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