Three Sisters Make a Wish for Uppercase Issue #67 (2025)
A year from now, here are five things from this week that I'd like to remember:
MONDAY
For my current Being column, I wrote about taking creative inventory. I make an effort to do this at the beginning of ever quarter, in order to re-align my creative work with my evolving values. An excerpt is below; the entire article is available for reading in the current issue of Uppercase Magazine.
Three Sisters Make a Wish, published in Issue 67 of Uppercase Magazine (2025)
“On a rudimentary level, this means disengaging with behavior where other people’s lives and work stamps out the value of mine. I stop scrolling Instagram, where it becomes easy to believe that everyone else is better at everything—from parenting to painting—than me. I stop reading books by artists I love if I find that I’m comparing my voice to theirs. Instead of turning to Pinterest—or even the books in my studio, for inspiration, I head to the library. I turn back 100 years or so and usually find the most exciting inspiration in work that was created prior to the Internet’s existence—before the allure of someone else’s life and creativity became more important than my own.
On a more conscious level, this work means recognizing my true voice—my values, stories, and desires, deeply enough to separate it from the rest. When self-doubt creeps in and tells me my work isn’t good enough, I recognize that it’s the voice of my fear, who can’t bear to see me fail. When the pressure of producing more work than is sustainable grinds at me, I recognize that it’s the voice of my immigrant upbringing that tells me I must succeed to be worthy, even of my own love.”
—from Creative Inventory: Going Back to the Basics for Issue 67 of Uppercase Magazine
TUESDAY
“My grandmother says that mango trees used to belong to everyone”; tracing the removal of Confederate monuments across the American south; the principles of patience.
WEDNESDAY
The cover of LEARNING TO LET GO, published by Michael O’Mara Books (2025)
The UK edition of LEARN TO LET GO, titled LEARNING TO LET GO, came out this week! I’m thrilled to have this edition available for overseas readers, and very grateful to Michael O’Mara for supporting this book.
If you’re in the UK or overseas, please support this edition of the journal buy purchasing directly through Michael O’Mara, Amazon UK, Waterstones, or at your local independent bookstore.
For a limited time, Bookshop.org is offering 10% off with the code LOVEBOOKSHOPS — it’s the perfect time to pick a copy or two for the upcoming holiday season. Thank you, always, for your support and encouragement.
THURSDAY
Some of you may remember that I painted Tony Hoagland’s Reasons to Survive November during my MFA program three years ago. I was introduced to the poem by Laura Olin and from the moment I read the first line, the poem has never left my brain.
To me, the mark of good art is if it propels the reader to do something. Hoagland’s poem did that for me; it inspired me to pick up a paintbrush and create something new. The poem itself speaks of an enemy, and in my early years of motherhood, the enemy felt external: the many obstacles that stood in between me and the art I so desperately wanted—needed, to make.
Over the past handful of years, I’ve worked myself up into a fever trying to make emotive work—not work based on an emotional subject or experience, but work that made the viewer feel. How can I use colors to better express certain emotions? How can I use texture to create an emotional landscape? How can word and image come together to create something otherwise inexplicable? How can I make a simple drawing that beckons a feeling otherwise unseen, a feeling that can only survive deep inside the heart?
Years later, the questions above are still the questions I ask myself each time I sit down to make. And years later, Hoagland’s poem still inspires me to take action: to pick up a paintbrush and create. But as I grow as a person and as an artist, my enemy looks less like someone or something outside of me. The more I make, the more deeply I understand that my biggest obstacle isn’t balancing motherhood and career, finding clients, or growing an online platform: it’s reducing the volume of the voice inside me that says I’m destined to fail.
Reasons to Survive November hanging in our mudroom (2025)
This painting now hangs in our mudroom; N refers to it as The November Poem. Most days, I walk right past it in an effort to tidy the mountain of shoes, pack backpacks, or shove tiny feet into even tinier socks. But when I do look up, I see much more than a strange painting laden with young brushstrokes and skewed perspective. I see myself in a kaleidoscope, through a million different lenses, every version of myself eager to help the next survive.
FRIDAY
November like a train wreck—
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
The sky is a thick, cold gauze—
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.
—Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.
I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
—Reasons to Survive November by Tony Hoagland
See you next week!
xx,
M
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