Hello friends, family, and community — I hope the spring is bringing you peace and purpose. Over these past few months, the great big mystery of living on my end has been filled with much activity, joy and grief, meaningful life experiences and nourishing routines. Outside of a one-day writing retreat at the incredible Winslow House Project in Vallejo, CA, my creative / life-practice has been more movement and connection-based than of the written word, and honestly, this has been wildly healing for me to lean into. I appreciate that artistry can be any expression of our aliveness and the creative spirit within us — a conversation, the way we move about water, any form of channeling that can either be documented or dissolve into the air. And most of the time, I am not thinking of what I am doing as though I were creating at all. But in the allowing of ourselves to be expressed, to listen, to respond, we are engaging in the process of making. Through relating — to my own body, to others — we are contributing to the materials of the moment, to the shapes of the room. There is not always a sellable “end product,” there are the many changes happening in our bodies as we affect and are moved and moulded by each other. We dance, we cry out, we run, and we pray.
My poems, House Cleaning and On the Way of St. James, are in the May/June 2024 issue of The American Poetry Review. I feel so deeply honored and grateful to be included alongside such renowned poets. Please do order yourself a copy here :)
After a long personal hiatus, I am reopening submissions for the Recenter Press Poetry Journal. Submission guidelines for Issue Five can be found here. I am so looking forward to sharing the work of writers and artists I’m excited about, and learning more about your work. If you have poems and visual art that need a home, send your work in!
Oh wow—those two poems are lovely! And congratulations on getting them published in power! That’s always so vindicating for writers~