket.

What I also know is this: silence is a tax too. The kind you pay with your integrity.

So I'll keep showing up. I'll keep calling. I'll keep writing, here, and everywhere else I can. ”Make art in the face of fuck,” as Lidia Yuknavitch has said, including in her remarkable conversation with the luminous Jane Ratcliffe.

Because the opposite of paralysis isn’t certainty. It’s motion. It’s the next right thing, even when the next right thing feels impossibly small against the scale of what we’re up against.

Tax. Toil. Strain. Heavy demand.

Yeah. That’s the word.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

P.S. I made my graphic today from a selfie with my Nope hat — my girlfriend makes these and a bunch of other great ones (FCK ICE!), find her on IG to get one for yourself.

Last Saturday, I was twenty-something writers deep into a Zoom workshop with the supernova Lidia Yuknavitch when it hit me.

We had introduced ourselves: name, where we were sitting in the world, and a word on our minds, dropped into the chat as we took our turn.

Mine was:

sober

(That word gets its own dispatch later this month when I hit my eighth Soberversary on April 28… stay tuned)

Then Lidia started talking about narrative fragments. Creating in bursts and chunks. About what happens when we let go of linearity and the perceived obligation to follow straight lines. How a different kind of meaning accumulates when we move by juxtaposition and arrangement of said bursts and chunks. About asking ourselves…

What story is trying to emerge from the fragments?

We then moved to a writing exercise, using our first shared word as the starting point. I’m not going to walk through details on the prompt, as those are her methods, and you should experience them yourself by taking her workshop. What I will say is that she gave us a structure, and as I was writing that first piece, I felt a full body shift.

As in that, “Holy shit, wait a second…” moment. As in A-ha on steroids.

Four days earlier, I’d launched the Hopeless Semantic Substack with my first post: The Word Was the Door. Here’s What Was on the Other Side. I shared what the Hopeless Semantic project originally started as: a word as a jumping-off point, a single definition cracking something open.

And here I was, just days after reshaping that idea as the foundation for my Substack, sitting in a virtual room with one of the writers who most profoundly shaped me, doing exactly that.

Using words as doors. Watching what walks through.

I don’t call that a coincidence. I call it a nod from the universe.

Label me woo-woo all you want. I take it as a compliment.

It’s not the first time such nods have occurred. And listen up, buttercup, because it won’t be the last.

Lidia Yuknavitch has been in my life for over a decade. The first time I experienced her orbit was in Port Townsend, Washington, where she was paired with my longtime mentor Pam Houston for a two-day weekend workshop. So while Pam was my North Star for heading that way in the first place, I’d always been drawn to Lidia as well. We had a ton of friends in common in Portland, where we were both living at the time, and I was actually surprised we’d not yet crossed paths.

But we hadn’t. And I know this for a fact because when we finally did? The phrase I used to describe it was, “She rearranged my DNA.”

And I am still using that phrase whenever I am blessed with breathing the same air as this phenomenal human (even if that air is through a Zoom screen). Lidia has this gift for really seeing and hearing you, often in ways you’re not quite yet capable of doing yourself, while simultaneously introducing new architecture for how you think about language and story.

She’s been doing that to me for twelve years.

I know the exact number because after last Saturday’s workshop ended, I opened Facebook (which I rarely do) only to find one of those “On This Day” memories waiting for me.

April 4, 2014. Port Townsend. Pam. Lidia. A photo of sailboats on the water and my own caption: Destination: writing weekend. Yeah, I think this will do.

Twelve years to the day.

Woo-woo to the core.

Later in the workshop, Lidia asked us to shift our focus to another word. Something else that was speaking to us. It was 1:23pm. I’d gone to hot yoga in the morning and my post-class pit stop to Pressed for Juice for my favorite Field of Greens smoothie was not cutting it. So the word came quickly.

Again, I won’t get into the details of how Lidia guided us next, other than to say I wrote three fragments, each approaching the word from a completely different angle and entry point, in two to three minute sprints.

Here’s what emerged:

Hunger

I.
On rare occasions, my mother tucks a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream in the freezer. I wait until no one is home and scrape a few small spoonfuls off the top, just enough to not be noticed, then add a dollop of nut butter to the most basic of ice creams. I wash all spoon and bowl evidence away and lick toothpaste to erase my breath before she gets home. There is no way to water down a pint of ice cream like a bottle of booze. It’s a routine I can only pull off if the pint is at least half full.

II.
When dating a GLP-1, your relationship really never goes beyond the same set of questions.

How often do you find yourself hungry?
How often do you find yourself thinking about the next meal?
How often do you find yourself pushing thoughts of food out of your mind?
How often do you find yourself…

Your choices for response are limited. All the time. Some of the time. Seldom. Never.

Always say some of the time. Or seldom. Never say never. That’s how you keep the relationship going. Anything else could provoke a breakup.

III.
Here’s what I never understood about Goldilocks: if the first bowl of porridge was too hot, wouldn’t she have burned her tongue and skipped the other options? Wouldn’t she have learned her lesson? Why did she keep wanting more?

Well look at that. Turns out there’s more than one way to get from here to there when you play with words.

Part two of the workshop, Reading the Waves: Nonlinear Nonfiction Practice and Play, is next Saturday, April 11. I am certain the universe will be right there with me, nodding. She always has her camera on in Zoom, so there’s no chance I’ll miss it.

And if you don’t know Lidia’s work, go find it: The Chronology of Water, Thrust, Verge, Reading the Waves. And take her classes. Immediately. Let her rearrange your DNA the way she rearranged mine. You will be reborn. That’s a promise.

xo,
SG

P.S. I'd love to know if you've had one of these. A nod. A moment where the universe seemed to be paying attention. Drop yours in the comments if you’re willing to share.

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.

In the summer of 2017, I started a project called Hopeless Semantic.

The premise was simple: spot a word in the wild — on a street sign, a billboard, a menu — photograph it, look up its official definition, and write a short piece inspired by what I found. The word was the door. The story was whatever was on the other side.

I loved it immediately. I also had no idea what it was actually doing.

On April 28, 2018, I got sober.

I won’t bury the lede on that, because it’s not something I’m interested in burying. Sobriety is central to who I am now: how I work, how I write, how I show up. But truth be told (and truth will always be told), I didn’t even know at first that it was permanent. I thought I was taking a break. Three months in to said “break,” as I was approaching my come-out-of-my-mother’s-womb July birthday, someone asked me if I was going to celebrate with cocktails.

And without pause, I replied, “Uh…no. No, I am not.”

And that’s when I knew: sobriety was the only way forward. The only way to actually live the life I kept writing about wanting. The only way to actually STAY alive.

That summer, I also went back to the pieces I’d originally written for Hopeless Semantic over the past year. Some from before I kicked the Bota Box of wine to the curb. Some from those first tender months of early sobriety, when my heart was broken to a level I have never experienced, from a relationship that imploded in ways that brought me to my knees and nearly took me out completely. And yet, somehow, even without lubrication to numb that pain, I realized I was paying attention to language and meaning in a way I hadn’t in years, maybe ever. I gathered about a dozen of my pieces, shaped them into something, and used that work to apply for my first writing residency.

I got it. The Writing by Writers Mill House Residency, November 2018.

I remember thinking: Would this have ever happened had I not turned towards sobriety?

Let me be clear: just because I got sober did NOT mean I suddenly started making the most awesome choices ever. In fact, my first year of sobriety was an absolute shit show at times, especially in the romance department, to the point that you might have been inclined to give me a breathalyzer to confirm I was, in fact, making such choices stone cold sober.

So what followed after unlocking my first writing residency was not a straight line (it never is), but it was movement, and it was mine. I adapted my second novel into a screenplay. I produced things that mattered to me. I kept saying yes to creative work and slowly, deliberately, started saying no to everything else. By 2022, I’d left full-time corporate life. By October 2024, I was working entirely on my own writing and producing. The thing I’d been circling for years, finally landed.

Hopeless Semantic didn’t go dormant during all of that. It became the foundation. And since then, we’ve been building and renovating.

And now it’s time for a house warming party. So here we are.

Let me tell you what “here” is: “Hopeless Romantic” describes a person in love with love. I am a Hopeless Semantic. A person in love with meaning. With language and subtext and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, how we got here, and what we’re going to do about it.

This is where those stories live.

Dispatches from the intersection of humor and heartbreak: the writing life, my sobriety, why dogs are better than humans, pop culture (the good, the great, AND the gross), WTF is going on in the world (no really… what the F IS going on in the world), and whatever else is currently lighting me up. Funny ha-ha and funny strange and funny-not-funny. We will not shy away from politics, because silence isn’t an option. We will absolutely get personal, because good writing has to be. Some weeks short; some weeks longer and harder-won. Occasionally, a word spotted in the wild that cracked something open and I had to tell you about it.

My name is Sarah Grace McCandless. My friends call me SG. I am a novelist, screenwriter, producer, workshop teacher, Poshmarker, and the dog mom of Gilda Radner, my corgi-terrier rescue and best decision I’ve ever made. I was born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs of Detroit, served time in Portland (Oregon), DC and NYC, but now living the life of a showgirl in Las Vegas with frequent jaunts to Los Angeles.

And I’m a Hopeless Semantic. I have been for a while.

Welcome. Let’s go.

xo,
SG

Hopeless Semantic lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. If someone in your life belongs here, send them this way.