January Check In

Hi friends!!

Just a quick note to offer my continued gratitude for you being here and supporting my writing. I've written a lot since starting this patreon, most of which does not get shared publicly but has joyfully made its way out of my body and onto a page. And, perhaps more importantly, I've been finding the spaces and places and permissions that I need in order to get the words out. Your support has also helped me organize a system to start sending snippets of my work out for publication. Just setting up a framework to not feel overwhelmed by this world has been a major goal of mine. Thank you!!

Poetry is all around us and so I think about it constantly, not just when I'm physically writing. I think about this interview between Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ocean Vuong all the time, where Ocean says,

"For the Vietnamese, a lot of love is articulated through service. We don’t say, I love you. We cook, we massage, we cạo gió, we scratch each other’s backs. It’s always this action, and it started to inform the way I thought about language — that language is embodied, language is carried. I think that’s how I maneuver the rhythms in my work. The intuitive moments of the line break, the silences, the pauses, the alliteration, all of that is finding an embodied movement of language, carrying the language, which is why I seldom write. I carry, and then I walk, and I interrogate, and have this friction with the line. The writing is the last part for me."

On a related note, I thought I'd give you a list of some places I'm finding poetry / where I'm carrying language lately:

• I laughed a lot in 2022
• My new compost bin
• Winter Korean Language classes start next week!
• Art by Erin Wallace
• I recently learned to snow shuffle I mean cross country ski
• I didn't know about The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Jester until this year and it was like one long dad joke full of adventure, like Alice in Wonderland exept Alice falls down a dictionary. If you haven't read it yet pls change your life and add it to your queue!
• This poem by Ellen Bass: Dead Butterfly
• @roomofonesownbooks has been making memes to help overwhelmed readers pick their next book and they're fantastic
• I'm going to cook Roasted Honey Nut Squash and Chickpeas with Hot Honey tonight; what have you been cooking?
• on a search for that Ocean Vuong interview I found this other Ocean Vuong interview (Ocean Vuong interviews are my favorite work of his; I love hearing him talk/write about writing) and whew I love it so much, here are two favorite quotes:

"You can’t just sit down and wing it. Those ideas have to be developed through time, and the best way is to just live your life but tend to the work mentally. Tend to it while you’re doing your dishes, while you’re showering, taking a dog for a walk."

"The poem is like a tree, and the book is a photograph of the tree. You take a photograph of the tree, but the next day, the tree has new cells. The next year, it has new branches. We have to make peace with the fact that a book is actually just a photo album, and that the organic psychic life of the poem is already growing somewhere else, somewhere inside you."

Thanks for being here.

You are loved

xo, na mee