It would be an understatement to say that the past week has been rough, but I realized today that the week has also brought some really lovely moments of connecting with people over poetry, and I want to hold on to those experiences.

On Monday evening, I went straight from the airport to the Mingei Museum in Balboa Park for a fair of women-run organizations and the book launch of Jane Muschenetz’s Power Point. It was life giving to celebrate Jane’s book and to be in the company of so many incredible women.

On Wednesday afternoon, I hosted our annual Poetry on Point reading at PLNU. I started this event 9 years ago so that all of the faculty and staff who write poetry could gather to read our poems for an audience, and it’s so lovely and joyful to hear my colleagues across disciplines sharing their poems.

On Thursday, I was a guest poet in the University of North Dakota’s Virtual Speaker Series. I read a variety of my poems and talked about my process of learning (over and over again) to let myself write what I need to write without letting my worries or anything else hold me back. Even via Zoom, they were such a lovely audience and had great questions. I’m grateful to Patrick Henry for inviting me and teaching my work in his class!

Yesterday afternoon, I got to be a guest speaker at the International Memoir Writers Association monthly gathering. I talked about and read from my chapbook 28,065 Nights, answered questions about chapbooks and about how poetry and memoir intersect, and ended with a writing exercise (that got me writing too!). I was honored to be invited to share with this group of kind writers.

Another thing that lifted me away from post-election despair was this: I filled in for a friend’s American Literature class on Friday, and he had assigned readings from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. Re-reading these texts and discussing 19th century women’s rights with a room of college students (all brilliant women) felt so important, and I think it fired me up to face whatever comes next.