Dear Somebody: The only book worth writing.

Favorite warning (London, 2025)

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

After our usual English breakfast, we start a long, leisurely walk to Bishop’s Park along the river. I’m meeting V, a fellow writer (and editor), for the first time. We first entered each other’s orbit nearly a decade ago, when she commented on an Instagram post of one of my books. I was honored then, as I am now, to have my work read by someone I so deeply admire. 

I drag the kids along, half-pulling N, half-carrying F. We left plenty of time to walk, but the children pause to kiss every dog and wave at every gull and before I know it, I’m already late, nowhere near the park.  Go on ahead, T tells me, and I do, half-walking and half-running, now pulling myself along faster than my feet prepared for. 

Gulls congregating along River Thames (2025)

When I finally arrive, we get drinks and move over to a bench facing the river. After the initial few moments, we fall into conversation quickly and easily. I am so comfortable with this stranger, in fact, that although it gushes a mere few feet away, I never look away from V and back towards the river. Not once. 

I am reminded, once again, about how expansive life becomes when I allow others in—how, no matter how small or routine my life may feel at any particular moment, opening myself up to the right person will immediately buoy it. The right person reminds me of my own possibility, my own effervescence, my own value. The right person reminds me that the right people are worth the effort: the hundreds of lackluster coffees and playdates and one-sided creative collaborations that led me, eventually, to this moment in Bishop’s Park. 

For two hours, I am engulfed in conversation with another creative, another mother, another writer who I don’t have to explain myself to—because she already knows. For two hours, my brain buzzes with interest, with joy. I am invigorated in a way only possible when sharing meaningful conversation: when the conversation itself is the meal, the food and drink and river all forgotten. All this from a chance meeting with a stranger? All this from a comment on an Instagram post many moons ago? All this from a text message, a kind word, a hello? All this. 

T and the kids arrive to collect me. I sign books for V’s friends and daughter, I place the gift she’s brought me—a prescription bottle of poetry, labeled A Room of One’s Own, in my bag. Hugs are exchanged, letters are promised, and I walk away satiated, wondering if this the beginning of a new friendship.

It’s now been four weeks since our time together in the park; I think of V often. At this age, there is so much space and strangeness between me and anybody else, lifetimes of moments and memories that we’ll never share. How do new friendships begin? How do they sustain when so much life has already been lived? V lives in london, I live in Saint Louis. Her daughter began college this fall; mine beg me to ensure no monsters take them away. Our day-to-day lives? Different. Our faces and brains and cultures? Different. Our upbringings? Our thoughts and fears and desires? Different, different, different. Life is a series of unfinished roads, dozens of bricks piled up and forgotten. 

A gift from V: A prescription from The Poetry Pharmacy (2025)

A month to the day I placed the bottle of poems inside my bag, I finally open it. The pill I shake out is indigo, my favorite color. It’s a quote by Hélène Cixous, that reads: The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed.”

Poetry prescription from my bottle of medicine (2025)

I know this is true of my work and I want it to be true of my life. After all, what’s the difference between writing a book and writing a friendship? Both require a little bit of vulnerability. Both require a knock. Both require you to stand at the door, asking to be let in. I’m afraid of many things, but I know that fear is a costume that courage wears often—so I pick up my pencil and begin to write.

TUESDAY

I’ve recently seen the cyanometer, an instrument for measuring blueness, make its rounds on the internet. It was invented by Horace Benedict de Saussure, a Swiss physicist and mountain climber in 1789. 

I was reminded of Sophie Blackall’s recent creations of her own four cyanometers, which she used to measure the blueness of the sea. I don’t know what to call it, but I’d like to make a meter to measure the color of clouds. 

WEDNESDAY

My Start Where You Are 2026 weekly planners and wall calendars (2025)

For those of you who haven’t seen, my 2026 wall calendar and weekly planners are now available, and they are bright, lovely, and a joy to use. This will be my last calendar collection, so if you’ve been wanting to hang a calendar of mine, now’s the time to grab one.

You can order them directly from Andrews McMeel/Amber Lotus Publishing or in my BuyOlympia shop, as well as your local book shop or Amazon. 

THURSDAY

I haven’t recorded a podcast in a few years now, so it was especially enjoyable to break my recording fast with a really, really lovely conversation with designer and author Radim Malinic. 

We discuss all things creativity and books, but I especially loved how easy it was to sink into a meaningful conversation about letting go: life is a continual series of transformations—and if you’re going to grow, you have to let go of the person you used to be. You can listen to the episode here. 

A bonus episode, that focuses on a few especially meaningful moments (including my belief that letting go isn’t something you do, it’s simply the byproduct of acceptance) is available here. 

My gratitude to Radim for having me on, and for such a pleasurable conversation. And! If you haven’t already, you can pre-order Learn to Let Go: A Journal for New Beginnings. 

FRIDAY

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

—Paul Robeson by Gwendolyn Brooks

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A year ago, these were the five things I most wanted to remember:

Dear Somebody: Losing a Penguin (September 20, 2024)

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See you next week!

xx,

M

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To sign up for my weekly newsletter, Dear Somebody, please subscribe here.

Dear Somebody: On this side of the lake.

Planting a Garden (sketchbook, 2025)

Yesterday, I wrote to my representatives and senator requesting we shut the Everglades detention camps—you can, too.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

Lake Michigan on the Milwaukee side (2025)

We pile into the car evenly—three children and three adults, a dozen books and crayons shoved into backpacks, grocery bags of assorted snacks. We sing songs and have nonsensical conversations; we count how many hours, then minutes, there are left. W cries from the numbness that settles into her unused limbs, F cries that my hand is too far away to hold. From her perch in the third row, N watches with detached amusement. Nearly seven hours later, we arrive in Milwaukee. Though K and I have been friends for 30 years now, this trip together with our young children is our first.

After unpacking and settling in, we feed the restless children and tuck them in. The next morning, we head to the beach. On this side of the lake, the cold water is clear. I wade in after N and look down at my toes. Though they are two feet below water, I find them easily. I don’t know if the water is clean, but I pretend it is, the transparency of it inviting me to look more closely. My toes curve over hundreds of stones, mostly Basalt and Septarian, smoothed over hundreds of years in the sea. Each one is the perfect shape. It’s easy for me to love—to seek out, even, the blemishes in natural materials. It’s much harder for me to accept the flaws in people, the flaws in myself—but I am working on it. I look for Yooperlites, but find none. 

The morning passes easily. The sun is hot; the lake is cold. The girls oscillate between joy, fatigue, and hunger. N and I build a sand castle; F knocks it down. W has a qualm; no one knows what it is. The children cry and then move on. We do, too. When it’s time to pack up and head home for lunch, all three girls protest, having fallen in love with the lake. My heart is close to bursting, for all I want is for my girls to love the water, themselves, and each other. We’ll come back tomorrow, we promise, brushing the sand from their bodies. On this side of the lake, multiple friendships are forming. 

On the deck of our rental house, I hang up our wet things. Our three girls sprawl over the wooden slats and eat. It’s odd to see how much F and W resemble the younger versions of K and I—how these incarnates will have their own chance for a lifetime of friendship with each other. How N, maybe, will look after them the way my own sister does. Long car rides, conversations late into the night. Tears, arguments, the inevitable periods of silence. The first phone call after. The acceptance of each others’ flaws. I hope they will take turns holding on and letting go, but mostly, I hope, they’ll spend their time making each other feel known. 

We spend a few more days at the lake. Our three girls play and chatter, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Like the stones I reach for, each is strange and wonderful. We build more sand castles, and this time, it’s the water that knocks them down. On this side of the lake, we don’t mind, because the water teaches us about friendship: it ebbs and flows, but always, in the end, it goes on.

TUESDAY

For Issue 66 of Uppercase Magazine, I wrote about my recently revived journaling practice, and the effects it’s made on my life and creative work.

A photo of my latest essay for Uppercase Magazine on daily journalling

A photo of my latest essay for Uppercase Magazine (2025)

Issue 66 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)

“Over the past 8 months, I’ve changed how I approach journaling. This desire sprang from a cycle of emptiness: I found my attention was compromised, tired of being pelted by constant news, memes, and even the latest popular works in art and literature. Perhaps most alarming, I felt an uncomfortable urge to adopt whichever creative trend was flavor of the week. To challenge myself, I began writing daily in one of the many blank notebooks I’ve acquired over the past decade. I kept my expectations low to guarantee success: write about anything I want, for any amount of time, every day. There was no minimum page or word count (I’d fallen out of the morning pages routine years ago), no restrictions on content or format (I could vent, make lists, or write poetry), and I had little expectation of where this practice would lead me. The satisfaction was meant to be found in the act of writing itself—and it was.” 

—from Daily Journalling: A Practice that Forever Altered My Work (and My Life) for Issue 66 of Uppercase Magazine

WEDNESDAY

I’m excited to announce that now, when you pre-order Learn to Let Go through BuyOlympia, you’ll receive this limited-edition LETTING GO art print, too! Get yours here—and consider ordering a few for some friends, too. We could all use a little encouragement in the places we feel stuck. 

Many thanks to my friends at BuyOlympia for putting this together.

THURSDAY

While in Milwaukee, we spend time at the Grohmann Museum. Surprisingly, it is a place where all four of us fall in love. The museum showcases the evolution of labor and work throughout history and it was easy to see that nearly everything is possible using the two hands in front of me. Writing about it now, I see—again, quite easily, how much good it would do for me to remember this. 

I was surprised by how N gravitated towards the depictions of household labor: how she seemed enchanted by skilled trade as much as I am. Some of our favorite pieces showed ordinary people transforming ordinary materials into something more: cork shaped into stoppers, glass blown into bottles, chemicals mixed into medicines. 

The Happy Gardener by Hermann Kem (oil on panel)

The Breton Spinner by Eugene Feyen (oil on panel)

Glass Blower (artist unknown) (2025)

Although I’ve always been a crafts person, age encourages me to learn as many skills as I can—to be less reliant on corporations for my needs, to spend more time creating the objects that surround me. They are usually less beautiful, and sometimes less useful, but they mean more—and these days, meaning goes a long way. 

FRIDAY

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

—The Two-headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

See you next week!

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Creating joy.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

Still tiny, a small comic about the large joy in tiny things.

TUESDAY

I graduated with my MFA last May, though it only feels like a few days between then and now.

During my defense, my professors ask me how I’m going to continue my education post-graduation: How will I nurture and encourage my continuous learning? How will I ensure that I wouldn’t lose sight of my pursuit—drawing and writing for children—amidst the chaos of ordinary life? 

Easy, I reply, because I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to draw a four-panel comic every week. This will solidify a regular drawing practice, improve my ability to draw from life, and ensure that my love for drawing not only remains, but flourishes. I am determined. I think to myself, with certainty: Yes. My love will keep this work alive.

That was five months ago. 

As you’ve probably guessed, I spent those five months relearning an old familiar lesson: that love, alone, can’t keep anything alive—not a burgeoning skillset, not an inspired state of mind, and certainly not a five-month old baby.

I’m not sure if it’s all children, but mine requires regular feeding and rocking, every two hours—still, seven outfit changes a day, and constant mopping. She’s a mess and apparently, also sentient. This little bowl of mush needs serious eye contact, tickling, and someone to giggle with. She likes being read to aloud and often. She likes when her older sister is near, which comes to absolutely no surprise to younger siblings everywhere, across the entire spectrum of humankind, for as long as siblings have existed. She likes having her limbs examined. She does not like when I put her down to draw.

So here I am, five months later, with my first four-panel comic—and it’s only three panels. It took me 10 hours to make, from conception to sketch to final coloring, and several revisions—spread out over seven naps, each ranging from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours. If I think about how many days it took me (seven, a full week!) I lament, especially when I compare my speed to my life pre-children. 

But none of that really matters because the entire time I was drawing this comic, I was full of joy. Real joy. The kind I text my friends about because I can’t believe it’s real—that the feeling I’m always chasing is here, right now, swimming inside me. 

I feel joy flood down every avenue. I feel joy because I’m drawing and because I feel joy while I’m drawing. I feel joy because I’m pushing myself to try new things within my work, however slowly, however little by little. I feel joy because I’m getting somewhere. I feel joy because I’m trying. 

I feel joy in drawing my children, in having children who are so sweet and so round, in knowing that someone out there may recognize their own child in these drawings. In knowing that maybe a child will even recognize themselves. 

I feel joy because for a little while, my mind is quiet and my blood is steady—and that although joy is a feeling I am always chasing, it’s also something I know how to find. Joy is something I know how to create. I created it here for me, for my children, for you. 

WEDNESDAY

“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and on. My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow — which does not necessarily mean we have the same sorrows, but that we, in common, sorrow — might draw us together. It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love. And though attending to what we hate in common is too often all the rage (and it happens also to be very big business), noticing what we love in common, and studying that, might help us survive. It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.”

—from Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy

THURSDAY

My new 2024 calendar, still in its plastic wrap, lest I spill something on it before the calendar year turns.

In case you missed it last week, my new 2024 planners and calendars are now available! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

—So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: A baby sister's tiny feet.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY 

When N comes home from school each day, she runs towards me screaming. Mama!she yells, though we are only a few inches apart. I’m here to see my sister.

She walks over to the couch where I sit cradling F, who is either smiling or sleeping or spitting up, and pulls off the knit blanket that covers her. She pokes around to find F’s hands and then her feet, peering closely. They are so tiny, she says, and lifts each hand before dropping it flippantly, reaching for the feet next. She handles her baby sister carelessly, as though each hand and foot exists independently, as though they aren’t all four attached to their respective limbs, and as if the limbs aren’t attached to a body, also living and breathing, or at least trying to. 

They are so tiny, N says, lifting the left hand, examining more closely now, marveling at each set of fingernails—perfectly shaped, a smudge of moon on each finger. Fingernails that patiently wait, existing only to do their job: to keep each little finger protected, safe. 

They are so tiny, she says, investigating F’s small toes, ensuring that a proper set of five belongs to each foot. She runs her fingers over the heels—first the left one, then the right—heels that are more small buttons than they are heels, heels that could fit in your pocket if you needed, if you wanted them to. She puts a sock back on each doll’s foot and sighs. She has satisfied her daily inspection. It is time to move on.

Mom, she says seriously, in a voice that becomes more and more like a teenager’s each day. But, Mom. Did you remember to make my snack?

TUESDAY

“When our two sons were going to Hebrew school, preparing for their Bar Mitzvahs, one of them asked the Rabbi, “What if I’m not sure that I believe in god?” To which the Rabbi replied, “It’s unimportant that you believe in god. What matters is that you search for god, look for the sacred, and learn to recognize what is holy.” And with those simple words, my kids were not only liberated from their fear of trying to maintain a lifelong devotion to a single, abstract, static “belief,” but they were also given permission to put their faith into their own actions and efforts to be kind. Free to marvel at the strangeness of it all and stand unafraid of their “not-knowing.” To focus on the undeniable beauty as it unfolds in front of them. To watch and wait for wisdom.”

—from Jeff Tweedy’s newsletter, along with his cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s America(no, I do not listen to anything besides Paul Simon)

WEDNESDAY

Thank you for your warm words, comments, re-shares, and pre-orders for my forthcoming journal, Go Your Own Way. 

This is the fourth (!) journal I’ve made and it amazes me to know that soon, it will stop being a book that I made and instead become a place where you see yourself a little more clearly. Maybe it will be a place where you rediscover a part of yourself you hid away a long time ago, and you can’t remember why. Maybe you’ll resurface in these pages. Maybe you’ll swim to shore.

All books, I think, have the possibility of doubling as a mirror: in them—or maybe because of them—you see yourself as you are. I hope this book will fulfill that purpose for some of you, too.

If you’d like, you can pre-order Go Your Own Way: A Journal for Building Self-Confidence. It comes out October 24th!

THURSDAY

I opened my mail this week to find a boxful of my new 2024 planners and calendars! 

These are now available through Buy Olympia, directly through Amber Lotus Publishing, or in bookstores everywhere. 

FRIDAY

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

—The Mower by Philip Larkin

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: How to keep going

The final essay from my upcoming book, How it Feels to Find Yourself

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

For a limited time, my friends at BuyOlympia are giving away a free, 5”x7” limited edition print of my How To Keep Going paint palette with every pre-ordered copy of How it Feels to Find Yourself. 

This palette, in particular, is special to me. It accompanies the final essay in the book and is a daily reminder and source of encouragement to find the inner strength and commitment to keep going. 

This illustration outlines the steps that I’ve always relied on in moments of hopelessness and discouragement: accepting life’s duality, finding meaning in the difficult and joyful, keeping what’s useful (while discarding the rest), letting go of “should”, making peace with change, and beginning again. 

Pre-order your copy and complimentary art print here.

TUESDAY

“What do you think an artist is?…he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.” 

—Pablo Picasso

WEDNESDAY

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.”

—from The Notebooks of Raymond Carver by Raymond Carver

THURSDAY

“Don’t wait for someone to tell you that your project is worthwhile. If you’re moved to write, draw, create, produce something, that’s all the permission you need to devote some time and energy to it. Make a commitment to yourself. Some of my most rewarding collaborations over the many decades have been totally homegrown, grassroots situations (like the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy) that ended up reaching really wide audiences because—in part—they were unfettered by “too many cooks in the kitchen” bullshit or the bad advice of supposed experts.”

—10 Thoughts on Building a Life You Love by Courtney Martin in The Examined Family

FRIDAY

I.
In March the earth remembers its own name.
Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.
The rivers begin to sing. In the sky
the winter stars are sliding away; new stars
appear as, later, small blades of grain
will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place
is joyful.

II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

III.
because it is spring;
because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -
a love match that will bring forth fantastic children
who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run
    over the surface of earth;
who will believe, for years,
that everything is possible.

IV.
Born of clay,
how shall a man be holy;
born of water,
how shall a man visit the stars;
born of the seasons,
how shall a man live forever?

V.
Soon
the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,
will enter his life from the tiny egg.
On his delicate legs
he will run through the valleys of moss
down to the leaf mold by the streams,
where lately white snow lay upon the earth
like a deep and lustrous blanket
of moon-fire,

VI.
and probably
everything
is possible.

—Worm Moon by Mary Oliver

xx,

M

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Dear Somebody: Confronting your inner critic.

From The Worst Boss I've Ever Had, a comic about confronting your inner critic.

Hello, everyone! I know it's been awhile. I'm navigating some unexpected personal news and health changes, but things are finally beginning to finally shift to a manageable place. Though it's freezing here in St. Louis, I'm enjoying the seasons' transition; I hope brisk air is sweeping you into its arms wherever you are. 

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

I don't often feel like a mother. Two years into being one, the title continues to feel like a pair of too-big shoes I'm eagerly waiting to grow into. What does a mother feel like? I have my suspicions, certainly. A mother is calm. A mother is well-assembled. Someone that knows what to do. Someone who has answers, and a medicine cabinet full of tried-and-true remedies. A mother knows their way around the kitchen, and a new city, and the inner workings of their own mind. A mother is someone who knows. Someone whose heart has been split open, as I hear so often, by their child––a heart that's now grown so large there's barely enough space for it left in their chest. Is this me? I don't know. My heart seems well-adjusted to its cavity. 

N wakes up sobbing lately. Her cries are like a siren; she sits up and wails with such alarm that I wonder what terrors visited her young mind. When the crying doesn't stop, I go in and pick her up. We move to the light that slips in between the closed blinds. I sing Carole King until she says Mama, no, putting her hand to my mouth. We sit in the big chair, her face buried in my chest, my cheek resting on her head. Already she's so tall, legs like a ballerina jutting out from my either side. Her breath becomes deeper, steady. She is asleep and my arms are full of her. She is asleep and I feel strangely settled. She is asleep and I am someone who knows how to soothe. For her, I figured out how. My medicine cabinet is empty, but my heart is full. I am a mother––this I have known, but for these few minutes, I begin to believe it, too.

TUESDAY

For the WORK issue of The Nib, I made a comic about the worst boss I've ever worked for: myself. You can read the comic here on my blog and order a print issue of the The Nib – please help support this wonderful indie publication!

My 2023 calendar and planners are also now available, through Buyoly and Amber Lotus Publishing. These are excellent gifts for the upcoming season, and a great way to encourage my little business.

*Support more BIPOC makers this year! I love these hand-poured candles by Golden Hour Co. in rainier and oakmoss. 

WEDNESDAY

“You have consented to time and it is winter. The country seems bigger, for you can see through the bare trees. There are times when the woods is absolutely still and quiet. The house holds warmth. A wet snow comes in the night and covers the ground and clings to the trees, making the whole world white. For a while in the morning the world is perfect and beautiful. You think you will never forget. You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise.” 

––Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

THURSDAY

All through autumn I wish for my body to become something new. I want my body to be stronger, less sensitive to these invisible, internal changes. I want it to be stoic, indifferent to the weight of its responsibility. I want it to perform flawlessly. I disregard the fact that it completes thousands of tasks to keep my heart beating and lungs full of air, without my knowing when or how. I am grateful, I think, but I ask it for more. I want my body to be decent. I want it to look beautiful though I know it is doing too much. It is tired and needs rest, but there are books to write and school to attend and so many to care for. 

For months, I offer my body no grace. I shroud it in resentment. I criticize it and wonder why that doesn't amount to change. Why it won't simply be better, the way I imagine other people's bodies to be. I speak to it like I would never speak to another; I allow my imagination to make me even more cruel. After months of sickness, when I finally come to my senses, when I remember how love actually works, it strikes me that I have never taken my body into both arms, never voiced the words buried beneath my anger: Yes, it is you. It is you that I choose over and over again.

FRIDAY

she told me then
that they
"the slaves who were ourselves"
searched for one another
tried to get back
to places they had been before
to them that they had known
needed and loved
to them that knew

she told me then
that this searching
was hard journeying
harder even than
moving over water
than finding strange language
and people with nothing under their skin
hard journeying she told me
this way back to ourselves

––exiles return by bell hooks

xo,

M

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Dear Somebody: A Simple Hello.

A page from my sketchbook: Lisle Sur Tarn, France – reimagined with N

A quick note: Tonight I'm leading a Time Capsule workshop with the Summer Writers Institute at Washington University, where I'll teach you to make an 8-page zine that captures this moment in time––using a single sheet of paper. Join me if you wish! This virtual workshop will be casual and reflective.

A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:

MONDAY

I've been home for nearly a month now and things between me and N have improved, although she does still ask for dada while I put her to bed, help her get dressed, or do almost anything. I smile and nod along while it's happening, saving my grimacing for later––for when I am alone or on the phone, or with T, who speaks to me sympathetically, albeit with the security of someone who is loved.

It's nearly 5:15 in the evening and N and I are coloring together, bright green silky scribbles on the paper that reach for the wooden floor. She makes marks the same way a dancer leaps across the stage––deliberately, with strength, using her entire body. I excuse myself to start dinner and she follows me into the kitchen, urgently shouting to be picked up. She wants to play with the upper cabinets, where we keep the cocoa and coffee, bags of sugar and corn starch, tins of assorted mushroom teas that I impulsively bought and will, really and truly, never drink.

“I have to cook, Naddo, so I can't watch you while you play on the counter,” I say. “It's not safe to stand up there alone.” She stares at me blankly and then resumes shouting, choosing not to understand the plight of a person who can't be in two places at once.

I want to be loved, so I pick her up and put her on the counter. She opens the cabinets and grins at the assortment of powders and potions inside. She laughs maniacally––with satisfaction, I imagine, at both the scene stretched in front of her and the agility with which she controls her mother. I turn away from her, leaning against the counter so she can't fall, but she shouts “Mama!" so loudly I spin back around.

N kneels down on the counter and takes my face between both of her hands. Her eyes are open wide, studying me intensely, and I unexpectedly feel…seen. Like I am a person in the world. Like I am someone special. Like in this very moment, all N wants is for me to be here with her. She leans towards me until our noses are touching and takes a deep breath.

“Hi," she says, exhaling the word deeply. Hi. A one-syllable meditation. The most beautiful word I've ever heard.

TUESDAY

“Writing, like all art, can be a site of safety, freedom, imagination. It can hold futures and dreams, our best memories, our worst. But because we deal in language, it seems inevitable that each writer, at one time or another, must confront other uses of writing, its place in a larger structure of power, and that structure’s hold on our social hierarchies. How we take in these moments, how we react to our knowledge of them—that is what makes the difference in the kind of writing we can hope to do.

The nice thing about going your own way is that you’re already “wrong”—but in your wrongness, in being off the map, you can stay free for a little while longer. To become that writer requires a radical act of imagination. More than one. And then the courage to choose yet another path. To keep moving, and know that there is truth and strength in that.” –Yanyi, on Justifying Your Writing

WEDNESDAY

"In the early 1940’s, abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko began pushing artmaking into uncharted territory: they sought to create works that resembled their internal sources of being—their spirit or consciousness. The abstract artists of this time rejected traditional images and visual realities in favor of walking freely into their own untethered imaginations. They were explorers of their own consciousness, interested in understanding (and reflecting) the vulnerable and often unseen sides of themselves.

I often wonder why I am so interested in my own feelings. I occupy a large amount of my time with emotional sorting: sitting with, identifying, and then categorizing the various heaps of daily emotion that pile themselves upon me. It’s only later, when I finally sit down to work, that I recognize the environment that begins to build from layers of paint on paper. It is my own emotional residue, transferring itself from my hand onto the painted page. Any powerful piece of art creates an atmosphere—a feeling of sublime that transports the reader or viewer out of their own world and into another." –An excerpt from my latest column, Being, for Issue #53 of Uppercase Magazine

THURSDAY

My new 2022-2023 weekly planner with Amber Lotus Publishing is now available! You can get a copy in my BuyOlympia shop, through the Amber Lotus Publishing website, and in bookstores everywhere.

FRIDAY

When you come, bring your brown-

ness so we can be sure to please

the funders. Will you check this

box; we’re applying for a grant.

Do you have any poems that speak

to troubled teens? Bilingual is best.

Would you like to come to dinner

with the patrons and sip Patrón?

Will you tell us the stories that make

us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

Don’t read the one where you

are just like us. Born to a green house,

garden, don’t tell us how you picked

tomatoes and ate them in the dirt

watching vultures pick apart another

bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one

about your father stealing hubcaps

after a colleague said that’s what his

kind did. Tell us how he came

to the meeting wearing a poncho

and tried to sell the man his hubcaps

back. Don’t mention your father

was a teacher, spoke English, loved

making beer, loved baseball, tell us

again about the poncho, the hubcaps,

how he stole them, how he did the thing

he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

–The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual by Ada Limón

(our 24th Poet Laureate of the United States!)

xo,

M

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