Notabilia

The Good News

Things are shit in the world, but they’re looking up here in Toquerville, Utah. Check out all the good news:

  1. The sheriff who was nasty to me when I was traumatized and manic resigned.

  2. The bookstore in Hurricane where part of my mania played out in 2023 is under new ownership, so I feel like I can go in there again.

  3. The neighbor who wrapped his house, his car, and himself in American flags has moved.

  4. Only one truck rolled coal at me when I was out today.

  5. I saw two dozen baby goats by the side of the road.

  6. The pond at my neighbor’s house has been repaired and filled.

  7. The feral peacocks have returned to the pond.

Reflecting Light

Speaking of loneliness, I once played with light as a friend. When my brother-in-law, who was much older than me and a physicist, was visiting one summer, he showed me how to capture light in a small mirror and project it onto a wall. After he left, I played with the light for hours and hours in an otherwise dark hallway, the one that led to my parents’ separate bedrooms and to my bedroom and to everything that happened in them. I don’t know what I thought I was going to accomplish by getting a ball of light to bounce around on those nicotine-beiged walls, but I knew it was better than going it alone in that house. My light friend was everything to me that summer. It only let me down on cloudy days.

No Manifesto

It’s haunting to read the “No Manifesto” poem from Chicago Review ten years after it was published. It came out thirteen days before I left poetry because I experienced some of the very issues this poem addresses. It’s situated in a time and place, or rather places, but is also timeless in that too many of the lines could be written today and still be applicable. What a mess we’ve made of poetry. I want better for it, for us. I wanted better for myself.

This is actually the first time I’ve seen the poem and this issue of Chicago Review, which includes a forum on “Sexism and Sexual Assault in Literary Communities.” The “No Manifesto” poem begins on page 221 of the linked document. The poem is 13 pages and 271 lines long.

We’ve been fighting this fight for a really long time. I can’t even see who’s been fighting alongside me. What I see is who didn’t, who hasn’t. When my loneliness leaks into the fissures left by poets and their complicity, it feels like the time I poured salt on a gash in my hand under the magnolia tree in my backyard on a sunny, blank day. I was a kid then. I didn’t know what pain was but wanted to. I’m an adult now and have no need for this pain that won’t stop seeping.

Tall Tales Turned Titillating Truths

I found a document that my paternal great-grandfather dictated for the Indian and Pioneer Historical Collection in 1937. It turns out that side of my family also took part in the 1892 Land Run.

On my mother’s side of the family, I found a news story about one of her uncles dying after being shot four times in the back by a pool-hall owner in Headrick, Oklahoma, over the sum of fifty cents. My mother told me my great-uncle was shot while walking down the street, but I thought it was a tall tale. Turns out, she pretty much told the truth about everything.

Also, I found a portrait of my fourth great-grandmother on my father’s side. She looks like the botched Ecco Homo restoration.

Image: The Altus Times, July 16, 1914, with a front-page story about my great uncle being shot to death outside Garrett’s Pool Hall in Headrick, Oklahoma, by the establishment’s owner, Bud Garrett.

Propel Disability Book Series

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining the advisory board for the Propel Disability Book Series at Nine Mile Books. Propel focuses on disabled poetry, noting that disability is often overlooked in publishing, even by presses that prioritize other forms of diversity. All Propel books are written, edited, and produced by disabled poets.

Steve Kuusisto invited me to be part of Propel in this role. I can’t capture in words how much this opportunity means to me. The work is essential and dovetails with my personal experience and advocacy around severe health- and mental-health issues, neurodiversity, and trauma.

This role also gives me a sense of belonging, which is something I don’t typically feel. Belonging is also essential and allows us to do our best work in the world with a sense of meaning and purpose. I mean it when I say I’m honored to serve something bigger than me and something that matters to me in poetry—all while being accepted for who I am and the perspective my experiences have given me.

I feel like a clipping that’s starting to grow roots, the magic of that.

Image: The covers of three collections from the Propel Disability Book Series. Left to right: Anne Kaier’s How Can I Say It Was Enough?, Nathan Spoon’s The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded, and D.J. Savarese’s Swoon.

Keeping Count

I’m counting is how I am. I have something to do in 206 minutes. Yes, I count things down like this one minute at a time, as well as how many pages remain in a book I’m reading and how many steps I have left when walking from my weaving room to my bathroom.

Counting like this, down and up and sometime back down again, has been a thing for me for a long time, ever since I discovered it in middle school. Marching band didn’t help matters any. I still count my steps when I exercise. I like to count them like a waltz when I’m happy and in a heavy 5/4 time when I’m angry. I know, for example, that 100 steps equals one minute on my walking pad, Teddy. Yes, I named my walking pad. I named it Teddy. Names are another story.

Now it’s 201 minutes. I lost five minutes of my life writing this. Poof! There they go, the minutes, soon to be hours, soon to be decades. I don’t have many decades left. But I’ll have minutes until the very end. Almost.

Breaker

Somehow knowing there are sandhill cranes in Ardmore, Oklahoma, right now brings me comfort. The area around Ardmore has high rates of trafficking. (I can’t describe that trafficking in more detail without Facebook blocking this post, but I’ll link to an article in the comments.)

My father used to have me talk to truckers using his CB radio on the highway between our home and Lake Texoma. I had a handle. At least one of the men would ask about me using my handle. I didn’t realize what was happening at the time. I mean what kind of men would want to talk to a girl in grade school and what kind of father would facilitate those conversations.

But the birds help—all the birds at Lake Texoma and in Ardmore and in Norman, my hometown. I love the posts about them in the Oklahoma birding group I belong to. The fact is, those birds were there even when I was young. They’ve always been there. Beauty is always everywhere, including inside us, where it’s untouchable.

On and Off the Page

What my last post is leading me to is the understanding that I matter, meaning my voice matters, my perspective matters, my experiences matter, and my identity matters. That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. Reading Andrea Gibson all day yesterday led me here, to a place where I can say That’s true for everyone, and it’s also true for me. In my case, those are easy words to say but hard ones to believe.

What’s also true is that I have a new intersection to consider, one that will guide me as I continue to share my poetry. I want to find publishers who like my work and also want to support my being in poetry. I want my voice, perspective, experiences, and identity to matter to those publishers, not just the work that stems from those things. This is especially important as I try to find homes for my manuscripts.

Right now, I feel that level of support from several publishers, including Chiron Review, Meat for Tea (both the review and the press), Moon in the Rye Press, The Nomad, ONE ART, and Thimble Literary Magazine. Each feels like it’s saying why I write what I write matters, not just what I write. Given what I’ve come through in poetry and in life, that’s important to me.

I don’t want to publish with folks who dislike me or just tolerate me. Once they know a little bit about who I am, I want them to feel like it’s important to include me in poetry, on and off the page.

Fuck Sanism in the Writing Community

I just read one of the most sanist, ableist things I’ve ever seen on Facebook. I am awake and alone and it’s the middle of the night and why do I even try is all I can think. Why do I try when it makes no difference? When folks like me are detested, seen as less than human, when everyone piles on as soon as one person gives the green light to do so?

I don’t know what to say. I am crying and shaking. The person, a writer with whom I share almost 250 mutual friends, is upset because his friend is experiencing psychosis. Folks should read his post and his comments and the comments others have made. Then they should set their own biases aside and imagine someone talking about them that way.

I left my own response in the comments, which I’m sharing below. Fuck sanism. Fuck it. We deserve better, especially from our fellow writers. This writer is wrong. He’s doing immeasurable primary and secondary harm.

—

I’m an advocate for those with mental-health issues and have lived experience myself. I know you’re upset, but I encourage you to find your own center here and situate yourself within a framework of understanding and compassion.

I don’t always love NAMI, but they have support lines for loved ones who are dealing with situations like the one your friend, and by extension you, are going through. You can call them day or night. I encourage you to do so before you do secondary harm to others, like me, who are reading your words and feeling your disgust and hatred for folks like us.

If you wouldn’t say it about a cancer patient, don’t say it about someone experiencing psychosis. It’s dehumanizing and may take someone’s last hope and remaining dignity away. Your words are doing that for me right now. I’ve survived a lot. I’m in tears. You’re saying the part out loud that everyone thinks about us no matter who we are, what we do, what we accomplish, or how much we try to educate others through art and advocacy.

Flint

My father and his friends destroyed my childhood innocence. The poet who sexually assaulted me destroyed the innocence I reclaimed in adulthood. He did it in part by making me talk about how my father and his friends violated me while he violated me. I know you don’t want to hear about that. I know nobody wants to hear about that.

Maybe you want to write your poems. That’s what I want, too. Maybe you want to see your work in the world because you believe it could help others—and you for that matter. That’s what I want, too. Maybe you want to belong to something and feel proud of what you belong to. That’s what I want, too.

If there’s a difference between us, my guess is that you’ve been heard, believed. Or that what happened to you isn’t what’s been happening your whole life. Or that you found poets who are safe, kind, welcoming. Or that you conjured some kind of flint to restart the fire of your life.