Practice Makes. September 2024

Happy Equinox, friends! Summer is somehow behind us here in Oregon, and lately, although I’ve been beginning my days as I usually do—sitting in my backyard trying to soak up as much sunshine and birdsong as I can while glued to a computer for work—I’ve been doing so bundled up in a sweater and puffy vest, a beanie tamping down my bedhead. Every day in the early afternoon, I’m surprised to find that I’m roasting and need to run inside to ditch the layers, lose the wooly cap in favor of a tee shirt.
 
That’s what this time of year is like—full of dramatic shifts, sometimes in the ambient temperature and sometimes in my inner weather. I often feel like a scale weighted in one direction, then another, never balanced. I’m hustling and bustling with nonstop activity, or I’m sprawled all day on the couch. I’m longing to flit about and meet all sorts of people, visit new places, try challenging things, or I’m craving acres of solitude and stillness and nothing more challenging than guessing which bird that is calling from the neighbor’s pine.
 
On this day when light and darkness are equal, I’m reminded that perfect equanimity is rare, that our whole little world has its own pendulum swings, rocking between a triumphant abundance of daylight and a long cloak of secluded darkness. As we arc from one season into another, may your own shifts and swings be easy, may there be solace in both the hum of the light and the quiet of the dark.
 
xo
JP ‪

When I started sending out my most recent book to publishers, I knew it wasn’t done. In the past, with every book I’ve written, I’ve spent weeks or months or years noodling with the order of the poems, swapping some out, writing new ones to fill in gaps, revising and revising and revising until, at last, something snapped into place. It’s akin to the feeling I get when I finish a poem—that feeling is, in fact, how I know a poem is finished, that sense that something has clicked closed, a door securely latched, a puzzle piece pressed firmly into the last remaining spot. But with this last book, although I swapped and wrote and revised for years, that feeling never arrived, and so I sent the manuscript out anyway, knowing that even if it wasn’t quite finished, it was close enough, and that if it got picked up, I could sort things out later.
 
But later is now—or actually, later was last month, when I had to send the final edits on the manuscript to my publisher. As I reentered the book, I could still feel the problem clearly, but not the way through it. The problem was the ending, where I’d placed all the poems that offered some relief from the heft of the first two-thirds of the book, which focuses on racism, gun culture, grieving my mother’s death, and the painful end of a relationship. (You know, just some light reading.) I wasn’t trying to slap a happy ending on, but I wanted to gesture toward a way forward through all that despair. So I’d ended the book with a dozen or so odes to queer communities where I’ve found hope, even when it’s been fraught or tempered by fear. When my editor shared notes, they confirmed that this sequence of poems, often set among the revelry of nightclubs, seemed like an abrupt shift from the themes and settings of the rest of the book.
 
This summer, I tried to build a bridge to those poems, adding in detours and side trails that might connect one landscape to another. It felt odd, and sometimes annoying, to have to build that bridge for readers. After all, my own experiences of queer joy and hope live right alongside my grief and pain and rage, so couldn’t I trust a reader to make the leap to understand that, too? But I knew that, without some signposts, some wayfinding, a reader might not know how a body can cross those territories, how readily someone can step from one to another.
 
So, I set out to build some placards, to lay some branches across the path in the shape of an arrow, to leave some breadcrumbs to say, This way! Follow me! After months of not writing—and of wondering, as I always do, will I ever write again?—the pressure of a deadline worked its potent magic, and I wrote a handful of new poems that I thought might serve as those pointers. I tested out the signs, the bridges, the side trails. Those new poems grieving my sister’s death, my regrets about our relationship? Too bleak, a route covered in slippery rock that could make a reader plunge into a canyon instead of rising toward the viewpoint I wanted them to see. But those other poems, the ones where I returned to using the “acrostic-telestic double whammy karaoke remix” form that I wrote about in ? Those were a more promising track, a scenic route that might lead to a different vista than the one I’d originally set out for, but one that might prove satisfying nonetheless. (Can you tell how much hiking I did this summer? So much.)
 
There was something to these poems, which riffed on problematic but popular songs from my childhood. One in particular—a poem that borrowed from Aerosmith’s magnum opus, “Dude Looks Like a Lady”—pointed me back to my own body, a body that has aged and ailed and otherwise transformed, that has confused other people—that has confused me—with its flouting of racial categorization, with its alternating and overlapping demonstrations of ladylike and dudely demeanors. My body—site of grief and pain and disappointment, site of delight and wonder and humor—gave me a new focus for the ending of the book. I pulled together poems about my body in its sickness and sweetness, in its gore and glory, in its mess and magnificence, and these became the gesture toward hope, toward survival, that I wanted to end the book with.
 
I sent off that new version of the book to the publisher a few weeks ago, and I’m still waiting to hear back from the editors, so maybe this isn’t where the book will end after all, but for now it feels fitting. I still haven’t felt that familiar click, but perhaps that’s because with this book, I’m not trying to turn the page on a chapter of my life, the way I’ve tried to do with my previous books. This book is about racism and gun culture and grief, and those things, I’m sad to say, don’t have an end in sight, don’t have a door to latch shut. I have not solved those puzzles. Instead, I have the open door of my body, which I walk through, looking for that new vista, waving to the reader, this way, follow me.

In my very , I wrote about how birds kept finding their way into my poems, on account of all the birdwatching I’d been doing since the pandemic started. Three years and some months later, as I went back into editing the manuscript that contains many of those poems, I noticed that even though the book touched on a wide array of themes and tones, birds were the constant throughout every section. The speakers in the book are observing birds, or looking for birds, or swearing they just saw a bird that no one else saw, or they’re turning into birds themselves, or turning back from birds into humans. There might be some meaning to make here, something about the flight response to threats, or the transcendence that can come from a bird’s-eye-view on the world, or hope being a thing with feathers. But the root truth is that the birds aren’t metaphors, they’re neighbors—always have been—and it seems odd to me now that they made only the occasional appearance in previous books.
 
When I wrote about birding in that first newsletter, I described myself as an amateur, and that still feels true, though I bought my first good binoculars earlier this year, tired of always having to borrow a pair when I went out for a bird walk. I even obtained a free spotting scope, a hand-me-down from Bird Alliance of Oregon, though I’m still so slow to maneuver the tripod and all the fiddly adjustments that even the most sedentary bird has taken wing before I can get it in view. Still, three years ago, I could identify maybe a dozen birds by sight or sound, and now, thanks to so many gentle guides who have helped me to slow down, to listen and look, there are maybe four dozen that I can reliably say hello to when I’m out and about, and maybe another forty who I can recognize in some fashion, the equivalent of being able to say, “I know we’ve met before—remind me of your name.”
 
More than racking up a list of names and characteristics, though, I’ve started organizing my life around birds. The little plot of land where I live, which I once would have dug up to cultivate tomatoes and melons and okra and beans is now mostly a smorgasbord for my feathered friends, who feast on the Oregon grape, snowberry, thimbleberry, and oceanspray, and compete with the bees for the spiraea, checkermallow, collomia, and kinnikinnick. I’m starting to embrace what a colleague called my señora days, meaning living like a grandparent, an elder, who devotes their free time mostly to sitting and looking at (and sometimes chatting with) birds. I even started organizing my vacations around birds, taking a stretch of days last month to drive out to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, where I saw great horned owls who looked confident they could turn me into prey if I got too close, innumerable lovable quail with their plumes flopping about on their crowns, and a white-faced ibis shimmering its iridescent oil slick body against the sunset and just generally looking like an ancient god.
 
Recently, I found out I’d have the opportunity to train with a local organization, People of Color Outdoors, to lead beginner birding outings, and I was over the moon, thinking about devoting this next year to learning about bird biology and behavior, to acknowledging more birds by sight and sound, and to understanding better how to invite other people, old and young, into their señora days. I know that at this time next year, I won’t be a bird expert, will still have more questions than answers about my bird neighbors, but I’m excited to indulge my bird curiosity even further, to help other people meet their spark birds, and to discover how birds might turn up in my future writing, perched in a paragraph or alighting on a line, their calls still a constant, no matter what comes next.

After taking a few months away from most things writing-related, I’m plunging back into the fray, beginning with a Cascadia Field Guide Poetry Celebration this Thursday, September 26, 6pm PT at McMinnville Public Library in Oregon. I’ll be reading alongside Brittney Corrigan, Barbara Drake, Lex Runciman, and Nancy Slavin, sharing writing about some of the many beings included in Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry.

If you’ve got an opportunity you’d like me to include in a future newsletter, please let me know.