December Newsletter

Hello hello!! If you’re new to the newsletter, welcome! Below, you’ll find some updates, some recommendations, and some insight into my writing life. Always feel free to reach out on Instagram if you have any questions for me about writing or reading or translation or anything else!

These are snippets from my blog posts on Patreon. Feel free to explore those memberships at the link below:

Writing Life Updates

Speaking of Poems... I've discovered this really cool poetry prompt generator? The suggestions are so specific and weird and I'm kind of obsessed. They have a cool Instagram, too.

Recommendations

Books

• If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson is so gorgeous. I've maybe recommended it before, but I finally finished reading it this week and it's just so gorgeous. I'm trying to decide which fragment I want a tattoo of, that's how much I love it.

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin is another one I've finished recently. I recognize I'm late to the party on this one, but wow it is good. Super sad, but good enough that I think it's so worth reading (but only if you're in a good headspace.)

Song

• "End of Beginning" by Djo popped up on TikTok forever ago but I've just now taken the time to listen to it. It's a good song! I honestly think the TikTok edit did it a disservice, it definitely didn't feature the best part of the song.

In Depth Review-Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults

II have a thing with cults. I've consumed a lot of media about what they are and how they work, from podcasts to articles to documentaries and fictionalized TV shows. I think this obsession is fully routed in the fact that I feel like I, personally, would totally go all in on a cult. I think of my knowledge of cults as an armor to help prevent me from getting sucked into one--a tactic that cult experts believe everyone should be taking on, because while it feels easy to say people who get into cults are dumb, it's simply not true: most people who get into cults are smart, capable, educated people from good families.

While I have consumed a bunch of cult media, there are two things that I find myself being drawn to again and again: a podcast and a miniseries about Heaven's Gate.

Of these two examinations of Heaven's Gate, I think the podcast is my favorite. The host, Glynn Washington, grew up in a cult himself, so his approach is incredibly personal and highly informed by his belief that he might've been in the same place as any one of the Heaven's Gate members, killing himself because he was told that's how you can be saved. It's a really unique perspective from a cult show because it asks you to buy into the whole thing as a way of making sense of what they did.

The TV show is the thing I end up revisiting the most frequently just because I have more opportunity to watch TV. I think of it as an 'old school' documentary, by which I mean it's not sensationalized and doesn't seem to be super biased in one way or the other (unlike some recent cult documentaries I've watched, like Breath of Fire, which completely ignores the ways in which Kundalini yoga is super appealing). It's not quite as impactful as the podcast for me, but it has its moments--there's a particularly heartwrenching animation sequence in there, and they end the whole thing with Aimee Man's "Save Me."

Behind the Scenes

For this first prompt, you’ll be using enjambment to create a poem. Start by writing a short letter to someone (friend, family member, hero, whoever is on your mind). Aim for five or six sentences max. Then, use enjambment to create breaks in the sentences. Think about how these line breaks might cause the reader to focus on a certain word or phrase by isolating it from the rest of the sentence. 

Another way to do this exercise is to create emphasis with punctuation and capitalization, like this phrase from “Twin Flower, Master, Emily”:

Dickinson has her own unique style of writing poetry that includes dashes, like the two lines below:

Play around with different techniques to create a poem out of your short letters.

Want to see snippets from my work-in-progress? Subscribe to my Patreon for free below!

Love and gratitude, friends. See you next month.