Stumbling into Summer

after a head-spinning spring.

Dear Poets,

In an attempt to still send out a monthly dispatch, I’m doing did my best to zing this one out before the month’s end. In part, because I’m I was excited about this live YouTube event later at 4:00 (PT): TWC Live! Marketing Your Poetry Collection. It is co-sponsored by AWP and The Writer’s Chronicle and my beloved Trio House Press editor Natasha Kane will be one of the speakers. Postscript: still available on YouTube to watch and worthwhile!

It has been a head-spinning spring with AWP, travel, the upheaval (physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual) of being upended from a home (again) and the many-layered work of moving. Not to VagueStack (too much anyway) but May has sent more curveballs, all swerving me in a different direction than I had planned. I sometimes wonder not when, but if, I will ever get the kind of clear, straightforward outlay of months (even weeks — I’ll take days!) again that allow for a steady path. Seems doubtful right now, just as post-Eaton Fire, that kind of anchoring sense of stability seems forever gone.

As we wrap “May-tember” with its many end-of-school year events, I’ll add another timely one — the rally in front of Pasadena Unified School Districts’s headquarters (also) later today at 351 S. Hudson Avenue. Another feature of this month’s intensity has been the school board’s impending vote on closing several local public schools. Come by to support, write to the school board about the value of public education, or better yet, actually send your kids to public schools. I’ll be wearing my son’s school logo gym shirt and cheering with the crowd — surprisingly cathartic. *P.S. Triumph! Closures are tabled for now.

Reach out if you’d like to know who the school board members are and how to write them (or recall them! that’s another active petition).

Meanwhile, sharing with you:

If you are so inclined, at its six-month birthday, 🎊I would love it if you would leave a review of my book on Amazon, Bookshop, Goodreads, or other places. As always, I am grateful for your support! 💙

Stay tuned for the registration details soon to be released for the course I will teach this fall for University of Chicago’s Graham school. I’m very excited — such wonderful students! IYKYK. 😉 The dates will be Oct 2, 2026 - Nov 20, 2026 and we will meet on Zoom on Fridays from 11:30-1:00 (PT).

I thank Deborah Bacharach for her generous, close reading of my recent book and her beautiful review: “Finding Power Among the Trees: Elline Lipkin’s Girl in a Forest” in the journal Terrain.

Lost in the chaos of March, I meant to post my review for Terrain. Here is a link: “Lanterns in the Night Market,” by Mary Morris.

And I don’t think I ever posted that I was featured as a ‘Good Creature’ on Nancy Reddy’s wonderful Substack: “Be Less Careful.” It’s rare that I’m asked about this aspect of my writing life. Here is our online interview: “it’s important to claim time and show that writing has value by letting one’s family know that it’s a priority.”

"it’s important to claim time and show that writing has value by letting one’s family know that it’s a priority"

Nancy just announced her own version of summer school (entitled “Summer School”😉) which will offer guest writers, various prompts, and more surprises. Today’s announcement: “For a limited time — through the end of the day on Tuesday, June 2 — I’m running a Summer School sale.”

The SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) Residency at the Betsy Hotel in South Beach in Miami is about to open up summer applications! Dates to apply are June 1st-August 1st. More details in their FAQ, though they advise looking for updates on their Instagram.

I couldn’t be more proud of my former student Chuck Zumbrun whose first published piece is now live at the site Five Minutes. Here it is: “Pinned.” Chuck’s bio reads: “Chuck Zumbrun is a farmer, computer programmer, and student residing in rural Indiana.” I’ll add a deeply talented poet, new MFA graduate student, and all around wonderful person. Congratulations, Chuck! 🎉

I also want to offer a hearty mazel tov to Brian Sonia-Wallace who was recently named the new Los Angeles Poet Laureate. I read with Brian last fall at the first Los Angeles meeting of Yetzirah and look forward to participating with him as a guest ‘typewriter poet’ at the Creative Workers Rising Resource Fair to be held this Saturday from 10-5:00 at the Altadena Collaboratory (540 W. Woodbury Road, Altadena). We’ll be there (with other poets) from 12-3:00 with readings from 3-4:00.

On a related note, there are tickets still available to attend Yetzirah’s summer conference online, which will run from June 16-19th. It looks like the ‘pay what you will’ tickets are sold out, but online ‘all-events’ passes are still available. Register here.

And kudos to Arthur Sze who was recently named the next U.S. Poet Laureate and will take over from Ada Limon. From the press release: “The winner of the Library’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, Sze will begin his laureateship with a reading of his work on Thursday, Oct. 9, in the Library’s historic Coolidge Auditorium, and free tickets will be available on loc.gov starting Sept. 18.”

Eons ago, when I lived in Berkeley, an organizer at the Napa Valley Writer’s Conference (coming up July 26–31, 2026) asked if I would introduce him. I was thrilled to do it and he couldn’t have been more gracious, kindly buying my book and thanking me sincerely.

It’s not too late to apply for this intriguing-sounding residency in Italy at Residenza Lago Scuro which runs from September 20th-October 1st, 2026. The deadline to apply is June 7th.

Finally, the doors will soon close (for two years) to register for the wonderful biennial Friends of Book Arts conference taking place at Western Oregon University from June 24-28, 2026. I loved teaching there two years ago. My friend and poet extraordinaire Genevieve Kaplan will be teaching not one, nor two, but three one-day classes! She is teaching “Altered Pages and Blackout Poems—Working with Text,” “Altered Texts—Obscuring to Reveal,” and “Creative Writing for Book Artists.” Each one will be stellar. 🌟

Personal Update: “A Graduate Degree in Grief.”

It’s hard to know where to start (and sometimes continue, for that matter). We are very much still settling into our new rental. I went yesterday to pick up free air purifiers from a donation site in Altadena that is (amazingly, faithfully) still serving the community. I went there just after the fire and hadn’t been back, but it is so obvious there is such tremendous need — not just for people like us who started another rental cycle this spring but for others who are still displaced from their homes or struggling financially as a result of the fires. About two weeks after we moved my turn came up at A Sense of Home (I had filled out the paperwork months ago) so the timing was good (for once!) since while our former landperson let us take some furniture (at our first rental), we needed many new pieces. I was very glad these resources were still available.

It’s been interesting to do another sort of what we’ve acquired and realize there’s much to still cull — boxes and bags of things we accepted blindly in deep need to simply feel a sense of abundance again — to change the dynamic of knowing everything we owned didn’t boil down to the one suitcase apiece we each left with that night. I expect this is a task that will continue all summer long.

One bit of positive news is that our county permit has been approved! All told, it took about four and half months, which isn’t bad. Some of this likely resulted from deciding to build what is called ‘like for like’ — meaning we will retain the original footprint of the house and were able to grandfatherperson in 200 square feet of unpermitted space + the 200 added square feet that was allowed without raising our property taxes. It has been heartening to know we now have that in hand.

We’re still settling on a contractor — a long, protracted process that has dragged on for so long I’ve reached the point I almost don’t care any more who we sign with. Once the universe of understanding architecture plans closed, we entered the universe, (nay, galaxy), of understanding how to hire a contractor. All of which were educations my husband and myself never wanted to undertake. Yet, good graduate students that we will forever be at heart, we meticulously tried to study, comprehend, and master this disparate material. We began this process with enthusiasm in January, since our architecture plans were filed just before the year’s end, and wanted to lock in a contractor so construction could begin this spring. Needing to move knocked that plan right out of place and we could only pick it up again a few weeks ago in mid-April, at which point we had to more or less start all over, holding new meetings with the viable contenders. Our resentment about having to do this (again!) is high and it is another moment when I find myself angry about the ‘opportunity cost’ of having so much unwanted additional work heaped into our lives.

Initially, I even felt a little flummoxed about why we had to research contractors at all — the architect set our plans — shouldn’t any contractor basically ‘just’ execute them? Weren’t they all meant to yield the same result? It took me awhile to honestly understand the differences between them — communication style, attention to detail, reputation, how they handle subcontractors, payment schedules, and a thousand other things I can now converse about, if not fully understand. Another sense of stress comes from trying to understand how we want to fling thousands of precious insurance dollars into our ‘allowances’ — for appliances, for windows, for doors, for finishes, for countertops, etc. and wanting to be sure we’re making good choices (many, many, many x infinity choices). It’s bewildering and many have warned us that if ‘decision fatigue’ hits now (just with deciding on this first step) we need to brace ourselves. Once we’re into the design phase, there are hundreds, if not thousands, decisions yet ahead.

One thing I realized the other day is how fundamentally disconnected I feel from the plans I went into 2025 with (my half-filled out ‘goal planner’ left open on our dining room table as we fled — incinerated physically and mentally). I was convinced 2025 would be the year I would get a ‘real’ job and stop freelancing. I had created a list of places to reach out to — contacts to press, ideas for various career pivots, more. Now, it feels like I can’t really remember what I was planning to do with my life at all. I hear a constant low hum of guilt for not restarting my independent teaching business the way I thought I would. It’s enough — more than enough — to just address the myriad and never shrinking pile of ‘recovery’ tasks. It’s a moment when I feel the dividing line of ‘before the Eaton Fire’ and ‘after’ keenly. It seems impossible to understand what goals, ideas, hopes, I understood when I saw our lives in Altadena as continuous and we had the ‘ordinary’ stability of just working to keep the pieces steady and in place. Climbing solidly into middle age, so much seems to reinforce the idea that we never know what’s coming around the bend, etc., yet I wonder if the fire has more firmly reshaped my DNA-level understanding of this. These are things we all know, but try to push to the back of our minds. My sense is that those who have been through this will never be able to do so again.

I’ve noticed a lot of mournful posts lately in the Beautiful Altadena Facebook group (our virtual community center) where I saw someone use the phrase “a graduate degree in grief” about the reverberations still felt — there seems to be an ongoing lambasting of the self when reliving that night — the things that could have been taken but weren’t; the steps that would have altered all else; what it would have meant to tap into a sense hovering at the edge of being thinkable, but was pushed aside; an intuition ignored which could have changed all the choices that followed. It’s baffling, overwhelming, and almost impossible to comprehend, still.

There have been some broadscale wins for survivors. Joy Chen of the (amazing) Eaton Fire Survivors Network (who deserves a medal or ten🏅) has spearheaded lobbying for SB 877 which institutes new insurance reform (its bipartisan passage in the CA State Senate just occurred last week). As she says, “It does one simple thing: requires insurers to show policyholders the original loss estimate and any revisions made to it.” The list of bills they have set in motion is impressive — and there are more to come. From her newsletter: “AB 1642, the Wildfire Environmental Safety and Testing Act, has passed out of Assembly Appropriations and is headed to the Assembly Floor. This is the bill EFRU is sponsoring to create statewide, science-based standards for testing, remediation, and clearance after wildland-urban interface fires. The goal is simple: families should not be pushed back into homes, schools, or workplaces unless safety has been proven through testing and clear health-based standards.”

The LAT is expanding their coverage. This article in particular has incensed people of late: “New 911 records deepen questions about why west Altadena was left vulnerable.” I am also going to tune into this Zoom later this week.

There are so many community organizations in place to help fire survivors it’s dizzying. I appreciate the headline here: “Come Home to Altadena.” Here’s a list from just this weekend alone.

An all day fair on Saturday from 10-5 for creatives in Altadena with lots of community crafting, resources, and great spirit. I joined the typewriter brigade with other Poets Laureate. There was a fantastic community vibe.

Alma Cielo was there helping people create mosaics from their found fragments.

An Altadena Forever community picnic at Loma Alta Park from 3-6:00.

Then from 6-9:00 p.m. there was the opening of the Altadena Musicians free record shop.

Today there was the re-opening of an Altadena trail to commemorate a new mural.

And, tonight, a community song circle!

Ongoing community resource fairs.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. On one hand, it’s completely overwhelming — keeping track of what’s being offered is practically a full-time job alone. On the other, I’m so glad all of these resources are here. I recently ran into a parent who I knew from my son’s school. After they lost their home they immediately packed up and moved back east, yet she kept her job in L.A., flying in every six to eight weeks to be at the office. When I asked how her kids were doing she mentioned how difficult it was to explain to others (who only vaguely knew about the fire as a quick newspaper headline) what it was really like to contend with such profound loss. She said when she was back in L.A. she meets friends for what she called ‘trauma dates’ to process her grief and was sorry her kids couldn’t do the same with their friends who also lost homes. It was such a mixed moment — on one hand, I felt envious of her escape; on the other, I do think being here and moving through these stages, collectively and in community, is what will bring the most healing.

Let me end with the inimitable Jane Austen. Here’s to summer ahead. ☀️