For the Birds: a big, *personal* publication announcement
stories + edits + daughters + mothers. Plus an investigatory writing prompt for my paid readers <3
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1.
On Mother’s Day, we hiked.
I have a handful of instant photos I could share with you: Macro shots of lupine and western buttercups, perfectly in-and-out of focus. Blues like the first blue, greens like the first green. A double exposure that turns sky into water and grass into watercolors.
A perfect butterfly, perfectly camouflaged.
Moss so golden and textured that the photo made me laugh when I first saw it: made me want to reach a finger out, thinking I’d be able to feel more than what I did: just a glossy, untextured surface, reflective in the right lighting.
Alternatively, I could show you these ones:
2.
Anne Sexton:
“I am often being personal,” she once said to a classroom full of students, “but I am not being personal about myself.”
I have never struggled to understand what she means.
3.
Two winters ago, I had a dream. I was meeting Anne Sexton’s nephew, showing him a new project wherein I had begun translating his aunt’s poems into “templates,” which could then be used to write new poems.
When I woke up, I remembered a single bracketed title at the top of a page: [“Mildly Gendered Description”].
I understood right away: I had translated “Her Kind” into a poem-template, in a dream.
If you only know one Anne Sexton poem, “Her Kind” is likely the one you know.
Two winters ago, buzzing with nearly 20 years of admiration for Anne, I got to work.
4.
Four sections in and I still can’t decide what today’s newsletter is about—a hike, a publication (one I haven’t even mentioned yet), or a daughter. Me. What’s the angle?
Sharing shapes the story—what I choose to show you, and what I don’t. Which photos. Which feelings.
Editing shapes the story, too: What I condense, and what I keep; what I hang onto most fervently, the parts I grip so hard they start to crinkle.
There are certain parts of certain stories I would rather bend than let go of.
And others? I let them go. Everything I toss shapes the story, too. What I release. What I forget.
What I didn’t see. What I did.
What I captured. What I did not.
5.
Our Mother’s Day hike took place in Lyle, Washington, just across the river from where we live, on the grounds of a new natural area owned by Friends of the Columbia Gorge. There are no proper hiking paths in place yet, but my friend / mentor / hiking bff, Bill, knows all about these kinds of local gems; a retired wildlife biologist, he’ll be conducting a year-long survey of the entire 105 acre area.
Picture it: Me, M, and Bill, walking and walking and talking and talking—a little education here, some laughter over there—pausing so I could duck real low, almost horizontal, and take an awkward photo; or hold a flower still while I obverse the beetle cushioned in its pistil; or take my sweatshirt off once I had finally (finally!) heated up. We talked about the things we always talk about and, more importantly, the way we always talk about them: creativity, travel; the outdoors and stewardship; photography; my new part-time job as a teaching-writer for neurodivergent humans; friendship. All of it glittering with devotion and gratitude.
When Mo and I hike with Bill, we remember how good our present-day lives already are. We’re reminded of our favorite version of the story we tell about ourselves. In this one, many things are held, and many, many things have been released for good.
6.
I wonder what happened two winters ago? What made me so extra receptive and full of motivation. The dream was electric—most of my dreams are; many of them take time to recover from—and in a thoughtless way I charged forward. Thoughtless because there was nothing to think about; thoughtless because some ideas live outside the space where thinking occurs. One by one, night after night, I translated one of Sexton’s poems into a poem-template right before going to sleep, and I used the template to write a new poem every following morning.
I did this for the entire month. It was February. I finished with 27 templates and 27 poems.
About halfway through the month something else showed up, something loud and vivid and fully situated in the waking hours of my life, in the precise middle of the day, in the precise middle of the month. One sentence, then another. A jolt of them. They were so personal. An essay started falling out of me. I was primed. I was ready. I had been awake long enough to hear it. I dropped everything I was doing and ran to my laptop, catching everything in real time. In a waking fever, I wrote it all down.
I gave it a name—“Swan Singing.”
I’d been thinking about birds & metaphors. Birds, and metaphors, and templates, and Anne.
7.
I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I edited and cut and reordered and wrote some more, made space for all the divulgences divulging themselves to me. My writing has always been of a confessional nature, and yet this time was different. More vulnerable, yet more crafted. More crafted so as to contain more confessions, a whole under-inspected lot of them. Experiences that needed to be written from, and through.
Dear Reader: I wrote an essay that took every single thing out of me. It went through multiple drafts. I had help from three different readers. I reordered the text in such dramatic ways that it scares me to think about the earlier versions—not because they were bad, but because it would have been so, so easy to have stopped sooner.
8.
Writing is looking. Writing is looking away. Writing is capturing. Writing is finally, finally! setting the thing down. Writing is personal. Writing is personal writing about impersonal things. Writing is personal when it’s about people, but it can be personal when it’s not about people, too, and it can be about people even when the people are memories and versions and parts and iterations and sided-stories, full of everything you can muster to the best of your ability; there you are, trying to hold the truth in one hand and something like the benefit of the doubt in the other, trying to make something pretty without toppling in either direction. Trying not to fall and hit your head. Writing is dangerous. Some of it is personal. All of it is real.
9.
On Mother’s Day, we hiked. On Mother’s Day I texted my mother hello, sent the traditional words of celebration. I texted other mothers, too—B, V. On Mother’s Day I celebrated, briefly, my own childlessness, a zealous choice for which I carry no ounce of regret or confusion. On Mother’s Day, I thought about the young people who M and I offer support to—social, emotional, financial—as they need it, as we are able. (I have tucked a spell for good boundaries, yours and mine, into the writing of that last sentence.) On Mother’s Day, we hiked and hiked and hiked, guided by Bill’s enthusiasm, and secretly to myself I counted on one hand the number of men who I have ever felt truly safe around, men who I can be my full, unmasked self with. On Mother’s Day, I hiked with two of those rare men.
10.
Dear reader: Two days before Mother’s Day, and almost three years in the making, “Swan Singing” was published by Hobart Pulp.
You can read it here. I would be so grateful if you did.
I would be so grateful if you read it and then shared it with one other person—maybe someone who has also (tw) navigated tense familial relationships where emotional abuse, mental illness, and difficult mother-daughter relationships are present. Not just present—common and normal.
Why all this asking—nearly begging—to be read?
Because at certain junctures, some of us are flooded with the need to expose the thing, to give it light and air, and quickly.
As many eyes. As many molecules.
At certain junctures, healing and expressing are impossible to tell apart. The one camouflages perfectly into the other.
11.
On Mother’s Day, in my own divergent way, I celebrated my mother.
In my own divergent way, I celebrated myself, too.
The essay is for her. And her and her and her and her and her. All of them. But all of us, too.
I am ready to let this one go.
Writing is never finished, only abandoned, so they say.
Nope: This one’s finished.
There was need, and I was able.
Your own weird im/personal guardrails
~an investigatory journal prompt~
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