The writing does not just come through my fingers. It comes through my spleen, my kidneys, my 6-year-old self, my mother’s womb, my hope of me when I’m 62, the wild cotton outside my window that my eyes eat every day. It’s all inside me. It all is me. And the words breathe through them, each of these filters, all of these filters, mortared and pestled into one.
Table of (Forms &) Contents
I just write, letting my content create its own form. Below are some common-enough labels we can use as guideposts. But remember, those things are all just made up, so don’t get stuck there.
Prose Poetry
Jonke
All you have to do is pick one point, throw a flag toward pavement and see where it lands, and there you will find your first clue. The gate appears just behind the edge of a road wall, so that you just barely peek it, make a u-turn, and slide, angled, so underbelly doesn't scrape off asphalt.
Gate is locked and no one comes when you call, but you have to squat between weeds, and that's just the time it takes the man to leave his post of TV or telephone or tedium to appear.
No lo tengo.
But he calls Jesus for you, just down the road. And Jesus is supposed to be your savior, but you arrive to find, no, he doesn't have it either. But his is a nice gate to look through, and he tells you there's another place behind his: Giras ahí, he points, y te vas hasta topar con la torre eléctrica.
Where the tip of his finger was, you dip about two meters off pavement, drive along the border you just dropped down from — trace it back — and then to keep tires from dry-miring into arroyo sand, turn the next one sooner, and there: the other world, the downsideupness, Jesus just the gatekeeper this time to a gate which you would never find without his finger.
Inside is:
barnyard
boneyard
file cabinet
still lives
sculpture garden
dentures hanging
tongue kisses
aquarium fishes
dogs that come when you peel off, not pull up
lottery ticket scratch-off that exposes red on your silver-green as bumpers bump.
And you realize that the apocalypse has already happened and how strange it is that everyone is still waiting, predicting the time of the knock. But you’re not sure which is which on either side of the gate. The isness. The aintness.
But it doesn’t matter, because you have the winning ticket on both sides, a perfect line of cherry red.
Files flipped, treasure found, you come out. And it is so obvious: you come out. Except one and a half hours on the other side of smooth pavement back in the town where you live a grocery story life a woman walks her horse from the car window.
And so you sit still long enough while the treasure is delivered to realize the riddle: the gate is your eyelid, your head the hinge, and Jesus did just save you.
Non Fiction Novella In Flash (excerpts)
If you like what you read, below, then buy the book to read the rest (and to hold it as a precious object in your hands). Right now, it is sold out. (They’re handmade. Read on. You’ll see why.) But you can get on the waiting list for the next release.
Letters to the Self, for Remembering
Introduction
During December 2022, I moved into my studio and unpacked boxes of old journals, scraps of paper I had been holding onto, and began reading and rediscovering parts of myself.
These were all little paper mountains of words that I had accumulated around me, like a squirrel thinking she would come back to it in another season, but then forgetting, moving on to another nut.
Finally, I took shovel and rake, sickle and sythe and harvested.
Remembered myself.
Found appreciation for my mind and my way of thinking about and experiencing things.
It was like I was reading someone else. I liked the writer.
I ripped out pages of old notebooks, harvested lines, then soaked and ground the paper fibers into pulp that I made new paper with.
Re-processed, re-purposed.
All my notebooks went back to late 2016 when I ended a nomadic period and re-settled. And they stretched until that December move-in.
I saw patterns.
I saw changes.
I saw myself shedding.
I saw myself saying the words I needed to hear to move on from one thing to the next, to be brave, to let go, and let my hands be free to grab onto something else.
I saw things I needed to remember.
So instead of letting it all go back to mountains that filled holes in the ground, I pieced it together into one piece that I can easily re-read to remember myself when I forget.
The lines of this book are a jumble of thoughts from 6.5 years. They are from 4 different relationships, but they read as if from one… because really, they are from one: my relationship with myself. I took things that did not necessarily go together and made them linear; I took the circles of my life and stretched them out to be flat, one tail end to another, or one belly cut off and attached to a head.
This project was a way for me to make use of all my creative mountains that were just sitting there. To take one output and resource it as material to create another output.
To create purpose.
To create.
Excerpts
dedication
To myself
Sometimes I forget who I am, but then I read and remember.
page 1
“Where are you from?”
I’m from everywhere I’ve ever been.
And everyone I’ve ever known.
page 2
He is large, loud. He is yang.
I am subtle, a whisper. I am yin.
My power presents differently but is just as strong.
Both salt and sugar can draw water out of fruit.
page 6
Sometimes I feel like I escape myself, leave my body, and the me that's left behind wonders where the other she went. I awake and find her missing, and there is only the half left behind, which feels so much less than a half because it's the half that does only the walking about, the eyes that the other looks through, the ears that the other uses to listen. Everything is an effort because there is only body to carry it out, and nothing inside to move it. I miss this other half terribly, desperately, but have no idea where to find her, where to even look. She left no note. Then suddenly, as I'm lying reading, a sheet pulled over my legs, I feel the weight of her there next to me – she's snuck into bed. And she's pressed herself so tightly against my back and the backs of my knees and the soft bottoms of my feet that she spills right back into me. And suddenly I am no longer just eyes, but I can see. I am no longer just a breathing body, but I can feel. I am no longer a pulsating mind, but I can know. I am no longer just fingertips of skin and nail, but I can hold things with everything outstretched inside me.
page 12
There are certain things, if not done regularly enough, go out of you. And in their place, something else takes over. So sometimes you have to drive that something else out, like taking a swath to kudzu. To cut away at things so sharply – to do that on your insides – can make you feel like you're dying.
page 24
Sometimes I see everything that it is.
Other times I see everything that it’s not.
Which one should I be looking at?
page 36
It turns out what I wanted in December, I got two months later, in February. Isn’t that the way it goes sometimes? Sometimes things must come in a different season and not according to the timetable we assign them. Sometimes, in fact, we want something for July and get it many months, many seasons earlier, in December…
I asked for a certain life and it was handed to me on December 23, like an early Christmas present. And the card attached: “You wanted it, so here you go. Hope you’re ready.” Signed: “The Universe.”
I suppose I’ve been saving the gift receipt, stuffed at the bottom of my bag. But that will be left in the trash bin when I leave, and on the kitchen counter, a hand-written thank you note back, signed: “Yours truly, Amanda… P.S. Looking forward to the next one.”
10-Minuted Prompted Writing, Unedited
Yes, unedited. I talk (and reveal) a lot about process, the subconscious, and letting the inner voice come through. A 10-minute writing prompt often goes turning-point to turning-point and, afterwards, leads me into longer pieces.
These are my works of writing, and they’re also my writing prompts. My style of prompt drops you into any style, any genre. I use these in writing workshops and in the online prompt packages you can download here.
Mostly Fiction. Some Non. Whatever wants to come out.
“_______” he screamed, just as she was…
Come back here. Go away. I don’t know.
He screamed all the things. In all the ways. Some with his words, some with his eyes, some with the angle of his words – his tone – and some with the angle of his lips – their corners. It was a mixed pot of mess, his messages. And she didn’t know which one to listen to. So she did what she always did – exactly what she wanted – and this time, left. Took her every thing and left. But the double boiler pot, she left for him, and the iron skillet and the mirror and all of her glass jars. Those things belonged more to the house now than either of them.
Where would she go? She didn’t know. She just got in the car and drove. Drove and drove until the gas ran out to let that be the decider. Was it stupid? Probably. But she did it anyway. And it happened somewhere around mile marker 392. 6:27 PM, just as the sun was nearing its own exit out the back door. She got the car roadside, just off the shoulder. What was around her was forested – to her right, a climbing hillside of conifers, and to the left, a cliff down into the sea. She would climb. Leave her things, take some water, throw a blanket over her shoulders and climb.
These two things did not…
These two things did not match, like oil and water, paint and gasoline, silk and orange juice. But still, there they were. Next to one another. Drawn, attached. What was it between them – the magnet pulling?
When he left the room she felt it. Like suddenly it was time for her to go too, even though it was a different going, to another place. She looked up and realized that: “oh, it's not because everyone is going that I feel it's time to go. Everyone is still here, really. Only he has left.” She found it curious, strange. And then, while she continued in her conversation with the girl who was talking about Eskimos – the riddle her dad taught her – her mind started to wander. And to wonder: what other things were like this, what other invisible threads did she have attached and to whom? Whose movements were causing her to move, sending out an impulse?
“It was the ice,” the girl said. Suddenly she was back in the room looking down at the large spherical cube in her own glass, melting. The real riddle in front of her and all around, never with an answer. It was like an ivy-walled maze with barricades she could not peer over, where everywhere there appeared to be an ending – an exit – there was only a wall. Another dead end, a point of return, turn-around. This green world had become her home, the plants her friends, the soft green walls, alive. She suspected there was no exit, only the illusion of one, and that once she accepted this, that this world would drop away, vanish: what was real to be revealed as the illusion, what was illusory to be shown as the only thing true.
It was different from the moment…
It was different from the moment the tree toppled. It hit the roof just above my bed. Well, it went through the roof just above my bed. It happened when I was in the kitchen making breakfast – eggs and rice – and it pulled me from the stove and the hot pan, so that I had not one problem but two.
I don't know what caused it, and I still wonder. Was it the storm from a few weeks back? The ground was soaked, the backyard bog-like. Any living thing can only take so many seasons of that. And if it was that, wouldn't it have leaned slowly, so that I would have noticed? But then again, do we really notice those things? Of course I can't help but think of Greta and what she told me – confessed. Did it have something to do with that?
In some ways, it doesn't matter. Because I live in the here and now, and now I have to share a house with Jimmy.
Creative Non-Fiction
Messages from the Interior (excerpt)
This piece existed both as audio during one of my Writing Journeys (immersive installations based on writing) and in books for reading and writing. It guided the experience and lead each individual participant into their own writing. (Migrante Galería, Todos Santos, BCS, México | June 2023)
Everything speaks.
I listen.
Breeze through my open window makes a sail of the curtain. The earth’s breath is caught.
Yesterday, on the drive south out of town, the air coming in the car window was chilled, from the Pacific, which entered the window on the right, and which started its flowing descent down from the Arctic. But I made the turn – took the left fork – and dipped more into the desert, with rocky cactused peaks on both sides, and the air was warm, coming from baked earth. Then it was the land’s hot breath I breathed, instead of the cool exhale of the ocean.
At night I sleep with my windows open, the voices silent, the curtain just a curtain, instead of a sail. All of us resting.
Sun returned, I awake, make coffee, then write in bed with pillows behind me, birdsong and rooster crows filtering in with the morning light.
Around 9AM I become aware of the glass of water on my bedside table and its fragility as the curtain, again, begins to blow. This breath is gentle at first, only a whisper, just awaking. Then, as the sun continues to rise, she picks up. She deepens. The breath again dancing.
What does she say? Or is it a he? Or neither? What is the quality of this voice? Its tone, its texture? Where does this breath come from that enters here? Is it one voice or many?
Is it the breath of the sea that I can see from my window? I sense those cool tones carried in as they brush my skin – different shades of blue, of Pacific, of Arctic, of Japanese as the Kuroshio current brushes against the Asian continent and washes eastward to where the Aleutian finds us. In moments, it is also equatorial warm, eddying up from Australia, even Peru, and so many other places it touches and gathers into itself.
Is it also the breath of the cactus-studded land not far away and of the one scattered with houses and dogs and tire tracks much closer?
It is the breath of the ground stirred up by bulldozers and shovels as the houses get built? Of packed layers of sediment, like secrets forgotten and buried, now unearthed?
Is it the breath of asphalt, of molted black petroleum mixed with crushed rock – human-made lava – spread over packed dirt and then cooled for us to all move over?
Is it also the breath of the humans, themselves – all their exhales – and those of the animals, the dogs and the cats and the horses and the jackrabbits and the wrens and robins and scorpions and snakes?
The breath of the cacti too, the trees, the cotton growing by the neighbor’s fence, and even the cottonwoods, in the first hills of the Sierras, which turn golden, tucked in the river bed, which runs with water in some seasons and has a breath too?
All of these things exhale. These beings breathe… their essence contained in what comes through my window, which I breathe in and then breathe out through my fingers onto this page…
