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…
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.
books / creativity / feminism / history / motherhood / poetry / writing
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…
community / Earth / magic / social change
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…
climate change / community / creativity / Earth / nature / poetry / storytelling / writing
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
“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…
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…
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…
