Throwback Film: ‘Trail Medicine’, Disability Justice  Trail Running, and awkward comments

In the spring of 2020, I was set to take my first plane ride in many years, and attend a writers’ retreat on Whidbey Island. I got a call, from my sister, and a forwarded email from our cousin, saying that many elders were dying of a virus. “It’s bad, do not come here”, she wrote. I canceled my flight, and soon after the retreat was canceled. Within days, Covid was a household term, and many of us who could, and who cared, stayed home.

It was a time of retreat, of inner reflection, of grief, and shocking fear. I admit I lost faith in many people, especially the outdoors and ‘wellness” communities. Where I had once taken refuge and found renewal in these groups of people, suddenly they were full of Covid deniers, people who prioritized their ski days over saving lives, and believed in “personal strength” over basic realities, science and— most sadly— care.

The Rainshadow Running fam adapted quickly: moving the Trail Running Film Festival online. Within weeks, my partner Tianse and I pulled together a film about recovery, and losing and gaining back my relationship with running, and it got accepted into the festival.

Unlike the zines and community publications I had plopped my writing into before, this story—incredibly intimate—would be seen by thousands of people, thousands of strangers, in real time.

I was terrified.

I have never seen myself as a runner or athlete. I picked the sports I could hide in: I liked swimming because I could put my head under water and not hear people bullying my queer body, because the sound of the pool drowned out the daily verbal abuse I was going through. As a kid running cross country, I would slow down meditatively when a coach told me to push. After years of psychiatric hospitalizations and drug addiction, I didn’t feel ready to tell my story so publicly, especially to a group of people within a culture that often doesn’t recognize disability.

But we had already made the thing.

At first I was very excited, I still am excited about it. As we got closer to the film festival, I began to get anxious. The mean comments people always make at any outdoors film festival, when the film is about anything other than someone breaking a record, reverberated in my ears. I felt scared, but my fear also validated why I wanted to make, and publish, this film. I wanted people to see the disabled side of running, the part of running that means more than winning or competitive intensity. I wanted them to see the healing side of it, and the faces of people who came to running from a deeper place. So, that meant including my story, my face, my feet and sneakers and the snow I was running on at the time and my rescue dog running partners, in the festival.

Boi howdy was I scared.

The time came for the film festival, and you can imagine how it went on the internet, with people able to write YouTube comments about my psychiatric history, getting abused by a former partner, and super cute dog running clips: it was nauseating, and I also held my ground, with grace. I also got a ton of positive comments from the people who knew and cared about me, and many strangers.

I’m starting to come out of my Covid shell a little bit. I’m still masking, staying home, testing, turning down social invites. As someone whose mental health is intertwined with their physical health, I’m scared to get Covid again. I’m scared also for my friends who are even high-er risk than I, and I want to keep spending time with them. So much has changed for me in my relationship with disability in the last 4 years, and in many ways revisiting this film now feels informative, like I was planting a seed for myself, something forced out of me at the beginning of pandemic.

I do hope you enjoy it.

“Looking for Datura” in Querencia Spring 2024 Quarterly

One of my favorite poems, about one of my favorite flowers. An elegant ditch weed, a mesmerizing creature you feel staring at you. How much time I spent hunting for that sound, and that glow. In Querencia Press’s Spring 2024 Quarterly Anthology.

“ Daylight // Nightlight” in New Words Press

“Daylight // Nightlight” started out as an exphrasis of Aesop Rock’s tandem songs, “Daylight” and “Nightlight”, written deep in pandemic isolation, but working, schooling and writing online. The comfort I felt when beamed into each others’ homes via the magical zoom tube contrasted heavily with the realization that I would most likely never actually physically share space with the people I was meeting in pixel land. So, I set out to capture the dissonance of these remote sensory experiences, attempting to capture binary experiences of a single reality that Aesop Rock’s songs captured. In process, I played with the light and dark of intimate screen time, the dream-like qualities of moving up-close, and the weird paranoia that can come with reaching across distance. 

This poem, me, and us did get to be among bodies in a room. I read this poem at our first in-person Open Mic at the Daniel J. Evan’s Library, making a room full of people laugh affectionately at our zoom quirks, saying the word dildo in person, and sharing in a room of masked poetry friends. Then I went to go staff the real, live merch table. 

A year later, “Daylight // Nightlight” got picked up by New Words Press, who are doing THE BEST WORK getting trans poetry out at a time where trans lives are actively under attack (more so than usual!). What’s more, they recently took the dive and got off of meta products, writing a sweet but unapologetic goodbye letter to meta. Poetry is a space where we can exist and be when everything is trying to un-make us, and New Words is as bold and genuine as it gets. 

Circling back to my under-slept, online life of remote contact that birthed the poem, I read Daylight // Nightlight for the release reading while I was living on literal other side of the world from occupied Lenape Territory: the Republic of Georgia. Staying up until the wee hours of the night so I could read synchronously, chosen family logging on from the Midwest of Turtle Island, and my partner listening from bed. Some strangers, some so close. I was asking myself where everyone was, at the same time everyone felt right there. Then I closed my laptop lid, and crawled back into the darkness of sleep. 

“Memory Box” in Querencia Press’s Not Ghosts but Spirits V

Memory Box is about a relationship that passes over a desire for children, choosing instead to focus on holding memories, like deep secrets. I started this poem at Juan Morales’s workshop at the 2020 Jackson Hole Writers Conference, where we wrote about recent dreams. Shortly after, I traveled to the north end of the spit protecting Wilapa Bay; Dragonflies played in the electric seaside air, pausing and resting on the plants that were struggling (and succeeding) in their spring growth. Everywhere you could see suggestions of trails and infrastructure that had been removed from the landscape. There, I could develop the poem, imprinted with this world where dragonflies traversed the spaces emptied by what almost was. Their flight patterns of exploring, testing, and pausing inspired the dizzying— yet orderly— line layout.

Wilapa Bay being spooky

I originally submitted this work to Querencia’s Quarterly Anthology, but they wrote back that it belonged in “Not Ghosts, but Spirits”. Collections are tiny collective miracles: fitting multiple authors together in a single piece of work, and reading it all together. They show me that we really have something more in common than we might experience if we write, and live, in our little bubbles. Editors orchestrate togetherness, the smoothing of our chaotic individualism. I love that someone heard the spooky palimpsest and grief in “Memory Box,” and chose to hang it in the right room. More often than not, experience of sacred care counteracts the fear of submission. So, brava.

Actually, instead of whispy dancing ghosts, why don’t we go with “bold and clear” when it comes to tattoos? by Allison Goodnight

Poetry for Palestine: On Mosab Abutoha’s Charge to Make Art Now

I got my first Smartphone in 2013. Over the last 11 years, the slow, upward swipe of my thumb up my phone’s screen has become intimate: a physical movement and sensation that signals, that I’m about to witness the art of someone I’ve never met; watch videos of friends’ music; see snapshots of their babies’ expressions; rage together against the freshest hell du jour; or enjoy a moment of extreme peace of a friends’ most recent adventure. Everytime I open instagram or Facebook, I prepare myself to laugh, to cry, to breathe. 

As I scroll, I stop. It is late October 2023, early in this current, intense wave of genocide of the Palestinian people. I greet a new poet, reading The View from My Window in Gaza as he, his family and community orient themselves, at a time we didn’t know would be the beginning of a much longer wave of violence. Forward, I would follow Mosab Abutoha’s work, as the genocide continues, longer and longer. The live conversation created over social media offers snapshots of poets’ finished work, as well as their interiority– reflections on craft, little influential moments, shy-brags, vents and catches, and quickly I turned to Mosab, and other Palestinian creators, to make sense of– and help direct– the deep process of this chapter.

I wasn’t sure I was prepared to act, or to speak.

I am used to responding to requests from bipoc people with a solid “yes”, and herein lay a contradiction, a question I couldn’t so easily solve: Why am I so obsessed with Mosab’s charge, and feel so ill-equipped to respond to it? I am feeling so, so much and can’t find the courage to speak, can’t make enough sense out of what is happening, to write. It’s also happening so, so quickly that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with. 

My heart has to beat, but does it have to beat like fists, like jackhammers, or is its power also in the pulse of water, propelled tides washing up and down shores, its weight falling on and then re-collecting itself to recede? My throat space is as thin as a layer of ice, as fragile. It is like magnolia petals, it does not bruise easily and it’s wetness holds up during pickling and chopping. Maybe my voice isn’t lacking when it speaks from this place of quiet, of absolute listening. How can we still the world around us so much so that we can speak?

I write this without really being able to open my mouth. What are the words of listening? When are we shattering some thin– very thin– layer between ourselves and what we consider “other”? The quiet is a space of delicacy between ourselves and other, of not wanting to disturb or break anything, to become a little invisible so we can watch something else, or quiet enough to let something else acclimate ourselves to it, and speak from that place.  While this might be the reaction to war and genocide, it is not on par with it.

So, how do we move forward? How do we write during critical times?

Listen first– read. When the genocide started, I felt like I didn’t understand Palestine enough, in spite of a lifetime of growing up around people talking about Palestine, of reading and watching documentaries about Palestine, of listening. I pause and put a breath in between myself and this is western stand-in that prizes hierarchical, class-based education over being able to understand and empathize with people, especially those who divisive capitalism has “othered”. How can I know or feel enough to write, to speak?

I also have to consider the news as human, artistic inputs: I’ll be honest, I am reading, sleeping, and eating Palestine and Gaza right now. I lose interest in ig when it’s not about Palestine. Like the psychic charge of a contemporary spell, I am building weight for change by learning, by witnessing. While the IDF and the war machine interrupt the memory and transmission of their crimes, I can help carry the weight of witnessing, so people do not have to do it alone. Palestine is in everything now, in my music, in my food, in the fabric of my day.

Following and supporting journalists, poets and artists is an essential act of solidarity, and something we can do very easily. It’s terrifying to get to this point in the genocide and watch Palestinian voices quiet on my feed, to navigate over to people who have been posting nearly daily to find out if they are dead, if they were able to leave, or if the ever-powerful algorithm has hidden them. I got comfortable getting attached to news reporters, letting myself genuinely care about people I had never met. While we talk about media intake like some sort of diet we have to moderate– too much we get overwhelmed, too little and we are hiding ourselves from the trust. Rarely is it discussed for what it is– as a sacred practice of witnessing. But it’s only the first step. Like some power we grow, a capacity to feel and speak to, to reverberate that widens and expands. 

Writing is a spiral, and presence is constant at this time. I know these are broad points, a fuzzy map, that I’ll be following up on weekly. Please email me lycanelvie@gmail.com if you’d like to get on our discord and talk more about this, or leave your thoughts in the comments. No oppressive bs or baiting will be tolerated, TYSM.

*I am an experimental poet, who is also a Marxist, so it’s important for me to pause and do the simple math that is behind sweeping calculus and simple answers– including determining when and how to speak. We have to “show our work”, and truth ourselves. As a mostly white poet with some indigenous background, and a ton of class privilege, I am nearly always defaulting to not taking up space, to making myself small and leaving space for bipoc and working class voices. At least this was true of the east coast Turtle Island communities that raised me; in the PNW, I find myself asked to step up and use my voice more on behalf of people of color. I also admit that, as a non-binary person, and a survivor of a verbal abuse, visibility is confusing (at best). The weight of my voice, and the pieces I use to calculate it, are constantly jumping off the page, moving around, affected by new formulae.

Featured Reader at Cultivating Voices’ Pride Poetry March: Almost-Barfing at the Cusp of Birth

Last spring, I was graduating and finishing up my work at the Evergreen Writing Center. I spent much of the time curled up into a ball in my shed-office, like if I closed my eyes and held my breath *whatever* was waiting for me on the other side of graduation and my job ending– that threshold between myself and *the future*– would just keep waiting for me. It was as if I ignored it long enough, the inevitable passing of time would wait for me to come to it, for me to pick up my feet and walk over to it. Instead, time was coming for me, chasing me, and I knew eventually it would overtake me.

I wasn’t at all ready, because, honestly, I was pretty happy, at least in that way we have to adjust to a really great situation, the best really I had been in in my life, even if it wasn’t the end game. I was incredibly tired– working at a state university was exhausting in many, many ways. I felt both deeply in community, and often isolated. I had found a queer workplace, but now confused why I wasn’t invited to my coworkers’ graduation parties, still that 7th grade wallflower. I couldn’t blame it on being queer, because everyone was queer there.

But I felt incredibly beautiful. I had a great date, a great dress, a few weeks left with a great boss. I was weird and ready for… something. I wasn’t actually ready, even though I had been working towards that moment for many, many years.

And, I was a feature reader at the 4th Annual Cultivating Voices Poetry Pride Parade.

I honestly texted a few poet friends rather quickly, like “Dude, I’m reading alongside… xyz famous person we all looked up too… I feel so excited but also I might barf…” The most honest of them wrote back like “Thats nutso! I remember when that happened to me, you got this tho!”

We are all so supportive of each other, ultimately, in queer-poetry-land.

And I held myself up. All those weeks leading up to the reading– of waiting, of filling out graduation forms, of trying on and then changing what I was going to wear, of assembling friends to join me as I read over zoom. Of soaking in the time with my really great boss (are we even allowed to have those in late stage capitalism?), of not taking Elvie-dog on enough walks, of licking my teeth and being surprised that I could taste something else, especially something that wasn’t fear.

I wasn’t just leaving Evergreen; I was shattering through the cozy isolation I had adjusted to during the early days of Covid. While I was sad and grieving pretty much the entire time during the first few years of Pandemic, the world was also on my same page– alone, also sad, staying home, dealing with death all of the time. This was the work I had known during the most genuine period of my life– would could possible come after it?

I realized later that I was ready for completion, but not release. I had been done for a while at Evergreen– comfortable with my voice and my process, now able to suss out who to work with, making new and newer things. I wasn’t ready to get thrown out into “the world”; I was still that wallflower, that shy kid, but I had to buff myself up, take all that tenderness, and read alongside many of my heroes. Poetry readings are like drugs: take a medium that you work from because you are so, so quiet, and then put yourself in a room of other very, very quiet people who will coo and clap for you at the end, and maybe fall in love with you. Even if they shuffle, and are awkward and don’t really like what you wrote, often they will come up to you afterwards with something they appreciated about it. Heck, I even had a very terrible, not-queer boss (not Sandy!) come up to me after I read once and said “Hey, I appreciate you reading– I’ve been up there.”

Unconditional love really makes you come back for more. And, we’re really often supportive in queer-poetry-land.

And you know what? I got on that not-ready train. I recorded my poems to practice, speaking into a microphone that wasn’t really as good quality as what I paid at Best Buy (I was rushed, and didn’t read the reviews– ok?!). I listened to them on playback in my shed-office, drinking coffee and losing track of time. I listened to my own voice over and over again until I could fall into it, until I knew it wouldn’t freak me out when I heard it out there.

Meanwhile, the team assembled: my friend from the Writers’ Circle I held organized an in-person component where we hung out and ate chips in it’s parents’ garage at a long folding table. On the day of the reading, it was raining (well, yea, it’s Oly in Spring). We all wore jackets, and you could see my mus-tache on the screen.

I delivered my words to the zoom room from a swivel chair, into the microphone I’d spent too much on, in a room full of people (some famous, some not so, every poet and listener important in queer-poetry-land), the amazing boss, my date, my friend, and all those chips. Afterwards, I went and bought some essential oils at Barnes and Noble because wow– I was gonna pass out and just needed to be around a bunch of empty journals and tell the cashier I had had a long day and go home and sniff some stuff.

So, yeah, I did it. We all should all do this. We should all be celebrated enough and honor each other enough that we should get the courage to read. We should all have enough readings that we are asking and inviting each other to read. And I’ll do it again hopefully someday. And I’ll know what to say if someone writes me telling me they are excited but might barf: I can write them back in a good way, because “Hey, I’ve been there”.

Did I mention Cultivating Voices is a really super supportive space in queer-poetry land? International, intersectional, and made me feel well at home.

You can watch me not-barf, here:

Only on Paper: Snag, in CPJ’s Poetry Corner

RSVP to a Snag

Lightning hollowed you out

death becoming    you, the conductor, the container from 

the inside out, allowing yourself 

to hollow

Offering  the driest part of yourself, 

the almost-dead part of you—soft, crumbling, becoming 

fuel  from the inside out. 

From there, you held us 

inside. Time was Depression Time— You can stay here as long as you would like.  Feed on muffled Time here—big maple leaves, squirrels, everything happening through this cavernous veil.

Everything is emptied, in here Everything is hollowed 

Everything is remembered I can remember nothing 

Take a break from memory— allowing ourselves, you allowing me, 

inside you, inside an off-button with no future, all past

You gift me   moment. I press a complete pause,

to name my breath

With this space, everything is 

   empty nothing here   nothing resists

my breathing

I’m inside the lungs you’ve made 

The container you left behind

Burned xylem holds   all of us. 

In the fire, your words slowed. You quieted yourself. I heard not re-remembering.

I look to the edges of your toes. I emerge, the blackness started to become itself into dross, my toes shoveling your toes. Being is turning, turning is being, a little bit at a time, of me, of you

I stay, to bring eternity with me into moving time. An eye looking out from the cavern, your charred body a sanctum— a knife of space, careening like the lightning that split you open. A portal, a slit in separation. Re-entering through more space. 

Maybe I’ll be empty someday. Maybe I will house someone. Maybe I will hold space. Maybe I will be space. Maybe. An ancestor. 

____________________________________________________________________________

I didn’t write this poem– about ancestors, about forests, about trees, for Tortuguita. I didn’t know them, but I know they are in my mycelium. I did write it in the weeks leading up to Tort’s death– coincidentally. However, when we live in layers and layers of circular, repressive time, are there coincidences? Are we aligning witness with reality? Is there some presence we are tapping in to, and are we getting something right; even if it comes with heaviness, with grief and weight?  

I have so many memories from the Daniel J. Evan’s lobby. The day I learned about Tortuguita’s death, was also the release day for Snag in the Cooper Point Journal’s Poetry Corner. I remember clattering on the lobby tile of epoxied bricks. I sometimes reveled in, and sometimes ripped through, the college’s attempts to insulate us– to support us. The muffling, trying to turn chaotic cacophony into bubbling water. I know my reactions to these sounds aren’t commensurate, or appropriate. I know there is joy and calm here, and kids bubbling with joy about Furry Club and field internships and free popcorn and the Cottonwood Club. I know it’s good. I wish I could stay with this goodness, and not feel lost like the clattering is just screaming. That day I was wearing my earplugs and on to my way to work, walking past all the club tables and people excited about something or other.

I find a friend, who I could lock eyes with. The sounds swimming all around me, pounding the glass windows, knocking my eyes back and forth, trying to steady myself like dandelions gone to seed as wet winds blow against them: “It’s so fucked up,” they would understand. They would come closer and then step back. Like me. Like us. We would get overwhelmed. We would get drawn to the things that exhaust us. We would shut down and withdraw. We would get closer. We would hide and come out. We might do this for the rest of our lives.

So, why a poem in a newspaper? Why turn a tree into a poem? Why put it in paper? Why turn life into language? Why make it tangible, touch it, hold it, have it take up space in a backpack, on a shelf, in a newspaper kiosk? We might stand next to each other– like trees stronger against wind, shoulder to shoulder.

A year later, I am walking with my husband in Tbilisi, and he remarks that he really loves walking in this city because of the trees. The beech trees that line the streets remind me of home, home I can’t go back to because of bullets. Or maybe I turned my back on the places that bear me. Maybe I am to keep moving, to re-arrive always. Maybe this all becomes something, the words borne from this silence, a wrapping, some growing energy. Resistance. Life. Something so good that it takes up too much space, that someone might want to cut it down, even the remembering of it. Because the cops were tearing down their memorial. Because I wanted to remember something good, someone good, even if I hadn’t met them. Because I want us to stick around, to see the good around us now. To keep growing and building.

On Writing at Work: Publishing Love– not Cops!– in the Library

Almost a year ago to date, I published this piece in the Cooper Point Journal. Here is a short essay on the little events that lead up to it and followed it, the many continued layers that our work lives within, and is borne from.

A year ago, I was working for the Evergreen State College’s Writing Center, as a peer writing tutor. For Black History Month, we were to watch a film on the history of white supremacy. For a state college with a very liberal reputation, lying in the womb of grunge (Olympia, WA), Evergreen has a heavy police presence: It’s common to see fully armed police officers, unmarked cars, and an ever-increasing number of private security services on campus. We all are cognizant, in a tense, compartmentalized way, that these forces are in direct contradiction to the progressive Evergreen package, with its Audre Lorde quotes, MLK photos, posters listing the 10 elements of fascism, coveted gender-neutral bathrooms, and a workspace where we can use our preferred pronouns. It’s hard not to feel gaslit when the school insists on police presence at its Social Justice Center, alongside constant offers of mental health support and meditation practices– in lieu of making the campus actually safer and more liberatory.   

I still believe in public education, and in public service, but Dang– it has tried me.

So, we watched this film. I know lots of people, especially white and privileged people, need to watch these films. I don’t consider myself past watching these films; I am also a person who watches a film like this, and gets a ptsd reaction: shaking, becoming non-verbal, my tongue tingling and going dry, my vision tunnels. I took the next day off of work, using my sick time, accrued through so many days and hours doing something I loved with a group of people I loved, serving a community I loved, within a thorny cage of an administration that cared so little about us. 

Pretty much all of public service is like this.  

So I sat in my shed and wrote this piece in a day and a half, with minimal editing. I then submitted it to the illustrious, amazing, wonderful, Cooper Point Journal, and they printed it. Our journal was the only place it belonged, where these words could truly be vibrant and alive with meaning. While my public service jobs have always been trying, I also get to have some good days. I felt like I was getting shot out of a cannon: buoyed by fireworks, thinking I might scatter to the ground down there somewhere, but, for now–very happy. I knew I might get fired. My coworker and I joked “no one reads the CPJ anyway”. Then people started to come up to me– many, many people: some acquaintances, some I didn’t expect, moms in my classes, library staff who were theoretically above me in the thorny cage chain, writers who I had tutored, and absolute randos. They all just said thank you, and some door was opened. 

It was a sunny, cold spring day on campus, which in Olympia comes reliably, but interspersed with the heavy, cold rains hanging on. The sun warms and settles the chill, sunlight steams off cold rains, leaving the air bursting, like frozen cherry blossoms bulging and shattering as they thaw. I felt free, elated. I felt close to Rob, like we had furthered some sort of purpose from his death. I felt like maybe we could win something, at some point, like maybe some carve out a bowl, a cop-free space of clarity. 

I walked back to my car, and looked at my phone. I received a text message that a co-organizer had lost a co-organizer: Eucy, a seattle-based DSA member, to suicide following periods of houselessness and police interactions. I wrote back something that I thought was meaningful– raw, warm but also stilling, then I sat in my car, my bright cloud muddled now, riddled with tiny nails. I put my head back, and drove home completely emptied.

While I believe in public service, as an abolitionist, I still live in a world of constant violence. 

Any songs we write, we sing inside an echo chamber of grief, which can make renewal and little gains seem meaningless. In the following weeks I reached out to my co-organizer, M, just as friends and trying to offer support. I promised her I wouldn’t talk about work or organizing. She shared about Eucy’s death, the ways the community were responding and processing. She would make these little pauses and eventually there was a long pause. She had been waiting for me to say something. 

“Sorry, I know that’s a lot,” she followed up her own story, sinceI didn’t know how to respond; I’m always better in writing than talking, dysphasia being a constant presence in my life, but I know it wasn’t that. Over my cell, which, in my almost-40 brain should clear out all the imperfections of the landlines of my youth, I could hear clicks of shoes echoing in the hallway where she was sitting, people coming and going from their lunch, walking past her as we spoke. I knew I just felt sad. 

We slid into talking about our movie lists: her 90’s lesbo rom coms and my favorite artsy action movies, and then backslid further into talking about work, and, eventually, organizing– even though I promised I wouldn’t. Eventually, M said “Ok, well I should get back to whatever I am being paid to do right now,” and we cordially said our goodbyes, to go back to that traumatizing world. 

In spite of this failure– to really be there for M, in this thread of our community affected by police violence– I remain curious how I can find, and create, shelter in this world– a shelter that insulates but also pushes back against violent, hierarchical fabric. I want to create writing and art that is accessible, that motivates and metabolizes rather than paralyzes. I want to write stories that spare no details but also give us ground to stand from and lift ourselves from. I hope this piece can be a vehicle for that work, and ultimately I hope that we can realize Lorde’s dreams: of a world without police.

Tree of Many Fruits # 2: Root Runners

Pfewff. Sickness. Heartbreak. The co-creative energies that sometimes sever, sometimes soothe. Through it all, this beauty emerged. It tastes like grief and a light in the sweet darkness. The edges of flowers are clear. Enjoy.

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In-Program Zine! Tree of Many Fruits

Presenting! Tree of Many Fruits, vol 1. Collected works gleaned from the Fall 2022 Evergreen program, led by Miranda Mellis: Writing as Experimental and Ecological Practice.

treeofmanyfruitsvol1electronic-1Download

Tree of Many Fruits is anti-copyright, and free for download. If you would like a version that can be printed and assembled into a zine, follow this link to the booklet file. Print double-sided, using short-edge binding (in Layout settings). Fold, staple, and distribute freely.

This was my first attempt at facilitating collaborative, community publishing, and I found it to be a unique art form, one that stands alone, yet can work in-tandem, with individual writing. The poem at the beginning All My Bones are Branches was a collaborative practice: we asked writers to answer the question “What does the forest mean to you?”–aiming for 5 words or less, but open to longer responses. I then re-combined the answers into a poem. I mixed lines to create new meanings, and found myself able to group shared concepts and objects, that appeared across the responses, together into stanzas. This was all without any lateral communication during these exercises, but perhaps shaped by program content.

Art was similarly crowd-sourced: Participants of the class were invited to draw fruits, which we hung from tree branches and trunks cut and tore from collected scrap-booking paper, mostly found and recovered– the most memorable being patterned tissue that once wrapped toilet paper rolls! Together, Kaelin and I assembled the zine: formatting the submissions, laying them out to the split 8.5 X 11″ bounds, taste-testing these fruits, and repeating this process until we found something that resonated. Then, we glued them down, without the need for visual editing software like Canva or In-Design.

Much has been said as to the connections between weaving and words, and we became community “weavers”. While we weren’t sitting in knitting circles or around looms, the “zine team”–a group of students from the program–all contributed thematically in the process and the ethics-building of the publication. Themes of hybridity, along with the zine’s title, came out of the buzzing hive of our initial meetings. Seemingly small choices in small publications spoke deeply of the groups values. Most of the original zine team were drawn into the undertow of the quarter’s work, compounded by social and school obligations. Communicating via email did not reflect the real-time demands of scheduling around weather changes, and the many mishaps of the quarter. By the end, Kaelin and I sat around a metal folding table in their music studio, with the chaos of raw paper materials–the images, the words, the stories and impressions– laying in paper trays I had assembled from office paper that same day, gleaned from a …. creative offshoot, or printing attempt that was destined for the recycling bin. In this world of gods, Sophie and Keiko (Kae’s canine companions) barked and wrestled as we talked about life– the rants and raves–, unpacked the co-creation of science, and asked each other our deeper ecological questions. Like all great friends, we left some holes in our answers, sharing humble ponderances between complications.

The level of respect lent to creators truly broke down any binaries I felt between writer and audience. I pictured the writers reading and viewing their own work within the context of the publication. Choices made to ordering, artwork, and layout were all done with the writer and reader in mind. As I shared a print copy with one of the writers, I saw his eyes light up, and as he shared his reflections, I felt the resonance of seeing work in a publication that had paid attention to the content and tone– and amplified it.

Will I continue this work? Yes, I hope to. Although, as someone processing caretaker and nurturance roles, I struggle to maintain a connection to my “own” voice. Within capitalism, we are often asked to focus on our selves–our own work, our own stories, our own creations, and can think of shifting back and forth between collaborative work and individual is a zero sum game: there are editors, and there are writers. There is “other people’s writing”, and our “own”. Secretly, I found making this collaborative zine to be a new, fun art form; I was challenged to hold and re-fashion the work of the group into something whole and new, a creative process within itself. One of the lessons of this class is that “we” exist as interconnected with a nexus of something larger, of an ecosystem, that our identities and experiences are by no means singular. This was the intoxicating fruit that I found: to widen channels that connect creators across time and space.

After a period of gestation, these new aesthetic powers will show up in my work. In the meantime, I am retreating to much-needed “me time”, and focusing on my own writing. Without that, I am truly lost, and–to channel Miranda–publishing and collaboration definitely can pull focus. While it’s been a labor of love and I am finding belonging in being indistinguishable from a creative whole, I never want to wholly sever the anchor to my own voice. So, for the time being, I’ll be returning to my writing and art-making, and perhaps this, too, falls within what it means to be ecological–to attend to what falls within our immediate circle, and trusting that, in time, we can feel into our branches again.

Cheers, and a massive thank you to everyone in the Fall 2022 Writing as Experimental and Ecological Practice.