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“The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear.” John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent

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“The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear.” John Climacus’s The Ladder of Divine Ascent

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Hildegard, Tarkovsky, Citrus Trees by Nicolette Polek

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June 3, 2026 – “In humility and trials, fruit can emerge.”

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“I was no longer the center of my life and therefore I could see God in everything...”

-Hildegard von Bingen

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Kate May-Price inevitability finds herself living with the beginning and end in mind. She writes to examine emotional complexity and to re-enliven life when it’s grey outside her home in New York City. Her debut chapbook, Faster, Clarion is available from Bottlecap Press. She was a 2025 Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow.

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Sources:

1. https://jessicadore.substack.com/p/offering-february-2025?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=390088&post_id=155682090&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1oef8u&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

1. In her recent paper on shared grief, philosopher Louise Richardson reviews some of the objects philosophers have suggested might be the thing that we grieve when we’re grieving. For Colin Murray Parkes it was an “assumptive world” that one grieves. For Peter Marris, a “construction of reality.” For James Gillies and Robert Neimeyer, the object of grief is a particular “meaning structure.” For Michael Cholbi, the thing we grieve when we’re grieving is the “loss of a relationship with someone on whom one’s practical identity depended. ¹”

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Spring 2025, photo by dear friend and poet, Taryn FitzGerald

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Bio Summer 2025: Kate May-Price inevitability finds herself living with the beginning and end in mind. She writes to examine emotional complexity and to re-enliven life when it’s grey outside her home in New York City. She was awarded a 2025 residency at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in New York. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hog River Press.

Instagram: katemaypricewrites

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Lily King’s latest book, Heart the Lover

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“Random” Poetry: a conversation with Bob Hicok - Ploughshares

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I have, for at least the past year, been mildly to massively frustrated by the rise of the word “random” as it’s presently used. This is dull in all sorts of ways—every writer’s got his/her words which frustrate, to say nothing of the nebbishness of even bothering to be pissed at some utterance—but I haven’t…

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In preparation for Saltonstall residency, a proposed bibliography to work from...

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In preparation for Saltonstall residency, a proposed bibliography to work from...

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Meet the 35 artists & writers from across New York State who were awarded 2025 Fellowships. Congratulations To All!

For the sixth year, this is the first of two one-week residencies designed for artist and writer parents and caregivers.

Diane Carr, visual artist, Brooklyn

Lee Cotman, screenwriter, Ithaca

Flynn Larsen, photographer, Beacon

Michael Gac Levin, visual artist, Brooklyn

Kate May-Price, poet, Brooklyn

Michael Gac Levin was born in Los Angeles in 1984. His latest solo exhibition took place at My Pet Ram, New York, in 2024, preceded by presentations at Hexum Gallery, Montpelier, VT; and at Parts & Labor, San Antonio, TX.

He has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including at The Hole and Deanna Evans Projects, New York; at Marvin Gardens, Brooklyn; as well as online with Taymour Grahne and Platform. His work has been featured in Artmaze Magazine and Maake Magazine, and he has completed special projects online for the Jewish Museum and SCREEN_.

He holds an MFA from Pratt Institute (2015) and a BA from the University of Chicago (2006).

Santina Amato, visual artist, Brooklyn

Lindsey Guile, visual artist, Poughkeepsie

YulanC. Julian Jiménez, playwright,

Anne Arden McDonald ('19), photographer, Brooklyn

Hana Widerman, poet, Ithaca

July 14 - August 11, 2025

Roni Aviv, photographer, Brooklyn

Jessica Cuello ('15), poet, Syracuse

Jordan Ealey, playwright, Rochester

Alyssa McClenaghan, visual artist, Troy

Emily Tironi, visual artist, Saratoga Springs

Alyssa McClenaghan is a New York based artist who received her MFA in Painting from Brooklyn College. She has shown her work throughout the U.S. and internationally with recent exhibitions at Main Street Gallery 495 ( Catskill, NY), The Rad Hourani Foundation (MTL), Hesse Flatow (Chelsea, NYC), Peep Space (Tarrytown, NY), and solo presentations with Paradice Palase at NADA x Foreland (Catskill, NY), Collar Works Gallery (Troy, NY), Deanna Evans Projects (Tribeca, NYC), and blah blah Gallery (Philadelphia, PA).

Alyssa's work has been published in ArtMaze Magazine 's 20th Anniversary issue and was featured in Friend of the Artist Book: Volume 13 and she has been an artist in residence at the Studios at Mass MoCA, at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, the ChaNorth Residency run through ChaShaMa, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Working with materials typically used in construction, Alyssa's work continually mines the ideas of labor, femininity, gender, and her own lived history. Enacting a labor intensive process, big box store construction materials are transformed and re-imagined into bodily objects, straddling a space between the psychological and the domestic.

Emily Tironi is a disabled mixed media collage artist based in Saratoga Springs, NY. Her works are a celebration of the disabled experience and the disabled body. She has an AAS in Media Arts from SUNY Adirondack and a BA in Disability Studies from CUNY School of Professional Studies.

In 2020, her work was included in the 31 Women Exhibit at the Sedona Arts Center and she had her first solo exhibition at Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, VT. In July 2022, Emily was included in the publication, Inside Their Studio: Deaf & Disabled Artists Reshaping the Arts and participated in her first artist residency at Salem Art Works. In May 2024, Emily had her fourth solo show at the Saratoga Springs Train Station through Saratoga Arts. Emily participates in NYC Crit Club's Canopy 2.0 program and regularly shows her work.

Aaron Landsman, playwright, NYC

Rebecca Fay O'Neill, filmmaker, Brooklyn

Timothy Ree, poet, Brooklyn

Diana Schmertz, visual artist, NYC

Jessica Stratton, visual artist, Ithaca

Aaron Landsman is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher. His awards include a Creative Capital Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Princeton Arts Fellowship. Aaron is obsessed with cities, shadows, anonymity and how we perform power.

His current and recent works include: Night Keeper, commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2023, now released as an album on Hallow Ground Records; the libretto for the new opera Follow, at the Gaudeamus Festival in The Netherlands. His new piece, All The Time in the World, a game-based performance about collective self-regard and social media, will premiere in 2027. His prior work has been commissioned and presented in the US, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Norway, Serbia and Belarus.

Aaron is the founder of Perfect City, a working group at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and design. He co-authored The City We Make Together with Mallory Catlett, published by The University of Iowa Press in 2022. His writing appears, or will soon, in The Washington Post, Theater Magazine, The Iowa Review and Urban Omnibus. He is a Lecturer at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts.

Paul Anagnostopoulos, visual artist, Merrick

Alice Eve Cohen, playwright, NYC

Roger Ferney Cortés, visual artist, Brooklyn

Wayne Liu, photographer, Brooklyn

Obi Taswell, poet, NYC

Obi Taswell (they/them) is a queer and trans poet, abolitionist, and educator based in New York City. Their work draws on their own experiences and the power of language and storytelling to imagine the existence of disabled, trans bodies beyond systems of oppression.

They have received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets, Manhattanville College, the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Juniper Institute at the University of Massachusetts. They have also been featured as a Brooklyn Poets Poet of the Week, and their work has been published in Third Iris, Eunoia Review, Pornstar Martini Magazine, Beyond Queer Words: A Queer Anthology, Lucky Jefferson and Qwerty Magazine.

September 29 - October 13, 2025

Sergei Burbank, playwright, Brooklyn

Jesse Egner, photographer, Brooklyn

Julian Guy, poet, Syracuse

Asia Stewart, visual artist, Brooklyn

Natsuki Takauji, visual artist, Queens

Sergei Burbank (he/him) is a screenwriter, playwright, performer, audiobook narrator, and producer in New York City.

His works have been staged by the Scranton Shakespeare Festival, Quick Silver Theater Company, Oracle Theatre Inc., the BoCoCa Arts Festival, and the Planet Connections Festivity. His articles and short stories have appeared in Vernacular Journal, Indie Theater Now, NYTheaterNow, Parabasis, Howlround, fwriction:review, and Baseball Prospectus.

He is resident playwright with Quick Silver Theater Company and member of Actors' Equity Association. He holds an MFA in Playwriting from the Writer's Foundry at St. Joseph's University and a BA in Drama from Kenyon College.

Julian Guy is a trans and queer poet and essayist currently finalizing his first book of poetry, In The House Where I Love You, which was longlisted at YesYes Books and named a finalist for the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Julian's poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Sundress Publications' Transmasculine Poetics, Queerlings Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Catapult and more.

A 2023 Tin House Scholar and 2024/25 Tin House Reading Fellow, Julian teaches community writing workshops through the Onondaga Public Library System. His work has been supported by Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Tin House, and Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Find him online at julianguy.com.

For the sixth year, this is the second of two one-week residencies designed for artist and writer parents and caregivers.

Avital Burg, visual artist, Brooklyn

Alida Dean, poet, Ithaca

Caroline McAuliffe, visual artist, Brooklyn

Marcus Newton, photographer, Binghamton

Emily Zemba, playwright, Brooklyn

Alida Dean's poems and short stories have recently appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Forge, Ninth Letter, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other venues.

She earned her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati and teaches online fiction workshops through the nonprofit Literary Cleveland.

Alida lives in Ithaca with her partner, daughter, dog and two cats. These days she spends a lot of time listening to audiobooks while going for long stroller walks.

Emily Zemba is a playwright and screenwriter who creates work that is funny, formally inventive, and female driven. The 2021 production of Emily's play Superstitions - as part of The Pool 2021- was praised by Helen Shaw at New York Magazine as "Elegant and weird" and "a return to what Off-Off was originally for."

Some of Emily's other plays include The Strangers Came Today (Society: at New Ohio Theater), Deer and the Lovers (First Floor Theater), and Have You Been There (Williamstown Prof. Training Company). Her work has been developed with support from places like People's Light, Boston Court Pasadena, Two River Theater, Rattlestick, New York Stage and Film, and more.

In addition to plays, Emily enjoys creating guided theatrical tours and audio experiences - including the acclaimed OF A MIND: Oklahoma City (OKC Rep 2022). Emily is an affiliated artist with New Georges and The Playwrights Center, and a member of Society Theatre Company. She is adjunct theater faculty at Manhattanville College. BA: Sarah Lawrence; MFA: Yale School of Drama | emilyzemba.com

Constance Saltonstall
Foundation for the Arts

435 Ellis Hollow Creek Road
Ithaca, NY 14850

©2020 All Rights Reserved | Site by AWP

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Meet the 35 artists & writers from across New York State who were awarded 2025 Fellowships. Congratulations To All! For the sixth year, this is the first of two one-week residencies designed for artist and writer parents and caregivers.

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Wandering the streets of Kyoto, Japan.

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I plop down on my couch in the early evening and turn on my TV. I scroll through the show selections on one of the streaming channels. I wish I could say I spend minutes going through listings, reading descriptions, and watching trailers, but I spend seconds and do none of the above. I already know what show I will watch. It's the same one I've watched for years, over and over.

This quality of mine perplexes my friends as it did my ex, who had a front-row seat to my viewing patterns. I was in turn perplexed by the fact that he rarely watched movies or read fiction books. I never asked him why, but for the both of us, I think our habits have something to do with the mediums themselves - their qualities, affordances, and limitations.

A movie requires more of you upfront but a new TV show requires more of you indefinitely. Quality: Life span. Quality: Duration. A fiction book allows immersion in an imagined world and non-fiction grounds you in a real one, past or present. Affordance: Escapism. While we may not think about it in these terms, we are always encountering mediums and holding them up against our wants and needs.

Ross Gay describes something similar in his essay "Writing by Hand." His medium is language/prose, and he writes about how the tools he uses affect the ways in which he explores that medium. He talks about the distinction between writing on a computer and writing by pen in his notebook, how his prose in a Google doc makes itself tidy, "correct," "maybe, dull" while his prose in a notebook more accurately represents the winding, perhaps tortuous and mistakeful process of thinking.

In the same way that we decide whether to write in a notebook or a Google doc, we choose which mediums to engage with based on how they interact with the nature of our lives. If we are trying to get to something legible and extensive, we may write in a Google doc and we may write non-fiction. If we're just trying to get our feelings out, we may pick up a notebook and write a poem.

**

I stopped writing poetry for years while I was in college because I picked up the shiny new medium of websites and Twitter bots and browser extensions. At the time they appealed to me. They were interactive. They said the thing without directly saying the thing. They occupied the same space we all did (the internet), which at the time felt welcoming and rich. People were building things that were funny and useless and critical. Websites were accessible, easy to reach. All I had to do was publish it on Glitch and Tweet about it and suddenly people were interacting with my work.

Then a romantic relationship started, got rocky, ended. The pandemic came, my dad died. My awareness of all the wrong in the world continued to expand. I could no longer make websites. Or, I could not make them with the same level of conviction I had before. What could a website do in a pandemic? What could a website do when another Black person was gunned down by the police? What could a website do when my father died? What could a website do in a genocide? What could a website do?

In lieu of making websites, I picked up poetry again after a 7-year hiatus. I've always written poetry when I couldn't do much else. I had never consciously considered why, but when I finally did ask myself that question the answers came easily. Its affordances and potential were already defined in my head. Writing poetry is low effort. It doesn't take long. It doesn't require tidiness or clarity or refinement. It does what it is supposed to do: it gets the feelings somewhere other than in.

My embrace of poetry and disembrace of the web had everything to do with their qualities, their nature, their affordances, and what I thought were their limits. Making a website was fun for me but not bereft of frustration. It was time consuming and involved, whether I chose to do it by hand or through one of the many web frameworks. The material of it (HTML) was far distanced from the idea I was trying to represent. As opposed to a poem, where the idea would come together in real time right there on the page, I had to serve the website to see an idea come to life. In other words, I was beginning to feel like it took more for me (and maybe also for the user) to distill meaning from a website.

With the time and effort it took to build, I really wanted a website to do something: change a mind, raise some money. For me, poetry is a medium that successfully evades any expectation of spurring action. You post a poem and expect people to ooh or ahh and feel with you. You post a link to a website and expect people to click, scroll, fill, sign up. While others may ascribe revolutionary potential to poetry, I don't. I write a poem and don't imagine it'll do anything.

That sentiment felt freeing to me, so I continued to write poems. And when my ideas expanded beyond what a poem could do, I started writing fiction and non-fiction. Two years after I picked up poetry again, I wrote a 21 page short story. But I still couldn't make a website. I was scared of failing, I hadn't done it in so long. There was that. But there was also the baggage that came along with making something for the internet.

In a class I taught at School for Poetic Computation, I described a framework for critiquing new media art:

We start out thinking about the qualities and characteristics of the object, what it evokes. Then we consider its container, its interface, then everything outside the interface - our society, our cultures, etc.

When I apply this framework to websites, I find that they are inextricable from their context and the military origins of the internet. As Chia Amisola says in her essay " On Domain Naming ": "All sites on the internet are tinged with a sharpness and an ever-pervasive question of who serves who." A poem, by virtue of being written or read out loud, is not automatically in conversation with everything ever written on paper. But the internet is a network, and so a website - like a house built in a neighborhood - becomes part of this larger thing. The act of making a website public admits it into the internet - the same internet that continues to be the subject of discussions on surveillance, centralization, and abuse.

Partially because of this growing baggage, the novelty of making something and within minutes it being accessible to people all over the world had worn off. But I still found myself interested in the materiality of the web, what it affords, and what it doesn't. I made an Are.na channel and I tried to articulate for myself what a website was doing, what unique aspect of the medium it was taking advantage of. I started to ask myself again what the medium of the web had to offer.

Eventually I realized that what I thought was an escape from the medium of websites (writing poetry) turned out to be an invitation. A poem I was writing was asking for something more. It was breaking out of its assigned medium.

**

This poem I was writing existed in my head under a theme but on my phone as about twenty separate notes.

at the us open

on the c train

during my morning walk.

I was collecting places where I had encountered my grief. I knew this list was trying to be a poem but something stopped me from combining all the separate notes into a single document. What was it?

Putting it in a single document would impose an order, even though, to me, the order didn't really matter. What I wanted to convey was not that grief found me here (number 1) and then it found me there (number 2). I wanted to convey how random it was. How scattered. How permissionless.

If I turned it into a traditional poem, lines would follow one after another written on a page. A reader would read it the same way every time. The order would be important, because that's one of the limits and affordances of a poem.

This poem needed a medium that afforded randomness.

Websites and other interactive media allow for interaction - a user can come by and do whatever they want, within the bounds of the creator's playground. This in turn allows for disorder, for creating a world and letting something go wild in it. Which is how grief felt to me: like something had been let loose to rampage in the room that is my life.

The first thing I did was display the places grief had found me as folders on an emulated desktop. There's an expansiveness to what the elements of a website can represent. With my website-poem, I wanted a visual that felt personal to me, so I made the website look like a desktop system. The folders on the desktop would hold my memories, and clicking on the folders would open them. The idea was that a user could go through the folders and create a record of my grieving. A click was grief finding me yet again.

This quality of websites - the ability to give an " intangible thing physical controls" - is one that thrills me the most when surfing the web. Anything can await you behind a click or a scroll. On a website, a click can open a window, or transport you to a different location. A scroll can take you on a walk or control the direction of the "wind." There's an expansiveness to what an input (like a gestural action) can output or control.

And if the creator wants it, the input can be limitless. In my digital poem, the user can traverse through the folders as many times as they want, meaning that much like in real life, the grief could go on forever. Websites, although bound to a screen, are boundless in terms of pixels. A text can always grow, there is always room to scroll. On a website you can depict subjects of great magnitude. On a website, like and unlike other mediums, an "unrepresentable phenomenon," things that "cannot be brought before our eyes," as Jacques Rancière describes in his essay "Are Some Things Unrepresentable?" may "be given a specific conceptual shape." Like the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire, or the limits of a humanitarian zone.

I still don't have answers to what websites can do. But I have answers to what they might be good for, why we might reach for them.My list of answers hasn't made me into a believer again, not in the way I was before - wide-eyed and delirious with the possibilities behind depiction on the web. I have other mediums now: poetry for illuminating those infrequent bursts of emotion, and fiction for dramatizing my life experiences, twisting them and making them unrecognizable. But rather than turning away from any and all opportunities to open up my code editor, I ponder each idea for a website, swirl it around like a sip of a wine, see how it holds up against what a website has to offer, if it really needs the medium.

Omayeli Arenyeka is a Nigerian writer and technologist. Her work encompasses code, net art and writing in all mediums. She creates as a way to clarify things for herself then for others.

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What Is a Website Good For? | Are.na Editorial

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On mediums, their qualities and affordances.

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Track #2: new writing workshop series // "after loving you... laid out my teeth"

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My poem, "Stay With Me" published by Hog River Press. Thank you, Kathryn & Julian!

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My poem, "Stay With Me" published by Hog River Press. Thank you, Kathryn & Julian!

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So grateful to Roxan and my lovely feedback group for all they offer my work every week. 

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So grateful to Roxan and my lovely feedback group for all they offer my work every week. 

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I’m A Writer, Creative Coach And Workshop Facilitator.

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I spent several years writing at the studio with some amazing people. I will be forever grateful to The Writers Studio and its method.

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I spent several years writing at the studio with some amazing people. I will be forever grateful to The Writers Studio and its method.

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The Original School of Creative Writing + Thinking- The Writers Studio

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Creative Writing Workshops Online and in NYC, Tucson, San Francisco, Hudson Valley, + Italy. Students publish and win awards.

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She edited out useless distractions. She cherished the small moments, which are the sweetest.

Every action was done with care. Every day was filled with precise and brilliant actions.

She bought a lemon.

She mailed a letter.

She wrapped a package.

Sara had found her time.

Sara had found HERSELF.

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Maira Kalman’s new book STILL LIFE WITH REMORSE. 39 short stories as light as a soufflé about you-know-what.

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For thinking through a poem I’ve been working through for years now…and possibly a new theme for the work. 

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For thinking through a poem I’ve been working through for years now…and possibly a new theme for the work. 

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https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/05/03/advice-on-writing/

Note: this could definitely be a more diverse list. Who else should be included?

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Hemingway, Didion, Baldwin, Fitzgerald, Sontag, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Morrison, Orwell, Le Guin, Woolf, and other titans of literature.

By popular demand, I've put together a periodically updated reading list of all the famous advice on writing presented here over the years, featuring words of wisdom from such masters of the craft as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean, Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, and more.

Please enjoy.

1. Anton Chekhov's 6 Rules for a Great Story

Mastering the essential complementarity of compassion and total objectivity.

2. Zadie Smith on What Writers Can Learn from Some of History's Greatest Dancers

"Between propriety and joy choose joy."

3. The Continuous Thread of Revelation: Eudora Welty on Writing, Time, and Embracing the Nonlinearity of How We Become Who We Are

"Greater than scene... is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame."

Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ( formerly Brain Pickings) going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant - a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality. Here's an example. Like? Claim yours:

Also: Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below - it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:

One-time donation

You can also become a spontaneous supporter with a one-time donation in any amount:

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Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay - life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page.

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Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

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By popular demand, I've put together a periodically updated reading list of all the famous advice on writing presented here over the years, featuring words of wisdom from such masters of the craft as Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Stephen King, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean, Ernest Hemingway, Zadie Smith, and more.

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After Akbar’s Martyr read Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love. 

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After Akbar’s Martyr read Carvell Wallace’s Another Word for Love. 

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I only got smart about hightlighting passages on my Kindle when I was almost done reading this fantastic book. So sadly/gladly I will need to buy a copy and reread it! So here's a few...because clearly had I started highlighting from the beginning instead of getting captured like an entrancing bird, I'd just have to mail you an annotated copy.

It is liquid and explosive, the chaos of leaves and rivers, mountains of lava, fecund and overflowing. (p.20)

We were moving, as adrienne maree brown says, at the speed of trust. (p.182)

...if we cannot understand our own ambivalence, if we do not know how to listen with precision, and delicacy and susceptibility to the whispers of our bodies and hearts and souls, then how can we ever, even for a moment, listen to anybody else's? (p.186)

...there are no words that can match what it means to put a millennium of violence onto the body of someone who took the risk of loving you. (p.190)

Someone once told me that there is no such thing as apology, there are only amends, and to amend something doesn't mean to change it, it means to add to the record. You can never erase the record. What you can add to the record is new behavior. The old behavior is an entire lifetime of indoctrination. The new behavior is an entire life of practice. (p.190)

This is what words are to me. The sound of us trying. (p.195)

They say you have to let go of the past in order to heal. But what is the past is now? Forever and ever now? What if by healing one moment, you can heal all the moments that ever were and ever are to come? (p.225)

Once, when she was back in town for a few months and we were remembering to love each other again she said... (p.227)

Maybe everything is worth crying over if you spend enough time with it. (p.231)

We heard the ceaseless churning, swaying and running, clattering and collapsing, and we called it weather. We only knew of it as weather, weather was all our brains had been trained to understand. Weather was temporary. Weather could be waited out. The origins of weather had nothing to do with us, we were not responsible for weather. Our only task with weather was to deal with it, to put on the proper gear and tough it out. (p.237)

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Another Word for Love: A Memoir, by Carvell Wallace

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 KIRKUS NON-FICTION PRIZEA transformative memoir that reimagines the conventions of love and posits a radical vision for healing. In Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace excavates layers of his own history, situated in the struggles and beauty of growing up Black and queer in America. Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it--to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world. With courage, vulnerability, and a remarkable expansiveness of spirit--not to mention a thrilling, and unrivaled, storytelling verve--Another Word for Love makes an irresistible case for life, healing, the fullness of our humanity, and, of course, love. It could be called a theory of life itself--a theory of being that will leave you open to the wonder of the world.

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White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative non-profit space.

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Patricia Lockwood · Diary: When I Met the Pope

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The invitation​ said ‘black dress for Ladies’. ‘You’re not allowed to be whiter than him,’ my husband, Jason…

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Layer After Layer of Loving Devotion | Vestoj

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Read about Dr Watts’ tool originally created to prepare participants for psychedelic therapy sessions in the Psilocybin for Depression trials at Imperial College, London. Listen to the guided imagery journeys - The Pearl Dive and Planting the Pearl as a Seed.

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Sources:

1. Take My Name but Say It Slow, Thomas Dai (https://tertulia.com/book/take-my-name-but-say-it-slow-essays-thomas-dai/9781324066378)

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Take My Name But Say It Slow: Essays, by Thomas Dai

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Thomas Dai has never gone by his Chinese name, Nuocheng, fashioned from the Knoxville (Chinese: Nuokeshiweier) of his childhood and the Chengdu his mother called home. Seen another way, Nuocheng also contains the cheng of Chenggong: success. In one breath, his name speaks of a hometown, a geography, a half-baked promise to succeed. For Dai, every name is like a map, and every map can define identity.In Take My Name but Say It Slow, Dai writes of a river that runs only in the mind and a queer map housed on the internet; of love carved on the rocks of Taipei and Arizona; of pounding the racetrack in Wenzhou, watching his grandfather fade from the world. He recounts a relationship that would literally go the distance from the American Southwest to China and back again, and a road trip chasing the memory of Nabokov, the writer and lepidopterist. As he reflects on the paths his parents took to build a life in America, he also asks what it means to “return” to a place he never felt he could claim as his own.Incisive and gorgeously written, Take My Name but Say It Slow offers a fresh perspective on placelessness, yearning, and belonging, and introduces a sparkling new literary talent.

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feed yourself
only with what nurtures.

let the process of shedding
be joyous in its eternity.

create and call it creation.

tell lashing out that
it isn't worthy of your song.

beat the drum
instead of yourself.

beat the drum when hands
want to become fists.

beat the drum to get
beneath the surface.

jump off the bed.
welcome waves in the tub.
cook as if dancing.

be a metaphor
when literal is too much.

cry into your journal
as if it is rising's way.

praise into your journal
like you ain't apologizing
to no one for shine.

claim into your journal,
for there's no need
to die waiting.

be too vibrant for lingering
on those who neglect.

too awww
to keep treating yourself
so poorly.

be more than knowing.

in case you need encouragement,
I'mma share
that memory
you tucked away,

scared you'd be laughed at
trying for more than
drowning spectacularly.

that shows you beyond
the bad beats.

who you were before
that season you've forgotten.

to remind
that every victory counts
and that you're
one step closer today.

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Note to Self Work - get there before sundown.

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"Katalog"What would you take with you if your house was burning?" "The fire”, replied Cocteau"

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Dying while waiting for access to this...

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Dying while waiting for access to this...

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New writing workshops from experienced instructors every month. Forever. Click to read The Forever Workshop, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

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One of my favorite human beings...love you Jaya.

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this cheery fever feels
like a temporary insanity I was safer
in the country of control doling out small pleasures
to myself like a wily jailer like a loosie peddler
like a guppy's sphincter this morning
I washed tiny newborn bloomers there were no fates
scuttling in the washing machine no sheep livers
on the drying rack later in the shower when I felt her
moving like a bag of cats between my hip bone
and my heart I painted a cobweb of Silly String
around my fat belly cupped my veiny breasts
and crowed not long ago I grew my certainty
fresh every day like a liver asked the doctors to look deep
at the pieces of my child sparkling in my blood
her stars her tattoo I hummed a boy scout
is always prepared my daughter heard me
through my navel and laughed lying
slathered in aspic I clutched at every skeletal preview
each glimpse of augury fading too fast
a stick of incense on a dark stair I always wanted
to be a mother but I thought I'd be
an armory a phalanx her stillsuit
in a gray shitty world instead
I see her hiccup on a monitor
and I break open into sunshine
completely

Jaya Tripathi has worked as an actor and as a human rights documentation expert. She is a student at The Writers Studio and splits her time between New York and Virginia.

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By Jaya Tripathi this cheery fever feelslike a temporary insanity I was saferin the country of control doling out small pleasuresto myself like a wily jailer like a loosie peddlerlike a guppy's sphincter this morningI washed tiny newborn bloomers there were no fatesscuttling in the washing machine no sheep liverson the drying rack ...

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I was lucky to be in several writing classes at the Writers Studio with Ann, she is an amazing poet and human being. Ann, I wish we lived closer so I could be your best friend.

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Explore the poetry of Ann Chinnis, MD-Poet, Pushcart Prize winner, writers Studio student, author of "Poppet, My Poppet" and "I Can Catch Anything".

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The Music of the Planets: Jupiter (183.58 hz)

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The Music of the Planets: Jupiter (183.58 hz)

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183.58 Hz - Frequency of Jupiter (Pure Tone)

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виолончелистка

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Official website of Cellist Anastasia Kobekina

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What's Next? (click through) Week 29: SUMMER

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What's Next? (click through) Week 29: SUMMER

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Made with Tally, the simplest way to create forms.

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I'm literally on page 3 and am already inspired...

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I'm literally on page 3 and am already inspired...

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The Lost Journals of Sacajewea a book by Debra Magpie Earling

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Winner of the Montana Book AwardFrom the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea.“In my seventh winter, when my head only reached my Appe’s rib, a White Man came into camp. Bare trees scratched sky. Cold was endless. He moved through trees like strikes of sunlight. My Bia said he came with bad intentions, like a Water Baby’s cry.“Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history.Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive” gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper.Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves.Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance--the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.

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I love the ease of this- let's see if it holds up. I've done a version of this with pico de gallo for tacos, and it's fantastic, so I have high hopes.

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This hands-off path to pulled chicken results in a juicy, saucy tangle of meat for a crowd The combination of boneless chicken thighs and breasts creates a mix of feathery and hearty shreds, while cooking the meat slowly in barbecue sauce ensures it won’t dry out To emulate some of the smoke and savoriness created by cooking meat over smoldering coals, chipotle chiles in adobo, Worcestershire sauce and onion powder are also added

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Sheila Heti, author of , Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, among other works, speaks to writer, journalist, filmmaker Juliet Jacques, whose published works include Monaco, Variations and Trans: A Memoir, about her writing to date. The discussion touches on revealing the hidden face of the self in writing, taking contemporary culture seriously as subject matter, the possibility of capturing 'the spirit of the age' in a time of fragmentation, and the unconscious processes that shape our lives. Listen here.

Below for reading list of the books mentioned in the episode:

Eunoia by Christian Bök (2001)
Diaries 1920-22 by Bertold Brecht, tr. John Willett (1980)
Soliloquy by Kenneth Goldsmith (1997)
The Connecting Door by Rayner Heppenstall (1962)
Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by B.S Johnson (1973)
The Diary of Anaïs Nin by Anaïs Nin (1966)
Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau, tr. Barbara Wright (1958)
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, tr. and ed. Michael Glencross (2004)

Recorded at Young Space in May 2024. Edited by Frankie Wells. Music composed by Kwes Darko.

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Fitzcarraldo Editions Archive: Sheila Heti in conversation with Juliet Jacques - Fitzcarraldo Editions

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Sheila Heti, author of Alphabetical Diaries, Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, among other works, speaks to writer, journalist, filmmaker Juliet Jacques, whose published works include Monaco, Variations and Trans: A Memoir, about her writing to date.

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So I'll get 31 postcards from folks, which will mean I have 31 bookmarks for my 31 books of poetry for my personal poetry month in February!

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"Leo Tolstoy said only two stories existed: a hero goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town."

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Annie Ernaux's The Years
Clarice Lispector's The Complete Cronicas
Sandra Lim's The Curious Thing
Tove Ditlevsen's The Copenhagen Trilogy
Mark Wunderlich's The Earth Avails
Jacqueline Rose's The Plague

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Appreciating // Interview with Brunello Cucinelli

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Appreciating // Interview with Brunello Cucinelli

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"The mind no longer searches for things."

"In the past, say we were going to to meet up. I had seen you once before — your face, your body. But I didn’t know what it would be like to meet again. Whereas now I’ve seen you and you’re wearing your bikini. I’ve seen you everywhere. I do not want to deprive you of the surprise of the magic. Because then when you finally show up, you feel the smell of the burnt wood and everything else."

"I am fascinated by the time that we are living in, because enlightenment and romanticism are blending. We are rediscovering human dignity, plus the dignity of the territory, the community."

"Everything is visible, when things go well and also when they go less well. When we are sad, when we are worried, when we are happy: If you show all these different moods, then you are credible. That’s why I say this is simple."

"No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself."

Brunello Cucinelli in conversation with Om Malik

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RECIPE: Cranberry Ginger Walnut Muffins (Gluten Free)

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RECIPE: Cranberry Ginger Walnut Muffins (Gluten Free)

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2 cups almond meal/flour (fine)

2 cups measure 4 measure GF all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp, salt (kosher or less if sea salt)

1 cup sugar

(1) lemon, zested

4 oz. crystallized/candied ginger, finally chopped and tossed with 1 tsp neutral oil, separate pieces with fingers

8 oz. fresh cranberries, roughly chopped

3 oz. walnut halves, roughly chopped small

1 cup sour cream or yogurt (full fat/whole milk)

1/2 cup whole milk

2 large eggs, beaten

half stick salted Euro-style butter (like Kerrygold), melted and cooled

METHOD

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Combine and whisk dry ingredients

Combine and whisk wet ingredients

Add cranberries to dry, combine

Add walnuts to dry, combine

Add wet to dry gently combine

Add gingered, gently combine

Fill prepared muffins cups (sprayed with oil or line with paper) 3/4 way

Bake on middle rack for 20-30 minutes until fork comes out clean.

(Makes approximately 24 regular sized muffins)