Getting the Flowers Yourself

On a Wednesday in Mid-June

Covent Garden Flower sellers, probably before 1925

I was going to write a post today, something kind of light and lovely, about getting the flowers yourself, about making a home and a space for light and beauty, on having and creating the material conditions necessary for others to connect, on being porous to the world, Clarissa-Dalloway-as-Queen-of-Pentacles. It’s the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s novel ostensibly about a woman throwing a party, said to take place “on a Wednesday in mid-June.” I love Mrs. Dalloway—I’ve read it a number of times, most meaningfully in grad school, for Stephanie Paulsell’s class on Virginia Woolf and religion, have thrilled to the way it leaps from character to character, the way it seems to mimic the best parts of living in a city, the way it makes room for everyone to have a voice and a mind.

I’ve been re-reading Mrs. Dalloway to prepare for writing this, and have ended up instead with my phone propped between the pages of the book, watching reel after reel, reading article after article about the increasingly violent, brazenly illegal ICE arrests in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and also, the increasing state violence against protestors who are rising up to defend their communities. When ICE patrol cars are rightfully being set ablaze, when families are being torn apart, what does a Wednesday in mid-June 100 years ago matter?

I don’t have a great answer to this question, other than to think about time.

Mrs. Dalloway is obviously not only about a wealthy woman throwing a party. It’s a novel about aftermaths, anchored very concretely in time—we hear the clock chime at every half-hour, we know the day of the week and the month and the year (1923). It is a novel of building anticipation set in a variety of nested aftermaths. Clarissa Dalloway is in the aftermath of an unnamed illness (in all likelihood the Spanish flu) that has left her thin and pale, all of London is in the aftermath of the first World War, and we see it touching on characters—Miss Kilman is bitter and lonely, shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith feels himself to be guilty of a great crime. You could even argue that the novel is about the aftermath of youth—all the great patterns set in motion, and nevertheless the youthful ambitions and loves and dramas rising back up to haunt our characters.

In a lot of ways, Mrs. Dalloway is a book that looks around a shelled, shaky version of the world and asks “…what now?”

We are not currently in an aftermath, we are in the emergency. Things are happening now in our neighborhoods and our cities, in our governments and on our streets that have implications for generations. Some of us are better insulated than others—no one is knocking at our doors, some of us can afford the party, afford the brain space to think about the party.

There’s a sense in which Clarissa is porous to the suffering of Septimus Warren Smith—she feels the moment of his death in her body, she goes up to her little attic room and away from the light and glitz of the party to really feel it, to be more present. However, she also basically stamps her foot, feels like this news has ruined her party, resents the intrusion.

I have read this book generously before, have listened to Stephanie Paulsell describe virginal, contemplative Clarissa as a nun, praying for and taking in the world from her little slice of London, have read her porosity as care. This time, I was short on generosity—I found myself impatient with the flowers, impatient at the gossip, at the willingness to let the generative, argumentative friction of youth go in favor of a soft, supported adulthood. I’m impatient with her hand-waving dismissal of the Albanians or Armenians or whoever and their suffering, infuriated at her daring to feel Septimus’ death on a kind of coequal footing. I suspect this impatience, this anger has more to do with how I feel about myself than how I feel about Clarissa Dalloway.

I feel alienated and disempowered, tired and angry, unsure even of how to speak out about this, how to clear my throat just to say the obvious thing, the thing I’ve been saying all along. People deserve safety, deserve our care, deserve not to be picked up and deported. Immigrants do not get their value from their hard work, from their being mothers or children, from following the laws and jumping through hoops. And yet: I’m packing tonight for a trip to the west coast to watch my sister graduate and my friend get married, I’m going to hand over a REALID at the airport and board a plane like it’s nothing, I just got my nails done to match my outfit for the wedding, I’m wondering what earrings to pack. The flowers are well taken care of.

More vulnerably: I wrote a book about immigration and about getting involved in your community and I find myself strangely wordless, feel like a cheap poser activist more attached to the label than the work in this moment. Yeah, I’m doing work with the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, but I’m mostly at home, sending emails. I wonder if this whole newsletter isn’t me hiding behind, say, needing to re-read the entirety of Mrs. Dalloway and pack for a trip rather than trying to get my feet on the ground. It is so fucking easy to stay complacent, to fuss about getting ready for the party and obsess over my own comfort than stay in these places of anguish and heartbreak, and its easy to retreat into this little shell of yourself. It’s one thing to feel the death, the suffering of another person in your body, to pull yourself away from the party, it’s another entirely to put your actual body on the line, to plunge into the heart of it.

I’m not ready to discard Mrs. Dalloway—there’s something there, something I’ve written about before that lives at the heart of all Virginia Woolf books—she writes, ultimately, about care, about the little flame of subjectivity and personhood that lives at the heart of everyone. She sometimes fails in her writing of people that are very different from her—those in different social classes, races, religions—but there’s also a kind of deep understanding of personhood at the heart of her work.

There’s also a way to read Mrs. Dalloway as a book about creating a space for care—she says she wants her party to be the kind of place where people go beyond themselves, where their every need is met and they can attend to….something else, something beyond the spiritual realm. I got asked, once, very insistently, by a panel moderator why I had made a book about such ugly things so beautiful, and the answer then, as it is now, is that beauty does not cease to be a human need, even in difficult conditions. The thing we fight for when we fight is not just survival but the right to beauty—to determining what beauty is, and to laying a claim to it for ourselves, the right to build a beautiful life. But I think, right now, that should not be the focus. We are not in the aftermath, where building a new world seems possible. We are in the emergency, and we need to fight like hell to make sure we bring as many people as possible with us to build that new world—that people and families stay whole and unbroken.

This is all to say (and I say it to myself here, primarily) : by all means, go get the flowers yourself, but also, perhaps, throw a brick or two on the way.

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Midwest Immigration Bond Fund is having to close their application for the first time this year. We only close when we run out of funds, and this year has been tough. The rise of electronic monitoring has meant it is tougher for people to fulfill their bond conditions (ankle monitors running out of battery, glitchy apps to report to, rapidly changing rules and regulations), and showing up to immigration court isn’t exactly a safe thing for anyone right now, so we are understandably getting fewer bonds back. In addition, bond amounts have been going up substantially—we’re now regularly seeing bonds between $7,500 and $15,000, as opposed to the median bond for FY 2024 of $5,000. Donations from individuals and our community are the main ways that we’ve been able to get 38 people out of immigration detention this year, help us make it 39 by giving us a few dollars.

A quick note to remind you that my workshops are coming up:

Dear Diary: Building a Sustainable Journaling Practice is a class where we’ll talk about how to get the most out of your journal—and how to make it a flexible, beautiful part of your day-to-day life that grows and changes as your needs do. I’ll be offering it on Saturday, June 28, 2025 from 11-1 ET, and on Sunday, June 29 from 7-9 ET.

Translation as Obsessive Re-Reading is a class where we will be exploring translation as if it were a form of obsessive reading: a way of personally creating and recreating those texts that fascinate us. Using the reflections of authors/translators such as Kate Briggs, Mireille Gansel and Rosario Castellanos, we will investigate how to create a translation practice that coexists with reading and writing. Class will be Saturday, July 29th from 3-5 pm E.T.

Paid subscribers get a 25% discount, so subscribe today! HOWEVER IF YOU DONATE AT LEAST $10 TO THE MIDWEST IMMIGRATION BOND FUND AND SEND ME YOUR RECEIPT, I WILL ALSO GIVE YOU THAT DISCOUNT CODE. Paid subscribers: Discount codes can be found at the foot of this email.

May, a Recap

On....the month I just had

So it’s been a minute, and that wasn’t on purpose.

May started out beautifully—I received an alumni award from Harvard Div, and got to go back to Cambridge and see the lilac bushes and my parents and many of my favorite professors, got to experience the absolute wonder of a ceremony organized by a committee of clergy and people who understand the power of ritual. I think most importantly to me, I felt seen and loved by a community that matters to me so, so deeply. I cried literally the whole time, for a lot of reasons that I’m still teasing out, but that had a lot to do with the marked contrast between how I felt here, and how I felt in my day to day life.

the honorees—from L to R: Rev. John L. Jackson, Dr. Shenila Khoja-Moolji, me before I started crying, and Rev. Liz Walker

Am I romanticizing my grad school experience? Almost certainly. Should I expect to feel like I’m winning a deeply meaningful and affirming award every single day? No, I guess not. But I think the thing that most hit was how good it felt to be understood and appreciated for the work that matters the most to me. My calling is not anything particularly complex or obscure—I make nice sentences that try to uphold human dignity. That’s kind of it, that’s my whole deal. But I was in a workplace that either passively or actively devalued all of that, while also saying, “no, no we really care about these things, we love art and also human dignity.” And I think that contrast was what really became plain that day in Cambridge.

And so, after spending a weekend with

Haley E.D. Houseman

being coddled as I got an absolutely horrifying fever/cough combo on her couch, I came home intent on changing my life….

Just as soon as this big fundraiser at work was over.

And I did it! Two weeks later, I worked the fundraiser, watched the organization raise a ton of money, coordinated 13 visiting artists, bound programs, orchestrated a ludicrously successful paddle raise, did the kind of logistics work that makes my brain go brrt….and then three days later, got laid off.

And so, for the last two weeks, I’ve been unemployed.

I’m ok—I have healthy savings, an active freelancing vibe, I have health insurance through my husband, I’m applying to new things which was a thing I meant to do anyways, and, best of all I’ve felt healthier and clearer in the last two weeks than I did any day at that job for the last nine months. And now I’m in a space of figuring out what comes next—a PhD? another comms job? Trying (again) to give freelancing a full-time go while working on another book? I feel a little bruised and uncertain, a part of the normal human experience and yet, such a uniquely humbling time whenever I experience it.

All of that being said—I’m coming back to this newsletter with renewed meaning and intention, it’s a great time to become a paid subscriber (hint hint)

and not just because of that, but because, at long last, I’ll be offering my journaling workshop, as well as some other fun things on Zoom for the first time, and paid subscribers get a 25% discount (check the footer of this email if you’re a paid subscriber!)

Dear Diary: Building a Sustainable Journaling Practice is a class where we’ll talk about how to get the most out of your journal—and how to make it a flexible, beautiful part of your day-to-day life that grows and changes as your needs do. I’ll be offering it on Saturday, June 28, 2025 from 11-1 ET, and on Sunday, June 29 from 7-9 ET.

I’m also trialing a new-ish workshop called Translation as Obsessive Re-Reading! I first taught this as a bilingual English-Spanish workshop for Lit & Luz Festival back in October, and you’ll notice that this one is at a discount—mostly because it’s my first time teaching it as a language-pair-agnostic workshop, and I expect there will be a few bumps! This is the only time I’ll be teaching this class at this price, so if you’re at all interested, please do sign up. Class will be Saturday, July 29th from 3-5 pm E.T.

Beyond that—if you’ve ever wanted to hire me to talk to your org, bring me in for a class visit, write for your publication, buy my book, whatever—this is a great time to get on the books.

The next newsletter is going to be on the 100th anniversary of a certain Wednesday in mid-June, and we are going to get the flowers ourselves.

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Where I’ll Be:

• “Following the Thread: Well Researched Writing” - Thursday, June 19, 2025, 7 pm CST, ZOOM—The Writers League of Texas invited me to participate in this fantastic panel with Eiren Caffal and Isa Arsen, to talk about our research practices. For me, research falls into one of those “I always want to ask 800 very nosy questions about people’s processes” so this will be very fun.

• “Dirty Kitchen: A Virtual Reading and Conversation” - Wednesday, June 25, 2025, 7 pm CST, ZOOM - Jill’s new book, Dirty Kitchen, is a fucking incredible memoir of growing up undocumented in the U.S. that weaves in food and myth and theory. Here’s what I said about it in my blurb: "Jill Damatac brings together myth and memory, history and hauntings, colonialism and catharsis and seats them around her table. Any reader of Dirty Kitchen is in for a feast when they pull up a chair." It’s good, we are going to have a good chat.

What I’ve Written:

• I wrote about my post-Marilynne Robinson Reading supercharged protestant molecules for Christian Century

• for Presbyterian Outlook, I wrote about Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show, and nonviolent resistance

• For Injustice Report I wrote about art and community and the Midwest Immigration Bond Fund.

  Community & Poetry & Liberation

What I’m Reading:

• A bunch of things I can’t talk about (yet), between applications for orgs, books I’m reviewing, and books I’m blurbing (all I’ll say for now is…you had best preorder

  Caroline Tracey
  ’s forthcoming Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History). Between all of that, I’m listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry and reading Adriana Herrera’s Las Leonas series—Caribbean heiresses take Paris, in a very fun, queer, sexy way.

A Book as a Recipe

On wanting to perform Rebecca May Johnson's Small Fires

A very dramatic, unrelated image. Photo by bady abbas on Unsplash

I’m in the midst of a re-read of Rebecca May Johnson’s incredible book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen. Ostensibly, this began because I wanted to write an essay about it for one of my regular columns at the Christian Century, or at least an essay that glanced off it in some way. I’ve written about Small Fire and feeding The Other before—for Presbyterian Outlook¹, in one of my favorite essays², but this is the first time I’m re-reading since about a year and change ago.

The real reason I think I’m re-reading it is because I’ve been a little disenchanted lately. Part of that is with my reading—in the last 6 weeks or so I have worked through 21 books for CLMP, 35 applications for Chicago’s Individual Artist Program grant, 2 books for a Q&A I’m doing this weekend, and while many of the things I read were incredible, they were also…not really my choice to read, and there was a certain kind of pace I had to hit to get all of it done before the various deadlines. Reading as a(n occasionally joyful) chore. However, the feeling goes beyond that. Lately, I feel a mounting sense of dread any time I have to grocery shop or pick recipes, feeling exasperated and exhausted, idly wondering about crossing the Soylent rubicon. I went to the doctor’s for my annual yesterday and filled out their little depression screening, looked down at it when I was done, and said, “oh, yikes.” Things are weird and bad right now for reasons both internal and external to my life, and it’s time to look for more sources of enchantment.

A copy of Small Fires that is not my own, because I am finishing this newsletter in the office and I left it at home. Photo from Cookette

This week, Small Fires has been that source of enchantment. If you’re not familiar—Rebecca May Johnson brings the tools of literary criticism to bear on the idea of the recipe, and you end up with essays on cooking as performance, as translation (if you’ve ever read anything else I’ve written, you can see the sparks going off in my brain here), as gender, as kink, as play, as negotiation, as care. I’m someone who cooks dinner every night, and I’m also someone who theorizes the everloving shit out of well, everything, and Johnson’s book is an invitation to do just that.

The thing about Small Fires is that it itself feels like a recipe, like an invitation to play. I want to, in Johnson’s own framing (!!!), perform the book in my own kitchen, walk my own food autobiography through the steps of her reasoning, re-examine my own hands and habits under the lenses she provides throughout the book. I want my disenchanted sigh at my refrigerator doors, to be transformed, under her sparkling vision, to a questioning head tilt—what is the source of my dread, why do I need to feel enchanted with myself as a home cook? I want to think about the chilaquiles I’ve made since college in the same way she does the red, hot pasta sauce that threads its ways through the chapters of the book.

Back in grad school, I wrote an essay about the eucharist as a translation. The very origins of the practice are “translated” four times, once through the eyes of each of the four evangelists. It’s every repetition is a translation, with all the same holes and bagginess through which meaning escapes and enters the translation of any text—the “misfires” as Amy Hollywood puts it, through which possibility and play enter the ritual. Into this essay I brought Annie Dillard (“Expedition to the Pole”) and Anne Carson (Decreation)—in other words, I made it my own, populated it with my own greatest loves. I wanted, in it, to suggest that the eucharist, like a translation, was both a site of grave importance and a site of play, that the Holy Mysteries of what happened at the altar were subject to other, very earthly mysteries. In the words of Annie Dillard: “A high school play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since the year one… Week after week, we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter.” I got a B on it, largely because my theology was bad, but I still think of it often as an essay in which I wrote a true thing that I believe, which is to say: that real life is holy, and playful, and that mistakes and refusals and misfires, that the reality of our human bodies engaged in these holy mysteries—this is what allow that holiness to come through, rather than blocking it.

I think Small Fires more than anything, reminds me that the things that we do every day are worthy of the most attention, that our hands among ingredients and among our friends change the world and our tastes every day. It’s one of the first books I’ve really read that affirms this idea, that honors the desire and the hunger of the everyday.

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Where I’ll Be:

Tomorrow is a doozy!

April 26th, I’ll be moderating an event with the INCREDIBLE Marcelo Hernandez Castillo at Chicago Public Library—he’s keynoting their Poetry Festival, and I’m just lucky I get to yap with him.

pilsencommunitybooks

A post shared by @pilsencommunitybooks

Also April 26th! I’m taking part in a reading and teach in to support my beloved Midwest Immigration Bond Fund at the incredible Pilsen Community Books—come thru, buy posters, buy prints, spend a little cash!

May 1st, I’m going back to the old stomping grounds of Harvard Divinity School for the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors. I’m one of the honorees this year, which has me absolutely geeking out, but I think there will be a public component to the program that you can sign up for.

What I’ve Written

I wrote a Lenten reflection for Commonweal about losing faith in institutions to protect us and finding a new way forward.

I wrote a review of We Are Green and Trembling for Americas Quarterly—it’s the story of a former Spanish nun turned swashbuckler in the New World—a really beautiful weird story that nevertheless glosses over some historical issues that deserve a little more consideration.

And finally, for Injustice Report—I wrote about Necrocapitalism and the immigration system—a consideration of the remarks and actions of the administration from the last week or so.

Immigrants as Prime Deliveries, Immigrants as Financial Ghosts

1. We are going to talk about my beautiful publishing niche as a writer with Raised-Evangelical-In-Texas religious trauma who is somehow making a career out of writing exclusively for Lefty Christian Magazines some other time, but for now, yeah, wow, that is…present.

2. Is it weird to say that about something I’ve written? I don’t really care, it is.

On Saturation

My Lit & Luz Keynote

the interconnectedness of all things really jumps out at you when you make eye contact with a creature

Since I’m on a tight deadline this week, and also, I love this piece, I thought I’d send out the keynote lecture I delivered for October’s Lit & Luz Festival. I love Lit & Luz so much—it’s a nearly perfect, very weird, bilingual literary/arts festival. It is also biannual: Chicago in October and CDMX the following March, and includes cross-border collaboration and conversation between Chicago and Mexican artists. I’ve loved attending and participating whenever possible, and I was thrilled to be offered the opportunity to keynote the festival in Chicago last year.

While it very clearly is angled towards a specific time and place and audience, I stand by it, even now, after the election, after everything that’s happened since October.

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This year’s theme for Lit & Luz is the idea of saturation, saturación. It’s a theme inspired by what it feels like to be a person alive and sort of absorbing media during an election year, the absolute overwhelm and inundation that comes along with it. While Mexico has gotten theirs over with, here in the US we are just about a week and a few days out, and things really feel like they’re reaching total saturation, and that saturation is intense! It feels like every election I’ve been able to vote in has been described as “the most important election of our lifetimes.” And the worst part is—that they are! They have been!

There is so much to care about, so much at stake, both for ourselves and our safety and peace of mind, for our friends and families, but also for the lives of thousands of people we may never meet. Here in the United States, our election season has included discussions of immigration, and whether or not this country should undertake mass deportations of undocumented people, whether we should close our doors to migrants, to people at our doors, asking for our help. There are also questions of resources. How, as a nation, are we spending our money? Are we spending it to make the lives of the people that live here easier and kinder, to provide necessary services to everyone who calls this country home, or to buy bombs that have killed men, women and children across the globe in Gaza?

In Mexico, the issues people voted back in June on were, among others, also questions of migration and of resources—would they continue collaborating with the United States to militarize their borders, to turn back migrants, often violently? Would they continue allowing multinational corporations to use Mexican resources extractively, leaving behind decimated ecosystems, uninhabitable places that in turn displaced people from their homes?

These are not light questions, they are questions of survival, they are questions that ask us, at a deeply moral and personal level, to think of people other than ourselves. The promise that elections make us is that we, as a citizenry (and more on that in a minute), get to answer those questions—but that’s a promise that rarely, if ever, gets borne out. Every cycle, elections involve a tremendous amount of organizing, of activism, of demanding better from our disque representatives within and without the system—and also a tremendous amount of frustration as the understanding sinks in that there are limits to our voices in political systems that, in both countries, are saturated with money, with greed, with the detritus of capitalism.

Let us stay here, for a minute, on this idea of the citizenry. “Citizenship” as it were, in this country, is a highly conditional state—conditional on your birthplace, the amount of money in your bank account, on your arrest record—and therefore often on the color of your skin. This citizenship that voting promises grants you a voice in our electoral system is already a narrowed, limited view of who lives in our neighborhoods, who makes up our families, who sits around our tables and makes up our community.

And I think with all of that in the air this year—these limited, hamstrung ways in which we’re given a voice on issues that matter en nuestras entrañas, down to our bones— the main feeling I have, what I am saturated with, if you will, is grief. Is this the best we can do? To argue for, not the flourishing, not the health, not the growth but rather the bare-bones survival of our fellow humans? Of the earth itself? To continually place questions of capital in opposition to living beings and watch as time and time again, the system decides in favor of finance? These are questions that are so lacking in care and compassion and imagination that I can only feel grieved that this is where we are.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that. In fact, I feel like every time I talk to someone about, you know, everything that’s going on there’s denial, there’s anger, there’s bargaining, there’s depression. There’s a lot of depression.

What I am not seeing—and this is probably more down to the caliber of my friends and loved ones than an overall mood—but what I’m not seeing is acceptance. I’m seeing people continuing to fight, continuing to protest, continuing to make their plans for liberation despite this huge, hugely expensive political machine grinding its way to election day. And I’d argue that that, too, is a different kind of saturation.

In an essay written in the aftermath of 9/11, the philosopher Judith Butler argues that grief—that desolation at the loss of the other, at dispossession from a community or place, perhaps at the feeling that your country itself has lost its way—that grief shows us the ways and places in which we are entangled with each other. “Let’s face it,” they write. “We are undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

We are undone by each other, but in that, we are also made up of each other. I am made up of my dad’s curiosity, my mother’s stubbornness, my sister’s honesty, my sibling’s righteousness, my husband’s tenderness, my teachers’ lessons, my friends' humor and their creativity and their care. I am made up of, my politics are made up of the countless conversations I’ve had with folks who came to the US to find safety for themselves and their families, of the long talks with colleagues and comrades who are working to make the world a better place, of the people who took the time to correct me when I was ignorant or misinformed. I am made up of all the art that’s moved me and the artists who have made it, the books that have changed me and the people who wrote them. To zoom out even more: I am made up of Lake Michigan and the trees in my front yard and the squirrels that live in them, the Skokie Lagoons and the blue herons and the muskrats I saw every week this summer. I would be undone without them. I would guess that you probably have your own list of beings that you are made up of too, maybe overlapping and intersecting with mine, your own list of characteristics you borrowed or inherited or learned from the people you love the best, ideas you cribbed from conversations and art, places and people and creatures that feel like home.

This, in itself, is another kind of saturation. It’s an acknowledgement that we are permeable, that everything we are we owe to other people, that we exist in webs of if not love and community then at the very least mutuality. An acknowledgement that we are undone by each other—that without the other we would be lost to ourselves. This is not always an easy acknowledgement, particularly when we live in such an individualistic society, one that elevates self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your boot-straps, one that tells us that someone who can’t stand alone is weak. But if I can convince you of anything this afternoon, it is to lean even farther into that saturation, to not just acknowledge but to celebrate the ways in which we are entangled and porous, in which we are woven one into the other.

Take language—I’m a translator, I work between English and Spanish, transferring one to the other and back. There’s something all-encompassing about translation—it takes your whole brain, obviously, in making connections and deciphering new ways to say the same thing, but it also takes your body—gut feelings and the memories so deep they’re stored in your bones.

When I speak Spanish, I’m speaking the language of Cortez and Malintzin, Sor Juana and Gioconda Belli, Cervantes and Marquez. It’s also my own language—the words taught to me by my mother when I was just learning to ask for what I wanted, the made up language composed of malapropisms of my siblings and I as we were learning to talk, the borrowed words from English, the patterns of sentences and 1980s slang I unknowingly absorbed from my parents ways of speaking and made my own.

This language is the water I stand in, the well I draw from. There are tributaries feeding my spot in the river, both above and below the earth. This same river, a little further upstream, is the one the 17th century poet nun Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz drew from, and when I say the word “mujer” or the word “fe,” these are words that have been fundamentally altered by her having written about them some 300 years ago. The Spanish she wrote, in turn, was as influenced by her time in the Viceroy’s court as a lady-in-waiting as it was by the Nahuatl she learned from her mother’s household staff as a child; as influenced by the Spanish of Hernan Cortez who had first come to Mexico just 129 years before her birth as by the language of Malintzin, the Nahua woman who served as his interpreter, his slave and the mother of one of his children. This was the water Sor Juana drew from, and what she returned to the river was forever altered by having passed through her hands.

When I speak or write, my words flow out from my own little eddy to rejoin the wider stream—my turns of phrase become part of the Spanish that exists in the world, just as Sor Juana’s did, able to be picked up and passed around, drawn up to drink from and to be appropriated by another wader. In this way, language is made up of the personal and the cumulative—each of us standing in our own space, absorbing the words around us and contributing to the greater stream. Like the waters of the river, it’s an inevitable, inseparable commingling of the collective and the individual. Language would not work if we could not share it, but the individual impressions we leave and the baggage we bring with us on each word we say matter too.

Language, and writing, this thing I’ve given my life to, this thing that permeates me, is the result of this same kind of interweaving, allows us to bring into our minds friends and strangers alike, the genius of Sor Juana and the equal, if different, genius of whatever teen girl first gave us, “pero, like.” All this language is all the more powerful for having been co-created—every conversation a miracle of individuality and collaboration.

Literature and art are places where that interrelation is easier to celebrate because we have practices for it, names for it. We can call it citation or acknowledgement or collaboration or reference or homage, and art gives us language to be deliberate and generous in pointing out the places where our work shows the way we are saturated in the work of others.

And that is, essentially, what we are here to celebrate this week, during Lit & Luz—the building of relationships, the artistic interdependencies between two countries, the celebration of the ways we have, despite borders and politics and distance, wrapped our minds around the same questions, made the world clearer by using each other’s work like lenses.

It is a very specific kind of acknowledgement of who we are to one another. The collaborations that this festival makes space for highlight the ways that our passions and talents and interests fit together to create a more coherent, more vibrant whole, shows us that engaging in this kind of togetherness can lead in surprising new directions. And so then what is left to us, as artists and audience (if such a distinction can be made) but to take these lessons and carry them out into the world, into what remains of this election year and beyond it.

I have talked a little bit already about how difficult and frightening it can be to acknowledge that we are reliant on each other, and I think that fear is over and over again reflected in our isolationist, nativist national policies. Big beautiful border walls and mass deportations and, for that matter, sharply curtailing asylum and not acknowledging the presence or the human rights of the millions of undocumented people who already live in this country—these are all reflections of that fear.

I think that the grief that I opened this talk with, the presentiment of loss that many of us are carrying around these days is, in fact, an absence of that fear. It is an acknowledgement of how much we have to lose by the separation and fragmentation of our communities, an acknowledgement of how much we have already lost. It can be so easy to let this version of the story be the one that sinks into you, the one that shapes your actions. There are so many ways that the system is set up that lets this grief and these losses feel inevitable, that lets you get saturated with the bad rhetoric and the sadness and the anger. And these are not feelings that are useless—this anger and sadness can take us to the streets, it can push us into demanding change, but they are also unsustainable feelings.

What I am calling you to is not just to vote as interdependent beings but to live like them. To let yourself be saturated not by fear but by the relationships that sustain you. To find ways to use artistic practice of citation and borrowing and referencing and homage in your day-to-day life and name them, even if just to yourself.

“I am making coffee in the way my mom taught me.”

“I am at this protest to honor my friend who can’t come out.”

“I am looking after my neighbors in the way my grandmother looked after me.”

“I understand this issue differently because once, I watched someone online share their life with me in a video and it changed my mind.”

This, too, in its own way, gives us a reason to fight and change things, reminds us that our voices and our actions are strongest when they are collective and embodied, re-embeds us in the communities our political system seek to alienate us from.

We live in a world that seems intent on saturation—whether it’s the TV in the doctor’s waiting room or the doomscroll that’s always a few clicks away on our phone or the endless meaningless political coverage but I think there’s also something of a choice in what kinds of saturation we let in. We can choose instead to fill ourselves up with the people around us, with sun on changing leaves, with favorite books and new ideas and art made by people and not machines. To take the grief and honor its origins in everything beautiful around us. I can’t promise that I’m 100% there, that I’ve figured out to be this completely fearless and politically enlightened figure because again—it’s so hard not to be scared these days, hard not to act out of fear or scarcity or anxiety, but I do think, in joining the world of immigration advocacy, in finding out how to turn a language that binds me into my family and home and safety into a language that I can use to help usher other people into that safety, I took a step in that direction.

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Where I’ll Be:

I’m teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know—I’ve gotten some feedback from you all already, and am tentatively looking at this summer for online, but I will say that teaching this class in person has been really lovely not just for the class itself, but for getting to sit with a bunch of people who are earnestly thinking things through. Next date is April 26th, and there will be another in May!

Also on April 26th, I’ll be moderating an event with the INCREDIBLE Marcelo Hernandez Castillo at Chicago Public Library—he’s keynoting their Poetry Festival, and I’m just lucky I get to yap with him.

May 1st, I’m going back to the old stomping grounds of Harvard Divinity School for the Peter J. Gomes, STB ’68 Distinguished Alumni Honors. I’m one of the honorees this year, which has me absolutely geeking out, but I think there will be a public component to the program that you can sign up for.

What I’ve Written:

For

Injustice Report

, I tried to wrap my head around the “deportations” to El Salvador and all the reasons they’re really bad news:

Yes, the El Salvador “Deportations” are Really Bad

What I’m Reading:
Still going strong on the CLMP titles for judging the Firecracker Awards—it’s been really fun and also just powering through a LOT of books.

Also still working on Much Depends on Dinner and have started a re-read of Jenny Offil’s Weather, a book I first read in 2020 and feels worth revisiting in these strange days at the turning of a too-warm spring.

Embroidery & Solidarity

On Being a Part of Something Bigger

For years, I’ve had the word “embroiderer” stuck into the very first sentence of my official bio, the handful of sentences I send in when event organizers ask me to contextualize myself. “Alejandra Oliva is an essayist, translator and embroiderer.”

I’m not even primarily an embroiderer when it comes to textiles—it’s too hard to do it while reading, so I usually knit (textiling-while-I-read serves the dual purpose of creating sweaters and socks and keeping my hands too busy to pick up my phone). But still, there’s something about identifying myself as an embroiderer—I like the mental image it produces, I like nestling it alongside my literary practices as something else that is at once ornamental and strengthening, that distracts from its own labor with beauty.

A few weeks ago, Tatter Library, a textile archive in Brooklyn, put out a call for volunteers to embroider the names of each of the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire for a memorial banner for the fire’s 114th anniversary, March 25th.

I signed up, and was given the name of Gussie Bierman, a 22-year-old who worked at the factory.

We were given dimensions, and some color ideas (inspired by the colors of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union) and set loose to create our own tributes. I started embroidering Gussie’s name—in a 3-stranded blue chain-stitch, taking up most of my allotted canvas, all the better to stand out—and also started reading. Jason had taken a class that covered the fire back in grad school at NYU, so we had a copy of David von Drehle’s Triangle: The Fire that Changed America on our shelves. The book came out over 20 years ago, but I think it’s still one of the most definitive accounts of the fire, based on court testimony and records believed to have been lost in the intervening 90-odd years.

In it, he gives context to the fire—the grueling shirtwaist workers’ strike that had happened the year before, the pogroms and social unrest that many of the Russian Jewish workers had fled, the opportunity a job at the shirtwaist factory might have been for a girl living in a Lower East Side tenement, the factory owners’ greed, the jam-packed, fabric-filled conditions across three floors of a “fire-safe” building with a single available exit.

He gives a minute-by-minute, accounting of the fire, from multiple perspectives—needed because the whole thing lasted no more than a handful of minutes. The fire was started by a careless workers’ cigarette butt in a too-infrequently-emptied scrap bin full of light cotton shirting scraps. Only one door to the outside was unlocked, because the owners wanted to ensure that workers leaving had their bags inspected for stolen product.

He tells about the mounting panic, the dash from one end of the workroom to the other, only to find locked doors. The daring escapes from a rickety ladder on the roof, the crush to get into the elevators, the mad dash down the fire escape, only to have it wrench off the side of the building and send panicked workers into the cellar and the wrought iron fence below. The women trapped against the windows, escaping death by flame with death by free-fall, the women who tried to jump onto the roof of a moving elevator. The sacrifices and the bravery and the sheer, unnecessary horror of it all, compressed into mere minutes of time.

There are so many ways that the stories of the young people that died in this fire fit into the questions we are still facing today—as consumers, as Americans. The Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Bangladesh happened 12 years ago, killing 1,134 garment factory workers—men, women, children. There’s an old Michael Hobbes article I think about all the time about the absolute impossibility of following our clothing manufacture all the way to the end to ensure it’s ethical.

But I think the thing I was most closely thinking about while I was sewing was the work of

Alice L Driver

. Alice’s latest book, The Life and Death of the American Worker takes on the workers at Tyson poultry processing plants in Arkansas. Many of the workers there are undocumented, people who have fled gang and cartel violence, people who are trying their best to make a living but don’t have many options to speak up, to organize because of the fear inherent in their immigration status. The book essentially opens in 2011 with the kind of horrifying industrial accident that is of a piece with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire but also too modern, too low-key to make the news, to change policy—a worker, not properly trained in a language he could not understand, accidentally mixes two chemicals and creates a cloud of chlorine gas in the factory. Workers pass out, sustain permanent lung damage. The company shrugs it off.

Nine years later, during the COVID-19 epidemic, these workers begin to sicken and die. They are dying because of the dangerous conditions imposed on poultry plant workers during the pandemic—the lack of protective equipment, the close quarters, the too-fast speeds, the disincentives to stay home when sick, the precarious employment and immigration status and all of it. However, they are even more susceptible to these issues, faced by all poultry processing plant workers across the U.S., because nine years ago, they survived a chlorine gassing and did not receive adequate medical care in the aftermath. Alice reports all of this—she and her subjects speaking out with incredible bravery against the kind of large, greedy company Sinclair Lewis’ nightmares were made of—and in reporting it, shows that we are facing the same problems now that we were back in the Gilded Age.

alice__driver

A post shared by @alice__driver

One of my favorite podcasts, 5 - 4, has dubbed our dawning administration The Age of Diarrhea thanks to the quickly loosening regulations to benefit corporations. While we are all likely to, uh, experience these deleterious effects, no population will bear the brunt of this deregulation more strongly than those in industries already cutting costs at the expense of their workers.

Even prior to his nomination to the cabinet, Eugene Scalia, Secretary of Labor under Trump’s first administration (and Large Adult Son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin), was part of a long-term plan to discount repetitive motion injury as a question of worker safety—leaving millions of workers across the country with devastating, disabling injuries spanning from carpal tunnel syndrome to chronic pain and inflammation. Workers—many of whom are immigrants and refugees, fleeing their home countries because of fear of violence—come to the U.S. to face potentially deadly and disabling workplace conditions, all in the name of survival. Very little has changed since the day Gussie Bierman first walked into a shirtwaist factory.

Let me tell you about Gussie Bierman. When she died, at 22 years old, she had been in the United States for 4 years, and was a Russian Jewish emigre, fleeing the pogroms that had shattered her community. She was a union member. Her family identified her body by the watch chain she often wrapped around her neck, and complained that the rings she usually wore were missing. In his book, von Drehle frequently describes her as “matronly in her pince-nez”—a description no 22-year-old would love, I think. In addition to her name and her age, I gave Gussie her signature pince-nez, a needle and thread for her trade and mine, and a sheaf of wheat and a rose—the bread and roses that the striking textile girls of Lawrence, MA would popularize a year after her death. Sustenance and beauty, solidarity and resistance. All of it, all at once.

My contribution to the Tatter Library Triangle Shirtwaist Factory memorial banner

tatterbluelibrary

A post shared by @tatterbluelibrary

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If you want to support workers’ rights, worker safety, and immigrant rights, there are so many ways and places to do that. Unionize your workplace, and find an organization in your area that does the kind of work towards labor rights that you support—for me, here in Chicago, it’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, for you, it might be someplace else. This is a program that as much as it is federal, is also hugely important on a local level.

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Where I’ll Be:

I’m teaching a handful of in-person classes on “Journaling For Growth” here in Chicago at Intuit Healing—much to my own surprise I am, in fact, a daily journaler, and I have a lot to say about it, so come hang out at my class and find out! If you’re interested in an online version of it, let me know! I have taught this class once before and really loved it, so come through! The first class is on March 29th, and there will be another in April, so sign up now!

What I’ve Written:

For

Injustice Report

: a piece on Mahmoud Khalil’s kidnapping and how it follows a pattern of ICE behavior that we’ve seen up until now.

Mahmoud Khalil’s Kidnapping is Nothing New

What I’m Reading:

I’m currently reading for CLMP’s Firecracker Awards in nonfiction so the answer is just…a lot of very cool indie-published nonfiction books that I am not at liberty to talk about, just trust and believe that the media landscape outside of the big five is wider and weirder and cooler than you can even imagine.

Still working on Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser, and (re)reading

Ingrid Rojas Contreras

’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds like a particularly rich and strange ice cream—in small, savoring bites. Delightful.