“There are few questions in life that interest me that have definitive answers, as definitive answers tend to house a desire to put an end to thinking or talking, rather than to deepen or enliven it, to make sure it goes on.” - Maggie Nelson (born with Mercury in Pisces)
✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨
Hello! This is my first proper newsletter.
You are on this message if you are a friend, collaborator, fellow student or teacher, supporter of the arts, dear client, or subscriber to my other channels. I am so grateful to be in your web and hope to make stronger bonds with all of you.
I encourage you to unsubscribe if your inbox already feels incredibly overwhelming and / or if you are not interested in:
- mystical writing
- methods of divination
- astrological insights
- narrative design
- poetry & lyric essays
- filmmaking & screenwriting
- contemplative practices
- mind-body connection
- land ethic and eco-grief
- medieval lit
--the topics I will be sending resources on through this newsletter.
It would be my pleasure to write to you a few times each season about the questions I am exploring in my studies and creations.
And, I would love to hear back from you about what you're swimming through or grappling with in these times.
I'll keep this first message brief with an offering of a few quotes from poets who were born while Mercury was in Pisces, or by astrologers thinking about the energy of Mercury in Pisces:
"Where is home
when one needs it?
Where is the whistle
in the distance calling you back?" - Jane Creighton
"A poet is a channel of impossible things. We have no idea what we are channeling. We only know urgency, the unshakable knowing that if we don't run for a pen to capture our thoughts about trains, something unspeakably precious will slip away and be lost to us forever." - Ada Pembroke
"There is nothing that you can't tell in a fact that you can't tell in story but there is everything that you must tell in a story that you cannot hope to tell in a fact." - Alice Sparkly Kat
from Audre Lorde's Questionnaire to Oneself:
- What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]
- What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
- “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]
- If we have been “socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition,” ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?” [So, answer this today. And every day.]
And I invite you to write in community with me and others on Wednesday, February 26th at 4pm Central.
divine dictation is a once-monthly-ish free virtual poetry workshop. Each workshop collects poems-of-inspiration from poets born while Mercury was in the sign of focus, this time we’ll be looking at questions written by Audre Lorde, Eduardo C. Corral, and Jane Creighton.
Register for divine dictation here 🧃🐋
My hope with these free virtual prompt-based writing workshops is that we see how Mercury likes to move in different zodiac signs. When researching poets born while Mercury was moving through Pisces, I saw the prevalence of asking questions, of sitting in the fluid and unknown, and of feeling so deeply for the collective.
Though this is a poetry writing workshop inspired by astrological concepts, it is more so an opportunity to practice asking questions. I am inspired by this quote from Joseph O’Connor and Andrea Lages: “Good questions create movement. They shift perspective and open doors in the mind that may have been closed for years.”
And this quote from Hélène Cixous: Our body is the place of this questioning. And what about the flower part of our body? I’m planting this question here and I’ll let it grow.
When we learn to ask questions of ourselves and our bodies, we are better able to be of service to humanity.
