Writing Not In This Place But Another Place

New work in Khôra

I keep wondering how to do all of the everything there is. My list is a beautiful hopeful list filled with wonderful possibilities for things that might never see the light of day. I keep wondering how to just touch my brush down again after my show in March. I keep wondering how to call all the calls and listen to all the listens and write back to my aunt, and write more and finish reading a book and maybe slow my heartbeat just so, so that I can sit by a fire and stare at its sparks which is a bit like making room for myself again. Or just burning more holes in the air for my head to poke out of.

One of the things that is a comfort amongst all the things that are not a comfort is reading how I am not the only overwhelmed human artist looking for an out or really just a way in. There is a lot of writing about it. About folks who are overwhelmed by how to activist, how not to turn away, their phones, their business models, by all the to-do’s and if you’re paying attention, the to-don’ts. But Margaux reminded me today via carrier pigeon that we would be no good without our bee-like attention spans. We’d fill the holes with more if we had too much downtime. Really I’m just looking for a deadline. And fewer ideas maybe. There is so much to do + there is also a lot of weeding. Spring is an itchy time.

Which leads me to this story which I suppose is about all of this and I also suppose is really about me which I deny in the piece itself.

The Four Portraits + Violet, the piece I wrote and pictured this month for Khôra Journal, is out today. It’s a portrait of four flowers who are women who are flowers. It’s a portrait of me, maybe you, and also all the women who have ever been smushed flat between the covers of a book. You’ll see what I mean if you read. You can also listen here but it’s so much better for you to look there so you can see all the darkly pretty pictures which I hope are like portals to something interstellar.

What I forgot to tell you this whole while, while I was wintering and writing and resting and having a one year substacking anniversary and combing the river’s edge for every other idea than the ones I have had all along, is that I was asked to be part of a curated group of artist-writers for Khôra, an on-line art and lit space for the next few months. Khôra is the publishing arm of Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing, a collaboration with writer and editor Leigh Hopkins who is seriously wonderful. I get to share work, give and get feedback with three other writers, poets, artists + Leigh. I get to create whatever I want. I made myself some parameters (which I’ll write about next in a piece I am making for you called “How to Make Yourself (some really good) Parameters”.)

I’ve learned so much in such a short time about writing, myself, and perhaps what I love the most, other people’s creative processes. Settling into that kind of growth is extraordinary actually. It’s a river raft ride. It needs me to steer sometimes and let go and just float other times. Perhaps you can come down river too if you choose to participate by reading.

I keep thinking about freelancing without a deadline. Without the deadline or the contract or whatever gets you to concentrate and revise and decide and revise and decide (and edit pictures and think and forget to breathe), and have place to hand it in, I, like you maybe, keep getting swept up into my own weird river, falling in sometimes, in such a rush, in such hopes of seeing making doing everything, I sort of begin to drown in the same river of my everything and my own making. But maybe thats the way freelancing is. Maybe this is the way this modern life is. And maybe this river metaphor is a little drab.

Anyway, it’s taken me two weeks just to get here but we’re here. I have to keep myself tethered or else I will float away, a balloon over land over my own river of all the things to make happen.

This was sort of the impetus for the piece I will link you to. All the mundane shit there is to think about along with the existential crisis of fading away all wrapped into four flowers. The flowers who are women who are flowers. Perhaps it’s about what it is to live and what it is to know it will be over at some point and what it is to hold both simultaneously, like everything else we hold and juggle. Perhaps what I wrote is simply what it is, what it is to be in the world at all.

You can read more of what it is here: FOUR PORTRAITS + VIOLET: A STORY IN PICTURES AND WORDS

What I’m into this month:

Reading Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Brian Dillon’s Affinities (not just for the cover). Also, Clarice Lispector short stories, Bruno Shulz.

This gorgeous poem written by my friend and vecino here in NM, Tim Rafael. This poem won the Terrain Poetry prize chosen by poet Ross Gay snd its no surprise.

Getting ready for my next Watercolor for Writers workshop (still room if you want to join—it’s a good one!) and designing a new palette for LDBA.

Saying farewell to Faith Ringgold who died this month and who I met once in the bathroom at the Brooklyn Museum and complimented her on her amazing technicolor dreamcoat, quilted of course.

Starting seeds and planting new roses to make a garden. But mostly pulling tiny little ragweeds out of our 1/4 acre and blowing my runny allergic nose.

And waiting for What I Can't Bear Losing: Essays by Gerald Stern to arrive. He passed this week at 97. I remember him dining at the restaurant where writers from the Writers Workshop would eat and where I would serve them their dinners. Read my friend Michael Judge’s beautiful elegy/celebration of his teacher Gerald Stern.