on imagining what it might be and what it is

This last month I participated in a writers group and as part of of it I have been imagining what I want this newsletter to be. It was useful and generative. It also asked for us to push these newsletters into something that does something legible. I realized that I want space for experimenting. I want intimate, a little weird, and shapeshifting. I wanted to invite you in with this piece of writing below to the dreaming up process and to give you some tastes of what might be coming!

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The tulips have taken the party sideways. They lean down for warmth and light.

Breakfast and kneepads are spread on the floor.

I just pried a sticky pecan off of my bathrobe.

My mind is smudged because of the hours awake in the middle of the night with a baby getting her teeth.

It’s 9:02 am and I have already somehow had a parent teacher conference, made and cleaned up breakfast, moved this body, smeared toothpaste on teeth and inadvertently bodies.

And its quiet save for the birds and clicks of a house heaving and sighing.

If it were a dream there would be images of secrets. There would be poems. Scores. It might be zine. Things would be written in a combination of handwriting, drawings, code, and recipe.

It would have glossy surfaces and sticky textures. And each day there would space for a prayer.

A prayer for the gift that is living.

Or the bitter warmth of camelia leaves in hot water.

Or the bleat of a foghorn.

The delight of an old man whose face is my face as he holds his dog to the camera.