For the Birds: April nourishment (& an extra special Resiliency Circle)
This month's Resiliency Circle is a collaborative effort! Plus Lady Gaga, BIRDSEED, some *discerning* writing prompts, and win free creative mentorship.
Happy World Autism Acceptance Day! I’m on a mission to serve others through writing & mentorship, and I’m doing this work as a self-employed autistic human. Your support has a bigger impact on my life than you likely know. Please know it!
When you can, thank you for reading closely, sharing widely, and upgrading to a paid subscription.
Dear birds,
I thought about using today’s intro to talk about Autism Awareness Month, a yearly event that coincides with National Poetry Month, which I think is pretty neat.
I thought about telling you that I’ll be 38 in a couple of weeks, and how it feels so special and kismet and true to get older while sensitive humans are writing lots of poems and celebrating neurodivergent agency.
Instead, I want to talk about Lady Gaga.
It was 2013 and I was in grad school, reading lots of Jack Halberstam and William Carlos Williams, straddling the English and Women’s Studies departments. Still married to a person I was not in love with but who made me feel safe, we were renting a house from a music professor away on sabbatical. This was Maine; both my cats were still alive. I hadn’t spoken to my father in maybe four years, which was finally starting to feel like old news.
And then, something happened—who knows what, or how—and I became obsessed with her. Was it just right timing? Can any of us truthfully pinpoint the origin of a special interest when they arrive so frenetically? One minute I couldn’t picture her face, and the next I was gazing up at the real thing in the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, during one of the final shows before it was torn down and replaced by a skyscraper. I see you! she yelled to the audience. To me.
I began contributing to Kate Durbin’s Gaga Stigmata (rip) project. I started working on an essay—half philosophical inquiry, half love letter addressed to Gaga herself—that would place runner-up in Black Warrior Review’s 2016 Nonfiction contest. I wrote another essay—a scholarly piece of writing that I worked on in my feminist methodologies course—deeply inspired by her gender-bending and subversive identity performances, which I saw as on peak display the minute ARTPOP dropped. (A twin essay that I worked on in that same classroom, about the subversive power of teenage girls, Plath, and Durbin’s own creative work, was recently published in Electric Gurlesque.)
I even got quoted in Buzzfeed as “Gaga scholar Sarah Cook,” a credential that means absolutely nothing to no one but me, and which nevertheless melts my heart every time I remember about it.
I just love how absolutely, adoringly weird she is! I love how she moves her body. I love the bonkers iTunes concert she played right after the release of ARTPOP, that terribly weird album full of strange cultural references (plus one or two big mistakes) and which will always remain my favorite project of hers.
I love her conflation of hero, villain, and witch, and her reclamation of monstrosity. I love the way she turns her own fashion choices + identity eras into drag shows of herself.
I love the way she’s always performing even when she’s pretending not to, and how easy it would be to read her as silly or fake because of it, when in actuality she’s in on the joke; she knows exactly what she’s doing. I love the implications—namely, that self and personhood are never not a performance. That we are always making choices about how we present ourselves to the world. That authenticity is as revealed as it is made.
I love the fact that she’s a multi-platinum Grammy Award-winning artist who does not cater to the male gaze in the way that so many of her pop star peers do.
And oh my good gawd, I fucking love Jo Calderone.
As a highly sensitive human completely bewildered by branding, marketing, and optics, and the sharp & confusing contrast between who I am and how I seem, I am full to the brim with admiration for Gaga’s playful, subversive explorations, not just of celebrity culture but of identity as a whole.
There’s a good chance you don’t care about Lady Gaga the way I do—but I’m betting you have your version, and I wonder: How often do you remember to check in with your biggest, weirdest loves? When Mayhem dropped last month, it was like I suddenly remembered about this whole other significant part of myself, a part I had quite innocently forgotten about. And yet here she is, enthusiastically intact, singing along to the same setlist every morning in the shower.
Making active time and space for the things that energize you most, the people who inspire you to nearly whacky, childish degrees, and the ideas that have the power to literally calm your nervous system is, in my humble opinion, what April is all about. Imagination + performance + creativity + unapologetic amplification of what matters to you, no matter its reputation.
I hope you make lots and lots of time and space to love your obsessions and your little monsters this month.
And I hope you do some of that loving in public, where it has the chance to become contagious.
xoxo,
S
P.S. That was…a lot of links. If you need specific prompting, I really do recommend watching this SNL performance as well as this really endearing interview, where Gaga speaks candidly about artistry versus stardom.
BIRDSEED
~a monthly playlist, curated by M. (Thank you for buying us that shower-proof speaker!!)~
April Resiliency Circle: “What Moves You”
This month’s Resiliency Circle is a deeply inspiring prompt-based workshop hosted by the brilliant
!Here’s a few words from Rebecca herself:
These days, the daily news moves many of us toward stress and fear, especially those of us attuned toward meanings and connections, and extra-especially those of us who are neurodivergent and always feel things deeply.
In this gathering, we will look at several poems and a work of art for inspiration, and then we’ll write according to related prompts. By doing so, we’ll connect with things that move us toward life and beauty, even amid worry and stress.
If you are:
Looking for easeful ways to keep your head above water,
Craving gentle, low-stakes community, or
Trying to prioritize some creative nourishment this month
…then this workshop is for you!
We’ll gather on Friday, April 25th at 9:30am PST / 12:30pm EST for 90 minutes. Zoom link + RSVP included at the bottom of today’s newsletter.
The Resiliency Circle is where paid readers of For the Birds gather in order to write, reflect, and nurture our creativity. Learn more here.
is a teacher who uses books, poetry, and art to guide youth and adults into self-realization and creative expression. She has taught high school American Lit, college freshman Composition, and middle school Creative Writing, as well as workshops in her Lynchburg, Virginia, community, where she is also a museum docent. Find her writing in places like Kinfolk Magazine, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, the Curator, Midstory Magazine, and in her own Substack, Out for Stars.
Win free creative mentorship!
In honor of the joy and enthusiasm that this month brings, I’m running two raffles for free hour-long creative mentorship sessions with me.
Here’s how to participate:
Were you a paid reader on or before March 31st of this year? Great—you’re in! Nothing for you to do. One currently established paid reader will receive a free session with me.
All readers who upgrade to paid this month will be entered into their own separate pot! (If I get two new paid readers in April, then you’ve got a 50% chance of winning, etc.)
I’ll reach out to both winners by email on May 1st :)
Some discerning writing prompts
For this month’s writing prompt, I was instinctively pulled toward Jessica Blaine Smith’s “Birds Oracle Deck,” and the card I drew was so on the nose that I laughed out loud—one of those hard, flat laughs, like your body is bullying the air right out of you.
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