You may/may not have noticed that my cadence with this newsletter has slowed. I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with the amount of other things to manage in my life, so I’m trying to be as gentle as possible with myself - give myself a few more inches where I can.

Some of those things going on:

* I just put a bunch of work for sale on my website - which was a lot of documenting and editing and pricing and making some new things. Feel free to check it out if you haven’t already (and extra thank you to anyone who has peeked, indulged themselves/me, posted/shared about the sale - you all are real ones!)

* self-promotion city is an emotionally fraught destination for me (unique feeling alert)- that constant pull of : I want to share/feel supported/give people the opportunity to engage with my work AND putting a monetary value on that is extremely arbitrary/not aligned with my own metrics of value in relation to my creative practice and my relationships with others, etc etc etc etc

* as I was gathering some of the pieces that people bought yesterday, reviewing the poems attached to them, I did feel especially touched to think of people keeping my writing, relating to it in a personal and intimate way

* that’s a pay off of the feeling of unnecessary exposure

* I also started my aforementioned poetry class - which I was feeling slightly stressed about putting on my plate, but (as intended) the external pressure to dedicate time to writing and being thoughtful about other people’s writing has made me, at least for this week, feel really creatively engaged and activated and thus escorted away from other preoccupations and feelings of being overwhelmed

* the class has got me thinking about the role of editing in my writing process; the ways that I need to push myself to edit more liberally and deliberately

* I can feel so tied to the archive that I work from that adding extra language, rearranging words, imagery, changing structure can feel out of bounds of the process but I think that some pieces would be stronger with more editing

* Pretty obvious take away from a workshop class

* This poem is the one I submitted to class this week. we were invited to think of our ancestors (literal ancestors, poetry ancestors, past selves as ancestors). I wrote a poem that used all the best lines from a group poems I wrote during a poetry workshop I took in 2019 with a poetry idol of mine. The workshop was kind of a precursor to my current project, I made my first light & magnets cyanotype during that weekend . It was fun to use my own [poetic] writing as an archive to remix - it felt like using my well-practiced approach to writing in a new way. Again… editing! Crazy!

* I’m trying to avoid overexplaining my work in class, so I’m indulging myself here, can’t hold anything back.

Maybe there will be some refined versions of this to come, maybe some new versions of old poems you’ve already seen.

the promise of change

CHOOSE: delicate or realor same and same and same and same, big or little bodied samemy flowery bristle imagined its shadow different:ceremoniously stopped in timeby lush capacitywater declaresmy viscous dividejoyful in hope unused I want new everythingin my earlouder than all the thoughts slipping out between glossy constraintslooking sidewaysat oncedisappearedpiled up blossomed upwaiting

your addiction to memory of me,the space behindtranscription from the crooked lightlooking away, back, in the same directioni keep findinga softness new to meI should come to expect to findyou too waitingwith the questions you never asklately is getting longer than i think

so i’ll tell youhere are the things i’m not: I’m not surealways on aboutwhat i’m not looking back atit’s not quite clearbut this is a measuring, or an allocatinga keeping, an accountingsomething solid to wager on:the chaos we’re made ofa habit of time

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