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.
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…
On Power and Aporia in the Academy: A Response in Three Parts
I posted something on my Medium page last night. 950 people have read it in about 14 hours now. That feels like a lot. If you read it, too, thank you, truly. If you don’t, I’ll chalk it up to the crazy-making (though somewhat hilarious, once you get some distance) obfuscation of Derrida! – Amy…
Not Broken
On the morning of election day last week my eight-year-old was lying on the sofa with a blanket over his head. “What’s integrity?” we heard him say, in a muffled sort of way. I took a deep breath and said, “Wow.” Then breathed some more. “Integrity,” I said, “is when a person is making choices…
On History, Patriarchy, and Possibility, Too (With the Help of Virginia Woolf and Facebook)
I do not work in higher education. I work as a mother. I work as a poet. I work part-time as a copyeditor. I work on my children’s school board, as a political activist, and for my rural, collectively-owned community. All those things are work. But because of the society in which we live,…
Have I mentioned Uncertainty Club?
“It is distressing, baffling, confusing, but the fact must be faced; there is no certainty in heaven above or on earth below.” – Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Virginia Woolf was right. Of course. But it’s what we say in Zen, too. And at Pacific Zen Institute, we have started an online magazine of Zen and…
After the Fire, Flood: Announcing Poetry451 and #CDCpoetryflood
It’s been a wild autumn. I was picking up speed here, posting about Barbuda and Puerto Rico, and a poem in response to Las Vegas, and then…silence. The reason for my silence was fire. I live in Santa Rosa, which was the city hardest hit by the Northern California fires in October. I was rendered…
Untitled
I want to write a poem about silence just like almost every other poet ever probably and am of course twisted up immediately in words but here is why I want to write a poem about silence silencers all sorts of silencers metal ones and flesh ones and metal ones that cut flesh with their…
On Puerto Rico (how to learn, how to help) …
This post will not be complete or even sufficient, but it’s what I have in me right now. Fifteen years ago I spent time on Guam and in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (which together form the Mariana Island archipelago) to help make a documentary about the indigenous communities there and the…