An assortment of plug adapters next to a bouquet of flowers abd a cup of coffee
Packing day still life. Alice and I leave for Japan tomorrow -- I'm working on poems about weapons, horror, complicity, empire. (Thanks Human Rights Initiative for the support!) Alice is working on Pokémon. :)
I am not as brave as a person needs to be to face the moment we're in. But look at this kid's moxie! I feel braver just looking at him.
A very tattered duffel bag with torn canvas. A needle and thread are halfway through the stitching process. The sewing is very poorly donen
A little slap dash mending the night before a trip as evidence of a life well-lived.
Several piles of books artfully arranged on a table.
My editor suggested a short notes section of sources for HELD. Twelve pages later and a week past due, I think it's done. This book should probably be dedicated to interlibrary loan and JSTOR.
The book spread out over a blank notebook next to a pen and a cup of coffee.
This book is a delight. And disturbing as hell. Like wonder and zoos and the world tend to be.
PHOENIX
This is the cage destined
for the resurrection of the Phoenix.
(It's ashes will arrive in December.)
-Nicolàs Guillén, translated by Aaron Coleman
from THE GREAT ZOO
Books on a table with a cup of coffee and a pen.
"Was the command the first utterance in any language, or was it the narrative, the story? Or the declaration? Or the question? ... What was the first lie?"
-Vi Khi Nao & Sun Yung Shin, SIX TONES OF WATER
The title page of HELD: Essays in Belonging shown open for editing in Word.
287 resolved comments later and I've learned I love a comma splice, hate hyphenated/open/closed adjectives, and have no idea what transitive and intransitive verbs even are, much less how to conjugate them. Which is to say, thank god for copy editors, especially my exceptionally good one!
Sikekianos's book open on a patio table beside a notebook and a glass of wine.
Poems and a glass of wine on the patio -- just out here living the dream.
"How do you know?
I know because I speak a language too
a lung-language night can hear
in its big empty bald head"
-Eleni Sikelianos
YOUR KINGDOM
Was woken 7 times (!!!) last night by a constipated two-year-old weeping "want poooop." I'm about to get on a plane to LA with what is surely the least amount of mom guilt I have ever felt before a trip. AWP pals, see you soon!
Toddler holds up a romance novel with a shirtless buff man on the cover.
On walks I let the two-year-olds pick a book out of the neighborhood little free library. And the way this guy leaped for the steamy romance novel!
The book ME & OTHER WRITINGS by Marguerite Duras lies open on a table.
"When there is nothing, there is a piece of paper. It's the dawn of the world. There's nothing, it's blank. And then two hours later, it's full. You compete with God. You dare to create something. You write... You do your own thing. You. It's completely terrifying."
-Marguerite Duras
When the student in the back seat of the 10 passenger van asked if we could pull off so she could hug a white pine, you better believe that van was tilting on two wheels as I took that hard right. Tree hugging emergency!
There's so much to love about teaching this science writing class at the headwaters of the Mississippi -- swans fishing, geese fighting, jack pines, fire ecology... And, when I ask if anyone wants to see the picture of zombie chipmunks I took up at the Biome Center, everybody says "Yes please!"
Hello from Itasca Biological Research Station, where I'm spending spring break with 17 students in my Watershed Workshops class, writing about the headwaters to the Mississippi, birch-fir tree mutualisms, cool fungi, eagles doing it in mid-air (!!!), and, and, and...it was a good day.
Two toddlers splash in a puddle on a city sidewalk. One has an acorn and the other has a stick.
I'm not doing so well lately, because who could and how in a time like this? But also, it's spring and the world is full of puddles and acorn caps and very nice sticks. I feel like my heart breaks open a hundred times a day, often in the good way.
Notebook with a Moomin cover laying on a table beside a pen and a cup of coffee.
I love new notebook day!
It takes some coming to terms with the simultaneous truths we are small amid the mighty forces of destruction and also capable of effecting change, that things are dire but not all hope is lost... It can be dizzying to hold all these things -- and the grief itself can get in the way.
-Lauren Markham
Apropos of some bullshit at my work that is probably happening at your work too...
"Do not obey in advance.
Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given."
-Timothy Snyder in ON TYRANNY
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/558051...
I love how Ayşegül Savaş captures the creative complexities of motherhood in THE WILDERNESS.
"I find, in this liminal experience, a site for multiplicity, for experiencing the world beyond ourselves...redefining how we relate to the flesh of the world, and how we allow the world to touch us back."
The book SIDETRACKS by Bei Dao sits on top of a black notebook.
"Why draw prison walls in the dirt
in the name of freedom
Could there be a sky beyond the sky"
-Bei Dao
A couple little guys who LOVE mail are turning two tomorrow and I'm pretty excited for them to wake up and let me play with their presents. Maybe I'll teach them about SASEs and form vs. personalized rejection letters.
My inbox! It will only be this way for 10 minutes max, but what a feeling. Like there's tiny emeritus professor in my heart who just fell asleep by a fire with an open book in her lap.
"...my site is wherever
a rose grows,
wherever clouds cast their shadows on
roofless houses,
wherever a bomb does not fall,
wherever a child does not confuse a cloud
for bomb smoke."
-Mosab Abu Toha, "To My Visa Interviewer"
Brian thought it would be super cute to teach this guy to sing "Mama, oooo oooo oooo" like a little Freddie Mercury every time I walk in the door. And it is super cute. And that song is a lot of feelings to have toddlers demanding on repeat at 5 o clock in the morning.
"A slug is not
As you might think
A snail without a shell
A slug lives its whole life
Without a shell
Like I do"
Trying to be a relaxed, nurturing, art mom like those totally real people on Instagram, but I'm pretty sure I just hatched a new stomach ulcer I'm naming Finger Paint. And anybody who gives these twins a "sensory table" for Christmas is going on my "People Whose Deaths I Won't Grieve" list.
Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" and Marianne Moore's "The Fish" both come to mind. The "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow" line in Bishop's might be stunning enough make up for the gruesome hook imagery. Geffrey Davis's "The Night Angler" might work? www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/154730...
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I've been dilligently reading a very fine book of narrative nonfiction with engaging and anecdotes and solid reporting and it's just so... meh. Could somebody please drop me in a deep chasm between one understanding and another and leave me to clamor out, but with words?
The thing about cake is sometimes it wants be bread. And the thing about bread is sometimes it wants to be a weapon.