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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