Noticings, This is my new substack newsletter. While I’ve loved my little Ramblings blog here, I haven’t visited often enough. It has felt, well, neglect-full at best. My website is still running all the things: upcoming events, new projects, and freshly published art and programs.
Noticings will hold a theme: the little things I notice that contribute to my creative life.
I guess what I need and, maybe you might enjoy too, is a weekly glee-full rant. Think, avant-garde poetry salon mixed with analog methods, like vinyl records, long-hand writing, to-do lists, and home-baked bread. Think, gathering around a campfire and sharing stories, experiences, noticings. Think, postcards, hand-written Thank You’s, and a proper cup of tea.
Within weekly Noticings, I’ll share my thoughts, along with a creative call or prompt or tool. Something that you might find useful. Something to keep you inspired and your heart filled.
If you’d like to check out Noticings, subscribe, share, enjoy.
Content Warning:This post discusses suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and sexual abuse and trauma
My body, this body, how many times she’s nearly not made it. 2006, a bizarre ear infection. The bacteria traveled to my mastoid, a honeycombed bone in the back of my head. The air pockets in the bone filled with strep. They—the surgeons—couldn’t simply slice me open and remove the bone, replacing it with a plate. There’s but a thin membrane between the bone and the brain. Instead, they admitted me, placed me on my side, allowed the poison to drip from the myringotomy tube, saturating my pillow.
As my body released toxic waste, I told myself, These are the lies others have told me about me. Told myself, These are the lies I believed.
It took a full year on antibiotics to recover, regain lost tissue and weight, as my body fought her way back to center ground.
Later, 2021, a sinus infection that wouldn’t quit. Staph flourished, entering my cheek bone. My body endured surgeries, debridements, scraping bones. My body absorbed heavy doses of antibiotics for another year. Again. Bone. Bone near brain. Bone and bloodstream.
Bacteria is natural to the body, but here, in mine, it often rampages. Still she—my body—fought, with and without outside assistance…
continuing reading this article over at Write2Heal on Substack…
NOTE: My entries are published non-linearly, offered to the world based only on courage. Today’s entry was originally penned on September 8th. Here, I’m ready to share.
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Let me tell you, I’m amazed with my body. I can’t tell you if I’ve ever, across my sixty years, simply witnessed her miraculousness.
After each baby pushed through, I tortured her back—however I defined back—each time. Wore girdles, dieted, dehydrated, crunched her into size four. Sometimes size two. I liked her better smaller, flatter, leaner.
I knew she knew this.
I’m sad about this now.
I can’t imagine liking anyone for anything external.
Here, today, I’m letting her.
Letting her be her in all her glory.
Letting her heal.
I left the ICU twelve pounds heavier and thirty percent less muscle mass than when I’d arrived. I can press anywhere on her—my body—all the way through to the other side, to another galaxy. After my neck collapsed, twice, I spent two years struggling to re-gain control and use of both hands and my lower right leg. (You can read my essay, “Braced and Bedazzled” about this chapter in my life in The Rumpus).
Here, an image of me around 2014, braced and navigating university, single-motherhood, and not healing.
I pushed and pushed her—my body—telling her, You’ll heal stronger. I honed ambidextrous ways. I quit wearing my lower leg brace, telling myself, This hurts, and It gouges my ankle.
I’m a liar.
The brace is ugly. It makes me feel vulnerable and broken.
I fell apart yesterday. Along with the body, this body, my body, pulling herself together, my heart cracked and crumpled. A break-up. My choice. My clarity for life moving forward. Clarity to know who and what I will allow access to me based on love, kindness, compassion. My choice—not rash nor emotional—but a series of linked behaviors, especially during and directly following my ICU stay.
The grapes ready themselves. They fascinate me with their way. The bunch of them living in different stages on shared stem. Some ripe. Others raisened. A few maintain their hard green selves. It takes me two hours to gather twenty pounds. I’ve still a second grapevine to tend.
When I fell apart yesterday, I cried my long drive home from the Saturday market. I met friends at the market, bought sourdough bagels and tomatoes and lobster mushrooms. I’m usually satiated by the vibe of concessions—all this community sharing common values of preservation and organic living. And I was. Satiated. Until I was not. The grief over potential future and current loss began its process.
After washing my grapes, I pluck and pack the ripest to freeze for smoothies. The raisins find their way to a mason jar and the green beads move to compost. Matt Berninger plays in the background while my seventeen-year-old fries home-made battered onion rings. The heavy aroma of oil and pepper lingers in light smoke. Or perhaps my vision clouds. I’m not sure.
Yesterday I pulled my stent out. The surgeon instructed this post-op, though I barely remember her guidance. Blood. Warm bath. Meds. Pain.
The day before, I bled-peed all day. This too, expected. Still, when you witness your body pouring blood through an orifice that should not bleed.
Yesterday I prepped stent-pulling with a strong dose of Tylenol. I don’t ingest pain meds. More accurately, my body doesn’t cope with prescriptions. She—my body—cramps, vomits, shudders. Post-op pain management looks like an endurance test with heating pads, ice packs, and Tylenol. I also believe that pain is a symptom and masking a symptom often brings more complex challenges.
The day before, I joined friends at The Sandbar for live music. The band played 80’s tunes and a third of the crowd dressed the part—Cyndi Lauper-ish, neon jogging suits, hair poofed to sky. I knew the lyrics. I danced in a non-bouncing gentle way and realized that this was my first outing, my first witnessing of clouds outside my backyard. My body warmed with movement. I still peed blood.
(continue reading on my substack blog, Write2Heal)
Tomorrow brings surgery. My 17th or 19th while in this bag of skin. When I leave this world, I’ll leave lighter, fewer organs and rage than the state in which I arrived.
Today. I make a list of nourishing things: cool morning breeze, cricket choruses, fire pits and poetry, slow reading and even slower writing, pausing to push mundane tasks—dishwashing, dusting, laundering—into meditative moments of restoration.
Tomorrow they remove the infected kidney stone, too large to pass even with a stent. Perhaps tomorrow they will send the said-stone for analysis and determine what, within my body, helped build this beast. In a week, they will re-culture my blood and hopefully find the bacteria has flushed away. I won’t ask, Where did it go?
Today. I read pages of Tao Te Ching. I read this same book while serving in the military. A few pages every morning. Once I finished the book, I began again. I did this for four years and now, 40 years later, I see the way life shifts. I note the way we re-absorb story, language, another’s wisdom based on our ever-shifting lived experiences.
Wednesday, August 19th, my body fetaled, severe cramps spasming my lower abs and left flank. Probably a kidney stone, I thought. Maybe food poisoning. I dry heaved every ten minutes and thought, Manageable. Part of me feels like I could CLEP out of Med School after nurturing and nursing my son through 42 procedures, post-op home care, and over 60 hospitalizations. Then I add in my own disabilities and medical challenges.
This continued until four in the morning. I couldn’t keep a swallow of water or Ginger Ale throughout these six hours. I couldn’t pee.
Most likely a kidney stone blocking passage.
Still, I wasn’t worried until I stood up and couldn’t see, my legs boneless, my body numb.
Oh no, I thought.
I’m probably dying.
This is less than good.
Still, I waited. I mean, sometimes these little things work themselves out. Right?
Are writers who take years to publish better writers than those who publish frequently?
I’m asking for myself because I hear this fairly often. Because I hear this often, I assume the statement is targeted at me. I might be the target because over the last four years, I’ve published four books. (Thank you, Moon Tide Press). By some literary standards this looks like frequent publishing.
Maybe I’m just sensitive.
Maybe I’m feeling imposter syndrome.
Maybe I’m looking for another reason to doubt myself, my work, my worth.
Image credit: Howard Kinga
I want to dismantle the myth around “fast publishing.”
When I say, Publishing, I mean the traditional path: agents or indie publishers or university presses, etc.
Should it take a writer years between each major publication?
That depends.
How frequently and consistently a writer is published depends on how frequently and consistently a writer writes.
Let’s play with numbers.
I pen a poem or an essay every day.
EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
I do not claim to write a decent or even logical poem or essay each day. But if you write 365 poems or essays a year and you use basic stats with a five percent return, 18.5 of your pieces, about 20 poems or essay, should churn into something close to publishable.
And the number of pieces a writer submits will have a similar return rate, between 5-10%. If you submit ten poems a year or 220…well you do the math.
A few years ago, I joined Suzanne Roberts‘ Rejection Club. The goal of her club was to help writers commit to sending work out into the world. The number of rejections received indicated how much work the writer was submitting.
The first person in the group to reach 100 rejections within the year “won.”
The win?
Free dinner, compliments of the group.
One year, I reached over 200 rejections.
I can officially claim that I am the ONLY writer to ever out-reject Suzanne Roberts.
Literary publishing is a numbers game.
You might compare successful publishing to dating or gambling or job-searching. I compare it to high-level athletic training. To become a seasoned athlete, you show up, you push through the reps, you eat the science-based proportional meals, you rest.
When I was at the height of my “game,” competing on the national and international stages in SportAerobics, I trained six hours a day, six days a week. No matter. I did this for eight years.
There’s a science behind conditioning at high levels.
Maybe there’s a similar science behind publishing at high levels too.
Image Credit: Eric Prouzet
Naturally, athletic discipline transferred into my writing life. Into my life. Perhaps my time in service, eight years in the United States Air Force, also conditioned my mind-body approach to writing (and to life) as well.
Athletic and military training did not feel like punishment. I loved the challenges. I loved testing my body and brain. I loved discovering what I was made of.
Writing with discipline does not equate to harshness, torture, or punishment. At least not to me.
I love to write.
I love to journal.
I love revision.
I love mapping books, images, poems.
To this day, I still diagram sentences.
I love the the challenge of form, structure, genre-bending, and strange prompts.
I mostly love what writing offers me: self-understanding, self-awareness, healing, compassion, and empowerment.
I never write with the intention of publication. I never write thinking of an audience. My first draft is simply to write. To write for me. Only me. I write to sort through my life. I write to understand my wounds. I write to unbury pieces of me that I’ve hidden for years. I write to unleash my holy rage. I write to pour my gratitude onto the page. I write to find language so I can unsilence my silenced self.
Sorry, let’s return to numbers.
Say you write every day. Say that equals 365 pieces a year. Say you’ve been writing every day since the age of 19, when you believed every thought held both importance and truth (like many 19-year-olds). Say today you’re 59. That means after 40 years of daily writing practice, you’ve accumulated 14,600 pieces of writing. Say you’re an extremely organized writer and you’ve sorted these writings into categories: nature, body, world events, parenting, humor, spiritual, rage, love, desire, etc. Say one morning, you gather your file on childhood sexual trauma and notice you’ve collected 80 poems and even more essays. Say you tell yourself, This might be a book.
Say, a month later, while shaping and revising the childhood sexual trauma book, you sort through your files regarding your son and his medical challenges, and you notice, Oh! Here. This might be a book-length poem.
While working on the childhood sexual trauma book and the book-length poem, you still write a poem or essay every day. You still discover and challenge, flex and stretch your writerly self.
This.
My little writing life tucked in a small corner of Star, Idaho.
Image Credit: Radek Grzybowski
On the outside, it looks as if I’m churning out a book almost yearly or publishing poems or essays every few months. I mean, I am. That’s true. What you don’t see is the years of material accumulation. What you don’t see is the training of a seasoned writer. Let’s face it, when you train consistently, you improve your game.
This is true of dance, gymnastics, running the 400 (all events I fared well).
This is also true of writing.
On the outside, it looks like I’m new to the writing game. I guess I am with my first lit journal publication in 2017. But my publishing life launched while serving in that military, age 19, 1985. That equals 40 years of time working with editors, review boards, publishers. 40 years fueled with rigor, fact-checking, and editorial feedback.
During my time in service, I wrote a 12-month training program for my career field, Flightplanning and Airfield Management. I wrote this program on my own time, returning to work late at night where I had access to a computer. I wrote this program on WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. I taught myself how to map out a proper training program that might stand the test of time. I wrote this program because a gap existed in adequate training for my career field once we were reassigned to the European theater.
I was awarded the Inspector General’s Award of Excellence for this program.
This program is still in use today, 40 years later.
40 years later, and I still write into the gap, still ferociously and unflinchingly fight systems and methods to create magic: placing language where none existed.
I’m not the same writer.
I am the same writer.
I’m not writing the same story.
I’m forever writing that same story.
Am a I good writer?
I couldn’t say.
It’s subjective measure. And since it’s subjective, how frequently work is published should not be part of the equation. What should be part of the equation is the quest of writing. The why. The intention. Perhaps we pause and consider, The world of publishing for a writer is an “On the Outside,” story.
If I circle back to my original question, Are writers who take years to publish better writers than those who publish frequently?
After considering my 40-year journey, I wonder if anyone publishes anything “frequently.”
I taught a kintsugi art class in 2024. It went less than well, mainly because I nearly caught a few participants’ eyelashes on fire. I’ll come back to my fire-hazard moment. Let me back up: I’m not a kintsugi expert and this was my first and only kintsugi workshop.
For me, kintsugi began as a fascination and turned into a meditation, like many of my other artsy explorations. At my core, I’m a fixer. At my core, I long to help. My sons might tell you, She’s solution oriented, if you asked them how I manage challenges. I avoid words like “good,” “bad,” “problem,” and instead I auto-frame a situation as “opportunity.” Some of my most difficult experiences were truly opportunities for me to shine, to rise, to grow.
Kintsugi (and my, uhm, kintsugi workshop) turned into a great experience.
If you’re not familiar, kintsugi, kintsukuroi (金繕い, “golden repair”) is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. This form symbolizes embracing imperfections, finding beauty within the mending instead of hiding flaws or tossing away fractured items.
I found myself researching ways to make gold in my home to “fix” small items.
I felt like a magician.
I poured through a number of resin-based products with zero or little mishap, but the end result would often malfunction or fall apart.
I learned that what mattered most was not only the “content,” but the brand. Gorilla Glue and Let’s Resin worked best.
NOTE: You can download my instructions at the end of this blog.
I felt like a scientist (I may or may not have donned goggles) as I brushed on product, realigned edges, filled in gaps. The product always ended up less-than-perfect, but more interesting and, actually stronger, once finished.
Which felt a lot like life.
I love imperfections, accidental misspellings, one nipple a little lower than the other, a thick waist, a crooked tooth. I love pushing against social pressure to look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way (especially “your age”) simply to feel a sense of belonging.
It took me a long time to arrive here, this place of love.
I struggled with approval-need-addiction a good amount of my life. I chameleoned into what my abusers demanded, what the military expected, what a husband desired to the point I lost myself. I spent the last five years purposefully isolating because I thought I needed to heal from so much damage.
What I needed was to time with myself.
Even though I’m no longer in “hibernation,” I now know that alone time for lengthy time is a necessary part of my growth.
I shared some of this experience, including my kintsugi practice, with my friend Esther. After, she asked if I would teach the art form to the Jewish Women’s Circle at Chabad.
No problem, I said.
We only need a few items, I said.
Lucky for me, my friend and colleague, Court Harler arrived (not for my class, but for Treefort) and offered to help me set up.
We needed 30 broken items. I bought bowls at a Dollar Store
Court and I may or may not have arm wrestled over breaking bowls because this part of the set up felt the most cathartic.
We placed extra products on a table, including small art files and baby wipes.
On a side, I could write a self-help book on the two thousand household uses for baby wipes.
I could also pen a sequel on the three thousand household uses for glue guns.
(Sorry. Different stories for different days.)
One of my favorite art appliance is a mini heat gun. If you’re also a watercolor artist, you know why.
These little pups are great for phone repairs, embossing, paint/seal drying, candle making, epoxy resin, and shrink wrap too.
We needed food, which Esther took care of in her usual brilliant capacity.
I began the workshop sharing all the great benefits of kintsugi and then invited the participants to gather ’round me as I demonstrated how to mix their resin with glue for best effect. At home, I used paper plates for my mix. For the workshop, I had purchased small plastic containers for each participant. Withing a minute, the mixture smoked and then the entire little container began melting in my hand.
Here’s where my military training combined with a lifetime of single-motherhood kicked in.
That’s unfortunate, I said.
At the time, I thought the “challenge” was the combination of the plastic container with the ingredients.
Do you have paper plates? I asked Esther. No. Only a plastic variation, which I thought would not work.
How about an old cardboard box? I asked.
We broke down the box and gave participants small sections to “mix” their potions on.
The resin burned through. Participants re-gathered.
No worries, I said.
Let’s brush on only the glue onto the crack. Add the powdered resin to the glue. Quickly push the chunks of bowl together.
This worked.
Sort of.
One significant aspect of kintsugi, as in many Japanese methods, is the slow and mindful process. We lost this because the resin “heated” and then hardened almost immediately. Still, the bowls re-fit and repaired.
Later, I’ll think about my reactions, my way of bringing a solution to the surface and when one way doesn’t work, I’ve two or five more ideas. This is not a super power. This is a mindset. A choice. A way of living.
Once home, I needed to sort out what happened. I wondered why I couldn’t replicate my home experience in a different setting. I soon realized that I’d purchased Gorilla Glue super glue for the workshop. Apparently, the super glue product is not the same as the plain Gorilla Glue and when it comes to science, one atom off makes a difference.
I felt lucky that no one lost a lash.
I re-did the workshop experiment in the privacy of my home and found success (and how much I loved a broken bowl with a “hole” to mend).
Court bought me flowers.
I placed them in a kintsugi-repaired vase on my kitchen sill.
I know I need kintsuigi in my life, in my attitude.
And I’m thinking about how much we need kintsugi in the world.
Kintsugi reminds us that we can transform difficult experiences into opportunities and resilience. Reminds us that each “break” is unique and, instead of replacing an item (or person), this 400-year-old art technique highlights our “scars” as part of the design. Reminds us that sometimes in the process of repairing broken things, we create something more unique and beautiful.
Disclaimer: I am not a kintsugi expert and if you use my ideas, techniques, methods and damage anything in the process, I am not held liable. In fact, I’m not an expert at anything and all that I share is simply that: a sharing.
I’m a single mom with three sons. I’ve taught them all the things, like turning off toilet water in an emergency, the care and upkeep of wool sweaters, and how to pee standing up (which involved aiming for Fruit Loops).
Of the three, Zach’s the oldest. He’s also the fuzziest. I’m not sure how his body manages, but it grows an impressive amount of hair and nails, like overnight. It also heals rapidly. Think, Wolverine. To date, Zach’s checked off 41 surgeries and almost double the hospitalizations. He’s a fairly high-functioning (and beyond creative) Williams Syndrome guy. One of Zach’s continuous medical challenges is visual impairment. At three months, Zach endured his first strasbismus surgery. At 18 months, he underwent intraocular lens (IOL) implants, restoring vision to both eyes. One of his many visual challenges includes depth perception. This means Zach struggles with up close work, like cooking, reading, and apparently, shaving, which I failed to think about until…
a few years back, Zach walked into my home office missing part of one eyebrow and half of a side-burn.
Hey, Mom, he said. Can you fix this?
You bet, I said, happy (and somewhat delusional) to help.
A week later, Zach asked, Can you make my face into a goatee?
You bet, I said, unaware of the training I would undertake.
I spent three days researching goatee styles.
Who knew the number of shapes one could make out of facial hair?
Zach had his own thoughts of how he wanted his goatee.
We opted out of this one.
We opted out of this one too.
I filled with deep gratitude that I held zero face-shaving experience, though my older female friends tell me I will need this skill someday, adding, You’re so lucky to have Zach’s help.
I like to think Zach continuously trains me in life and love.
I spent three more days researching perfect goatee-ing. Yes, there’s a goatee system. You need supplies, like a mustache comb, beard trimmer, and precision trimmer. I spent $252 on a variety of highly recommended (by Google) devices.
I developed a list of goatee-shaping steps:
Trim beard hair. This sounds easy. Do not be fooled. Zach’s folicles grow in every direction and super thick. The end result initially looked like a patch of wheat on top of a pile of dried grass. I worried. I ate a snack. I kept going.
Create an outline. I’m a writer. I’m a poet. I’m an artist. None of my own experiences applied. Apparently, the outline of the goatee needs to compliment the shape of the face. For example, wider goatees look better on longer faces. My brain blew up. I took a nap. I woke. I kept going.
Style around lips. If you’re unfamiliar, there are as many under lip styles for goatees as their are stars in an Idaho sky. Zach wanted a triangle. I made a triangle out of a tiny patch of hair. We immediately removed the shape because Zach didn’t like MY idea of a triangle. I stressed. I hugged a pup. I kept going.
Trim goatee to desired length. This required combing with a teeny comb made for Barbie (I didn’t tell this to Zach). We reduced the length of his goatee. He was happy. I was relieved. I ate another snack. I kept going.
Tidy. Clean all the non-goatee areas. This took the longest because, according to Zach, I kept missing hairs. I tell you, Zach could find a hair in a haystack. My wrist cramped. I paused. I stretched. I kept going.
All in all, it took four hours and 32 minutes for our first shaving experience.
If I’m honest (and I am), I’d tell you that Zach and I shave him four times a week. This does not include his eyebrow trim, the tops of his big toes (his kind of a Hobbit too), or his back (this will be shared in a part two blog at a later date). We play music. We laugh (which messes up my highly developed precision shaving). We bust out a dance move (also not great during shaving time).
I take my shaving job seriously.
This year, Zach underwent two heart surgeries. Both required shaving his chest. Zach asked me to do this the night before each procedure.
You know, the surgical team will do this again before your surgery, I reminded him.
I know, he said. But, I trust you.
This type of love breaks me. Every time.
Uncle Zach (with a decent shave) and Charlie, 2025
