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Dear you (and you and you),
When I think about what it takes to write a newsletter... I think about that ever-present question: How does one write a book? I was lying awake in the pre-dawn darkness this morning, trying not to think about how my perimenopausal migraine felt like my right eyeball was preparing for takeoff, and the answer occurred to me: By thousands of small decisions. Last time, I shared that my first book of poems, Imagine a Woman, will be out on June 9th, 2026. I’ve made the small decision to send news on the 9th of each month until then. The date does not, for me, hold more significance than that (Swiftie status aside), nor will it - I would guess - when we are more than a year from publication. So for 12 small months I will make it a ritual. “A ritual can be defined as an enactment of myth. By participating in a ritual, you are actually experiencing a mythological life. And it’s out of that participation that one can learn to live spiritually.” – Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth Thank you for making the small decision to read and be here. I also shared an easter egg last time, about the title of this newsletter sharing the title of a poem from the book, and about it being rooted in the history of humans and wolves. I promised I’d share what that all has to do with women, especially the women we imagine and embody in our own lives, and for that I went back to my notes. In The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner writes: “In the Biblical story [of Genesis] the knowledge which is forbidden to humankind is of a dual nature: it is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, and it is sexual knowledge...The consequence of sexual knowledge is to sever female sexuality from procreation. God puts enmity between the snake and the woman. In the historical context of the times of the writing of Genesis, the snake was clearly associated with the fertility goddess and symbolically represented her. Thus, by God’s command, the free and open sexuality of the fertility-goddess was to be forbidden to fallen woman. The way her sexuality was to find expression was in motherhood.” In other words, the sins of the body were placed on women around the same time that the body was separated from our spiritual connection to the natural world we are inherently a part of. Our fear of the body’s temporality, and of its dark cravings, reminded me of how we assigned sin to the body of the wolf. The woman and the wolf became sisters in my mind. Part of my journey in writing this book was to better understand the transfer of sin onto the bodies that represent creative transcendence - the ability to grow, birth, and feed the future of the human race. I was also trying to understand the duality of my own mom, what she resisted in her radical feminism, and what she embodied in patriarchal culture. The woman she taught me to love and fight for, and the woman she hated and tried to destroy. Joseph Campbell again: “When human beings destroy nature...they destroy their own nature too.” As I watched my mother closely, I wrote my own version of the story through the fairy tales and myths I loved, the ones that let me carve out my own sense of what being a woman was. I came to see that ‘what the wolf wore’ was cast upon her, and it was also the robes of the goddess. She always contained us all: the creator, my mother, and me. “She and the predator have known each other for a long, long time. She tracks him through dreams, through stories, through tales, and through women’s entire lives. Wherever he is, she is, for she is the one who balances his predations.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves The act of creation is our birthright, as well as a form of consciousness, reclamation, and resistance. As Gerda Lerner writes: “The voices of anonymous women were present as a steady undercurrent in the oral tradition, in folksong and nursery rhymes, tales of powerful witches and good fairies. In stitchery, embroidery, and quilting women’s artistic creativity expressed an alternate vision. In letters, diaries, prayers, and song the symbol-making force of women’s creativity pulsed and persisted.” What shall we get into next time: some specific myths, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes that you’ll find in the book? Or an interlude to talk about creativity and process (hint: it will involve Frankenstein)? I *think* I figured out email forwarding in the last month, so you can now hit reply and say hi about this or anything else that’s on your mind.
Thank you for reading, D.For independent study: The Great Women Artists podcast episode 106 with Siri Hustvedt, who sheds light on the absence of the placenta in visual art. When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone The White Goddess by Robert Graves
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