Irish Soda Bread
All Irish ancestors are famine ancestors, in one way or another…. And inside this simple bread are all the whispers. So much complexity.
Still Life
We have sat quietly in front of our computer screens in California, Washington, New Mexico, Mexico, India, Canada, and elsewhere – through pandemic, divorce, social unrest, insurrection, the death of loved ones, catastrophic wildfire…. Inside of all the turbulence, there has been still life.
Celtic Time Begins in Darkness
Last weekend, I either learned or was receptive enough to hear that Halloween, or Samhain, marks the Celtic new year. As in, the start of the cycle of seasons, not merely an autumn holiday on the way to the end of the year, as I grew up believing. The Irish teacher/guide who said this (in…
The Year That Could Not Be Written
This has been a year that does not want to be written. Out loud.
I had an essay in progress about the way my son was navigating loneliness but decided it was too private.
And then, fire.
Dear Eavan Boland
I pitched something to Lit Hub and they took it. A dream. But bittersweet. Because it’s for Eavan Boland. It’s about motherhood, and middle age, and passion and confusion and regret. So it’s also for all mothers who have art stirring, and waiting, inside them. Go be you. I know it feels hard. But do…
“The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love…” or, Waking Up with Simone on Easter Morning
Good morning. It is Easter and the sun just rose. Every morning recently I have been waking and sitting with my coffee, my journal, my cat, and Simone Weil. She was a radical philosopher, a mystic and marxist, a spiritual seeker and committed materialist, who relentlessly sought an experience of the reality of justice and…
Flower Mind / #FireHaiku
During the Kincade Fire some friends and I wrote some little things. Literally, little things: haiku. And then I wrapped some more words around them, and published it on Medium. I’m just getting around to putting it here. I hope you enjoy.
I Refuse. And I Nurture, Too.
The seed of this piece of writing is fatigue.The seed of this piece of writing is anger.The seed of this piece of writing is curl-up-in-a-ball-and-remember-that-shitty-Christian-pregnancy-clinic-that-showed-you-oversized-photos-of-fetuses-and-cry-but-no!-there’s-so-much-work-to-do-plus-your-kids-need-you-and-so-do-other-people-too. Right now I have three pieces of work to do, in front of me–One is a book review about British concentration camps during famine, plague, and war in India and…
Nutcracker, I Have No Patience For You Anymore
I have a new piece up at Medium. If you adore the Nutcracker, it will … well, make you think about it. I went on a field trip with my 8-year-old and my head nearly exploded, so I had to write. It’s a quick pastiche of thinking about sugar and ballet and colonial power. View…
We Never Know When We May Need a Hand Extended Across the Sea
November 22, 2018 I am aware that I am sitting in a house on Wappo land, in the Mayacamas Mountains. I am sitting on land that is owned collectively, in a house that is owned collectively, as part of one small effort to live an alternative to the steamrolling system called private property and industrial…
Two Pieces for #MeToo: “Nice Men” and some anger, unloosed
I’ve published two pieces in the past few days: a poem on the website Poets Reading the News, and a raw ‘assay’ into my own history of sexual assault, on my Medium page. I was already tired of holding on so tightly to my story, and have written about it elsewhere, in an oblique, intellectualizing sort of…