Volume 5, No. 12: Thinking with Water, Reading with Friends

Greetings, poetry people! It has been a long time. I did not mean for a month to go by, but here we are. It’s been a busy fall: school, community events, visits with family, poetry-making, applying to transfer to finish my BA. Talking to trees and tending to friendships.

Before we get into it, I want to mention an event I’m participating in in November: the 30 Poems in November Fundraiser put on by the Center for New Americans. The Center for New Americans serves immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers in my home of Western Massachusetts. They offer free English classes, legal support, and other essential services.

The annual Poem-a-thon is a fundraiser for the CNM’s free English classes. I’ll be writing a poem every day in November, and I hope you’ll consider donating! My goal is to raise $500. Maybe you can contribute $30, one dollar for every poem? You can donate via my donation page here, and in the link above.

I hope to share a few of the poems I write here throughout the month. The event organizers send out a prompt every day (and it’s not to late to join as a writer!) but I’ll also be using prompts from Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal’s amazing newsletter Mondays are Free.

Okay, let’s talk about some October things!

In this issue...

• Reading with Friends

• Writing in Emily Dickinson’s House

• Antidote Books

• Tree Talk: FALL!

• Some Art: My Mind in Bloom at A.P.E. Arts

• Thinking With Water

• Wonder & Care

Reading with Friends

I have a new reading strategy and it is buddy reading. Buddy reading is all I want to do. I have abandoned all reading challenges (including my own) and projects (well, I’m still reading 40×40 books, but haphazardly). Instead, I am reveling in reading with friends and for book clubs. Even when I’m not officially buddy reading (which, to me, just means reading a book at the same time as a friend and chatting about it), I’m reading books I know friends have already read and loved so we can discuss. Writing, it turns out, is not a solitary act. Neither is reading. I’ve finished 17 books since my last newsletter. There were only three that I did not actively buddy read or discuss with people I care about. I cannot recommend this practice highly enough.

Briefly, a few of my favorites:

The Lilac People by Milo Todd: This book made me think so much about the connections between liberation and survival. I exchanged many long voices notes with my pal Camilla about this one, and I’m still thinking about all the ways Todd explores queer grief, visibility, archives, and complicity.

So Many Stars by Caro De Robertis: I came away from this collection of oral histories with trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and Two-Spirit elders of color feeling so humbled. Rather than a collection of interviews, the book is broken into themed chapters, and each chapter includes a chorus of different voices. This structure is so moving to me. It felt like a way to celebrate individual lives without putting individuals on a pedestal.

The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow: This beautiful memoir is about a place I love dearly: Knoll Farm, where I lived and worked during the summer of 2008 when I was 22. It was a formative place for me, and it was so special to read about it and to share some of my memories of that summer with my friend Emma as we buddy read it. It’s also simply a gorgeous book about belonging, land, motherhood, death, seasonal cycles, sheep, and what it means to know and love a place. Helen is such a generous, thoughtful person. I think you should read this book—and buy it if you can!

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls: My book club choose this incredible graphic memoir as our pick for October, and I can’t wait to talk about it with them this weekend. Happily for me, I haven’t had to wait to talk about it, because it’s another book I got to buddy read with Emma! Something we talked about a lot while reading it is the incredible amount of work that obviously went into it—and how transformative the actual making of the book was for Tessa Hulls.

This is something I can’t stop thinking about. It reminds me of a passage from Body Work by Melissa Febos which I have never forgotten: “I want more than mechanics, more than experimentation. I want to feel on the page how the writer changed. How the act of writing changed them.” Feeding Ghosts is an incredible feat: it’s the story of three generations of women in Hulls’s family, a cultural history of China, a psychological exploration of trauma and lineage. I have never read anything like it. I was utterly awed by it. I could feel on the page how the making of it changed the author.

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis: This book has been on my TBR for a while and now I have read it, sort of, because I will never be done reading it. The titular poem is a long narrative poem composed entirely of titles and exhibition text of art pieces in which a Black female figure appears (and some pieces made by Black women in which Black female figures do not appear). Lewis did not change or alter the found text, beyond punctuation. The thing she creates is stunning beyond belief, a witness to incredible violence, a claim, an un-making, a re-making. It’s one of the most remarkable poems I’ve ever read. There’s also an essay about the making of the poem at the end of this book that shook me to my core. Again: the transformative power of making, but also: the weight of making. What making can take from you. The physical, emotional, and spiritual labor of it. This poem is a gift I do not take lightly.

Berenice Abbott: Photographs: Earlier this year I saw an exhibition of Berenice Abbott’s photographs at the Clark in Williamstown. I was completely dazzled by her portraits, especially the ones she took of queer writers and artists in the 1920s, and immediately checked a book of her work out from the library. I’ve been enjoying talking about photography and portraiture with my friend Charlott, and all of those conversations enhanced my experience of looking at these photos. I find her New York photography less interesting than her portraits, but I loved the book overall. My favorite photograph, without question, is this portrait of Claude McKay, which I love beyond reason.

Writing in Emily Dickinson’s House

On an evening in mid-October, I spent two hours sitting at a little folding desk in Emily Dickinson’s parlor, writing.

For a few nights each season (I think), the Dickinson Museum hosts Mild Nights — two hours of quiet writing in community in the poet’s house. There are 10 slots, with people set up in different rooms. We took a tiny tour and then settled into our desks. I was in the parlor along with three other people. I brought my collected poems, my notebook, and a pencil (no pens allowed). I didn’t arrive with any particular project in mind. Instead, I wrote into some prompts I’d made for myself, questions I divined (a process inspired by the poet Leila Chatti, whose collection Wildness Before Something Sublime is, I think, a book of my life) from Emily Dickinson’s poems. Outside, the sun set and the sky grew dark. The little circle of lamplight glowed on my desk. I wrote scraps and beginnings. Around me, the quiet of other people writing and thinking.

It was a profoundly moving experience. There is something that lives in physical spaces. A presence, a weight, a shape. I was not visited by Emily’s ghost—but I wasn’t not visited by her ghost. I felt the centuries. I felt small and alive. In some minor but consequential way, I stepped into the mystery on that night, in my notebook, in Emily Dickinson’s parlor.

Spots on these Mild Nights are $75—not the cheapest way to spend an evening. But it was worth it and then some for me. I encourage you to check it out if you’re local and intrigued.

Antidote Books

A friend and newsletter reader (hi Jay!) recommended Antidote Books in Brattleboro to me. I had never been there, so I made a point of visiting a few weekends ago. WOWIE! I have rarely been so impressed and delighted by a bookstore. It’s a very small space attached to a very tasty cafe (I had a fantastic rose tea latte and a doughnut), and it is impeccably curated. It’s so well-curated, in fact, that I am not going to be able to go there very often, because I do not think it will be possible for me to leave without a book.

There’s a wall of incredible art books and unusual cookbooks. There’s a chapbook rack! It is full of queer and radical books from indie presses. They highlight translated books and local authors. There were so many books I’d never heard of that sounded SO INTERESTING! I could have easily spent twice as long browsing this tiny space.

I wanted to buy 15 books but I only bought one! I deserve a lot of gold stars for this, I think. Here’s what I did buy:

From the publisher: “Taking its inspiration from this world, Let's Become Fungal! looks at a range of Indigenous practices from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia that are rooted in multispecies collaboration, symbiosis, alliances, non-monetary resource exchange, decentralization, bottom-up methods and mutual dependency—all suggestive of the behavior of the mycelium.”

They also have events! Local friends, please go visit and then tell me what you bought so I can live vicariously through you.

Tree Talk: FALL!

We’re in a bad drought year and plants are struggling. At first I thought we weren’t going to get much in the way of foliage, because there was a lot of brown and bare trees at the end of September and beginning of October. And then. Then came the magic. Like these trees, in this sunlight:

And these leaves:

And the view from the library at school these past few weeks, where I spent a lot of time:

I will spend the rest of my life trying and failing to express my awe at this biological process that happens every year, that turns forests into sunsets. This universe is full of miracles, but this miracle is, for me, the most miraculous. I literally cannot explain to you how wildly I love it. I do not have the words for the enormity of my life.

Some Art: My Mind in Bloom at A.P.E. Arts

My friend Kristin and I got to see a really fantastic exhibition at A.P.E. in Northampton, which is quickly becoming a favorite gallery. Here’s a little bit about the show:

There were several pieces I loved, including some incredible mask installations. There was also an interactive public art project, The Missing Quilt. There were scraps of fabric in all different colors and patterns. We were invited to write down something we missed, and then physically stitch it to the quilt, using needles and thread provided. I loved reading what other people had written, but I also found the whole process very moving. The needles were blunt, and stitching my piece onto the quilt took effort. I liked the way it forced me to slow down for a moment, to think and feel the work of missing something.

Thinking With Water

I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about water this month. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot with water this month. With water, and with other people. I am never very far away from water. Rivers, lakes, the ocean, tears. Most days, the world feels impossible to inhabit. The scope of the evils being enacted right now, impossible. The enormity of the suffering, the endlessness of the destruction, impossible. Water is not unaffected. Water is suffering, too.

But water also holds infinite space within it. Water, always in a state of transformation. Always becoming another version of itself. Always moving, always still. Water: a living being, but without an “I". A collection of many. There are a thousand beautiful metaphors I can (and will) make about water, a thousand stories water tells, a thousand different wisdoms water offers. And there is also the fact of it. The way water moves is not a metaphor. Its aliveness is not a metaphor. If you have ever loved a river, you know this.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the purpose of poetry, and then, eventually, I stop. I come back to the poems, what they do in my body, who they connect me to, what they bring me toward. I spend a lot of time thinking with water, and then, eventually, I stop. I go to the water.

I listen to it. I try. I pay attention. I try. This is most of it, I think, most of loving, most of living: I listen. I pay attention. I try.

Wonder & Care

Operation Milkweed is a collection of mutual aid initiatives supporting families impacted by ICE raids in Massachusetts. From their website:

“Operation Milkweed is the ultimate collection of mutual aid and direct support for Massachusetts families impacted by ICE enforcement since 2025. These fundraisers were created by the families themselves and their advocates. Donations are NOT tax-deductible, and we take no cut of any donations. Just as monarch butterflies use milkweed plants to deter predators and create safe conditions during migration, immigrant families need community support when facing ICE enforcement. Be the milkweed.”

They highlight the campaigns that need the most urgent support at any given moment, but you can also search by location. I’ve been checking in about once a week and donating what I can to different folks.

Finally, another reminder that you can donate to my 30 Poems in November fundraiser in support of the Center for New Americans here!

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: the sun rising over the fields on one of my favorite roads.

Thanks, as always for reading. Maybe I’ll see you back here next week, but no promises.