Really excited to be on this panel of Childfree & Childless Women Writers at #AWP26 with such impressive and talented humans: @stevieedwards.bsky.social, @janehuffman.bsky.social, @kaicoggin.bsky.social, & @christinastoddard.bsky.social. If you’re in Baltimore next week, come thru! Details below 😊
Ready to worship our lord & savior on this sacred Super Bowl Sunday 🙏🏼🐰🇵🇷🙏🏽
Chinga la migra 🖕🏽🖕🏽🖕🏽 I don’t give a fuck about the Super Bowl, but I’m so stoked for the halftime show 🐰🇵🇷
If their sin is hate
And my sin is love
Guess we'll see when it's all said and done
If they're drawing lines then
I know on which side I belong
I should refuse to lose sleep
Over know-nothing sheep
But they come for the land that I love
These damn motherfuckers
Are gonna make me buy a gun
🥹 Thank you so much, dear friend 💓
I never thought this would be possible for me, but here I am, today, one year sober from alcohol, and marijuana too.
I have so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I can’t extricate one emotion from the next, and so much goes unnamed. Everything is everything. These days all I do is feel.
That back-to-school grind 🖤 Advanced CNF workshop followed by my magical realism topics course today, and first day teaching popular fiction at the men’s prison tomorrow 👩🏽🏫 Good luck to us all! What a time to be alive 🙃
Page from Brenna Womer's Dear Mom: four-sided pieces of material overlapping in a way that only leaves the words "Dear Mom/I feel/and/I feel/and."
@brennawomer.bsky.social has a new free digital chap in petrichor 29, Dear Mom, in which erasure is the content of the letter.
petrichormag.com/current-issue/
Thank you so much, Elena, and right back at you! Honored to share space 💖
Cover art by Laura Wetherington. Collaged images of autumn and winter trees over a collage background of text and sheet music.
And so:
petrichor #29 is here for you. hey neat.
petrichormag.com/petrichor-29/
The Quiet Car My heart surgery was going well, the train conductor told me. He said, be aware of your surroundings. I told him not to worry, but when I looked around me, I wasn't so sure. Who were these other patients in the car? And where the hell did all of their hearts go? -Elena Zhang
Happy to have two small poems in the beautiful new volume of @petrichorlit.bsky.social! Here’s one:
petrichormag.com/29-pebbles-v...
My hybrid chapbook DEAR MOM is out now from @petrichorlit.bsky.social ☔️📖
You can read it here 👉🏽 petrichormag.com/wp-content/u...
Thanks to Seth & the whole Petrichor team, to the mags that published excerpts, to the generous blurbers, and to you for any time spent with the project 🙏🏼🙏🏽
A total shitshow getting up to North Tahoe yesterday to teach for UNR’s low-residency MFA, but I’m now a total pro at tire chains 😝 Excited for nine days in this winter wonderland. I’ve missed the snow so much! 😭🤩
So impressed by the beautiful job @sugarhousereview.bsky.social did with their full-color Sweet 16 issue, and excited to receive contributor copies in the mail today, featuring my poetry comic “i do everything twice” 🌹🥀❤️
This year, instead of buying my partner and our animals individual ornaments, I sewed felt ones 🤗 The dogs and cat got mopey, teary likenesses bc they’re a buncha crybabies 😂 and Tyler got Art the Clown bc he loves horror 🤡
I made salt dough ornaments for the first time this year and had a lot of fun! I’m excited to try a bunch of different shapes and designs next year, but I stuck to the basics this time 😊 I’m using them in place of to/from tags on gifts for the corresponding kiddos 🎁
“Hope is visible in the objects in our homes. Identities and plans rest dormant in a stack of books. The kitchen pantry reassures us of our future nourishment. A toolbox is the confidence that we can fix what will break. Little notes to self. Little notes of self.”
Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book
Being 2e/twice-exceptional can make life incredibly hard. There’s constant imposter syndrome—it doesn’t matter how much we accomplish bc, if we didn’t do it the neurotypical way (which we usually don’t), it feels lesser somehow. It can be paralyzing 💔 But he’s lucky to have strong support in y’all.
Oh, it’s good he’s open to medication! But yeah, the dorms were a terrible experience for me too. I felt totally out of place and overwhelmed, just miserable. I refused to ever have a roommate after that; even when I couldn’t afford to live alone, I did. Temple really is a great school, though!
If you don’t think it would upset him, you could gift the audiobook on the platform he uses. It’s a more passive way to absorb it, which he may be more open to. All of this is such a struggle to deal with w/o professional help and, for many of us, medication—especially if his anxiety is that bad 😢
I’m sorry he isn’t open to outside help, and I hope that changes soon, friend ❤️🩹
I can’t recommend this book more highly if you’re AuDHD, think you might be, or just want to learn more 💜💛 I’m listening to the audiobook, and it’s such a gift post-diagnoses 🥹😭
FEE FREE 48 HRS 🐑when you get a break from the severed floor, journey to submittable... sotospeak.submittable.com/submit
My very first graphic essay, “Only”—about the complexities of remembering as an only child—is in Blackbird 24.1 🖤 It was a hard one to write and illustrate, but I’m grateful for the process and the processing. TW for suicidal ideation. If you take the time to read and engage with it, thank you 🙏🏼🙏🏽
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
LBJ
🧊🎣
And if the escalator tries to bring you down go crazy
First five min of the Lilith Fair doc and have already cried twice. (Hulu!!)
