It’s been dark and dreary and I’ve posted nothing here in over six months. Which doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. I’ve spent much of this surreal new year scribbling journal entries for a weekly virtual writing workshop hosted by one of my favorite contemporary authors, Sabrina Orah Mark (which just concluded yesterday morning—but there are more coming up, so take one if you can).
Yes, a journaling workshop: each week, I and nine beautiful women from all over the world were tasked with bringing in a handful of journal entries from the previous seven days—scraps, notes, to-do lists, snippets of poems, of stories, of nonsense, doodles, prayers, inventories, photographs, data, memoire, confessionals, erasures, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. My every Monday morning, these last five weeks, began with a cathartic exchange of raw & lovely creative energy.
Another thing I’ve been doing a lot of lately is reading fantasy stories—more than usual, I mean—and walking around in the snow listening to Mary Lattimore on my headphones. (Highly recommend Christelle Dabos’ The Mirror Visitor quartet if you are looking for something very dreamy and escapist and mysterious and love Jane Austen and/or Hayao Miyazaki.) Honestly, reading a bit of whatever escapist fantasy novel I’m on and taking my little Mary Lattimore walk through my neighborhood are the most important parts of my day lately. And I’ve been loving winter more than I usually do, this year. The quiet, the cold. Bundling. Being alone nearly everywhere you wander.
Anyway, I’m not going to write much more here today, but I’m going to share this little sweep of a poem1 (or poem in progress? who knows if I’ll come back to it) that I wrote for yesterday morning’s workshop. Someone a few weeks ago in the workshop said they can’t always tell what’s reality and what’s fantasy in my journal entries (which is at once a little flattering, a little exciting, and a little unsettling to me!). I decided to lean into that by mythologizing my daily walk in this poem, transforming it into some sort of a scavenger hunt, an enchantment, a riddle (and I’d be delighted to hear if anyone recognizes anything from the Wilkinsburg/Edgewood area in these lines).
If you’re in need of a creative writing prompt, or if you just want to make your world feel a little nicer and more magical than it maybe feels lately, I suggest you try it yourself.
Neighborhood
Past a pitch-
black portal
Past gauzy giraffes
guarding a library
Into the forest: find the path
that runs beneath two
seal-sleek
trees:
they form an X when you stand before them
but up close they don’t touch at all
Or else, find the ocean
and then turn your back on it
Keep walking ’til you find
stairs and
descend:
flight,
flight,
flight,
asterisk,
flight,
flight,
flight—
💕 dev
Alas, the formatting is a little wonky unless you're on desktop—you've been warned.
It’s always a delight to get a notification that you’ve posted.