Hannah Ensor

Runner-up in the 2022 Contest in Prose. Read judge Amina Cain’s blurb here.

from If You Can Never Love It Enough

0.   

In my dreams about Tucson, there is a fictional highway running around the outside. Someone is on their way to the airport; a friend drives them. The friends who inhabit the dreams are my lovers, or my exes, or my sisters. They are on their way somewhere, and I am too. I am on a visit. It is a short trip. I have to get back. The town I know I am visiting is not the Tucson where I lived, and the friends or exes or lovers are no one I ever knew or dated. We are simply on our way to the airport on a round road. There is no saying how many times I have dreamed of this; I remember its reoccurrence too late to catch the similarities.

The other night, as I was dozing off, a phrase came to me that I thought I should write down. I didn’t do it, instead I fell asleep (again). As best as I can remember, I wanted to write down, the overlap of words under words, Jenny Schecter. In my mind, perhaps related to the manatees. 

I decide to write about the autofiction that is television’s The L Word (2004–2009). I say it in my head like this, “television’s The L Word (2004–2009).” It’s unclear to me how many people have seen The L Word, and what audience I would be writing to and for. For some reason, though, I can’t stop thinking about it: creator Ilene Chaiken’s relationship to her protagonist, Jenny Schecter; Jenny Schecter’s relationship to her protagonists, Sarah Schuster and Jesse (no last name); the impulse of a creator to invent an alter ego only to destroy her, kill her. “I’ve decided to kill Sarah Schuster,” Jenny whispers into a phone, five years before Ilene kills Jenny, before (if you believe this) Jenny kills herself. 

I, like Jenny Schecter, have wanted to be a good writer. I, like Ilene, have self-sabotaged to avoid ridicule. 

When I moved to Tucson in the summer of 2011, I had already seen every episode of The L Word. The friends I would meet in Tucson had also seen The L Word. They had met each other at a café long-closed by the time I got there, The Rainbow Planet Café on 4th Avenue; they had watched episodes of The L Word at another long-closed venue, The Biz (full name Ain’t Nobody’s Business) on Broadway. In August 2011, despite there being several bars that would be described to me as “biker bars,” there was only one gay bar left in Tucson: IBT’s. I went once, and without any queer friends, though I would later have sex with two of the friends I went with, separately, not more than a few weeks apart, and months after our visit to IBT’s.

When Jenny first writes about moving to Los Angeles, her friends read about themselves in The New Yorker and can’t believe how she misrepresented them; or perhaps that she represented them accurately, but without generosity or affection. When Jenny steals a friend’s idea for a screenplay, she says that that’s what fiction writers do. I’ve decided to write a book about television’s The L Word and its relationship to autofiction; narrative ethics; what we owe to our audiences; how we love and respect fictional characters, ourselves. The book I am writing may be a novel; an autofiction. I have been stuck for years now on the fictional lives that were ended by the creators of television’s The L Word and what an audience is supposed to do with those deaths, can do with those deaths. I imagine myself to be writing a depressing book, a very serious book, about a ridiculous show.

Because I am thinking of this book I am working on, I write “Jenny Schecter is here to ruin 2020” in my notebook in the first days of the new year. 

1.   

Some of my gayest memories of Tucson include being my then-boyfriend’s boyfriend. He was one of the not-queer friends I went to IBT’s with; he was at that time trying to help me date the not-queer friend that I slept with first after watching a spaghetti western on my couch a few blocks away from IBT’s, pausing the film regularly to photograph the horses. When I take an online quiz about which character from The L Word I am, I get Max, “who deserved better.” At the outset of my writing about The L Word, I tell myself I’m not going to write about Max. The idea tires me, and I know I couldn’t do it. 

In my relationship with my cis boyfriend, I was perhaps most literally a Max, “a female to male transsexual” (in Max’s words). But in terms of the dynamics of that relationship, I was a Billie Blaikie. When it comes to what would come of that relationship, I am still Billie Blaikie, having driven away in my convertible, never to be seen again, after being fired by Kit Porter for my pattern of consistently unacceptable behavior.

Am I a bottom … to circumstance? I write in my notebook. This, I tell myself, is for my book about The L Word

2.   

One of the central premises of Jenny Schecter is that writers are mostly intolerable. Or entirely intolerable. “I’ve decided to kill Sarah Schuster,” Jenny whispers into the phone, several months before she discovers that she can write about manatees. When I write, I now imagine the words floating above and around the screen, across my face. Whispered many times in my own voice. I cannot help but draft in this way. 

When I read good literary fiction, I understand what is so hard about depicting a good literary fiction writer on screen. I have never invented a person, never mind a person who invents people, and I have never needed to make that person exist in a world that could understand them.

In my writing, I have elided the Johns of my life (one living and one no longer) as well as which men I have taken train journeys with. At one point, on a train, a man we did not know died. The face of my boyfriend blanched. The first morning he and I woke up in our train seats, one of us brought the other a coffee.

3.   

You meet Jenny Schecter and Kit Porter in the dream. They are holding hands under the table, sisters now. It is a catered meal and all excitement has passed. Most everyone here is tired, done making conversation for the night. That quiet period between the eating and the standing up. 

You push out your chair. “I thought you were dead,” you say, too casually. The rudest thing you could possibly say to someone who once sat beside you. You’ll be ashamed of this forever.

4.   

At the end of a long day I text my friend who has long hair now and no longer a motorcycle. I imagine them on a seesaw, black and white. I imagine them in a trailer, gutted and refloored. I imagine their open hand holding what used to be a living butterfly over a sidewalk radiating heat in Phoenix. I imagine them in my backyard, laying our objects out on a tarp.

In couple’s therapy my wife says that we likely haven’t processed my breakup with Noah enough. 

Did Noah stop talking to us because we never returned his copy of The Dhammapada? 

I would like to see the timeline again. Noah holding a sign above his head at an Indigo Girls concert – what does it say? I am squinting again at the past.

I never watched The L Word with Noah, can’t remember even talking about it with him. Who I was with him: a boyfriend, football companion, typewriter, train. The thing about a DVD is there is no end. 

5.   

At dinner, a new friend asks you how you identify and something within you shorts out. Perhaps it is because a large dinner in a tent is sonically complicated; you haven’t been hearing them very well; the banter has been hard for these reasons. You are excited to talk with them, they could in some ways be your gender twin or kin, but you don’t really want to loop the others in. You can feel your wife’s eyes tracking you, another friend’s. There is a simple enough answer but you instead go wild, vulnerable. “I don’t know,” you almost yell. All the things you say in your own house about public/private gender. About not wanting people at the hospital to call you your baby’s “mother.” The bugs are biting and they hurt. You stand up to spray more bug spray away from the table, and all the pairs of eyes track you in your flight to the empty patch of golf course where you are suddenly standing with your cloud of aerosolized chemicals, bare legs. No one knows how to proceed. You could have just said nonbinary and left it at that. What happened?

+++

When I moved to Tucson to enroll at The Institute I had never heard of lyric shame but I had heard of rewatching The L Word ad nauseum. I had heard of making a beloved start Grey’s Anatomy from the beginning with me, of pausing a spaghetti western to photograph the horse. Kristen Stewart said in an interview that bisexuality is “quite the opposite” of confusion. The first non-queer friend I slept with in Tucson claimed some sexual enjoyment in my company but in a way that made me feel small or humored. She set a boundary, told me she was dating a professor, but still came over after our meal and sat too close on my couch leaning in until she was almost flat, bike lights still blinking. I didn’t care much about what she was telling me about the professor, it had been weeks since we’d made out once or twice, I just wanted to tell Noah about it. Another night, Noah and I, friends, rode our bikes to an elegant restaurant and ate a meal we both jokingly called date food, shared a bottle of wine, red meat nicely cooked. We ran into Lucy either as we went in or as we came out. Noah was trying to help me date the non-queer friend back then; I was trying to help him date Lucy. Lucy may have already been dating the professor: a different one. We three stood by our bicycles, one of us locking or unlocking a U-lock, warm night, dry sidewalk, convention center parking lot, some foot shuffling and all three of us potentially ready to flirt or to stop flirting, to bike away or get into a compact sedan, dusty windows down. Any of us ready to tousle any other one’s hair. We did or didn’t stop at the Circle K. We did or didn’t make plans to see each other the next day. “When will I see you again,” a joke we made about romance or longing even long after it wasn’t a joke. Some periods of time are so compressed in retrospect, so much happening in such little time. The professor suddenly watching TV with us in his boxers on the Berber carpet at the apartment that Lucy and Noah shared, Noah and me fucking under a poncho, Jimmy Fallon on in the background or Black Swan or the thriller called Hanna. All of us buying NA beer because the professor had said it was good for you.

6.   

The first time I see Kit Porter I am lonely. I am eighteen, it is fall or winter. A few friends and I hear about a watch party with older lesbians also in our college; they are juniors and rent a house together. It is 2005. We leave the dorm by foot, it is snowing or it has snowed in Michigan. The walk is about 20 minutes, past the women’s studies building.

The first time I see Kit Porter I have just removed a jacket, boots or wet shoes. I am in a house, sitting on a wood floor, still new to my own desires and how to make them shapely, myself, into a life. It will be months, even upwards of a year, before I am kissed by a woman at a different house in a different part of town with different college students all around me; at least a year from then before I kiss someone I choose to kiss because I desire her.

Kit Porter is straight but wasn’t always meant to be. It was her back upon which “the chart” was supposed to be tattooed, the logistics of which would have been a hilarious mess. Every time another Los Angeles lesbian had sex with another Los Angeles lesbian, she would have to head to the local tattoo artist. It was only when Jennifer Beals offered that she would only do The L Word if she and Kit were made to be half-sisters – Pam Grier and her Kit Porter Black, Beals and her Bette Porter biracial, sharing a father, played briefly by Ossie Davis in his last role– that Kit was made to be straight, not fully a part of this lesbian friend group but there, beside.

The first time the television audience sees Kit Porter, she is being pulled over. It is 2004. The cop’s mom is a fan. 

When Kit Porter is pulled over in the pilot episode of The L Word, she is driving without a license. She is a celebrity, a singer, though we’re supposed to understand her as somewhat washed up, on the other side of her fame. The young white man cop’s mom listens to the musicians she’s on her way to gig with. She’s let go with a warning. Her sports car is gorgeous under a marquee, Los Angeles. She is on her way somewhere. Her son doesn’t speak to her anymore. She’s an alcoholic, not yet recovering. Isn’t in very good touch with her sister. Has a party at her small apartment. The last time on The L Word that more than three Black women, some Black men too, share a scene.

7.   

Everyone on The L Word is a lesbian. This does not mean that anyone is queer. 

Have you ever felt the contortions of a world invented by one white lesbian? It is possible that you have, on the shores of a lake on private land in Oceana County, Michigan, where everyone is “she.” There are worse invented worlds than ones wherein everyone is a lesbian, and better ones as well.

All the stars who come on The L Word are lesbians for a day. Some of them are lesbian actresses playing straight. Some of them are “gay icons”; they are lesbians for a day, playing themselves. Burr Connor is a lesbian, she is President Fitz from Scandal. Are you gay? Well, I was on an episode of The L Word and this is my boyfriend. Have you ever been a lesbian trans man at your baby shower after your gay male lover has left you, he too a lesbian, yelling slurs and insults at each other in the lesbian hallway? Have you ever tried to be a simple lesbian, living your life, using he/him pronouns and running a vintage car shop, fixing up vintage cars, they too lesbians, your bandana itself lesbian? Have you ever heard your own name, a lesbian’s name, whispered over the loudspeaker at your lesbian place of work, over your lesbian life, while you encounter your future ex-fiancée’s lesbian tattoo in honor of her dad, a fallen lesbian, never to be spoken of again? Lesbians, we are all forgotten. All too often we forget.

I am a lesbian who has never stopped watching television. I have not fully stopped using she/her pronouns, have never felt comfortable identifying with “lesbian,” which is of course also referred to as “the L word.” Alice is bisexual in name only; she is a lesbian. I am bisexual in act only; I am a lesbian. Sometimes she and I fuck men, sometimes we even fall in love with them, are left by them; sometimes we mourn and mourn and mourn in a near-stranger’s expensive house, panes of glass from floor to ceiling, breathless and stupid, hawks alighting on the edge of the hot tub, open and cinematic spaces filled with our cries. Until the end of season one, that is; from then on, we are lesbian. 

I have never stopped watching The L Word. One time a friend and I were very drunk, playing darts, one of many lesbians’ bar games, the bar games themselves lesbian, she asked if I wanted to go watch The L Word and then she went down on me as the DVD looping music to The L Word season one played for whatever duration it was until I said “ok ok ok,” stopping her, building some untenable attachment that wouldn’t resolve until it did. 

Oscar says he tried to watch The L Word but he felt like a dirty old man. I responded, “We’re all dirty old men when we watch The L Word,” which was a way of saying what I meant, which is, “we’re all lesbians when we watch The L Word.” None of us, anymore, queer.

Here is a list of lesbians who have never appeared on The L Word: none. Every lesbian has appeared on The L Word. 

If a lesbian has not seen The L Word, they must tell you upon meeting you. 

On The L Word, there are no lesbian trans women, only cis lesbians played by trans women. There are some trans men, and they inform their mothers that the girl they knew is dead. They inform their colleagues that they are trans men, and that they want to be someone; Bette Porter will not be the reason they won’t. Bette Porter, a lesbian, is the reason all lesbians and trans men cannot have what they want from this world. Every lesbian can tell you how many of their favorite television characters have died, and in what order.

In this world that you and I and Ilene have created, everyone exists in relation to their own lesbianism, which may be on a Kinseyan scale, from lesbian to lesbian. The sex shop is for lesbians, and the butt plugs are incongruous, embarrassing, funny, because lesbians do not have assholes. The vampire is lesbian, which makes Alice lesbian. Alice is mad at Lisa the Male Lesbian for being lesbian; she too is lesbian on The L Word. Leisha Hailey was one of the few actresses to be able to say during the original run of the series that she was lesbian. Uh huh, her. On The L Word, you either live, lesbian, or you, lesbian, die, which erases much of the range of human experience, while also remaining true. Many lesbians die in their twenties, thirties. Many lesbians live into their forties and fifties. Some live longer, or shorter. Many lesbians experience something that has happened on The L Word.

Pam Grier lives; wears turquoise and cowboy hats; receives honorary doctorates. She lives; not a lesbian– 

Jenny is alive, says Mia Kirschner, not a lesbian– 

Karina Lombard lives; not a lesbian; takes the opportunity of a pride march to rant in a very lesbian way against The L Word– 

When you are not a lesbian you can live long enough to refuse The L Word– 

In this decade, the fear goes, no one is lesbian; we all refuse The L Word– 

Even we white lesbians feel the contortions of a world invented by one white lesbian. It is the sandy beach (no character on The L Word ever goes to the beach unless it is to swim to Cheri Jaffee’s house) that rises up to a pink pussy hat, singular in its identity and needs. 

Have you seen the show Forever, in which three heterosexuals are in a lesbian relationship underneath the death ocean? Have you ever watched the lesbian you will marry do handstands on a beach after she and you have both broken up with your boyfriends? Have you ever really been on a beach? Has this beach always been the space between living and death, between death and something else?

8.   

When I first moved to Tucson all of my friends had already watched and moved on from The L Word. We mostly didn’t speak of it. When I showed up I watched 20/20 on the TV that was included in my furnished apartment. A feature on heroin moving from the southern border via Tucson then Phoenix with arrows to the rest of the continental U.S. This is national news and I am here.

“The problem with a TV is you can never love it too much.” – Tan Lin, Insomnia and the Aunt  

The best-case scenario when you write is that you write a book so commercially successful that it becomes a film. “Les Girls,” when published in The New Yorker, ruined Jenny’s friendships. I want to become a film. I want to grab the remote and stand up to see myself in the screen.

I have been the problem and making myself the problem is also the problem. So I understand. I have been the problem in my lovers’ lives, I have been the problem in the writing I have turned in to be read by my peers, I have been the problem to myself, I have been the problem when I assume myself to be the problem in a therapy session. “Well here we are, problems again,” I say to myself, problematically. I am problem the bittersweet. I touch your leg with my leg at the party. Or you touch mine with yours. I am indeed a little too drunk. It is a problem but doesn’t end up being a problem. A problem is a thing with consequences; a problem is a thing with pleasures.

The problem with TV is that you can never love it enough. The problem with TV is that it makes you believe in repetition as ethical imperative. Do you remember when you used to turn on the TV and see what was there, curious? Instead, I myself repeat. You could say that for my students the problem of the course they have signed up for is my brain. Every once in a while, I want my therapist who has known me for so long to tell me where to begin or what to do. 

At what moment in time do I exist in writing? If this helps us pin it down: For our protagonist, there is something indeterminate about gender. Something about the way their gender is described that doesn’t quite fit. There is something askew, off-kilter. The moment when Max says to Shane, “Let the butches handle it,” our protagonist is the space between Shane and Carmen’s eyes. Something electric and incorrect. Maybe less judgment. So perhaps they are the space between Max's mouth and the air around Los Angeles. Los Angeles that is Vancouver. Yes, that is it. The gender identity of our protagonist is the air between Max Sweeney’s mouth, actor Daniel Sea’s mouth, uttering, “Let the butches handle it,” and the cold air of a Vancouver afternoon in Los Angeles.

9.   

As I watch Jenny move through The Planet, a record plays in my living room. Camille Saint-Saëns. Breathy, calm, contrapuntal.

In this scene, Kit Porter is a DJ. Jenny traversing a café. Tina, judgment. Imagine if you will the oboes rising as a formerly sober alcoholic takes a drink from a glass bottle. A formerly straight lesbian traverses a space toward her fiancé and her clandestine lover playing pool. A single reed vibrating high against itself and the column of air vibrating too. The Planet a column of air, bodies passing through. Kit a column of air, moves her body against another song, not quite perceptible even with the sound on, which it’s not. 

Most of all Marina is a column of air. This is what we understand.

It is easy to talk about The L Word. You say “The L Word” and suddenly everyone who has seen this show lights up and tells you about where they were when they watched it. Today again I told someone that I was writing about The L Word and it turns out in 2005 we were a block or two away from each other, both watching in large houses full of college students. Too many women on each lease; legally brothels. I didn’t know any of her house’s people, she didn’t know any of mine. I was on Lawrence Street at the time; she was on Catherine. 

Many logical fallacies and misapprehensions about the self propel one’s late teens, early twenties. Things you have to figure out or don’t want to be talked out of. A familiarity with making big decisions entirely on one’s own, e.g. to stay in the closet, to leave one’s occupational training, to ask out or not ask out the upstairs sophomore with the expensive bong and the nose ring. 

10.   

Is there a television show that explores erotic dreaming as an ambience? Is there a TV show that is ambivalent about dreams, that presents them, a wash, unimportant to causality or story? I learned I was queer from a dream involving the moon and the mother of someone who shared my first name. What is the least consequential dream in television history? 

I have been curious about my child’s dreaming. Joked recently: “She doesn’t have shame or friends!” She dreams and is herself preverbal. Her dreams cannot conform to televisual narratives as mine do, as she has never watched every episode of Desperate Housewives or had a romantic friendship.

On television, people dream they are in love with their friend(s) and when they enter the waking world again they are shocked; they wake “in a sweat”; this dream presents a now-real problem; the dream is true; they love their friend and that creates narrative tension and sometimes comedy.

I have never seen a television character wake up and laugh with their partner about how they dreamed of loving a friend; they never have imperfect dreams or permissible pleasures.

Perhaps “with a start” is how all television characters awaken from a dream; how they rise up or out of it, emerge. What are all these directional metaphors for departing a dream? My child is asleep on my left shoulder as I write this.

I have had dreams about The L Word. Have hid dreams. Wish I could now remember the dreams and how many there have been. Another just last night, though even I am bored of it.

A voice yells in my head as if from outside of it, though I know it is not, it is in here: 

+++

Is sleep a space of non-memory? I remember, at times, my dreams, or light awakening, or a feeling I had in the night. When they asked me in the sleep study to tell them how long I thought I was asleep they meant to find out something about memory and sleep cycles and perceptions of time. This is perhaps another way of saying “narrative” or “ego.” What is the self outside of time? Sleeping well or unwell affects memory, we know, but what about how memory affects self? What do her friends remember about Jenny Schecter? About Kit? I can almost hear it, the caricature of a narcissist, an alcoholic, an addict, a selfish artist, someone whose self-harm is pathological and cartooned. What does Kit remember in season 1? What has she forgotten? The show does not remember its characters. We remember Kit Porter, we remember what she was wearing when she set up for her dinner with Benjamin, how she ordered a lobster to be shipped to The Planet and put out water for herself and white wine for him.

I am here for my own pleasure.

+++

Despite being raised by two psychologists who hated psychoanalysis, who thought dreams were unintelligible brain trash, I have become obsessed with my own and other people’s dreams. The professor used to tell me to read Adam Phillips. I tried for a while, and it helped me write a lecture. This was back when I was taking the professor’s advice.

11.   

The L Word is an advertisement for low-cut jeans, midday coffee, Pam Grier. Laugh tracks are one way of waking you up; The L Word does not feature laugh tracks. The sweet spot for a successful television show, one that is an advertisement for goods and/or services and/or ideologies, is to prick you awake but not to send you storming off. The show would like you awake and present, it pokes and tries not to puncture. 

Does sleep exist on television in order to indicate sex having happened or not having happened? I would like to see sleep freed of sexuality, of eros and the absence of eros. We like to walk in on women sleeping. We are the audience for this painting.

A scene: the camera lingers. She stays asleep. 10 seconds to 10 minutes, a variable performance shot durationally to be controlled by the perceptions and attention of the viewer. The actor may or may not herself be sleeping. She gets to decide. End scene.

12.   

When I first move to Tucson I meet with the professor, my thesis advisor, who barely exists. He asks me if what I’m working on is fan fiction. “No,” I say. He asks if it’s a movie novelization. I say, “No, The L Word is a TV show,” and as I say it I wonder if I should write a movie novelization of Lez Girls. “What are you writing, then,” he asks. “A refusal of those forms and also a refusal of the ways they are dismissed.” He corrects me, “the ways in which they are dismissed.” “Yes,” I say, “exactly.” “Well, eventually you are going to have to choose something,” he says, “something has to go in the space left behind by all your refusals.” I jot something down in my notebook and he looks at the hairs on his wrist, late to dinner with his secret girlfriend, Lucy, my favorite friend. As he stands up he makes little lobster claws with his hands. I think this is innuendo meant to connect us. He doesn’t say goodbye. Later he sends me a one-line email about his most recent therapy session. He does not mention the draft of my project. 

Later I think I should have said, “I am bringing myself to the dry edge of a river wash.” But I also knew he was right. 

When I don’t know how to fix the mistake he has invented, I am at another loss. The problem he has chosen for me is again me. Because this is my first time in graduate school, I am surprised. I do not know the way through. 

13.   

The L Word does not allow its characters to collaborate in who they say they are. Does not invite them to speak for themselves. 

A public interview series with the following people who were invented in order to populate The L Word: Lisa the Male Lesbian. Ivan Aycock. Ivan Aycock’s assistant at the shop with the bandana. Max Sweeney. Sunset Boulevard. Wheezy the contractor. Kit Porter. We hold our public interviews with our feet in Bette and Tina’s pool on a soundstage in Vancouver. 

I guess I am there too.

14.   

When I first moved to The L Word I burrowed into a tunnel under the railroad tracks. I took a drum, a soft wool mallet, I wore contacts and a purple and yellow t-shirt, there were other people there with other instruments, their voices choosing Simon & Garfunkel distances echoing in the strange dry-damp of the concrete tube. Jim took a picture. I was in black & white, v-neck, sincerity, endless summer but cool down there. It was my first year in The L Word, or the fourth. I never went back to that tunnel again, honestly can’t remember where to enter it or how.

Everything about being alive exists alongside moments of not being able to tell the truth. Abstractly. The thing is, though, the truth always masquerades as being in contradiction to or contraindication with everything that is said, everything that daily life exists because of.

Once, I sat in an underground room and tried to imitate Wallace Stevens. Another: I sat on the library porch in the rain and tried to imitate Rosmarie Waldrop. There was a squirrel rotting sweet between the screens. I tried to resist metaphor again and again.

The other day I said to my wife, “Remember sitting by the pool?” and I think she was frustrated because she responded, “That was for, like, a second, a million years ago.”

I understand that nostalgia has been described as corrosive. I find it erotic. I am at the pool outside my apartment in my blue shorts in my memory and nothing else. I am myself in the sun, reflecting all the light off my torso, bare. Photographed like this once, as if from the cloud. Bleached out and bleaching.

When I thought I could be Henry, I felt calm. I was in an oversized gray and brown plaid jacket, soft into the night. I was driving in the dark on a corridor from one city west to another like I’ve done a million times. A car going 90 or 100 wobbled into my space and I felt it, gravity, and then it was by, in front, away.

Mackenzie Schubert Polonyi Donnelly