I do
think we should praise
each other and our world
more often. I do
think good frybread
renews us. Good and sad
poems can use odes
as margins, reminders
of lively tastebuds.
It’s hard to drop
our raw selves in oil,
to curl up like a bowl
and hold heavy things,
no matter their taste.

You know in praising your mouth
you fall into foodie pornography.

Lately my meditative craft of choice has been making earrings from the bits and pieces I pick up off of our tool room floor. I can’t tell if I think they’re beautiful or ugly, but I wear them only on my right ear asymmetrically paired with a diamond stud on my left side. I’ve looked into Etsy shops that do the same thing—though obviously, much higher quality—and just can’t tell if I would want that: there’s something quick and immediate about fashioning these weird decorations.

Also: face fuzz!

1. bullet casing + crystal

2. metal scrap + wire wrap

3. safety pin + amethyst bead + nut + wire wrap

It’s funny: chapbooks and zines form a kind of Venn Diagram, the difference (broadly) being that chapbooks are sometimes fancy and/or expensive—and hold higher editing standards— while zines are almost always cheap self-produced projects, making good use of a photocopier.

Chapbook: “a small book or pamphlet of popular tales, ballads, etc.” The term derives from chapmen, a type of peddler in the 19th century, and currently refers to small books up to 40 pages, usually of poetry.

Zine: a small-circulation self-published work of original and/or appropriated texts and images, usually making good use of a photocopier.

Book artists have especially embraced the chapbook as a way to showcase material creativity, branching slightly away from the poetry publishing and creating objects that resemble attentive, artistically-produced versions of zines.

I’ll be reading some of my poems at a show on March 7 and am hoping to have a chapbook for sale by that date. The goal is to produce a collection that is 75% chapbook and 25% zine, so all this block printing and paper-cropping has got me looking for inspiration.

In other news: are gallery blog posts obsolete since the rise of Pinterest? Probably, though I like a collection presented with meaningful thoughts or commentary.

(Click on the images to view the sources, with the exception of the top image which was featured on ModCloth.)

I’ve been writing for weeks now about pain, and I’m tired of it. Personal writing can have therapeutic benefits—resolving conflict, healing trauma—but it isn’t helping me now. And more importantly, it will only be helpful (for myself and for others) if I find a way out of cynicism; right now this project is just spinning in circles.

I tried reading zines about chronic pain and was frustrated to find that they contained little more than account after account of struggling with pain, all sounding sadly similar. Instead of feeling strengthened by a larger community of shared experience, I felt even more depressed that so many individuals share the same struggle in a culture that actively discourages real, holistic health. (You know, the kind without restrictive diets, exercise machines, prescription medications and a rainbow of supplements)

But this isn’t really about pain—the inability to sit still or straight in a chair, the numb uneven landscape of my back. Pain is a breakdown in the larger ecology of wellness, and it’s just one facet of the larger conversation about self care—something that everyone, not only those in pain or healing from trauma, needs.

Caring for ourselves is cultural and communal; it honors the activists who work to legitimize invisible disabilities and the labor unions who successfully limited the work day to 8 hours. People have organized for centuries to determine and protect the health of individuals.

In this larger conversation about care (not just pain), some advocate a movement from self-care to communities of care. I’m instinctively drawn to the latter, but mostly because I’m inclined to care for others and find myself frequently wanting them to actively care for me. I was lucky to grow up in a church that—despite its ideology—provided a good model for how groups of people can care for each other. And now as an adult, care still seems intuitively reciprocal.

“Self-care” in radical communities is probably the equivalent of “self-help” in mainstream culture: a sort of egotism that doubles as a survival tactic. And both instances assume a specific definition of selfhood that dictates the way we relate to care—both for our “selves” and for each other. As Kathryn Shultz writes in a recent essay, ”the phrase self help is so commonplace these days we don’t hear the ideology implicit in it, but there is one: we are here to help ourselves, not to get help from others nor to lend it to them.”

The self-help genre totally bypasses the deeply warped structural oppressions that make us unwell, both as individuals and as communities. And while radical circles recognize those structural oppressions, their emphasis on self-care often creates an individualist isolation that reproduces systems of oppression and alienation. So, the argument goes, community care as an alternative is collective, collaborative and interdependent.

Unfortunately, interdependence can easily create dynamics of obligation, and these communities reproduce the oppression of, say, the church or state. And any person who has had to care for an ailing parent or chronically sick spouse knows that these situations can easily breed resentment and exhaustion.

So how, in a collective house, do we agree to care for each other, and then do so? How do we balance between isolation and obligation in a way that fosters reciprocity, growth and mutual liberation? Is it healthy to believe that your wellbeing is our liberation?

This is what I hope to explore.

Further reading:

• Communities of Care, Organizations for Liberation
  
• Catch More Flies with Honey: Toward Visionary Organizing
• Balancing Acts: Building Accountable Communities of Care
• Forget the Placebo Effect: It’s the ‘Care Effect’ That Matters

My brother once got kicked out of a club and tried to sneak back in, only to be recognized: “hey, no, wait, you’re the kid with the cool shoes.” This is a highlight of my portfolio, I think.

Several years later, I’m in the process of creating two new pairs: one for my brother and one for his girlfriend. My fabric-painting skills have gotten better, though I look forward to creating a pair with my own aesthetic and design rather than a request.

One of the Solstice gifts I made—a dark dreamcatcher with gold leopard beads (you know, for the wildest dreams).

Sadly, I didn’t reach my goal of reading fifty books in 2012. Though I started the year strong with a handful of reviews, summer turned tumultuous and I didn’t pick up any new books until early Winter.

Luckily, the 31 books I did read were a solid bunch. Early 2012 was filled with women writers, after which I slid into an David-Sedaris-on-audiobook phase. In Autumn I explored some anarchist theory and writings and the last month was almost totally consumed with fiction by Michael Ondaatje.

Despite not meeting my goal this year, I’m still going to attempt fifty books in 2013. No reason not to aim high, right?

P.S. If you’re on GoodReads, friend me!

A slate roof will last you a hundred years if you take care of it, but we don’t orient ourselves toward long-term investment these days.

The slate outlives the house under it and the people inside it. Consider

the spaces of time elapsing between when the silt deposited and collected
in the ancient river beds and compacted for millions of years — shimmying
and hopping and bopping to the geologic boogie — into what is now your roof
as you sit shaded from the sun or drying under the rain. Consider

all that mineralogical pressure, the way in our flesh and blood, fears
and desires, bits of memory and insights, can crystallize into some force
that is as magnificent as the roofs of spires and cathedrals, how out of our own
crystallized mica we can be a protector and at the same time splendid. Consider

how it must have been created on the first day, with all the other stuff of the earth.
Consider how its origins are a mystery, like love and death and the desire
to use a material that will last beyond our own lifetimes, like planting trees
and making art, impractical and out-of-fashion, we of the long term,

we who have faith in the future, we who play our minor role
in the eternal drama of the significant stone, which will last eternities
without us, we who want to know what our small part of forever feels like.
Because each square of slate is really a petal of a flowering sediment,

a small piece of earth from within the earth. As children we were honored
to be called upon to walk to the large black wall of slate in the front of the room
and write our names and drawings and scribble our confused answers
and we were rightfully reprimanded to stay after and erase them.

A slate roof looks like a book before it is bound. All of the pages
are written by a collaborative effort of weather and time. Hold one slate
in your hands. It is smooth and in places crinkled like handmade paper.
You can’t see yourself in the surface, it has lasted and will last much longer

than you will, but it is beautiful, it makes any building — pigsty or majestic dome —
like a quaint hut, a cottage in a fairy tale. Because it is so of-the-earth
it is otherworldly. Something mysterious about the way it is always shimmering,
something perplexing about the way it seems to absorb all history and stay its place.

— The Slate Roof Poem, from The Slate Roof Bible

 

“Roof” by Andy Goldsworthy (photo by Thom Watson)

Slate journal by Nuance Journals made from green slate from New Orleans roofs

Realizing: how much my shaky-but-confident lines and angular doodles resemble my father’s architectural drawings: the angles all perfect and the lines with a hint of a tremor, just so that you know it’s hand-drawn.

There are morning-and-caffeine writers, and there are nighttime-and-alcohol writers. You pick the time of day when your brain feels best, and pick the substance that brings it out.

I thought that was a quote from a writer, but I think I just wrote it in my journal once. Maybe I was inspired by an interview or article that gestured toward the distinction. This was during a phase where I found myself transitioning from a morning-and-caffeine writer to a nighttime-and-alcohol writer (a frightening change, for the record).

I do my best writing once or twice a year while flying. There is something about big, public space designed for transience; the intimacy of families or couples traveling together in massive crowds; the convergence of languages and accents.

Most likely, airports are just ideal spaces for people watching, which is the third most important writerly activity (the second most important is sitting and staring into space, and the first most important is writing/typing sentences). Everybody is too concerned with their own journey to look up, so a person with a long layover gets the best view—especially if you happen to be in the Charlotte airport, where the main terminal is lined with rocking chairs.