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. We are not really special. The whole world has done this, even if “meditation” has not been the intention, or if the quiet has lasted just the space of a heartbeat, now and then.
Inside of all the turbulence, there has been still life.
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.
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…
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 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…
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…
Dear Rebecca, Maybe you already know this: When I was in my late 20s and in graduate school at Stanford, you came to give a talk about the American West. I think it was right before you published River of Shadows, your book on Eadward Muybridge and the technological west. I approached you afterwards. I told…