Dear friends,
I think I slept four hours last night after playing a show in a bike shop in Kingston, NY. I woke up at 6am to write my morning pages and made a French press for me and Alex and Sam while the sky got blue and the rain revealed itself. I’m trying a new budget and proud of the changes I am seeing in my spending. This week was overbooked (three shows in a row), and meant to be a playground for me to see what enough care and rest feels like in busy times, as I find more sustainable patterns of decision-making. Turns out, I love road trips, but I don’t love missing time at home, or leaving early from work. As much as I can, I need to find a way to be in relationship with spirit every day. And I feel better when I cook for myself.
Lint Journal / Things I’m appreciating this week:
Playing Kirby & the Magic Mirror again for SP, thanks to Sam :)
“Maria” by Greg Mendez
Stewart’s gas stations (Their root beer was my favorite when I was a kid)
purple potatoes
My mom might be a psychic (I don’t think I will go into more context at this time)
I’m supposed to take myself on an artist date (thanks Artist’s Way) but that’s actually pretty hard on a Sunday night. When I was touring this summer, Alex and I went into a church in the North End of Boston where one of my novel sections takes place. It was quiet and I saw Saint Lucy’s statue, and the prayer candles, and I remembered the mixture of awe and fear and inappropriateness and strangeness I felt as a kid. I was thinking tonight about finding a Catholic Church that’s open late, to be back in that space, and see what comes up, maybe talk to Gram. But that’s a tall order late at night. And anyways, I’m turning to poems this month.
I ended up at a dive bar I’ve been wanting to try near my house, and I sat in a leather booth and read. Not exactly a true artist date but the writing I got done helped me think about what honesty can look like in my poetry practice, now that I’ve had some distance from writing poems, and am trying in earnest again. I am thinking about how poetry tangibly informs how I live the rest of my life. When I get up early and write, I’m a more patient person to the people around me, and am more grounded in myself. I find spirit before anything else in the day, through tarot or free writing or lighting a candle. When I make time to write, I end up carving out time to plan for attending protests, for calling my reps. And right now while we are resisting and fighting and mourning this genocide of Palestinians, I don’t want my writing to be separate from any of it. Ariana Brown posted some prompts for a Free Palestine, that I’ll share here. They’ve been helping me this week as I try to focus in in new ways. I saw a James Baldwin line on another Instagram post today, “The world will change because it has to.” Here are 3 lines for the first 3 days of my 30/30. (I gave a little extra because I wanted to follow the image.) I’ve mostly been free writing and I definitely want to find more gravity in the poems, but I’m pleasantly surprised at how relieved I feel to be writing poetry again.
The pear tree I climbed with my sister, that’s grown moss now the color of toothpaste, like the tree bark is gums receding, like the fortunes aren’t in the teeth but in what holds them in place.
I am so full of feelings I forgot about for years. I bought a dress that looks like something Leonora Carrington would paint, the sleeves like pitchers like they’re holding wells of futures of hugging friends, of lifting my arms to dance, of carrying platters of September’s cranberries cooked down and glass punch bowls and tiny ornate cakes for someone I love.
I started wearing other peoples’ language for danger, how they wrapped their mouths around it… Who is on the inside of the circle of salt?
I found out this week I was a finalist for a chapbook prize at a dream press — poetry.onl. This is a GREAT sign!! But I’ve been writing this book in different iterations since I was 20. My undergrad thesis, which I feel in some ways embarrassed of, and grateful to have grown from, hinged on this axis of memory and queerness. The book evolved because well, time passed, because of grief for my Gram, and considerations of gender. So now is the time for me to step back and see what is at the core, the heart, the foundation of the project. I think I’m so close to it I can’t see what I’m looking at, you know? So I’m finally reading Obit by Victoria Chang, which I started in grad school but never finished. My project began with trying to articulate my Grampa’s Alzheimer’s. In Obit, Victoria Chang writes about dementia and her dad’s stroke, and processing the grief of each piece of the story. Just so many good lines. “The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking” for one. I’m hoping that reading it will knock me off my axis in a helpful way.
When I posted my last newsletter, outlining this project, my friend Fern texted me 20 minutes later, about how they’ve been wanting to do the Artist’s Way. I texted my brother to recommend the book to him, and separate from any conversations we’d had, he had already started it, and was on week 8! So far, my review of the Morning Pages (TLDR explanation: three pages of meditative journaling each morning): I was resistant because I wanted to be productive right when I woke up, and then I thought about that for a second, that need for productivity. So far, the pages level out my morning buzzing feeling, that anxiousness. My friend Shlagha and I caught up on the phone last week and she’s been sending me prompts <3 and then someone in Knoxville asked her how I’m doing, and she said I seem so much happier in Philly. It made me think about the place I was in in grad school and where I was writing poems from.
I wanted to share a section from the craft essay that I got a head start on, that has been really important but really difficult for me to write.
“…I wasn’t scared at all. My body was so strong… my shoulders that looked like a swimmer’s. I wasn’t scared to chase what I wanted, to be loud and try things and laugh and keep going. Somewhere along the way, there was a distortion. I’m returning to the funhouse mirror and as I write I don’t know what I will find.
…
What was my body saying then? As I write, my throat is tight and I feel the pressure behind my eyes. I want to shift to something different.
What are the times I’ve sought re-entry to my body? It has always been in grief. When I found out about Gram’s cancer, I numbed out, so I went on a run the week of Christmas and took a cold shower. I watched Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinnochio and thought so hard about Gram in her aliveness, I couldn’t stop crying, but it was the right kind, the good kind.”
Questions I am asking:
What makes an image meaningful enough in a poem?
How can I be more honest in my poems?
Okay, I wrote more here than I expected!!! I hope this isn’t too much but I appreciate you all being there for my questions, thinking, etc. I want to reach out to writer friends and have more meet-ups and discussions and shared poems, so if you’re interested, let me know :) And feel free to comment questions below or things you want to hear more about.
In love & solidarity,
Sara Mae