Category: writing
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On Movement & Creative Mentorship
Today I was reading Pleasure Activism and was struck at the way dear sister Doctor Alexis Pauline Gumbs wrote about the mentoring that was done by Toni Cade Bambara and how those mentees have served as examples to Lex. I was left breathless and a little jealous thinking, oh how I hope someone will write…
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April is National Poetry Month
Ironic that I wrote about it without even realizing it. Or was it divine intervention?
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Reviving the Sleeping Poetisa
This is my third semester in college and it quite a doozy (did I really just use that word?). I haven’t considered myself a poet in a long time and one of my classes is a poetry class with the final project being a chapbook. I have wanted to create a chapbook for a long…
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10 Year Cycles
Nostalgia has always been a haunting presence in my life. Too often let my mind wander into the what ifs and I hone in on key moments, key people. At age 41 you’d think I get over this nasty little habit, stop feeding the bad spirits so that they recognize they can’t have a home…
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Compassion & Accountability
The last couple of days have felt overwhelming. If I were being honest I would actually frame the mix of sadness, shame, anger, frustration and stuckness within the timeline of when #metoo ceased to feel kind of far away and stood screaming at me in my living room through the body of my adult…
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Workshopping
Never ever have I ever shared my writing for the express purpose of being critiqued and judged by others. School papers and submissions to be edited for the magazines and blogs I have written for over the course of my life don’t count to me for some reason. This year I enrolled in a…
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The Wormhole of Memory
Image by David Samuel I have not been good at blogging. It’s not for a lack of things I want to say/write about. It’s a lack of wanting to share them. Which is strange because I didn’t used to have a problem with sharing and when I decided to start blogging again this year I…
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We Are One Another’s Survival
I haven’t written for a few days. I was travelling – physically to Detroit, emotionally and archivally much further back. Returning to Detroit after 5-6 years Detroit has changed so much. If I felt shock at the Q line and the stores and restaurants along Cass, I can only imagine what it feels like to…
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We Have Lived Volumes
I’m proud of how 2018 is going, despite the heartbreaking reminders of what a terrible, unjust world we live in, country we live in, city I live in. There are sounds, breaths, smiles, whispers, words, text messages, emails, this week that remind me me how much I am held up, how much I hold others,…
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So It Begins
This is where the panic set in. I decided I was going to write with the goal of publishing. But but where the hell do I start. What genre am I going to do this in? Is it through poetry? A series of essays? Do I write about mami’hood? Organizing from teenage…
Maegan E. Ortiz - Mamita Mala 