"In June 2022, Sharon Bridgforth and Daniel Alexander Jones held an intimate and searching conversation about the pragmatics of making art and engaging the communities - living and ancestral - from which their work emerges. The two longtime friends reflect on Bridgforth's bull-jean & dem/dey back, a collection of two performance/novels written twenty-two years apart about the eponymous bull-jean (published by 53rd State Press). Bridgforth reveals how motherhood spurred her towards understanding her/their/Mermaid genders and sexuality, and how the desire to love, heal and live in truth has compelled Mermaid writing and life choices. Bridgforth details the weave between their early work in social justice (based in Austin, TX, where she and Jones met), their artmaking and their remarkable commitment to community. Bridgforth details the ways their writing starts in the marrow of their own healing, noting that the courage to share the work is because it is their offering to the people about whom and for whom it is made. Together, through this conversation, Jones and Bridgforth offer tested strategies for living a grounded artistic life"--