Writing, Resistance, and My Garden

Hi, everyone, and happy pride month!

Me and my partner Natalie at last year’s Pride!

WHAT’S GOING ON

Sonnets to Sestinas: Form Poems for This Century

This 6-week workshop series will give poets the tools to write the often dreaded (but exciting!) “form poem.” We’ll be looking at only modern examples of these forms (this ain’t your great-great grandma’s poetry workshop), including ode, elegy, sonnet, sestina, erasure, and my personal favorite, the contrapuntal. At the end of the course, you’ll even have the opportunity to invent a new form of your own! We’ll take a peek at modern form poems by poets including Danez Smith, Victoria Chang, Paul Tran, and Shira Erlichman.

I hope to see you there!

Register here: https://writers.com/course/sonnets-to-sestinas-form-poems-for-this-century

Root Beer and Resistance

Join fellow community members in a night of art, resources, resistance, and root beer!  In this low-key space, we will support one another and tap into some of our collective power. 

As Joan Baez once said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” So let us not despair! Instead, let us drink root beer and get some work done. 

If you’re new to activism, don’t know where to start, or aren’t sure if you’re “that type” of person, this space is a great fit for you. If you find yourself really wanting to make a change, but then find yourself routinely burnt out or overwhelmed, we welcome you here! R&R is intended to be a gentle and supportive space to build community, listen to some art, possibly email some reps, and find a sustainable activism home. 

If you’re like me, you often end up feeling so overwhelmed that you can’t fix everything that you end up doing nothing instead. R&R is a place to do something, even if that something feels small. If we all do something small, it will add up to a whole lot.

Special thanks to Kyle Tran Myhre for co-organizing this with me!

More details here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1456615705523849/

PROMPT

In the spirit of resistance . . .

POEM

I write poems for most of the Writing Prompt Wednesday prompts (but rarely post them). Here’s mine for the above prompt, as an exclusive little thank-you for subscribing to the newsletter!

It was hard to fit this into a small poem, but I wanted to also say here that a lot of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is directly targeting trans women, trying to take away trans women’s resources and rights. There’s a new Harry Potter TV series slotted to come out, and boycotting it is one of the things you can do to stand in solidarity with trans people, and trans women in particular. J.K. Rowling has made a fortune off of Harry Potter, and is actively using that money to fund anti-trans groups, with the express purpose of barring trans women from accessing resources (this is not just a few bigoted tweets, folks). If you want to still be a part of the Potterverse, I highly recommend doing it in a way that doesn’t give her any more money.

PETE

There’s a blep if you ever saw one!

OLLIE’S THOUGHT CORNER

Think, think, think, think…

What’s on my mind lately is my garden-- I’m obsessed! Let it be known that being obsessed with gardening is not the same thing as being good at it, which I am not and will never claim to be. But I’ve been spending the past few weeks putting things into the ground, and so far, nothing has died, which I’m considering to be a minor miracle. 

There’s something about this tending, about noticing small growth, that’s been really grounding for me-- in a world of military in the streets, outrightly bigoted laws, AI generated content so accurate you can no longer spot a fake, and our billionaire daddies’ public break-up (just to name a few). 

The more stressful the world gets, the more I find myself reaching towards the ways I can notice beauty. I feel like I’ve spent half of my career trying to put into words the sense of awe and gratitude I now feel in the world-- something that was completely born out of my father’s death and the grief that followed. It is hard to explain, and the only person I’ve ever met who has ever captured this feeling for me is Andrea Gibson (here’s a great place to start: https://andreagibson.substack.com/p/i-stopped-waiting-for-awe-to-find). 

Many people are confused, and some even find it borderline disrespectful to talk about joy at a time like this. And I know the ache of wanting others to see your pain, because if they don’t see your pain, they can’t truly see you. I also know that I have spent so many years letting my pain be the loudest thing in the room-- and who knows, maybe that’s just where I needed to be at the time. Some pain is loud, and it’s loud because it hurts. What I’ve also found is that, at any given moment, it is a “time like this” for someone. And when it was a time like that for me, I walked through the world stunned by grief, uncomprehending at how anyone could be doing something so normal as buying a banana in the Wal-Mart only hours after I had held my father’s hand while he took his last breath. Joy felt like it was not “for me” for a long time, and I felt like I lived in a totally separate world. Other people were happy, other people laughed— other people were not me, and if they had been me, they would see how much everything fucking sucked. In my early twenties, many of my friends were doing things like getting drunk, hooking up with strangers, learning how to make bread for the first time. I was mourning, spreading ashes, cleaning out my father’s room, crying myself to sleep, making urns out of clay. The world was ugly, and selfish, and stupid-- my grief was unknowable, and I was unknowable, and it is to this day the loneliest feeling I have ever felt. 

And then something happened. I can’t tell you when, or why, but the world became beautiful. And it wasn’t like returning to my sense of the world before my dad’s death-- not at all. The world pre-death was grayscale compared to this new world. I had wasted everything, before this. I had never noticed a single thing. Why had I never noticed? That it is absolutely incredible that some flowers open during the day and close during the night? (How do they know???) That a maple leaf is stunning? That my best friend’s earlobe is magnificent? That the wind off of the lake makes you more alive than you ever thought possible? And don’t even get me started on the birds--

But of course, this is about my garden. Currently, there are two impossibly small green tomatoes growing on one of my plants, and a pepper that seems to double in size every five minutes. Our lavender has sprouted another batch of purple flowers, and when we touch the leaves, we come away with the smell on our fingertips. Two days ago, we walked to Ace Hardware and bought a morning glory, and in those two days, it has wrapped a single tender vine around a stick we found in the yard. It almost makes me cry-- that delicate little tendril, absolute magic, curling so quickly that it has made it another halfway around the stick by dinnertime.

My partner and I visit our plants every day and exclaim at these miracles (“Oh, look! There’s a new strawberry!” “Isn’t our pepper the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?” “I still can’t believe that when you touch the sage, your hand smells like sage!”)

At one point in my life, I didn’t know any other way to be but sad and cynical, noticing only the things which could hurt me. And now, I don’t know how to be any other way than this: totally gobsmacked, unbelievably amazed, remarkably stunned, overwhelmingly grateful, and completely, utterly, in awe. 

Love,

Ollie

Poetry, Pottery, and Pete

As we recuperate from National Poetry Month, we’ve still got lots of fun things on the horizon (but at a hopefully more reasonable pace…)

My friends and co-organizers surprising me with flowers and a big card signed by a lot of the teams for this year’s Mash-Up! (I cried!)

WHAT’S GOING ON

I Won A Thing!
I’m honored to announce that I won the Palette Poetry Previously Published Poem Prize (try saying that 5 times fast). You can check out the poem here:

https://www.palettepoetry.com/2025/04/23/my-father/

Midwest Poetry Mash-Up Was a Huge Success!
With 10 teams from all across the country, we had so much fun, built so much community, and successfully tricked a bunch of very smart poets into coming to MN and being our friends. A special thank you to all of the volunteers and attendees who made this event possible!

The truly wonderful poets I co-coached with Natalie Kaplan, who are Macalester students and recent grads.

If you were here this year, we hope you loved it! And if you weren’t, we hope to see you next year! (Me and my friends Zach and Tanesha, who run the tournament with me and without whom I would surely perish).

Minneapolis Oddities and Curiosities Expo

Now that April is over, my life shifts a little bit to focus on pottery, and I’ve got a huge show coming up! I hope to see you there! If you like weird stuff, this is the place for you!
Tickets here: https://www.showpass.com/minneapolis-oddities-curiosities-expo-2025/

Me at my booth at last year’s expo!

Some of my darlings!

Slam Poetry is Good Actually

I wanted to share this article written by Kyle Tran Myhre (not just because there’s a cute photo of me in it, although there is). Kyle is someone I think of as a true community player, and I often look to him and his work for ways that I can be more supportive and more in tune with community. Plus, I think he makes a great case here for the power of spoken word, and the article is a great read: https://racketmn.com/slam-poetry-is-good-actually?ref=guante.ghost.io

PROMPT

Here’s a prompt if you feel like writing!

POEM

PETE

The toothbrushing legend himself!

OLLIE’S THOUGHT CORNER: A STORY ABOUT POTTERY

think think think think think….

A Story About Pottery

I spend about a third of my life making and selling ceramics (under the name Sick Kitty Ceramics, although I hope all of your cats are well). Of course, as someone with (several) non-traditional arts careers, the path towards this was not linear, and it almost didn’t happen at all. Here’s a little bit of the beginnings of my journey as a potter:

I grew up in a small town and went to a small town public high school-- in some ways, this sucked, but in some ways, it was actually awesome. I was always fiercely interested in art (I had my first solo exhibit at the age of 16 in the local arts center), and because there’s nothing to do in the country, I spent so much of my free time fighting off boredom basically skill-building a fistful of hobbies: drawing, painting, piano, drums, oboe, woodburning, set design, sewing, bass guitar, learning how to scream a la Attack Attack, etc. My small town didn’t have all of the resources that a bigger school district might, but we did have a kiln and a very supportive art teacher who let me do basically whatever I wanted. After taking the only pottery class offered, my senior year, I did an independent study in clay, throwing terrible thick little mugs, sculpting faces with their eyes stitched over, and creating a three-foot wide cat skeleton whose ribs were held together with twisted wire (and the skeleton, of course, was wearing big yellow bunny slippers). 

When I got to college, there were so many different things to learn, and I stopped doing pottery in order to focus on drawing and printmaking (surrealist drawings were my main interest, and my senior college exhibit showcased three two-foot tall drawings: one of me giving birth to a unicorn, one of me tearing off my own breast and eating it, and the third of me taking a shit on a transphobic professor’s desk). But the spring of my senior year of college, I had a roommate who took pottery, and our apartment was full of dishes that they had made. It felt really special to me, to eat off of something that a person had made, and my interest in pottery was reignited. 

I approached the ceramics professor at my college and asked if I could, with my prior “experience,” skip the Ceramics I course (where they primarily focused on handbuilding-- which I wasn’t interested in at the moment because it turns out there’s nowhere to store a three-foot wide ceramic cat skeleton with bunny slippers, and I certainly didn’t need to make another). I only had this last semester of college left, and I didn’t want to waste it making more massive sculptures that stayed in a closet in my mother’s basement. I wanted to learn how to throw, and to throw well. I wanted to eat my toast off of something cool, and drink my coffee out of something cool, and slurp my soup out of something cool. 

When the professor asked me what I wanted to make in Ceramics II, I said that I was really interested in making dishes. He scoffed and said, “That’s not art. Imagine if you told [the printmaking professor] that you took her course in order to make Christmas cards.” Despite the shit-on-desk statement of my honors project, I was actually incredibly conflict avoidant and a former-gifted-child teacher’s pet, so I didn’t say anything to him, even though the printmaking professor encouraged us to make usable, everyday objects and would have never in a million years said something so dismissive and elitist.

Despite this, somehow, he let me into the advanced course. 

And I fucking hated it. By which I mean, I loved ceramics, and I hated him. He was one of the least encouraging and least kind professors I have ever worked with. When I say I was a teacher’s pet, I mean it. For better or for worse, I was a people pleaser with a penchant for kissing ass, combined with a genuine desire to do well and learn skills beyond what was necessary for a good grade. I was an incredibly dedicated and intentional student, spending hours each day practicing my throwing. I spent virtually all of my free time trying to both improve my skill and to prove myself to this terrible man. At every step, he only had negative things to say. I could not please him, no matter what I made. At one point, I told him I wanted to make mugs that combined sculpture and function in the shape of cute animals, and he straight up told me “That’s not art. Art is not cute,” and refused to let me make the mug, even on my own time. (I literally cried, and scheduled a meeting with my trusted drawing professor to process this, and she very kindly listened to me and told me not to give up). I spent the rest of the semester frustrated, making work I didn’t like in order to impress a man I didn’t like even more.

And then, he died. 

And now, I make a third of my living selling cute (and creepy) little animal mugs, and the hundreds and hundreds of people who have bought my work definitely think it’s art. 

But of course, there’s more to the story: 

First off, I want to acknowledge that it was sad for some people that he died (I don’t think he was universally hated or anything; he was just not a good fit for me), and I’m not trying to make light of this. But if there’s one thing you know about me, it’s that I’m not going to shroud a mean man in platitudes just because he’s no longer around (see: my entire body of work). This professor had a hugely negative impact on how I felt about ceramics, as well as my self-esteem and the way I viewed myself as an artist. Here at this point in the story, I really want to say something kind about him, to balance things out— but that simply was not my experience. Him dying, in all seriousness, was quite possibly the only thing that saved my relationship to making pottery. 

After he died (natural causes), he was replaced with one of my favorite professors on this planet, who allowed me to do an apprenticeship a few years after I graduated (an opportunity I never would have gotten under the old professor, who was notorious for cherry picking his favorites, of which I was decidedly not one). Ceramics is super cost prohibitive, and as a recent grad barely scraping by, there was no way I could have afforded to work in clay without this apprenticeship. This new professor was kind, encouraging, and she had an actively non-elitist stance and a love of all of the ways clay can be used: cute, scary, functional, performance, you name it. She helped me for years, until I moved into another potter’s studio, then a friend’s basement, and now, finally, almost ten years later, I have a studio in my own home. I feel immensely grateful for her support, and because she saw something in me, I was able to reconnect with an art form that has since become a deeply meaningful and healing part of my life.

The moral? I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s about the power of a single person to change your relationship to an entire medium. (This is honestly something I think about a lot in my own teaching, of how to be like Professor #2 and not Professor #1). Or maybe it’s about trusting the chaotic path that life can put you on, and that happiness doesn’t always come on a timetable? Or maybe it’s that sometimes, in life, you just need to wait for someone to get out of the fucking way, so you can meet the person you were supposed to meet and live your dream.

Love,

Ollie

Newsletter #3: Midwest Poetry Mash-Up and The Ghosts of Tournaments Past

Hi everyone, and a happy National Poetry Month! 

Me and my friends Zach and Tanesha at last year’s Midwest Poetry Mash-Up! We run the tournament together, and they are truly the best.

WHAT’S GOING ON:

We won a grant!! I feel so humbled and honored to have this support; it is a huge step towards sustainability in this passion project I love with my whole heart.

Midwest Poetry Mash-Up: April 25th-26th at Open Book in Minneapolis, MN

I am indescribably excited for the 3rd year of Midwest Poetry Mash-Up! In just a few weeks, 10 teams of incredibly skilled poets will go head to head in an epic battle of poetic prowess. At the end, one team will be crowned the winner and awarded a cash prize!  Being in community is one of my favorite things ever, and this tournament is literally so fun. If you’re nearby, grab your tickets now to see some of the best poets in the country (and England and Canada)!

Tickets are on sale now, and you can grab yours here: https://midwestpoetrymashup.square.site/

If you’re interested in competing next year, you can get on the Mash-Up email list by sending an email to midwestpoetrymashup@gmail.com

If you want to slide into a bout for free, we’re still looking for a few volunteers to run concessions, and you can email us at midwestpoetrymashup@gmail.com to volunteer!

PROMPT

Here’s a prompt, if you feel like writing!

POEM

Here’s a brand new poem, about how much I love the woods, and about how much I want to protect our remaining natural spaces.

PETE

My darling boy, applying the “work smarter, not harder” adage to the treadmill.

OLLIE’S THOUGHT CORNER

think, think, think, think….

All of the scary shit in the world is feeling very present to me right now, but I’d like to take this month’s newsletter to talk about the joys of community and to reminisce a little bit about some of my favorite memories from the Ghosts of Poetry Tournaments Past.

I used to compete at a lot of poetry tournaments (hopefully this is not too much of a brag). In college, I would compete in the collegiate slam poetry circuit (CUPSI) as well as the adult circuit (NPS) and often throw in a regional tournament like Rustbelt as well-- at least 2-3 tournaments per year. As you may or may not know, the national slam scene has faced decimation after decimation, and there are now way less performance opportunities than there used to be. CUPSI used to gather 70+ college teams from across the nation, and now there is literally no collegiate circuit (we fought so hard to keep it, folks, but the parent organization just didn’t want to do the work to bring it back after the initial years of the pandemic).  Side note: if you know of any college students who want to compete or create/resurrect a slam, send them my way! Filling in some of the need left by CUPSI was one of my main goals in creating Midwest Poetry Mash-Up, and I feel really passionately about college students having access to slam.

So back to the stories I promised: 

Enter: me, an 18-year-old goth kid who grew up in the country, driving an hour and a half south to live in a city that felt like an entirely new world. I was super traumatized, newly out as both queer and trans, an opinionated Aquarius, and constantly wearing cargo shorts with duck boots no matter the season. If you haven’t guessed it yet, slam poetry was the perfect space for me. 

I couldn’t afford therapy, and honestly didn’t have a good enough understanding of what had happened to me in high school to even have the idea that I needed therapy (doesn’t everyone have debilitating breakdowns, panic attacks, and feel safest behind the coats in the front hall closet with the door closed?) So slam was what I had! Normally, whenever I’m teaching a class, I’m very clear that I don’t believe that poetry is a substitute for therapy-- therapy involves a trained professional that can be your emotional guide, and poetry is just you. But that doesn’t mean that poetry isn’t one hell of a processing tool-- and couple that with a supportive community of people with higher-than-average emotional intelligence? Bingo: sad weird kid is still sad and weird, but with a support network! Slam was exactly what I needed, and it helped me feel connected and valued when I was, quite frankly, drowning.

Trying to describe the energy in these slams and tournaments to someone who hasn’t experienced it feels almost impossible. Imagine, a group of fifty, a hundred, five hundred people, truly listening to you. And not just with their ears, but with their entire bodies-- being able to hear and feel their support, their snaps and murmurs, their inhales of fellow-feeling, their engagement, their witness of you. That feeling of being so thoroughly and blessedly seen, for all of the parts of myself that I was taught by society should never be seen-- well, it healed something in me that desperately needed tending.

I don’t have a single memory of any specific slam where we won (although we did, for the record, ahem), but what I remember most are the after parties, being in community (and sometimes in bed-- ha!) with other poets. If you’ve got the idea of a poet as a quiet mumbler who barely whispers into the bookstore podium mic, get that idea right on out of your head. Slam poets are (scientifically) the sexiest people on the planet, and the giant post-bout parties we had reflected that, passing a bottle and staying up routinely until four or five a.m. In fact, some poets were so rambunctious that several hotels straight-up kicked all of the poets out (this happened more than one year). Of course, there was conflict and bullshit and boredom, but mostly, to me, these post-bout festivities felt like a giant super cool adult summer camp, where everyone there had the same niche interest as you and wanted to hear you talk at length about your mean dad (the sixth love language). We would leave the last bout of the night, after several hours of performing and listening to poetry, and then form unofficial circles on the lawn or in someone’s hotel room and perform more poems. These cyphers weren’t scored, they weren’t competitive-- they were for the love of the art form, for the muchness that we were. The chosen poet would stand in the middle of the circle and perform 360 degrees, and then close their eyes and spin, pointing to the next poet randomly a-la-spin the bottle. Some of my favorite performances are memories from these cyphers, where the energy fucking crackled through the night air, and we were free. 

If I could copy and paste those experiences directly into your brain, I would. My wish for all of you is that, at some point in your life, you get to feel so thoroughly seen by a group of people (and maybe take a cutie home afterwards for a smooch or two). 

Oh, and get your tickets for the Mash-Up! Can’t wait to make this magic with you for the third year in a row!

Love,

Ollie

Newsletter #2

Welcome to the second newsletter! If you missed my first one, you can check it out here: https://www.ollieschminkey.com/newsletter-1

Me out enjoying nature with my new flat chest!

I’ve been spending the last month and a half healing from top surgery, which has come with many emotions-- if you’d like to hear more about my experience, I’ve included some thoughts/feelings/ramblings at the end of this newsletter.

WHAT’S NEW
30 Poems in 30 Days

April is National Poetry Month! In this class, you’ll get 30 tailored prompts and write a poem every day of April. This class is a great fit for you if you want to write more (whether for pleasure or for a project), connect with community, and push yourself to explore new types of poems. You’ll also get hands-on support from me as your instructor, and some poetry feedback as well. All of my classes are designed for both experienced and beginner poets, and my classes have a very fun and encouraging atmosphere!

You can register here: https://writers.com/course/30-poems-in-30-days

Midwest Poetry Mash-Up Tickets are Now Live!
April 25th-26th at Open Book in Minneapolis, MN

Mark your calendars! 

Three years ago, I created a slam poetry tournament after the closure of CUPSI (the national collegiate slam poetry tournament that helped me and so many others to start their careers and find community). I really wanted any college students that wanted to do slam to have a tournament to go to, and so poets across the country could still access some of those networking and community opportunities that national competitions used to offer poets. 

Now, several years later, I’ve got several friends helping me organize (thanks, Zach and Tanesha!), and Midwest Poetry Mash-Up has grown into an (inter)national tournament with both college and adult competitors. Although I’m probably biased, I think this year might be the best one yet!

Tickets are now LIVE for the third Midwest Poetry Mash-Up! We're going BIG this year: larger venue, twice as many teams than we had in 2023, more opportunities for you to cheer on your favorite poets (or decide their fate should you be lucky enough to judge), and CHEAPER tickets than ever before! Get yours today so you can watch poets from all over the country compete for fame, glory, and a cash-prize over two days and 5 jam-packed bouts! Single event tickets* and full weekend passes available at https://tinyurl.com/mashup25tix

*Please note that tickets are divided into individual bouts (events) and make sure you select a ticket for the specific bout(s) you want to attend. If you want to attend all events, purchase a full weekend pass. Tickets are non-transferable and non-refundable. 

Questions? Email midwestpoetrymashup@gmail.com

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

PROMPT

Here’s a prompt, if you feel like writing!

POEM

I’m working on poetry book about top surgery! Here’s an exclusive sneak peek into the manuscript, as a thank-you for subscribing to my newsletter. I watched a bunch of stuff about trans people while I was healing, including Will & Harper, which absolutely made me ball my eyes out (and totally changed how I think about Will Farrell).

PETE

Pete has been incredibly helpful to my healing process— providing lots and lots of cuddles!

OLLIE’S THOUGHT CORNER

This past month has brought with it some extremes. I got top surgery just a few days after Trump signed those executive orders, some of which came with huge anti-trans sentiment and consequences. Not to mention that Iowa just removed gender identity from its civil rights code, making it the first state to stop protecting a group of previously protected people. There is so much hatred coming for trans people right now, and it’s really overwhelming and scary. 

As a non-binary person, I’m kind of used to transphobia showing up for me personally largely as erasure; which, in my life, has mostly been annoying and disheartening (and resulting in a years-long depression in college). This isn’t to say that erasure isn’t harmful; it’s definitely given me a mental health crisis or two. It’s just to say, that now in my 30s, I feel like I’ve come to terms with it in my own life. Cashiers will always “ma’am” me, internet strangers will always send me weird and mean messages, but I have a really solid community of people who see me for who I am, and who honor and celebrate me because of it. Besides, when I came out, I never would have guessed that non-binary people would be on TV, in movies, and be famous comedians with Netflix specials (shoutout Mae Martin). So, in that sense, despite all of the bullshit, I still feel incredibly lucky; public acknowledgement of non-binary people has already exceeded my wildest expectations. But the flip side of visibility is that now, people can see me, and that’s been feeling like a scary thing lately.

Post top surgery, it feels very strange to be marked now as physically “trans” during a particularly blatant anti-trans political landscape. For better or for worse, I’m used to erasure and invisibility providing a sense of safety for me, and now that safety feels tenuous. For the first time in my life, being transgender is on my medical records (I kept it off for the last decade out of fear of medical discrimination, but I needed to be officially diagnosed with gender dysphoria in order for insurance to cover my surgery). I personally don’t think any sort of medical transition is necessary for someone to be transgender, and I waited ten years (10 years!!) after coming out as trans to decide that top surgery was the right choice for me. But now, anyone could look at me and “tell.” Someone could know I’m trans without me telling them I’m trans, and this is new for me. (Not that I was exactly hiding it; I think any queer person would know instantly anyway, boobs or not).  I know that this public visibility is the reality for a lot of trans people, and has been for a long time, and I look forward to learning from them how to be more resilient when it comes to this. But I don’t think I was prepared to have new feelings about my gender a decade after coming out, and it’s taking me a moment to sift through them. 

While healing from top surgery has been more emotionally and physically difficult in some ways than I expected, the euphoria I feel with my new body is immense. The amount of community support I’ve felt is incredible. I’ve gotten to eat dozens of amazing dishes brought to me by friends and loved ones (who have turned out to be awesome cooks). I’ve felt so loved and cherished during this vulnerable time in my life, and I feel deeply grateful. 

There’s no tidy sum-up here, except perhaps to say that I’m moving into this next part of my life trying to honor each emotion, “good” or “bad.” Everything about life is nuanced, and I’m capable of holding joy and fear in the same moment. The changes I’ve made to my body represent both the fear of being seen, and the joy of being seen. And as I end this bit of rambling, I am feeling overwhelmed with the joy-- what a gift to be here, with you. 

Love,

Ollie

Welcome to the Newsletter!

In case you missed it, here’s my first newsletter that went out to folks; if you’d like to subscribe, you’ll get an email in your inbox every 1-2 months. It’s free!

Hi everyone, and a sincere welcome to my newsletter! Thanks so much for being a part of this!

This will be a fun and low-key, monthly-ish space for me to share what’s new-- whether that’s classes, prompts, poems, a spicy opinion, or pictures of my cat, Pete.

If you want to read more about why I’ve created this newsletter, I’ve put a few thoughts at the end of this email (TLDR; social media is letting me down on many levels, and I’m seeking a source of more sustainable and genuine connection). 

Starting Off: A Note of Love

I want to start with a genuine thank you for being here. There are a thousand things I want to say, but I also want to keep this newsletter to a reasonable length. So I’ll just say this: I really appreciate your support, and I’m really looking forward to connecting with you in this new medium— it means a lot to me that you’re interested in hearing what I have to say.

Onto What’s New: Upcoming Classes

I’ve got a few classes coming up through Writers.com that I’m really excited about! 

Mastering the Manuscript: Feb 6th- April 10th, live over Zoom. 

https://writers.com/course/mastering-the-manuscript-completing-a-full-length-poetry-manuscript-from-start-to-finish

This class is a great fit for you if you want to make serious progress on a poetry manuscript, whether you have an existing idea or want to start from scratch. We will cover everything (yes, everything) from ideation to metaphors to form to formatting. All of my classes aim to be fun and non-competitive while also providing you with a ton of tools and support to grow as a writer.

30 Poems in 30 Days: Starts April 1st, asynchronous through Wet Ink

https://writers.com/course/30-poems-in-30-days

This class is what it sounds like! In honor of National Poetry Month, you’ll get an intentionally tailored prompt every single day for the month of April. You’ll also get weekly feedback and access to a community of folks who are also committed to writing lots of poems. 

Prompt

Speaking of prompts, if you follow me on socials, you might know that I post a prompt every Wednesday. Here’s my favorite one from the past month:

Poem

And here’s a poem I had the honor of getting published kind-of-recently at Poets.org, that digs into some of the ways I’ve been trying to harness resiliency lately by shifting the way I look at things: 

https://poets.org/poem/first-rule-buoyancy

Spicy Opinion

I don’t think fruit and chocolate belong in the same bite. They are different kinds of sweetness that simply don’t go together. You could not pay me to eat a chocolate orange. If your mouth is different than my mouth and you really enjoy fruit and chocolate together, I am so happy for you, and if I’m ever forced to encounter a chocolate covered strawberry on my plate, I’ll give mine to you.

Pete

As teased, here’s my cat, Pete! His full name is Petry (pronounced as “Pee-tree;” I don’t know why we spelled it with a “y”-- it confuses people all the time. He’s also named after Petrie from The Land Before Time, so why didn’t we spell it like that? One of life’s great mysteries).

(basically twins)

A little bit about why I’ve created this newsletter, put at the end because it’s kind of long:

As social media has shifted to become more focused on videos and the algorithm has gotten truly wild (right now my Insta reels is almost 100% someone having a prolapsed something or other, and I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this!), I’ve found that I’m feeling increasingly disconnected with people who follow me on those platforms. I’ve tried to be a person who can join the rat race of content creation, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t want to create content videos for strangers, to deal with a constant stream of internet hate, or to become obsessed with reach and engagement numbers. I became a poet because I want to write poems, and to share those poems with people who want to read them. I’m hoping that this avenue will allow me to be a more genuine version of myself and to begin to have a more positive relationship to sharing what’s going on in my life and career, with people who actually want to hear it. 

That being said, I’m also pissed. Mark Zuckerberg (the sack of shit that runs Meta-- Facebook and Instagram) has decided to stop fact-checking all together (to be honest, I didn’t know that they were doing it in the first place) and now explicitly allows calling trans people mentally ill (read more about it here if you’re interested: https://glaad.org/releases/meta-removes-anti-lgbtq-hate-speech-policies-ends-fact-checking/)

On top of all that, it doesn’t sit well with me to feed AI programs that profit off of stealing the work of artists and writers like myself, especially when we have no way of opting out of that theft. (Also, did you know that AI is actually pretty bad for the planet and is accelerating climate change? It turns out that the internet and AI tools are not just magic things that float invisibly in the sky; they are all stored in huge processing centers that take large quantities of electricity and water to maintain). Here’s more if you want to dive in a little deeper on that: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about

I don’t know if I’m leaving those platforms yet or not, but I have gotten a Bluesky (@ollieschminkey.bsky.social), so if you’d like to stay in touch that way, give me a follow and watch me awkwardly learn how to use a new platform (somehow, I skipped Twitter/X entirely).

All of this to say, I’m really glad to meet you here, in this space, and I appreciate that you care and want to listen to what I have to say. 

Love,

Ollie