August is my least favorite month of the year

or maybe it's November

It’s been a long summer. Busy, really. Often heart wrenching. I have spent some of it on the road for The Land is Holy, some of it in Mexico and will end up in [redacted] for a few weeks. And most of it has been spent in deep deep climate grief: so many days spent hiding in the one air-conditioned room of my house, as Philly summers become fully unbearable. Where does all this energy go? All this despair and grief and anger? Can you metabolize the feelings of witnessing your own extinction?

I have been avoiding the feelings, fluttering from one place to another, knowing what would unravel if I sat still for long enough. Over 300 days of genocide in Palestine, increasing climate apocalypse. The cruelty of American living.

A few weeks ago, at the invitation of the beautiful people of Pocoapoco, I spent a week teaching a workshop about decolonizing the archive, about tending to liberatory futures. The artists were all brilliant, and on one of our last days, we practiced what Marcelo Hernandez Castillo taught me once at Roots.Wounds.Words. : burn the draft. Write something and burn it. Rewrite it from memory (whatever matters will remain). Burn it again. Let go of the inner censor, let the process unfurl. Burn again. Choose to keep the remaining draft or release it to the flames too.

I kept thinking about this question for myself: How do I let go of the desire to own? How do I let go of my own need to control? I wrote and wrote and wrote. I interrogated the shame and the fear. The rejection that always looms behind the shadows. I thought about how I wrote a book that I had hoped would usher a perfect new life for myself, and well…that didn’t happen, because, of course, that’s not how life works. And I thought about the ways I am loved, all the joy that permeates my days, even when the world is falling apart. About how, even in those dark, sweaty, impossible days, I continue to find new people to love. Burn it, release it. Hope it will, indeed, transform, into something else, you are not quite able to imagine just yet.

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A few things I want to tell you:

1- TONIGHT, I’ll be in conversation with my Periplus mentor Grace Talusan for my book The Land is Holy. It’s virtual, at 5pm EST (which means at a time that could work for other timezones). It’s free. REGISTER HERE, and please tell people about it.

2- I have a piece in the summer issue of the Kenyon Review. You can read it for free by registering OR listen to my voice read it for you.

3- A short interview I did for the Massachusetts Review.

4- I am actively starting to map out my next book events, looking at the Midwest. Friends over there, reach out if you can help

5- Please continue supporting mutual for Palestine. Especially E-sims which are drying out

<3 love you