I started this blog in May, 2025 as a way of exercising my freedom to engage with diverse information and ideas.
illicit texts is a response to the deteriorating political conditions in my home country, the United States, especially related to freedom of information and expression. The U.S. in 2025 is a place where empathy, history, and humanity are under purposeful and vicious attack. Liars, gaslighters, grifters, and criminals are openly in power, executing long-dreamt-of acts of systemic theft, violence, and cruelty.
I want to be reading what these “leaders” don’t want me to read. This blog is a slow, small act of defiance, a record of the improper ideologies, unruly texts, and ungovernable writers and artists that help me make sense of the world, its histories, its possible futures, and my place in the family of things.
~ Margaret

about the writer
I earned a PhD in English at a state university in the Pacific Northwest. I taught classes in writing, literature, & women’s, gender, & sexuality studies there for most of a decade.
I run an online bookstore selling rare, collectible, and worthwhile books, art, and ephemera.