TRAVELING THE RED ROAD
From the writer
:: Account ::
My journey into this piece began in the first semester of my PhD at the University of Southern California. I took a class in Shakespeare wherein we analyzed each play via one word from the text. In addition, we each needed to choose one word for our own semester research. In an irreverent moment, on the day we needed to announce our personal words, I chose the word “menstruation,” not comprehending in that moment that I was completely changing the direction of my research and my life. It didn’t take long to realize that I had inadvertently put my finger on the very pulse of the most ancient and pervasive way a patriarchal society has abused women. My answer could only be to tell my own story not only as an Orthodox Jewish wife but as a woman in modern society. How do we undo misogyny? We learned from #MeToo to share our stories and find power in solidarity.
THE FRUIT OF DARKNESS
You might think a total solar eclipse would have no colour. The word “eclipse” comes from ancient Greek ekleipsis, “a forsaking, quitting, abandonment.” The sun quits us, we are forsaken by light. Yet people who experience total eclipse are moved to such strong descriptions of its vacancy and void that this itself begins to take on colour. What after all is a colour? Something not no colour. Can you make a double negative of light? Would that be like waking from a dream in the wrong direction and finding yourself on the back side of your own mind?
STILL IN IT'S LONGING IT FLIES TO YOU
Silence in the Poetry of
Emily Dickinson, Ocean Vuong, & Jean Valentine
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​The responsibility of the poem is a resonance beyond itself; that each line, each word and
utterance, even each sound will add to that echo, the ability to conjure human experience within
the vibrating vessel of silence, “toward silence....as the substance of writing, not its limit.”
(Evans 3) Meaning is made whole through the music of each word, formed and held each in its
individual vessel where sense can resonate, amplified within its own vibration: this pressure, this
synergy, this energy within the marriage of music and meaning where poetry is found.
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SALAAM OF BIRDS
letters to Marvin
A correspondence